Stella's Keys

Original art appears rarely on this blog, and when it does it tends to be the work of granddaughter Stella. Here is her take on our recent trip to the Florida Keys, a little piece she prepared for Anna and Lexi, the two girls who live next to Monique's house here in Metro Detroit—good friends of Stella’s from summer vacations. Stella has captured all of the highlights in her own very original way. The usual advice: click through to magnify, Esc to return.

Immersed in the Inhuman

Miami dominates the tip of Florida and around it thick and vast lies Dade county. Both are aggressively vibrant expressions of the modern and the human. But just a few miles south and east, in the Florida Keys, extends the ocean, coral reefs, and shores thick with wild-life, mangroves, pines, palms, and, here and there, the vivid colors of the bougainvillea. For us it was a family gathering in Marathon, FL, a patch of summer punctuating winter: three generations briefly reunited. Such events have many aspects. One of them for me, early mornings, evenings, nights, was temporary immersion in the inhuman, that word used not in its usual negative sense but to designate a vast, virtually limitless expanse, beginning there, on the shores, but extending up and outward, including the planets we admired every evening marking the ecliptic, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and even Mercury—visible just above the horizon—and beyond: Orion bright above, Canis Major to the left, topped by brilliant Sirius, and (this was a special thrill for me) even Canopus visible dimly lower down. And this great, shimmering, moving, every-changing, colorful, windy world was by far the dominant impression. Well, that is now over; we are back. I’d planned to write posts marking our stay; I made a beginning, but I made all posts labeled “Florida notes” after our return from notes scribbled in the shade, and in the wind. That other world drew me far from the computer. I spent my time watching birds at low tide, admired sunrises, sunsets, and watched palm trees grimly enduring a very strong wind while their coconuts sullenly ripened.

This Key Won’t Open Any Locks…

… or “Arawakan Spoken Here.” All right. So you’ve never heard of the Arawakan people. Nevertheless, you have used the Arawakan language if you’ve ever held a barbecue, owned or used a canoe, rested in a hammock, feared a hurricane, roasted an ear of maize, eaten a potato, used tobacco—or visited the Florida keys. Well, You, my imagined reader, probably have heard of the Arawakans, but I had not, not until I got to wondering about the origin of that word “key”—now that we are about to visit Florida. Geography, and geographical designations, are shaded by much mystery in my case. I discovered that key comes from cay, an Arawakan word; the Spanish rendered it as cayo, slightly modifying a word used by the Taino, a sub-group of the Arawakans, people who lived on the string of Islands extending downward from the tip of Florida, beginning with the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and then curling down toward South America (the Lesser Antilles). Needless to say, the Taino lived in the Florida Keys too. Arawakan-speaking peoples also occupied many regions of what we today call Latin America. I am showing a Wikipedia map (link) of their settlements on that subcontinent, showing the Nordic and the Southern versions of that language in light and dark colors. My next mystery is the archipelago. I can already hint that it’s another lulu, but since that takes us to quite another location, I’ll defer unveiling my discoveries for now.

The Mouth of the Mice

The future also throws its shadow, itself a worthy subject—but not today’s. What I mean to indicate, however, is that we’re planning a trip down to the Florida Keys, and in preparation for that I’ve been looking at maps. In that process I noticed that the Keys, if extended northward, actually begin well above the Bay of Biscayne in a detached chain of islands of which Miami Beach is a part. A satellite view of that (clicking on image will enlarge it, Esc returns):

This sort of meditation brings memories, in this case of earlier trips to Florida. Then up floated a name: Boca Raton. That place is way higher than Miami, and looking at it one sees no bays of any sort. This got me curious. I learned that the original name had been Boca Ratones—and that raton is a mouse, not a rat, in Spanish; the word for rat is rata, pl. ratas. Next I learned that the original location of that name was actually associated with the much more southerly Bay of Biscayne. Well. That bay is a pretty good-sized boca, meaning mouth. So. The Mouth of the Mice.

The marvels of modern life. With Google’s satellite mapping images, I started to look for the teeth of those mice. My assumption was that that gracefully curving thin line of islands that form the Florida Keys and then run in parallel with Florida’s land mass might at one time have been more prominent at the outer edge of that bay. The next two pictures show the map itself and then a closeup of a portion immediately south of Key Biscayne. Here they are:

 

Quite visible in the center of the second picture, faintly brown, are rock formations lying close to the surface of the ocean—and the black channels mark the places where water had once carved paths for itself as it flowed into the sea. Was that rock lying higher in the old, old days when Boca Ratones had been named? I expect so. Or were sea-levels lower? To answer that question I’d have to undergo serious study—rather than meditating idly on an  upcoming trip into places quite wondrously different than the eastern edge Michigan where once the Penobscot people roamed.