A Salty Piece of Land Read online

  Copyright © 2004 by Jimmy Buffett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group, USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at hachettebookgroupusa.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The author is grateful for permission to include the following: “If I Had a Boat,” written by Lyle Lovett. © 1987 Michael H. Goldsen, Inc./Lyle Lovett (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Used by permission; “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” written by Warren Zevon, © 1978, Zevon Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission; “The Wind Cries Mary,” written by Jimi Hendrix, © Experience Hendrix, L.L.C. Used by permission. All rights reserved; excerpt from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, English translation copyright © 1943 by Harcourt Inc. and renewed 1971 by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, English translation copyright © 2002 by Richard Howard, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Inc.

  Fish illustration by Peter Bernard

  First eBook Edition: November 2004

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-1292-4

  Contents

  Also by Jimmy Buffett

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  author’s note

  1: The Soul of the Light

  2: The Song of the Ocean

  3: The Patron Saint of Lightning

  4: Dreaming of Columbus

  5: Land of the Lost Boys

  6: How Nightmares Turn into Dreams

  7: Pancakes Make the World Go Round

  8: One Man’s Cathedral

  9: Fish Tales

  10: Into Everyone’s Life a Coconut Man Should Fall

  11: Tree House of the Mayan Moon

  12: If I Were Like Lightning

  13: Grandma Ghost

  14: Everybody Out of the Pool

  15: Schooner Fever

  16: Dinner and a Show

  17: The Dance of Life and Death

  18: Leap, and the Net Will Appear

  19: And the Wind Cries Mary

  20: Hello from the Netherworld

  21: Quiet Time

  22: Any Place Named After the Holy Ghost Is Fine with Me

  23: Well, Hello, Cowboy

  24: Some Days There’s Just Magic in the Air

  25: Shackletons or Magellans They Are Not

  26: Ground Zero

  27: One Thousand One . . . One Thousand Two

  28: A Little Family Fun

  29: Take Me to Your Blender

  30: A Cowboy Float

  31: Belly to Belly

  32: Somebody Call a Witch Doctor

  33: Put on Your Sailin’ Shoes

  34: On the Case

  35: Trying to Catch a Little Neutral

  36: Not a Bad-Looking Piece of Driftwood

  37: The Spare Bulb

  38: From a Distance

  39: Catching the Tail of the Comet

  40: The Seconds Between Light and Dark

  41: On the Back of a Crocodile

  42: Gone Fishing

  43: A Gang of Lady Pirates

  44: Boats to Build

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  about the author

  Also by Jimmy Buffett

  Tales from Margaritaville

  Where Is Joe Merchant?

  A Pirate Looks at Fifty

  (and for young readers)

  The Jolly Mon

  Trouble Dolls

  For Peetsy, Jay, and Groovy

  To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend, and if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures.

  — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

  The Little Prince

  We sail within a vast sphere,

  Ever drifting in uncertainty

  Driven from end to end

  — Pascal

  author’s note

  November 30, 2001

  Coconut Grove, Florida

  George Harrison died yesterday. I found out as I checked my e-mail this morning before waking Cameron early, which I “pinky” swore to do last night. I walked out onto the balcony of this hotel and looked out to the east over the rusty Pan Am hangars and the decaying wooden markers that framed the once-active runways for the Clippers as they came and went on their pioneering routes from Biscayne Bay. They are gone as well.

  Everything leaves eventually in the physical form, but the memories of good people and good work are timeless. So instead of saying a prayer, I just visualized George Harrison boarding a Pan Am Clipper, guitar case in hand, greeted by Captain Gardner McKay and entertainment director Fred Neil.

  The plane lifts off the silky surface of the bay and heads toward the rising sun out over Elliot Key and the distant shimmering waters of the Gulf Stream—I would call a flight like that one hell of a joyride on the way to the ultimate adventure. Have fun, boys.

  Mortality marches on—today, George Harrison; last week, Gardner McKay; and in July, Fred Neil. I’d better get to work.

  December 24, 2003

  Palm Beach, Florida

  Unfortunately the manifest for this flight has grown. Please make a note that added to the crew is Gordon Larimore Gray III, copilot; and James Delaney Buffett and Mary Loraine Peets Buffett—newly arrived honeymooners bound for eternity.

  —JB

  1

  The Soul of the Light

  tully mars, checking in

  It all simply comes down to good guys and bad guys. As a kid, I wanted to be like Roy Rogers, the good-guy cowboy of all time. Roy and his horse, Trigger, would go riding through the movies, helping those in peril while never seeming to sweat, get a scratch, or wrinkle a pair of perfectly creased blue jeans. When the day was over, they would join the Sons of Pioneers by the campfire and sing the sun to sleep. Now that is what I called the perfect job.

  One day, long ago in another place and another time, I was playing out my fantasy of being Roy with my childhood pals in the rolling hills above Heartache, Wyoming, where I was raised. We were racing our horses, bat-out-of-hell style, through the aspen grove that led to our little ranch. Like a true daredevil, I passed my friends in a wild sprint to the finish line, and once I had the lead, I turned around to admire my move as the leader of the pack. The next thing I remembered was waking up on the ground, my head covered with blood, my left arm pointing in the wrong direction, and pain—lots of pain—shooting through my young body. That’s when I knew that life wasn’t a movie.

