ONE FINE EARTH DAY MORNING IN 2022, my cell phone lit up with a Hawaiian phone number from a caller the device has long identified as “The Dude.”
“Hello, dude,” drawled a friendly, salty voice. “I’m heading out to Folly tomorrow. You have any time to catch up and go for a paddle?”
The caller was none other than Jimmy Buffett. And by God, when God’s own drunk and a fearless man calls you to go paddle-boarding, you go paddleboarding. Jimmy was in Charleston, South Carolina, where I live, to rehearse his upcoming summer tour. Per custom, he was flying under the radar. Per custom, I was expected to both honor that and be ready for whatever adventure—or misadventure—lay just ahead.
I first met James William Buffett on a midsummer’s day in 1999, a few weeks after I’d walked into the Manhattan offices of Men’s Journal, clutching a notebook of slide photos and with a hopeful headful of article ideas. There, the legendary editor Terry McDonell introduced me to an energetic young staff. Circling back to his office, he then asked a question that would change my life: “Do you know Jimmy Buffett?”
I might as well have been struck by lightning. , I did not know Jimmy Buffett. But like most Southerners, I felt like I did. Growing up between Atlanta and the South Carolina Lowcountry, I internalized his music as if it were the soundtrack of my life. Seeing him grace a cover of — casting a fly rod from the wingtip of the Grumman Albatross seaplane he called the —and reading the accompanying excerpt from his book had actually helped cement my decision to head to New York. I left my magazine in Dana Point, California, and traveled three thousand miles in a wheezing VW camper. McDonell, who years later would pen a memoir called , told me Jimmy was looking for a surfer who could code HTML, write, and sort of document his life and tour. “It’s not writing for the magazine,” McDonell said. “But it could be pretty interesting.”
