So you had the locals build your survival retreat. . .
An excerpt from Doomsday Reef, showing possible pitfalls in in survival planning by high-net-worth persons
He was limber for his age and came up the transom steps like a teenager, grabbing the stern rails on each side of the opening by the Dushka to hoist himself the final way onto our aft deck. He removed his hat with his left hand, extended his right, and I shook it. Huge hands! It had been quite a long time since I’d had to look up at anybody aboard Rebel. Perry went six-four or five, and he had plenty of shoulder span on him from when he’d carried more meat on his bones.
While pumping my hand he said, “My name is spelled with three R’s and two S’s. Did I tell you that already? Well, now you’ll never forget it. It’s Curtiss with a hard C, and you can call me Curt. I never cottoned to Perry Ormond Curtiss.” His gray hair was pulled back and tied in a ponytail.
I extricated my hand. “Are you by any chance related to Glenn Curtiss, spelled with two N’s and two S’s?”
“Do you mean the fastest man alive in 1907? The father of naval aviation? Yes, he was my great-grandfather. Say, do you have any tobacco on board? Spirits? Rum? Whiskey? By the pretty young faces lurking in your deck house I see that you have women aboard—and God bless you for that—but do you happen to also have the wine and song? I’m really after the trifecta. Please excuse my babbling but my mind is so full of ideas and I only have Arthur to share them with. You might say he is strong in the back but weak in the mind. But a very good man. Anyway, please do forgive me if I tend to dominate the conversation. It’s the first one I’ve had in three years.”
“Don’t worry, Curt, I understand. My name is Dan Kilmer and my boat, as you have read, is named Rebel Yell. We’ll get around to everybody else’s names, but for now, Curt Curtiss, tell me, what the hell are you doing on Mayaguana?”
“May-aguana. Not My-aguana. I have it on good authority that the locals used to call their island May-aguana.”
“So what do they call it now?”
“Call it now? They don’t call it anything, Dan. They’re all gone. Now it’s just Henry and me. I mean Charlton. We’re the last of the Mohicans. That is, the last of the Mayaguanans.”
“Really? That’s fascinating. So come on and get under the shade, Curt. Mind your head on the boom. Barry, let our guest sit there in the back. And everybody hiding in the pilothouse, you might as well come out too. And can somebody bring up a cutting board and a couple of kitchen knives?”
He had to duck under the tarp to join the party in its soft tan shade. I ushered our guest to the seat of honor at the back of the cockpit. He stepped down into the foot well, but before he sat he grabbed the leather-covered wheel with both hands and looked down into the compass, and then he stared over the pilothouse at his island, and back down at the compass again. He repeated this several times, sighed, and then dropped down to sit at the back of the cockpit, removed his sunglasses, and studied the details of the new world around him. Curt had a sharp nose and green eyes. He went silent, possibly overcome.
I sat on the port side near him, our bare feet close. My tan was just beginning, his was deep and permanent. We could look across the water at his island, or at each other, or shake hands or bump knees. I could tell that he was overwhelmed to be surrounded by so many people in such close quarters.
Gino sat across from me, the three oldest men on board forming a triad. The other deck apes moved to new positions around the cockpit and on the aft deck. Rita came out and sat on the aft deck by Adam. Curt looked at me, then at Gino and then at each of the crew around him. Without his sunglasses our guest had raccoon stripes around his sea-green eyes.
I thought his white button-down dress shirt and gray dress slacks were in good shape for a man who had been marooned for several years. His slacks were cut off short at mid-calf, and his wrists extended inches beyond the unbuttoned sleeves of his oxford shirt, meaning they weren’t his clothes, or at least, not originally. If you get the waist and chest about right, the rest of the measurements don’t matter, not when you’re marooned on an island. And the mysteries were piling up.
“Say, Curt,” I asked, trying to open him up again, “If you don’t mind my asking, where did you find the cool shades?”
“These? Do you like them? Here, try them on.”
“No, thanks,” I replied. “I’m good. I already have a pair.”
“We have more on the island, if anybody wants them.”
“You have more? More sunglasses?”
“Sure. Nobody is left on the island but Arthur and me. We have our pick of what they left behind.”
“When was this? What happened to them?”
