By Ben Roberts
I was sitting in a sunflower field on the outskirts of Vidette, watching the sun rise on the morning of Georgia’s dove opener when my mother texted me that Jimmy Buffett had died. The irony that it was she who delivered the news was not lost on me. I was not always an easy son to raise, and it’s fair to say some of that was the result of Mr. Buffett’s influence.
I was first introduced to Buffett in high school when a group of us attended a concert in Atlanta the summer before my senior year. We tailgated in the parking lot, taking in all that famous Parrot Head atmosphere had to offer. During the show, I stood on the grassy lawn of what was then Lakewood Amphitheater and made out with a girl I had just met. This was just the kind of sin a preacher’s son was looking for and I was hooked.
Even back then I knew I wanted to be a writer. Buffett led me to the works of Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Guy de la Valdene, and Hunter S. Thompson. Valdene’s collection of essays, For a Handful of Feathers, documenting his conversion of a former tobacco farm in north Florida to a haven for quail just so he and his pointing dogs could hunt them, is still a book I reread every fall when the temperature starts to change.
After high school, I managed to get into the University of Georgia, only to fail out within a year, choosing to major in subjects learned in downtown Athens instead of a UGA classroom. I got a job in a restaurant, cooking first and then tending bar. While these are skills one can take virtually anywhere, the restaurant industry is notorious for its extracurricular activities.
A coworker who actually managed to complete his undergraduate studies, made plans to get his master’s from the University of Montana. He convinced me and another sucker—rather easily—to travel west with him to live in Missoula. It was not quite the trip I imagined. I worked as a prep cook in the mornings and washed dishes at night, barely scraping by and often eating leftovers destined to be thrown out at closing. There was little time or energy and certainly no money for fishing Montana’s rivers or stalking game in the hills and mountains.
Our third roommate had a serious girlfriend back in Alabama that sent him off with us for the year under the condition that when he returned there would be an engagement ring and the requisite house and picket fence. He had called her bluff and thrown his belongings in his car. That was early September. By November, her patience was gone, and he was told in no uncertain terms his Western experiment was over.
It was around this time that I saw a newspaper ad that said something to the effect of “See Alaska – Get Paid.” So, the first week of January, I sailed out of Seattle on a merchant vessel bound for Alaska’s Pribilof Islands. It was literally about the furthest you could get from Key West, but I was sailing just the same. I spent the next three-and-a-half months turning opilio crab into snow crab legs for all-you-can-eat buffets back in the lower 48.
Having sailed across the Bering Sea in January, I now possessed bona fide sea legs. A friend of a friend who worked at a marina in Charleston, South Carolina, guaranteed I could find work on a boat headed south, particularly if I wasn’t too choosy about the type of work I was willing to do.
I was all set to head back to the South of my birth when a cute blonde with a crooked smile convinced me—again, without much effort—to spend the summer in Kalispell. The young lady and I barely lasted three months, and when the end finally came, I couldn’t get out of Montana fast enough.
I didn’t move to Charleston, and I never caught that boat heading somewhere warm. I don’t write those words with regret so much as with the curiosity of what might have been. I guess Jimmy said it best when he sang, “Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame; But I know, It’s my own damn fault.”
