Pappy and the Smugglers - Part One

Everyone called him Pappy because no one really knew his first name or his last. Pappy, however, was an islander fixture and living the “Salt Life” before anyone knew what that was. Pappy was so dynamic and so full of life he was the envy of many, but beneath his rugged good looks, he was like an osprey in a hurricane: unsurprised, stoic, and ready for anything.

Because Pappy wore his age and his charm like a suit of common sense, he was popular at any watering hole that ever set up a stack of bottles behind a bar. Pappy was a true Florida Cracker who made his living on, or very near, the waters of Marco, Goodland, or the Isles of Capri.

Pappy was born alongside the Tamiami Trail at Monroe Station. He grew up frog gigging and hunting alligators in the Everglades. By the time Pappy was sailing through his first year as a teenager, the Great Depression had hit, and even the frogs and the alligators seemed to sense hard times and trouble.

When it was a chore to find work hunting or fishing, and even coffee and flour became scarce, Pappy’s daddy had no choice but to find another way to bring home groceries, shoes for the kids, and clothes for the girls who needed to bait the next generation of life in the Everglades.

When Pappy was 13, his daddy and grandpa were running rum from Cuba into the Everglades and Pappy was the budding first mate on his grandpa’s shrimper. After more than a few rum-running runs, the emerging Pappy was standing watch in the pilothouse and guiding the rust-streaked trawler through the shallows while his grandpa and daddy were teaching him how to hide from the law.

When the ban on liquor was over, Pappy grew up learning other trades, but he always had a berth somewhere near the mangrove black water or the clear green tide that came in over the sand when it was not blowing or raining too hard.

Over the years, Pappy worked on the seawall crew when the Mackle Brothers were building Marco and even helped on the beach when the treasure hunters came to the fancy hotel jobsite and claimed a pirate treasure was buried under the beach.

When the next recession hit and layoffs on Marco were as plentiful as Jimmy Carter’s new rules about building on the mangroves, Pappy began to figure on an old-fashioned way to make a living on the water.

Pappy tried weed once: when one of the Naples hippie girls talked him into driving to Miami to see Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band, but he could not figure what all the fuss was about. For Pappy, smoking that stuff gave you a worried feeling that something was going on that everyone knew about but you.

A couple of years after Ronald Regan won the race and kicked the peanut farmer out of the White House, the Everglades City and Goodland Grapevine began to whisper about hard cash and how easy it was to make a lot of it—if a fellow didn’t mind running sideways against the law.

Pappy grew up as a good boy, and he knew enough not to play with dope, but he did figure that smoking marijuana was not too much different from drinking liquor. He also began to realize the rum-running skills he learned from his daddy and grandpa were the same kind of training a fellow needed to stay out of jail during a new kind of prohibition.

After hearing a few tall tales from some of the whisky-fueled dummies who were stupid enough to brag about the cash they were making and what they were doing with worn-out shrimp boats, Pappy decided anyone with a little discipline and some deep water experience might do better at hauling weed than anyone else.

Nothing screamed: “Arrest me, I’m guilty” more than a whispering huddle of local boys in white crabber boots buying rounds of drinks with hundred-dollar bills. After watching the same liquor-leaking reruns over and over, Pappy and a couple of his best buddies began to figure that if anyone was going to get caught, it would be the dummies in the bar bragging about smuggling in a room full of tourists.

After deciding the dummies would probably be caught and the law might be satisfied with a few pot-hauling cowboy trophies, Pappy, Butch, and Buddy made a few discrete inquiries and became the acquaintance of a man in Miami—a man who might have had money and contacts down in Jamaica—but was not stupid enough to brag about it.

When Pappy, Butch, and Buddy were ready with a cardboard box full of cash that smelled a lot like stale beer, they drove a rental car up to Fort Myers Beach. When the boys and the rental crossed under the bridge and parked at the sprawling waterfront marina where all the biggest boats in Southwest Florida were hauling out and getting work done, they began to walk around like tourists exploring the boatyard. Sparks were flying from welders and cutting torches, and from the skippers of the local tourist boats who were tearing out—what little hair they had left—over the cost of the haul-out repairs.

Meanwhile, waiting at the back of the boatyard and resting on a gravel field with crooked jack stands was a battered fleet of rust-bleeding shrimp boats. After half an hour of walking through the almost forgotten stench of long dead barnacles, the yard boss emerged from his trailer with the rattling air-conditioner and approached the three older men who did not look like tourists.

Stay tuned for the next episode in next week’s edition of Coastal Breeze News!