“What happened to them? They all left, except for a few, but that was before I arrived. When I got here there were just a few remainers who wouldn’t leave. They were too old to start somewhere else, so they were just going to trust in Jesus and take their chances. ‘I was born here and I’m going to die here, and dying holds no fear for those who trust and believe.’ They told me that from their own lips. That’s what you call faith. I did what I could to help them, but they were very old to begin with. Very old. Eighties and nineties. They had refused to go.
“So, there were five people still on this side of the island when I arrived. Two couples and Arthur, I mean Henry. Did I say Arthur? I’m not sure why I do that. Sometimes I think I tried to create multiple personalities for him, so I could have more company after the others had passed. But his multiple personalities were all in my head, not his, and he never cared what I called him. I take turns, you see. Today he’s Henry, so I speak to him differently than I speak to Charlton.”
“So, Curt, why did they leave? What did the old couples tell you about that?” At that point I was thinking I have a kook on my hands, but a harmless one. Maybe it was a combination of too much sun and isolation from human contact.
“Well, Captain Dan, I’ll just tell you what they told me. Mayaguana was always surviving right on the margin. Anybody born on the island with any brains got the hell off just as soon as they could. There was no economic activity, and the people on the island were just a welfare case for Nassau. They didn’t say it in those words, but it’s a reasonable inference. The only real money came from being a smuggling stopover, and Uncle Sam didn’t approve of it and stamped it out. The government brought in enough fuel to run a generator so they had a little electricity, but it was all a subsidy. There was only one hotel on the island, up at Pirate Wells, and it almost never had a guest. It was just Nassau keeping the flag flying in the outermost of the Out Islands.
“Even the Haitians steered around Mayaguana. But what finally did them in was a long drought, just as simple as that. They caught rainwater for everything, and with no rain they were done for unless the government sent down a water barge, but they had to come and fetch it. There was no water system. Then there was a hurricane that took down their power lines, and the island’s main generator failed and it had to be replaced again . . . and Nassau finally threw in the towel. The rest of the Bahamas already had enough problems and Mayaguana was one too many. It was written off. They told them that they’d be resettled someplace better, with health benefits and all that good stuff. They could leave on the mail boat or on the weekly airplane, free passage and no rush, but the electricity was off for good. Almost everybody took them up on the offer. I don’t know what happened to them after they left.
“And do you know the craziest thing? It’s been raining more than ever for the last two years. I guess it’s that volcano up in Iceland they talk about on the radio. They used to need to water their fruit trees with what they caught off their roofs, but not anymore. So now when everything is growing like it’s Florida or Hawaii, all the people are gone. Crazy, huh?”
**
Gino and I listened to Curt’s story, but the others were more interested in making a happy mess behind us on the aft deck throwing a citrus party. Slices of lemons, limes, oranges and pineapple were tried with lip-smacking, moans of pleasure, and surprise that anything could taste so wonderful. The twins were ecstatic, with fruit juices running down their faces.
Sofia brought the three of us old men sitting in the back of the cockpit a sample platter of citrus and pineapple, along with chunks of white coconut meat. A husked coconut is only the size of a big peach, and a few of them had been packed in the string bags with the fruit. Curtis informed us that there was a nearly inexhaustible supply on the island, so eat all you want.
Because we were anchored on calm water the ladies had baked bread, and there was still some butter from the Beaufort market. The mahi leftovers went into cooking a big pot of fish chowder. This happened below decks while we men chatted about Nassau, volcanoes and other important world affairs.
Tala and Sofia informed us of the dinner arrangements and told us when to come below. The three married couples sat across the table from one another: Luke and Jessie in first, then Sofia and Gino in the middle seats, and finally me and Tala on the outside. Boy-girl-boy on my side, the opposite on the other. This was Tala’s idea. Our tall guest sat on the stool at the head of the table. Gino took Jessie’s and Tala’s hands and the rest of us completed the circle. Curt took my hand and Tala’s without hesitation, and his grip was strong.
Gino said the blessing, and after our amens I reflected that this was our Thanksgiving Supper on Abraham’s Bay. When we were finished, we men were encouraged to depart for the deck so that the table could be cleared and made ready for the next sitting. Before we left I gave Tala a special request. After the previous night I wasn’t sure if she’d go along with it.
We resumed our discussions in the cockpit, watching the western sky turn from orange to red to silver. The day rolled into night with the full moon rising at sunset. Finally most of the adults were present to hear Curt’s story. The compass light was switched on. The compass was always our steady center.
