Songs sung in the Key of Largo

October 13, 1982, a pirate
looks at forty; 1,000 miles off
Cape Mendocino, California

As spring blossoms, it has a way of tugging in several directions at once. Years ago this was the time of year I abandoned whatever adventure I had been on for the winter and headed back to the ocean. It was time for the most dreaded time in any sailor’s life: YARD WORK. It was also the time to renew old friendships and make new ones at whatever waterfront watering hole we preferred. One spring I came back wounded from a love affair gone horribly wrong and took to naming ours Key Largo after the song that was going around at the time about a lamented love with the line "we had it all, just like Bogie and Bacall."

As the summer progressed into new adventures and new women, the lament faded but the name stuck and we would head for Key Largo every night after the day's work was done. It was always a place that held music even if none was being played at the time. That fall I joined some friends on a boat sailing from Alaska to Hawaii. In the course of the trip we all became immersed in the sailing songs of Jimmy Buffett. The one that particularly appealed to me at the time was "A Pirate Looks at Forty," although I usually called it "mother ocean." I turned 40 during that trip and I guess I felt very piratical (romantically so, not Somalian).

After the trip we separated and went about the coming winter's adventures. When those were done most of us returned to Key Largo in the spring. Sitting there one night, we were barely listening to the lounge singer. This guy really was one of those Bill Murray patterned his Saturday Night Live act after. We tired of his act fairly quickly and after he made an attempt at a Buffett song, I said to a friend who had been on the trip to Hawaii that if the guy tried Mother Ocean I was going to mug him. To which my friend replied, "Yeah, Nautical Wheelers" too." I noticed the bartender slip out from behind the bar and go over and talk to the singer. After that I never heard him try another Buffett song while I was in there.

A few weeks later another singer had arrived, a woman who sang several familiar songs in a way that didn’t alter them. One night paying little attention I thought I might have heard, "this is for Tim," but paid it little mind. Then I heard the chords and the first words of Mother Ocean. I must have reacted obviously because the bartender quickly came over and put her hands on mine. "No, it's OK," she said. (I really wouldn't have mugged a woman anyway.) Then this woman, Suzan with a Z, sang the song beautifully. I was in love. Suzan played one place or another around that town for most of the summer and I always went to see her when I could and she always played a song or two she knew I liked.

And that was the way the music went in our harbor life. Toward the end of the commercial fishing season when the seiners worked closer in, they would often gather at Key Largo and those were the days when we started doing our own singing. We had several favorites, mostly older songs that lent themselves well to our raspy out-of-tune smoked up voices, songs like "That's Amore" and "Sixteen Tons." One night when the sunset colored the mountains at the east end of the bay, we actually made everyone in the bar stand up and sing "...purple mountains majesty...."

But it wasn't just in town, music was there with us most of the time on the boats. That next winter I went crab fishing with a friend. We took some time off over Thanksgiving and while away, I came across a new Buffett album called "One Particular Harbor." I didn't have a chance to listen to the whole thing until one morning over breakfast on the crab boat. When he came to singing the line, "we are the people our parents warned us about," I looked at my friend and he looked at me with this wide eyed visage of recognition and I laughed so hard I spit out a mouthful of breakfast.

Years passed, winter adventures, summers on boats, occasional long voyages and always the reunions at Key Largo in the spring, a day like today when the ocean beckons even if it it means scraping and painting a bottom. And music, always music which brings us to where this blog has been going.

Toward late August one of the last summers of that life, the seiners were just about done and thinking about heading south, a few guys off the other work boats around, a few of us from the tour boats all gathered yet again in Key Largo more relaxed now as the season was coming to a close and there were not very many tourists around any more.

Somewhere, someone started the song and before long everyone within earshot had joined in. It was in what Pete Seeger used to call veer harmony. This song wasn’t sung with our usual boisterousness. As it progressed the emotion was almost tangible, each singer reaching into memory for the those experiences that created the reverence that seemed to grow as the song sailed toward its crescendo. When the last line had been sung, the room remained very quiet for a moment as each of us absorbed what emotion had been brought up and shared among people who know the sea. It was a precious moment you wouldn’t expect among the souls in that bar. I looked at my friend, the same one from sailing, crabbing and others and just above a whisper said, “that was special.” He nodded agreement. Slowly the noise level rose again as conversations picked up. We didn’t sing another song that night.

Perhaps that is why it came to mind today, a day when the impulse is so strong. “Mother, Mother Ocean, I have heard your call ...”