by Dave Barry
The worst part of the Bimini Customs and Immigration procedure was that periodically one of the officials would ask me, in front of other boaters, the name of my boat (or, as they put it, my “vessel”). The other boaters all had bold masculine boat names like Sea Biceps and Testosterone Torpedo, so I felt inadequate:
CUSTOMS OFFICIAL: What is the name of the vessel? ME (quietly): Buster Boat. CUSTOMS OFFICIAL (loudly): Buster Boat? ME (very quietly): Yes. CUSTOMS OFFICIAL: And you are the master of the vessel? ME: Well, I was steering it, yes, but I was basically following Steele, because ... CUSTOMS OFFICIAL: What is the name of the vessel again?
Finally they decided that we were not a serious threat to the Bahamian national security, so they let us in. And I’m glad they did, because Bimini is wonderful. The most wonderful thing about it is that, because of the prevailing winds, currents, tides, rum supply, etc., Bimini is located smack-dab in the center of what scientists believe to be the world’s most powerful Lethargy Zone. It is extremely difficult to remain tense there. The moment you arrive, lethargy waves start washing over you, seeping into your body, turning your skeletal system into taffy. You stop worrying about things like your job, your mortgage, your kids, whether the recession will last, whether your fly is unzipped, etc. You function on a more basic level, concerning yourself with issues such as: Should I scratch my armpit now? Or later? If you stand in one place too long, you can become so relaxed that you sink to the ground and form a very carefree puddle.
“See that puddle over there?” people will say, pointing to a blob of flesh on the dock. “That used to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He was supposed to stop in Bimini for just a couple of hours—this was in 1958—but the lethargy got to him before he even got off the dock. We think there’s still a pair of wing-tipped shoes under there somewhere. Twice a day we pour a pitcher of daiquiris on him, and he’s happy.”
If you want objective proof of the Lethargy Zone’s effects, take a look at the famous photograph of Gary Hart in Bimini, sitting against a dock piling with Donna Rice on his lap. Notice how relaxed his body is. Notice the goofy smile on his face. Here’s a guy thinking, “OK, on the one hand, I have a serious shot at becoming president of the United States, leader of the Free World, the most powerful person on the face of the Earth; on the other hand, I can sit here with a hot babe on my lap.” On Bimini, this is an easy choice.
Geographically, Bimini is divided into two major parts:
1. The water.
2. The land.
The water is clear and warm and blue and beautiful. It contains numerous scenic fish as well as some highly relaxed conchs and the occasional airplane that crashed while attempting to bring in illegal narcotics at night back in the Bad Old ‘80s, before the government cracked down, when smuggling was a major local industry. (I wonder what those pilots put on their Customs questionnaires? Maybe: “There was unusual mortality among the mice and rats caused by the plane hitting the water at 120 mph.”)
But the land is my favorite part. It’s really just a few little islands, altogether less than 10 square miles, with about 1,500 residents, 75 liquor licenses, and a group of friendly, casual, closely related dogs. Most of the development is on North Bimini, along a strip of land narrow enough that you could probably throw a rock from one side to the other, if you weren’t feeling so lethargic. At the south end of the island is Bimini’s metropolitan hub, Alice Town, which consists of a few dozen stores, T-shirt stands, restaurants, and Hat-out bars. Most of the buildings’ front doors open right onto the narrow street, which has no sidewalk, so that when you step outside, you’re basically standing in the middle of the main island road. “Never step out of a bar in Bimini without carefully looking both ways, especially if you have been drinking the legendary Bahama Mama rum drink,” is one of the Coast Guard’s Rules for Walking Around Bimini.
Fortunately, there’s not much traffic, and the drivers, many of them on motor scooters, cheerfully weave and beep their way through the pedestrians, usually missing everybody, which is a lot more than you can say for drivers in Miami. People in Bimini are friendly. This is a generalization, but it’s true, anyway. People tend to say hi to you even if you’re a flagrant tourist.
