Resurrection

When we walked into the office sometime past midnight, the guy behind the desk looked at us with a Vietnam vet's thousand yard stare and asked, "You aren't spring-breakers, are you?" When he told him that we weren't, he relaxed just a bit and told us, "Good, because I'd have to charge you an extra hundred dollars each for deposit on the room." What we couldn't imagine was why anyone would answer "yes" to that first question.
This was twenty years ago, when I made my first trip to Key West. It was, to be completely honest, a break we were taking in spring, but none of us were enrolled in school at the time so we felt comfortable with that assertion. Instead, we were there to celebrate a year's worth of sobriety for two of us. Hazy Davy and Killer Joe had hopped on the wagon coincidentally in March the year before, and we felt that a little tropical excursion would be the proper reward. Mikey came along as our designated drinker.
I flew into Miami from Colorado and met up with my east coast counterparts who had come in just ahead of me from JFK. We paid a little extra for a convertible, and proceeded to drive the hundred and seventy miles down Highway 1 to our nation's southernmost point. The sun set in the Gulf of Mexico as the moon began to rise over the Atlantic as we drove into the night. When we finally reached our hotel and discovered that we had indeed landed in the midst of a bit of a bacchanal. Most of the revelry had finished up by the time we headed to our room, but the dawn of the next morning gave evidence of what fun we had missed: Two doors down from us was a pair of Converse sneakers that had either been left or placed to greet whomever might leave that room first the next day. There was no way to tell if they were hi-tops or oxfords, since the canvas portion of the shoe had been burned away and all that was left was the scorched rubber soles.
But that wasn't why we were there. We were there on a pilgrimage of sorts, with our key inspirations coming from the music of Jimmy Buffett and the movie "Running Scared," the one with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines, not the Paul Walker mess from 2006. This was mostly for my benefit and Joe's, while Mikey looked on patiently. We spent our days at the pool or at the beach, and whenever we drove anywhere we kept a strict rule that no one should open the doors to enter the car. We ate conch fritters. I had a Cheeseburger In Paradise. We drank a lot of drinks that came out of blenders, and we kept asking Mikey what we were missing without the booze. I wrote some postcards. I neglected to take a picture of the manta ray I saw jumping out of the water. When the skipper of our sunset cruise first told us of this phenomenon, we all laughed and assumed it was the Florida version of a snipe-hunt. And yet there I sat, jaw agape with my camera in my lap as I watched this great leathery disc launch itself cleanly out of the sea before diving back into the depths. It was a peak moment for me.
I have been back to the Keys since then. Once as a port of call on my honeymoon, and again on my fortieth birthday. It remains the one place on earth where I feel completely relaxed wearing my Hawaiian shirts. Even in Honolulu, it just felt a little too spot-on. Little did I know that trip twenty years ago was the beginning of a much larger expedition. The one that took me where I am today: Oakland, California with a closet full of tropical print shirts.