Quite a stretch

Off to the left, over Barnes Sound, it was calm and lovely. In front and behind it was solid sheet metal: The 18-mile stretch took 86 minutes on Saturday. A truck and boat had veered deep into the sawgrass on the left about Mile Marker 125 -- following too closely, I'll bet, and had to swerve hard to avoid rear-ending the car in front. There was a car off to the right a few miles further. And so on.

After an hour of the slow-mo conga line, in the construction zone for the Jewfish Creek bridge project, I looked into my rear-view mirror in horror: A shiny black VW convertible was passing southbound despite the double yellow lines, despite the total inability to predict when the semis, boat rigs, motorcycles and occasional van-filled families going north would start whizzing by again.

I swerved into the gravel to let the fool squeeze in behind me, then calmly turned down the salsa music and dialed *FHP. The dispatcher was efficient, polite -- and interested in details. After all, there are a dozen or so (sometimes much more so) fatalities every year on the stretch, and unfortunately for the gene pool, the moron driver and his progeny aren't the only ones killed. The dispatcher said I hadn't been the only call about that car.

During one particularly long full stop, the driver in front of me put his SUV in park and sauntered back to muse about the insanity he'd seen in his rear-view mirror, to tell me how his blood had run cold when he thought about what might happen to him, his wife and kids -- and to ask if I had a cell phone he could use to call the cops. Not to worry, I told him.

Sure enough, there was a black-and-tan cruiser in the pulloff on the other side of the old bridge, lights flashing, with the trooper giving me a smile and thumbs-up as I crept past, and looking much sterner as she waved over the Beetle behind me.

One upside to the big delay: The lunch crowd had mostly cleared out by the time I got to Mrs. Mac's, bayside at MM 99.4, so when my patty melt and onion rings arrived, only six fellow diners in the back room craned to jokingly ask for samples.

Clouds moved in and it started to mist by the time I got to Long Key. It always amused me that Zane Grey whiled away so many hours at Flagler's fish camp there, riding far from the purple sage.

By the Seven-Mile Bridge (you can see the hump of the Moser Channel span waay ahead in the picture), the storm was really getting pretty. As far as I was concerned, that long finger of a cloud was pointing toward home.