BIG PINE KEY, Fla. – I was knee deep in flowing tidal water, sidestepping fist-sized chunks of coral and small sting rays on the white sand, when I saw my first Key deer. It was 50 yards away, across a salt marsh basin of marl and sea purslane, immersed in water itself, nibbling at the new green shoots on the low branches of a red mangrove tree. It had a small rack – a six-pointer – and was, for all purposes, a fully grown whitetail buck. Except, what was knee-deep water for me was neck deep for the deer.
Ordinarily, this would have been an odd dream, just enough details to make it right, but otherwise all out of proportion – me as Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputs. Except this was real life: I was on the lee shore of Big Pine in the Lower Florida Keys, and the little white tail would always be tiny, no larger than a collie.
You could argue the notion of real life is fluid here in these Keys anyway. They do seem squarely off the mainstream grid, trailing out into the south Atlantic from Florida’s southerly cape between the cusp of the tangible and the bit less so. This is, after all, a region that takes great pride in calling itself the “Conch Republic” in honor of a giant marine snail with a bright pink-lipped shell.
But that hardly explains the flesh-and-blood existence of the Key deer. Nor does it account for all the other raging signs of speciation present on these islands: The colorful banded tree snails, so distinct that they vary from one set of woods to another; the ringless ring-necked snake; the little marsh bunny unlike any found back on the mainland, a subgroup named for the founder of the Playboy empire as hefneri.
As Darwin found in the Galpagos and Wallace in the Malay Peninsula, evolution will more clearly change us into something other than what we used to be. Geographic seclusion will adapt, modify, speciate us. We will prosper in niches, radiating anatomically, to fill them.
Within the confines of a subtropical key with scant fresh water and fodder, we will become tiny white-tailed deer. We will number 400 to 500, and year-by-year – along with our fellow endemics – we will dwindle, circling the genetic wagons as the rest of the world stampedes ever closer in a cloud of dust.
Of the 43 islands linked together by the 110-mile-long “Overseas Highway” of U.S. 1, the two with the largest chunks of natural land remaining are Key Largo to the north and Big Pine to the south. Hundreds of other smaller keys in this same archipelago are scattered about – some as feral as the day they were birthed from the sea and sand. Uncorseted by the highway, they can be seen on the horizon shimmering like mirages.
But the roaded, bridged islands of Key Largo and Big Pine are remarkable for their great lopsided irony: Natural terrain on each sustains wildlife so rare it exists no where else in the world. Yet, this habitat pushes up against some of the most curious displays of civilization you’re likely to find.
So close and so far
Consider: The undeveloped landscape on North Key Largo, an asylum for tree snails and American crocodiles and endemic wood rats, is barely a half-mile from the Caribbean Club, a rowdy waterfront tavern claiming to be the location for the classic flick “Key Largo.”
Down near Big Pine, Lilliputian white-tails routinely wander out of the Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge and into the parking lot of the ramshackle No Name Bar & Grill, the slogan of which is “A Nice Place If You Can Find It.” Despite the homogenizing crush of upscale development, there are also enclaves of humans here as rare as the wildlife. Perhaps the nearby refuges somehow comfort them, too.
