| OCR Text |
Show 69, Jeffries, Islamorada [Section 2] "So there's a little. . .ghost town out there?" "Want to float out there some morning? Nothing to see, though, but some crumblin' cisterns. "The earliest wreckers. . ." The Old Timer said gravely, "were the Calusa Indians. . "Well these poured concrete homes," Rossmore continued, "stilted up like that, is a way of trying to survive a hurricane surge. And the railroad has some blame, in^this respect, see here we run the Hell Hole Fill across what the boys called Pull-and-Be-Damned Creek, we was plugging the natural water gaps, affecting the tides, a 1909 hurricane pushed water up over the Keys and washed out forty miles of track, there was bad winters in Europe, and they said we did that, changing the course of the Gulf Stream. So our engineers listened to the Conchs, and the technique was more for cofferdams, viaducts, and an extra eighteen miles of bridges." "Well an Old Timer's been in some storms?" "I've been at the borders of those hurricanes. Moreso, as a young man. Funny how they don't come this way nomore. Well that Donna was a killer. But the hurricane of '35 accounts for the fact that you'll never again hear a train whistle on Islamorada. . . "It was a calm, sunny morning in Key West, but in Islamorada thirteen Parkers was standing on a double iron bed in a second floor bedroom trying to stay alive. |
