The time the Keys seceded over a traffic jam.

In 1982 the Florida Keys seceded from the United States, declared war, surrendered after one minute, and applied for foreign aid. All of it started with a traffic jam on the road we drive every week.

The checkpoint

In the spring of 1982 the US Border Patrol set up a roadblock on US-1 just south of Florida City, in front of a bar called the Last Chance Saloon. Agents stopped every vehicle in both directions and searched it for drugs and undocumented immigrants. Under the seats, in the glove box, in the trunk.

The location was not accidental, and anyone who drives the Keys will see why immediately. They put it just north of the point where Card Sound Road comes back onto US-1. There are two roads off the islands, and they converge there. Block that one spot and you have closed the Florida Keys.

The queue reportedly ran seventeen miles. Some accounts say nineteen. Either way, people sat in it for hours, in April, in Florida, waiting for a federal agent to finish going through their beach towels.

Why it landed so hard

The Keys run on tourism. Take the one road in and turn it into a several-hour wait and you have not inconvenienced the Keys, you have switched them off. Visitors turned around. Bookings evaporated. Businesses that had spent the winter waiting for the season watched it drain away at a checkpoint sixty miles north of Key West.

The Key West City Council complained. Repeatedly. It went nowhere.

Mayor Dennis Wardlow went to the Border Patrol directly and was told the roadblock was none of his business. His answer has been quoted ever since: “Don’t tell a Conch it’s none of your business.”

Miami, 22 April

Wardlow and a small group including local attorney and pilot David Paul Horan flew to Miami to seek a federal injunction. Judge C. Clyde Atkins declined to issue one.

That left them with nothing, legally. So on the courthouse steps, in front of reporters, Wardlow announced that the Florida Keys would secede from the Union at noon the following day.

The logic was simple. If the federal government was going to run a border checkpoint on the way into the Keys, then the Keys would oblige it by becoming a foreign country.

Noon, 23 April 1982

Wardlow climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck in Key West and read a proclamation of secession. It gave Washington a choice: take the roadblock down, or get ready to put up a permanent border to a new foreign land. The people of the Keys, it went on, had no intention of suffering at the hands of fools and bureaucrats.

Then he declared war on the United States, and broke a stale loaf of Cuban bread over the head of a man in a naval uniform.

One minute later he surrendered, and applied for a billion dollars in federal foreign aid to rebuild the war-torn nation.

Out in the harbour the Great Battle of the Conch Republic was under way. The schooner Western Union, under Captain John Kraus, engaged the Coast Guard cutter Diligence with water balloons, conch fritters and toilet paper. The Diligence returned fire with its hoses.

It worked

That is the part people forget while they are laughing. The roadblock came down.

Not because of the bread or the fritters, but because a small city with no leverage worked out that the one thing it did have was the world’s attention, and spent it well. The story was irresistible, the coverage was national, and a checkpoint that had survived every formal complaint did not survive being made ridiculous.

The Conch Republic never went away. Independence Day is still 23 April and still runs as a week-long festival, and the flag is still everywhere in Key West. It describes itself as a sovereign state of mind, which is about as good a summary of the Keys as anyone has managed.

One road, then and now

Post 01 in this series was about the mile markers, and how the Overseas Highway is a railroad that a hurricane turned into a road. This story is the same geography from a different angle.

Everything that makes the Keys the Keys comes back to there being one way in. It is why the mile markers work as addresses. It is why a checkpoint at Florida City could hold an entire county hostage. And it is why so many transport companies quote a Keys run and then ask you to meet the truck in Homestead — because 113 miles of two-lane road across 42 bridges is a full day for one or two cars, and they would rather not.

We built the company around that road instead. Same road the Conchs were stuck on in 1982, and still the only one.