was the light source for this and many other old lighthouses.
So how does a cowboy wind up as a lighthouse keeper? Well, I didn’t fill out any job application. How I went from the saddle, to the deck of a schooner, to the tower of this lighthouse still baffles me. But I believe in the aboriginal line of thinking that life’s adventures are the verses and choruses of your unique song, and when it is over, you are dead. So far, I am still singing, but I would point out that adventures don’t come calling like unexpected cousins visiting from out of town. You have to go looking for them, and that is exactly how I wound up on Cayo Loco.
I saw Cayo Loco for the first time from the deck of the Lucretia. All I knew about lighthouses up until that point was that they were warning lights, and they marked some kind of trouble. I’d heard a few stories, and I’d met a guy who had some theories about them, but that was it. I sat in a dinghy next to Cleopatra as the crew pulled for the shore, and the lighthouse loomed so huge that I had to lean my entire head back just to see the top.
“This is it,” Cleopatra said to me as we made our way toward the beach. “I traded those bumbling bureaucrats in Nassau a building they needed for a Junkanoo museum on Bay Street for her. I think we both came out okay. All we have to do is fix her up and get the light back in shape.”
“No problem,” I said, shrugging. After what I had recently been through, fixing up an old lighthouse sounded like a piece of cake.
As the bottom of the dinghy brushed against the shallow sand, Cleopatra sprang to the beach like a teenager. I had to laugh. Three months earlier, my life was rolling by at a snail’s pace, and I was sitting on the beach in Mexico, wondering if the day would ever end. Then, all of a sudden, a ship carries me to a completely foreign place that would now become my home.
Solomon, Cleopatra’s first mate, buried the anchor in the sand. All you had to do was look at his huge body, his kind eyes, and his weathered hands to know that he was the kind of person you wanted running your crew and your ship. “I’ll stay with da boat, Cap’n,” he said.
“Then I’ll be the tour guide,” Cleopatra said. She nodded at a narrow path up through the dunes. “Welcome to Cayo Loco, Tully Mars.”
The well-worn path from the beach snaked up through the small dunes and then disappeared up the hill into a cluster of sea oats. We stopped at the top of the hill and looked down on the wreckage of time. With the exception of the light tower itself, the place looked as if someone had dropped a bomb on it. The concrete walls of what had been the compound of the lighthouse keeper came into view. The windows had been blown out, and the roof had been partially burned off.
We made our way through the overgrown paths, pushing back thorny bougainvillea bushes, sea grapes, and hibiscus blooms that camouflaged more destruction.
“This is the old cistern,” Cleopatra said as we walked across a large rectangle. “This place was one of the first spots on earth where they made freshwater out of salt water. Those damn limeys have a strange fascination for remote and desolate places, but you got to hand it to them—they knew how to bring creature comforts to the boondocks. When Solomon’s father was the light keeper here, this place was a little piece of paradise. There was a vegetable garden, flowered paths, and even a manicured green lawn.”
At close range, even the tower showed the ravages of salt and sea. I stared up at the peeling paint and the cracks in the outer wall.
“Good morning, St. Peter,” Cleopatra said as she stopped before a large, thick spiderweb strung across our path. Its weaver, a nasty-looking purple-and-yellow spider the size of my hand, hung suspended across the path. He seemed ready to defend his territory. There was no doubt that this was a web you could not just brush away without consequences.
“You know this spider?” I asked Cleopatra.
“He’s perfectly harmless, if you don’t piss him off,” she replied.
We detoured around St. Peter and walked in the brush between two small buildings. A raccoon exploded out