Does Climate Make A Difference?

Over the past weekend, I binge-watched a TV drama series on Netflix. The story took place in Seattle. It was not about Seattle; it was about a murder mystery. But the outdoor scenes showed the city of Seattle and its climate. Now, I have never been to Seattle but I have always heard that it is cloudy and rainy there almost all the time. And sure enough, the TV presentation showed that. With few exceptions, it was raining or black-cloudy in every outdoor scene. I feel sure that it was not the intent of the producers to present the city in an unfavorable way and, as part of the plot, the actors were not particularly preoccupied with the weather. That is just the way it was. They were almost always walking or running or driving in the rain. Jeez, I kept thinking, how could anybody live in a place like that?! Indeed, when I Googled Seattle and weather, I learned that it does indeed rain a lot there and that the sun rarely shines– and that many residents suffer from depression and that there is a high suicide rate. Go figure.

It made me, once again, appreciate the climate here in Key West. When we tell our friends and relatives who live somewhere else that the climate here is virtually perfect, we are not exaggerating. The occasional cool or rainy or too-hot day is just that– an occasional inconvenience. An average temperature of 77 degrees ain’t too shabby. Of course, there is a periodic hurricane, but (knock on wood) we haven’t seen one of those for several years.

Most of us who live in Key West came from somewhere else, so we especially appreciate the climate here. In most cases, we came here to escape winter. And many of us made life-changing decisions to do that. But most of us didn’t just decide one day to up and move to Key West. We did it in steps. When you ask local transplants when they moved to Key West, they are likely to say something like, “Well, we moved here in such-and-such a year– but we started coming down here on vacation years before that.” The more affluent might tell you, “We’ve had a second home down here for years– but we just sold our home up north last year.” Of course, we do have our share of dropouts who just started driving south one day and didn’t stop until they ran out of road.

Like many others, I didn’t make the move to Key West all at once. My first jobs out of college were in Philadelphia and New York City. That professional experience looks great on my resume but I absolutely hated the climate as well as the big-city environment. Yeah, yeah, there were the “changing of the seasons” and the “museums and the art galleries.” But that was not enough.

The good news is that I could afford vacations in places like the Bahamas and Key West. And I liked those places– and I couldn’t help but fantasize how it might be like to live there. So I made a plan to do that. (The operational word in that sentence is “plan.”) While living and working in New York, I sent out my resume and landed a corporate job in Tampa. That was way better than Philly and New York. But Tampa had more cold days than I like and it was still a relatively big city, with all of the aggravations that come with big cities. So when the possibility of a transfer to Sarasota came up, I asked for the opportunity. My boss tried to talk me out of it, reminding me that the move was not a promotion. “Trust me on this,” I told him. So he sent me to Sarasota.

Now that was more like it! But in a few years, as is often the case when one works for a corporation, I was told that I was being promoted and moved back to Tampa– and there was no stay-in-Sarasota option. No way, Jose! In order to stay in Sarasota, I sucked it up and quit my corporate job and became an independent consultant. By that time, I owned a sailboat and, whenever I was able to take a week off, we often made the relatively easy sail down to Key West. Then I decided to take a year off and sail to the Bahamas. As you sailors know, to get to the Bahamas from Sarasota, you have to turn the corner at Key West. But when we got to Key West, we decided to stay awhile– and that “awhile” turned into eight months. I worked for treasure-hunter Mel Fisher during that time. That was before he found the mother lode. But finally, we were on our way to the Bahamas and the “year off” turned into three years.

When it was time to leave the Bahamas, I did something I had always wanted to do– go back to graduate school to get a Ph.D. I selected a degree program at the University of Tennessee– where it was, by the way, both colder and hotter than hell. Two years later, it was time to return to Florida. We initially settled in Ft. Lauderdale, where I could make some money. But we spent many of our weekends in Key West and, eventually, I was able to headquarter my consulting business here. That was a few years before I did something else I had always wanted to do. I founded a weekly newspaper in in a small town with a near-perfect climate.

It has always been interesting to me that there are so few of us who have figured it out. We all have met tourists who look around wide-eyed and say, “I wish I lived here,” and we all know people who are stuck living up north and they hate it. But they simply do not have the gumption to quit their jobs and move to a warmer climate. On the other hand, maybe they are just more responsible than many of us were– and there’s a lot to be said about responsibility. But these are the same people who say, “You are so lucky to live in Key West!” The way I would like to respond is to say, “Luck has nothing to do with it!” But I usually don’t, because I don’t want to take the time to have a long conversation about gumption and responsibility.

I hope I am not alone when I say that I do not take the climate here for granted. I live in Old Town and I can walk just about everywhere I need to go. And every time I take a walk, I cannot help but note to myself how absolutely cool it is to live here.

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Dennis Reeves Cooper founded Key West The Newspaper (The Blue Paper) in 1994 and was editor and publisher until he retired in 2012.