Last Train to Paradise (14 page)

18

Railroad Builder Overboard

For bridge-building supervisor C. S. Coe, the race nearly ended at this point. Because so many key projects were now under way simultaneously, Coe had been assigned his own motor launch, staffed at all times by a captain and a marine engineer.

According to Coe’s daughter, Priscilla, the craft had two compartments, one where the captain and engineer spent their time, and another aft, where Coe kept a kind of floating office he used to review plans and the like, and where he might steal a nap as they traveled between job sites, not an unimportant benefit for a man who was now working very nearly around the clock.

One morning, as the launch was traveling south from Pigeon Key toward the work on the Bahia Honda Bridge, the last of the great challenges before him, Coe glanced up from his paperwork, realizing that he had time to make an intermediary stop at a troublesome project site along the way. Because there was no means of communication between the two compartments, he was forced to leave his own cabin and make his way forward along a narrow passage on the boat’s deck.

He was halfway to the front when the launch piled into a wave and sent Coe sprawling against the handrail. As he clutched frantically, the handrail gave way and he toppled headlong into the water.

He came up choking on brine and calling after the boat, but the captain and the engineer had their eyes ahead, engaged in a boisterous conversation of their own, and Coe’s cries were lost in the roar of the launch’s noisy motor. Coe was left to shout and wave his arms to no avail, watching helplessly as his launch disappeared. In moments he found himself alone in a desolate sea, miles from the sight of land.

For Coe, who could barely swim, the thought of reaching shore was out of the question. But he had learned to tread water, and to float. Forcing himself not to panic, he kicked off his shoes and worked himself onto his back, doing his best to keep his head above the swells.

As he worked and willed himself to stay afloat, Coe kept his mind on a story that had always stayed with him, in large part because of his very fear of just what had befallen him. A friend had once told Coe about being on board a small ferryboat that was crossing Lake Michigan. The ferry had sunk and the friend had found himself flailing about in the frigid waters, along with his wife and his young daughter, neither of whom could swim.

Coe’s friend had reasoned firmly but reassuringly with his wife and daughter, telling them not to panic and to simply keep their hands on his shoulders. He insisted that he could keep the three of them afloat, and if they would simply trust him, and stay calm, they would be saved.

Coe’s friend had been successful, as it turned out, and the message behind the story burned fiercely in Coe’s brain as he floated there in the lonely waters. He had certain things going for him, he told himself. There was plenty of daylight left, and compared to the choppy and frigid Lake Michigan, he might as well have been bobbing in a calm, if enormous, tub of bathwater.

Still, as the sound of the launch’s motor receded, he could feel the panic beginning to surge up inside him. Coe, who had seen more than one man die in his years on this endeavor, knew just how desolate his surroundings were, and how quickly these crystal waters could become deadly.

The irony of it all, though. The stupidity. If he’d simply been content to wait until they’d reached their intended destination, he could easily have scheduled his stop on the way back . . .

. . . and then he stopped, realizing that something had changed. Instead of receding, the sounds of the distant launch motor seemed to be growing louder. Coe listened intently, not certain whether he could trust his ears. Sound played strange tricks as it crossed these waters, another lesson he had learned.

But soon enough he was sure. The boat had turned around, the distant rumble now a roar once again. Coe was back to treading water, doing his best to thrust himself up where he could get a glimpse of the launch, or give his men sight of him.

And then, as a swell lifted him up and he saw the approaching craft, his engineer waving and shouting, relief washed over him. In moments he felt the hand of his engineer on his own, and then he was being pulled up to safety.

As he would learn, what his men had been debating, as Coe bobbed in the waters and the boat left him behind, was whether or not the boss might want to put in at a certain stop along the way and have a look at a bit of work that had been giving them all fits.

When the engineer had made his way back to Coe’s cabin to check, he’d been amazed to find no one there. That was when he had noticed the sheared-off handrail and realized what must have happened.

