My Jimmy Buffett conspiracy theory
For entertainment purposes only
Have you ever found yourself in one of those ice-breaker games where the question is: What’s a conspiracy theory you believe in? I have an answer that I’m always afraid to give, for three reasons: it’s embarrassing, I’ve never been able to prove it, and also I can’t keep from wondering if it might be true. So I guess I’ll make a newsletter out of it.
It came out of a chance—and fairly weird!—encounter I had with Jimmy Buffett, over thirteen years ago. As you probably know, Buffett died this past Friday at his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island.1 I always liked his music fine, though I’ve never been what you’d call a big fan, much less a “Parrot Head,” as his most zealous admirers call themselves. But I did achieve what one fan site called the “#1 Sign You’re a Parrot Head”: I escaped to “the islands,” moving from Washington to the island of Hispaniola in my mid-twenties, where I ended up spending five and a half years as an Associated Press correspondent.
It was there on Hispaniola—specifically in Haiti—that I met Mr. Margaritaville:
(I’m the one in the Yankee cap.)
Here’s the story. It was early March 2010, a little under three months after the catastrophic earthquake that wrecked Port-au-Prince and other cities in southern Haiti. The capital was still in utter ruins: hundreds of thousands were dead, something on the order of a million people made homeless. I was technically one of the latter group, though far better off than most; in those days I was sleeping in a very nice camping tent, working in the makeshift bureau my off-island colleagues had set up, and moving around with little trouble—on motorcycles, mostly, since they could work their way around the rubble.2
On this particular March afternoon, I found myself at the famous Hotel Oloffson. The