The Boys from Pine Island: Remembering John D. MacDonald
Copyright Randy Wayne White
The first time I met John D. MacDonald was in 1974, maybe 1975, when two friends and I decided to run a boat up the coast to Siesta Key, find the famous writer’s beach residence, and introduce ourselves.
That we had never been to Siesta Key and did not know where MacDonald lived seemed a detail of small importance. Nor did it cross our minds that the man might not be home. Or that it was terribly rude, not to mention presumptuous, to go barging in on a working writer—by boat, no less.
Have I mentioned that alcohol was involved?
It was. Rum with wedges of Key lime. Beer, too—Tuborg, a brand preferred by Travis McGee. I had not yet read MacDonald’s novels, but my friends were enthusiastic mimics of their favorite literary character, and I was enthusiastic about any kind of beer. In the fresh heat of a Florida morning, beverages packed in shaved ice are a pretty sight. Inspirational, even.
I was willing to navigate fifty miles of unfamiliar water to an unfamiliar island in search of an unknown house on the chance of encountering a stranger. It seemed like a good idea. Hell, it seemed reasonable.
But MacDonald was no stranger to my friends. They knew him well, or felt as if they did, through their relationships with Travis and Meyer and Chookie McCall and Sam Taggart and the rest. They had visited MacDonald nightly aboard the Busted Flush and the John Maynard Keynes. They had partied with him on the Alabama Tiger, along with almost everyone else who knows Florida, loves Florida, or has ever come close enough to be seduced by it.
The published word is as public as a bus station, but reading is personal—very personal, and private. To read is to access a conduit that flows directly from one human mind to another, a conduit that fuses one small life to another. We are all born alone, and we will all die alone, but in the interim there are books.
My friends had never met MacDonald, but they knew him. Indeed, they were intimates.
Besides, my friends reasoned, we had a lot in common. We all lived on Florida’s west coast. We loved boats, and so did MacDonald. We lived in a small hardwood house on an island. MacDonald lived on an island. Our house was on the water, and so was MacDonald’s. When it came right down to it, we were neighbors—neighbors united not by street signs, but by strands of beach and mangroves.
It was time to pay a neighborly visit.
We left my dock at Pineland, on Pine Island, at about ten in the morning in the calm of a sun-slick day. We stopped in Boca Grande Pass and watched pods of tarpon, then stopped off Englewood Beach and watched sunbathers. It is a pleasant thing to sit off Englewood Beach eating peanut butter sandwiches and watching sunbathers.
By noon we were just past Stump Pass, off Lemon Bay, but most of the beer was gone, and that was progress—of sorts. By two o’clock we were out in the Gulf, half a mile off Siesta Key, but what had seemed like a great idea back in Pineland now seemed idiotic.
Yes, we had sobered. Plus, the wind had kicked up, and nothing leaches a boater’s spirit like wind.
Also, Siesta Key looks small on a chart, but it seems huge when approached from the sea. There was a long rind of beach, a tree line, and through the trees fragments of homes—hundreds of homes, expensive places on stilts with raked lawns and boundary hedges that did not encourage familiarity.
We ran in close to the beach, killed the engine, and drifted. Perhaps MacDonald would run out and flag us down.
He didn’t.
We discussed hiking through lawns to ask directions. Nope. We were too shy for that. What we really wanted to do was go home, but we couldn’t. Not yet. To be able to honestly say we couldn’t find MacDonald, we had to at least look for him. Honor has its obligations.
There was a lone man in an aluminum boat anchored off the beach. We approached him. If he didn’t know where MacDonald lived—and he wouldn’t, of course—we could truthfully say we had tried.
The man in the aluminum boat told us, “John MacDonald lives right there.”
What?
He pointed at the house behind us. “That house with the tin roof. Right there.”
We had drifted to MacDonald’s doorstep.
Now we were trapped. We could have invented reasons to turn tail and run, but self-delusion requires careful thinking, and careful thinking requires time. The man in the aluminum boat was watching us. He had helped us, and now he expected action.
There were no options.
