The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing

Author:Olivia Laing
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781847677945
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

GOING SOUTH

WE CAME IN ABOVE MIAMI at half past ten. First the lights, in their beautiful switchboard patterns, and then things passing in the space beneath the plane: diffuse dark shapes that must have been clouds, but which looked for a moment like the shadows of something gigantic swimming overhead. We swung out over the Atlantic, descending fast. My ears popped. A woman behind me switched on her phone as soon as the wheels hit tarmac. ‘Guess who’s on this plane? My dad and his ex-wife. When I saw them at the airport I nearly freaked out.’

It was the first time I’d caught an internal flight, or flown without checked baggage. There was nothing to do. I just lifted my bag out of the locker and walked away. The airport was brightly lit and almost deserted and for a long time I went back and forth between levels, trying to find the stop for the hotel shuttle. It was very hot, and I went in and out, riding down on escalators and back up in lifts, my tiredness shot through with little fibrillations of alarm. Eventually I called the hotel, but the answering service was stuck on a loop. ‘Dial 5 to speak to a hotel service representative,’ a mechanised voice kept repeating. At last, when I was almost sobbing with frustration, the minibus appeared and swept me away to the Red Roof Inn.

The next morning, I collected the car. The day was overcast and very warm, and there were clouds of vultures circling the city. I drove out on Route 1, past strip malls and strip joints, signs for psychic readings and computer repairs. Then the buildings thinned and beyond the alligator fencing there was nothing but mangrove swamps and pools of standing water, where little white egrets dipped for fish. After a while the land narrowed in like a neck and there beyond the swamp was the sea. It was shallow and seamed with sandbars and deeper channels, the colours shifting musically from turquoise to green to a rich purple like spilled grape juice.

I parked by the bridge to Fiesta Key. There were two elderly black women fishing on the jetty. I said hello, and one turned to greet me. ‘Y’all going to Key West?’ she asked, and when I said yes she nodded at the pilings running out to sea, and said: ‘That the old road.’ I asked her what she was fishing for and she replied: ‘Snapper. Drum. Whatever comin’ through here on the way to the Gulf.’

In Marathon I stopped for lunch at the Cracked Conch Café, drank a beer, ate a chicken quesadilla, drove on. Conch, pronounced Konk, the name for Key natives. Within minutes I was at the start of the Seven Mile Bridge. I’ve had dreams of crossing over water all my life, and as I drove up on to it I had a funny, overwhelming sense of realities collapsing into one another. The road was made of pinkish concrete, and the old bridge ran beside it, handrails rusted.

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