Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Of course, I didn’t know any of this stuff when, in December 1973, fresh from a university miseducation, I decided to step back from the forthcoming betrayals of the nascent Me Generation. I didn’t know, for instance, that Providence islanders, in the words of one anthropologist, were keen on generating hypotheses concerning the whereabouts of the treasure, or that over the years they had dynamited and dug up the length and breadth of Catalina, and a good many sites on Providence, or that the Colombian government itself had sent soldiers to excavate the old ruin believed to be Morgan’s fort—everybody down here running, in effect, a high fever searching in vain for pirate’s gold.

  Actually, I had never even heard of an island named Old Providence when I boarded the cheapest flight in Miami that would deposit me, at least technically, on Latin American soil. The flight’s destination was San Andrés, the main island in an off-the-map archipelago and a budding Colombian resort. From there I planned to boat-hop to the continent in pursuit of a romantic’s itinerary, the adventurous dreams of youth: I wanted to sweat in the oceanic jungles of the Amazon, scale the Andes, surf in Peru and Brazil, smell the fires of revolution igniting. Free and restless, I had just turned twenty-two and wanted out—out being not only a destination but a hazily imagined lifestyle.

  I never made it, though, to the South American mainland. On the flight down, fate’s ever-playful travel agent booked me a seat next to a fellow I had observed in Miami checking in an egregious amount of excess baggage: footlockers, duffel bags, scuba tanks, an air compressor no one could lift. He had gleaming eyes, a brush mustache, and hair like a clown’s wig, and from the start he impressed me as a genius of self-importance. As we entered Cuban airspace, he began to fiddle with a long cardboard tube, removing nautical charts that he rudely unscrolled in my face.

  “Here,” he said without even looking at me, “hold the end of this.”

  With the index finger of his free hand, he tapped three or four meaningless spots clustered in the archipelago we jetted toward, mumbling to himself and behaving like an ass. Impatience, not curiosity, got the best of me.

  “All right already,” I said. “What’s your story?”

  Howard was a dive instructor from Chicago who had once worked in Isla Mujeres, where he had befriended an American couple—Tay and Linda Maltsberger—who now lived in Providence, and somehow were in possession of an exclusive license from the Colombian government permitting them to salvage old shipwrecks in the clump of islands. Since we were both cheapskates, that night Howard and I shared the expense of a hotel room in San Andrés. In the morning before he left on the weekly flight to Providence, Howard made a most casual, semi-serious invitation: Should I happen to be in the neighborhood, he’d teach me how to scuba dive. The impulse to take that forty-eight-mile detour, I have since thought, was tantamount to trading a massive illusion for a small unknown. In my imagination the continent struck an obscene pose, pursed her lips, and beckoned me with a gesture of unlimited possibilities, yet here I was contemplating a blind date with an unheralded island I felt no special interest in. I’ll go for a week, I told myself, but the week ballooned into a year as Providence began, however clumsily, to shape me into a writer.

  An old raconteur once suggested that one-third of all criminals are nothing but failed adventurers and that the vocation of adventurer is ultimately as tragic as that of youth. Even in the best of circumstances, treasure hunting is a slippery business, 98 percent bluster, bravado, and self-delusion, and when the bullshit stops, treachery has been known to rewrite the script. Typically, a salty impresario will con a group of investors into financing what amounts to a wild-goose chase. On Providence’s reefs, however, centuries-old wrecks weren’t difficult to find—the locations of at least a dozen were common knowledge among the local fishermen—but without the equipment or resources to salvage them, such information fell into the category of useless.

  When I landed in Providence, two weeks after Howard, and tracked him down, I was grateful for his effusive welcome, only partially tempered by his announcement that, if I went halves, he could now afford to rent a launch.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said, amazed. “You’re going to salvage a galleon, but you don’t have a boat?!”

  It could have been worse, I suppose. He did, after all, have the air compressor and scuba gear—the first on the island. My career as a treasure salvor began and ended with our third dive, which also was my last with crazy Howard. My journal entry, dated January 24, 1974, begins: Our object was a Spanish galleon sunk 300 years ago ¾ of a mile off Morgan’s Head on the island of Santa Catalina. Reading this today, twenty years after it was penned by my adolescent hand, I wonder, however briefly, if I made it up. Is it early evidence that I was already being influenced by the islanders’ habit of thought that aggressively blurred the lines between fact and fiction? For instance, what about those details? How did I know the wreck was three hundred years old, a galleon, or even Spanish? Did Linda or Captain Tay tell me, or are these morsels of verisimilitude my own invention?

