When you think of a historian, what do you imagine? A person whose nose is always buried in a book, who feels as comfortable in a library as his or her own living room, a stickler for detail about things long past and nearly forgotten?

Joan Gill Blank, Key Biscayne's resident historian, is all of these things, yet she's so much more. A pixieish lady who sits barefooted and cross-legged on a high stool while talking about her life, she's an adventurer who has traveled the world in a quest for knowledge and has turned detective to unearth long buried roots of Key Biscayne history. She's a poet, sculptor, artist and collector; a wife, mother, grandma and even a one-time archery champion. But more than anything, she's a writer.

"I always knew that I wanted to be a writer," she says. "Someone once told me that to be a good writer, you should take a lot of history, keep your ears and eyes open and write, write, write."

And so she has. She's kept her ears and eyes open in all parts of the world, whether accompanying her husband Harvey on his intercontinental lecture tours, visiting her son in Japan or following the fragmented line of Key Biscayne history to the Balearic Islands, England and 22 states. The result of the latter expeditions is the definitive book on this little barrier island's short, yet intriguing, past, Key Biscayne: A History of Miami's Tropical Island and the Cape Florida Lighthouse, which was published in 1996 by Pineapple Press.

"I started the book because, well, it had to be done to straighten out the history of Key Biscayne," she says. "I thought it was something I could easily do since I'd lived on the Key for so long. But the in-depth research took me close to a decade, which is a long time to put into a piece."

In chasing down island descendants who'd been lost from history, she once walked into a house in Galveston, Texas, catching the residents by surprise.

"The family insisted that they had no relatives or connections to Key Biscayne, but then I turned a corner and saw this hanging in their hallway," she says, flipping open her book to an oil painting of the Cape Florida lighthouse. "It was painted by one of their relatives." She flips a few pages and shows you a few faded black and white pictures. "These I found in an album in their attic..."

She goes on to describe the buildings pictured and their historical significance, but your mind is stuck on the image of this determined little woman turning up at a stranger's door, announcing to the unsuspecting Texans that their lineage traces back to the pioneers of Key Biscayne and winds up rummaging through their attic.

"The most difficult part of the project was turning the history into a lively, readable book that was meaningful in getting people to understand the importance of being coastal guardians," she continues, then chuckles. "Actually, the hardest part is talking about it."

She tends to speak deliberately, choosing each word carefully and sometimes backtracking to change a word or phrase, a manner of speech which parallels the writing process. But her efforts to enlighten people about the history of Key Biscayne transcend the written word.

Her latest project has been the creation of the Key Biscayne Heritage Trail, which will culminate in the Heritage Day festivities Nov. 11.

"The whole trail business began when I went to Tallahassee to present a paper on Mary Ann Davis, the Mother of Key Biscayne, to the Florida Historical Society," she explains. "While I was there, I picked up an application for a state educational grant and saw that there was money available for this type of thing."

The powers that be in the Village agreed with her that it was a wonderful idea, a matching grant was secured and Joan was appointed project consultant.

"I laid out the concept, then researched, identified and evaluated for cultural history and environmental significance all possible sites from Bear Cut to Cape Florida," she says. "The idea is to present and protect sites so they won't be lost in the future. The biggest challenge was to find a vanished site and bring it back into the picture in a way that will inspire people to envision and relate to their past."

The result is an 11-mile trail around the island, featuring 33 stone markers which hold bronze plaques describing the significance of the various sites.

"The Heritage Day festivities are also going to honor the modern pioneers, the first ones who didn't come here by boat," she adds. "They braved some of the same things as the original pioneers, like mosquitoes, a lack of communication and limited provisions."

Joan was one of those modern pioneers, arriving on the Key in 1951. She now lives on the 10th floor of the Mar Azul Condominium. The apartment seems to be part art gallery, part library and part curio shop, as art and artifacts from her many travels decorate walls, tables, shelves and even the floors. Brightly colored paintings from the Caribbean and South Pacific hang on the dark foyer walls, a row of African masks watch over the living room and sculpture ranging from primitive to modern seem to fill every nook and cranny. She points out that some of the rugs on the floors were made by her mother, who started out as a social worker and ended up as a silversmith and weaver.

Her father was a renowned economist, a professor and dean at the University of Buffalo who was occasionally called to Washington, D.C. to advise the government.

