My favorite spot in downtown Bimini is an arch erected on the side of the road. It says:

BIMINI—GATEWAY TO THE BAHAMAS

THE YOUTH DEPARTMENT

THE ORDER OF ELKS OF THE

WORLD (I.B.P.O.E. OF W.)

WELCOMES THE TOURIST

TO BIMINI

Underneath the arch is a little shrine-like display, featuring an arrangement of conch shells surrounding a toy rake, shovel, and hoe, pointing aloft. Next to this display is a small, mysterious sign that says:

TO BE AWARDED TROPHY FOR BEST KEPT YARD.

To one side is a rusting antique hand fire-fighting pump. (Why not?) Across the street is a sign that says:

GLENDA’S SCOOTER RENTAL AND THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

Yes. Not only does Bimini have scooter rentals, but the Fountain of Youth is located there, over on South Bimini, according to legend. You can take tours to it. We didn’t bother, because of being in the Lethargy Zone. We figured, hey, if we got young again, we’d have to go through young adulthood again—zits, career-building, etc.—and it just sounded so tiring that we decided to skip eternal youth and have some beers and conch fritters instead. We did this at one of Bimini’s most famous social spots, the Compleat Angler hotel and bar, which is where famed novelist and macho hombre Ernest Hemingway used to hang out. One room is a sort of museum, with pictures of Hemingway all over the walls, including one with the following caption: “ERNEST HEMINGWAY SHOOTING THOMPSON MACHINE GUN, BIMINI DOCK.” He liked to shoot guns at sharks. One time he got so excited, shooting at a shark, that—this is true—he shot himself in both legs. That’s the kind of sportsperson Ernest was.

I have not begun to describe all the things you can see and do just in metropolitan Bimini. I have not mentioned the plaque commemorating the late congressperson Adam Clayton Powell, who spent a great deal of time in Bimini, drinking scotch and milk and no doubt thinking up ways to better represent his New York City constituents; or the Chalk’s Seaplane Terminal with the antenna that looks like a Science Fair project made from coat hangers, where you can watch the plane come in and taxi right across the main road to discharge its passengers; or the End of the World Bar, whose floor is sand and whose walls seem to be made entirely of graffiti; or the Bimini bus, a van equipped with numerous bumper stickers and what appears to be a radar antenna. What with all the things to see, plus the lethargy factor, plus the beer, it took us a little over four hours to walk through Alice Town and back, a distance of several hundred yards. Of course, on the way back we were fighting a strong tide of passengers who had been released from the SeaEscape cruise ship for the afternoon and were sweeping down the island, snorking up rum and T-shirts.

Bimini attracts all kinds of people. One morning we watched as three men pulled up to a dock in a loooooooong motorboat, the kind shaped like a floating marital aid with numerous large engines on the back. They picked up a young woman wearing a practical nautical outfit consisting of an extremely tight, extremely short dress and spike-heeled shoes. She could barely move. She couldn’t climb into the boat without causing her undergarments to be visible from Fort Lauderdale, so one of the men had to lift her into the boat like a large, high-heel-wearing sausage. Then off they roared, out to sea. Probably planning to do some snorkeling.

Bimini offers a wide range of nightlife activities. You can eat. You can drink. You can walk around the docks and watch sportspersons on large expensive boats slice fish apart and get slime and flies all over themselves and seem genuinely happy. You can eat some more. You can, if you are very fortunate, see Steele Reeder do his impression of how a conch looks at you when you have removed it from its shell (“Now what” the conch says). You can drink some more. You can dance, with or without a partner, in a bar or right on the street.

On Saturday night Olin and I were sitting at an outdoor bar, listening to a band called Glenn Rolle and the Surgeons. Three young women were dancing with each other. A man came dancing in off the street, nattily attired in shorts and an artificial leg. He danced up and joined the women, smiling blissfully. The four of them danced for a minute, then the man danced off, waving his artificial leg around in a manner that can only be described as joyful.

“There’s a short story in there somewhere,” remarked Olin.

I was so impressed by Glenn Rolle and the Surgeons that I went up to Rolle and asked if they had any record albums, and he sold me one for $5. When I got back to my table, I sensed that the album might be defective, inasmuch as it had a big bend in the middle, so you could easily fold it in half. Rolle cheerfully exchanged it for a new one, which I played when I got home. The album is called Steal Away. Side One consists of one song, called “Steal Away, which is a little over six minutes long. Side Two is also “Steal Away,” but it’s the instrumental version, which is identical to Side One but without the vocals. All in all, I think Steal Away is an excellent name for this album.

We honestly had planned to do more than just eat and drink and swim and laze on the beach and buy straw hats and walk around very slowly while burping during our stay in Bimini. We honestly intended to do some serious research on local points of interest, such as the Mysterious Underwater Thing Possibly Built by Aliens from Space. I am not making this point of interest up. It’s called the Bimini Road, and it consists of hundreds of big, flat rocks forming a half-mile-long, fairly regular pattern, shaped like a backward J in 18 feet of water a half mile from Bimini. It was discovered in 1968, and many respected loons think that it has something to do with the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Others think it must have been aliens from space. It’s a big mystery. How did it get there? What is it for?

My theory is that the space aliens were going to write a giant under-water backward message of advice for humanity starting with J, possibly “JUST DO IT.” But after a short while in the Lethargy Zone they decided to knock off, maybe have a Bahama Mama, and before they knew it a couple of million years had passed and they had to return to their planet, leaving the message unfinished. Closed for renevations.

We were in a similar situation. Before we knew it, it was Sunday, time to head back to Miami, assuming that Miami still existed. There was no way to know for sure, because the Bimini phone system had been out of order the whole time we were there. I’m not sure telephones would have been all that effective, anyway. The speed of electricity on Bimini is probably around 10

miles per hour.

Anyway, we had children and jobs to get back to, and we were getting dangerously close to forming permanent flesh puddles. So after a well-balanced breakfast of about 17,000 pieces of Bimini-bread toast, we set out for home, with me, Master of the Vessel Buster, once again following Bonefish Howard Steele Reeder II, who was once again following the Loran.

In a couple of hours, Miami was on the horizon again, apparently intact, but I didn’t dare to relax, because I knew that ahead of us lay the greatest maritime challenge of all, a hazard so dangerous that no sane boatperson would dream of attempting it: Biscayne Bay on a Sunday afternoon. You know how sometimes you’re driving on I-95 in heavy traffic, and some substance abuser driving a car whose windows are tinted with what appears to be roofing tar weaves past you at 127 miles per hour, using all available lanes plus the median strip, and you say to yourself: “Why don’t they get that lunatic OFF THE ROAD??” Well, trust me, on Sunday afternoon he is off the road. He and all his friends from the South Florida Maniac Drivers Club are all out on Biscayne Bay, roaring around in severely overpowered boats, looking for manatees to turn into Meatloaf of the Sea.