Coe’s survival was miraculous, but what he would live to accomplish was equally amazing, at least to most observers. For the remainder of 1910, work continued relentlessly on the remaining miles of track down the Lower Keys as well as upon the completion of the Seven Mile Bridge. However, the difficulties that plagued the project did not abate.

Jefferson Browne, the original booster of this route, had been accurate when he wrote that construction of the bridges spanning the Seven Mile and Bahia Honda channels would be the most difficult and expensive portion of the work. But, he maintained, the final section, from Bahia Honda to Key West, “presents no difficult problems . . . the surface of the islands is as level and smooth as a ballroom floor.” Easy for Browne to say. But as Flagler’s engineers had learned, nothing in the Keys was simple.

While Coe wrestled with the difficulties of bridging the Bahia Honda, others encountered a problem they had hardly expected in the tropics: forest fire. Little Duck Key, where the southern end of the Bahia Honda Bridge was to make landfall, marks the beginning of what are usually referred to as the Lower Keys. While the Upper Keys are formed of coral outcroppings and support relatively little natural vegetation, those south of the Bahia Honda Channel are low-lying formations of solid limestone that can be classed as true islands, and where varieties of scrub brush, cactus, palm, and even stands of southern pine are found.

Big Pine Key (MM 32), eight miles by two, is the second largest in the entire chain after Key Largo, and, at the time of the railroad’s approach, contained pockets of fresh water just under its rocky surface. Moreover, Big Pine not only featured a sizable pine forest (which Browne had theorized could be leveled to furnish all the wood necessary for the railroad ties), but one that housed the extant population of the singular Keys deer.

At the time the railroad workers arrived, local Conchs had already perfected an early form of the “controlled burn,” though this version had nothing to do with fire prevention. The Conchs were simply trying to vary the source of protein in their diet by setting small blazes that would flush the timid, two-and-a-half-foot-tall deer out of hiding and into snare traps or across the sights of a rifle.

In addition, other settlers had established charcoal-making kilns on the island, where the flourishing buttonwood trees could be converted into a readily transported source of fuel. Unpredictable wind gusts and the general carelessness of the kiln operators often resulted in unintended conflagrations, and if that meant trouble for a bunch of railroad-building interlopers, there weren’t many Conchs who were going to lose sleep about it. Though the possibility of fire had never been an issue during all the years of work on the Key West Extension, now Krome and his crews were often forced to stop work or literally flee for their lives when a wind-whipped wildfire raged across the right-of-way.

Nor was every settler happy at the encroachment of builders who “mobilized their digging machines along the waterfront, streaked the islands with railroad grades from end to end and boosted the prices of real estate by leaps and bounds.” There was Montenegrin Nicholas Mackovtich, for instance, a recluse who set booby-trapped spring guns all about his property and refused to speak with anyone who tried to reason with him or buy him out. And, in an eerie precursor of things to come, there also were tales of confrontations between railroad men and boats of Cuban gunrunners picking up caches of arms, and swarthy revolutionary types bound for insurgency operations on the island.

The occasional trip gun, encounter with revolutionaries, or forest fire might have constituted frustration, but any losses were primarily those of time. What truly continued to concern Krome was the possibility of hurricanes. With Flagler having passed another birthday, Krome had already determined that work would continue through the late summer and fall of 1910.

It is a curious phenomenon to be observed among certain hurricane survivors: the area crossed by such a storm is so relatively small and its fury so great that once one has been struck directly and has been fortunate enough to survive, a certain denial, or form of bravado, sets in.
I have been struck by lightning now,
one may be tempted to reason.
What are the chances that it will ever happen again?

For roulette players, the odds that 00, or any other number, will come up twice in a row are about 1 in 1,200. The odds that a hurricane will pass over the same stretch of land two years in a row are somewhat less. Long odds, certainly, but the fact that the Extension had been battered in 1906 and again in 1909 did not mean that a hurricane could not strike again in 1910.

And so, on the morning of October 17 of that year, as Krome sat at his desk in his Marathon office, reviewing the details of his team’s progress and wondering if they could somehow manage to beat the ticking of the Flagler clock, he heard a clamor outside and looked up to find a telegraph operator rushing into his office with a message held aloft, his face an ominous mask.

