About This Series

Setting Sail For A Glimpse Of Our Future

October 18, 1998|By ROBERT McCLURE Staff Writer

Why did we take this trip? Because an important time is coming for a special place.

Again and again, you hear the same complaint from Floridians who visit the Keys: Too many people have discovered this paradise. It's being trashed. There's the traffic. The Jet Skis buzzing around like flies at a picnic. The creeping cancer of signs along the road.

The gradual fouling of local waters is less evident to the casual visitor. But there, too, scientists say conditions are worsening. Only a few decades ago, it seemed you could see forever through these waters. On a calm day, it was nothing to peer 100 feet through the blue-green Atlantic along a coral reef.

Today, 40 feet is pretty good.

Closer to land, scientists are compiling mounting evidence that these waters - billed as crystal-pure - are being polluted by uncontrolled sewage.

With every tide, human waste leaks through the porous limestone underlying the Keys. With every rain, a foul concoction of oil, gasoline and a dozen other byproducts of modern life washes off the islands into the ocean.

The fishing, once legendary, has grown hit or miss. Forests that shelter some of the world's rarest birds and mammals are increasingly being diced by development.

How many people can live in the Keys? How many can visit? At what point are we so many that we destroy the water, air and wildlife that drew us there?

The federal and state governments have promised to answer these questions. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers outlined such a study almost a year ago. But it is stalled. State officials say the Corps' proposed study would not answer the overriding questions: How many people can live in the Keys without ruining the place? Have we already reached that point?

"It's time that we know what we're up against," said Teresa Tinker, an aide to Gov. Lawton Chiles. She has recommended that Chiles and the state Cabinet reduce allowable growth in the Keys by one-fifth. That decision was to be made in late September but was postponed when Hurricane Georges approached. It could be taken up again in November.

We set out to document what this place is like today, nearly a quarter-century after the state of Florida declared the archipelago gravely threatened by population growth: an "area of critical state concern."

Back then, in 1975, I was in high school and Sean was in junior high here in in South Florida. Nick, a few years out of the Navy, had escaped Indiana winters for good after coming to South Florida to cover a plane crash. "Concern" was - still is - the antithesis of how most people feel about the Keys. It's paradise. A place to kick back with a rum runner, to snorkel and fish and swim and dance and eat and watch the sun set without a care in the world.

And even with the mounting damage, the Keys remain wonderful, a crescent of islands bathed in a subtropical sea whose forests, coral reefs and seashores shelter plants and animals that exist nowhere else.

A color chart. That's what you want when you try to describe the hundred variations of a hue embodied in the water, the sky, the tropical hardwood hammock. Only a thesaurus has enough words worthy of any one of these islands. No description could ever be as perfect as the sight of wild dolphins frolicking off your bow.

People take in the Keys from every conceivable angle: tourists at the raw bar, scientists at the coral reef, sailors from passing ocean liners, locals from cars on increasingly clogged roads.

Sean, Nick and I wanted to get a look at the Keys the way all those people do, and then some. We would start at Key Biscayne and sail to the Marquesas, the last of the Keys left more or less untouched.

A few years ago, Sean and I took another trip. In a canoe, we retraced expeditions of the 1800s from Lake Okeechobee down through the Everglades "River of Grass."The first journalists to do so in a century, we chronicled the massive changes humans have wrought in the 'Glades.

This Keys sailing trip was sort of an extension of that, but also completely different. We followed routes sailed from Florida's earliest days, where people in sailboats still go every weekend.

Only after we finished our trip and prepared this series of stories did Hurricane Georges storm ashore.

Hurricanes always have been part of the Keys. Georges caused a lot of damage, rearranged whole seashores, and ripped up dozens of houses. But it did little to change the enduring dilemma faced by the island chain: How many people are too many?

If anything, Georges brought this issue into sharper focus. Today's arguments and gnashing of teeth over growth restrictions in the Keys will reverberate across this state for decades. This island chain is, in a very real sense, the Keys to Florida's future.

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