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a railroad bridge, the remnants of which still stand as a fishing pier stretching, unspliced, from the south and north, and paralleling the modern highway that zips alongside. Water everywhere, right, left, ahead, and behind, so much of it that land is nearly out of sight; fishermen standing a few feet away, vying with pelicans for elbow room on the old bridge rails: the traveler might wonder whoever had the thought to build such a road as this in the first place.
    It’s a thought that won’t go away, despite another interlude of landlocked driving through Grassy Key, a spot so isolated that big-city aquaria and water theme parks regularly send their overstressed dolphins to the marine research center here for a little R and R. After Grassy Key comes Crawl Key, and next Key Vaca, and the sudden quasi-urban sprawl of Marathon, where actual airplanes are tethered along the narrow runway at highwayside. There is a plethora of motels and restaurants in Marathon, most of them there to service the moneyed sport fishermen who have come to pursue the more than four hundred varieties of fish that are said to live in the waters surrounding the Keys.
    Yet this overbuilt enclave marks another stage in civilization’s steady unraveling down the archipelago. When the original railroad was being built along this path, progress was swift and steady, despite the many obstacles this unique terrain presented. Even the Long Key Viaduct was built rapidly and without incident, relatively speaking.
    But just past Marathon, at MM 47, land as most people reckon it truly ends. From this jumping-off point stretches seven miles of open water. Even the railroad builders were stymied. For three years, engineers struggled and men died to span the unthinkable distance between Knight’s Key and Little Duck, until finally it was done.
    Following the railroad’s disappearance, the highway was built atop the old railroad span, and in the 1980s, another modern bridge was built alongside. As was the case with the original Long Key Viaduct, much of the original railroad bridge was left standing, some of it serving as fishing pier, some of it simply remaining, massive stretches jutting up from the water, pilings and arches built literally out of sight of land, as obdurate and mystifying to the modern traveler as the vestiges of Stonehenge:
    “What
is
that over there, anyway?”
    “Old railroad bridge.”
    “Railroad?”
    “Yep.”
    “Across the ocean?”
    “That’s what it is.”
    “Who would build a railroad across the ocean?”
    “Now that’s another story.”
    A lucky traveler might get that much out of a typically closemouthed Conch, maybe one he’d bumped into on the rocky beach at Little Duck, MM 40, or Missouri or Ohio Key. But there might not be anyone on those flyspecks of land, not unless someone had come to do a little roadside fishing or load up a pile of the lobster traps that are often stored along this lonely stretch of road.
    Along with Bahia Honda or “Deep Bay” Key, this relative hiccough of land marks a true geological distinction between the Upper and Lower Keys, the Upper Keys being formed primarily of ancient coral, the lower an upheaval of limestone that nourishes a somewhat wider range of plant and animal life. Separating the two are the waters of the Bahia Honda Channel, the deepest to be encountered in the Keys, and a fresh challenge to the builders of the railroad.
    While the waters to be crossed at Long Key and Seven Mile were vast, they were at least shallow. Pilings could be sunk in water a few feet deep at most. And, as engineering science holds, even hurricane-driven waves could not logically exceed the depth of the water, so the height of the bridges was correspondingly modest.
    At Bahia Honda Channel, MM 38, engineers encountered steely blue waters, however, and divers soon confirmed their fears. “Twenty-three feet in some places,” was the report. “Thirty-five in others.”
    Which meant the pilings that were