The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  Scott removed his sunglasses, revealing eyes that matched Jenita’s bright blue, and picked up the thread of their story.

  “We sold the car, the silverware, our clothes, the furniture. We downsized again and again, and it felt so good to get rid of material things, it was liberating.”

  “How do you get by? It must be tough.”

  “It was for me at first,” Jenita said. “I’m a sweepaholic. After living in a big house, with no house to clean, I started sweeping sidewalks.”

  Scott said, “We’ve got the money from the sale of our possessions, and I’ve got skills. I drove a truck for a living, I know contracting work, I pick up odd jobs.”

  They were not trained counselors, but they had experience ministering to the addicted. From the way they described Huntington, I gathered that it’s not the West Virginia John Denver sang about. Methamphetamine is the drug of choice in most of small-town and rural America, but crack is the plague in Huntington.

  “The crack comes from Detroit,” Scott said. “Dealers from there sell it in Huntington for five times what they’d get in Detroit. I’ve seen them with MONEYNGTON tattooed on their knuckles. That’s what they call it, ‘Moneyngton.’”

  Jenita preached to the neighborhood kids that it was a sin to use crack. They called her “Aunt Cheetah” for the time she ran down a gang of punks who’d tried to break into her van. Another time, Aunt Cheetah caught a runaway girl prostituting herself for crack.

  “Gave her a job cleaning our house. End of the day, she told me she was goin’ out, and I knew what for, and I told her, ‘No, you ain’t.’ Then she said she had to call her parents in Kentucky. She did, and then she took a shower, and while she was in there, I hit REDIAL and talked to her parents, and told them, ‘I’m Reverend Meyers, and I’ve got your daughter right here, if you want to come collect her.’ They did, and I still get postcards and letters from them. She’s clean now, she’s got a job.”

  If you think the Meyerses have a pretty high street IQ, you’re right. But, Scott said, Key West had introduced them to a whole new dimension.

  “I’ve known social alcoholics, but these people are professionals. You think you know the world, you get down here and know you don’t.”

  “We saw one young woman somebody said looked like a man,” Jenita said. “Right there in the open, she dropped her drawers and said, ‘Do I look like a man?’”

  She told tales of people down on their luck, way down, victims of the current economic wreck: a couple from Ohio, both fifty-eight years old, who’d been laid off from an auto plant, went through foreclosure, and were now on the street. A man who’d lost his wife and his job and had come down to the Keys to drink himself to death.

  “Some of these stories just rip your heart out,” said Scott. Then a skeptical expression played over his narrow, angular face. “But you don’t know what’s a real story, what’s a hustle.”

  Eric begged another cigarette, and Jenita manufactured it in her little machine. She and Scott then excused themselves for a moment, leaving me with Eric, who so far hadn’t spoken a word beyond his cadging smokes.

  He was twenty-eight, the adopted son of a well-to-do family in Rockford, Illinois, and, he declared, “homeless by choice.”

  “I can go where I want, I’m a free man. I’m not like most homeless people. I don’t panhandle. I do work. I’ve worked barges in New Orleans, I did house painting in Las Vegas. Look at this”—motioning at the panorama of green sea and white sand and palm trees—“People pay thousands, millions, to look at this. I do it for free.”

  “In other words, you’re kind of an old-fashioned hobo.”

  “Whatever,” he said, shrugging. “I’ve been doing it for eight years, and it’s hard. Not just finding something to eat and a place to sleep, but making sure your stuff doesn’t get stolen. You lose your driver’s license or your state ID or your Social Security card, and you’re done. And you’ve got to watch your health, physical and mental. Being homeless isn’t for the mentally defective.”

  Here’s a sharp survivor, I thought, and asked if he’d benefited from Scott and Jenita’s counsel.

  He gave me a canny look. “I’m teaching them a lot.”

