Happy Sunday 🍵☕
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There's only one road in and out of Key West.
It's a two-lane highway, and on both sides of it, as far as you can see, there's nothing but crystal blue water. I took too many pictures driving it. I couldn't stop. Something about being that far from everything familiar, with nothing but ocean on both sides of you and nowhere to go but ahead.
When I got there the girl I was staying with took me around. She was a friend of a friend and was nice enough to be my tour guide for a couple days. Key West itself is fine. It's charming in the way tourist towns are charming. The dive bars, the crowded pier, the cruise ships rolling in at sunset while everyone lines up to photograph the same sky — I set up my easel in the middle of it anyway. That's the only way I know how to be in a crowd. Not performing, not making small talk, just drawing. Letting whoever's supposed to find me, find me. She was enamored with the ships coming in and out of the harbor, wondering what life would be like anywhere but here. I was more interested in that thing the sky does each night — but there was something about her romanticism of life on the water that spoke to me. I called the piece "She Wanted a Cruise Ship." The drawing isn't my favorite from the trip, but the name is, and sometimes that's enough.
Later that night we went to the Southernmost point of the United States. “90 miles to Cuba” the monument says. I drew the water, looking out into the soft, navy abyss under the dark night sky. Late, quiet, a sliver of moon and some yellow structure sticking out of the water glowing on the surface — I still don't know exactly what it was, but it was perfect for the composition so I kept it. I called it Blue Velvet. It's one of my favorites from that whole era. The kind of piece that captures a feeling rather than a place.
But that's not what Key West gave me.
What Key West gave me was two people I barely knew driving me somewhere in the dark. No real explanation of where we were going. Just: get in. We ended up on a remote island, pitch black except for the sky, which was doing that thing it does when you’re nowhere near anywhere you’ve been before. Stars, everywhere, absurdly bright, the kind that make you feel like you've been lied to your whole life about what the night actually looks like. We had cameras. We took pictures. We talked. That was it. No agenda, no destination inside the destination. Just three people standing in the dark feeling like they'd found something no brochure could ever mention.
That's when I felt at home.
I went to the southernmost point of the United States. I took a selfie with the marker that tells you how many miles to Cuba — I did a drawing there. I saw the famous sunset. I went the divey beach bars. I did all the things you're supposed to do at the end of the road.
But the thing I actually found was off the road entirely, in the dark, with strangers who felt like something more than that by the time the night was over.
That's what this newsletter is. One place at a time. Where I have been, what I have seen, and what I was personally moved by.
26 States down. 24 to go.
Want more from this trip.. photos, recommendations, stories that didn't make the cut? Just reply and ask. I've got plenty.
Just an Easel and a Dream is Cody's ongoing plein air pastel project: drawing in all 50 states, one landscape at a time.
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Thank You!