Tala brought up a plastic pitcher and cups but she stayed inside the open pilothouse door, so I went to her. She said, so only I could hear, “This is what you asked for, and also it has some coconut milk.” Her amber eyes narrowed to slits and she whispered, “But if you are again like as last night, I may kill you when you are sleeping.”
I took the pitcher and cups and passed them to Gino, saying “Don’t let me get like last night. Tomorrow’s going to be a work day. Above all we have to get a wire forestay on the mainmast. We’re going to turn-to at dawn. No, let’s make it eight. Now pour me a drink—what are you waiting for?”
The pitcher held my suggested recipe of liquor, water and blended citrus juice, along with a little coconut milk. No ice, of course, but that had been the case for years. Jessie brought up her mandolin and sat beside Luke in their usual place at the front of the cockpit facing the rest of us. Without a word she began to play softly, just strumming chords at first.
I told Curt, “Wine, women and song—we have it all. We have everything except a vertical foremast.”
Luke said, “Did you know that in the pirate days, cooks and musicians got a share of the loot even if they didn’t fight? It’s true. Good food and good music make life worth living.”
“And worth fighting for,” Barry added.
The moon was rising over the eastern end of the island. I could make out the unlit BaTelCo tower marking the deserted village of Abraham’s Bay. “Curt, has the light been out on the tower since you got here?”
“Correct, it’s been out. I never saw it, but they told me about it. It’s how fisherman found their way home. There was a red light on top that flashed the Morse code for M, which is dash-dash. They said it could be seen from twenty miles out to sea. Every island big enough for a BTC tower had a letter. B was for Bimini, and so on. The locals said they knew it was all over for their island when BaTelCo shut down their operations. Then there were no more weekly airplanes, only charters, and the mail boat. The mail boat was what they called the supply ship. Near the end it only came once a month. It got harder and harder to live on Mayaguana until they all quit and left. All but the five remainers.”
I said, “And you arrived after that.”
“Yes. And not long after I got here the drought broke and it started raining practically every day. I think that sometimes Mother Nature has a wicked sense of humor. Or is it irony?”
“So what in the world brought you here?” I asked him.
“I was shipwrecked, but I can’t start the story there or it won’t make any sense. I was trying to get back to Florida from Antigua. It’s quite a long story, are you sure you want to hear it? And young lady, you are magnificent on that instrument. Is that called a mandolin?”
“It is, Curt. And my name is Jessie, Jessie Hanahan, and the piratical-looking fellow next to me is my husband Luke.”
Curt stood and reached over the compass to shake their hands. He had an impressive wing span.
Tala came out with a fresh pitcher and said, “Curt, you will sleep on our boat tonight. This is not a problem for us.” She sat between me and the wheel, and Sofia sat by Gino.
She was right, of course. A half-mile open-water dinghy ride back to land in the darkness would be madness. Anything goes wrong with the rig, the sail or the tiller and you’d wind up on the five-mile reef and then out on the open Atlantic.
I said, “Curt, you were telling us how you got here.”
“Yes, I was, but before I continue with that story I have a question for you. Captain Dan, did you build this steel boat?”
“I rebuilt her and I re-engined her and I renamed her, but she was built before I was born. In Holland, I think.”
“That’s what I should have done, gotten a boat, a sailboat. I often thought I should learn how to fly an airplane and how to sail, but I thought it would be simpler and easier to just hire a professional who was already an expert. That was a mistake, thinking I could always hire someone else to take care of my transportation requirements. But I had lots of money. Millions of dollars, in fact. So I thought that I could always hire someone else to get me from point A to point B. Big mistake.”
He paused, and we all exchanged looks after hearing him mention his wealth. After a moment Gino asked him, “How did you come by millions of dollars, Curt?” Our guest looked like a weather-beaten and half-starved retired cowboy, not a trust fund beneficiary or a Wall Street hedge-fund brainiac.
“How? What? Oh, the money. I was an inventor. I worked the oil fields in my youth and my college years, and eventually all over the world. The mechanical stuff always fascinated me. I saved up to go to school and I got an engineering degree. I went back on the rigs but in management, and then I branched out into consulting and that paid for my post-graduate studies. I made my living where metallurgy and fluid dynamics meet. I shared the patent royalties until I figured out the business end. In my best years I made a fortune inventing little gadgets you could carry in your pocket, and big gadgets you’d need a crane to move. I just had a knack for it.”
