peacocks-and-snowbirds-blog

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I wrote the following narrative about my trip to Key Biscayne. I took each photograph on Thursday, March 23rd at the Crandon Park Zoo, the Crandon Public Beach, and Bill Baggs State Park. I edited each image and paired it with a corresponding section of my travel document to give a more holistic illustration of “snowbird” life in Key Biscayne, through the lens of my camera and my grandfather’s biking route. 

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I followed him— the black spandex, the peach cable-knit sweater vest, the neon yellow windbreaker. I followed the helmet, which bobbed off-center on his balding head. I followed the mismatched sneakers, two slightly different models of the same sturdy, gray size-thirteen, New Balance shoe.

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My grandmother wears a four, and she and Pop are about as different from one another as the size of their feet. It was mostly little things— like Pop’s inability to find matching shoes—that so aggravated my grandmother. She said Pop’s appearance wasn’t just about him anymore, but a reflection of her care. When he got dressed in the morning, my grandmother would look him up and down and then stare out the window of their apartment (Tower F, Floor 9, Room 906B) for a long time, absorbing the small strip of beach and the endless carpet of blue. This view, though obstructed by other apartment complexes and exorbitantly expensive, brought her much joy. She would take a bite of the chocolate croissant she had ordered in Spanish from the boulangerie and glare at the mismatched sneakers. With a buttery croissant flake and a smear of chocolate on her magenta lips, she would say, half-jokingly, to the balcony: “Do you see what I have to live with?”

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Walking is even harder for Pop than finding sneakers. He stumbles and staggers and drags his size-thirteen feet. On a bike, however, he pedals with ease. He is free, and nobody need watch him.

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One Tuesday in March, when my brother and I were visiting, Pop announced, despite the digital thunder clouds that appeared on the weather app, that we would be taking the bikes on a scenic tour of Key Biscayne, Miami’s southernmost barrier island. Biking, Pop said, is the best way to really see a place. Apart from its beaches, Key Biscayne is known really for two things— its massive “Seaquarium” where tanned trainers ride dolphins through tiny pools, and the Miami Open, a tennis tournament to which all sorts of spectators flock to get sunburnt, sip frozen lemonades, and watch Nadal smash a yellow fuzzy ball past his opponent. Since my grandparents have lived in Key Biscayne for nearly ten years now, and my family visits annually, we are already familiar with the typical tourist sites. So, we took to the bikes to explore the Key’s more hidden gems: the Crandon Park Zoo and Bill Baggs State Park Lighthouse.

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We left the apartment complex, Pop leading, and pedaled south for the public beach. The wind was blowing so hard, it bent the palm trees, so their spines were more hunched than some of Pop’s oldest friends. I thought the coconuts— of which there were many since Key Biscayne used to be one large coconut plantation— would plummet from their precarious perches and fall on our heads. Pop insisted we wore helmets. 

As we rode, sand swirled through the air and into my eyes. I squinted to avoid the flying granules and saw the beach to my right, void now of all people, partially because it was a Tuesday in March and partially because of those digital thunder clouds.

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The beach was peppered with yellow lifeguard huts, beach volleyball nets, and picnic tables. I imagined bodies, lathered in sunscreen, diving into the warm sand to propel an inflatable beach ball into blue sky. I imagined sizzling barbeques and children squealing as they threw seaweed at each other. But now, the sand looked cold and wet, the water was more gray than turquoise, and the sun hid behind heavy clouds, which decided, just then, to wring themselves out like towels and drench our t-shirts (and peach sweater vests/neon windbreakers) in rain that made everything, even my brain, feel soggy. Brochures never show the beach on days like these.

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Pop forged on, laughing and yelling “let’s go, slow pokes!” into the stormy clouds ahead. He was calm and steady on his bike. He didn’t stop, but soon, the rain and the wind did. The palm trees returned to their full stature, the sand stopped swirling, and the sun dried our wet clothes. Pop reached his neon yellow arm to the left, signaling a turn away from the public beach’s slippery boardwalk. We entered the Crandon Park Zoo.

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We passed another biker, ruddy-faced and white-haired, clad in an equally drenched lavender polo. Pop called out to him as we whizzed by, “Have a good one, Ken!” and Ken echoed the call. Like Pop, Ken was a sun worshipper from a New England town. Also like Pop, Ken moved to Miami for the winter months— to speak Spanglish to store owners, to bike in abandoned zoos, and to grow old where the sun almost always shined. Ken and Pop played bridge and golfed and went to church and volunteered in a local elementary school, just as they might in New England. But here, life was different— there were palm trees and spicy foods and salty air and art shows and women who walked around in bikinis and stilettos. They were doing the same old-people activities, but life was infinitely more vibrant.