  Whatever the case, we did indeed dive that day on the visible remains of a ship lost during the colonial epoch—a scenario that would have produced yawns in Hollywood. After snorkeling all morning across a grid of reef off Catalina, we spotted what we were hunting—a prosaic mound of ballast rock, round as the cobblestones that paved the alleys and esplanades of the New World. We skin-dived down four fathoms—as generations of former wreckers might well have done—to inspect a brass cannon nestled in the sand, and an enormous fluked anchor nearly twice my length, cantered against the rock pile. I recovered a page-size sheet of whitened lead, an oxidized iron or silver rod with four symmetrical nodes on its crown, coral-encrusted shards of amphora. Fixing the general location in our memories, we moved up the reef to spearfish and then returned to Providencia for lunch. A small crowd had gathered on the dock, anxious to learn if we had found Morgan’s treasure. No matter what we said, it was assumed we were hauling up gold by the bucketful. My journal advises me that I was too excited to speak, and that someone commented on the wild, lusty look in our eyes. After lunch, Howard and I returned to the site with tanks and crowbars. The journal entry ends anticlimactically, but with a trite and grandiose flourish: We found nothing of great significance, except to me, but we know of two more galleons, and these have never been dived on—so there is this possibility called tomorrow.

  Christ.

  We were the most hapless bunch of treasure hunters the world has seen, our naïveté only exceeded by our incompetence. I’m not entirely sure why, but I never dove on a wreck again. Anytime we took a boat out to the reef, however, it seems, now, the entire island grumbled: Dem fellas takin’ we gold. We had the license, the scuba gear; we were gringos. We were chronically half-assed, but that trait seemed to elude the isleños. In their minds, two plus two equaled millions, equaled Morgan’s treasure.

  Meanwhile, a better story unfolded, far richer in potential: the island itself, its astounding beauty, and the fascinating singularity of its people. I rented a house on the beach in Old Town, on the other side of the harbor from Town (which no one called by its actual name, Santa Isabel). The house had no furniture and, like everyone else’s, no running water (we bucketed water out of a cistern squirming with mosquito larvae), and though it was one of the rare houses in Old Town with electricity, the power plant only managed to function three hours in the morning and two more in the late afternoon, keeping the fishmongers’ freezers in a state of perpetual thaw.

  I purchased a kerosene stove and lamp, removed the kitchen door from its hinges for a table, with seats made from driftwood, ordered a hammock from Moraduck the hammock-maker in Lazy Hill, and began to feel, with an overwhelming inner sense of arrival, at home—a feeling that my new neighbors, welcoming me with fresh-baked johnnycakes and plates of food, did not discourage.

  For twelve dollars I became the owner of Reeva, a spirited Paso Fino, and we began
to explore the island, galloping bareback on the palm-lined beach at Southwest Bay, reining the horse into the turquoise ocean until the bottom fell away and we swam together in liquid air, my hand wrapped in Reeva’s black mane. In rum shops I sipped the local moonshine—called Jump Steady or Jom’s Toddy—and heard the braggadocio of the fishermen. Ingesting the mushrooms called duppy caps—duppy meant “ghost”—I climbed into the mountains whacked out of my mind to stand on the peaks in the raging wind, the sea an expanse of fox fire and tumbled jewels below me.

  Howard moved in and set up his compressor on the veranda; so did a woman named Beth, from Friday Harbor in Puget Sound, whose brother had once worked for the Maltsbergers in Honduras. I began courting the only available Latina on the island—twenty-year-old Marta, uprooted from an upper-class life in Bogotá with her younger sister, Clara, and two little brothers and transplanted unhappily in this most remote of places by her beautiful but slightly demented and unforgiving mother, a relative of the Archbishop of Colombia, who exiled herself and children to an alien paradise upon learning of her husband’s infidelity. Marta’s overprotective mother despised me, ­naturally—I was the first boyfriend of her oldest and favorite child. She’d come hammering on my front door to rescue Marta from my caresses; her shrieks would send Marta dashing out the back door, scurrying across the mudflats to be home waiting not so innocently for madre’s tempestuous return.

