Judge S.S. Jolley Bridge

Everyone who drives to Marco Island crosses the Jolley Bridge, and almost nobody looks at it. It deserves a minute. The Judge S.S. Jolley Bridge carries Collier Boulevard over the Marco River in one fixed arc roughly 55 feet above mean high water, and that number is the point: no drawbridge, no openings, no line of cars waiting on a sailboat. Marco functions as a resort island partly because somebody made that decision in the 1960s.

It was not the island's first road link. A wooden swing bridge at Goodland reached the mainland from 1938, which put Marco's front door at the quiet southeast corner. The Jolley opened in 1969 and moved that door to the north end. The mid-rise towers, the resorts and the shopping followed it there, and the southeast corner stayed small. In 2011 a second parallel span went up beside the original, doubling the lanes across.

The first bridge carried fishing piers slung underneath it. Hurricane Wilma wrecked them in 2005 and they were taken away rather than rebuilt, which people here still grumble about. Anglers fish it anyway, from the rock and broken shell at the foot of the span where the tide funnels through.

Look southwest from the approach and you are looking at the ABC Islands, a cluster of mangrove keys in the Marco River carrying one of the busiest wading-bird rookeries on this stretch of coast. In spring the trees look decorated. Bring binoculars, because the birds are not close and they are not coming closer.

The practical reason to stop is the Collier Boulevard Boating Park, the ramp everybody calls the 951, immediately north of the bridge on the east side of the road. Two lanes, a courtesy dock and, since a county expansion, a realistic chance of a trailer space even in February.

There is also a sense-of-place argument. Driving south you leave the strip malls of East Naples at the toll-free top of the span and land on an island where the tallest thing is a condominium and the water starts immediately.