  * * *

  The Meyerses went off to spend the night in a homeless shelter on Stock Island to, in Scott’s words, “learn firsthand what these people are going through.” I did not see them again. I admired them for turning their backs on a culture that enshrined consumption and self-indulgence, knowing I wasn’t capable of so radical a renunciation. Thinking of Scott at the bus stop, and the epiphany he experienced in the moment of despair, I recalled a line from Tolstoy’s short novel The Cossacks: “Happiness lies in living for others.” They seemed happy, this couple who’d tramped out of West Virginia with nothing but what they carried on their backs and a zeal to aid the marginalized. They probably would not rehabilitate many people with their ad hoc methods, but the attempt was what mattered. Their mission, whether or not it had come down from heaven, restored to their lives the purpose and meaning lost with the loss of Scott’s employment. In trying to save others, they saved themselves.

  * * *

  Before leaving Key West, Leslie and I wanted to get a photo of ourselves at the Southernmost Point and to see the Southern Cross.

  At the point, we joined a queue of tourists waiting to take photos. When our turn came, a balding, fortyish man behind us agreed to snap our picture. We posed beside the monument, he clicked Leslie’s Nikon, and we returned the favor. Noticing his accent, I asked where he was from. He pointed seaward. “From there, Cuba.”

  Mario Rodriguez wasn’t a tourist—a Cuban citizen has a better chance of getting a ticket to the moon than permission to visit the United States—but another escapee from Fidel Castro’s tropical Alcatraz and, as of last year, a citizen of the United States.

  I expected Rodriguez to tell of a perilous flight by sea, but his tale showed that the hope of freedom did not dwell only in the breasts of the desperate. He’d belonged to the Cuban elite, the beneficiary of perks denied ordinary citizens, like foreign travel and permission to study abroad. At eighteen, he was sent to East Germany to earn degrees in mathematics and business administration. There, he met and married an Ecuadorian woman and worked in what he termed economic research until East Germany, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, vanished from the map. He and his wife then moved to her native country, where Rodriguez taught math at a university and later established his own market research firm. His work, and vacations, took him all over the world, thirty-five or forty countries, he told me.

  He’d heard about a U.S. law that allowed any Cuban who managed to get here to obtain a green card if he stayed one year and a day; after five years, he could apply for citizenship. In 2004, he got a visa from the U.S. consulate in Quito and flew to Miami. That’s all there was to it.

  His undramatic departure made him an unusual Cuban immigrant. What draw did the United States have on someone so privileged?

  “The situation in Ecuador was not good,” he said in a boyish voice. “It was not secure. I was, you know, how can you say when somebody takes you and asks for money?”

  “You were robbed?”

  “Yes, I was taken for two days…”

  “You were kidnapped and held for ransom.”

  “Okay, yes.”

  “Do you know who kidnapped you and why?”

  “No, and I don’t want to know. After that, I decided to come to the United States. I love Ecuador, it’s a nice country, but the situation there isn’t right, so I came to this country because it’s the opportunity country.”

  “And your wife came with you?”

  “No. She died in Ecuador. Of cancer,” he replied flatly. There was a whole other story, but I sensed it was not one he cared to tell.

  Now Rodriguez was living near Fort Lauderdale, a substitute math teacher in a high school, hoping to qualify for a university teaching position. He did not, unlike Cuban émigrés of an older gene
ration, feel the slightest moral obligation to liberate Cuba. He was just happy to be here.

  “I traveled all around the world, but I always say this is the country where I want to live, because the freedom we have here, you know, we never have that freedom in other countries. To develop your self-realization. There is crisis, I know, economic crisis, but the United States is the best country in the world. I think so.”

  * * *

  Someone had told me, years ago, that Key West’s latitude was the northernmost from which the Southern Cross was visible. I had glimpsed it just once, in 1980, while on a night swordfishing trip in the Gulf Stream. It hung a hand’s width above the horizon in the southwest—four stars like the points of a crystal kite.

  On our last night, looking for the asterism, Leslie and I walked on Higgs Beach, where Scott and Jenita Meyers did God’s work. Somewhere underfoot the bones of nameless slaves lay in a mass grave unmarked except for the brass plaque that told the story of how three U.S. Navy frigates had rescued them from Confederate slavers and brought them to Key West. The slave ships were captured out in the Caribbean, with more than a thousand Africans on board, in conditions so wretched that 264 of them died of disease within days of breathing the air of liberation. You can only wonder who they were, cast into a ditch and covered with sand beside the sea looking eastward toward the continent they’d left in chains.

