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back—while I was watching the gulls circling overhead.”
    Once Melissa and Joe were seated at their table inside the restaurant, they were treated to a spectacular view of the now-radiant sunset and of the historical old lighthouse.
    “There was a hurricane that wiped out this island back in 1935,” Joe began. “The only locals who survived, except for a few who had gone to Miami to see the ball game, were six young highway workers who ran inside the lighthouse and climbed up to the top to wait out the storm. That painted line over there on the side of the lighthouse—at the eight-foot level—that’s how high the water got during the worst part of the hurricane.
    “It struck on the Sunday before Labor Day that year. Some of the waves were estimated at twenty feet high. A rescue train was sent in from Miami by the federal government. But the hurricane washed the train right off the tracks as soon as it got here. The locomotive, which weighed over a hundred tons, was the only thing left standing.
    “The highway workers who were staying in town were building our current road, Route 1. The Miami to Key West section, right through the Keys, was constructed by itinerant laborers from the Works Progress Administration, the so-called W.P.A. There was no other highway. Aside from boats, the only way to get from one island to another back then was by railroad. But the train tracks, along with most of the towns along the way, were wiped out by the hurricane. The railroad was never rebuilt.”
    “That hurricane seemed terribly potent,” Melissa commented. “Do they usually cause so much damage?” Melissa saw a faraway, almost pained look cross Joe’s face for a brief moment before he continued on.
    “The experts say the disastrous flooding was a result of the way Henry Flagler built that railroad of his. The high embankment next to the tracks prevented the water from washing its way through the island. Instead, the embankment acted like a dam, keeping the water level extremely high.
    “One old timer, who lived in nearby Marathon, the next town between here and Key West, told me that the barometer went under twenty-seven during the hurricane. That’s supposed to be some kind of meteorological record. Almost all of the Keys were devastated. The postmaster up in Key Largo had a total of forty-nine relatives living on the Keys before the storm, and only ten were still alive the day after the hurricane.
    “Every once in a while, a skeleton turns up on one of the mangrove islands. And every couple of years, another old car is found half-buried somewhere—bearing 1935 license plates.
    “After the storm, when Islamorada was rebuilt, the town council erected a monument to the dead highway workers. That monument is in the middle of a small park on the other side of the Seascaper, at Milepost 80.”
    “These highway workers, the W.P.A. people,” Melissa inquired, “where did they come from? Were they from other parts of Florida, were they prisoners, or what?”
    “Most of the laborers got the jobs because they were veterans of World War I. They were unemployed—victims of the Depression. And they moved from one tent city to another, following the highway. The famous author, Ernest Hemingway, who lived for a few years in Key West, wrote a magazine article soon after the storm. In it, he blamed the W.P.A. for not providing the workers with adequate shelter. He also criticized the lack of a prompt rescue.
    “The only good thing that came out of the storm was the fact that the railroad bridges, which connected the long string of islands, were still standing. Even though the rail beds on land had been ripped apart, all of the railroad bridges from Miami straight through to Key West were in perfect shape.
    “And since the W.P.A. had commissioned only the land portion of the overseas highway and had not yet gotten money to build the highway bridges, when they learned that the railroad would never be rebuilt, they turned the old