A Salty Piece of Land

  “Hey, gringo!” she shouted as she walked toward me on the beach. The sound of her voice and the look in her eyes froze my feet in the sand. “I am looking for Destin Walker. Ever heard of him?”

  “The lighthouse guy?” I asked.

  “I know him as Dr. Walker of the National Geographic Society.”

  “Ahh, yes, ma’am, I do know him. I did some work for him awhile, actually right here at Tulum, about a month ago,” I replied uncomfortably.

  “Well, aren’t you a bubblin’ fountain of information this afternoon, junior? And who might you be?”

  “Tully Mars.”

  “So, Tully Mars, are you one of those expat beach bums that found his way to Mexico and is just goofing off or trying to find himself?”

  “No, ma’am. I live here.”

  “Well, you certainly aren’t from here.”

  “Ah, no. I would originally be from Wyoming. I am a fishing guide.”

  “I thought you said you worked with Dr. Walker at Tulum.”

  I was getting more and more uneasy as one question unfolded into the next. Normally I would have told anybody else to mind their own fucking business, but there was something about Cleopatra that made me just keep delivering the information she was asking for. “That was just part-time, because I was interested in his lighthouse experiments. But my real job is —”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she interrupted. “Son, you just said the magic word. What kind of lighthouse experiments?”

  I gave her a brief explanation of Dr. Walker’s work with the windows and the lights.

  “Do you live here in Tulum, son?”

  “No. I’m a guide at the fishing lodge down in Punta Margarita,” I answered.

  “Oh, pirate country.” She beamed. “And are you a pirate, son?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said rather nervously.

  I must have been showing my extreme discomfort with her questions. Cleopatra stopped talking and just looked at me for a moment. Then she said with a slight laugh, “Relax, junior. I am not the law.”

  “Is that your boat?” I asked.

  “She certainly is. She is called Lucretia,” Cleopatra replied.

  “That’s a nice name,” I said lamely.

  “It was my mother’s. So back to my original question,” Cleopatra said. “Destin Walker?”

  “Oh, yeah. They finished their work here about two weeks ago.”

  “So where did Dr. Walker go?”

  “He told me that he was headed to Belize, to a little island out in the Turneffe archipelago called Half Moon Cay. There’s an old lighthouse there that was banged up pretty bad in the hurricane, and he was helping a local conservation group repair it.”

  “Well, that is some valuable and interesting information that I could have gotten nowhere else on the planet today if I hadn’t decided to pay a visit to this Mayan tourist town. It is a noble thing Dr. Walker is doing, but it don’t help me one goddamn bit with my search.”

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “That, Tully Mars, is a long story better discussed over dinner. Would you care to join me aboard this evening?”

  All I had ever hoped for that day was a Kodak moment with me on the beach and the schooner in the background, so Cleopatra’s question hit me like a Jack Aubrey broadside. The thought of ever actually going on the schooner had never crossed my mind. “I . . . I’m not really dressed for dinner” was all I could muster up.

  “You look fine. You will find us a rather informal bunch, and I would imagine that suits your style, sir. I think we are having freshly caught dorado tonight, and I have a few bottles of good Chilean wine.”

  I just stood there for a moment trying to figure out if all this was really happening.

  “You have a previous engagement this evening?”

  “No. Actually, my dance card is a clean slate these days,” I told her. “I just don’t know what to say.”

  “‘I accept’ would be a start,” she said.

  “I accept.”

  16

  Dinner and a Show

  I felt as if one of my dreams had come true as I sat in the immaculate white tender. The crew rowed toward the big boat. The man at the tiller had introduced himself as Roberto, the second mate, when he gave me a hand up into the dinghy. Captain Highbourne perched next to him, and he kept one hand on the tiller while he extended the other to her as she made herself comfortable. Roberto spoke that wonderful island English with clipped diphthongs and local metaphors.

  His crew set about their tasks like a well-oiled machine, maneuvering the dinghy out of the surf break as Roberto called out commands and made course changes with the tiller.

