LEFT TO RIGHT In 1937, the single road running from Homestead, FL, and ending in Key West passed through Marathon with 13 bars and no schools or churches. That year the landmark Overseas Liquor and Lounge began its tenure as a mainstay stopover. Today it celebrates drinkers that bellied up to its bar, from Hemingway and FDR, to the infamous Al Capone. Photo: Robert Dotson “It’s no secret that our Keys ecosystems are struggling on multiple fronts. This flat, my favorite local spot, has seen more prop scars and run-aground jet skis than most others combined. A lack of signage and no buoys are partly to blame, but the overabundance of careless boaters is hard to ignore. A school of snook weaves through signs of the times.” Photo: Ian Wilson-Navarro THE FISHERMAN BUYS ME A DRINK I sat on a barstool drawing tarpon flies in my notebook and a man came up to me and sat down, just to watch. I’m no good at drawing, and that was obvi-ous. The lines of erosive sweat stains funneled from the brim of his visor, and in the light of the tiki bar, he got closer to me than I would have liked. Like his hat, his breath and teeth were stained from fishing stories he told guys like me at the bar after a few too many. He told me there was a day in May last year where he couldn’t stop taking waves over the bow, that he was the only one in the lineup that could get a fish to eat. I laughed when he told me the guides drove up to his boat to try and have a peek in his fly box. I didn’t buy any of it but acted like I did. His cigarette stalled in the tray where so many other cigarettes have, and we spent several hours trading tarpon stories. He insisted on buying me a beer, even though drinking isn’t my thing and never really has been. I let the longneck glass bottle sweat out amid the smoke and listened to the tarpon story he’d told twice already, this time with more pauses, more jolts when he hooked the fish, more screaming when the fish took off, more hair pulled out when it broke, more silence when it all went to shit. The crooked posture of the cigarette stumps leaned in the ashtray. He added another to the mix, pinching his fingers and twisting. My drawings of the flies went unfinished and were far from perfect. The imagination goes off the rails when no one is watching, when no one is there to contest it. Like the man who caught more tarpon than he could count, no one was there to tell him it wasn’t true. Sometimes we must live in the worlds we create by ourselves because they are not nearly as magical to those who know they don’t exist. They will likely stay that way forever. I closed my notebook for the night. I thought about whether that man was real, or just a figment of my imagination. He slipped away to the pay phone to make a call to an ex-wife, and I made my way to the door. 078 MARATHON
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 13.4: Page 78