We ran our boat up onto the little beach behind MacDonald’s house and threw the anchor out into the yard, an aggressive gesture that still makes me wince. As we approached the house, a handsome woman with copper-tinted hair peeked her head out the door. Then MacDonald appeared behind her, looking bigger and broader than in his photographs. His black-rimmed glasses added a no-nonsense effect that suggested this was a man who knew how to deal with trespassers.
He had every right to call the police or order us off his property. We were salt-caked, sun-bleached, and scraggly.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he laughed—an unusual Walter Brennan sort of cackle—when we told him why we were there and where we had come from.
“All that way in an eighteen-foot boat?”
He shook our hands and pushed the door open.
“Come on in.”
We spent maybe an hour with MacDonald. He showed us around his house. It seemed to amuse him that the roof leaked.
“Proves it was designed by an architect,” he said.
He was proud of his new IBM Selectric typewriter, which he demonstrated with a futurist’s delight.
“The day will come,” he said, “when I’ll be able to send the ribbon cassettes to my publisher and a computer will convert it into type.”
My friends began to ask detailed questions about his novels.
“God,” he said, “I’m terrible at my own trivia. I can’t remember what character did what to whom.”
But I do remember him saying that Travis McGee’s middle name was Dann—“Two n’s”—and that the apartment complex on which he’d based Condominium was on Casey Key.
“The one with its feet in the water,” he said. “You came right past it.”
When I left Siesta Key that day, I liked MacDonald a lot. He was friendly, funny, and obviously very smart. But it wasn’t until I began to read his books that I understood why my crazy friends were willing to travel one hundred miles in a small boat just to meet the man.
When MacDonald died in December 1986, he became a statistical vehicle for the neat summarization of newspapers: in forty years as a writer, he published dozens of books, including twenty-one Travis McGee novels, which sold millions of copies. Like baseball box scores, obituaries require numbers. Thus a life is distilled.
But numbers, while fine in baseball box scores, are a poor gauge of a writer’s life or his worth. That is certainly true of MacDonald, whose work affected Florida nearly as much as Florida influenced the work.
When I was asked to write this story, it was suggested that I write about the impact MacDonald’s books have had on this state. It would make an interesting study, and I would like to do it. But I can’t. Even if I were qualified, which I am not, the influence of books is impossible to measure. As I said, reading is personal and private.
Even so, some observations can be made about the books themselves and, in doing so, perhaps a pattern of impact is implied.
Decades before the environmental movement became fashionable, MacDonald was already providing tough, insightful exposition not only on the ecological outrages Florida had suffered, but also on the self-serving political networks that endorsed those outrages. In those days, it was a startling theme: any man or organization willing to scrape two hundred acres of living earth raw for profit probably wasn’t above killing a few people, too.
MacDonald was a shrewd observer of Florida’s unique social milieu as well, particularly when it came to transplants who allowed themselves to be duped by developers, con artists, and slick advertising. No one has been able to slow Florida’s population growth, but MacDonald helped educate that population. He also provided a strong call for smarter resource management, one heard not only by his readers, but by legislators in Florida and beyond.
There is no doubt MacDonald was farsighted. I also believe that, in decades to come, his work will provide invaluable historical tableaux. MacDonald’s Florida was the Florida of the 1960s and ’70s, and in just a few sentences he could nail any piney-woods cow town, mangrove shanty village, Keys trailer park, duplex singles retreat, or glitzy raw-sod development project.
Those of us who read him in the 1970s thought: yes, that’s exactly the way it is.
Those who read him a century later may think: so that’s how it was.
The impact of MacDonald’s work is not a mass-market phenomenon, not in the truest sense. It is the result of a chain reaction catalyzed by a solitary writer speaking to a solitary reader, communicating in a way that goes straight to the marrow.
This was illustrated to me a few years ago when I was invited to speak at the annual John D. MacDonald Conference on Mystery and Detective Fiction. The conference was held at Bahia Mar, the real-life marina where the fictional McGee moored his houseboat at Slip F-18. During a break in the proceedings, I wandered out to the docks. I had been to Bahia Mar before, but I had never taken the time to see if Slip F-18 really existed.
