I didn’t understand lushness until I moved to Miami; the colors are richer and the touches deeper. Ocean Drive is fanciful. Coconut Grove is spirited. But it’s difficult to experience a genuine sense of place here—nothing simply is what it is, and it hasn’t been around long, anyway.
I lived in Boston for nine years. Miami is temporary; Boston is permanent. Miami is ingenuous; Boston is august. I had collected a number of “totem” places in the northern city. One of the walls in the Davis Square subway station sported porcelain tiles painted by a third-grade class. I would linger over the tiles, especially the one of the daisies and the one of the farting cow. I thought the patches of green grass running through the middle of Commonwealth Avenue were refreshingly un-manicured for such a fastidious urban environment. And a special part of my consciousness still dwells near the 1369 Coffee House in Central Square, where the ancient, toothless Reverend Larry Love used to sit out front and study passersby, with his ragged blue Sergeant Pepper coat buttoned and his golden soldier’s helmet affixed.
A totem place belongs to you—even though you leave it and even though other people might use it, too. These spots can serve as Rubicons for romances: if he loves me enough, you think, he will appreciate my special place. If she loves me enough, you imagine, she’ll understand why it’s so great. When s/he inexplicably does not, a little piece of the relationship dies.
After four years, I can happily report that the Perky Bat Tower on Sugarloaf Key (MM #17, i.e., 17 miles from Key West) has finally ended my totemless Florida existence. While it’s true that I don’t actually live in the Florida Keys, it’s also true that I live closer to them than I did before.
Joy Williams writes the following about the tower:
The bat tower, shingled, brown, and elegant, is about 35 feet tall and to be found down a dirt road just past the Sugarloaf Lodge…People bounce down the road to view it, circle it warily in their cars,
then look a little embarrassed because they’ve“ gone out of their way to see it.” (The Florida Keys: A History and Guide. Random House, 2003. p.119)
During the 1920s, R.C. Perky planned to erect a glamorous resort on Sugarloaf Key; he envisioned a casino and a fancy restaurant (almost all of South Florida has fallen prey to developers’ fantasies and failures at some point). Mosquitoes were a serious problem in the Keys then, and conventional wisdom suggested that bats were the solution. Bats eat mosquitoes. To attract the special nocturnal Brownies, Perky built the bat tower based on the design of a Texas scientist, and he also ordered a box of special bat bait. Williams is convinced that the bait was snake oil.
The bats never came.
Perky went broke. He died, the fledgling resort vanished, and the tower alone remains. And I do mean alone. The road Williams mentions is paved now, but it’s still awfully obscure. The road provides no sign to guide visitors. You drive down the little road, and you begin to get the inkling that all you will see at the end is something industrial, like a generator.
The tower itself has no label of any kind. It is silently, maddeningly nondescript. It was raining and overcast the day I saw it—its slickened wood gleamed. The long chute down the front made the structure look ancient and magisterial; it almost suggested a Mayan ruin or a fortress in Myst.
One can stand under the Tower and gaze up into its intricate, symmetrical wooden slats. The slats create hundreds of crevices—perfect for a hanging bat in need of daytime retreat.
I suppose it’s foolish to expect any random third party to come along and take an interest in the tower, a deus ex machina to swoop in and declare it a special landmark. Besides, what would it be a landmark to? Capitalism? Quixote? The ungracious bats who never put in an appearance?
I live a little too far from the tower to appreciate its underwhelming glory on a regular basis; Miami is about two hundred miles from Sugarloaf. I think of it often, though. And later, I indulge in whimsical, cavernous, bloodsucking dreams.
I lived in Boston for nine years. Miami is temporary; Boston is permanent. Miami is ingenuous; Boston is august. I had collected a number of “totem” places in the northern city. One of the walls in the Davis Square subway station sported porcelain tiles painted by a third-grade class. I would linger over the tiles, especially the one of the daisies and the one of the farting cow. I thought the patches of green grass running through the middle of Commonwealth Avenue were refreshingly un-manicured for such a fastidious urban environment. And a special part of my consciousness still dwells near the 1369 Coffee House in Central Square, where the ancient, toothless Reverend Larry Love used to sit out front and study passersby, with his ragged blue Sergeant Pepper coat buttoned and his golden soldier’s helmet affixed.
A totem place belongs to you—even though you leave it and even though other people might use it, too. These spots can serve as Rubicons for romances: if he loves me enough, you think, he will appreciate my special place. If she loves me enough, you imagine, she’ll understand why it’s so great. When s/he inexplicably does not, a little piece of the relationship dies.
After four years, I can happily report that the Perky Bat Tower on Sugarloaf Key (MM #17, i.e., 17 miles from Key West) has finally ended my totemless Florida existence. While it’s true that I don’t actually live in the Florida Keys, it’s also true that I live closer to them than I did before.
Joy Williams writes the following about the tower:
The bat tower, shingled, brown, and elegant, is about 35 feet tall and to be found down a dirt road just past the Sugarloaf Lodge…People bounce down the road to view it, circle it warily in their cars,
then look a little embarrassed because they’ve“ gone out of their way to see it.” (The Florida Keys: A History and Guide. Random House, 2003. p.119)During the 1920s, R.C. Perky planned to erect a glamorous resort on Sugarloaf Key; he envisioned a casino and a fancy restaurant (almost all of South Florida has fallen prey to developers’ fantasies and failures at some point). Mosquitoes were a serious problem in the Keys then, and conventional wisdom suggested that bats were the solution. Bats eat mosquitoes. To attract the special nocturnal Brownies, Perky built the bat tower based on the design of a Texas scientist, and he also ordered a box of special bat bait. Williams is convinced that the bait was snake oil.
The bats never came.
Perky went broke. He died, the fledgling resort vanished, and the tower alone remains. And I do mean alone. The road Williams mentions is paved now, but it’s still awfully obscure. The road provides no sign to guide visitors. You drive down the little road, and you begin to get the inkling that all you will see at the end is something industrial, like a generator.
The tower itself has no label of any kind. It is silently, maddeningly nondescript. It was raining and overcast the day I saw it—its slickened wood gleamed. The long chute down the front made the structure look ancient and magisterial; it almost suggested a Mayan ruin or a fortress in Myst.
One can stand under the Tower and gaze up into its intricate, symmetrical wooden slats. The slats create hundreds of crevices—perfect for a hanging bat in need of daytime retreat.
I suppose it’s foolish to expect any random third party to come along and take an interest in the tower, a deus ex machina to swoop in and declare it a special landmark. Besides, what would it be a landmark to? Capitalism? Quixote? The ungracious bats who never put in an appearance?
I live a little too far from the tower to appreciate its underwhelming glory on a regular basis; Miami is about two hundred miles from Sugarloaf. I think of it often, though. And later, I indulge in whimsical, cavernous, bloodsucking dreams.
The Florida Keys
1 comment:
What a facsinating post. As an urban planner I have always been kind obbessed with the idea of place. I like the idea of totems, I want come up with a list of my own now
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