  White Street pier juts a couple of hundred feet into the ocean, and we strolled to its end in the breathless, humid dark. A few people were fishing, seated on camp chairs or stools beside plastic bait buckets, poles braced against the railings and the lines shimmering like spider’s silk in the pier lights till they vanished into water that looked like a sheet of wet tar. Far out at sea, the lights of buoys and channel markers blinked white, red, green. We looked beyond, to where black water dissolved into black sky, and scanned right to left, left to right. The Summer Triangle—Deneb, Vega, and Altair—glimmered high up. A haze veiled the horizon, or maybe it was the faint light dome of Havana ninety miles off. But we never saw the Southern Cross.

  6.

  Decades before Starbucks was a gleam in its founders’ eyes, café con leche was a staple in the Florida Keys. It’s the equivalent of a latte, but with a higher octane rating. I bought two grandes at Sandy’s Café on White Street, where Cuban patrons were knocking back buchis—shots of heavily sugared espresso—which made the Spanish they were speaking sound like a language lesson recorded for 33 rpms but played at 78.

  I returned to the campground with the grandes to caffeinate Leslie and me through the to-do items on our departure list.

  “Y’all gonna go all the way to Alaska in that little thing?” asked Harry Wade, a trailer-park neighbor who was giving us a hand. Harry, a retired homicide detective from Alabama, was traveling with his wife in a sleek, new RV as tall as a boxcar and longer than an eighteen-wheeler.

  “We are,” I answered, with more confidence than I felt.

  “Wal, if y’all’re still married at the end of it, that’ll be a surprise.”

  That hit a nerve. Weeks before, in thrall to the notion of going it alone, I’d worried about the effect a long separation might have on our marriage. But now I wondered how well it would stand up to four months in a space smaller than a walk-in closet. Leslie’s friends had not exactly encouraged her. “My husband and I would kill each other” was their common refrain. “Two dogs and an impatient spouse, to boot,” a boss e-mailed. “Saint Leslie of the Highways.” Her mother had given her a book of “Tension-Taming Crosswords” to break out at the first sign of stress.

  “Do you have any advice for staying married on trailer trips?” she asked Harry.

  He thought for a moment. “Get a bigger trailer or take shorter trips.”

  Not through with cheering us up, he fetched a camera from his land-going cruise ship and took our picture.

  “That’s so we’ll know what y’all looked like, case y’all disappear.”

  * * *

  I went to the beach on Boca Chica channel, where tides from the Gulf of Mexico mingled with those from the Atlantic, and filled a third of a backpacker’s water bottle. I intended to fill the next third at the Pacific, then top it off at the Arctic Ocean and shake it like a martini mixer, blending the waters that lapped all the coasts of America. A friend had suggested this ritual. He said it would symbolize the merging of races and nationalities. The notion charmed me.

  As I walked back to the trailer, Harry Wade’s warnings of severe marital thunderstorms preyed on my mind. I meant to ask people what they thought held the country together. Another riddle was: what held our marriage together?

  Calling it a mixed marriage would be like calling gin and olive oil a mixed drink. Leslie was nervous before meeting me on a blind date in New York in 1985, but the minute she set eyes on me, she relaxed. Phew, she thought, he’s not my type. For one thing, we’re physically mismatched. Leslie is a slender, long-legged five-feet-nine. While I’m pretty well put together—I’ll say that much in my favor—I’m not only almost thirteen years older but nearly three inches shorter. I’d wondered why she ever gave me a second glance, and she said that she liked my forearms.