The Bimini stores give new meaning to the term “small business.” Some of them could easily fit into a dressing room at Bloomingdale’s. The window displays are eclectic—Bimini mugs, T-shirts, conch shells, a roll of film manufactured during the Carter administration—generally covered with a nice, relaxed layer of dust. A number of buildings are boarded up or missing key architectural elements such as a roof. Men were working inside one bright blue building called The Chic Store (“Bimini’s Oldest, Established 1935”). A hand-lettered sign in the window said: SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE. CLOSED FOR RENERVATIONS.
The Chic Store was just down the street from Melvin’s Fashion Center, which featured a nice selection of T-shirts, and Priscilla’s Epicurean Delights (“To Thrill the Gourmet Palate”), which featured conch. Conch is one of Bimini’s major palate thrills, served in fritters and salads, or as a main course. It’s delicious, especially if you don’t think about what it looked like before they cooked it. “Never think about the fact that a conch is basically a large underwater snail” is one of the Coast Guard’s Rules for Eating Conch. Bimini also has a locally baked bread, sweet and heavy and highly addictive.
My favorite spot in downtown Bimini is an arch erected on the side of the road. It says:
BIMINI—GATEWAY TO THE BAHAMAS
THE YOUTH DEPARTMENT
THE ORDER OF ELKS OF THE
WORLD (I.B.P.O.E. OF W.)
WELCOMES THE TOURIST
TO BIMINI
Underneath the arch is a little shrine-like display, featuring an arrangement of conch shells surrounding a toy rake, shovel, and hoe, pointing aloft. Next to this display is a small, mysterious sign that says:
TO BE AWARDED TROPHY FOR BEST KEPT YARD.
To one side is a rusting antique hand fire-fighting pump. (Why not?) Across the street is a sign that says:
GLENDA’S SCOOTER RENTAL AND THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
Yes. Not only does Bimini have scooter rentals, but the Fountain of Youth is located there, over on South Bimini, according to legend. You can take tours to it. We didn’t bother, because of being in the Lethargy Zone. We figured, hey, if we got young again, we’d have to go through young adulthood again—zits, career-building, etc.—and it just sounded so tiring that we decided to skip eternal youth and have some beers and conch fritters instead. We did this at one of Bimini’s most famous social spots, the Compleat Angler hotel and bar, which is where famed novelist and macho hombre Ernest Hemingway used to hang out. One room is a sort of museum, with pictures of Hemingway all over the walls, including one with the following caption: “ERNEST HEMINGWAY SHOOTING THOMPSON MACHINE GUN, BIMINI DOCK.” He liked to shoot guns at sharks. One time he got so excited, shooting at a shark, that—this is true—he shot himself in both legs. That’s the kind of sportsperson Ernest was.
I have not begun to describe all the things you can see and do just in metropolitan Bimini. I have not mentioned the plaque commemorating the late congressperson Adam Clayton Powell, who spent a great deal of time in Bimini, drinking scotch and milk and no doubt thinking up ways to better represent his New York City constituents; or the Chalk’s Seaplane Terminal with the antenna that looks like a Science Fair project made from coat hangers, where you can watch the plane come in and taxi right across the main road to discharge its passengers; or the End of the World Bar, whose floor is sand and whose walls seem to be made entirely of graffiti; or the Bimini bus, a van equipped with numerous bumper stickers and what appears to be a radar antenna. What with all the things to see, plus the lethargy factor, plus the beer, it took us a little over four hours to walk through Alice Town and back, a distance of several hundred yards. Of course, on the way back we were fighting a strong tide of passengers who had been released from the SeaEscape cruise ship for the
afternoon and were sweeping down the island, snorking up rum and T-shirts.
Bimini attracts all kinds of people. One morning we watched as three men pulled up to a dock in a loooooooong motorboat, the kind shaped like a floating marital aid with numerous large engines on the back. They picked up a young woman wearing a practical nautical outfit consisting of an extremely tight, extremely short dress and spike-heeled shoes. She could barely move. She couldn’t climb into the boat without causing her undergarments to be visible from Fort Lauderdale, so one of the men had to lift her into the boat like a large, high-heel-wearing sausage. Then off they roared, out to sea. Probably planning to do some snorkeling.
