Chapter 9: Day 5
Bummin' in Bimini
Earnest Hemmingway, Gary Hart, and Georgia Hilton had all discovered the same essential truth that only now had been revealed to me: that mankind's entire reason for existence is to be able waste your days in Bimini, and spend your evenings partying your ass off at the Compleat Angler. While I never had any stomach for partying, I could certainly well appreciate the sentiment.
As with any other epiphany, further reflection on the matter convinced me that my life would never be the same again. At least not until McDonalds starts selling Conch Burgers and Goombay Punch.
If there's any repeating theme to what I didn't like about this vacation, it would have to be the part about getting awakened every morning. Aside from the obvious irritation of having to deal with a morning stuck right in the middle of a vacation, it also means having to deal with the still-breathing person who's responsible for the problem in the first place.
But, this morning was different, mainly because I'd gone to bed just after sundown (which felt like midnight, but in reality was about 6:00 PM), so I found myself in the totally unfamiliar position of waking up before noon, all by my own doing. I really didn't know what to do with myself.
It was a nice morning (assuming that it's ever proper to use the words "nice" and "morning" in the same sentence). The sun was out and all four boats were clustered together, wherever the hell it was that we'd decided to anchor. What can I say? It was one of those picturesque sailing vacation scenes that you always see on those "Travels With the Obnoxiously Rich" programs.
In Admiral Georgia's mind, there were two major objectives for the day: first to get the boats in to Bimini proper, second to have the Captain's barbecue. In my mind, there were two more important objectives: first, to find (and use) some indoor plumbing, and second, to try one of those Conch Burgers that Cap'n Judy kept going on about.
The sail in to town was pretty uneventful. Uneventful that is if anything having to do with sailing can ever be considered uneventful. It still meant incessant messing around with all that boat stuff. Fortunately, there were enough guys on the boat to take care of all that.
What was really exciting for me was arriving at the pier, right next to dry ground, a small town, and everything that entails. Still working under a self-enforced ban on the use of the boat's heads, I had my usual overjoyed reaction to the sight of land. The most obvious side effect of this was that anytime we ever got in to town anywhere, my eyes would be bulging out on six inch stalks, my butt-cheeks would be puckered up so tight that each would fit in a Campbell's Tomato Soup can, and I'd have do this funny little penguin waddle to the nearest restroom.
Not wanting to sound too Gulliverian here (as if I haven't already), but it was at this point that I found myself on a sort of second honeymoon with my lifelong love affair with indoor plumbing. Rack this up as one of dozens of reasons why I'll always consider going outside to be a very stupid (not to mention uncivilized) idea.
This brings us to item number two on my list of things to do for the day, which was sampling the local Conch Burger. In fact, this was on just about everyone's list. A bunch of people from our boat wandered down to a greasy spoon called "Cap'n Bob's", and a bunch of other people from the other boats in our cruise did the same. I don't know if everyone was there, but I do know that there were enough of us to fill the restaurant, and enough to make me feel pretty claustrophobic.
Feeling claustrophobic wasn't quite necessary, either. It seemed that my body had totally adjusted to the idea of sitting on a boat that's continually, rocking, swaying, lurching and rolling. What my body evidently wasn't ready for was for solid ground to be doing the same thing. Well, ok, I don't have any real proof that the island was rocking, swaying, lurching and rolling, but that's sure as hell what my inner ear was telling me. As close as I could tell, the whole restaurant was leaning at about a 20 degree angle, and it was on some pretty choppy seas. I had to prop my left foot up against the wall just to keep from falling off my chair.
It was in this setting, getting a nasty case of motion sickness in a place where there was no documentable evidence of motion, that I got my first chance to sample the local Conch Burger, washing it down was a frosty glass of Goombay Punch, the local carbonated concoction of sugar and water.
It was ok. I think. I can't really say. I was too busy just trying to ride the restaurant. The "burgers" appeared to be exactly like sandwiches of fried clam strips, except that they tasted good and they didn't give me nightmarish flashbacks of early HoJo's experiences.
I returned to the boats, pausing only to stop and pay homage to the local porcelain collection, and tried to spend the rest of the afternoon doing nothing. It's just that sometimes, trying isn't good enough. This time, I guess everyone was sore because they didn't have a chance to wake me that morning, so they all lined up asking for my help with cellular phone things instead.
There was Kathleen who wanted to check with her boss to see if having a broken foot violated her employment contract, and there was Roger, who decided that what would be really fun would be for me to spend the afternoon talking to the Bahamian telephone company. The official rationale for this was that it was an attempt to get his phone to work on the local system, but it was really a festive stress test of my blood vessels, just trying to get someone to answer their phone and (in the same day) admit that they worked for the phone company.
They won. I lost.
What made this game so much more fun was shuttling across the docks from the Sea Galls to the Vanessa Rose and back with an armload of cellular phones and cellular roaming guides. The extra bonus feature of this task was that the tide was coming in on top of a seventy-million knot ocean current, which in turn was pushing the Sea Galls about as far away from the docks as the ropes would allow (which was pretty far).
We can start building a somewhat accurate picture from here, with me trying to balance all that fancy electronic hardware and documentation in my arms while simultaneously leaping across the chasm between the boat and dock that was now so wide that any successful crossing would get me a job as a stunt double on some cop/action-adventure film. We can start building the picture from there, but it's still missing one important little feature.
It seems that that seventy-million knot tidal current also brought with it a veritable ark-load of wildlife containing at least two of every man eating (or merely ornery looking) seaborne creature known to Steven Spielberg. By the time I commenced my death-defying leaps, we had a half dozen Great Whites circling around under the boat, already wearing their "Happy Lobster" bibs.