  The odd couple’s differences extend to family backgrounds. Blue-blood girl meets blue-collar boy. My roots in America go back to a paternal great-grandfather, an illiterate Italian miner who emigrated in 1885. On her mother’s side, Leslie’s roots reach directly to two passengers on the Mayflower, and on her father’s side to the Massachusetts Bay Colony through an early settler (1642). Add to her pedigree a roomful of illustrious ancestors and relatives: John Stevens, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt as chief engineer for the Panama Canal; Benjamin Seaver, mayor of Boston under whose administration the Boston Public Library was built; Henry Bryant, a renowned nineteenth-century surgeon and naturalist; and his grandson Henry Bryant Bigelow, founder of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

  One day, when I discovered, in a genealogy in Leslie’s parents’ house, that she could trace her lineage to Charlemagne through a French nobleman, Count Sohier de Vermandois, I overcame my modesty about my own forebears and informed her that I was the great-nephew of Dominic Blasi, aka Nick Blaze, a high-ranking capo in the Chicago mob and the FBI’s principal suspect in the assassination of its boss, Sam Giancana. Uncle Nicky, as he was known to his relations, was never charged. His highest achievement, a remarkable one considering his profession, was to die of natural causes at seventy-five.

  Let’s move on to matters of personality, temperament, outlook. Leslie was raised Presbyterian; I’m a practicing Roman Catholic. Leslie is a pacifist who’d marched in antiwar protests when she was in high school; I’m an ex-marine, Vietnam vet, and all that implies. Leslie was a diligent student in her youth; cum laude, St. Lawrence University; master’s degree, University of North Carolina. I was a college dropout for a while but returned to school, barely graduating with a 2.2 grade-point average. Leslie never married before she married twice-divorced me. Leslie’s steady, serene, quiet, self-effacing; I tend to be mercurial, moody, a motormouth never so animated as when I’m talking about myself.

  So what has made this apparent misalliance work for twenty-three years? Our politics align, though she’s more liberal on what are called social and cultural issues. We love dogs. We love literature and books and can talk endlessly about novels and poetry. We love travel, obviously. (Leslie climbed Mount Kilimanjaro when she was eighteen, rafted the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, and went to the Amazon on assignment with Audubon magazine.) We’re both ardent conservationists with a passion for the outdoors and outdoor sports, though Leslie disapproves of my fondness for shooting animals large and small. She is reserved in public, playful and affectionate in private. She’ll sneak up behind me as I’m shaving, stick her head on my shoulder and start talking about the morning’s plans, then walk away with a faceful of shaving cream.

  She has a tart tongue when called for, but there’s always a wry humor in it. I like all that.
I’m still not sure what she likes about me, beyond my forearms, that is.

  In the end, it’s best to look upon a successful marriage as the Lakota Sioux look upon any marvel beyond their understanding. They call such a thing wakan—mystery. Love, the deepest wakan of all, does not submit to rational analysis.

  * * *

  At a quarter past eleven on the morning of May 23 we headed north. U.S. 1 brought us to the Florida Turnpike and into metropolitan Miami’s ghastly sprawl, a tide of asphalt and concrete that had been washing inland for a long time and now lapped the shores of the Everglades. That morning’s Miami Herald reported that the Florida legislature, responding to calls from “the business community,” had voted to dismantle the state’s growth management laws because they were “unnecessarily inhibiting development.” Well, whatever the growth management laws managed, growth wasn’t it. Florida had about seven million people when I moved there in 1977; now, with a population edging toward eighteen million, it was the fourth-largest state in the union. It’s always been a model of bipartisanship when it comes to making money off real estate. Democrat or Republican, from local zoning boards right up to the state senate and the governor’s office, its officials seldom meet a developer they don’t like, an instinctive affection nurtured by campaign contributions and more shadowy gratuities.

  Comforted by the knowledge that tough times had not soured the legislature’s love affair with developers, we swung off the turnpike in Sweetwater and went west on U.S. 41, aka the Tamiami Trail. It passes through Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve. The park’s boundaries, south of the road, and the Miccosukee Indian reservation, to the north, serve as seawalls, halting the storm surge of strip malls and subdivisions. One minute we were surrounded by houses and IHOPs and gas stations, the next cruising through broad sawgrass prairies studded with islands of sabal palm.

  In contrast to Florida politics, the Tamiami Trail is straight. As if on a runway, we sped across Shark River slough, the marshlands on both sides rolled flat to the horizons and mottled by the shadows of drifting stratocumulus. A flight of ibis, wedged like geese, flapped over a distant hummock, and egrets stalked in the grass with slow, patient motion, feathers so white they almost hurt the eye.