Roosters Before Dawn

Coke sat outside my bedroom window again. Crowing again. Crowing always.

Roosters don’t just crow at dawn.

That was news to me.

I grew up in the suburbs in St. Louis. There were no roosters. I lived in Chicago near Lake Michigan as a young adult. There were no roosters there, either. When I got to Key West, they were everywhere.

At first, I thought it was quaint. Charming even. Chickens with their flocks, roosters standing protective over them. Protected by local ordinances. The only predators house cats and raptors. The raptors pretty much just focused on the chicks. It was sad. One day you’d see a hen with six babies following her. The next day five. After a few weeks, maybe only three.

Nothing ever seemed to hunt the roosters. Early on I saw a cat get too close. It was the last I saw of that cat outside, running for its life, the rooster on top, clawing, pecking, the cat bleeding, hissing.

The cat sits in a window along the street now, staring out. It doesn’t react when people walk by. It hisses and runs when a rooster does.

We were up again, my wife and I. Quarter til five. Again. Coke standing outside our bedroom window on the neighbor’s roof, crowing every two minutes. As close as the homes in old town Key West are next to each other, he might as well have been standing on our bed.

I named him Coke. Short for Coq au Vin. My plans for him if I ever got my hands on him. It was a joke. Mostly. I had given up chicken years before. I told people it was to reduce my carbon footprint, the inefficiency and effect of chicken feed on the environment and all that. Truth is, it was really because I met a chicken. 

My mother’s neighbor raised them in her backyard, a new urban hobby that didn’t exist when I was a kid. The neighbor insisted on introducing me one day when my wife and I were back for a visit. “Oh they have wonderful personalities,” the woman babbled, me barely concealing my eye rolls, a thin smile as I obligingly petted the head of a small reddish hen at my feet that she’d named Charlotte. For the rest of the visit, Charlotte followed me around, rubbing at my legs, settling between my feet when I sat down for a cup of tepid decaf coffee.

When my wife offered me a bite of her chicken sandwich the next day, I could only think of Charlotte. Two rules I learned at that point. If you want something to be food, don’t meet it and don’t name it.

From that point to today, eating a chicken to me would be the same thing as eating a cat.

Roosters, though. That was a different story. It crossed my mind. Nearly every night.

Key West is famous for its sunsets. People will stop everything and head to the waterfront, Mallory Square, out on boats of all shapes and sizes, to witness the sun setting over the water. It’s spectacular.

What isn’t as well known, and definitely not as well attended, is the sunrise.

The place to see one is White Street Pier.

I wasn’t a morning person. Not until Coke insisted upon it, and lying there one morning listening to him again, wishing for sleep, I looked over at my wife whose expression said, please strangle that thing. I made a different suggestion.

“Want to go see the sunrise?”

I halfway expected her to tell me I was high. But she said, “Sure, why not.”

I fumbled around in the dark of the bedroom, looking for my sneakers, stubbing my toe on the edge of the platform bed, holding in a long list of obscenities that wanted out.

“Why don’t you turn on the light?” my wife asked.

“I’m not ready for bright yet,” I grumbled/explained.

“But you’re good with a broken toe,” she said.

Her logic made her pretty much undefeated in every argument we ever had.

Grudgingly I turned on a small lamp across the room that would cast the dimmest light possible. It was still, at that moment, blinding.

Within five minutes, we were in our shorts, t-shirts and sneakers and out the door. White Street Pier was on the south side of the island. We were nearer the north. It was still only a fifteen minute walk.

The first thing I noticed, stepping out into what was still mostly night, was how quiet it was. Even with the occasional rooster crow. So quiet we could hear the sound of our shoes on the sidewalk. The sound of a distant scooter, its motor rising in the distance, growing louder as it approached, passing, a hum like a swarm of bees, and then fading to quiet again as it disappeared down the road. 

An Italian restaurant, tucked in amongst the houses, had early activity. An employee hosing down the sidewalks, the water pulsed off the concrete, a rush. A wave from the employee, pausing long enough to let us pass without getting wet, but no words. Our shoes making a popping sound, soles suctioning off the wet pavement.

The sky began to lighten subtly, as we walked. Darkness giving way, shapes transforming into more identifiable figures, plants shifting from dark blobs to discernible shapes with leaves and flowers and species, birds silhouetted on the telephone wires, beginning their morning songs. 

As we got closer to the water, a breeze began to blow towards us up White Street. The smell of salt, moisture on our skin and clothes, humid and cool at the same time.

A deep breath, my wife and I exchanged glances but not words, each of us waking up with the world. 

At the pier, activity. Slight. A few others. Regulars.

The early morning fishermen, casting nets for bait at the mouth of the pier. Some solo, some in pairs. They knew each other, but spoke little and recognized no one but their companions and the fish.

The retirees, a regular morning meeting, complete with their dogs and coffee mugs, always a third of the way down the pier. A clique, local, always laughing, always with the stories before dawn. Equal men and women, equal time for men and women. 

The bearded man of impossible to determine age. Maybe in his forties, maybe in his seventies. A native, a Conch as the locals called themselves. If not lifelong then at least long enough to be considered native. In minutes, we knew his dogs, Bear, a shaggy shepherd always off leash and always welcomed by everyone and Rocco, a small pug, always on leash and always welcomed but not quite as warmly as Bear. The Conch’s name never came up.

A lone young man, his bicycle propped against the stone bench anchored to the pier, curled tight against the increasing wind the further out on the pier one walked, his phone played music softly, Calypso at best reckoning. His eyes never left the horizon, waiting for the sunrise.

A few other people interspersed here and there, newcomers or tourists mainly, smartphones capturing videos of pelicans diving for fish, each ungainly splash appearing that the pelican had misjudged the distance, reminding me of the old footage of World War 2 airplanes being shot down in the Pacific, but the pelicans always emerging unscathed. Their expressions always with the implied “What? I meant to do that.”

As the light began to grow, the clouds distant on the horizon took on a dark almost purple cast. That was the closest color I could reckon. In that moment it became the only color. That moment between night and dawn. That moment between sleep and awareness. That moment that very few other people shared.

Everything else, the people, the pier, the sea, the shore. Everything else shared the same color. Just for the moment. Everything was silver.

And then the upper edges of the clouds grew ablaze. Deep orange. It outlined the tops of the clouds and then lifted above them, revealing the blue in the sky, and the blue in the ocean. And then light and then life. And all color returned.

And we remained for awhile, then drifted apart towards our days, knowing we had just shared something that very few others ever would.

My wife and I vowed to return the next day. And often afterwards.

And the sound of roosters before dawn never quite bothered us so much again.