A music tape holder with a white cover sat on a shelf in the
wheelhouse of a 41-foot US Coast Guard patrol boat. On the cover were the words “A1A” and the
album’s authors name, Jimmy Buffett.
Until now my experience with Buffett had been his hit song
“Margaritaville” played on rare occasions on the radio, and the performance of
“Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw” by a cover band during intermission at a rodeo
in Jamestown, North Dakota. That lack of
experience changed today as we slowly moved away from the Coast Guard Station
Marathon dock bound for the Gulf Stream.
Our objective was to check boats for compliance with myriad Federal and
state regulations, to look for bad guys running drugs, and for me to look for
seabirds in the deep blue waters of the Stream.
My first visit to the Keys was in July 1984 while conducting
research on Kirtland’s warbler. We wanted to put tiny radio transmitters on the
backs of the birds and track their movements.
Before doing so we wanted to practice on a more widespread and more
numerous species, and we wanted to do this in habitats and humidity similar to
what we would occur a few months later in the West Indies.
While working at the Florida Key Deer National Wildlife
Refuge on Big Pine Key, I saw the Coast Guard station just up the Keys as an
opportunity to get out on the open ocean to look for birds that live on the
edge of the Gulf Stream. A quick stop at
Station Marathon one day confirmed that I could go along with the Coast Guard
on their Saturday foray out into the Gulf Stream.
When I arrived at Station Marathon, I was given a quick
briefing on how to keep from being thrown overboard if we encountered rough
seas. As we left the dock, Buffett’s
song “Presents to Send You” was playing on the tape and by the time we reached
the Seven Mile Bridge it had switched to “Stories We Could Tell.” The music set the mood for the morning on the
ocean and I was thankful the Coast Guard captain brought the tape with
him. Our laidback Keys Saturday morning
changed rapidly, just as the song “Life is Just a Tire Swing” began, when we
received a call instructing us to be on the lookout for a stolen boat. Hearing this, the captain knew exactly where
to look and we changed course for the Cuban Docks on Vaca Key. Apparently if you are going to rip someone
off and try to hide the boat afterward, the most logical place to try was the
Cuban Docks. The Captain switched off
the tape, instructed his crew to prepare, and we started hunting boats.
We had a description of the boat but to me they all looked
the same. As we made our approach to the
docks the Captain asked me to stand in the bow with my binoculars and read the
registration numbers on the boast as we passed. This was exciting at first but
soon it became boring. That all changed
when we came on to a thirty-foot shrimp boat because sitting in its wheel house
was a simple, lone, unassuming marijuana plant growing in a bucket. Not thinking much of it I casually mentioned
to the Captain that there was a marijuana plant in that boat and was he
interested in it?
He took my binoculars, looked at the potted pot plant and
exclaimed, “I’m going to seize that boat!”
Our plans changed again when the pot plant was found. We docked the Coast Guard vessel next to the
shrimp boat and kept it under surveillance, then radioed the U.S. Customs
Service and the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department to alert them to our
find. Both agencies said they would send
backup. This was followed by the rather
dramatic laying on of guns. Two of the
four Coast Guardsmen were designated the boarding party. It was their responsibility in these situations
to board boats and look for contraband.
The boarding party strapped on their .45 caliber pistols and waited for
Customs and the Sheriff to arrive. In
the mean time I stood with the other two Coast Guardsmen wondering what would
happen next.
Arrival of the reinforcements meant that the boarding party
could jump into action and as they approached the shrimp boat, one of the two
Coast Guardsmen still on the boat went below decks and came out carrying three
12- gauge shotguns. He handed one
shotgun to the boat Captain and then loaded a shell in the chamber of the
second gun and kept it for himself. He
then turned to me.
“You’re a Fed, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but I’m not in law enforcement.”
Thrusting the loaded shotgun in my hands he yelled “If they
shoot, shoot back!”
With their guns drawn, the boarding party approached the
shrimp boat. As instructed, I stood in
the bow of the boat with the shotgun aimed at the wheel house. It was my responsibility to shoot if anyone
shot first. Between them the four-person
boarding party had enough armaments to support a small insurgency in Nicaragua
and as they made their way to the shrimp boat, I maintained my aim at the
unseen doper inside.
With guns drawn the boarding party walked up to the main
door of the shrimp boat and yelled at the occupants to come out. Nobody inside moved. They yelled again and still nobody
moved. At the conclusion of the third
yelling session, one of the Coast Guardsmen on the boat kicked in the
door. I flicked off the safety on my
shotgun. The entire scene reminded me of
a script for some surreal movie but it was real life and real time.
No shots rang out as the four men entered the shrimp boat to
confiscate the lone marijuana plant in the wheel house. After what seemed like an hour inside, they
returned to the main door leading a rather disheveled individual who was
shirtless and shoeless (this was the Florida Keys after all) man with scraggly
hair. His arms were securely behind his
back and his wrists were held together by hand cuffs. The Customs Agent yelled at us and told us
they had found some cocaine on the table along with the malevolent marijuana
plant. He also informed us that we could
take down our arms and prepare to tie off the boat.
