Dismal Key is a small island, part of the Ten Thousand Islands archipelago in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida.
It lacks a permanent source of fresh water, which is available only by being imported, collected from rainfall, or extracted from the local cacti. In pre-Columbian times it was inhabited by members of the Calusa nation, highly skilled as fishers, artisans and traders. A huge mound of oyster shells, 15 feet high, remains as a monument to the Calusa. In recent times, Dismal Key has no permanent human habitation - only the occasional hermits, poachers, smugglers and tourists.
Dismal Key is the locale for the second half of the novel Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen.
Famous quotes containing the words dismal and/or key:
“I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“It so happened that, a few weeks later, “Old Ernie” [Ernest Hemingway] himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from literary columnists and reporters during one of his rare stopover visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and all the furniture has been repaired.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)