Assuming you don't have a boat, there's only one way to get to Egmont Key. The $15 ferry leaves from Ft. De Soto Park, and once you're on it, there's no turning back. The island will be your home until the boat comes back four hours later. So imagine my excitement when, 10 minutes into the ride out to Egmont, the ferry's first mate had this glowing endorsement for me: "It's really kind of boring out there."
Great.
The ferry docked at the island's northern tip, which looks out toward St. Pete Beach across the 70-foot-deep channel that most ships use to get in and out of Tampa Bay. The folks disembarking — families and couples with beach gear in tow — started the walk along the water to the west coast of the small island (Egmont Key is just 1.6 miles long and half a mile wide, and eroding rapidly). I followed them at first, wondering how I could have just paid 15 bucks for the privilege of being stranded on an island. Then I looked left, passed a maze of felled palm trees and overgrown plants. A concrete slab, the remnants of an old building, was covered in graffiti. A line across the top, written in large capital letters, caught my eye.
"PAUL-N-LUIGY-R-GAY!"
Perhaps the island had seen better days.
The slab was part of Fort Dade, constructed to defend Tampa in the run-up to the Spanish-American war. De-activated in 1923, the fort today is just a shell, and an eerie one at that. The buildings are empty, the doors long gone, the paint stripped. I walked through the small rooms, down a few dank hallways, but didn't want to stick around any longer — the hollowness was starting to get to me.
A long cement path leads into the center of the island, and though the beach was just a hundred yards away, the waves and the rustling of the bushes were loud enough to drown out any noise I might have heard from folks frolicking in the water. It's not often in Tampa Bay that you can be as alone as I was — it felt like nobody had ever walked here before.
And then I heard a motor. It was faint at first, but as I passed by the foundation of Fort Dade's old firehouse, the roar grew. I headed down a brick-lined street, turned a corner and there she was.
Barbara Schmidt, a petite woman wearing small diamond earrings, had an industrial-strength leaf blower strapped to her back. She was moving methodically up a cracked sidewalk, blowing sand to the edges, clearing a path.
Schmidt and her husband John first set foot on Egmont Key 12 years ago — "We came over the channel and we've been here ever since," she said. "It was wall-to-wall jungle back then."
Slowly, the Schmidts uncovered what was once a vibrant city built to support the fort and its troops. The Treasure Island couple cleared off the roads (and the path I'd walked down), planted agaves in the dunes to curb erosion, and uncovered foundations for houses, a bakery and even a tennis court.
"In its prime, this place was a better functioning city than Tampa or St. Petersburg," said Schmidt, who volunteers at Egmont at least three days a week and calls the place her "adopted child." Fort Dade had its own power plant, its own ice machine and its own fire department. "Oh yeah," Schmidt told me, "They had a great life."
Before she got to the island, she had no use for history, almost failed it in high school. But a dozen years after arriving on Egmont Key's shores, Schmidt can out-buff anyone.
She has tracked down hundreds of photos of old buildings, and mounted them in front of where the structures once stood. She's in touch with a few folks who grew up on the island, and tells their stories as animatedly as a kindergarten teacher reading to her class. She studies period by period, she says, from the imprisonment of Seminoles in the 1850s (two Seminole children are still buried on the island) to the Civil War (Egmont was a Union stronghold) to the island's role in prohibition (bootleggers occupied several of the vacant houses; Egmont was the spot in Tampa Bay to pick up a fifth).
Schmidt told me all this after turning off her leaf blower, but her fellow groundskeeper wasn't as excited to talk. Tom Watson, a park ranger, has lived on the island for more than three years. He's Egmont's only full-time resident.
"It's wonderful," he said as he took a break to light up an unfiltered Pall Mall. "I've got the best job in the world."
Wearing dark aviators and his teal park ranger uniform, Watson told me he wasn't supposed to talk to the press without clearance. But I doubt he would've wanted to anyway — you don't move to an uninhabited island to chat with tourists.
"I'm sorry, pal," he said, strapping on his blower. "But we got four hours of work to do in the next 20 minutes. It doesn't ever end — it's gonna rain and ruin all this," he added, waving his arm toward road he and Schmidt had spent the morning clearing.
As they moved on, I moved over the dunes on the west edge of the unearthed city and into Egmont Key's other world: the beach. On most weekends, the water is packed with the boats of enterprising people looking for a place less built-up than Clearwater or Treasure Island. But it was overcast, and only a dozen had made the trip.
Egmont's beach is rugged — a dead sea turtle lay among the downed trees — but it certainly looked more familiar than the island's interior. Kids made sand castles, adults who shouldn't be wearing thongs wore them, classic rock played from boom boxes.
Charley Rowley and his family head to Egmont once a month from South Tampa on their 18-footer, The Charley Horse. "It's like paradise out here," Rowley told me from the under the shade of a blue canopy. "If I had it my way, I'd come out here every weekend."
Barbara Schmidt thinks it's paradise too, but she doesn't spend much time on the beach. I caught up with her again just before the ferry came to take me back to Ft. De Soto. She was standing near the 147-year-old lighthouse, a mammoth white tower that is still operational.
"I see these people in their bathing suits and a cold drink in their hand," she said. "And I think 'Awwwww' — why don't I do that anymore?'"
Then she answered her own question.
"If we don't stay on it, these roads would sink into oblivion."
So Schmidt keeps working, uncovering new pieces of Egmont Key's history with her leaf blower, as far from boredom as she could be.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.