Bimini offers a wide range of nightlife activities. You can eat. You can drink. You can walk around the docks and watch sportspersons on large expensive boats slice fish apart and get slime and flies all over themselves and seem genuinely happy. You can eat some more. You can, if you are very fortunate, see Steele Reeder do his impression of how a conch looks at you when you have removed it from its shell (“Now what” the conch says). You can drink some more. You can dance, with or without a partner, in a bar or right on the street.
On Saturday night Olin and I were sitting at an outdoor bar, listening to a band called Glenn Rolle and the Surgeons. Three young women were dancing with each other. A man came dancing in off the street, nattily attired in shorts and an artificial leg. He danced up and joined the women, smiling blissfully. The four of them danced for a minute, then the man danced off, waving his artificial leg around in a manner that can only be described as joyful.
“There’s a short story in there somewhere,” remarked Olin.
I was so impressed by Glenn Rolle and the Surgeons that I went up to Rolle and asked if they had any record albums, and he sold me one for $5. When I got back to my table, I sensed that the album might be defective, inasmuch as it had a big bend in the middle, so you could easily fold it in half. Rolle cheerfully exchanged it for a new one, which I played when I got home. The album is called Steal Away. Side One consists of one song, called “Steal Away, which is a little over six minutes long. Side Two is also “Steal Away,” but it’s the instrumental version, which is identical to Side One but without the vocals. All in all, I think Steal Away is an excellent name for this album.
We honestly had planned to do more than just eat and drink and swim and laze on the beach and buy straw hats and walk around very slowly while burping during our stay in Bimini. We honestly intended to do some serious research on local points of interest, such as the Mysterious Underwater Thing Possibly Built by Aliens from Space. I am not making this point of interest up. It’s called the Bimini Road, and it consists of hundreds of big, flat rocks forming a half-mile-long, fairly regular pattern, shaped like a backward J in 18 feet of water a half mile from Bimini. It was discovered in 1968, and many respected loons think that it has something to do with the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Others think it must have been aliens from space. It’s a big mystery. How did it get there? What is it for?
My theory is that the space aliens were going to write a giant under-water backward message of advice for humanity starting with J, possibly “JUST DO IT.” But after a short while in the Lethargy Zone they decided to knock off, maybe have a Bahama Mama, and before they knew it a couple of million years had passed and they had to return to their planet, leaving the message unfinished. Closed for renevations.
We were in a similar situation. Before we knew it, it was Sunday, time to head back to Miami, assuming that Miami still existed. There was no way to know for sure, because the Bimini phone system had been out of order the whole time we were there. I’m not sure telephones would have been all that effective, anyway. The speed of electricity on Bimini is probably around 10
miles per hour.
Anyway, we had children and jobs to get back to, and we were getting dangerously close to forming permanent flesh puddles. So after a well-balanced breakfast of about 17,000 pieces of Bimini-bread toast, we set out for home, with me, Master of the Vessel Buster, once again following Bonefish Howard Steele Reeder II, who was once again following the Loran.
In a couple of hours, Miami was on the horizon again, apparently intact, but I didn’t dare to relax, because I knew that ahead of us lay the greatest maritime challenge of all, a hazard so dangerous that no sane boatperson would dream of attempting it: Biscayne Bay on a Sunday afternoon. You know how sometimes you’re driving on I-95 in heavy traffic, and some substance abuser driving a car whose windows are tinted with what appears to be roofing tar weaves past you at 127 miles per hour, using all available lanes plus the median strip, and you say to yourself: “Why don’t they get that lunatic OFF THE ROAD??” Well, trust me, on Sunday afternoon he is off the road. He and all his friends from the South Florida Maniac Drivers Club are all out on Biscayne Bay, roaring around in severely overpowered boats, looking for manatees to turn into Meatloaf of the Sea.
