Jimmy Buffett - A Salty Piece of Land

Copyright 2004 by Jimmy Buffett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group, USA

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

The author is grateful for permission to include the following: If I Had a Boat, written by Lyle Lovett. 1987 Michael H. Goldsen, Inc./Lyle Lovett (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Used by permission; Lawyers, Guns and Money, written by Warren Zevon, 1978, Zevon Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission; The Wind Cries Mary, written by Jimi Hendrix, Experience Hendrix, L.L.C. Used by permission. All rights reserved; excerpt from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupry, English translation copyright 1943 by Harcourt Inc. and renewed 1971 by Consuelo de Saint-Exupry, English translation copyright 2002 by Richard Howard, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Inc.

Fish illustration by Peter Bernard

First eBook Edition: November 2004

ISBN: 978-0-7595-1292-4

Also by Jimmy Buffett

Tales from Margaritaville

Where Is Joe Merchant?

A Pirate Looks at Fifty

(and for young readers)

The Jolly Mon

Trouble Dolls

For Peetsy, Jay, and Groovy

To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend, and if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures.

Antoine de Saint-Exupry,
The Little Prince

We sail within a vast sphere,

Ever drifting in uncertainty

Driven from end to end

Pascal

November 30, 2001

Coconut Grove, Florida

George Harrison died yesterday. I found out as I checked my e-mail this morning before waking Cameron early, which I pinky swore to do last night. I walked out onto the balcony of this hotel and looked out to the east over the rusty Pan Am hangars and the decaying wooden markers that framed the once-active runways for the Clippers as they came and went on their pioneering routes from Biscayne Bay. They are gone as well.

Everything leaves eventually in the physical form, but the memories of good people and good work are timeless. So instead of saying a prayer, I just visualized George Harrison boarding a Pan Am Clipper, guitar case in hand, greeted by Captain Gardner McKay and entertainment director Fred Neil.

The plane lifts off the silky surface of the bay and heads toward the rising sun out over Elliot Key and the distant shimmering waters of the Gulf StreamI would call a flight like that one hell of a joyride on the way to the ultimate adventure. Have fun, boys.

Mortality marches ontoday, George Harrison; last week, Gardner McKay; and in July, Fred Neil. Id better get to work.

December 24, 2003

Palm Beach, Florida

Unfortunately the manifest for this flight has grown. Please make a note that added to the crew is Gordon Larimore Gray III, copilot; and James Delaney Buffett and Mary Loraine Peets Buffettnewly arrived honeymooners bound for eternity.

JB

The Soul of the Light

tully mars, checking in

I t all simply comes down to good guys and bad guys. As a kid, I wanted to be like Roy Rogers, the good-guy cowboy of all time. Roy and his horse, Trigger, would go riding through the movies, helping those in peril while never seeming to sweat, get a scratch, or wrinkle a pair of perfectly creased blue jeans. When the day was over, they would join the Sons of Pioneers by the campfire and sing the sun to sleep. Now that is what I called the perfect job.

One day, long ago in another place and another time, I was playing out my fantasy of being Roy with my childhood pals in the rolling hills above Heartache, Wyoming, where I was raised. We were racing our horses, bat-out-of-hell style, through the aspen grove that led to our little ranch. Like a true daredevil, I passed my friends in a wild sprint to the finish line, and once I had the lead, I turned around to admire my move as the leader of the pack. The next thing I remembered was waking up on the ground, my head covered with blood, my left arm pointing in the wrong direction, and painlots of painshooting through my young body. Thats when I knew that life wasnt a movie.

During my mending process, I discovered a new role model in Butch Cassidy, who took me through my teenage years. He wasnt perfect. He made mistakes, and that seemed more in tune with the way my life was working out in the real world. He thumbed his nose at authority. To put it in todays terms, Butch Cassidy didnt work for The Man. He was his own man. He ran away to Patagonia.

The West was changing, and so was I. Now, looking back, I have to thank old Roy for teaching me that when you fall from your horse, you climb back in the saddle and plow ahead. From Butch, I figured out that what I wanted to be was my own manjust a good guy with a few bad habits. This is Tully Mars reporting in.

W hen I left Wyoming some years ago and made a not-so-difficult choice between becoming a poodle-ranch foreman or a tropical expatriate, I tossed a massage table through the giant plate-glass window of the ranch house owned by my former boss and modern-day witch Thelma Barston. That day, heading off to freedom, I made myself a promise. As I fled across America, I swore I would never again work for anybody but me. I pretty much kept that promise until I met Cleopatra Highbourne.

Cleopatra Highbourne is my present boss and the woman who brought me here to this salty piece of land in the southern Bahamas. She hired me to restore a 150-year-old lighthouse on Cayo Loco, which she owns, having swapped for it with the Bahamian government for some property on Bay Street in Nassau.

To begin with, Cleopatra is 101 years old, but she doesnt look a day over 80. She is the captain of her beautiful schooner, the Lucretia, which was a present from her father on her eighteenth birthday.

Cleopatra has simply defied the aging process. Her eyes are a piercing green, and her speech is lilted with an island accent that is somewhere between Jamaican and Cuban. There isnt a romance language or Caribbean patois she doesnt speak like a native, and there isnt an island she hasnt set foot on between Bimini and Bonaire. Her skeleton is erect, which she attributes to being a practitioner of yoga for eighty years, having been taught the craft by Gandhi himself. She wears no hearing aids or glasses. Her skin is void of the weathered, leatherlike appearance caused by age, ocean, and ultraviolet exposure. She never smoked cigarettes, but she has her daily ration of rum and occasionally will puff a little opium if she is feeling ill. She also has a taste for Cuban cigars.

She dines on fish, rice, and tropical fruits, and a collection of potions, teas, and elixirs keep her biorhythms, brain, and sense of humor humming. She cusses like the sailor that she is, and she is rabidly addicted to Cuban baseball.

Though she says she has a few good years left in her, Cleopatra is on a most urgent mission, and that is where I come in. I am here to rebuild the lighthouse as her final resting place while she continues her search for an original Fresnel lens, which was the light source for this and many other old lighthouses.