I'm not talking about the sort of outright confusion that gains you entrance to the rubber room — say, a Jewfish strolling South Beach (though Miami's heartier partiers may see precisely that). No, the intermingling is more subtle. Close your eyes and the tropical breeze caressing your face as you consume a frosty beverage at a waterfront bar becomes the warm current that earlier that very day flowed past your face plate as you stood inside the wheelhouse of a wrecked freighter 80 feet down. Travelers — a river of floral shirts, straw hats and muumuus — pouring along Key West's famed Duval Street become cascades of goatfish and French grunts. Plunging from squinty-bright sunshine into the cool darkness of an afternoon bar is not unlike entering the dim recesses of a submerged cargo hold — only instead of happy drunks and moose heads, the establishment is filled with glassy sweepers forming shimmering apostrophes in the blue. Fine. Maybe the tropical sun affects one's judgment. But it is a happy alteration, and, like any happy alteration, it should go without apology. Aimless Meandering My outlook was altered on a nine-day road trip of unapologetically aimless meandering from Fort Lauderdale to Key West. What photographer Chris McLaughlin and I planned was simple: We would dive as much as was humanly possible, and when we weren't diving we would immerse ourselves in South Florida's unique lifestyle. Chris proved the ideal travel companion. Having lived in the Keys for a time (he now resides in Naples, Florida), he was a natural guide. He had long since deciphered and approached South Florida as only a clear-sighted local can; his incisive tour began with the two of us wandering the beach in Fort Lauderdale. Lauderdale's beachfront understandably steals most of the press; on postcard days — of which there are many — palm trees rustle under a baby-blue sky, reggae music drifts over the hot sand, and perfectly proportioned members of both sexes skate along the squeaky-clean beach promenade, wearing clothing's equivalent of a postage stamp. From our vantage point on the bikini-crowded sand, it was difficult to imagine that one of the world's top wreck diving regions lies, in relative secrecy, just offshore. In fact, Fort Lauderdale rivals many of the world's top wreck meccas — mostly due to an aggressive and successful artificial reef program. Although we both appreciated the beachy distractions, we pulled ourselves away and headed off to trace a blue path through the famous Fort Lauderdale Five Wreck Trek. We anchored within sight of the beach party skyline, then hit the trail. Here, five different wrecks all lie within a few fin-kicks (about 150 feet) of each other in 70 feet of water — the 95-foot harbor tug Jay Scutti, freighters Ken Vitale and Merci Jesus, and sailboats Pride and Moonshot. We didn't finish the entire penta-route. Actually, we hardly put a dent in the mission. Schools of spadefish and other schooling fish put up a distracting barricade. Barracuda, thick with teeth and well-practiced menace, hovered above the wrecks, waiting for their moment in the predatory sun. Tiny black and gold nudibranchs prowled the structures like slow-motion marauders, and stealthy stonefish sat motionless, secure in their expert ability to blend with the multi-colored growth. After the dives, we did what any right-minded diver would do — headed back to Lauderdale's famed sands and cleansed our salty tongues with cold beverages, listening as bartenders told us what we already knew. "It is paradise, isn't it?" smiled Miguel while placing sweaty beers before us, an ocean breeze sweeping through Fort Lauderdale's timeless Elbo Room. Later that night, we jaunted off to Fort Lauderdale's new prowling ground for the young and restless, the Riverwalk. Fat with cafes and eateries, winding along a historic area alongside New River, Riverwalk's landscaped paths conjure up images of old Florida. Except old Floridians looked nothing like this. Having hauled themselves off the sand, the beautiful people now promenaded beside the quiet river in the warm press of evening, past shiny white yachts which anyone — beautiful or not — could rent for $2,000 an hour. Short on this kind of disposable income, we rode the water taxi instead — same slowly eddying river, plus a feel for South Florida real estate courtesy of taxi Captain Nelson. "Seven new condominiums going up," barked the Captain. "One of them is 42 stories high. You can find a condo here for as little as $100,000. You just can't open the window at high tide." Captain Nelson cackled at his own joke. We preferred a more traditional underwater view, and