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