The image of the emaciated gray-bearded stranger sitting between us did not match the story, but his vocabulary and his diction raised the possibility that he was telling the truth.
Sofia asked him, “Are you married? Do have a family?” That night Sofia and Tala decided to sample the punch, and discovered that they enjoyed it. The clear corn whiskey was more to their taste when it was mixed with water and juice.
“I was married twice, but they didn’t last. I have two families, maybe alive, probably not. Who knows? In Florida and Oklahoma, last I knew. I was trying to get back to Florida, but I’m getting ahead of my story. So, how did I wind up on Mayaguana? That’s the question? Well, I was fifty years old and I decided to cash out. I had millions stashed in banks in three states and about a half million a year in royalties coming in. I bought a place in Oklahoma, a place in Montana, and a place in Florida. Spread the risk, right? They couldn’t all turn out badly, could they? All three places were condos. Turn-key operations. You fly in, you have a place to stay and everything you need is already there. I didn’t want to own a place I had to take care of from long distance. No lawns, no landscaping.
“But I’d also been bitten by the Caribbean bug when I was married to wife number two. We started taking cruises and it grew from there. We lived in South Florida, and Florida is cruise-ship-central. We cruised from Jamaica to Trinidad, but we bought a place in the Virgin Islands because they’re American and that made it easier. We bought a condo on St. Croix, and I let her keep it when we got divorced.
“After we split up I wanted a little more elbow room in my primary location. Elbow room and privacy. Compensation, maybe, for being single again—and for good. Mid-life crisis? I don’t know, maybe. But I wanted a real house, not just another condo, and I didn’t want to be under American jurisdiction anymore, so the U.S. Virgins were out. I wanted a garden and fruit trees, and a swimming pool and a Caribbean Sea view. I looked at a dozen properties on a few different islands before I finally bought my place. Do you know where Antigua is?”
“Sure.” I said. “In the middle of the Leeward Islands. It’s a little country called Antigua and Barbuda. It was British, and if you pronounce it An-tee-goo-ah everybody knows you’re a tourist. They pronounce it like you do: AnTEEga.”
“Right. It was very strategic in the old square-rigger days because it has a few natural harbors. Not so much after that. I bought a hurricane-proof house that was also beautiful to look at. Stucco and tile work like you just wouldn’t believe. Art and architecture, both. It was on a private road and each place had a name. My place was called Double Vision. My property was high up on a point with two different views of the Caribbean Sea, hence its name. Anytime I wanted to travel I could leave by water or by air; I’d just make a call or send a text. A fast boat, a slow boat, an airplane, a seaplane: whatever I needed. And Antigua had an international airport with daily flights to North America and Europe. It was crawling with wealthy ex-pats. Mostly old British money; my spread was just middling.”
“What about water?” I asked him. “Drinking water. The Leewards are pretty dry.”
“I wasn’t worried because I bought the slope uphill and I turned it into a rain catchment. The property above me was too steep to be buildable; so I bought it just for the water runoff. I designed it all and I drew the blueprints. I hired the contractors and I wrote the checks. I used local labor for the cement work, and I imported the pipes and filters and did that work myself. Double Vision already had a swimming pool, and that was my backup water cistern. The island’s electric power was erratic so I brought in another backup generator and I put in a bigger fuel tank. I had enough money and you could still get things shipped in. The water catchment worked so well that during a good rain I could send the overflow to a few of my downhill neighbors, which they really appreciated.
“So there I am on Antigua, and I’m all set. Everything is in place, and I’m watching American cities burning down on my satellite television and on the internet. I was shifting my money around, putting more and more into cash and precious metals. That was my new preoccupation after I quit inventing better widgets. So no matter what happens, I’m all set, right? I have a ten-year supply of food and more water than I’ll ever need. I’m a real genius, sitting there on the patio by the pool looking out over two views of the Caribbean. I’m a master of the universe, just waiting for America’s final collapse. Then I’ll fly home and buy everything I need. It’s paradise, right? I mean, as long as you don’t mind the lonely old bachelor part. With two ex-wives and grown kids you almost never see. But at least I could support them financially, and I did. Gladly.”
Gino refilled his cup and then asked him, “So, Curt, what happened to paradise? It doesn’t sound very happy.”