The clerk was not about to offer his summary of the news, and Krome had to snatch the message from the man’s trembling hand. It was a bulletin from the weather office in Miami: a hurricane was approaching, one that was projected to sweep across the Keys sometime that night.

Weather Bureau records indicate that this was an unusual storm, one that had developed a week before over the western tip of Cuba and was presumed to have drifted on into the Gulf of Mexico and died out. As it happened, however, the storm gathered new strength in the Gulf and then drifted backward, striking the same area in Cuba that it had pummeled only a few days before. After this second assault on western Cuba, the storm wobbled northward toward the United States, but was stalled over the Florida Straits by a large high-pressure weather system. Instead of dissipating or spinning away, the storm moved about the warm waters of the Straits, in a tightly contained counterclockwise loop, gaining strength all the while. When the high-pressure system moved off the Florida coast into the Atlantic, this first of the “loop hurricanes” as they came to be called began to bear down on the Keys.

By noon of the seventeenth, winds estimated at 125 miles per hour were pounding Sand Key, where the Weather Bureau’s observer reported that “the wharf and woodpile were washed away and the lighthouse shook and swayed in the wind. . . . The force of the wind drew large nails from the doors. The sand was all washed from sight by this time, and monster waves broke over the whole island.”

It was hardly welcome news to Krome, but by this stage, preparedness “on the grade” was ratcheted as tightly as he could make it. An agreement had been struck between the FEC and the Weather Bureau, whereby any weather advisory arriving in Washington would reach the camps within ten minutes, and during the hurricane season the most familiar inquiry said to pass between superintendents comparing notes was “How does your barometer read?”

Krome sent the alarm out immediately. Equipment was secured, boats fastened, men moved to shelter in buildings that had been engineered far beyond previous standards.

And yet once again, nature one-upped mankind. The storm of 1906 had concentrated its fury on the Upper Keys, where most of the work ongoing at the time had been centered. The hurricane of 1909 had blasted the Middle Keys, where work had similarly progressed by that time. In 1910, as if guided by an especially malevolent hand, the storm turned its greatest intensity upon the Lower Keys, where unfinished bridge and track work and infrastructure once again made it the most vulnerable segment of the entire Keys Extension.

Even worse, the 1910 storm had slowed greatly by the time it reached shore. The effects of even a catastrophically powered hurricane such as Andrew in 1992, with its 175-mile-per-hour winds, are significantly mitigated if the storm passes over land quickly. Andrew moved ashore just above Homestead, just after midnight, at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour, an extremely rapid rate of advancement. With its storm bands tightly packed, Andrew was gone by 8:00
A.M.
And while that 1992 storm proved the most costly in all history, experts pointed out that the toll in damage and lives lost would have been vastly greater had it passed over land at anything resembling a normal rate of speed.

The hurricane of 1910 might have lacked the wind speed of an Andrew, but what it lacked in force, it made up for in staying power. It took more than thirty hours for the storm to pass over the Keys, long enough to convince anyone in its path that the onslaught would never end.

One worker, who held his post on Boot Key as long as he dared, finally called in to Krome to report that his office was knee-deep in rising water. An incredulous Krome ordered the man back to Marathon immediately. When the employee struggled into the main camp, he brought along daunting news: most of the outlying buildings had lost their roofs, and the long wooden trestle that curved off the main line out to the steamship docks had been pounded to smithereens by the wind-driven rains.

Farther south, the damage was even worse. Seventeen miles of roadbed that had been laid across Bahia Honda, Spanish Harbor, Big Pine, and the Ramrod Keys, from MM 37 to MM 20, were washed away. One section of track was found, virtually intact, more than six hundred feet offshore where the winds had dropped it.

One foreman caught in the storm tried to save himself from being swept out to sea by climbing a nearby tree. When the waters continued to rise beneath him and the winds threatened to toss him from his perch in the upper limbs, he tied himself to the trunk with his own belt.