Lauderdale was more than willing to serve them up. The Five Wreck Trek is not the only offshore artificial allure in Fort Lauderdale. PADI IDCs and dive shops abound in this city, offering loads of expertise and plenty of GPS coordinates for wrecks of all kinds. Although the southward tug of our Florida Road Show didn't allow us to spend enough time indulging in our wreck explorer fantasies, great wrecks and artificial reefs — such as the heavily encrusted fish magnets Mercedes I and Captain Dan and the swirling pace and electric pulse of activity that defines the Tenneco Towers — await divers with an eye to local adventure and an appreciation of the sheer power of the sea to quickly define and encompass structures wrought by man. Fort Lauderdale's artificial reefs surprised us both with their wild allure, non-stop marine life and sublime silence. But Florida, of course, offers more, so we climbed in the car and headed to the mind-altering and uniquely surreal world of the Conch Republic. Southern Interludes I preferred to lose my own mind beneath the surface, though, and in South Florida this was easy to do. The Keys, of course, are the stuff of diving legend. A chain of low-lying islands; it forms an arc between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Stringing along beside these islands is our country's last great coral reef. The reef receives the largesse of two oceans, becoming a mixing pot for Atlantic and Gulf Coast species; feather stars, spiny lobster, pink shrimp, snapper, grouper, red-tailed triggerfish, hulking Jewfish — they're all here, and plenty more besides. But the mainland shouldn't be ignored, either. Off Miami, courtesy of the Key Biscayne Artificial Reef Site, lies a potpourri of wrecks, making for some of the country's best wreck diving — the Lakeland, the Orion, the Hopper Barge, the Blue Fire. Though Florida's southernmost reefs steal the headlines, the Keys signature dives are its wrecks, and some of the best —themassive 510-foot Spiegel Grove, the Bibb and the Duane, and the Benwood — await off Key Largo and are accessed directly from Key Largo by PADI 5-Star CDC Ocean Divers and PADI Gold Palm Sea Dwellers, and from nearby Tavernier by PADI Gold Palm Conch Republic as well as other great operators. On a bright Friday afternoon we motored out through Tavernier Creek aboard Conch Republic Divers' 42-foot Republic VII. The folks at Conch Republic exhibited a professional efficiency without sacrificing their easy, Keys attitude. A native Floridian, co-owner Gary Mace tried his hand at the real world — he spent some 20 years as a landlocked engineer — before returning to his rightful place in the sun two years ago. For the Love of the Wreck The Atlantic spread before us, a vast emerald-green prairie. The Keys' outer reefs are typically separated from the islands by a shelf of sea-grass beds, patch reefs and sand; these shallows exhibit more shades of green than a motion-sickness club on a roller coaster. I stood on the bridge beside Gary. "I'll bet your office didn't look like this," I said. "Nope," he grinned. "But my screensaver did." Pulling ourselves down the line to the Eagle — a 260-foot freighter some four miles offshore — the waters opened to us, a deep and clear blue. Chris motioned me down beside him, pointing up to the hull of the Republic, clearly visible on the surface. I checked our depth. Ninety-seven feet. I love diving wrecks for all kinds of reasons, some definable, some not. Descending toward the wreck I love how the vessel morphs suddenly into view — like one of those Highlights magazine puzzles where the hidden shape you were staring at abruptly registers in your brain. I love how the silence of water — always soothing — is magnified within the confines of a wreck; this deeper silence is mirrored by still water, thicker and more viscous, sometimes nearly milky in its movements. Wrecks also fill me with a mixture of sadness and joy. Their passing highlights our own impermanence in this world, but they offer a happy thought too — we pass on, but the ocean's beauty remains, swallowing other wrecks and mesmerizing future divers. Peering through a porthole of the Eagle I watched a file fish float past, balanced on end. Black grouper spotted the sandy bottom, barracuda hung in the slight current, and a Jewfish — looking like a disgruntled, bloated old man — floated in the shadow of the bow. Two days later the same serenity and plethora of sea life were found on the nearby Duane, a 327-foot Treasury Class Cutter that once pursued German U-boats and now rests quietly some 110 feet down, about a mile south of Molasses Reef off Key