Chapter 34
“Paradise . . . well, it turns out Antigua had a few fatal flaws. I had enough water for all my needs on my two-acre habitat, but the rest of the island didn’t. Antigua is about a hundred times prettier than Mayaguana, but it’s only a third bigger and it had a hundred thousand people living on it. A hundred thousand people on land that couldn’t sustain ten percent of that number after you cut it off from the world. Just look at Mayaguana, and try to imagine sixty thousand people living on it! Without fresh water and electricity, Mayaguana couldn’t even support three hundred people.
“Ninety percent of Antigua’s food was imported. Eighty percent of the fresh water was made in a desalination plant by reverse osmosis, and that plant ran on oil. So after the tourism dollars dried up and the rich ex-pats started running away, it went to hell real fast. Antigua couldn’t pay for the oil to run the reverse osmosis plant, so there went the drinking water.”
From behind us Barry said, “It’s like pulling the plug on a tropical fish aquarium. I saw it happen in Charleston. To the whole city, I mean. To the people.”
“Indeed.” Curt continued. “Turns out the locals didn’t like the rich ex-pats as much as they pretended to when they were serving us in the bars and restaurants. And they knew about my private water catchment because local labor had built it. I tried to lay low, but everything was falling apart fast. Robberies, carjackings, home invasions, all of that. Antigua is ninety-percent black with a long colonial history, including slave plantations, so it was finally payback time.
“Then I got word from my gardener that a new ‘people’s committee’ had decided that my water system was going to be ‘reallocated’ in order to the serve the common good. ‘All of Antigua’s water belongs to all of Antigua’s people’ was going to be the new policy and the law. I had no idea any of this was coming until my gardener told me. We were both living on the same island but in two different worlds, black and white.”
“Even if the water was captured from rainfall?” I asked.
“Even if. When the rain hits the island, it becomes island water unless it sinks into the ground. They said, “How can you whites have swimming pools, when little babies are dying of thirst?” Hoarding island water was going to become a crime, and I was near the top of the target list. Being a rich white ex-pat went out of style fast. I couldn’t go food shopping—it was too dangerous. And when you pay somebody else to shop for you, the word gets around fast. I could read the writing on the walls, I mean, literally on the walls around the island, and the writing said kill whitey. If I stayed, I’d be living under siege while I’m trying to hold off the natives until doomsday. One white millionaire splashing around in his swimming pool, against the rest of the island. Yeah, good luck with that.
“That’s when I knew I had to get out. The problem was the international financial systems were all failing, and then you couldn’t buy a plane ticket to save your life, or the flights were cancelled. I had two million dollars and euros in a pair of rolling suitcases, but what could I do with all that cash? Thank God I had my precious metals. And my satellite phone worked some of the time, and my sat text worked almost all the time, so I could still make some moves.
“A buddy of mine was a retired Brit, ex-military. Colonel Colin Fletcher. He was my private-road neighbor just downhill. I sent extra water his way, and he plugged me into the ex-pat network. He had a radio license and he played around on the short wave radio, so he could talk to people thousands of miles away. I thought this was just a hobby, an anachronism, but it proved to be quite useful. It was a mostly British scene on our end of Antigua, but it was falling apart fast—and not just on our island. He’d heard on a Caribbean radio net that there had been massacres of whites on Saint Thomas, Saint Croix and Saint Lucia, and that the massacres had come after food riots, and there were food riots starting on Antigua. We knew we had to get out or we’d be trapped and probably meet an ugly end. Colin was aiming for Jamaica, and I was heading to Florida.
“We decided to fly from Antigua to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos, and then catch our next flights from there. He had to visit his safe deposit box. Provo is like the Cayman Islands; it’s wall-to-wall banks. It was just five hundred miles so we chartered a light twin. I paid for it with two ounces of my gold. It took my gold and Colin’s short wave radio to set up the flight. My gardener drove us to the airport in my Range Rover. We ducked down in the back and hid under a blanket. It wasn’t safe for whites then. When he dropped us off I gave him my house keys and I wished him and his family luck.”
What a great novel. Living on Galveston Bay, I especially enjoyed the ending. You are a true inspiration, sailor, and warrior. Thank you.
Thanks for putting up an excerpt here. It’s a handy place, so I hope that you host more of your writings here.
Atlas Shrug