For the most part, everyone else was content to watch me make shark-meat of myself for a while. Then, as if with the tide, a wave of testosterone washed over all the guys on the cruise, causing each of them to decide to take their turn at trying to single-handedly wrestle the boat back in closer to the dock by pulling on the ropes. The most tangible result of their efforts was them re-tying everything so that the Sea Galls was now even farther from the dock.
I couldn't have asked for anything better, because this left me on the boat, all by myself. No one was about to try that leap, which meant that I was going to get some peace and quiet. I bade them all a fond "Good afternoon," and went below.
Or started to, because just as I thought I was safe, Cap'n Judy leapt (in brilliant pegasuslike fashion) onto the boat and set about pulling it in closer to the dock. She had quite an audience, too, with all the guys parading up and down the dock, proudly flexing and slapping all their manly muscles which had proven no match for the tidal current, reminding her that if they failed, she surely would as well.
Now, Cap'n Judy isn't the sort of person to take this sort of badgering to heart. Nor is she the sort of person to let an excess of testosterone interfere with her higher reasoning facilities. She waved off all her detractors, quietly connected a dock line to one of the winches on the boat, and just as quietly winched the boat in closer to the pier. The guys responded by quietly skulking off into town in a mumbled collection of muscle flexure and head scratching.
I just headed below to fetch my laptop.
There's not much more to say about my afternoon, other than one major key thought that's the result of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization: Civilization begets electricity. Electricity comes to us in its heavenly offspring "dock power," which is transported into the confines of the boat by magical electron conducting conduits. These conduits pay homage to the divine "compressor" which begins anew the eternal cycle of refrigerative air conditioning.
Praise be to freon!
I blew off the afternoon in air conditioned bliss while the rest of those losers wasted their time doing things OUTSIDE. Stupid things like diving, and walking, and sunbathing, and swimming, and sightseeing. I swear. I must have been the only fully intelligent life form on the whole cruise.
I didn't really emerge until late afternoon, when things started cooling down a bit.
Bimini is an interesting place. It's kind of a famous place, too, especially if you like doing stupid things. For instance, a dude named Hemmingway spent a lot of time around Bimini, and as we all know, he made a lifelong pursuit of doing stupid things. Another guy named Hart vacationed in Bimini once, and had such a great time there, he decided he didn't need to be President after all. Now, I'm not about to suggest that any one of our crowd were of the same caliber as Hemmingway or Hart, but we were nevertheless ideally suited for the place. Let me explain.
The town of Bimini is a little-bitty town on a little-bitty island that's located just far enough away from real land that you run a not-so-little-bitty chance of getting killed, just trying to get there. After all, the Atlantic Ocean isn't renowned for being one of the world's most hospitable places. In short, Bimini is one of those island paradises that you see on TV, but know doesn't really exist in real life -- except that it really does exist.
The part of Bimini I saw had a single main street, lined by a collection of small businesses, sleeping dogs, and very content looking residents. It is, in all honesty, the only place I've ever been where all main street traffic -- be it auto, cycle, or foot -- has to stop for regularly scheduled crossing airliners.
The residents appeared to me to have that easy-going island life that we always hear about. These people will never be wealthy, but things seem to be going too well to consider them poor. They only need to work to have their basic needs met, and since the climate and island supply so many of those, there really isn't much left to do.
From what I could tell, the most popular career choice in Bimini is finding a fool with money and separating the two (with the fool being the first to leave the island). Naturally, the residents were working their asses off by the time we arrived. The major subdivisions of labor in this regard were:
- Selling brightly colored souvenir tee-shirts
- Selling rum drinks
- Selling deep-fried rubber-band sandwiches (called "Conch Burgers")
It was all wonderful. I can think of no better place to sit around under the tropical sun, drinking Absinthe, listening to your own brain rotting away -- if you're so inclined. And, it all went on all around me while I spent the afternoon with my face stuffed into the air conditioner vent. Like I said already, I had a great time. I didn't emerge until it was time for the Captains' Barbecue.
The idea behind this event was that the Captains, who were normally exempt from cooking duty, would take a collection of meats, burn them over an open fire, and laugh their butts off while everyone tried to crunch down their charco-steaks without saying anything that could get them keel-hauled. In our case, Cap'n Judy had a bunch of freshly filleted king mackerel to show off.
In the meantime, Roger got to make an entire battery's worth of phone calls back to Vermont on my phone. The major relevant point from this event was the discovery that Burlington, Vermont, had just seen fifteen inches of snowfall. Everyone cheered their good fortune for not being there (except for me, since I like snow).
I had intended to go to bed early, except that I caught myself just before I did, realizing that it'd mean getting up in the morning again. Instead, I sat around and talked to Robert, while he and I tried to fabricate a coherent list of reasons as to why we shouldn't go into town with everyone else. We eventually decided that since we were there, we had to be able to say that we'd done what there was to do, even if we didn't do it for very long, so we headed in to town to see what all the ruckus was about.
What we found was a bar called "The Compleat Angler," just down the street from "Cap'n Bob's Conchburger Heaven." The "Angler" is the place to go in Bimini. After all, Hemmingway and Hart went there, and look at what happened to them (both ultimately committed some form of suicide). The bar even had a sort of museum area dedicated to Hemmingway, although I couldn't find anything commemorating Hart's stay.
Like I said, we found this bar with Hemmingway stuff inside. What we found outside was our group. Stinking drunk, up on top of the building, "surfing" the roof. The locals were positively salivating over the earnings potential this represented.
Well, I came, I saw, and that was plenty enough for me. I went back to the boat, to bed.
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