Recovered from: “Fugitive Memoirs Volume I”
We go about stashing some emergency cash in little drops in the Bahamas. Later we will do the same in the Virgin Islands. Wilem teaches me that in the islands the place to go is the provision stores near major marinas that recreational sailors frequent.
“You can find amazing stuff in these places, and you will blend right in with the other foreigners,” he says as we browse around the aisles. Two aisles over a family I can only describe as insane shops for provisions on what I can only imagine is their first day before boarding their bareback boat rental. A brat of a boy, 10, mercilessly taunts his sister, 7, both of which being ignored by a brooding goth of a 13 year old boy who seems to be possessed of a two word vocabulary consisting only of “whatever” and “tragic.” Their commotion attracts all eyes in the place and Wilem and I carefully navigate around and take advantage of the distraction to remain virtually invisible.
“Do you think anyone at all in here today is going to remember us?” Wilem muses.
There’s a “paperback exchange” shelf where renters are encouraged to leave their read paperbacks or other books and pick up the leave behinds of others for their journey. Wilem lifts two identical copies of The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.
“I’ve read it,” I protest, but he ignores me.
Wilem picks up some desiccant, a sort of plasticy white sand. Very coarse. He speaks in a low whisper:
“Cash, passports, documents, they will all rot in the tropics even if you bury them. You have to get the moisture out. Black mold is the worst. It loves the dark and it will eat right through passport pages. You need to encase the cash or documents in a plastic bag, put some desiccant in to absorb the moisture, and squeeze out all the air before sealing it up. Be careful not to bury it in a box that leaks. Even if it’s encased in plastic you’ll end up with a box that just holds water against the package. That’s not good. I usually put the sealed plastic inside another plastic bag with some air in it and throw some more desiccant in there. That way there’s an extra buffer between the package and the elements. Don’t bury anything at the base of a tree. People are always using trees as markers because the think they will remember the location better. Depending on the tree a bit of root growth can ruin your whole day. Much better is under or near a rock, especially one that looks like it’s been there for a long while. It isn’t going to grow, or fall over on you and the ground below it is shielded from direct rainfall. Prefer high ground. A hurricane and some tidal surges or flooding can pull stuff right out of the ground and float it right out to sea. If you are burying something metal, and it is near a populated area you can always ‘salt’ the ground with things to set off metal detectors. Spread them all over the place in a wide area and any casual beach comber will give up pretty quickly and look somewhere else. A big can of old nuts and bolts tends to work well and results in ‘prizes’ worthless enough to discourage the metal detector operator. It’s good to pick historic places. You have a good idea that some developer isn’t going to knock the place down and dig everything up.”
With that out of the way Wilem and I take a ferry to Andros Island and creep onto the grounds of the All Saints Anglican Church late at night and bury around $100,000 in cash and one of my emergency passports next to a beachball sized stone.
“Churches and graveyards are your friend. They rarely get torn down and developed, if they are old you know they won’t get flooded, or washed out by a storm or hurricane, and you know the spots in a graveyard that are unlikely to get dug up again. Just be careful not to be caught digging in one in the dead of night.”
When we get back to the hotel Wilem explains the purpose of the books. They are a sort of secure communications system. We have two identical copies of The English Patient, the “First Vintage International Edition, 1993” which we will use as keys for a “book” cipher. Either of us will place a classified ad in one of several papers we agree upon in advance. To use the code I just have to count the number of letters in each sentence and map the results against the book to reveal the message.
I look at the cover of my book. There is a lone figure, hunched over and running away from the photographer through the dark, grainy, black and white emulsion. It evokes a sense of mystery and escapism in me and I am charmed by the concept.
Wilem leaves the next afternoon and I lounge around my hotel room until the sun sinks below the horizon. After some wistful procrastination I catch a ferry to Andros and dig up our buried treasure. It is a nasty instinct, and it isn’t that I don’t trust Wilem, but that I think my emergency pack should be mine alone.
I move the cash cache only about 20 meters and bury it aside another rock closer to the church walls. While I am digging I hear movement in the darkness and freeze until what sounds like a drunken man ambles by and back into the gloom. I finish up and, not wanting to take a ferry at this hour, wander down to the shore where I take in the night air and listen to the lapping of the waves and my thoughts drift to my mother and my father and Sir Nigel and Karl until daybreak.
I pack for the Virgin Islands slowly, mournfully. It is not usually like me to be sentimental, but because the Bahamas were, in a sense, the first stop on my journey I felt like they had a certain association with my flight.