of wine. I had made an unbelievable trip back from death’s door to dinner, and to my wild surprise, I was sitting right next to Willie Singer.
Willie vividly remembered our first meeting back in the Tortugas when we traded grouper for autographs. He told me he had actually written a song about the evening and had recorded it for his new CD, which he had made with a host of old-school calypso singers in Trinidad.
Willie, it turns out, was from Mississippi originally, and he was a distant cousin of Sammy Raye Coconuts. They had actually written songs together back when Sammy Raye was still actively involved in the music business. One of Sammy’s regular pilots had gotten sick, so Sammy had called Willie to see if he wanted to go fishing and help out in the cockpit. Willie, it turned out, was planning a trip to the Yucatán himself. So it had worked out perfectly for both of them. Willie would crew for Sammy Raye and use the plane to go up to Mérida, where he had some business to handle while Sammy Raye and Donna Kay fished.
I needed more wine. I had nearly died, and the woman I had jilted had shown up along with one of my all-time heroes, not to mention Sammy Raye. Storytelling seemed to be a family tradition with these cousins, and Sammy Raye and Willie traded hilarious, outrageous stories back and forth at lightning speed until all of us were laughing so hard our faces were wet with tears.
Of course Sammy Raye had been an investor in the Pearl Road treasure hunt. When Bucky asked what it was worth, Willie just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Enough to keep looking,” but Sammy Raye interrupted, saying it had been a $30 million take between them. It was too amazing, and we all wanted to hear more. Sammy egged Willie on to tell about his latest adventure, and he did.
Willie had bought a new plane. Actually, it was quite an old one and, like all old planes, came with quite a story. He was working in a recording studio in Sausalito when he had taken a day off and gone driving up to the wine country. The ever-present fog that enshrouds San Francisco Bay had retreated away from the coast. Meanwhile, Willie had gotten lost and had wound up way off on the Tiburon Peninsula. While trying to figure out where he was, like most men, he refused to ask directions. After about a half hour of winding around the roads and seeing the same old abandoned lighthouse again and again, Willie finally pulled up to try to find help. A huge, rusty fisherman’s anchor was planted at the head of the lighthouse driveway. The sign on the chain read EQUATOR AIRLINES—KEEP OUT.
Willie slipped under the barricade. The place had an abandoned and haunted look to it, but music was coming from the building behind the old lighthouse. It was Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls,” and as Willie rounded the corner of the building, he was not ready for what greeted him. In a deserted boatyard, he came face-to-face with an airplane.
At a table next to the plane, an old man was busy working on what appeared to be a model plane. He was shirtless in the hot sun, and his skin looked like a tanned hide. He was covered with faded tattoos. He wore a pair of tiny wire spectacles and a faded military beret, and a cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth.
Willie called out to him, but the old man didn’t look up. He was entirely focused on the tiny pieces of model plane.
As he moved closer, Willie saw that the model was made of bamboo and matchsticks, and it was a replica of the antique seaplane that sat in the field.
Finally the old man looked up. “You lost?” he asked Willie.
“You got that right.”
“Most people are,” the old man said. “Have a seat.”
It turned out that the old man, Burt Brown, was the owner of the plane and the property, which he had turned into a flight museum. He told Willie his story, how he had flown for Pan Am across the Pacific in the Clippers and had retired after the war to Sonoma and had become a winemaker.
“I was looking for glamour, but wine making is just farming. It wasn’t as much fun as flying,” he told Willie. So he had bought an old DeHavilland Beaver seaplane in Alaska, and