Oh gosh. I have dreaded writing this post because it still feels so crushing. But I kind of want to just rip off the band-aid and then I'll come back and write the other ones in between. (I do suggest reading the other posts I already published about this trip though so you can see that this was kind of a cumulative spiral of some not-so-great stuff where we kept telling ourselves that it would all be worth it in Dry Tortugas.) Here's the flooded trails in Congaree, the frigid snorkeling trip in Biscayne, the part in the Everglades where we got over a thousand mosquito bites, or the part in the Everglades where we got pinched by a crab outside our tent.
So we booked this trip back in 2021; you have to book pretty far out anyway and to get EIGHT people on a ticket when the ferry only takes ten campers a day--it is a big deal. (At every step of the way all of the ferry people kept double-checking our tickets saying "How on earth did you manage to get eight tickets?!!"). It was a big deal and it took a ton of planning and it was not cheap. Actually, the ferry tickets weren't terrible ($250 per person) but it was very expensive getting there and getting all of the gear, plus the rest of the trip (when we were in Biscayne on our abortive snorkeling trip I told Neil that at least it was the only time we'd ever pay $1000 to be in the water for twenty minutes--well, I was right, because we paid more than that to be in the water in Dry Tortugas for twenty minutes). To put it into perspective, this was our family's Christmas this year + our 20th anniversary + our birthday gifts to each other for the last few years.
A couple things to keep in mind--there are zero facilities on the island, so you're bringing in all of your food and water. You cannot cook with firewood or propane, so your options are briquettes or cold foods. There is no running water (there are compostable toilets available at night only). You're 70 miles from land and there is one ferry that runs once a day. All of your gear has to be in hard-sided totes of a specific weight and size, and you're limited on how much you can bring (per person allowance). It is one of the least-visited parks for a reason! You need to be at the ferry docks in Key West by 5 AM, and if your only available day that they offer you is New Year's Day, you better be prepared to spend New Year's Eve in the Keys ($$$$$). So...this is just a big deal and pretty complicated and there's a reason why we were saving it for our 20th anniversary. This took a TON of planning at every step of the way. If you've ever planned a vacation for 8 people, that's a lot of work. Add a camping trip and that's more work. Add a camping trip with zero facilities or water...that's a whole other ball game (and drive from Indiana to the southernmost point of Florida to get there).
We stayed in Marathon about an hour away, got up at 3 am on New Year's Day, and packed everything up in our car, drove to Key West, and started unpacking the car and repacking everything into our hard-sided totes (which we had to fit in our car for this whole trip--that was a huge logistical feat! Plus 40 gallons of water). Once we got all the totes packed, our baggage was inspected by the ferry crew, then we loaded it all onto the ferry. Then we went back to the car, put all the seats down, repacked everything so that the car-top carrier could go INSIDE our car (because the parking garage ceiling would not accomodate it), and then we waited a couple of hours for the ferry boarding to open, and then we waited for the boarding time to start, and THEN we boarded the ferry and we were off!! It felt so surreal, we had been waiting and planning for this for so long and I couldn't believe it was finally happening! I was wearing my National Parks Project shirt and the boys told me that morning that I needed to check off Dry Tortugas, but I was feeling like I didn't want to jinx anything and told them I would wait until after the trip.
It's a pretty long ride to the island--about 2.5 hours by ferry. We saw a couple of dolphins but mostly we just kind of tried to entertain Matthew (everyone else was happy to read a book).
When the island started to appear out of the ocean it was SO exciting!! Almost the entire surface of the largest key is covered by a Civil War-era fort, Fort Jefferson, which is the largest masonry structure in the northern hemisphere. (Samuel Mudd, who treated John Wilkes Booth, was imprisoned here.) We'd been researching this forever and listening to podcasts and comparing facts, so we all had different things we were super excited about, but all of us were REALLY excited to explore the fort and go on the ranger-led tours and watch both the sunrise and sunset from the top (spoiler alert--we never even got within twenty feet of the fort).
As we got closer to the docks, the captain came on the intercom and said that there were a number of migrant vessels here and to please not disturb them. As we got closer to the island we saw that there were a TON of migrant boats.
We had instructions to meet the park ranger before we did anything else, so after everyone else who was just there for the day (the ferry comes for about 4 hours and then leaves again at 2:30) disembarked, we waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Finally after about half an hour the park ranger appeared and spend another forty minutes giving us our orientation. He told us that there were hundreds of migrants here and that we absolutely needed to stay away from them because the situation was growing tense. He said that they had been arriving day and night for the last few nights and that it would likely be scary when we heard the arrivals at night, because there would be a lot of screaming and loud noises as they made land. At this point I was getting a little nervous but thought that if the park service was keeping an eye on things it should be okay, but as we walked to our campsite I wondered if we should go back and talk to the ferry captain about possibly leaving a day earlier (we were supposed to be there for three nights) if the situation continued to escalate.
