A Salty Piece of Land Read online

  Lafitte had no problem with their request. It wasn’t long before Mayan fishermen, who used the beach to dry their fish, took a liking to the new arrivals and the supplies that now came their way from the pirate trade.

  Jean Lafitte spent his final years as an old, rich, and happy pirate, roaming the magical beaches of the Yucatán. When he died, he was buried in the sand under a mound of conch shells and a palm tree overlooking the Bay of Campeche, but he was mourned just as much in Punta Margarita.

  Life went on, but the heydays of pirating faded away. Adjusting their sense of survival, the Margaritians combined forces with the Indians and took up the time-honored trade of wrecking, which was the economic artery of any town or village located within shouting distance of coral reefs. It was a simple trade: wait for ships to hit the reef, which they seemed to do with amazing regularity for nearly a hundred years, and then pillage them.

  Wrecking provided quite an income to the locals, who spent it as fast as they made it. They knew the value of living well. There was even an opera house built, which was frequented by the great singers of the world. Fast, beautiful boats raced back and forth to the reef when the cry of “Wreck offshore!” was heard from the lookout tower.

  Since there was no proper laundry service in the village, some of the more prosperous wreckers sent their linen to New Orleans on a regularly scheduled boat.

  But all good things come to an end eventually. As improved navigation made sea disasters less common along this coast, the rich days of wrecking went with the channel markers. The opera house burned down and the laundry ship sank. Punta Margarita became a simple fishing village again, and the villagers returned to the less glamorous life of the sea, gathering the lobsters, grouper, and snapper that lived beneath the reef as opposed to the ships that hit it.

  That is how Captain Kirk had found Punta Margarita on his first trip up the tricky channel. He was fighting his way south to the shrimping grounds of Honduras, rounding the western tip of Cuba in a gale, when he came across a couple of fishermen in a small boat being tossed about by the storm. Somehow he managed to get a line to them before their boat sank, and he dragged them aboard the Caribbean Soul.

  Once he got enough coffee and chocolate into the near-frozen fishermen, they told him that they were from the village of Punta Margarita. Kirk said he had heard of the place, but he had never visited because of the treacherous waters and reefs that surrounded it. The fishermen told him they could take him through the channel if he would take them home.

  As they were finally about to tie up at the town dock of Punta Margarita, a funeral procession was filing down the sand street of the waterfront. When the priest looked up and saw the fishermen on the shrimp boat, he began pointing and going loco about a miracle. It seems the fishermen had arrived home in the middle of their own funeral mass.

  Well, to the residents of the village, Captain Kirk had brought the men back from the dead. He was declared a hero by the villagers, and he simply fell in love with the place and began to base his southern shrimping operations from the island. Soon he found that he could make more money servicing the island with goods from America than by the backbreaking work of hauling shrimp out of the ocean. He converted his boat to a cargo carrier and began a regular route between Alabama and Punta Margarita.

  As the tourism boom lit up the beach towns to the north, the good road ended at Tulum, and Punta Margarita was again left to its own resources, which was fine with the locals. They preferred the village to be what it always had been, an outpost manned by an odd mix of pirate children, Indian fishermen, and the occasional gringo shrimp boat captain who splashed ashore and liked what he saw.

  It sounded like just the place for a cowboy-deckhand-art collector on the run.

  4

  Dreaming of Columbus

  It was later that night, back on the boat, as I lay in my bunk reading, that Captain Kirk asked me to come to the pilothouse. There, in the red glow of the compass light, he explained a few things to me about the voyage. He said he had done the run hundreds of times, but it was never quite the same trip. He explained that at the western end of Cuba, the land drops steeply into a mammoth trench more than six thousand feet deep. In this trench, the old Gulf Stream cranks into warp drive and pushes one of the most powerful currents on the face of the earth around Florida, up the eastern seaboard, and across the Atlantic, finally running out of steam off the coast of Ireland, where the last of the warm tropical water can still cause palm trees to grow.