  Life for all of us grew more immediate, less gold struck, more devoted to the quotidian pleasures of survival, island dramas, the textures and subtleties of a community where poverty intensified, rather than corroded, the honest joys of existence. Assimilating into their rhythms, we flared with modern schemes for short periods, then relapsed into timeless slothful bliss, taking to our hammocks with a book, savoring our Cuba libres. The Maltsbergers’ efforts to lure investors into the wonderful world of treasure hunting never got far off the ground. Linda and I came up with an idea to write a cookbook, but the project lost momentum and nothing ever came of it. I pitched articles to magazines, collaborated with a photographer, worked tenaciously, ran out of money . . . and nothing ever came of that either.

  Before long I went native, joining up with a pair of Old Town ­spearfishermen—Raimundo Lung and Gabriel Hawkins—leaving before dawn each morning to sail out of sight of land in Mundo’s lanteen-rigged catboat, learning the labor, fear, and glory of their profession and bringing home dinner to a house now crammed with a revolving-door ensemble of wanderers, outcasts, and expatriates. Then the collective magnificent weave of the year unraveled and overnight, it seemed, we were all gone, riding away on the currents to our separate futures, leaving behind in our wake a minor but nagging contribution to the island’s mythology, another screwy installment in Providencia’s leitmotif of gold.

  To tell the truth, I did not want to go back. For a long time, that’s how I felt.

  Coming back, though, was also part of the ethos of Old Providence, as was the act of leaving. “What defines islanders,” says the writer P. F. Kluge, “is not the way they live on islands but the way they move between them.” The islands—all islands—depended on the human flow. On the profound restlessness that leads to self-exile; on remittance; on the magnanimous return of the prodigal son. Travel as a rite of passage into manhood or some variety of marriage.

  This is what happened when you lived on a remote island, an unimaginable distance from the push and shove of things, the commerce and convenience of the temperate latitudes and the developed world, the dubious but seductive advance of the nuclear age and its postmodern spawn. An island where men, under their own power, went to the sea each day for their living, challenging its caprice in the smallest of boats. Where families took to the sea on holidays, to visit and to celebrate. Where obtaining a government permit, or buying a bag of cement, or keeping a doctor’s appointment meant risking the hazards of the sea. One day you were talking with someone, playing cards with him, dancing with her. The next day they were never to be seen again, and you were dreaming of them falling, slowly, with macabre beauty and grace, through the blue, ever-darkening thickness of space, and the dream never stopped but at its bottom lay all your missing friends, looking up through the water at the moon.

  Here is what I remember:

  Shortly before dawn each morning, Mundo would send his little girls down the beach to wake me, like songbirds. Mistah Bob, they’d whisper cautiously. Mistah Bob, they’d whisper through the open slats of my window, their melodic voices barely audible over the lap and hiss of the lagoon. Me faddah say you sleepin’ long enough, mahn. I would growl theatrically, they would giggle. Mundo say git up, Mistah Bob. Is time to go fishenin. They were beautiful cherub-faced girls with gap-toothed sunny smiles. I could see their silhouettes in the lavender light of the window, their long wavy tresses braided and beribboned, the pleasing line of their plaid school dresses. Mistah Bob, they’d persist, Mistah Bob, until I threw open the door and stooped for their quick kisses, and that would be the end of our lovely game.

  The year 1976 was the last time Mundo and I exchanged letters. His read: Bob, I have a sad story to tell you. My two daughters went to San Andres for Christmas and on their way back the Betty B [an old inter-island cargo and passenger boat] burst open and more than half the people drown. You must just know how I feel. Margarita and Virginia died.

  With great reluctance I had sailed on the Betty B myself, and I had sailed on the Acabra too, which was even less seaworthy than the Betty B, and proved it by sinking first, only a few months after I had sailed away from Providence, overcrowded with passengers but close enough to shore for all hands to be saved. And a month or so later, my friend Captain Ibsen Howard would disappear one night in the passage between San Andrés and Providencia, washed overboard his own boat in heavy seas.

