Read Last Train to Paradise for Free Online Page A

to hold the rails had to rise up in response, or else risk railroad passengers being swamped at sea, a concept as bizarre as it was terrible. So progress slowed to a crawl while the railroad builders could once again devise a way to do what had never before been done, all the while mindful of the advancing age of Henry Flagler and his determination to ride his own “iron” to Key West before he died.
    It is the sort of knowledge that few contemporary drivers contemplate of course. Those lucky enough to have timed the trip with the onset of evening might slow down to savor the view from the soaring bridge. Others, as desperate in their own ways as Flagler to reach Key West, find the bridge’s downhill slope a welcome spur to pick up speed.
    On the other side of Bahia Honda, the low-lying keys of Big Pine and Ramrod, Cudjoe and Sugarloaf, are notable for disparate, even bizarre, reasons. Cudjoe, for instance, is home these days, to “Fat Albert,” an unmanned interagency surveillance blimp that floats high above the island like a perpetually tethered cloud, keeping its ultra-high-tech electronic eyes and ears attuned to all naval goings-on—drug running not the least of it—in the Caribbean corridor.
    At MM 31, Big Pine is home to what’s left of the herd of tiny Keys deer: creatures not quite the size of a Great Dane and whose near extinction in the mid-twentieth century was one of the spurs to the passage of the Endangered Species Act. There is some debate among scientists as to whether or not the Keys deer are a native species all their own, or are the descendants of the Southern whitetail deer scaled down to Keys size by eons of hardscrabble life in a circumscribed environment, but in any case they are remarkable to see, assuming you can find one. Though the numbers of deer have increased in recent years, it’s not as though you’re likely to find the shy creatures grazing in herds along the road. And for creatures that are seldom seen, it’s the long-sought-after residents of the Bat Tower, on Sugarloaf Key, that are hard to beat.
    To reach this attraction, a thirty-five-foot wooden colossus that looks something like a mine shaft housing or, well, a bat tower, requires a short detour westward off the highway. The structure was built in 1929 by Sugarloaf’s original developer, R. C. Perky, a man who’d hoped to somehow attract a colony of bats that would in turn eat the clouds of mosquitoes that favored Sugarloaf, and that were discouraging Perky’s efforts to lure tourists to his island. Despite the deployment of a top-secret bat bait sold to Perky by a Texas entrepreneur, no bat has ever lived in Perky’s tower so far as anyone knows, but the structure remains, a somewhat lesser testament to the grander dreams of man.
    The Bat Tower, near MM 17, may be the last sight of interest to divert the resolute traveler from the jewel at the end of the road. From there, Key West lies less than twenty minutes’ drive to the west and slightly south, with only Big Coppit (not big at all), Boca Chica (home to a Navy air base), and Stock Island (home to Mount Trashmore, the highest point of landfill in the Keys) to intervene.
    Key West is, after all, the point of this journey for most, as it always has been, as it always is likely to be.
    There’s something special about Key West. It is the closest habitation the United States has to being truly tropical, lying fewer than fifty miles north of the Tropic of Cancer, and as locals are fond of pointing out, it is far closer to Havana (one hundred miles) than to Miami (half again as distant). Its geographical position is, in fact, one of the points that Henry Flagler raised when asked to explain his otherwise unfathomable urge to build a railroad here.
    But Flagler’s railroad across the ocean never earned a dime of profit, and it is difficult to imagine how a businessman as bright as he was ever thought it would. Flagler managed to fabricate excuses for his endeavor, one of