  Along the edges of the stream, the force of the moving water, eddies, and countercurrents, along with the dramatic underwater reef close to shore, can turn calm waters into a nightmare in a heartbeat. With a good forecast, Captain Kirk said, we would cross at night, but even with the weather in our favor, he gave me the warning of a wise mariner. “All that said, just remember, Tully, that we are at sea, and it could all go to hell in a moment’s notice.”

  That night, I dreamed of Columbus. He was in his cabin on the Santa Maria with his beautiful charts laid out on the mahogany captain’s table in front of him. He looked up at me and said, “Remember, Tully, just don’t panic, and it will be all right.”

  The rising sun brought a day made-to-order for our crossing, and after a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs and fried grunts, Captain Kirk plugged in a homemade tape he called The Greatest Hits of the Lesser Antilles, hoisted the anchor, and as James Taylor sang to us of Captain Jim’s drunken dream, pointed our boat toward the Yucatán Peninsula. When the old fort disappeared behind us, my anxieties of being out of sight of land seemed to vanish.

  It was a glorious day at sea. I got to try my hand at rope splicing and started to learn more about navigation and how to read a chart. I did my turn at the wheel with a lot more confidence than I had the first day out of Alabama.

  Around lunchtime, we hooked a big wahoo, pulled it aboard, sliced it into steaks, and dined on grilled fish sandwiches made with Cuban rolls from the panaderia in Key West.

  I climbed out of my hammock just before sunset and doused myself with the freshwater hose, then washed the salt off Mr. Twain. I had the six-to-midnight watch and was raring to go. That is when I saw Captain Kirk staring south at a faint little flash off the port bow.

  “Got to keep an eye on that,” he said, his eyes still glued to the south.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You might get your first taste of real weather tonight, Tully.”

  “But I thought you said it was going to be fine.”

  “I did, but it seems the gods have changed their minds.”

  “Well, what do I do?” I asked.

  “Live and learn.”

  I think darkness is the thing humans fear the most, for it takes away our advantage. In the dark, we have to rely on our instincts to survive, and as a species, those feelings haven’t been around the track in a while. You put all that fear onto the deck of a rolling ship in mountainous seas on a pitch-black night, and you can begin to understand why it was a sailor who probably painted the image of the patron saint of lightning.

  The first time I had put my hands around the worn wooden spokes of the wheel, Captain Kirk had given me a simple piece of advice: “The helmsman may steer, but the boat usually knows where she needs to go. She’s more like a horse than a pickup. Just give her her head.”

  I loved steering the boat. It is a unique pleasure that combines all the sensory perceptions sparked by wind and waves and the way a boat deals with those elements. During the preceding days of sunshine and gentle swells, all she needed to keep her course was a gentle nudge—but everything changed that night off the Cuban coast.

  I was no longer in the mind-set of loping along on Mr. Twain, giving him a gentle feel of the rein on his neck to make him turn. I was riding atop a four-ton Brahma bull, keeping a death grip on the riding rope, holding on for dear life.

  The little flickers of light that had appeared on the southern horizon had turned into long, defined shafts of lightning. In a sp
lit second, they connected to the vast amount of raw energy contained in a giant, anvil-like cloud that hung over most of the horizon.

  By sunset, the storm had caught up with us. Captain Kirk had quickly set about securing the boat for a blow. He told me to stay at the wheel while he and the rest of the crew set about their routine procedure for handling bad weather, with one exception—dealing with a horse on deck.

  They moved Mr. Twain back to the stern and found him a safe place away from the booms and rigging where he could ride out the storm. He took it all in stride and seemed much better equipped to deal with bad weather than I was.

  In the wheelhouse, I kept my eyes constantly moving from the compass heading in front of me to the flashes of lightning off the port beam to the painting of St. Barbara on the pilothouse bulkhead behind me.

  When the storm finally hit us, it was both terrifying and exhilarating. I had ridden through blizzards and run from tornadoes back home, but out on the ocean, the weather is a whole new ball of wax. To my amazement, Captain Kirk simply sat behind me and let me drive the boat. “Just keep her head into the seas, Tully, and you will be fine.”

