Annette Mathews, age l2, of Scipio, Utah, for her question:
What do they mean by the Florida Keys?
In everyday, language a key y is a tricky little gadget made to open n or close a lock. Another key may be the master item in a problem, the one that solves the puzzle. Different keys appear on pianos or in stone arches or with telegraph and typesetting instruments and some charts are called keys.
Florida was named by the Spanish with their word for flowery. They also gave us a name for the ocean Isles that loop like a necklace from the southern tip of the flower state. Their word for a rocky islet was cayo. We borrowed it and modified it to name the Florida Keys. Our word for the lovely little isles is not related to door keys or piano keys, to telegraph or any other key. Nor is it related to the word quay, meaning a wharf, which is pronounced the same as key.
The sea bed dips sharply off the eastern coast of Florida for here the sweeping gulf stream has carved a steep plunge to the ocean abyss. Generations of teeming corals helped to build up the string of keys that reaches l50 miles out to sea. The northern end of the necklace was once a coral reef, and here the busy builders still create new chunks of rocky coral. The far end of the necklace was once a sizable ocean island, broken by the pounding seas into separate islets of rocky limestone.
The keys tend to be narrow and long. The largest is Key Largo, about 30 miles long and more than two miles wide. The most famous is Key West, about 60 miles from the tip of the Florida mainland. This balmy isle is les3 than two miles wide and only four miles long. It is the home of the city of Key West which is as far south as the central Sahara Desert. Other islet keys are so small and low that high tides submerge them.
The balmy keys offer us a vacation paradise where the trade winds blow. Their beaches are ideal for bathing in tropic surf and basking under the sun. There are shady glades among tropical flowers and foliage. The salt water that washes the doorsteps of the islets teems with fishes, large and small.
Visitors to this ideal vacation spot may land at the airport on Key West. Motorists can drive l50 miles along a concrete highway that connects the chain, key by key, with the mainland. sturdy bridges and causeways lift the road safely above the dips and low spots.
Key West was a city settlement in the l830s. A generation later, cigar makers of Cuba built factories there and its wharves were clogged with the boats of sponge fishermen. At the end of the last century, Key West was Florida's busiest and biggest city and home to some l8,000 people. The main industries now are fishing and canning, and Key West is the home of a great U.S. Naval Base. Most of the other keys are content to be lovely, lazy island playgrounds.