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People like Ken and my grandfather form a contingent of the Key Biscayne population, known somewhat affectionately and somewhat scornfully as “snowbirds”— the retirees who migrate south during cold months. In October, my grandparents board the “Snowbird Express,” a trusted transportation company, advertised on an antiquated website with a psychedelic sunshine logo. A team of retired police officers move them, all their possessions, and their vehicle from New York to Florida, while they ride the bus. Among other tan-skinned, white-haired passengers, my grandparents eat tuna sandwiches and gingersnap cookies and dream about the sand that will soon be between their wrinkled toes. Twenty-four hours later, they file off the bus, hop in their car, and drive over the causeway from Miami to Key Biscayne, where over sixty-percent of the population speaks Spanish as a first language.

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I couldn’t help but think of my snowbird grandparents and their migration south as we entered the Crandon Park Zoo. According to local lore (and Wikipedia), the Crandon Park Zoo started when a circus caravan of two black bears, three monkeys, and a goat, broke down in the Key and settled there. After a series of devastating hurricanes hit the humble habitat, the zoo stopped charging admission fees and employing groundskeepers and let nature run her course. The gates stayed open. Nobody knows what happened to the bears, the monkeys, and the goat, or if they ever existed at all, but today, the cages still stand, oppressive and oddly beautiful, covered in murals of flora and fauna, now chipped, rusted, and covered in graffiti.

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The abandoned zoo is also home to a large, diverse population of birds. Bikers ride through the zoo and gawk at the strange, autonomous colony of peacocks, ducks, egrets, and other exotic tenants— some the perfect picture of health, some sickly and in-bred. We followed Pop closely, so the wild birds wouldn’t snap belligerently at our ankles and chase us out the gate.

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When I looked at the peacocks, in particular, I wondered how such beauty could just exist in nature. The emerald feathers that fanned from the speckled bodies seemed like the whimsical fantasy of an imperial palace decorator— royal, maybe even divine. But the Key Biscayne peacocks did not sit on thrones—just the rusty benches and dumpsters of an abandoned zoo, squawking at bikers who whipped out their camera phones and tried to capture this beauty.

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I thought about the birds as we exited Crandon Park Zoo: birds who lived among other species they would never otherwise know, due to strange twists of fate, like a caravan’s collapse and a massive hurricane. I thought about my grandparents, the New England snowbirds, who now live in apartment F906B, beside a Cuban-American family in F907 and a Dutch-Argentinian couple in F905— a circumstance also prompted by strange twists of fate like a layover flight that stranded them in the Keys and extended their honeymoon to the Biscayne beaches and their youngest daughter’s marriage to a Cuban-American, Miami-native. Or, maybe it was just the sunshine. But then, why did Pop so joyfully bike in the rain?

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We followed Pop and his tilted helmet to the other side of the island, a twenty-minute ride past the gas stations and Seven-Elevens and small sky rises of the main boulevard. We arrived at the mouth of the Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, 400 acres of wild green trails, picnic tables, beach, ocean, a snack bar, and a bike rental place— because biking, after all, is the best way to explore.

We whizzed past sail boats and signs that read “Caution: Manatees in Harbor” and men who threw nets into the water and filled plastic buckets with writhing fish. 

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The Miami skyline of jagged corporate offices and tinted glass windowpanes loomed to our right, and to our left, was endless ocean. On the horizon, we could make out a few specks: Stiltsville, a collection of seven homes built in the early 20th century that hover just above the water. It would be very lonely out there, I thought.

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Our destination was a lighthouse, a white-brick structure built in 1825— about 800 years after the Tequesta Indians settled in the Key from Cuba, about 300 years after Puerto Rican explorer Ponce de Leon “discovered” the point and named it Santa Marta, and about 100 years after the British first occupied the area. It had been 40 years since the British gave the territory to Spain and just 4 years since the Key was ceded to the United States and used as an escape route for enslaved Africans and Back Seminoles. In 20 more years, Florida would become a state. In 30 years, the lighthouse would become a U.S. Coast Survey Base Marker. In 122 years, the Rickenbacker Causeway would connect Key Biscayne to Miami, and the first Americans would take up permanent residence. In 182 years, my grandparents would move to Key Biscayne, and in 192 years, I would ride past this very lighthouse on a bike with my grandfather.