The berth was there, along with a brass plaque commemorating McGee. But the sight I found most touching was the adjacent piling, on which were pinned dozens of notes and letters, all addressed to McGee, each written as if McGee were away on some adventure and expected to return.
MacDonald breathed life into his characters, and his readers breathed life back.
The conference illustrated something else, too: MacDonald, whose career had roots in the pulp magazines, helped make the mystery genre respectable. There was an impressive list of academics in attendance, and one by one they presented scholarly papers on some bit of McGee esoterica.
To me, it was a startling display. Some educators, particularly unpublished educators, are quick to dismiss genre fiction as hack work not worthy of their time. “Formula writing,” some call it.
But MacDonald pushed the genre’s envelope. He used McGee and his other characters to explore dark, quirky, and sometimes hilarious corners of the human condition. He used digression—normally a taboo device—to climb onto a soapbox and speak his own mind. The conduit of his chosen discipline, mystery writing, wasn’t big enough for the things he wanted to say, so he ignored the limitations and thereby expanded the genre.
For that, writers everywhere should remain grateful to the man.
The academics I met at Bahia Mar were open-minded enough to understand that. The measure of their respect for MacDonald could be gauged by the number of them who took me aside and said, “You knew the man? Tell me about him.”
It would be stretching it to say I really knew MacDonald, so I told them about the boat trip. And about the boat trips that followed.
It became an annual summer event for my crazy buddies and me. It was never planned. We never notified MacDonald in advance. We would be sitting out on the dock, hot and lazy, and one of us would note how slick the water was. Then someone else would mention there was plenty of ice in the cooler and plenty of fuel in the skiff. An hour later we would be anchored off Englewood Beach, munching sandwiches and watching sunbathers which, as I have already said, is a pleasant thing to do.
We made the trip to Siesta Key six, maybe seven times. It grew into a kind of production. We would set the anchor in MacDonald’s back yard, then march up to his door and present him with a bottle of Boodles gin. Or maybe it was Plymouth gin. I can’t remember the brand for certain, but it was gin. Had it been beer or rum, the bottle would not have survived the long trip.
We found MacDonald home all but once, and each time he greeted us with the same Walter Brennan cackle and invited us in, sometimes calling to his wife, “Dorothy? The boys from Pine Island are here again.”
Afterward, my friends and I would hitchhike out to what was then the Kansas City Royals Baseball Academy, where our buddy Gene LaMont was a coach. We would swim in the pool, play catch, or just sit around and talk in the locker room. Then, if Gene’s old car was working, he would drive us back to the bridge at Siesta Key, where our boat was tied.
Twice MacDonald and his neighbor, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist MacKinlay Kantor, invited me to their weekly writer’s lunch at Martine’s Restaurant in Sarasota, and that is as close as I came to hearing MacDonald talk about writing.
Between games—they played Liar’s Poker for drinks—I remember him saying to Dick Glendinning, “I hate parties because, invariably, someone always comes up and asks, ‘Why don’t you try to write a serious novel?’ And just as invariably, they’ll tell me they’ve always wanted to do a book—if they just had the time.”
MacDonald’s stock answer, he said, was: “Yes, and I’ve always wanted to be a brain surgeon.”
Even though I heard that intimidating conversation, I like to think it is still to my credit that I didn’t tell MacDonald I hoped to someday write books. I remained one of the boys from Pine Island and, as a result, the few conversations and correspondence we had were relaxed and unbusinesslike.
After 1980, my friends and I never made another trip to Siesta Key, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because we, like all of Florida, were changing fast. Our obligations became greater, our schedules fuller, our days busier, and there was no time for loony schemes and pointless boat trips.
One crazy friend became the administrative chief of his chosen field. Another became the head of a mathematics department. Gene LaMont became manager of the Chicago White Sox. I, who have never aspired to brain surgery, quit my charter fishing business and began to write novels.
And in 1986, as we all know, the generator quit, the machine stopped writing, and John D. MacDonald died.
But in the interim, there are his books.
RANDY WAYNE WHITE
THE LEGEND ©
