Perhaps especially a man in his mid-seventies from northern New England who has longed since boyhood for escape, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic fresh starts, for high romance, mystery, and intrigue, and who so often has turned those longings toward the Caribbean.Why the Caribbean? Who can reliably say? Whether arriving as conquistador or castaway, as fugitive financier or packaged tourist or backpacking lonely planeteer, whether costumed as Ponce de León or Robinson Crusoe or Errol Flynn or Robert Vesco or the little-known American writer bearing the name of Russell Banks, early on I got yanked by the bright green islands and turquoise seas of the Caribbean out of myself and home into high-definition dreams that I projected onto my larger world like a hologram. And while some of my dreams were innocent enough or merely naive, like Crusoe’s, and some reckless, like Flynn’s, all of them got broken and re-formed by the reality of the place and the people who lived there: Ponce got slain by the natives on a south Florida beach; Crusoe, meeting Friday, learned humanity and went home a better man; Flynn, sailing to Jamaica, stepped ashore as Captain Blood; Vesco, conning Fidel, died in jail for it.
