There were mangroves, boats, beaches, and the bright, restless water of Key Largo, but the park’s defining landscape remained somewhere offshore and beneath the surface. Pennekamp protects approximately 70 nautical square miles, most of it underwater. Dedicated in 1960, it became the first undersea park in the United States after conservationists successfully fought to protect the coral reef from commercial exploitation.
Most parks are arranged for the convenience of human vision. They give us trails, overlooks, plaques, and arrows pointing toward whatever we have come to admire. Pennekamp asks for a different kind of attention. Its most important country begins where the shoreline ends.
For today, however, we remained above water.
We walked down to Cannon Beach, where the obvious features were the cannons. One stood near the shore, an iron interruption among swimmers, trees, and pale stone. About one hundred feet offshore, additional seventeenth-century cannons form part of a reconstructed Spanish shipwreck site, creating a shallow-water reminder of the vessels once lost along the reefs of the Florida Keys.
The cannon on the beach looked almost unnaturally solid. Everything surrounding it seemed temporary: waves advancing and withdrawing, leaves moving in the wind, visitors arriving with towels and leaving with sand attached to them in places where sand had no business being. The cannon remained where it had been placed, heavy with the authority of another century.
It pointed toward an older history of the Keys, when Spanish ships passed through the Straits of Florida carrying silver, tobacco, supplies, and the broad ambitions of empire. The Gulf Stream offered speed, but the reefs demanded precision. Hidden coral and sudden storms could turn an imperial voyage into scattered cargo before anyone aboard had sufficient time to reconsider the wisdom of colonial expansion.
Those wrecks eventually helped create an economy in the Keys. Salvagers watched the reef line and raced toward ships in distress, rescuing passengers, recovering cargo, and claiming a share of whatever survived. The reef was both obstacle and provider. It destroyed ships and enriched communities, behaving with the moral neutrality one expects from geology.
From Cannon Beach, that dangerous history was difficult to reconcile with the calm water. Children played in the shallows. Boats moved across the distance. The sea looked innocent, which is one of its more successful disguises.
Later, sitting near the marina, I began noticing the lizards.
At first, there seemed to be only one or two, moving in quick bursts across stones and tree roots. Then, once I had learned to see them, they appeared everywhere. Small bodies paused in the sunlight before vanishing beneath leaves or behind pieces of wood. The park, which had seemed still from a distance, was busy with tiny reptilian errands.
One lizard refused to disappear into the scenery. It climbed against the trunk of a tree with an orange head, a body nearly black, and a tail fading through bands of color. It looked dressed for some tropical military ceremony whose purpose had been forgotten by everyone except the lizard.
It was a male Peters’s rock agama, a species native to Africa and introduced into Florida through the exotic-pet trade. Its vivid coloring made it impossible to mistake for one of the smaller brown lizards darting through the undergrowth. It stood out not merely as an animal, but as evidence.
Its presence seemed appropriate in a place whose history is defined by movement. Spanish ships brought cargo through the Straits. Bahamian and Cuban migrants carried languages and traditions into the Keys. Railroads and highways brought visitors from the mainland. Now animals, too, have traveled with human commerce, crossing boundaries they would not have crossed alone.
A state park encourages the comforting idea that nature has been preserved in some original condition. The agama complicated that thought. It was wild, but not native. It belonged to the landscape in the practical sense that it was standing directly in front of me, yet its presence also revealed how thoroughly people have altered the ecology they later attempt to protect.
The distinction did not seem to concern the lizard.
It clung to the tree and watched us with the complete confidence of a creature that had already decided the matter. Perhaps it regarded the tourists as the introduced species. We arrived in cars, occupied the marina, photographed everything that moved, and expected the landscape to explain itself.
From the lizard’s perspective, the evidence may have been overwhelming.
That was the lesson of Pennekamp today. The park did not surrender itself at once. Its coral reefs remained underwater. Its reconstructed wreck lay beyond the beach. Its history hid beneath bright water, while its changing ecology darted between tree roots.
Tomorrow, time willing, we will return for the glass-bottom boat and look down into the part of the park that remained concealed from us today. There was something fitting, however, about beginning at the surface, among cannons, mangroves, boats, and a brilliantly colored African lizard behaving as though Key Largo had always belonged to him.
We came expecting to see the reef.
Instead, the park taught us where to begin looking.