Needless to say, the sudden arrival of Willie Singer’s plane one afternoon was a welcome surprise. In the skies over Key West Harbor, he made his presence known to me as I was fishing with a client on the flats west of the ship channel. He flew the Pearl no more than ten feet above the water and passed my skiff to port. This took a bit of explaining to the shell-shocked angler on the bow of my boat, who was obviously not used to friends stopping by to visit in such an abrupt manner.
At dinner that night, Willie told us he had received the news of Cleopatra’s death as he was backtracking home, and ironically, he had been in Vanuatu. He told me that he had passed the news on to Waltham and Parfait. To his surprise, both men appeared the next day in Santo at the airport with a sacred tree that they asked to have taken to Cayo Loco and planted beside Cleopatra’s grave. It was a gift and an everlasting connection to the Keed people of Dalvalo.
The next morning, we all loaded up on Willie’s plane, took off from Key West Harbor, and landed in Cabin Boy Bay three hours later. Ix-Nay, Diver, the locals, and a few passing sailboat families watched the air show. Diver told us Solomon had taken the Lucretia to Nassau to pick up a load of kids who were in his sailing school. After a big impromptu lunch on the beach, we hiked up to Osprey Point and planted the sacred tree from Dalvalo next to the lone palm that marked Cleopatra’s grave. Montana brought a conch shell from Key West and put it next to her initial offering.
We had come for a day, but we wound up staying a week. That happens in the Bahamas when the weather is good. Montana and I rode Mr. Twain and Ocean every day. Sophie had found something magical, she said, in the barren landscape of Cayo Loco, and she started taking pictures with her new digital camera. We had slide shows in the cottage on her computer every night, to the amazement of the locals. I could tell she was happy to be behind the camera again.
Willie and I finally got to fish together, but he was more infatuated with the soul of the light and how it operated. Diver took him under his wing, and Willie gladly stood a watch every night of his stay. By the end of the week, he sat us all down around a fire on the beach and played us a song he had written for Cleopatra. It was called “A Salty Piece of Land.” We asked him to take his guitar up to Osprey Point so he could play it for her.
One day, we hooked and released a bonefish that he said was bigger than any he had seen in his travels to the Pacific. Willie got a call from Sammy Raye to meet him down in Grand Turk, where they had a treasure-salvage operation in progress, but he flew us home first. Before we departed for Key West, I sat in the copilot’s seat and watched him enter the coordinates of Osprey Point into his GPS. He anointed the spot with the abbreviated title ASPL (A Salty Piece of Land).
Our takeoff from Cayo Loco included a low-level turn around the lighthouse—where all were gathered below on the catwalk, waving up at us—and a low pass and a dipped wing over Osprey Point. As Montana looked out the big porthole at the island disappearing behind her, she turned to Sophie and me, seated across the aisle, and said, “It’s great here, but I am ready to go home.” So was I.
It is a beautiful night in Key West, not just because I have Sophie and Montana, but also because I have been lucky enough to have been rescued from myself. Sure there are scars, but no regrets. My lovely wife is sitting at a desk working on a new book of incredible photos. My stepdaughter lies in my arms after correcting my accent as I read to her from a children’s book in French.
This whole adventure roared into my life on a storm, but tonight it rides on a breeze not strong enough to lift one page of my story. Many things pass through my mind as I sit here with a great sense of peace and satisfaction, but there is one thing that suddenly crystallizes everything, as the words of a great song should. I look down at Montana, pick up my guitar, and play. Together we sing those haunting words from Mr. Hendrix:
Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past,
And with this crutch, its old age and its wisdom
It whispers, “No, this will be the last.”
But the wind does remember—everything.
Epilogue
survivors
I finally have a real job. I am designing boats for Sammy Raye’s company on Stock Island. The business is called Los Barcos, and we are building the finest flats skiffs around. Yes, I still do a little bit of guiding when friends and a few old clients come to town.
Sophie’s photography book was bought by a top French publisher and became a best-selling book in France. Along with her work, she has taken up her aunt’s torch, so to speak, and is busy with the lighthouse keeper’s foundation and camp for kids on Cayo Loco with Solomon and Diver.
When “El Cohete” Torres received word of Cleopatra’s death, he was on his way to the stadium in Havana. He had the team manager sew a black armband on his jersey. He publicly dedicated the game to her and went out and pitched a no-hitter.
