Somewhere in Angelfish Creek, about 65 years ago, a little girl dived off a boat anchored in the curving waterway. She was hoping to find some angels.
To Dawn Rigby, this was true adventure-exciting, scary, mischievous. A child`s daring.
Too daring. She was swept, helpless, toward the ocean by a swirling current but finally managed to latch onto a twist of mangrove roots at the edge of an island. Hours later, or so it seemed, her brothers returned from a fishing trip and rescued the exhausted girl, still hanging on.
This is the first story Dawn Rigby Hallock Bliss Laws, now 75, will tell you about Palo Alto, a coral reef fossil thriving on the northern tip of the Florida Keys, because that was when her lifelong island fantasy began.
Palo Alto-the largest key in a cluster of offshore islands just south of the Dade-Monroe County line-is a rare tropical jungle, still wild and undisturbed except for the ruins of a sawmill and the remains of a lime orchard tended by Conch settlers a century ago.
The island belongs to Laws. In spirit and on paper. But a lot of other people would like to have it.
The Nature Conservancy has tried for years to preserve this chunk of vanishing Florida. The conservationists are eager to save 203 unspoiled acres at the gateway to three national treasures: the Everglades, the coral reef and the Biscayne Bay preserve. But they have competition.
The State of Florida also would like to preserve it. In recent weeks, negotiations have resumed and a secret appraisal of Palo Alto has been completed. An offer to buy the key will be made to Laws ”hopefully within a month,” says Fred Saxon of the Department of Natural Resources` land acquisition bureau. ”I`m very hopeful that we get a deal.”
And on Christmas 1989, a wealthy old gentleman who has long coveted Palo Alto sent Laws a holiday card with a blank check inside. Laws declined to fill it in (”I just wasn`t ready to sell”), but she has kept the check.
Laws, who lives in Coconut Grove, Fla., doesn`t know what to do. Her third husband, Langdon, can`t get around the way he used to, so the weekend trips to Palo Alto are history. But Laws has put so much money and sweat into the island over the last 50 years that she is reluctant to sell it, even though she has always thought of it as an investment.
”I guess it was in my blood from the beginning,” Laws says.
The island has been a constant in her life, the repository of her fantasies for 50 years.
It has soothed her in times of misfortune: Her first husband, a pilot, was killed when he crashed into a mountain in Ethiopia. And it has always been a great place for celebration: Her son Tim Bliss marked his 21st birthday on Palo Alto, banging congas and drinking rum and doing the limbo with 20 buddies.
Palo Alto remains a source of delight to Laws. On one morning she sits in a motorboat as it winds through marked channels into Angelfish Creek. When the island comes into view, Laws throws open her arms and squeals: ”Wheeee! We`re here.”
She is wearing a bright pink T-shirt dress, shredded at the bottom after the fashion made famous by Bo Derek. Laws is trim and nimble and strong, a swimmer all her life who once trained for the Olympics. With ice-blue eyes, she is at once vivacious and innocent: the little girl looking for the angels. So what`s it like to own an island?
”It`s bewildering,” she explains. ”It`s really something I always look forward to, knowing that it`s there, knowing that some of my fantasies may someday come true.”
Fantasies?
”They`re secret.”
She is prodded, and she mumbles something about lounging on a chaise with servants waving fans to cool her off and keep the bugs away. ”This is my own little secret garden.”
The fruits of that garden-wild orchids and palms, floppy-leafed plants and ferns-fill her home in the Grove, framing the pool deck and climbing toward the second-floor living room.
Laws` parents were nature lovers who settled in the Grove in 1916, the year she was born. Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived down the road. Orville Rigby, Laws` father, was a Miami commissioner in the `30s; Laws said he introduced another soon-to-be-famous neighbor, Ernest Coe, to the Everglades. Coe labored and lobbied for decades to turn the River of Grass into a national park; as part of that effort, Laws` brothers trekked across the Everglades on foot, emerging at Cape Sable.
Three years after Laws graduated from Miami High School, a photographer from New York City spotted her training in the pool of the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach. Her color picture-floating on her back in the water, legs and arms outstretched-graced the cover of Vogue magazine in June 1938.
In 1941, at 25, Laws started buying Palo Alto. She, her first husband and two other couples paid a total of $1,400 for three-quarters of it. Other people owned the rest. For Laws, it was an investment and an adventure. Over the years, she gobbled up more, buying out partners and their descendants.
”It was plain and primitive but great,” says son Bliss, 49. ”But the mosquitoes! You have no idea.”
Laws` brothers built a tiny white cabin for overnight stays on the island. An outhouse, marked with a slice of the moon, was poised over the mangroves, and a cistern collected rainwater. On muggy, buggy nights, Bliss climbed on top of the cabin.
”It was neat sleeping up there with your girlfriend in the moonlight,”
he says. ”And to escape the mosquitoes.”
On the northwest side of Palo Alto, the boat ties up at a break in the green wall of mangroves that rims the island. Giant slabs of concrete are all that`s left of the sawmill. Debris from trespassers, mostly beer and soda cans, quickly disappears as Laws heads into the woods, so dense it blocks all but slivers of sunlight.
An owl hoots, interrupting the incessant chatter of cicadas. The thunder of Navy jets on training flights rolls overhead.
Laws holds a fishing reel, tying the end of the line to a branch before ducking into the heart of the humid woods. It is easy to become disoriented in the forest-within 50 yards, the view of tangled limbs is the same in every direction. The leafy ground is damp and spongy underfoot. A tiger butterfly, yellow with black stripes, flutters by. Mahoganies, lignum vitae trees, wild coffee, thatch palms-a slew of rare and threatened flora-form the dark canopy. ”A spectacular hardwood hammock,” Mark Robertson, director of the Nature Conservancy in the Keys, says of the wooded island. ”There are very few islands in Florida preserved as a whole, especially in South Florida.
”I think it is a tribute to her that Palo Alto is still such an outstanding natural area,” Robertson said of Laws. ”She cares about that island. Something needs to be worked out to preserve it.”
There was another time when Laws felt civilization knocking at her island. She might have welcomed it.
In 1971, the state Department of Transportation paid Laws $12,800 for 5.8 acres, intending to build a bridge over Angelfish Creek from North Key Largo to Palo Alto. The causeway would have continued north to Islandia, a string of islands in Dade County where an investor envisioned a condo community on stilts. A few years later, after the bridge plan busted, Laws bought back the land.
Laws put Palo Alto up for sale in the late `70s. Asking price: $2.19 million. Nothing worked out. Again in 1982, according to a state report, she wanted to sell the island for $9,000 an acre, a little under $2 million.
Laws doesn`t want to talk about what price, if any, she would take for the island today. She appears genuinely uncertain. At one moment she says she`s eager to sell; at the next, she insists she wants to keep it.
She wants her ashes scattered over the island when she`s gone. That has been written in her will for decades.
Says Bliss, about his mom and the island: ”It`s where her heart is.”
And in her heart, she says, ”I`m still looking for the angels.”
