Dave Barry - Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

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.”

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.