Largo. On the Duane I finned into the wheelhouse a dozen barracuda hung easily in the blue, silver sentinels maintaining an advance guard. Exiting the hatch I flew like Peter Pan up to the conning tower. Hooking the tower with a neoprene elbow, I fluttered in the warm current. Below me grunt, wrasse, butterfly fish and angelfish strolled the deck. Back on the boat another diver read my mind. "I didn't want to come up," he said. You Have to Come Up However, you have to come up, and in South Florida this provides other marvelous opportunities. Food, for one. I'm no graduate of culinary school, but I like food as much as the next snobby gourmand, and South Florida has lots of yummy signature dishes — fish dip that's smoky on the tongue, the peppery tang of conch chowder and fritters, the sweet finale of Key lime pie (the real deal is not lime green, but yellow), the delectable heft of a Cuban sandwich, made all the better by cats circulating hopefully around the tables. There was also the opportunity to experience culture and nature. At Windley Key Fossil Reef State Geological Site we saw how Henry Flagler built his famed railway to Key West on the backs of polyps. On South Beach we saw how a narrow stretch of sand garnered global fame by combining beautiful people with jolly lets-be-madcap art deco architecture, plus neon nightlife that never ends. At Key West's famed Mallory Square ("Where the Sun Sets and the Fun Begins"), we witnessed the Square's attendant weirdness — barking sword-swallowers, chained Houdinis and fire jugglers — and the quiet sunset that steals the show from them all. Quiet Beauty Amid the Chaos The moments of quiet beauty were stunning. In Islamorada, Chris and I stayed at the Cheecha Lodge & Spa, a lovely waterfront resort with a long list of first-class amenities, including nature tours. One day, before our afternoon dive, we took a tour with Captain Xavier Figueredo, who operates the Bay and Reef Company tours that leave from the Lodge's dock. Motoring north we passed through Whale Harbor Channel and into Florida Bay. Water ran westward to the horizon, presided over by high towers of cumulus clouds. Throttling down, Xavier brought us into a stand of red mangroves festooned with frigate birds and cormorants. Beneath the hot press of sun, all was reduced to a quiet realm of croak and wing beat. In the Keys, it is easy to escape the world we know. Xavier smiled. "Pretty out here, isn't it?" Slow, Seething Magic A road trip, rightly done, is magic whatever the road, but few roads offer more magical tripping than the one to Key West. From the instant Route 1 sweeps down Florida Bay into Key Largo your heart arcs with it. From then on the world is a sparkling place of sky and water with herons white as snow and small skiffs with no one in them, dive flags bobbing in the water nearby. Hands on the wheel, Bob Marley in our ears, we adhered to proper road-trip decorum — namely, a loose plan with ample opportunity for change. Passing onto Lower Matecumbe Key, heading for Key West, Chris suddenly turned off the road. "Keys place," he said. This proved to be one of my favorite stops. A weathered wood shack with a happy tilt, Robbie's has many offerings, but their centerpiece attractions are the prehistoric tarpon that roil the water just off Robbie's dock. For one dollar you can ogle the tarpon. For two dollars you can buy yourself a bucket of baitfish and proceed to entertain yourself and others, feeding fish that seem to have bottomless stomachs and no discrimination regarding what they eat. Standing on the dock, I listened as a man in his twenties offered valuable advice to his pale-faced girlfriend. "Hell, just hold the baitfish out and close your eyes." In the green waters just off the dock the tarpon soared, majestically distant from man's superficial inanity. They were beautiful — dragons, shaped like torpedoes, rising from the water with a flash of silver, then falling back, unblinking, with the requisite baitfish and an occasional piece of knuckle. During the hour we spent at Robbie's a steady stream of bucket-toting tourists plodded out to the dock. This was Keys entrepreneurship at its finest. "Definitely not a chain," said Chris. Always Return to the Water We always returned to the water. We dove reefs off the Upper Keys, fat with life: nurse sharks, hawksbill turtles, morays and — my favorite — the queen conch, the lip of its inner shell mirroring the Keys' pink sunsets. In Key West, aboard Subtropic Dive Center's Pelican, we passed into the aquamarine Atlantic, descending again to a series of wrecks. The Cayman Salvage Master was our first stop. The 187-foot