"Our house was filled with books," she remembers. "One of the great memories I have is of my father stopping once a month at a used bookstore, picking out books for the whole family and bringing them home in a big duffel bag."

She started collecting early editions at a young age, and mentions the author W.H. Hudson because it will come into play later in the story of her life. After moving to the Key, she met famed environmentalist/author Marjorie Stoneham Douglas.

"It was right after she wrote River of Grass, and she took me under her wing," Joan says. "I learned a lot about the environment from her, and later on found out that she'd written a biography of Hudson, though it hasn't been published."

When she was a girl reading and collecting Hudson's books and others, Joan also spent a lot of time outdoors visiting historical sites and playing sports.

"I was going to be a tennis champion," she says, swinging an imaginary racquet, "and I was the midget archery champ of Western New York State at five." She draws an imaginary bow and lets an imaginary arrow fly, quoting the last line of Albert Camus' The Rebel before adding, "they were beautiful handmade bows of lemon wood."

She eventually attended college at Sarah Lawrence, where she majored in creative writing and minored in history. It was there that she met and befriended Joseph Campbell, who became widely regarded as the foremost mythologist in the world before his death in 1987.

"I got married and moved off campus in my senior year and wound up riding the train from New York City to Bronxville with him three days a week," she says. "I was studying James Joyce at the time, and he would always ask me where I was at. Then when I'd get to class, I'd absolutely horrify everyone. Finally, the professor asked what I was doing for preparation and could only laugh when I told him I was riding the train with Joe Campbell.

"Joe Campbell taught me how to see life as a journey and how we are all interconnected."

To illustrate, she uses the Heritage Trail as an example. "The trail does something which is quite important," she says. "It cuts through village, county and state land and describes the island as one complete geographic unit instead of just one segment. Everyone from Crandon Park to the Village staff to the state park cooperated beautifully to make it happen, and visitors will surely get from it a sense of island-hood."

After she graduated college, her then-husband got a job offer from the University of Miami. They moved here and she promptly had a baby, then another and another. Her eldest, Robin, 45, is now an author and acquisitions editor for a publishing house in Japan, where he has lived for about 20 years. Susan, 43, teaches at a community college in Gainesville and Prudence, 42, is on the faculty in the art department at Ohio State University.

Joan talks about a lot of things, but the subject of her age never comes up. From the ages of her children and fact that she remembers rolling Easter eggs on the White House lawn when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, you figure her to be in her mid-60s. She seems limber and fit and has an intellectual playfulness that keeps a youthful gleam in her eyes. She understands that history is people more than events, and she seems to have a wonderful understanding of the human condition, as evident by this story she tells about her grandson.

"He's five and was having a problem talking on the telephone," she says. "So one day, I made up this poem:

Sometimes I like the phone, Sometimes I don't, Sometimes I'll talk on it, And sometimes I won't.

"The next time I called, he recited it back to me word-for-word and, at least with me, doesn't have a problem talking on the phone anymore."

Along with her history books, Joan also has published a little book called Laugh Lines. In it are mostly one-line drawings entitled things like "punch line, laugh line, love line, toe the line" and so on. The drawings are like visual puns, a clever fusion of art and words.

She equates the Heritage Trail to the linear book because it is a historical line drawing in a way. Everything seems to relative to history to her, but when asked what her next historical project will be, she shakes her head.

"They take so long and one only has so much time," she says. "I've really got to do some poetry and nonsense. I'm quite serious about that."

Though she's not quite serious about a lot of things, Joan Gill Blank is serious about the preservation of the beach. She explains how this island of sand is only 4,000 years old--a mere drop in the sea of planetary history--that could soon be gone if its inhabitants don't do their best to fend off the unrelenting forces of nature.

"One of the reasons I wrote the book about Key Biscayne was that I wanted people to realize that they live on a barrier island and not just a suburb of Miami," she says. "One of the joys of the process has been seeing what a meaningful role such a little island played in the history of area, and the state," she says, then laughs, "and even the world."

Chances are that Key Biscayne will eventually succumb to nature and be reclaimed by the ocean. Gone will be the lighthouse and condos, streets and schools, Village and parks. But the story of the island might very well survive, thanks in part to the lady who took it upon herself to straighten out the history of Key Biscayne and record it in words and pictures, lest it get buried forever beneath the seas of time.