In Florida: End of an Era

By Jane O''Reilly

Until a few weeks ago, before the winds of progress struck, the Boot Key Marina was the kind of place where everybody got together and cooked a collective Thanksgiving dinner. They had parties all the time. Ellie Sharp, who spent the past six years at the marina with her husband Pat aboard their 39-ft. sailboat, the Tranquillity II, liked to collect everyone's aluminum cans, sell them and use the money for the regular Saturday hamburger cookouts. In the winter, when the weather was right, 25 or 30 people would wander down to the end of the dock to a little pavilion they called Fiddler's Green and spend the cocktail hour watching for the elusive sunset phenomenon known as the green flash. The ships' store was out there, with the telephones and mailboxes.

People played bridge on the patio furniture, and in the mornings Fran Markham used to conduct an exercise class. The view looked down the channel to the Atlantic Ocean and across to Boot Key, a tangled thicket of low-lying mangrove. The harbor is one of the few protected anchorages on the ocean side of the Florida Keys; it has been a major stop for anyone cruising to the Bahamas.

The marina is part of Marathon, halfway between Key Largo and Key West. The town's charms are not readily apparent to a traveler, who usually sees only a six-mile treeless stretch of U.S. Highway 1, where bars and cheap shopping malls are chaotically assembled under the glaring sun, lined up with occasional fading signs offering time-share condo developments. It is hard to earn a living legally in the Florida Keys, and the local residents hold two firm contradictory beliefs: 1) zoning and planning are outrageous interferences with free enterprise, and 2) mentioning aloud the less than salubrious effects of noninterference might discourage tourists and is therefore something close to unpatriotic.

The road to Boot Key Marina reflects an earlier, but no more graceful, state of Marathon's history. In a moldering trailer park a resident sits listlessly on top of a motorcycle, airing her black eye. Towers of lobster traps fill a fish yard. A dilapidated fish market offers the catch fresh from the fleet. The water in the harbor is a long way from crystalline.

The marina fills seven acres, more or less, of this point of land, and even the most sentimental observer can see that it is a piece of property "ripe for development." It is humble, but every winter it was home to about 120 boats. The wooden docks were lined with boxes full of tomato and lettuce plants. Bicycles, with the chrome abandoned to rust, stood unlocked next to supermarket baskets painted to match the vessels they served. Boats with some chance of being called yachts were berthed on A and B docks. The people tied up inside the piers next to the boatyard declared themselves IBLWT, or Inner Basin Low White Trash, and had logos and T shirts printed up.

Why would anyone want to live on a boat? "That's what all my family asks," says Lee Clark, 67, a former policeman from Ohio. He and his wife Mary retired to a 42-ft. trawler. The answer, for them, is in the name of their boat, Yolo, for You Only Live Once. Donna and Will Adams spent nine winters on a 22-ft. sailboat called Echoue (Aground). He used to teach French at Lamar University in Texas. Now they sail and work at whatever comes to hand. "We like to read," Will explains. "This way we can do it six to eight hours a day." Another couple, former New Yorkers, admit that living together on a boat is a discipline. "You have to move properly, speak only when spoken to. But houses are claustrophobic. On a boat the sky is part of our living space, like a tree house." To a landbound observer, a boat is like the center seat of an L-1011 on a nonstop flight to Singapore, on which one has to unpack and repack for every meal. But the observer misses the point: the life is different, and the people are, therefore, special. Joe Pluhar, who until a few weeks ago was the owner of the marina with his wife Bobbi, says, "The people made the marina, they helped, pitched in, patrolled. We loved them." Steve Coe, who was the dockmaster for eight years, says, "This place was for regular people who live aboard and do a little cruising, it wasn't for the gold-plated 65-footers."

Now, the gentrification of Boot Key Marina has begun. At the end of March the Pluhars sold it to a man named John Theurer. Rumor swept through Marathon that the selling price was over $2 million. Nobody knew much about the buyer. Up and down Highway 1, in the banks and the bars and the early-morning breakfast places, people were telling one another that he was part of the Theurer family that had made its money in truck- trailer manufacturing. "To be fair, no one knows what he is going to do with the marina," said a longtime resident, sitting on the dock in an aluminum chair.

But there were certainly strong hints that things had changed. The ships' store was torn down, reduced to bare ruined choirs in a matter of days. The loudspeaker system that once called residents to the phone was dismantled. Within a week, Steve Coe had been fired, with the explanation that he wasn't "a ball buster." ("In all those years, he was only late twice," said Bobbi Pluhar, with tears in her eyes.) Then transient mooring rates were nearly tripled. The permanent residents were never told what to expect, but they began to fear the worst.

"No one expected a change," says Will Adams. "It shows you how naive people are." Whenever the new owner appeared at the marina, fresh rumors broke out: their cozy anchorage would be replaced by a high-class resort with . tennis courts, gambling and gourmet restaurants. Some things were certain. Theurer had a custom sportfishing boat docked in the marina named the A/C D/C. He is 58. One of the few things he would tell a reporter was that he was raised in New York's Hell's Kitchen and never went past the seventh grade. He has a collection of gold chains. He gave a birthday bash for his wife that featured a stark-naked dancer on the bandstand and a tiered cake with a miniature space shuttle and a model car smashed into the icing on top. This whimsy apparently was reference to his wife's nickname, "Crash," and his, "Smash." He sent bowls of fruit to people in the marina with his card, which has JOHN "SMASH" THEURER printed on it. By that time, a lot of people were so upset they threw the fruit overboard. One morning, very early, he appeared on a spit of land across from the marina with a crew and some bulldozers and began tearing out mangroves, which are protected in Florida. The sheriff arrived and stopped him.

Around 700 people a day are now moving into Florida, and the state is caught in an inexorable conflict between progress and indigestion. At Boot Key, almost everyone decided the crunch had caught them. "All he had to do was tell us what he was planning," said a former regular Tuesday afternoon bridge player. "But not only could we not get a commitment, we felt intimidated." The camaraderie of a community had been destroyed. The exodus began.

At dawn one day not long after the sale, a heron flipped a fish at the end of the spit where the mangroves are still growing. A skiff headed out to sea, a Labrador standing in the bow. The mast of the Adams' boat was moving: they were up. "We'll probably go anchor out, all alone somewhere. That's nice. It's a different way of life," he says. The night before, everyone had gathered for the last party, an "End of an Era" cocktail hour. They gave Steve Coe $301 they collected as a thank-you present, and Bobbi Pluhar stood on a chair and promised there would be a reunion at her house next year. "I thought it would continue as it was," said Joe Pluhar, sadly. "We developed it into a business that I think was an institution, and inside of a week he has practically dumped it. It certainly gave us a shock."

As the former New Yorkers cast off for the last time, they called out, "This is a case of ships deserting the sinking rat." In the morning, about breakfast time, the new owner's crew dragged away a dinghy Ellie had filled with petunias and replaced it with an upscale plant: a screw pine.