With the boat shrimp boat secured to the Coast Guard vessel,
we slowly made our way back to Coast Guard Station Marathon where it was tied
off and guarded by another Coast Guardsman who proceeded to do about face
marches in front of the boat. It was his
responsibility to ensure that nobody came near that shrimp boat unless they
were personally known to the Coast Guardsman.
Should some nefarious individual attempt to board the boat before the
Customs Service could tear it apart, it was this Coast Guardsman’s responsibility
to shoot that person.
Agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency along with Customs and
the Coast Guard began tearing apart the interior of the boat. In the kitchen area they removed an interior
wall and discovered between it and the hull, numerous packages of cocaine. Lots
of cocaine. The Captain of that vessel
sensed something I couldn’t perceive and knew there was more than a single
marijuana plant onboard.
The shrimp boat incident at the Cuban Docks severely cut
into our time on the ocean but the Coast Guard had made a promise to me that
they would get me offshore to look for birds.
After finishing our paperwork and interviews we again left the dock
headed for the open ocean. As we passed
under Seven Mile Bridge, we received a call from Marathon but instead of
telling us to go back to the Cuban Docks to look for another boat, it was Coast
Guard Station Marathon wishing us a successful trip.
The water was a little rough when we returned to the ocean
but the Captain was undeterred. With the
A1A tape blaring over the hum of the engines, he explained that the best
possible duty station for him was the Florida Keys.
“I knew I wanted to be here the first time I saw Jimmy
Buffett in concert,” he said. His tour
in the Keys was quickly coming to an end and he said he knew already he was
going to miss it.
“Where are you going next?” I asked.
“Kodiak, Alaska,” he said.
I mentioned the obvious, that Kodiak was an awful long way,
in the wrong direction, from the Florida Keys and the Captain agreed. “I’ll just take my Buffett tapes with me and
they will keep me warm.”
I hadn’t thought much about Buffett until that day but after
hearing the A1A album, named in part for the Keys Highway, all day long that
Saturday, I was starting to get hooked.
I especially liked his song “Migration.”
It contains the verse, “Now most of the people who retire in Florida are
wrinkled and they lean on a crutch. And
mobile homes are smothering my Keys, I hate those bastards so much.” I hadn’t been in the Keys long but already I
was becoming annoyed by development and I was beginning to look at mobile homes
with the same disdain Buffett had. I was
beginning to like this guy.
Two days later in a music store in Key West I purchased the
tape of every Buffett album they had in stock and soon I was listening to
nothing buy Buffett. I took those tapes
with me when I was in the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, and quickly
realized that what Buffett sang about in “Margaritaville”, a place where your
most difficult task was searching for a lost shaker of salt, was exactly how I
wanted to live my life. I wanted to live
that life style and wanted to live it now.
The only problem was I was more than 20 years from retirement, I had
mountains of child support to pay on top of other bills laid on me by a
benevolent judge in the Stutsman County divorce court in North Dakota. I needed to stay working or wind up in
jail. Perhaps the easiest way to live a
Buffett lifestyle until I could retire was to do so through his music.
Some years later while stationed in Nebraska, I began
writing letters to Buffett hoping to get him engaged in environmental issues on
the Platte River. Nothing could help our
cause more than to have a famous singer of his caliber as a spokesperson for
the river and its cranes. Then I made my
first trip to Cuba and sent my trip report to him because of his apparent love
for the island from everything he said in his songs. After maybe five or six
letters to him, I finally received a reply and it was because of the Cuba trip. While there I saw a species related to the
American robin called the Cuban solitaire.
Jimmy wanted to know if that was a bird people could see in the harbor
in Havana. I wrote back and said it
wasn’t. Jimmy wrote back again and
explained that he was writing a book (“Where is Joe Merchant?”) that would
include a scene where a pilot was headed to Alaska and passed over the Platte
River during the peak of sandhill crane migration. He wanted to know what the area would look
like to a pilot so he could put that in his book.
I sent him several papers I had published about sandhill
cranes and also sent him a short movie produced by the Platte River Whooping
Crane Trust. It contained several
minutes of video of huge flocks of cranes flying to and from the river at
sunrise and sunset and that video would give him a sense for what the area was
like with the sky covered in cranes. A
month or so later I received another letter.
This one contained part of a chapter from Where is Joe Merchant. Jimmy was asking if I would read it for biological
accuracy.
One week after arriving in the Keys I was in Buffett’s
office on Fleming Street in Key West. I
went there to interview his business manager, Sunshine Smith, as part of my
research about attitudes toward the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Florida
Keys. Hanging on the wall next to where
I sat was a picture of Buffett with some fans and I casually mentioned to Sunshine,
“One day I am going to have my picture taken with him.”
She smiled and asked “Did you know Jimmy is holding a
benefit concert this Saturday in Fort Lauderdale?”
I didn’t.
She said, “The show is sold out but I think I can get you
tickets.” I was then given directions to
the venue and told where to go to find my tickets when we arrived.
