Ghosts are everywhere in Key West. Some remain as hidden as possible while others beg for your attention. One day, it took me an hour and a half to find the bungalow where Tennessee Williams had once lived, even after I had been given the address. The concierge at La Concha pointed out the spot on the map where I would find the house, but the map showed only the more prominent streets. He spoke gracefully, but Williams lived on a tiny side street not on the map. When I did reach the general area in question, not one of the locals knew of Williams or where he had lived, except for one distracted bike rider, who was at least familiar with the street itself. With this advice, I finally found Williams’ home, which is now privately owned and anything but a tourist destination, albeit a demure place where one might certainly be able to write in quiet.

Ernest Hemingway was a different animal, an iconic figure in Key West from 1931 onward, when he and his second wife Pauline bought a house on Whitehead Street and shared a rich but turbulent relationship that ended in 1939. Hemingway moved on, but Pauline’s and Hemingway’s legacy remained because she decided to stay and sustain a legacy that she might or might not have ever expected although I suspect she did, for whichever reasons. The original Sloppy Joe’s bar, now Captain Tony’s, was one of Hemingway’s haunts, and both the bar and his house are major tourist destinations, as is the current Sloppy Joe’s, also a vibrant place to visit and still Hemingwayesque. No one debarking the cruise ships has any problem finding these places. Several dozen cats descending from Ernest’s and Pauline’s original tribe fairly well own the Hemingways’ Key West house. It’s also worth mentioning that Jimmy Buffet began finding his way at Captain Tony’s. Buffet even wrote a song about a night he spent with Captain Tony called “Last Mango in Paris,” which speaks to the visceral reality of living in paradise and grabbing that golden ring and swinging on it if one is lucky enough to find it.

I asked some people about the disparity of my searches and received two interesting responses. First, Williams’ house is now privately owned. Who, living in a secluded residence, would want tourists gawking through windows and trampling across his or her yard? Williams also led a lower-profile life in Key West than did Hemingway, both by design and circumstance. Hemingway courted the public there in a way Williams didn’t. Many tend to honor such legacies. One man I met said the gay community still protects Williams’ privacy out of respect for his presence, reputation, and wishes. Unlike Williams, maybe Hemingway wanted to be enshrined as a defining local memory,  wanted his ghost to be remembered as something other than just a shotgun blast of despair and futility.

Key West’s surroundings define more than respond to culture. The sea, which is at the very edge of the Bermuda Triangle, is a telescope through which the right imagination can revisit but never fully understand our origins. The surface is a prism beneath the moody sky, whether smooth, choppy, pale green, azure, or black. Below is prehistoric, a place to be a cautious guest since the fish and coral are fragile, curious, or dangerous. Brightly tailored creatures shadow your every move, examining you as the tourist you will always be. On dry land, the same secrets and uncertainties apply to the properties built by people who understood the sea. Courtyards hidden behind the facades of mostly two-story houses lining every street are private indulgences waiting for new ghosts to emerge, the ones we know, knew, or have met, the ones who join us at the table or peer discreetly at us from behind a second-floor shutter.

I think of Key West every day, no matter where. Somewhere between the morning shower and evening news, I try to understand the place on my own terms. I even dream of it now and again, sometimes pleasantly and other times as a curious mental exercise. The community’s polynomial nature means that even Bubbas adapt soon enough to a different code where anyone of age can carry alcohol in plastic cups along the streets because somehow it doesn’t make sense to impose various state laws in the only Caribbean location in the U.S., just 90 miles from Cuba but 154 miles from Miami. In Key West, it’s easy to forget the day of the week, and it might take you three days to get stamps at the post office.

But the coral reefs are bleaching into pale underwater skeletons, due partly to increased water temperatures resulting from climate change. Higher carbon levels in the atmosphere are mostly to blame. Intrusive human activities on the water have done their fair share of harm as well. All of this means far fewer fish. Local fishermen know this. Many tourists don’t, or they prefer not to think of it. Should we kill the fish en masse, we kill our relatives, and then maybe ourselves. Then we’ll be dealing with a different community of ghosts.