My Secret Public Journal: Books

Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Fred the Tree

Fred the Tree stands on the abandoned section of the Old Seven Mile Bridge as though he has been assigned there.

He is not alone. A smaller companion grows nearby, equally improbable and no less charming. Together, they rise from the weathered remains of a bridge surrounded by saltwater, exposed to wind, storms, and the general hostility of an environment that does not appear especially interested in supporting trees.

And yet there they are.

I first learned Fred’s name before I saw him. This is the sort of thing people do in the Keys. They take something strange, isolated, and enduring, give it a name, and gradually turn it into a local celebrity. Fred is not simply a tree growing from an old bridge. He is Fred. He has a following, a reputation, and, judging by the attention he receives, a better public-relations department than many elected officials.

The smaller tree beside him does not seem to have one universally accepted name, which may be for the best. Not every companion needs a formal introduction. It is enough that Fred is no longer alone.

The pair reminded me immediately of a tree back home in Missouri that grows from the top of an abandoned silo beside I-49. I have passed it often enough that it has become part of the road itself, one of those landmarks that tells you where you are without the assistance of a sign. A tree growing from a silo should never become ordinary, but familiarity has a way of domesticating the impossible.

The Missouri tree belongs to the same peculiar family as Fred and his companion: trees that have ignored the usual instructions about where trees are supposed to grow.

Most trees choose soil. These chose infrastructure.

The Missouri tree rises from a structure built to store grain. Fred grows from a bridge built to carry trains across the sea. Both structures were products of confidence, labor, and engineering. The silo spoke of harvest and storage. The bridge spoke of Henry Flagler’s great Overseas Railway and the human conviction that enough money, steel, and determination could overcome geography.

For a time, perhaps, they did.

The Old Seven Mile Bridge was part of one of the most audacious transportation projects in American history. Flagler’s railway pushed southward through the Florida Keys, linking islands across open water and carrying passengers toward Key West. The bridge became a symbol of ambition, a monument to the belief that nature could be measured, crossed, and put on a timetable.

The trains are gone now.

The old bridge remains in pieces, weathered and partially abandoned. What was once an instrument of movement has become a place of stillness. Steel and concrete endure, but no longer for their original purpose.

Then a tree found a crack.

There is something satisfying about that. The bridge was built as evidence of human mastery, but Fred is evidence of something quieter. Nature does not always conquer dramatically. It does not always arrive with hurricanes, tides, or roots splitting pavement in two. Sometimes it simply takes advantage of an opening and begins.

The same is true of the silo tree in Missouri. The silo no longer serves the agricultural purpose for which it was built, but the tree has given it another life. The structure remains because the tree has made it memorable. Without the tree, it would merely be an abandoned cylinder beside the highway. With the tree, it becomes a landmark.

Fred has done much the same for the old bridge.

I am tempted to call this resilience, though resilience may be too polished a word. We are fond of turning trees into moral instructors. We look at them surviving storms or growing from ruins and immediately recruit them into service as symbols of perseverance. The tree itself may have no such ambition. It found a place where a seed could settle, and it continued doing what trees do.

We are the ones who make it meaningful.

We are the ones who see loneliness and invent companionship. We give the tree a name, worry about it during hurricanes, and search for it as we cross the bridge. We point it out to one another as though introducing an old friend.

“There’s Fred.”

The fact that he is inaccessible only adds to the affection. Fred cannot be climbed, carved into, hugged, or made to pose for photographs at close range. He remains offshore, beyond the reach of tourists and their admirable determination to touch everything they find interesting. He must be appreciated from a distance.

Perhaps that is part of his charm.

Fred and his smaller companion are not grand in the way the bridge was intended to be grand. They are not monuments to wealth, engineering, or industrial progress. They are simply alive in a place where life appears unlikely.

The builders of the railway tried to overcome the landscape. Fred has done something more modest. He has adapted to it.

That may be why he feels familiar. The tree in the Missouri silo and the trees on the old bridge are separated by more than a thousand miles, but they tell nearly the same story. Human beings build something permanent, abandon it, and move on. Then nature arrives without ceremony and gives the ruins a second purpose.

The silo no longer stores grain. The bridge no longer carries trains.

Now they carry trees.

And because a tree is growing where no reasonable tree should be, people passing by look up, smile, and remember where they are.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s former home now belongs to the cats.

His books, photographs, furniture, marriages, fishing stories, and carefully cultivated legend remain on display, but the cats move through it all as though the famous writer were merely a previous tenant. They sleep beneath chairs, patrol the gardens, and receive visitors with the composed indifference of minor aristocrats.

