The trick is to leave Miami before four in the morning. That gives you enough time to clear the city before the commuter traffic starts, to get through Homestead and Florida City while the sky is still dark, and to reach the first bridge of the Overseas Highway as the horizon begins to lighten. By the time you cross Card Sound Bridge, the sky to the east is the color of a bruise, purple fading to grey, and the water on both sides of the road is perfectly flat and perfectly dark.
Jackson Laurie has made this drive more times than he can count, and he has never found a better time to do it than the hour before sunrise. The highway is empty. The bridges, which in daylight feel like engineering, feel in the dark like something more elemental, like passages between one kind of world and another. The water is invisible below you. You are driving through darkness over open sea.
The first light comes around Islamorada, usually, somewhere in the Upper Keys where the road runs close to the Atlantic side and you can see the sky brightening over the water to the east. The mangroves on both sides of the road begin to take shape. The water, which was black, becomes dark green, then lighter green, then the color it will be for the rest of the day: that particular clear turquoise that the Keys are famous for and that no photograph has ever quite captured accurately.
By Marathon, the sun is up. The Seven Mile Bridge stretches ahead of you, and in the early morning light, with no other cars visible, it looks impossibly long, a thin line of concrete running to the horizon over open water. The old bridge, the one that was replaced in the 1980s and now serves as a fishing pier and pedestrian walkway, runs parallel to the new one, and the combination of the two bridges and the flat water and the early morning light is one of the more beautiful things in Florida.
Key West arrives the way it always does: gradually, then all at once. The road narrows, the houses get closer together, the trees get bigger and older, and then you are in the Old Town, on streets that are barely wide enough for two cars, with Conch houses on both sides and chickens in the yards and the particular smell of Key West in the morning, which is a combination of salt air and frangipani and coffee from the places that are already open.
The reason to arrive early is simple: Key West before nine in the morning is a different place from Key West at noon. The cruise ship passengers have not arrived yet. The bars on Duval Street are closed or just closing. The people you see are locals going about their lives, or visitors who had the same idea you did, or fishermen heading out for the day. The town has a quiet to it that it loses completely once the day gets going.
Jackson Laurie's preferred route from the Overseas Highway into Key West avoids Duval Street entirely. He comes in on US-1, turns onto Truman Avenue, and works his way through the residential streets of the Old Town toward the Gulf side waterfront. There is a small park there, Bayview Park, where you can sit and watch the water and eat whatever you picked up from one of the early-opening coffee places, and the view across the Gulf in the early morning is worth the four-hour drive from Miami.
The drive back is different. You are going north, into the sun, with the traffic building as the day progresses. But even then, even in the middle of the afternoon with the heat at its worst and the road crowded with rental cars, the Overseas Highway has a quality that is hard to find elsewhere in Florida. You are driving through a landscape that has no equivalent in the continental United States, a thin strip of road over a shallow sea, with the Atlantic on one side and the Gulf on the other, and the sky enormous above you in every direction.