But we made it through without getting killed, which was too bad because it meant we had to go through the U.S. Customs procedure, which is even sillier than the Bahamian one. It was developed by the hardworking Federal Bureau of Irritating Procedures That May Seem Pointless But Actually Accomplish Nothing. The way it works is, you have to report in from a special U.S. Customs telephone. The phone we went to is right next to a dock at the Crandon Park marina. But you can’t stop at the dock unless you’re buying fuel there. So the boat pulls up, and the captain gets off, and the boat has to leave—ideally with somebody driving it—and drift around the marina with all the other incoming motorboats, sailboats, Cuban refugee rafters, etc., while the captain gets in line to wait for the phone. It can take an hour or more for your turn, and when you finally get to talk to the Customs people, they want to know things like your Social Security number and birth date. How this information helps them protect the borders is beyond me. I suppose that if
you have something really important to tell them, such as that you’re carrying illegal aliens or a bale of hashish, it’s your responsibility to blurt this information out. Then I imagine you’re supposed to put handcuffs on yourself, take a taxi to a federal prison, ring the bell, and wait until they find time to let you in.
Eventually, they decided that our Social Security numbers had enough digits, or whatever criterion they use, and they let us back into the United States, and we went home. But we’ve already decided we’re going back to Bimini. I think everybody should go to Bimini from time to time. I think President Bush and whoever is governing the Soviet Union this afternoon should meet there. They would definitely have a more relaxed kind of summit.
A NICE TOWN, BAHAMAS—IN a surprise development, the leaders of the two superpowers announced today that they have learned all the words, in English AND Russian, to “Conch Ain’t Got No Bone.”
Maybe you should go to Bimini, too. Maybe I’ll even see you there, and we can wave to each other, if we’re not feeling too lethargic. Please address me as “Bonefish Dave.”
Shark Bait
It began as a fun nautical outing, 10 of us in a motorboat off the coast of Miami. The weather was sunny and we saw no signs of danger, other than the risk of sliding overboard because every exposed surface on the boat was covered with a layer of snack-related grease. We had enough cholesterol on board to put the entire U.S. Olympic team into cardiac arrest. This is because all 10 of us were guys.
I hate to engage in gender stereotyping, but when women plan the menu for a recreational outing, they usually come up with a nutritionally balanced menu featuring all the major food groups, including the Sliced Carrots group, the Pieces of Fruit Cut into Cubes Group, the Utensils Group, and the Plate group. Whereas guys tend to focus on the Carbonated Malt Beverages Group and the Fatal Snacks Group. On this particular trip, our food supply consisted of about 14 bags of potato chips and one fast-food fried-chicken Giant Economy Tub o’ Fat. Nobody brought, for example, napkins, the theory being that you could just wipe your hands on your stomach. Then you could burp. This is wh
at guys on all-guy boats are doing while women are thinking about their relationships.
The reason the grease got smeared everywhere was that four of the guys on the boat were 10-year-olds, who, because of the way their still-developing digestive systems work, cannot chew without punching. This results in a lot of dropped and thrown food. On this boat, you regularly encountered semignawed pieces of chicken skittering across the deck toward you like small but hostile alien creatures from the Kentucky Fried Planet. Periodically a man would yell “CUT THAT OUT!” at the boys, then burp to indicate the depth of his concern. Discipline is vital on a boat.
We motored through random-looking ocean until we found exactly what we were looking for: a patch of random-looking ocean. There we dropped anchor and dove for Florida lobsters, which protect themselves by using their tails to scoot backward really fast. They’ve been fooling predators with this move for millions of years, but the guys on our boat, being advanced life forms, including a dentist, figured it out in under three hours.
I myself did not participate, because I believe that lobsters are the result of a terrible genetic accident involving nuclear radiation and cockroaches. I mostly sat around, watching guys lunge out of the water, heave lobsters into the boat, burp, and plunge back in. Meanwhile, the lobsters were scrabbling around in the chicken grease, frantically trying to shoot backward through the forest of legs belonging to 10-year-old boys squirting each other with gobs of the No. 191,000,000,000 Sun Block that their moms had sent along. It was a total Guy Day, very relaxing, until the arrival of the barracuda.
This occurred just after we’d all gotten out of the water. One of the men, Larry, was fishing, and he hooked a barracuda right where we had been swimming. This was unsettling. The books all say that barracuda rarely eat people, but very few barracuda can read, and they have far more teeth than would be necessary for a strictly seafood diet. Their mouths look like the entire $39.95 set of Ginsu knives, including the handy Arm Slicer.
