This piece comes from a recent trip that a friend and I took out to Key West – a place I’ve dearly wanted to visit for well over thirty years. For a little bit of background: I’m a confirmed landlubber, who was raised hundreds of miles from any ocean, and indeed, I never even saw an ocean until I was well into my teens. Likewise, until this trip, I had never, once in my life been far enough out to sea, that land was no longer in sight.

Driving US-1 (i.e. the Overseas Highway), from Miami to Key West truly is one of those ‘bucket list’ things that have to be done at least once, especially if, like me, you have never been in the situation, where you’re completely surrounded by nothing but the place, where water meets sky.

Depending upon how clear of a day it is, that magical moment happens when you’re about halfway across the Seven Mile Bridge, which stretches between Knight’s Key and Little Duck Key. All I can say is that it’s a strange, and humbling sensation, when you’ve never experienced it before.

Other references/inspirations I have used are ‘Halcyon Days’, which is a term that has moved into the realm of poetic cliché (popularised by T.S. Eliot in his piece The Dry Salvages). The term originates from the ancient Greek myth of lovers Alcyone and Ceyx. After Ceyx was lost in a terrible storm, Alcyone threw herself into the sea in grief. The gods took pity, and turned them both into Halcyon birds (i.e., kingfishers), so they could be together. This gave rise to the notion of the ‘Halcyon Days’ being the seven days every winter where storms apparently never occur, so that Alcyone could safely lay her eggs.

Further inspiration comes from Bertie Higgins’ 1981 hit song: Key Largo, itself inspired by the Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall movie of the same name.

Last and certainly not least is Key West itself, which is one of those cities, where history seems to hang heavy everywhere, especially in places like the Hemingway Museum, and the ‘Little White House’, where US President Harry S. Truman spent his winter vacations. Likewise, is Captain Tony’s Saloon, which was the original location of Sloppy Joe’s, when it was Ernest Hemingway’s favourite Key West watering hole (the ownership of Sloppy Joe’s eventually moved the bar up the block in 1937, and it still exists under that name).

The aforementioned Captain Tony Tarracino, who purchased and reopened the original Sloppy Joe’s location under his own name, was perhaps one of the most famous ‘characters’ of Key West, even serving as mayor at one point. The most well known quote attributed to him was: “All you need in this life is a tremendous sex drive and a great ego – Brains don't mean shit.”

The older I get, the more I realise just how right he was about that. Especially about the notion that confidence is everything, and brains are often an impairment. You spend far too much time thinking, and far too little simply doing, and I realise more and more that thinking has always wound up getting me into ten times the trouble that simply doing ever has.