When I was a boy, I traveled compulsively and relentlessly. Once I learned to walk, it was short order before I began to climb beside my mother to the exotic megaliths of Tolum and Ek-Balam, or wade, chest-deep, through the dense vegetation of the Great Ape forests of Sabah. Even now I reflect on my travels to Fiji with a near-mythical reverence. I still find opportunities to parade out memories of seeking out horseshoe crabs on isolated islets near Rio Lagartos and sharing hand-rolled bread with native artisans beneath a shroud of mosquito netting in Belize. As far as conversation starters go, I find them to be reasonably effective, and it does me good to reflect on what I consider a far better time in my life.
Perhaps my favorite tale to share is, as it were, one of my most outlandish. I was seven. It begins on an altogether cramped little airplane, followed by a brief stint aboard an unbelievably yet undeniably smaller airplane into Edward Bodden Little Cayman Airfield, whose substantial name almost ran over the building to which it belonged. Our hotel was an idyllic, multicolored bastion of comfort on the very edge of one of the island’s coasts. The Cayman Islands remain popular for a number of reasons, of course, but two are chief among them. The first is the truly immense man-eating blue dragons (who are, I later discovered, both herbivorous and largely disinterested in the goings-on of people) that freely roam the Caymans. These miraculous iguanas were one of my earliest interactions with the odd quirk of island gigantism – the trend of island-dwelling creatures to be much larger than mainland counterparts – and they added greatly
to the mythical air of the islands. Indeed, my only real distractions from the rich history of the Caymans involved following unperturbed blue dragons around as they meandered around the reserve.
The second thing the Caymans are especially known for is the legacy of the mad pirate Edward Teach. Better known perhaps as Blackbeard, he ruled the surrounding seas for many years. I was utterly delighted by this, and I didn’t have to wait long after signing in to find the first confirmation of their long history there. Having fallen hopelessly in love with the myths and legends of the wild and free adventurers in my history books, I had come to the conclusion that pirates were inexorably, undeniably, relentlessly cool. I can’t say the new breadth of my historical knowledge has much changed that fact.
Though I knew in my heart that the world had moved on from the days of dashing/devilish buccaneers/cutthroats on the open seas, it seemed to me as if little bits and pieces of their lives had been bottled up and placed neatly atop the sub-aquatic shelf; presumably waiting for someone just like me to come along and wipe away the dust. I set off to do just that. The very next morning, I dragged my mother to a secluded cavern so deeply suffuse with moss and plant-life that it felt like the great hollow center of some unspeakably ancient tree to see what was appropriately called the “Pirates’ Caves”. The next day, I sailed out to a replica Spanish galleon on an old wooden dinghy driven by a silent Caribbean man who seemed to my childish eyes to be at least a thousand feet tall.
Much has changed since my childhood, and I find adventure not so accessible as once it was, but I think of the pirates often. I can still see bits and pieces of them, smiling gap-toothed smiles beneath twinkling eyes and sun-stained eye-patches, in the stories I tell today. That profound, childish sense of awe is still lodged somewhere in the depths of my mind, stubbornly reminding me that the world doesn’t have to be the dismal shadow on the wall it sometimes seems to be. If I squint my eyes a little more and look a little farther, I might just see pirates on the horizon.
Photo: Ruth Tomlinson / robertharding / Getty Images