Where do these people come from?

Jack
Wednesday, December 8. I have no idea why I just wrote that. It’s Saturday, I think. Or, they SAY it is anyway. I don’t believe them. I think it’s still today. Whatever it is.
I’m having that weird and wondrous strange feeling you have when you’re hungover. When everything’s kind of in slow motion, and strange, and kind of funny. And all of your nerves are raw from being up late last night drinking Guinness, and playing checkers with old guys named “Telephone,” and Charlie. And Hugh, who became an American citizen so he could fight in Viet Nam and lost some of his fingers. And because all of your nerves are experiencing the opposite of the depressant effect of the alcohol since it has now worn off, you feel excitable, and all of your emotions are cranked up another 75%. Everything is a big deal. Like this morning when we went back to the place we ate last night because the food was so incredible, and a guy asked about my “Lucky” tattoo, and I told him it’s not a nickname, but rather something that’s on my arm to tell you guys how I feel because I have you all. And I told him it just brought tears to my eyes to say it, and it did.

Anyway, here I am again. Still in Nassau. We had expected to pull out the day before yesterday, but Peter the harbormaster said it was okay, we could stay the night at no charge. So naturally, we stayed two more nights. (Oh, quick side note: Peter was quoted as saying he liked our boat, among all the other boats in that marina, all these huge, amazing, expensive boats, and he said he’d like to have one like… ours. The way we set it up. With the solar panels, and all that. How incredibly flattering to me. Of all these boats…) And now tonight, and we told him we’re staying again, because we’re still trying to email home, and make sure our dogs are okay, etc., and he charged us for one night only. People are so amazingly nice here, it’s like the opposite of usual with strangers, it’s like Christmas and everyone’s trying to give more to the person around them than they’re receiving, and you end up with this flurry of abundance and you’re sitting in the middle of it scratching your head, and the only thing that makes any sense is the tattoo on your arm.

Last night, we went to a place called Potter’s Cay, even though it’s still on the island. It’s a few blocks, under the bridge to Paradise Island, which is like the Bloomfield Hills of Nassau. What it is is where poor people hang out, old guys are playing checkers and dominoes, and drawing a crowd, and they even invited me to play and tore me into little pieces in about two seconds. It was sweet. There’s these plywood buildings, like fifteen in a row, 10x10, all touching, with people inside making cracked conch (sliced, breaded, and fried, with French fries), and conch salad and not much else. Conch salad is amazing. I think it may be the best food on the entire planet, and not just because if you eat it it adds 10 years to your life (per serving), but because of how it tastes. It’s made up of:

Conch, raw, sliced, chopped and slathered up with lime juice
Raw onions, slathered up with lime juice
Barely pink tomatoes, maybe a bit green even,
More lime juice
That’s it. And you can get a bit of Scotch Bonnet pepper, the hottest in the world, with a nice flavor, and mix it in, and if you’re totally insane, you can put it in and start to eat without mixing it thoroughly.

But it is, as my mother would say, “a bowl of health.” It is AMAZING. Better than you would ever imagine the sum of these parts could be. The meat, in the lime juice, becomes tender, and is the purest, whitest flesh you can imagine. And the onions react with the lime juice, so you don’t have any of the heat of the raw onion, just the sweet crunch. Incredible food. Absolutely incredible. I think it’s the culinary highpoint of human experience, thus far. Just perfect. Could not be improved. And you get it for 6 bucks or something, and they take a big bowl, and pile it high like it’s a giant bowl of soft serve ice cream. Like three times taller than the bowl it’s in. Just stacked up there, and they’re like “here you go,” like it was just a normal everyday thing. Absolutely incredible.

And there’s few tourists, mostly locals. And you help yourself when you want another beer. You just walk back behind the counters and get another one. The Guinness is the kind we used to get in Detroit but can’t anymore, without the nitrogen capsule, in a bottle, served cold. And it’s 7.5%, and Michelle and Gavin and Nathan keep sticking another in your hand like every two seconds, and then at the end of the night, pick up the check. Something in the water?

I told Gavin about the book “How the Scottish invented the modern world,” and another book “How the Irish saved civilization,” because he and Michelle are from Ireland. And he said “Again?” And then he said “I knew the Scottish had invented copper wire.” I said, “Oh, yeah?” He said “Two Scotsman fighting over a penny.” That killed me.

They’re traveling with our friend Nathan, who lives on the catamaran with them, and helps crew it for diving expeditions. Another great guy, and funny as the day is long. Cool guy. We’re going to come back up in mid January and go out for some dives with him.

Speaking of good people (all I ever get a chance to write about anymore… did I mention that I’m typing on Tom Deater’s computer?), we just had two people come ask us all about our boat. They wanted to know all about how we’re doing it, and that was quite flattering, because the guy had been a captain and lived on a boat for years. Their names were… drum roll… Laura and Peter. (might be a sign, you guys).

Less than ten minutes later, we just had ANOTHER guy stop us and ask us about our boat. He said there’s rough weather coming in, a low (pressure system). 5 minutes into the conversation, he told us he’s going to try to find the GPS coordinates of a free, safe, mooring that he knows of that has no buoy. You dive for it. So in this big city, it’s unused, and he’s going to offer it to us. While he’s paying for dockage.

DOES THIS MADNESS EVER END?