All of the campsites are in the trees pictured above; you can just barely see the roofs of the two composting toilets in the trees. The toilets are only available to campers staying on the island and locked while the Yankee Freedom ferry is in port (the toilets can't handle the waste of any more than the bare handful of people camped on the island) and so everyone is supposed to use the boat toilets during the day. But nobody had communicated this to the refugees, and so there was a steady stream of hundreds of people going back and forth between the fort, where the refugees had been escorted by the park service and asked to stay inside, and the toilets. Our campsite was about three feet from this path and had no visual or physical barriers between it and the path. So as we set up our camp, there were literally hundreds of people stopping to watch us. It made me increasingly uncomfortable, especially since so many of them were men, and they were just standing there staring at us (the girls and I were all wearing swimsuits since it was so hot and we were planning to swim right away). We were also unloading several days' worth of supplies and 40 gallons of water in front of people who had no supplies. I just got more and more anxious and after we set everything up, we actually ended up moving all of our supplies back behind our tent so they weren't visible from the path and were blocked by our tent. We also set up our girls' tent behind and touching ours and I was still SO nervous and telling Neil I didn't think I'd be able to sleep. The people in the site next to ours told us that when they got here a few days ago there had been six migrants, and that hundreds more had been arriving all day and night while they'd been there. They said they'd been woken up repeatedly at night from the yelling.
Just then we heard more commotion and turned to see another packed boat arriving several hundred yards down the beach. Another 50-70 people streamed off of it; I couldn't count how many but it was SO many more people than the boat seemed like it could hold. Meanwhile people were still banging on the bathroom doors, starting to yell here and there about the closed bathrooms, and a couple guys kept returning to the bathroom path and walking back and forth in front of our campsite. Then Neil came out from behind the tent and joined me and the guys immediately moved away.
We finally finished setting up camp, everyone was in their swim gear, and I told them to grab their snorkels and towels so we could go swimming. As we walked towards the front of our campsite the ranger appeared and told us "The situation has changed, there are too many refugees here, and we are evaucating all of the campers. You need to pack up right now, load your gear, and leave on the ferry."
My heart sunk and I just absolutely could not believe what I'd just heard. I had been feeling nervous but I had also been telling myself that I was overthinking it and we would be fine. It honestly felt like a nightmare and I couldn't believe it was real. We kept asking the ranger if he was sure and if we really had to leave--I think I started crying and said, "We haven't even set foot on the beaches yet!" and he just repeated that he was sorry but we had to leave, and that the campers who had been there for a day or two already were telling the rangers that they no longer felt safe. Then basically all of us were crying and I just felt so so so so so awful for the kids. So I said "okay, give us fifteen minutes guys. Just give us fifteen minutes and let's see how much we can do." And we have NEVER worked that fast (it was longer than fifteen minutes but not by much). We just dumped things into totes and didn't even try to be organized. I think we left half our tent stakes on the island. We were all crying and just dumping everything in totes and shaking so hard we kept dropping stuff. But we got everything packed up, wheeled it all back to the boat, got it stowed, and then we had twenty minutes to swim at the beach.
I cannot even begin to describe how beautiful it was. The water was crystal clear, there were so many fish, and the entire moat wall that encircled the fort was covered with 200 years of coral growth. We saw sea fans, anemones, so many types of coral, thousands of brightly-colored fish, a lobster that Neil swears was two feet long, a giant anchor covered in coral...it was just insane. Utterly unbelievable (and of course my camera was at the bottom of a tote somewhere). I was crying so hard into my snorkel mask and I kept coming to the surface to dump it out and go back under so I could see again (oh yeah, did I mention we bought everyone brand-new snorkel gear for this trip? Plus new water shoes, wetsuits for the little boys, underwater camera, solar chargers...).
