There’s always been something magical about Old Town Key West at night. It can still be sensed today, but it was especially apparent in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Back then, drawn by that magic, I sometimes walked barefoot around Old Town after dark. Palmetto bugs rustled and scattered like small moving leaves, and the day’s residual heat warmed the sidewalk.
But it wasn’t the warmth I felt most deeply. Through the soles of my feet, I felt Key West’s heartbeat drumming its rhythm into my blood — or at least that’s how it seemed — as though the island was a sentient creature that came alive at night.
While I walked, surrounded by the sweet scent of night-blooming plants, I watched lights blossom behind the windows of old houses and wondered about the people who lived within their walls. Did they too feel the heartbeat and the magic?
In those days we were reckless, with no exploit too crazy to consider. Eat the worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila and dive off a rickety dock? Absolutely. Hop aboard a sailboat with a brand-new friend for a long weekend offshore? Sounds like fun. Meet a pirate in a bar and take him home for the evening? Good plan.
We didn’t imagine we were immortal, but we were Key Westers — and those of us who felt the island’s magic had a deep-seated belief that Key West would look after its own.
It looked after the legendary Captain Finbar Gittelman and three cohorts when they survived a 1980 hurricane in a life raft after their boat sank, a local mayor who water-skied 100 miles to Cuba on a single ski and arrived unscathed, and an old friend when the Coast Guard boarded her sailboat but didn’t find the hidden contraband.
One night, when a car hit my bike as I pedaled down Duval Street, it was my turn to need Key West’s help.
I felt the impact, felt myself falling, and saw a brief flash of something big and white speeding away. Then everything spun crazily and faded to nothing.
Regaining consciousness, I found myself lying in the middle of Duval, surrounded by a circle of women. They looked like angels, arranged protectively around me to deflect traffic, their faces in shadow and their hair haloed by the streetlights’ glow.
“I’m a nurse,” one of them said as she knelt beside me. “Don’t move — an ambulance is on its way.”
“I put your bike on the sidewalk so it wouldn’t get hit again,” said another, as I tried fuzzily to focus and figure out what had happened.
One more trotted up and laid my purse beside my outstretched hand. “Here you go,” she told me. “I found it by the curb.”
They stayed with me until the ambulance came, and then they vanished — circling me one minute and gone the next. Or maybe it just seemed that way to my scrambled brain, because the ER doctor diagnosed a substantial concussion.
Even after my head healed, some memories of that night remained foggy. I tried to find the women to thank them, but no one knew who they were.
In the decades since, my reckless friends and I have settled down considerably — though I still occasionally stroll around Old Town after dark.
Sometimes during my walks, I think about the accident and wonder if the “angels” who helped me were flesh-and-blood women. They must have been, of course; it would be silly to imagine otherwise.
But on those nights when Key West’s heart still beats beneath my feet, it’s easy to believe something else: that they were the embodiment of the island, looking after its own.