  Once in deep water, a young boy sitting in the bow produced a polished turtle shell. Roberto said, “Okay, Benjamin,” and the boy began tapping out a rhythm on it with a small mallet. He was setting the cadence of the oars, and then Roberto broke out into a rhythmic tribal chant of some kind. It certainly was not Spanish, and I didn’t think it was French. Roberto sang what sounded like a question, which was answered by the crew with a song. The music seemed to lighten the load, and the dinghy glided through the waves.

  I just sat back and enjoyed the ride, realizing that with each stroke of the oars, the schooner ahead was becoming more three-dimensional and more real. I had the sense that my song line was about to move in another direction, and the Lucretia would somehow be a part of it.

  A short time later, the large links of the anchor chain came into view as we crossed under her clipper bow. The sprit itself was a massive, varnished prow held in place by angles of chain and steel wire that seemed to guard the carved figurehead below. There was no maidenhead with her breasts pointed out at the oncoming seas; instead, a teak dolphin led this ship. A name board trailed down the bow rail, and black letters spelled out Lucretia in Old English script.

  “How long is she?” I asked.

  “A hundred and forty-two feet from stem to stern,” Cleopatra answered proudly.

  “She’s so big, but she looks fast,” I said quietly.

  “She is both. She was originally built to race from Nova Scotia to the Grand Banks, have her hold filled up with codfish, and race home.”

  “Like in Captains Courageous?” I asked.

  “She is one of the boats that was in Captains Courageous.”

  “No!” I gasped, thinking about how many times I had actually seen that schooner race back to Gloucester when the mast snapped and Manuel Fidello was fatally pinned in the wreckage.

  “Son, I am one hundred and one years old. I don’t have time to bullshit you.”

  I wanted to ask Cleopatra more about the Hollywood past of the Lucretia and a thousand other questions, but I was too overwhelmed by the physical presence of the schooner herself. She was a living, breathing work of art. At the waterline, the air was thick with the smells of a working ship. An invisible cloud of pungent tar, peppered with diesel exhaust, surrounded the Lucretia. I heard the low rumble of a generator midway down the hull and what sounded like tango music reverberating from somewhere within. As the dinghy moved slowly down the long, blue waterline, mechanical odors gave way to galley aromas. Something good was cooking on board the Lucretia, and my stomach started to growl, but my mind was transported skyward from hunger by the masts and rigging of the ship. I tilted my neck as far back as I could and followed the rigging to the top of the twin masts. I almost lost my balance and nearly tumbled out of the boat in the process, but I was quickly and firmly replanted on deck by Roberto, who kept pace with the other oarsmen with one hand and now held me with the other. It was my near-catastrophe that made me aware that there was a strong current and ground swell ripping through the anchorage.

  A pair of deckhands dressed in khaki shorts and blue shirts bobbed up and down on the gangway, waiting for our arrival.

  “Solomon, we have a guest for dinner,” Cleopatra called out to the large black man who stood at the top of the gangway.

  One wrong move, and
the tonnage of the hull could splinter the tender. The closer we got to the ladder, the more dramatic was the sway of the vessel, but there was no fearful shouting of orders by Cleopatra or anxious clambering by the crew at the oars or the men on the ladder. They quietly docked the little boat to the big boat and held her there.

  “Beauty before age,” Cleopatra said, and gestured for me to step up.

  A ship’s bell sounded, and the ringing stayed in my ears as Solomon, the first mate, barked an order to assemble. He spoke in a deep voice accented with that beautiful Bahamian dialect, and the way he seemed to be an extension of the ship—like a mast or a rudder—immediately told me he knew what he was doing and was to be obeyed at all times. People climbed out of hatches, slid down rigging, and quickly and neatly gathered in the large oval in front of the wheel.

  “That’s everybody but the cook, Cap’n,” Solomon reported to Cleopatra.

  I counted sixteen young black faces and four “yachties,” those lucky kids who had somehow landed the dream job of crewman on a schooner. As would be expected on a ship run by Cleopatra Highbourne, a third of the crew were women.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is our guest, Mr. Mars, who will be joining us for dinner. He is also a lighthouse junkie like me.”

