MAJOR KEY

HUNDREDS OF SMALL ISLANDS TRAIL LIKE STEPPING STONES OFF OF FLORIDA INTO THE GULF OF MEXICOAND THE PATH LEADS TO KEY WEST.

- HANNAH AGRAN

When my plane descends from the clouds, a wash of blue-green fills the window.

The water isn't one color; it's dozens, shot through with sunlight, mottled and variegated like marble by sand and reef below. I begin to see ripples, whitecaps, the occasional dimple of a buoy or boat. Just as I wonder if our wheels will skim the surface, we bump down in Key West, at a tiny airport so close to the ocean that I catch a glimmer of beach from the rideshare line.

Confession: Until this year, I'd never been to Florida. As a born-and-raised Midwesterner, this feels almost like a sacrilege. And I'm still not entirely sure I have been. Because the Keys aren't regular Florida, either geographically or culturally. They're a chain of islands (a coral cay archipelago, properly speaking) that curl off the Florida peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico. Like beads slipping down a 120-mile thread, they fall toward Cuba, a country whose proximity is felt on local menus (and in the abundance of rum).

Many people fly here, but US-1, the same highway that will take you all the way to Maine, also connects the Keys, leapfrogging over the water from Miami to Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon, Big Pine Key and finally Key West, the southernmost point in the continental United States-Mile O.