vessel was supposed to be sunk far out to sea as a deep-sea fishing site. In the Keys, however, even inanimate objects are independent-minded; on the way out, the Cayman sank prematurely in 90 feet of water. On this day it sat in water so blue that even the Subtropic crew raised their eyebrows. Beneath the surface, a flood of purple Creole wrasse rode the Cayman's bow, joined by a 200-plus pound Jewfish. Like heaven, the place was filled with angels — queen and French, gray and blue. A half-mile away Joe's Tug, 65 feet long and broken in the middle, provided another Jewfish as well as a surrounding reef colored with giant star coral and soft sea plumes. My favorite part of this dive was actually away from the tug and the reef. Hanging at 30 feet I watched a squadron of barracuda flare silver and then darken as, somewhere up above, the sun passed behind a series of clouds. Atlantic spadefish passed slowly through the light, each fish in turn throwing its own silvery light. Even the professionals were impressed. "There's no better safety stop than blue water," grinned divemaster Eric O'Keefe. Lightly Attended Affairs Most of our dives in the Keys were lightly attended affairs. Nearing October, the Keys were passing out of their prime dive season (July through September). Just to the north of Lauderdale, in Pompano, setting out on the Aqua View with South Florida Diving, Chris and I descended to the Captain Dan, a Coast Guard buoy tender used at one point by missionaries. Their prayers must have still lingered; the vessel swarmed with fish, most notably Jewfish — five at Chris' count. Frankly, I lost track of the things. They disappeared and reappeared, floating in and out of portholes and cabin doors like gentlemanly blimps. On our last day of diving, South Florida was its sunny norm as we joined a hubbub of excited divers streaming out through Hillsboro Inlet, once again aboard the Aqua View. We dove a 165-foot hopper barge called the Sea Emperor. Finning to the far end of the barge I plunged into a hold. Inside, currents had sculpted the sand into a series of miniature Saharan dunes on which sunlight played. A school of tomtate grunts swept fluidly here and there, keeping just above the dunes: God's own piscine broom. There are times when you are giddy with just being alive. I was the last diver to ascend. Waiting out my safety stop, I watched as a last silver bubble, having freed itself from some steel recess, wobbled merrily toward the surface, once again melding land and water. Henry Flagler, his dream and his train, spring break groupies, South Beach preeners, Mallory Square weirdos, quiet beaches, tourist honky tonks, frog croak and wind beat of mangrove — water binds them all; it's a connection, an eternal constant, ethereal and surreal magic and wackiness just off the open road. [pagebreak] Florida Visit Florida www.flausa.com Florida Keys Florida Keys & Key West www.fla-keys.com/diving Dive Centers Aqua-Nuts Dive Center 800-226-0415 www.aqua-nuts.com Captains Corner Dive Center www.captainscorner.com Captain Hook's Dive Center 800-CPT-HOOK www.captainhooks.com Conch Republic Divers 800-274-DIVE www.conchrepublicdivers.com Dive Key West 800-426-0707 www.divekeywest.com Divers Paradise www.keydivers.com Florida Keys Dive Center 800-433-8946 www.floridakeysdivectr.com Holiday Isle Dive Center 800-327-7070 www.diveholidayisle.com Horizon Divers 800-984-DIVE www.horizondivers.com It's a Dive 800-809-9881 www.itsadive.com John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park www.pennekamppark.com Ocean Divers 877-451-3483 www.sportdiver.com/ebrochure/oceandivers Paradise Divers www.paradivers.com Paradise Charters 800-921-5549 www.paradisecharters.net Rainbow Reef Dive Center 800-457-4354 www.rainbowreef.us Sea Dwellers 800-451-3640 www.sportdiver.com/ebrochure/seadwellers Southpoint Divers 800-891-DIVE www.southpointdivers.com Subtropic Dive Center 800-853-3483 www.subtropic.com Dive Resorts/Hotels Amy Slate's Amoray Dive Resort www.amoray.com Looe Key Resort & Dive Center 800-LOOE KEY www.diveflakeys.com Ft Lauderdale The Greater Ft. Lauderdale Convention and Visitor's Bureau 800-356-1662 www.sunny.org Dive Centers Dixie Divers www.dixiediver.com Force E www.force-e.com Lauderdale Diver www.lauderdalediver.com Parrot Island Scuba 800-851-9106 www.parrotislandscuba.com Princess Cruises 888-919-9819 www.newwaves.com Pro Dive Fort Lauderdale 800-PRO-DIVE www.prodiveusa.com South East Oceanic Services 954-922-8134 www.divefortlauderdale.com South Florida Diving Headquarters 800-771-3483 www.southfloridadiving.com Scuba School and Dive Center 877-88-SCUBA www.scuba-school.com