  “You sure you don’t want to take her?” I repeated several times.

  “No, you’re doing just fine. This will blow over in about half an hour. It’s just a little line of squalls moving through.”

  Though he let me steer, he was constantly checking the chart, our GPS coordinates, and the radar. He didn’t have to remind me that our primary concern was, of course, the safety of our ship, but almost equally as important was the fact that we did not want to drift into Cuban waters. Despite Captain Kirk’s calming manner in the wheelhouse, my brain was flooding with visions of the boat on a reef, a collision with a speeding whale, and a midnight encounter with Cuban gunboats.

  Suddenly, all of those scenarios didn’t mean shit. I am not sure whether I heard the explosion first or saw the sizzling arc of electricity that shot from the dark sky toward the outriggers, but it sure as hell got my attention.

  There was a split second of blinding light, and then I was in the world of Ray Charles. I still had my hands on the wheel, and before I could get the thought from my brain to my vocal chords to yell “HELP!” the beam of a flashlight popped on and lit the compass.

  “That was close,” Captain Kirk said calmly. He quickly fit the elastic band of the light around my head and aimed the angle of the beam at the compass. “Ten degrees to port, and then hold that course until I get back. I need to check on a few things,” he added. “Hey, what do you feed that horse? Never heard of a horse that wasn’t scared of lightning. Whatever you feed him, I want some of that.”

  As usual, Mr. Twain was way ahead of me in the calm, cool, and collected department. Finally I spoke. “The GPS isn’t working.”

  “That’s what I’m going to check on, but in the meantime, all we have is our compass. But that’s all anybody had before electricity. Funny, isn’t it, that electricity is the thing that can help you the most out here, but it’s also the thing that can hurt you the most. Just steer that course until I get back, and a little prayer to the patron saint of lightning might not be a bad idea, either.”

  With that, the door to the wheelhouse opened and let a moment of the storm in and Captain Kirk out. I was alone on the bridge. I reached for my good-luck charm.

  In my dream, Columbus had told me, “Tully, just don’t panic,” and I tried to remind myself of that, repeating the phrase under my breath as I wrestled with the wheel and prayed to St. Barbara at the same time. The roller-coaster ride through ten-foot seas and the tropical downpour continued for longer than I wanted it to, and the duration was not helped by the fact that I kept glancing between the compass card and the big hand on the fluorescent dial of my watch. Ten eternal minutes later, the lightning barrage erupted again, but it was definitely moving away from us to the north—just as the captain had said it would. “Thank you, ma’am,” I whispered under my breath.

  In my pitch-black surroundings in the pilothouse, I could feel the seas subside a bit, and I was able to relax my grip on the wheel and catch my breath. The stars had disappeared long ago in the curtain of the storm, and I didn’t know if I was hallucinating from the long absence of light or not. At first I thought it was one of those spots that moves across your eyes when somebody pops a flash camera in your face, but it seemed to be staying in one place. I turned off my headlamp for a minute and then saw it flash for real. I counted to four, and then the light flashed again.

  That was the first time I experienced the uncanny sense of relief that the soul of the light brings. “Goddamn,” I cried, “it’s the San Antonio light, right smack-dab where she’s supposed to be! The compass worked!”

  And just like that, the power in the pilothouse came back on; screens started flashing, bells sounded, and the whir of the autopilot gyro spooling up was music to my ears.

  A few seconds later, Captain Kirk came back through the pilothouse door like an actor coming out for his curtain call. “We’re fine. It wasn’t a direct hit. Just popped all the breakers. This old lady may look a little long in the tooth on the outside, but she’s got the guts of the Terminator. The guy I bought her from was an ex-CO on a Trident who, along with a fondness for catching shrimp, liked the survivability components of an attack submarine. How you doin’?”

  “Fine, I think. I’ve got the lighthouse in sight.”