Solomon didn’t last much longer than I did on the Lucretia by himself. He had spent too many years with Cleopatra in his life, and now that the light had been restored, he was finally ready to come ashore. The day after he unloaded us in Key West, he told me that he was going to retire, give command of the Lucretia to Roberto, and move back to Cayo Loco. He was done with traveling the world. He just wanted to see his grandchildren, work for his son as a light keeper, and start the school Cleopatra wanted on the island where he had grown up. And that is what he did. He visits with Cleopatra every day, bringing flowers from the garden.
Diver became the head light keeper. He and his father immediately started building several more cottages for relatives and friends, and there were plans for a small school and a library as well. Cayo Loco was coming back to life.
Ix-Nay simply fell in love with the Bahamas. He has stayed put on Cayo Loco, and I gave him my cottage. One day, a weird wayward sailor named Chap Chap dropped anchor in Cabin Boy Bay on a weather-beaten sloop named Mantequilla Suave. He and Ix-Nay became instant friends. A week later, I got a letter from Ix-Nay telling of his new friend who was taking up temporary residence on the island. Chap Chap was going to help Ix-Nay build a boat that he could sail around the world. It came as kind of startling news to us, but hell, after what happened with the soul of the light, I have steered clear of using words like impossible, ridiculous, or unfeasible. Already several old boatbuilders from Acklins and Mayaguana have showed up to lend a hand, and the keel has been laid. Sammy Raye, in his new position as a kingpin in the marine industry, is backing the venture. Ix-Nay has already chosen a name for his boat: Cleopatra.
Roberto keeps the Lucretia busy with the usual cargo business but sticks to a route that traverses the Bahamas chain of islands, Key West, and Belize. He and Solomon take a yearly cruise through the islands, teaching local kids about sailing and lighthouses as part of Cleopatra’s school programs. I think nothing would have made her happier than to see wide-eyed kids discovering how to tie knots, read the constellations, and scramble like monkeys up the tall rig of the ship as it moved from island to island.
We often see the crew from the Lost Boys Fishing Lodge here and in the Bahamas. Once Sammy Raye was bitten with the fishing bug, he left Alabama for Key West and bought an island called Ballast Key, where he built a hideaway estate. He also financed Bucky’s purchase of the Lost Boys property from Tex Sex and Darcy Trumbo. It is still one of the top fishing lodges in the world and is now managed by Archie Mercer, who left Belize to the jaguars and moved to Punta Margarita. Sammy and Bucky basically travel around on a two-hundred-foot converted Canadian icebreaker named Nomad that Sammy Raye bought to explore remote fishing spots. It is run by Captain Kirk and carries all the toys any group of adult children need to go global flats fishing—helicopters, onboard seaplane hangers, two auxiliary sportfishing boats, and lots of wine. They now have built Lost Boys lodges in Tahiti, the Seychelles, and Zanzibar, and one on nearby Crooked Island, just within range of Cayo Loco.
Dawn Barston blew the family gas fortune in just two yea
rs, but she had a good time. After several trips to rehab, she landed on her feet and married a car dealer in Las Vegas. Noel-Christmas is a born-again missionary in Africa.
Speaking of fortunes, Hector the guard made it to Vegas and hit a $3 million slot jackpot at the Flamingo Hotel. He retired as a security guard and opened a bar on the beach at Tulum called Kiss the Sky.
Donna Kay and Clark continue to live in Alabama with their three kids. Clark still trains cutting horses, but only his own. A few years after they got married, Donna Kay sold a new idea for a cooking channel on cable TV to the Superstation in Atlanta. Now she is worth nearly as much as Sammy Raye, and when Sammy moved to Florida, Donna Kay and Clark bought Pinkland. Of course they repainted it.
The tree from Dalvalo inspired a ritual. People who came by boat to see the Cayo Loco Light and hear the story of how it came back to life began bringing trees to plant. There is now a grove of trees on Osprey Point, and Cayo Loco is not quite as salty a piece of land as it used to be.
Afterword
May 10, 2004
Bird Rock, Bahamas
The novel is done, except for dotting some i’s and crossing some t’s. There have been thousands of words, added and crossed off, chapters lost and found and gone through the black hole of computer hell to some parallel writer’s universe. The world also changed forever in the middle of this literary journal after 9/11, which made me realize that now, more than ever, we don’t just enjoy our escapism—we NEED it. I lost parents and friends, not to mention a multitude of bonefish and permit flies, sunglasses and space pens, yet I found Cayo Loco.