With typical crazy South Florida traffic, it took Jon and me
nearly four hours to drive from Big Pine Key to the Sunrise Amphitheater on
East Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale.
We found it despite heavy rush hour traffic, parked our car, dressed in
our Buffett concert garb, and entered through the main entrance. Signs pointed us to Will Call and there we
picked up our tickets. Attached to the
two concert tickets were two other tickets.
“What are these?” I asked.
“Oh, those are backstage passes to meet Mr. Buffett.”
We found Sunshine Smith, gave her the passes and she brought
us in through a rear entrance on the side of the concert hall. There, sitting on stage, was Jimmy Buffett
tuning his guitar. We waited where
Sunshine told us to stay while she went on stage. She bent over Jimmy and said, “Jimmy, your
ornithologist is here.”
Buffett said “What?
Craig Faanes is here?”
He put down his
guitar, jumped off the stage and walked toward Jon and me. Reaching us he stuck out his hand and said “Hi,
I’m Jimmy Buffett”
Like I didn’t know that?
He then commented that we were appropriately dressed for the
occasion. As I shook his hand I said “You
know Jimmy, this is the first time in my life I have ever been speechless.” A quizzical look crossed his face as he said,
“Speechless? The way you write letters how in hell can you be speechless? Let’s go have a beer.”
Accompanying him behind the stage we went into a large room
where a huge spread of food was laid out and next to it a cooler full of beer. Jimmy reached into the cooler, took out three
bottles of Corona and opened each one.
He handed one to Jon, one to me, and then took a seat. We spent the next thirty minutes alone with
Jimmy talking about politics (he’s a screaming liberal), bone fishing in the
Bahamas, his music, where he gets the ideas for his songs (by watching people),
and the general decline in the health of the human environment.
Nearing time for him to go on stage I mentioned that of all
his songs, “Migration” from the A1A album, that I first heard that day on the
Coast Guard vessel from Coast Guard Station Marathon, was my all-time most
favorite song. I added that despite
seeing him in concert about 15 times at this point I had never heard him sing
it in concert. We shook hands and
thanked him for the experience, then left for the concert hall.
Our seats were dead center, two rows back from the
stage. We could have spit and hit
Buffett had we wanted. We were that
close. When he took the stage to a
tumultuous uproar, he thanked everyone for coming, explained the purpose of
this fundraising concert was to kick start an effort of his to protect West
Indian manatees in Florida, and then began singing his first song. It was “Migration.” When he finished, he looked straight at me, gave
me a thumbs up, and then moved on to his second song.
For more than twenty years the US Fish and Wildlife Service
had been doing battle with the Florida Department of Transportation about
reducing the speed limit from 45 miles per hour to 35 miles per hour where US
Highway 1 crosses Big Pine Key. Our
concern through all of those years, was the large number of Key deer that were
being killed by collisions with vehicles on US 1. We reasoned that if the speed limit was
reduced, the deer would be less likely to be killed in collisions, especially
at night. Our argument made perfect
sense but it fell on increasingly deaf ears in the Florida Department of
Transportation office in Tallahassee.
That was until we sat backstage with Jimmy Buffett at a
manatee concert on Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. After the concert we composed a letter to
Buffett and typed it on Fish and Wildlife Service letterhead. We laid out the issue with speed limits, with
the lack of response from the Department of Transportation and wondered, since
he had done public service announcements for the refuge, if he could do one
more thing to protect its resources.
Could Jimmy contact the Department of Transportation and ask them to
reduce the speed limit to 35 miles per hour on Big Pine Key?
We sent the letter and anxiously waited for a reply. A written one never arrived but about two
weeks after writing to Buffett, the Assistant Manager of the refuge excitedly
ran into the office to report that the Florida Department of Transportation was
out on US Highway 1 right now changing all of the speed limit signs from 45
miles per hour to 35 miles per hour. The
impetus for this change in heart on the part of Transportation was unknown but
we had our suspicions.
Doing some sleuthing we discovered that Buffett had received
our letter and called his friend Lawton Chiles, the Democratic governor of Florida
with whom Jimmy had done several projects for the protection of Florida’s
environment. He asked the Governor if he
could possibly change the speed limit to protect those deer on Big Pine Key
from certain death at the hand of speeding drivers.
Lawton Chiles received the letter in the morning. By noon he had signed a gubernatorial decree
declaring that the speed limit on US Highway 1 as it passed through the entire
length of Big Pine Key shall not exceed 35 miles per hour. A courier took the decree from the Governor’s
office over to the Director of the Department of Transportation and by late
afternoon crews were reducing the speed limit to protect the deer.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service had tried unsuccessfully
for 20 years to have the speed limit reduced.
It took Jimmy Buffett two weeks to make it happen. Some purists will argue that it’s not fair
when someone with power or influence moves mountains and makes things happen
and that is partially true. If I can
accomplish something that protects natural resources by contacting someone
famous and well-connected, I will do that in a flash rather than worry about
appearances. So, too, will everyone else
who cares.
