There are quite a few cats at the Hemingway House in Key West. Some sleep on the bed, others on bookshelves in the small book/gift store. Others lounge around outside, seeking shelter from the heat in various shaded areas. Signs tell you that you can pet the cats at your own risk Many of them have six digits, but I didn’t quite feel brave enough to deal with six claws. Cats are notoriously fickle creatures, one minute friendly, the next a furry killing machine.
A couple of weeks ago I had two hours to kill in Key West. Seems like a strange thing to say, considering it’s a three and half hour drive from Miami along the coastal highway at reduced speeds. But, my son and I were on the road early Sunday morning, hoping to spend a few hours there sightseeing before heading to a Boy Scout camp on Islamorada. Apparently the first thing to do in Key West is to stand in line to get your photo taken next to a buoy proclaiming it the southernmost place in the continental US. Having spent 30 minutes on this venture we speed-walked along Whitehead Street over to the Hemingway House. Although they offered tours, as we were pressed for time as merely walked through all the rooms, then over to the gift shop. If I had more time and room in my luggage I probably would have spent more money, so I’ll have to save that for another time. Unfortunately I wasn’t familiar enough with the area to find a decent restaurant, so that’s another item on my list for a future trip.
It’s not hard to imagine Ernest Hemingway living there, across the street from the lighthouse, a short walk away from where he likely kept his boat, the Pilar. How he ended up in remote areas like Key West and Idaho are mysteries to me, considering his Chicago origins and many years in Paris. But the locale he picked and the house itself are remarkable, and probably were more remarkable almost a hundred years ago.
I consider myself a qualified fan of his writing. The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls are classics in American literature, even though neither takes place in America. His later novels I find disinteresting. His personal life overshadowed his fiction after the Spanish Civil War, and his political leanings were jejune and ignorant. His rift with John Dos Passos and his snippy treatment of his former friend I find abhorrent. Still, Hemingway is unique, and unlike the prevailing trend to cancel anything or anyone who has a scintilla of bad history, I sift through writers like Hemingway to keep what I like and ignore the rest.
As I write this, I have in front of me am ink drawing of the facade of the Hemingway House, a solitary cat in the foreground. A notebook from the gift shop sits beside me on the desk, yet I wonder if I’ll ever write in it, as it’s a memento, a souvenir, and maybe has more of a sentimental value if kept blank. Or not.
Key West and the keys are unique, much like Hemingway. These days most of the houses there are likely overpriced vacation homes. They’re used only part of the year, owned by people who can afford to keep multi-million dollar homes and not live there most of the time. It’s a risky place to live, with hurricanes an annual threat. With water all around, the people who live in the Keys likely also own boats. In some cases they own large boats.
I spent a week on and off a dive boat. Inside the shallow bay you need to know the channels and shallow areas, and out on the ocean you need to travel for miles before the water deepens. As a land-locked Texan, it felt strange to spend so much time on the ocean, as well as under the surface. There’s plenty of fish, yet also coral graveyards. There’s so much to see in the Keys. And, the Everglades are just a short distance away, yet from what little I know about the Everglades, it seems like a different world, with alligators, snakes, swamps, and a river of grass. And yet, my first thought when I returned home, was that I really needed to re-read Hemingway’s stories set in the Keys and Cuba. Having finally been in that area, would they read any differently from when I first read them? Does visiting a place that created those stories impart any other meaning? Maybe, maybe not. After all, Hemingway’s characters play as much a role in his stories as the settings, if not more. The characters in Sloppy Joe’s could exist in any place in the world, but there’s only one Florida Keys.