The idea began not far from where I stood this morning after rowing my kayak across from Pittstown to the Bird Rock Light. It began rather predictably during a night at the bar, where the conversation was dominated by the topics of flying and fly-fishing. That evening, I was introduced to a fellow who was down restoring the light. His name was Chris Owens, and he hailed from somewhere up in New England. He had stumbled through here like the rest of us, on a boat, but he had actually restored the Rose Island Light in Newport, Rhode Island. The locals on Crooked Island had anointed him Lighthouse Mon.
I had always had a fascination with the old lights of the Bahamas that I had flown over, and I had visited several, so talking about lighthouses and his work of bringing one back immediately got my attention. I left the fishing and aviation world to the experts who were gathered around the platter of conch fritters, and I began to ask Chris questions. In my world of making things up for a living, I feel that you have to find the story. It rarely finds you. In the thirty minutes before dinner, what I heard from the lighthouse restorer would change my life for the next five years.
I had planned to paddle out to Bird Rock the next day to meet Chris and see what his plans were, but as usual down here, the weather stepped in and stayed. I went home, and the next time I came back, Chris was gone, and I never saw him again. The hotel was changing management, and the project had been abandoned—another dream dead on the beach. I climbed silently up the spiral steps to the light, careful to avoid the rusted-out bolts and rotten boards that Chris had identified with strands of duct tape. Then I pried the hatch open, walked out on the catwalk, and took in the view. “Not so fast,” I thought to myself. The dream of restoring this light might be on the rocks in the real world, but not in my mind.
Nearly thirty years ago, on an island further south of here, I had arrived on my dream boat to that one particular harbor, where I sat one morning talking to a group of young gypsy sailing-boat children as we ate croissants and drank tea. One of them was talking about an amazing car that he said he drove around the island. The description of the vehicle was a cross between a Star Wars spaceship and a Jet Ski, and when I asked him where he kept his car, he looked at me with a mischievous grin and pointed to his head. “In my mind,” he said.
It was Chris who pointed me to Dave Gale up in Abaco. Dave runs the Bahamas Lighthouse Preservation Society, and I flew over to visit him one afternoon. I told him I was thinking of writing a book about an abandoned lighthouse. He was working on a book himself and opened his files to me. I took the rest of the afternoon to sit quietly in his office on Parrot Cay and read the stories of the people and places that occupied the world of lighthouses in their heyday—the beacons that guided the commerce of the planet past dangerous shores.
I left Parrot Cay knowing where I was going. It was Chris Owens’s tales that inspired me, Dave Gale’s notes that directed me, and my own imagination that created the mythical island of Cayo Loco, which I hope you will come to love as much as I have.
Bird Rock is still abandoned, and the breathtaking panorama as seen from the catwalk hasn’t changed a bit, except for the remains of a small boat that foundered on the north shore. Maybe one day, the dream of restoring the lighthouse will be realized; then again, we all may fade away, and the light will be left as it is, a deserted landmark on a conch-shell-lined island. But at least there will be a story.
I’m done. Time to go fishing.
—JB
about the author
After more than two decades of recording and performing music, popular singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett splashed down into the world of books in 1988, when he cowrote The Jolly Mon, a children’s book, with his daughter Savannah Jane Buffett, who was then six. In 1989 he published his first stories for adults in Tales from Margaritaville: Fictional Facts and Factual Fictions, which was the longest-running New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller of that entire year. His next book, the novel Where Is Joe Merchant?, immediately hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and in 1998, when his autobiographical book A Pirate Looks at Fifty was published, he became one of only six writers to have held the #1 position in the categories of both fiction and nonfiction on the New York Times bestseller list.
Jimmy Buffett was born in Mississippi and raised in Mobile, Alabama. He is a fourth-generation sailor, a rabid fisherman, a pilot, a surfer, and a frequent traveler to the remote and exotic places of the world, having become addicted to National Geographic magazine as a child. Among his many professional accomplishments, he has recorded nearly forty albums, most of which have been certified gold, platinum, or multiplatinum. On July 13, 2004, Jimmy’s License to Chill album was released and immediately entered the Billboard Top 200 and Top Country charts at #1. It is his first #1 album. He and his wife, Jane, and their three children live in Florida.
Jimmy Buffett, A Salty Piece of Land
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