This will be our third trip to Florida in a year. Friday week I have to be in Hollywood, the Florida Hollywood on the Atlantic Coast between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, so we’ll go two days early and drive south to Key West for a day. The guide, Andrew Asher, says that for February we’re unlikely to see bonefish, which means we won’t catch bonefish; that if it warms up we might fish for baby tarpon, the 20-40 pound fish, which means it will almost certainly be freezing; and that it’s a good time of year for permit. I’m not convinced that anyone ever actually catches permit. I suspect that we will have a five-hour drive and Kris will catch something just to taunt me. She’ll probably catch a permit. Blind casting.

I have an excellent if dated tourist guide for the Keys, The Florida Keys: A History and Guide, Tenth Edition, by the fiction writer Joy Williams. From time to time over the last year I’ve read bits of it because Williams’ observations are so wry and entertaining. It’s dated, it was first published in 1987 and my edition dates from 2003, but it’s very readable. I can’t remember when I bought it, or why.

There’s also a bit of magical thinking on my part. In my prior three days’ Florida fishing I haven’t caught a fish because I snubbed Key West, and I won’t catch a Florida fish until I go there. Funny thing is that whatever happens now that’s true.

If the Florida Peninsula is a long limestone spine covered with sandy soils, the Keys are the dribbling exhaustion of that spine, a 180-mile archipelago extending in a southwesterly crescent from the Everglades. The islands dot and cluster, with 106 miles accessible by car via Route 1 ending at Key West, and once you finally get there there’s no parking. One supposes that in places like Marathon there are plenty of roadside convenience stores to buy the road trip necessaries, Fritos and bean dip, or at least Cheetos. It is Florida, and there has to be roadside stuff, even on a bridge.

Before convenience stores, before the last ice age, the Keys were underwater, covered with coral in the Upper Keys and sand in the Lower. They popped out of the sea (along with the Bering Strait land bridge) about the time that Greenland froze and the oceans sank. Geologists estimate that the current Keys date from about 15,000 years ago, which makes them older than the Bible but younger than North America’s first human settlers. Key West is the southernmost outpost of the Keys (though the Marquesas Keys and Dry Tortugas are further west and a bit north), so of the continental states the Florida Keys are as far south as we can go, further south even than Brownsville (which I hardly knew was possible). The Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that you can’t legally mention Key West without saying it’s only 90 miles from Cuba. There. Done.

The Keys will soon have a chance to be underwater again.

Key West isn’t in the tropics, but under the Koppen climate classification system it’s tropical. This gets confusing, but the tropics aren’t the tropics because of temperature or flora and fauna, the reasons I would expect, but because of a celestial moment. In the northern hemisphere on the summer solstice, at 23°26’12.5″ latitude north, the sun is directly overhead. That’s the Tropic of Cancer, and as the earth tilts on its axis it is the northern limit of where the sun can sit directly overhead and establishes the northern boundary of the tropics. The southern boundary is the Tropic of Cancer’s southern counterpoint, the Tropic of Capricorn.

At a latitude of 24°33’2.51′ Key West is a bit more than a full degree north of the tropics, and is considered tropical not because of its latitude but because of its warm climate–it has never recorded a frost. It has a wet season from May to October and the rest of the year is the dry season. It has an average of fifty-five 90 degree days per year, and the hottest month is July. Houston averages 74 days, New Orleans 56. Houston (a good bit north of Key West at 29°45’46”) and New Orleans (a good bit north of Houston at 29°95′) are subtropical because of summer heat and humidity and mild, generally frost-less winters, but we are all New England Yankees to the Conchs.

All of Key West, Houston, and New Orleans share hurricanes, though not usually the same hurricane..

Somebody probably has a reckoning of how many islands comprise the Keys, and I’ve read that the number is over 800, but it wouldn’t be a simple calculation. Is that wee bit of mangrove hummock over yonder an island? Are those two tiny bits of sand and mangrove a single island or two? Even without a number though there is a list of names that we know. From the Everglades, and the Upper Keys southwesterly through the Middle Keys and the Lower Keys, there is Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon, Big Pine Key, Key West, the Marquesas Keys (which is different from the Polynesian Marquesas Islands), the Dry Tortugas . . . Facing south and moving down those names the Atlantic is on the left, with the Gulf Stream, blue water with blue water fish, separated from the Keys by a long coral reef, the Florida Reef. To the right is Florida Bay opening onto the Gulf of Mexico, a bay that hopefully we haven’t irreparably damaged by diverting freshwater flow from the Everglades.

There is a plan in place to restore the Everglades and to improve the Florida Bay water quality, but it takes money and political will. Florida politics is strange and fascinating stuff, and November’s election was textbook Florida, but the president of the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust has sent out a letter stating that the new Republican governor has made it a priority to restore the Glades. “[H]e delivered clear, unwavering messages about the environment and his intent to protect it. Sweeping actions announced by his administration include a $2.5 billion commitment over the next four years for water resources and Everglades restoration, a directive to [the South Florida Water Management District] to immediately begin design of the EAA Reservoir, a commitment to expedite other important Everglades restoration projects, and a call for the immediate resignation of the entire SFWMD governing board.” Whatever else Governor DeSantis may do, if he moves restoration of the Everglades forward that’s big and admirable stuff, and $2.5 billion is a start. A billion here, a billion there, it can add up to real money.

As for the Keys disappearing under the deep blue sea, most of the Keys is less than five feet above sea level. The Keys are already losing land to water, and have been for decades, but the process will accelerate as temperatures rise. The United Nations projects global temperatures will rise by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, which will submerge the Keys, Miami, and the rest of coastal Florida. They could be under water faster if the polar ice melt accelerates. Big Pine Key, home of the key deer, is projected by the Land Conservancy to be underwater in a matter of decades. It’s probably not the place to do any long-term real estate lending. That mortgage isn’t going to be very good security.