It’s a party game I play when I’m bored or when I just want to entertain my brain. I call it “What if we …?” Today’s is on the dark side: Could I thrive on an analog island?
It’s easy to forget Key West is a tiny, isolated spit of land sitting in the water where the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico come together. Since March 29, 1938, when the Overseas Highway was completed from South Florida to Key West, we’ve convinced ourselves we’re just an extension of the mainland, complete with most of the amenities Americans consider a baseline for civilization.
We’ve got water, electricity, transportation, food and digital communications, all courtesy of the Overseas Highway’s 113-mile umbilical cord. We’ve got retail shopping, albeit a pretty bare-bones selection limited to one of everything. Well, except grocery stores, gas stations, bars and T-shirt shops. We have a surfeit of those. We’ve got an airport and ship docks and enough national brand name stores to lull us into believing the only thing that separates our lives from those in the “real” world is island magic.
But what if the umbilical cord fails? Oh, sure, we’ve figured out how to manage for a few weeks (think Hurricane Irma in 2017, and even then the Navy steamed in with food and water). We chuckle when we retell our tall tales about a day without cell phones or throwing a block party to cook up the frozen food before it goes bad. But what if we had to survive for months, even years, without that lifeline to the mainland?
Do you have the skills to thrive on a primitive island? Probably not, if we’re honest. We’ve gotten kinda soft, what with Amazon Prime, door-delivery via an app when we’re feeling peckish, air conditioning and water in the tap and toilet, not to mention thousands of service and healthcare workers and public employees to gratify our needs and wishes.
Assuming we’re not among those who’d leave by any means handy, or just never come back, a la second-home owners, what skills and assets would we need?
Living on an island | Do you have the skills it takes?
Let’s start with drinking water. Humans can live three or four days without hydration, so once the hurricane supplies are depleted, where’s our drinking water coming from? Easy-ish — if you still have a cistern on your property, have the tools and skills to activate it and a gutter system to direct the rain into it. That’s how Key West survived for decades. PS: Don’t forget those little tablets that make it safe to drink.
Catch is, a lot of cisterns have disappeared over the years of renovations that either jackhammered them out or turned them into dip pools. Not to mention that most of us aren’t exactly on speaking terms with digging, shoveling, mixing concrete and climbing on the roof to adjust the gutters.
Next up is food. Humans can survive upwards of six to eight weeks without food as long as we have water. So assuming no more grocery trucks coming down the Overseas Highway, what’s for dinner? Mangoes, avocados, cactus, sea grapes and maybe some hybrid tomatoes — if you’ve got them on your property and know how to sun-dry them for the lean times.
Add in things that swim, if you’ve got the equipment and access. (God bless friends with water craft that don’t need gasoline and the White Street Pier and rocks off Fort Zach.) Chickens, for sure, and the occasional iguana. But ask yourself, when was the last time you chased down a chicken, wrung its neck, plucked its feathers, disemboweled it and cooked it over an open fire? Egads, do you even know how to start a fire? (I’m leaving out pets for dinner for obvious reasons.)
Now for a place to live. I’m going to assume you’ve got shelter, though once it falls apart, which it will, fixing the roof will be off limits for most of us. Keep the ladder and blue tarps handy. Things like an operational sewer system would be gone, so hopefully you’ve got a shovel and some lime handy to take care of the the aftermath of food and water.
Fourth, we’ll need to ditch electricity, and that generator will be a yard ornament once its fuel runs out. Eventually, we’re likely to get some local generation going and solar chargers can ease the pain of withdrawal, but I’ll be kissing goodbye to much of what makes Key West living palatable for 21-century folks.
And fifth, we’ll have to — deep breath here — actually talk to our neighbors, use a pen and paper (and carbon paper, if we have some from the old days) to share information and give up our love affair with digital everything. If we’ve somehow managed to duck AT&T’s assault on landlines, we might still be able to reach the outside world, but the cell phone, the ATM, the online shopping and the selfies are goners.
Could I do it? Thrive on an analog island? Get those basics in place before wondering how I’m going to set a broken leg or survive a bout of rusty-nail-driven sepsis? Oh, sure, I do it every year — for three days — when Ranger Ed and I camp at Fort Jefferson. But three months? Three years? Definitely not for the faint of heart.
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