  That brought a laugh from the line as they looked at me. The crew all smiled. I probably seemed more like a beach bum than anything else in my Jams, tank top, and flip-flops, but I had the feeling they were used to some rather unusual guests being brought aboard by their captain.

  “Enjoy the sunset. Mr. Solomon, please set the watch. That is all,” Cleopatra said.

  As the crew went back to their routines, I stood there, not knowing whether or not I should lend a hand.

  “Looks like you want to go to work,” Cleopatra said.

  “I’ve never been a guest on a boat. I only worked on one.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  “They’re all so young,” I added as I watched the crew working efficiently along the deck and up in the rigging.

  “No, you are just getting older,” Cleopatra answered.

  “How do you get a job like this? God, I would have killed to be their age and working on a ship.”

  “The white kids are on loan from a maritime college up in Maine. They come for three months, but the rest of the crew are actually from Belize—from a small town in the southern part called Dangriga,” she added.

  “That’s where the Turtle Shell Band comes from, right?” I asked.

  “How does a cowboy from Wyoming know about the Turtle Shell Band?”

  “I saw them in New Orleans.”

  “They are all Garifuna,” Cleopatra said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not a that, it’s a them. Here is a short history lesson, Mr. Mars. The Garifuna originally came from the Yellow Island Carib Indians, who occupied the Orinoco River Basin in Venezuela. From there, they conquered most of the Caribbean islands and intermarried with the Arawaks. That mixture gave birth to the island Caribs. In the late fourteen hundreds, they were waiting on the shore to meet, cook, and eat the arriving Europeans. A couple of hundred years later, a slave ship was wrecked on the island of Saint Vincent, and the survivors who didn’t drown or weren’t shot made it to shore and were taken in by Indians. They began to intermarry, and that gave birth to the Garifuna.”

  “How did they get from Saint Vincent to Belize?” I asked.

  “Through the courtesy of the conquerors from Europe, Mr. Mars. The Garifuna strongly resisted the invasion of the whites and held on to their traditions. They fought and killed the Spanish, British, and French, but in the end they were conquered and had pissed off a lot of people. They were deported to the bay islands of Honduras, and from there they eventually settled on the coast near the Honduran border. Unlike so many other cultures that disappeared, the Garifuna, because of their remote habitat, were able to hold on to their traditions. They are great singers and sailors, and I have employed them as crew on the Lucretia for more years than you have been on this planet. My crew now mostly comes from Dangriga. It’s the largest town in those parts. It’s part African, part Indian, and, of course, it has a bit of a pirate past.”

  “Sounds like a place worth checking out,” I said.

  Solomon approached us, apologized for interrupting, and said to Cleopatra, “Captain, excuse me, but if you be goin’ up, you should do it now.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Pinder,” she replied.

  “Mista Mars, will you follow me, please?” Solomon Pinder asked.

  I said good-bye to Cleopatra and followed the first mate to the open companionway that led down into the ship. He spoke as he walked. “You evah been on a schooner before dis, sir?” he asked.

  “No, I haven’t, but I sure have dreamed of it,” I told him.

  “Well, I guess dat dream come true. Dis be da doghouse. Since we have da exposed steering station, dis offa da protection from da wedder for da watch.”

  Mind you, my seafaring experience up to this point had been on a fishing skiff and a shrimp boat, and with no criticism intended of Captain Kirk’s old Caribbean Soul, it wasn’t the neatest ship on the ocean. The Lucretia, on the other hand, seemed to be.

  The inside of the doghouse was clean as a whistle. There were bunks on each side of the passageway, and sets of foul-weather gear, binoculars, and searchlights hung in order from polished brass hooks in the corner. I wanted to go slowly and take it all in, but it seemed Solomon was in a hurry. That meant I was too. We passed through the navigation station, where a chart of Tulum was laid on the table amid pencils, pointers, dividers, and other piloting tools. The shelves on the walls were jammed with navigation books. The other side of the room held a large radar screen and several very complicated-looking radios.