I paused to say hello to every cat I encountered.

This slowed the tour considerably, although none appeared concerned about my schedule.

Hemingway first came to Key West with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in 1928. Three years later, they moved into the Spanish Colonial house on Whitehead Street, where he lived through most of the 1930s. His writing studio occupied the second floor of a carriage house behind the residence, separated from domestic life by a courtyard and a short walk.

The arrangement suited him. He could leave the house without truly leaving the property, preserving both the comforts of marriage and the appearance of escape.

The Key West years became one of the most productive periods of his career. In the Whitehead Street studio, and during the broader years he moved among Key West, Cuba, Wyoming, Spain, and Africa, Hemingway worked on Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, The Fifth Column, and portions of For Whom the Bell Tolls. He also produced major short fiction during this period, including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

Of these works, To Have and Have Not belongs most directly to Key West. Its boats, smugglers, poverty, violence, and uneasy movement between Florida and Cuba grew from the island Hemingway knew during the Depression. Key West was not merely where he sat down to write. It entered the fiction.

The island also suited the public character he was constructing.

He fished the Gulf Stream aboard Pilar, boxed, drank, traveled frequently to Cuba, and surrounded himself with companions who shared his appetite for physical adventure and extended evenings. Key West offered deep water, large fish, strong drinks, masculine fellowship, and enough distance from respectable literary society to make every afternoon appear vaguely dangerous.

That mythology remains so powerful that the writer can disappear behind “Hemingway.”

The house tells a less heroic story.

Pauline’s family money helped purchase and renovate the property. She oversaw major improvements, including the swimming pool, an extravagant addition in a place where fresh water remained precious. Hemingway’s affair with journalist Martha Gellhorn contributed to the destruction of the marriage. He eventually left Key West, divorced Pauline in 1940, and moved toward another life.

The years preserved so warmly in the house therefore contained more than literary discipline and heroic fishing. They also held privilege, betrayal, domestic strain, and the slow collapse of a marriage.

Museums prefer objects because objects remain where they are placed. Lives are less cooperative.

The cats, however, seem entirely at home.

The property now shelters dozens of them, many displaying polydactyly, the inherited trait that gives them extra toes. According to the tradition maintained by the museum, they descend from Snow White, a six-toed cat given to Hemingway by a ship’s captain. The certainty of that story has sometimes been questioned, but the cats have long since outrun the need for documentation.

Each bears the name of a famous person, though celebrity appears to have made little impression upon them. They settle into shaded corners, drift among visitors, and occupy the grounds with a confidence Hemingway himself might have admired. Some of their paws resemble small mittens, though none appeared interested in using the additional toes for productive labor.

I greeted each one because it seemed rude not to.

Some acknowledged me. Others did not. This also seemed appropriate. Hemingway spent much of his life constructing the image of a man who could command rooms, boats, animals, landscapes, and sentences. A cat would regard this as an unnecessarily elaborate way of asking for attention.

It happened that we visited on Hemingway’s birthday, July 21.

Birthdays are strange occasions at the homes of dead writers. The person is absent, but the date returns each year with perfect punctuality. Visitors gather, guides repeat familiar stories, books continue to sell, and the subject of the celebration remains permanently beyond surprise.

I marked the occasion by purchasing a copy of A Farewell to Arms.

The novel occupies an interesting place in Hemingway’s relationship with Key West. It was published in 1929, before he moved into the Whitehead Street house and before the famous studio became his regular workplace. He had, however, worked on the novel during his earliest period in Key West and reportedly completed it while staying on the island.

It belongs to the beginning of his Key West years, though not to the room we visited.

That distinction made the purchase more meaningful rather than less. I was not carrying away a book produced in that particular studio. I was carrying one connected to the moment Hemingway was first discovering the island that would shape the next decade of his life.

The title also seemed quietly suited to the visit.

Hemingway repeatedly said farewell—to places, wives, wars, friends, versions of himself, and eventually to Key West. Yet the house preserves the illusion that he might return from the dock at any moment, carrying a fish story that had improved considerably during the walk home.

He never did.

Pauline remained for a time. The house became a museum. The studio became a shrine to disciplined work. The legend expanded, while the cats took possession of the grounds.

That may be the most fitting outcome.

Hemingway worked hard to make himself unforgettable. The cats accomplish something similar by sleeping in strategically visible locations.

I left with A Farewell to Arms in hand, having observed his birthday and greeted every cat willing—or unwilling—to receive me. Hemingway’s name brought me through the gate, but the cats determined the pace of the visit.

He wrote himself into immortality.

They got the house.