Drinking Beer With Jimmy Buffett

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.