  “Here we be,” Solomon said. “Dis be da guest cabin. You be findin’ an assortment of deck shoes in da closet along with shorts and crew shirts, but you be needin’ to change quickly. And dat instant camera der? Dat’s for you, if you be wantin’ to take some pictures.” With that, he left the cabin.

  Alone in the cabin, I suddenly realized that I could happily live in this space forever and join this crew and go sailing around the world. The cabin smelled of polished wood, and the walls were covered with black-and-white photos of the Lucretia in a dozen different exotic ports. In the middle of all the photos was an oil-painted portrait of a beautiful woman walking on a beach in a long blue dress that spoke of the turn of the last century.

  The bunks were covered with blue cotton blankets with white anchors stitched in, and the matching pillowcases were covered with stars. Little brass hurricane lanterns were gimballed above the bed for reading. A skylight ran the width of the cabin, and there was even a small fireplace in the corner. It was like a wooden womb, and I wanted to crawl in.

  When I opened the door, the closet let out the fresh scent of cedar. I found my size in the selection of outfits hanging inside, and in a matter of seconds, I had transformed myself from beach bum to crew member. I slipped the camera into my pocket. Then I found a pair of deck shoes that fit and crammed them on my feet. I quickly opened my waterproof fishing bag and placed my lucky conch shell on the bookshelf.

  “Mista Mars!” I heard Solomon shout down into the ship.

  “Thank you, Johnny Red Dust,” I whispered to the shell, rubbed it again for good luck, and raced back out of the cabin through the doghouse and up the companionway where Solomon was standing.

  “Where am I going?” I asked.

  “Up,” he replied.

  “Up where, Mr. Solomon?”

  Solomon laughed. “First of all, Mista Mars, you can drop da mista. I appreciate it, but I simply be Solomon.”

  Solomon was holding a thick canvas belt with a large hook attached to it. He led me down the steps. “You put dis on, Mista Mars. Da captain be takin’ you up.”

  “Up where?” I asked again.

  Solomon smiled, lifted his thick index finger, and pointed to the
top of the mast, where a long, triangular pennant blew in the breeze. “Up der,” he said.

  I thanked God for my climbing experience in the tree at Lost Boys, but that tree didn’t move. I felt kind of bad trying to keep pace with a centenarian who was scampering up the ratlines of the schooner toward what I knew from my reading had to be an old-fashioned crow’s nest perched near the top of the main mast. My instructions had been simple: Clip in where you’re climbing, and don’t ever put both feet on the same line. If you are afraid of heights, don’t look down.

  I stopped several times on the ascent just to stare at the boat below, but I was quickly ordered to keep climbing by Cleopatra until we reached the safety of the crow’s nest.

  Once you are in the rigging of a tall ship, the boat to which it is attached seems a separate world. Cleopatra told me that all her crew, even the cook and the dishwasher, were taught to set sails, steer the boat, and climb the rig. Some loved it and some hated it, but it was a necessity of life at sea.

  “You seem to be at home in this cobweb,” Cleopatra called down to me.

  “That I am, Captain. That I am.”

  Once aloft, I understood all the hurry as I saw the bottom edge of the sun slide down from under a cloud. Minutes later, the whole orange ball of light began to melt away behind the Mayan ruins on the cliff.

  “Takes you to another place, doesn’t it?” Cleopatra said.

  “It always has.”

  There was no green flash that night, but who needed one, given the vantage point from which we watched the day turn to night. The ship rocked gently in the swell behind the reef, and the first stars began to appear above our heads and back to the east.

  “So what was Destin working on here?” she asked.

  I pointed at El Castillo. “You see those windows at the top of the tower?”

  “Yes,” Cleopatra said.

  “The Mayans called those the windows to the world. Destin’s theory was that the Mayans used a light system to steer their ships through the offshore reefs, and that enabled them to go to sea and become world travelers as opposed to lagoon paddlers. He also thought that it might prove that ancient Mayan navigators logged a lot more mileage than anybody ever imagined.”