Florida trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive

by Winthrop Packard

Even as far north as the play garden of the money gods you have wide glimpses of the miracle. There are days at Palm Beach when the sea is simply the sea as one may know it at Atlantic Beach or Nantasket, magical and mysterious always but lighted by no miraculous inner fires. Again there come times of tide and sun when a wonder of color wells up from its depths, when it amazes with inner glows of gold and green and azure, and fires the skyline with smoky purples. Their subtle beauty lingers with you long after other impressions of the place have passed, a memory that is a promise of delight, the lure which the Gulf Stream scatters far toward the cold waters of the North. Circe has all who see it within the slender, elastic bonds of her magic and the lure of it will never be withdrawn. He who with seeing eyes has known the call must some day come back to the very source, or die dreaming of what it must be.

You get the first look at this as your train slides off the mainland onto the first key and it flashes upon you again and again as you pass from one islet to the next or roar by some tiny bay where cocoanut palms lean over waters for the describing of which language has yet no fit words. Someone has said that in the building of North America all the chips and dust left over were dumped off shore and thus Florida was made. If so the sea which bathes its southernmost tip of coral islands must surely be formed from the dust of all gems that have been put into the ground for mines since the world was first conceived.

Here by the very railroad is a shallow lagoon, dredged out by the builders for all I know, whose color is the semi-opaque, semi-translucent white of pearls. Another has no hint of these gems of the sea but is a deep topaz. Anon the free tides wash the embankment with waves of mother-of-pearl that leap from shallows of a blue so soft and pure that to look upon it is to cry out with happiness. The heaven of poets and founders of loving creeds can have no purer hue than this. Beyond again the sea deepens through shining purples into sudden shoals of emerald and jade, that bar it from the distant stretch of the horizon where the depth and richness of the violet blue are a joy that is half a pain so deeply does it stir the soul.

I have said this sea is made of dust of all gems. It is more than that. It is as if it were steeped with all dreams of purity and nobility, all holy desires and longings unutterable, here made visible to the eye of man in miracles of translucent color. The memory of it stays with you as does the memory of music that has stirred the soul to such happiness and dear desires that the eyes are wet with wistful tears at the thought.

The eye finds the land of the keys little but a repetition of the dusty purgatory through which the train has brought him to the place of dreams. The rock-ribbed foundation is the same, though the vegetation is more luxuriant and varied. The palmettos seem to give up the struggle to maintain a hold upon the slender soil as you swing in bird-like flight from islet to islet, and to be replaced in part anyway by the slender-stemmed silver palm, which looks a bit like a spindling scion of a noble race. The red wood of the royal poinciana trees is everywhere visible, and these in the blooming season make the favored spots a flame of crimson fire. Beneath is a wild tangle of shrubbery, whose components are hardly to be differentiated in passing. Where clear beaches of coral strand rim round some opalescent bay the cocoanut palms feather the ground with shadowy fronds.

Along the side of the railway are to be seen the tall palm-like stems of the West Indian papaw, and one can but think that the negro laborers who made the grade have planted the seeds of the well-loved fruit, so regular and persistent are these rows, which stand up like grotesque telegraph poles along this railroad which, as we flee onward from key to key, more and more impresses one with the might of a dominating idea.

At the water-gaps in the flood of color are dredges and pile-drivers sturdily repairing the destruction which the West India hurricane of the previous autumn wrought on these seemingly indestructible foundations. Where the two miles and more of concrete viaduct is expected one finds the train running gingerly on piling and marl

“By and by the road leaves the embankment and winds totteringly out on piling”

refilling, the supposed everlasting foundation having been ripped out in a night by the wind and sea. Men cling like birds to slender staging or insecure foothold, swaying to one side to let the train pass, then swaying back again to go on with their work. Through the piling beneath race the sapphire tides, and to lose hold for a moment is to be drowned in a suffocating transparency of miraculous color.