  However you got yourself to Providence, your faith in everything—God, man, technology, yourself—was sorely tested by the voyage, and never so wantonly as when you flew Cessnyca and its nine-passenger twin-engine Beechcraft, apparently maintained by obeah priests. My final letter to Mundo, hastily scrawled from the Windward Islands in the summer of 1976, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer, was to report that I had been assaulted and stabbed; stay tuned, I wrote, because further conflict seemed to be brewing. Except for that one night in my life when someone woke me in my bed and tried to kill me, I had never experienced moments of sheer terror except courtesy of Cessnyca.

  On my inaugural flight during December’s stormy weather, the fucking pilot knelt on the tarmac, crossed himself, and prayed before boarding the plane in front of me. Airborne, we roller-coastered through tremendous thunderheads, my surfboard levitating in the aisle. On my second flight to Providence, the pilot lost control of the steering as we touched down, the dirt runway turned to muddy soup from a recent downpour, and we crashed sideways through a stone wall, coming to rest in a mangrove swamp. Another day, my photographer friend arrived at the airstrip to find the flight crew wrapping a rope around one propeller and yanking it, the way you would a lawn mower, to start the engine.

  Twenty years later, getting on and off Providence still seemed like risky business, at least psychologically if not statistically. By the time I arrived in San Andrés from Bogotá I was understandably wired and struggling against a creeping sense of depression. No surprise to see that San Andrés hadn’t changed much—its fate was to be a teeming, overbuilt tropical shithole, eternally engaged in the process of making itself uglier, a low-lying featureless free port roamed by sunburned hordes of Colombia’s equivalent of Kmart shoppers, loading up on faulty appliances. The only difference seemed to be that now the mafia—meaning, the cocaine cartels—was doing its laundry here, building tacky mansions and chintzy resorts, apparently designed by architects using the Jersey shore for their aesthetic model.

  On the other hand, San Andrés’s frenetic shabbiness had always been the perfect foil for the purity of Providence’s unassailable beauty, multiplying a tra
veler’s sense of thanksgiving and wonder, seeing for the first time its exotic peaks, its stunning cobalt reefs, its raw charms, experiencing the midwestern hospitality of its people. Island-style here was an irresistible production, sort of a blend between Sinbad the Sailor and Little House on the Prairie, performed by a very mellow all-black cast directed by uptight, but absentee, South Americans. The kind of destination you truly only connected with in your imagination, because its existence was oftentimes too good to be true. A place endangered, ultimately, by your desires.

  If leaving was a mistake, I figured coming back had the potential to shake out as an even bigger one. Why break my heart reconfirming the trend, proving to myself that Providence was, after all, neither a quirky utopia nor an idyllic glitch, but a doomed fragment of a fragile, shrinking world? When the developers and speculators deployed—as surely a battalion had by now—who was going to be the fool who played Diogenes, rejecting their temptations, scoffing at their inevitability? Twenty years ago, I listened to the alcalde of Providencia tell me that he hoped the personality of the island never budged, never came to resemble San Andrés. “I watch my children riding horses bareback into the sea,” he said wistfully. “I leave my doors open at night knowing no one will enter and put a knife in my back. We live in peace and to destroy this would be a serious crime. If we can reject the influences of big capital, if we only allow the building of cabanas and reject any project bigger than this, then we can preserve our home in all its natural beauty.”

  Twenty years ago I believed this guy but now, as I sat eating my lunch at a little makeshift restaurant near the airport, waiting for the SAM flight to Providence, I entertained grave doubts that his vision, however sincere, could have withstood the onslaught of the forces playing late-century hardball capitalism in this part of the world. Reject the influences of Big Money? Yeah, right, I thought sarcastically. I fretted that I was coming back too late yet I didn’t know, I had lost touch absolutely, and since Providence was so vital a part of my past, had performed in fact a catalytic role in my self-definition, it was time I found out. As if, in judging Providence after twenty years of distance, I would also be measuring the life I had led against the life I might have lived, had I remained behind or had dismissed the impact Providence had delivered to my heart and soul. And what of Marta, whose mother had denied her the twentieth century by flinging her backward into the primitive world of a colonial pioneer? What of the two fishermen who had allowed me to share their lives as well as their boat—Gabriel, who had made me his brother, and Mundo, in so many ways my father?