HAS ANYONE SEEN THE PRESIDENT

SMALL REVOLUTION STRIKES THE KEYS

Marathon, Florida

26.01.01

IF IT WASN'T for where it is, I don't suppose anyone would remember Marathon for long.

It strings along US Highway 1; a cluster of homes and businesses built on a coral island in the Florida Keys. In fact, most people would say it's more of a 50-yard dash than anything long distance. You can drive right through it in about four minutes, including a wait at the stop lights.

What kept me there was a sign stuck on a pole near the garage. It said that Marathon had declared itself independent.

There had a been a revolution of sorts. The people had spoken. Never mind all the muscle of America in the 21st century, this was personal. Marathon had decided to look after its own destiny, thank you very much. I thought I'd better find out why.

I was actually on my way to Key West, the island at the very end of the Keys, to see where Ernest Hemingway once lived. But Wars of Independence don't come along too often in the US of A.

Now before I go on, I ought to tell you some more about this place. The Florida Keys are unique in the American experience - not just for the quality of their ecology, fish and marine life, but also for what the army generals would say was their strategic importance.

Conversely, there would be a devilish problem if they got invaded or were struck by a disaster.

Imagine if you will, one side of a necklace of coral dangling for 100 miles or so down from the southern-most State of America and out into the ocean. Here and there, like knuckles on the chain, islands have built up over thousands of years as sand and silt have solidified on the coral.

Man, in his unceasing ambition, has strung them all together. First with a railway, and then with a road, US 1, connecting them up with 42 bridges and enabling a population of around 80,000 people to build their homes and businesses. On one side of the archipeligo lie the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico; on the other, the sterner rollers of the Atlantic. Often, they are only yards apart.

And there they perch, the island Keys, at a precarious average of just four or five feet above the sea. To be honest, if I lived there, I'd get worried if it rained. But there's a whole bunch of bigger problems to consider. Like being in the middle of a Hurricane Alley for one.

America's powers-that-be seem to have mixed feelings about the Keys. The nervous ones see them as an Achilles heel where an enemy could invade (Cuba, for example, is only 90 miles away) and they worry, too, about the logistics of a mass evacuation along just one small highway in the event of a catastrophe - natural or otherwise.

They may be right. It has all the makings of a disaster waiting to happen. Apart from hurricanes, there are threats of tornadoes, waterspouts, oil spills, ship groundings and large fires to think about. Oh, and the outside possibility of a meltdown at Florida Light and Power's nuclear plant at Turkey Point.

A little comfortingly, Florida has designated the Keys an official "Area of Critical Concern" with a hotline system to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, wherever that might be.

On the upside, attracted by some of the world's finest game fishing, wildlife enclaves, coral diving, pleasure boating and beach scenery, it has become one of the nation's top playgrounds. America's riviera.

There is such a surfeit of attractions that three million tourists and holiday-makers turn up every year, multiplying the resident population (and the strain on drainage) 40-fold. Presidents come to spend vacations. Property values have sky-rocketed.

In short, it's an important, dangerously exotic and much-talked-about place. The kind where people start to get excited if there's a spot of revolution going on.

Which brings us back, rather conveniently, to Marathon.

Now, like I've said, there wouldn't usually be much to get excited about in this 50-yard dash of a place. True, it is one of the larger knuckles on the necklace. But at the last count barely 12,000 folk lived down here.

It's got some romantically-named resort hotel/motels like the Buccaneer and the Banana Bay, a clutch of shops and supermarkets, a neat little library, a surprisingly large Salvation Army hall and - probably quite unconnected - a couple of those outfits where you can hire Adult Videos to keep yourself amused on a quiet night in. I imagine they are rather busy.

There is also a branch office of the local newspaper, an assortment of boat chandlers and fishing tackle places, a set-up where the sheriff shares sub-office facilities with the tax inspector, and a small airstrip with a display of planes on show today which you can usually find replicated in balsawood at Toys 'R' Us.

More substantially, it is bounded at one end by an impressive bridge, seven miles long, which connects it to the next island, and which took such an age to build that workmen nicknamed the place after their epic. It stuck.

Less substantially, at the other end, is the new city manager's office (to which we shall return) tucked behind a supermarket parking lot.

There is also, I discover, a small harbour out the backside of town which is home for the floating population who visit in high season and which is guarded by a drawbridge. We'll hear more about that later, too.

It is not I conclude, the world's most obvious hotbed of revolution. But then again, Marathon's argument will never be bloody. Its struggle is with county hall and its battle of independence is with the authorities. I'll tell you why.

For a long time now, they have been a bolshie lot down on the Keys. And Monroe County, whose job it is to administrate the area, has come in for a good hammering.

I suppose the truth of it is that if you are having to cope with an annual invasion of tourists who clog up your one main road, your beaches and your drains AND if you consider that your house might be blown or washed away at any minute by a hurricane, then it's only natural to want your share of any spoils going.

The way Marathon saw it, Monroe County wasn't spending enough of its budget on them and - worse still - they felt it was favouring Key West, Hemingway's affluent island dangling on the end.