  During my mending process, I discovered a new role model in Butch Cassidy, who took me through my teenage years. He wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes, and that seemed more in tune with the way my life was working out in the real world. He thumbed his nose at authority. To put it in today’s terms, Butch Cassidy didn’t work for The Man. He was his own man. He ran away to Patagonia.

  The West was changing, and so was I. Now, looking back, I have to thank old Roy for teaching me that when you fall from your horse, you climb back in the saddle and plow ahead. From Butch, I figured out that what I wanted to be was my own man—just a good guy with a few bad habits. This is Tully Mars reporting in.

  When I left Wyoming some years ago and made a not-so-difficult choice between becoming a poodle-ranch foreman or a tropical expatriate, I tossed a massage table through the giant plate-glass window of the ranch house owned by my former boss and modern-day witch
Thelma Barston. That day, heading off to freedom, I made myself a promise. As I fled across America, I swore I would never again work for anybody but me. I pretty much kept that promise until I met Cleopatra Highbourne.

  Cleopatra Highbourne is my present boss and the woman who brought me here to this salty piece of land in the southern Bahamas. She hired me to restore a 150-year-old lighthouse on Cayo Loco, which she owns, having swapped for it with the Bahamian government for some property on Bay Street in Nassau.

  To begin with, Cleopatra is 101 years old, but she doesn’t look a day over 80. She is the captain of her beautiful schooner, the Lucretia, which was a present from her father on her eighteenth birthday.

  Cleopatra has simply defied the aging process. Her eyes are a piercing green, and her speech is lilted with an island accent that is somewhere between Jamaican and Cuban. There isn’t a romance language or Caribbean patois she doesn’t speak like a native, and there isn’t an island she hasn’t set foot on between Bimini and Bonaire. Her skeleton is erect, which she attributes to being a practitioner of yoga for eighty years, having been taught the craft by Gandhi himself. She wears no hearing aids or glasses. Her skin is void of the weathered, leatherlike appearance caused by age, ocean, and ultraviolet exposure. She never smoked cigarettes, but she has her daily ration of rum and occasionally will puff a little opium if she is feeling ill. She also has a taste for Cuban cigars.

  She dines on fish, rice, and tropical fruits, and a collection of potions, teas, and elixirs keep her biorhythms, brain, and sense of humor humming. She cusses like the sailor that she is, and she is rabidly addicted to Cuban baseball.

  Though she says she has a few good years left in her, Cleopatra is on a most urgent mission, and that is where I come in. I am here to rebuild the lighthouse as her final resting place while she continues her search for an original Fresnel lens, which was the light source for this and many other old lighthouses.

  So how does a cowboy wind up as a lighthouse keeper? Well, I didn’t fill out any job application. How I went from the saddle, to the deck of a schooner, to the tower of this lighthouse still baffles me. But I believe in the aboriginal line of thinking that life’s adventures are the verses and choruses of your unique song, and when it is over, you are dead. So far, I am still singing, but I would point out that adventures don’t come calling like unexpected cousins visiting from out of town. You have to go looking for them, and that is exactly how I wound up on Cayo Loco.

  I saw Cayo Loco for the first time from the deck of the Lucretia. All I knew about lighthouses up until that point was that they were warning lights, and they marked some kind of trouble. I’d heard a few stories, and I’d met a guy who had some theories about them, but that was it. I sat in a dinghy next to Cleopatra as the crew pulled for the shore, and the lighthouse loomed so huge that I had to lean my entire head back just to see the top.

  “This is it,” Cleopatra said to me as we made our way toward the beach. “I traded those bumbling bureaucrats in Nassau a building they needed for a Junkanoo museum on Bay Street for her. I think we both came out okay. All we have to do is fix her up and get the light back in shape.”

  “No problem,” I said, shrugging. After what I had recently been through, fixing up an old lighthouse sounded like a piece of cake.

  As the bottom of the dinghy brushed against the shallow sand, Cleopatra sprang to the beach like a teenager. I had to laugh. Three months earlier, my life was rolling by at a snail’s pace, and I was sitting on the beach in Mexico, wondering if the day would ever end. Then, all of a sudden, a ship carries me to a completely foreign place that would now become my home.

  Solomon, Cleopatra’s first mate, buried the anchor in the sand. All you had to do was look at his huge body, his kind eyes, and his weathered hands to know that he was the kind of person you wanted running your crew and your ship. “I’ll stay with da boat, Cap’n,” he said.

  “Then I’ll be the tour guide,” Cleopatra said. She nodded at a narrow path up through the dunes. “Welcome to Cayo Loco, Tully Mars.”

  The well-worn path from the beach snaked up through the small dunes and then disappeared up the hill into a cluster of sea oats. We stopped at the top of the hill and looked down on the wreckage of time. With the exception of the light tower itself, the place looked as if someone had dropped a bomb on it. The concrete walls of what had been the compound of the lighthouse keeper came into view. The windows had been blown out, and the roof had been partially burned off.