  “No shit!” Kirk exclaimed. “Well, damn, Mr. Chekov, you’ve turned into a fine helmsman.”

  Kirk stared down at the green glow of the radar screen and fiddled with the knobs a bit. Like Merlin weaving a magic spell, he brought the coastline of Cuba into view right where it was supposed to be.

  Half an hour later, what I thought was a camera flashbulb had turned into a huge beam brighter than the stars, sweeping across the tormented sea. It was like an angel riding on my windward shoulder.

  The light did its job, and we put Cuba behind us. When I finally looked at my watch, it was four in the morning. Overhead a break in the sky appeared, allowing the reflected light of the stars to accompany the still-strong beam emanating from the direction of Cape San Antonio. It may have been my first look at a lighthouse in action, but it would surely not be my last. The storm let up, and the tension on the boat naturally eased.

  “Nice job, Tully,” Captain Kirk said and gave me a pat on the back. “I am going to buy you a drink when we hit town. Take a break, and you might want to check on your horse.”

  I relaxed my hands, and they ached as I stretched my fingers out. As I zipped up my foul-weather jacket and turned toward the pilothouse door, I noticed that the painting of St. Barbara was hanging crooked on the bulkhead. I straightened her out.

  In the dim red glow of the compass light and the green wash of the radar screen, I thought I saw her smiling back at me.

  The storm had tested us, and then it went off like a bully to bother its next victims somewhere up the Cuban coast. It had rousted all hands to the pilothouse. I was so full of adrenaline that I never even realized I had stayed up all night until the sky began to lighten behind us and Captain Kirk ordered me off the wheel. It was as if someone had turned off my power switch. I was out of juice. I dropped in my bunk and slept until a little after noon.

  When I woke up to the smell of grilled onions, the crew was busy getting ready for our arrival. We ate our cheeseburgers out on the stern. The wind had dropped off to a light breeze, and the swells had subsided to a gentle roll. I finished my lunch and gave Mr. Twain a bath with the freshwater hose, which he seemed to enjoy immensely. Around four in the afternoon, the land clouds rolled up over the horizon like a list of movie credits and were followed by a tree line, a beach, and finally houses and people on the shore.

  “Take the wheel,” Captain Kirk said.

  I responded instantly to the invitation to take the ship up the channel to the end of the voyage, but there was only one problem. I couldn’t find the channel. The declining angle of the sun had turned the
clear green waters into a doughnutlike glaze, which made shallow water indistinguishable from deep water. On top of that, a cluster of fish traps, lobster pots, and skinny wooden stakes that seemed to serve as perches for a variety of shorebirds suddenly appeared off the bow like a minefield.

  I checked the Fathometer, and we still had ten feet under the hull. I took a quick glance at the chart and grew concerned when all I saw around Punta Margarita were shallow-water depth indicators and lots of little skulls and crossbones, which were the icons for reefs and wrecks. Captain Kirk was casually standing in the doorway.

  “Skipper, I am having a little trouble making out the channel here.”

  “Let me see if I can help your vision, there,” he said as he made his way inside the wheelhouse, opened a cabinet under the radar unit, and extracted a miniature brass cannon from a wooden box. “It was old Jean Lafitte who secretly marked the channel back when hiding places really were hiding places.”

  “Well, he did a damn good job,” I said as I reached for the throttle to slow the boat as the water depth had dropped to six feet.

  Captain Kirk cradled the little cannon in his arms like a baby and walked out the door. Then he dropped the stem of the gun into a fitting on the port rail.

  “You can keep your speed up, Tully,” he said calmly. “See all those birds out there?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Well, watch them carefully.”

  I did as commanded and focused all my attention on the birds. Suddenly I realized that some were real, and some were just decoys. Kirk had cracked the breech of the gun and was inserting a large, fat shotgun shell into the magazine. “When Lafitte had been shown the secret channel from the Gulf of Mexico to Crocodile Rock by the local Indians with whom he traded, he devised a rather ingenious way of marking, and then disguising, the waterway.