After years of wrangling there was nothing else for it. A vote for independence (or incorporation, to use the posh term). It was all quite constitutional. They went to see an expert, met the criteria, asked the people - and won. Now they've declared their little town a city, elected a council and a mayor, demanded back their share of dues and taxes, and expect to take care of things themselves from here on in.

If only pigs could fly. Did you ever hear of something simple happening in politics?

There had to be some horse-trading. Who would be responsible for what? Roads, bridges, street-lighting, emergency services, parks, playgrounds, planning, that disaster scenario...who's going to do it? Who's going to pay?

The two sides sat down. The money would have to be split, assets divided, jobs would be lost - and then recreated - new efficiencies, new procedures. It all took some doing. And, of course, some of it didn't get done.

Remember the drawbridge? On handover day, they still hadn't decided who should pay the keeper for lifting it up and down to let the big boats in.

"Right then," said the County, "if you're not going to take it over, we'll leave it where it is." And there it stayed, stuck in the upright position, a vertical salute of defiance, while officials from all sides held huddles in the bridge-keeper's hut and worked out a compromise.

"Let's be polite and just say there's some confusion over all of this," said Larry, harrassed assistant (and soon-to-be) editor of the local newspaper when I called to see him. He said he could go on. And he did. On and on.

"There's a bill in right now for bridge repairs which they are arguing about. Then there's the sewerage issue, and the road-widening issue, and the housing issue, and the pollution issue, and they want to trade the cost of garbage collection for the..." My head is beginning to spin. Thankfully a deadline is looming. "Sorry. Got to go. Front page leaves in five minutes," says Larry, beetling off.

"Er, no problem, I think I get the picture," I mutter.

"Why don't you try the new mayor's office," inquired the receptionist thoughtfully, as I went to leave. "Thanks. Good idea," I said.

It took a while. Marathon's City Hall is sliced, like the filling in a weight-watchers sandwich, between a hairdressers and an estate agent at the far end of a parking lot on the outskirts of town. I'm actually not sure I could have found it at all without the flags outside and a sign in the window.

Inside, I meet Ann, who is somebody in the planning department. "Oh, there's such a lot to do," she says. "I don't think any of us realised..."

"You're not getting discouraged already are you," I asked, probably too pointedly.

"Oh no, we feel we are really looking after ourselves now; not being just a little part of something so much bigger. You know?" I said I knew.

"Of course things will be alright when we can get a master plan together. Then we can really work towards something that will make us all feel proud. It's just that there's such a lot to do..." M'm, I said, just like before, I think I get the picture. And I left her to it.

The next conversation is with Ed, who owns the place where I am staying tonight. "Hey, you don't know the half of it," he says. "We are all as mad as prairie dogs down here. Beats me how we all survive.

"I think it must be the hurricanes that do it. We've had three of the worst ones in America this century, you know?" I said I didn't (although I did, as it happens; just like I knew that Hurricanes Andrew, Mitch, Georges and, most recently, Debby, have all come calling in the last 10 years and left a big trail of damage) but Ed was going to tell me anyway.

"Worst of the lot was in '35 - winds of 200 miles an hour and a 20-foot wave that washed away large chunks of the Keys. (I knew that,too. Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. 800 people died - half of them down this way). It knocked a train clean off the tracks at Islamorada and that put paid to the railways," said Ed.

"Damn things keep buzzin' around all the time. It's no wonder we want to look out for ourselves.

"D'ya know what they want us to do? Evacuate the place and trek off to a school hall in Miami. Can you imagine? Hundreds of thousands of people trying to get up that one small highway and leave everything behind? Are you surprised nobody has any time for the authorities round here?"

Ed, who owns several motel-type lodging houses on the Keys, is now aboard his favourite hobby-horse.

"Yeah, Marathon wants to look after itself. But there'll be plenty of others, you'll see. Big Pine and some of the smaller Keys are waiting to find what happens. Then there's Islamadora, they are going it alone already. It's everyone for himself. We must be a real problem for Monroe - and for the whole State of Florida I guess - but they've only got themselves to blame.

What Ed didn't say (but which I can now share with those of you who don't already know) is that the present rush of independence isn't the biggest show of rebellion on the Keys in recent times.

Twenty years ago on Key West, where the big money is, residents reacted in horror when police blocked off US 1 at the top end for a stop-and-search operation to catch drug runners and illegal immigrants.

Fearing their holiday trade would take fright, the Key Westers quickly went into action.

They fired an old cannon into the ocean, declared themselves a republic, announced they were at war with America, immediately surrendered and then demanded $2billion in foreign aid. The roadblock was removed soon afterwards.

Told you they were a bolshie lot down on the Keys. Like Marathon, I reckon their saga has a long way to run.

Further reading:

Monroe County Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan 1998

Marathon Incorporation: Budget Impacts 2001, by Monroe County's office of management and budgets

Monroe County: Sanitary Wastewater Master Plan, June 2000

Monroe County: Year 2010 Comprehensive Plan