907 Whitehead Street

Just a few blocks from 907 Whitehead Street in Key West, there's a cemetery where blindingly bone-white crypts bake in the sun among scrappy patches of grass. Hemingway isn't buried here but his friends are, like Josie Russell, his fishing buddy and owner of his favorite watering hole at 201 Duval Street. You'll find Joe Russell's grave adorned with mardi gras beads and tequila bottles weighting dollar bills. It's always happy hour there. We weave in and out of narrow streets on bikes. It's quiet, except for an occasional crowing rooster or the wind rustling the palm fronds like pieces of paper. It's not long before we find 907 Whitehead, tucked behind a brick fortress and a tangle of island trees. This Spanish Colonial home is where "Hem" as he was known wrote some of his best works, where he would rise between 5 and 6 a.m. to write in his guest house overlooking the most expensive pool on the island, then go out on his boat--the Pilar--to fish until happy hour at his favorite bar.

The six-toed descendants of his 60-70 cats still wander in and out of rooms here, still sleep on his bed, his chairs, still drink from the converted urinal he salvaged from a bar that was being renovated. His typewriter is still there before an empty chair where he sat, long before he broke his back in a plane crash and had to stand to write. This room is bright, airy, full of sunlight, unlike the house where covered balconies steal the sun, where ceiling fans were replaced by his wife's revered European chandeliers. How he must have loved the quiet and cool of that space, followed by a stretch on the open water, unconfined, the full blast of sea air, the lapping of water around the hull of his boat, the singing of a saltwater reel bowed by a marlin.

How good life must have been when the writing came easily, when the money flowed like the waters of his beloved Gulf Stream, until the critics and his own demons began to turn on him. What is it about an old house--a piece of tile, layers of paint on wanscoting, a rusty lock, cracked concrete, tarnished brass doorknob--that invites recall or conjures images of a time gone by? Maybe the dream of creating a moment so vivid, so exact, that you can find the same magic he found. Recreate the beauty of that 1930's haze in which he lived, hear the lisp in his voice, his thundering footsteps, see the worn lining of his hat, the cracks in a belt worn over the belt loops. And maybe therein you can summon the magic, the "stuff on butterfly wings," he called it, that enabled him to write, to make money and awards flow from his pen. There's something about time, about years gone by that makes him bigger than he probably deserved to be. We walk by the front gate in the gloaming, just after the sun has dipped into the cool waters between Key West and his beloved Cuba, and it could be just another house on Whitehead with its olive green shutters. The windows and doors are still open, lights on inside. Cats lounge on the still-warm patio and if you stare long enough you can imagine him stepping outside, reaching down to scoop one of them up in a rare moment of tenderness that so few of his friends and family--before he alienated them all-saw of him. You can see him whisper something, the cat's giant paws splayed against his collar and scruffy, white beard before he puts it down gently and heads back inside, the screen door groaning behind him.