  We made our way through the overgrown paths, pushing back thorny bougainvillea bushes, sea grapes, and hibiscus blooms that camouflaged more destruction.

  “This is the old cistern,” Cleopatra said as we walked across a large rectangle. “This place was one of the first spots on earth where they made freshwater out of salt water. Those damn limeys have a strange fascination for remote and desolate places, but you got to hand it to them—they knew how to bring creature comforts to the boondocks. When Solomon’s father was the light keeper here, this place was a little piece of paradise. There was a vegetable garden, flowered paths, and even a manicured green lawn.”

  At close range, even the tower showed the ravages of salt and sea. I stared up at the peeling paint and the cracks in the outer wall.

  “Good morning, St. Peter,” Cleopatra said as she stopped before a large, thick spiderweb strung across our path. Its weaver, a nasty-looking purple-and-yellow spider the size of my hand, hung suspended across the path. He seemed ready to defend his territory. There was no doubt that this was a web you could not just brush away without consequences.

  “You know this spider?” I asked Cleopatra.

  “He’s perfectly harmless, if you don’t piss him off,” she replied.

  We detoured around St. Peter and walked in the brush between two small buildings. A raccoon exploded out of the underbrush and scurried off toward the beach.

  “I thought you said this island was uninhabited,” I said.

  Cleopatra didn’t answer.

  While I stood in the rubble looking around, I began to have serious doubts. Then a banging noise caught my attention, and I turned around to see Cleopatra hammering away at a padlock with the butt end of her machete. It was chained to a large iron door at the base of the lighthouse. Walking over, I waded through a toxic dump of decaying lead acid batteries that encircled the light tower. The people who’d been in charge of maintaining the automated light had simply tossed the dead batteries from the tower when they replaced them, adding to the bombed-out look of the cottages and grounds of the keeper’s residence.

  I looked from the rubble up to the lines of the giant lighthouse and the blue sky above it. On the voyage over to the Bahamas, Cleopatra had told me the story of where the lighthouse came from and how it had gotten here. Even though the lighthouse had seen better days, the sheer strength of it was still very much apparent. I just stood there and stared up, wondering how in the hell they’d built it.

  “This goddamn salt air will eat anything. I just put this lock on here last month.”

  I went over to lend a hand. After a few more direct hits with a big rock, the padlock sprang, and I pried the iron door open. It creaked and squeaked and let out a thud as it banged against the wall.

  Inside, it was dark and hot and smelled like shit.

  “Here,” Cleopatra said, handing me a flashlight.

  I followed her with the beam of my flashlight, trying to keep pace as she bounced ahead of me like Becky Thatcher while I cautiously navigated the winding staircase.

  Our movements echoed off the iron cylindrical walls as we climbed through musty, humid air that had been trapped inside the lighthouse for God knows how long. Several furry little fruit bats scanned us with their radar as they fluttered around my head.

  “Don’t worry,” Cleopatra called out. “I know a way to get the bats out of here when you move in.”

  Up and up we circled, until small beams of light appeared at the top. Cleopatra stopped on the stairs bel
ow the source of the light—a rusty hatch cover just above us. “I always like this part,” she said. “It reminds me of the time I met Thomas Edison—the night he threw the switch that lit up the Brooklyn Bridge at the three hundredth celebration of the founding of the city of New York.”

  “You knew Thomas Edison?” I asked.

  “No, my father did. We were in New York on our way to France and boarding school, and we just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”

  I followed the beam of Cleopatra’s flashlight as we inched up slowly.

  “Electricity ain’t a bad contribution to the betterment of mankind in general, but it sure as hell wreaked havoc on the lighthouse keepers of the world. The record player would have to go on the top of my list of Edison inventions, way ahead of movies and lightbulbs.”

  Cleopatra took a marlinespike out of the case on her belt and jabbed away at the hinges of the hatch. The hatch gave way with a creak.

  “Ready?” Cleopatra asked.

  Sunlight flooded down around us. We lifted ourselves through the hole in the sky, and I stood there bathed in the morning light of the glass room. Below us, the Lucretia looked like a toy boat sitting at anchor on the smooth surface of crystal clear water that seemed to be only inches deep. But in fact it was in nearly thirty feet of water.

  I could see several members of the crew diving up conch from the bottom. The view from the light tower encompassed the whole island, against a backdrop of turquoise shallows and the deep blue ocean beyond. Cleopatra pointed out the landmarks of Whale Cut, Boo Hoo Hill, and Osprey Point that I would come to know as well as my horse.

  “Unbelievable” was all I could muster.

  “And well worth saving, don’t you think?”

  “I get the picture.”

  “Except for that,” she added, pointing to the bizarre tangle of frayed wires, makeshift junction boxes, and a strobe light resting atop a long, skinny shaft. “That has to go. The original lens that came with this light was not only a piece of engineering genius but a work of art. The lenses, circular prisms, and source that created the beam of light is called the bull’s-eye because it looks like a clear glass target. A French physicist named Augustin Fresnel designed it in the early eighteen hundreds.”