But this is as nonsense as the tourist who brings down a Nassau or Freeport into a pale imitation of itself. Being a tourist does not make you wrong. It makes you in need of a bit of relaxation, end of story. There are rules which tourists should follow; among them respect, reservation, a good ear, a head enough to obey the ecological rules for a fragile place. These are the rules which preserve a place's cultural and ecological dignity - not the rules of Mr. Travel Writer, and his ego.
Jane and I are here for just that sort of thing. An empty place without other people, without anything much but ourselves. That is what makes the out-island Bahamas weird. In all of its brutal history, we can forget all that and enjoy a piney marsh of a place for what it is today - a blank slate with a lean-to infrastructure. There is nothing to do here; one over-priced restaurant, no gambling, no night-life, no gatherings, no parties. Just random people, local and not. But that brutal history - a history which Abaco fanatics easily forget - is essential to its future. Without precedent, how easy would it be to turn your head - like so many locals did when the dredging operation came to town.
Jane settles the wheel of the boat, throttle and trim, until the wake is cut tight, and the unreal aqua underneath is a blur; the black spots - sea turtles, mackeral, barracuda, melt into the speed. We are cruising to Guana Cay, several miles from the Abaco mainland.
Baker's Bay, once the dredging grounds of the Big Red Boat, now looks somewhat like it once did. The Middle-Eastern palms are almost all gone. Those that remain are being choked, like the steel girders of Pirate Castle, which has almost fallen.
Around the north end of Guana, which faces its own barrier reef against the Atlantic, we motor hesitantly around the ravaged reef-heads and anchor in the sand. Anchoring means a mask, snorkel and thirty pounds of weight, which pulls you thirty feet down, to the sandy-edge of the reef-head. Jane is about to see the majesty of God; the bounty of balloonfish and pipefish and parrotfish, corals, sea fans and rays. I am about to see the majesty of a reef a few years removed from a dredging operation gone bad. Many of the corals are still dead - it will take a hundred more without Disney to get things back in line. But like proper justice, where the Big Red Boat failed, the reef has begun to flirt with its own resurrection. This is just a piece of the worldwide puzzle - a quarter of the world's reefs have already been destroyed by similar carelessness.
We had known each other our entire adult lives. We wrote letters - but friend's letters - just two lost people in different ends of America, with some sort of connection that never made sense. I first noticed her in German class twelve years ago. I was fascinated by her, and was surprised to find all those years later at a noisy dinner in Sacramento, and despite a dozen attempts from friends and mothers to get us on a date, that Jane was made for me. Or I was made for her.
Everybody has that one day in their life that symbolizes everything - your past and your future; your greatest accomplishment. For other people, it is not necessarily a day like this, in the drench-humid air of Abaco. That morning with the sun beating down, I asked Jane to spend the rest of her life with me.