When we came out of the water just twenty minutes later, the vibe of the island had noticeably changed. The other 200 day-trippers on the ferry had all reboarded and none of the park service employees were in sight. The island had previously felt very busy with familiar faces from the trip over, but they were all gone now. Most of the refugees were now out of the fort and there were hundreds of men spread out along the path back to the ferry, sitting on the picnic tables in the campground, and sitting on the park service's 4-wheeler. Whereas previously we had seen a few women and young kids, now it was only men. They were literally lining the path and I just had this very visceral terrified reaction walking through what felt like a gauntlet of people who were all staring at us and turning to watch us as we walked by. Neil was telling me earlier that nobody was going to do anything because they were desperate for a new life, and I said yes absolutely but also people were desperate enough to spend days on the open ocean in tin can boats and there were 5 rangers and 20 campers with all the food and water on the island. So when we loaded our gear back onto the boat we left all of our water and jugs and as we walked back to the boat I saw a group of men sitting defensively on top and around our water. I realized that I should have given it to the rangers to disperse but I didn't even think about that until hours later. I just don't think I've ever felt so scared and at the same time I was SO mad at myself for being judgemental and scared and having such a visceral reaction to people who were in very different life circumstances than I was. But I also felt genuinely worried about my safety and my children's safety, and I've never been in a position before where I felt so intensely vulnerable. And I was also FURIOUS at myself for being so heartbroken about a ruined vacation where these people were escaping such a horrible life situation. It was really really hard to hold all of those conflicting feelings. It's one thing to read about the plight of the refugees in an article later; it's another thing entirely to see barefoot people in tattered clothes staring at you while you unload all the water and food you packed along for three days. I felt simultaneously terrified, angry at myself for being scared, angry at myself for making snap judgments, angry at myself for crying about my vacation...it just felt like the kind of situation that was getting increasingly tense and just needed one tiny spark to set it off. And we were trying to explain to the kids (who were all super upset at leaving) why these people were here and why we needed to go, and trying to do so in a really even-handed way and explain how awful things are in Cuba right now. I honestly think the kids did a better job at handling it than we did. Isaac told me that he was super mad but then after we talked about it he just felt so sorry for the refugees and wanted so much for them all to be okay. So maybe this will be a huge foundational turning point for my kids in how they view people in circumstances different than theirs (and maybe it will be a source of lingering trauma, I don't know. We've already had some kids break down when we proposed other trips because they don't want this same kind of enormous disappointment again).
We got back on the boat and I think all of us just cried for the first hour. All of our food and entertainment stuff was in our totes and we’d left all our water on the island (as I’m reading this now I think why didn’t I leave the food too, but at the time I didn’t even think about it because it was in our cooler and we just picked the cooler up and carried the whole thing back to the boat), so we literally just sat there and cried (on the floor of the boat because it was overloaded with all the people the ferry was evacuating off the island so there were no seats left). The crew were SO kind and the galley cook made us food to order, no charge, and some of the other campers came up to us and told us they would help us find a place to stay that night (remember--this is Key West on New Year's Day!!!). Someone started calling hotels as soon we we got back to the dock--it probably took 2 hours to wait for the other passengers to disembark, then get our stuff, unload it from the boat, get the cartop carrier back on, repack the entire car, etc. I was just crying the entire time and had a full-blown panic attack at one point when Neil had gone to go retrieve the car from the garage and I was standing there surrounded by piles of our gear (remember we got up at 3 am that day and this is after days of terrible sleep in the Everglades thanks to mosquitoes and being so hot and humid that the tent was dripping on our faces all night).
And poor Matthew was so tired that he tried to go to sleep in one of our totes.
Another guy from the boat called me as we were packing up the car and said he'd found a hotel an hour away that had open rooms and he'd reserved them for us. I cried harder and thanked him. Then we drove to the hotel, went into the front office to check in, and I just started sobbing. Like full on full body all the emotions I'd been trying to hold back from the kids (I definitely cried in front of them but I basically LOST IT as soon as I was away). And the hotel people were absolutely amazing. They told me that the other guy from the boat had offered to pay for our rooms but they told him not to worry about it. Then they comped us TWO ROOMS IN THE FLORIDA KEYS ON NEW YEAR'S DAY. You guys--people are just so, so, so, so good. (And I'm coming back to add that the ferry people refunded our tickets when we called the next morning and made that so easy, I really did not expect that we would actually get a refund there, but I was so hugely grateful that they were so understanding.)
We got everyone in bed--poor little baby fell asleep waiting for a shower, fell off the bed, kept sleeping...oh man I felt so awful for him. And then everyone else fell asleep and I was just lying there shaking so hard, my pulse was racing...it was pretty bad. I called my sister Elise and she just listened to me sob to her for quite awhile and get all of the big twisty emotions out--all of the fear and guilt and anger and shame at feeling anger and sadness that so many people in the world do not have the privileges that I have, and that my kids were safe and warm and fed, and that a hundred miles away there were little kids trying to sleep on the sand in an old fort after surviving miles of open ocean. Man it was just a lot. And it is still so hard for me to think about all of it.
The park ended up being closed for about a week. I hope someday we can go back but honestly right now it is too much to even think about. And I hope I don't sound like an awful privileged person after this post, but let's be honest--I am EXTREMELY privileged and so are all of us who can sit here reading this post on our iPhones in our warm safe houses with our fridges and pantries stuffed full. The world is not a fair place and I also wish I could say that I've become a refugee activist since this trip, but hey, instead I've got an appointment with my doctor to go back on anti-anxiety meds next week and I've been taking sleeping pills every single night since this trip. Fun times! And now I really need to go to bed because this is getting way too open, and I'll probably regret later...
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