The Bizarre Truth (9 page)

veryone readily acknowledges that the world is changing, and our country has become obsessed with the
next new thing
, whatever it might be. I’m not above wanting the next best thing; in fact, I find I am just as interested in finding the latest Singaporean fish head curry spot as I am in downloading the latest application for my iPhone. On our planet you will come across people, places, things, ways of life, pastimes, cultural celebrations that are, in essence, the last bottle of Coca-Cola in their given stretch of desert. I don’t necessarily mean to say that I am a passionate advocate for bringing back the days of the horse and buggy, although with our obsession with fossil-based fuels and the implications of what the car has done to the modern world, perhaps that’s not a bad idea, but the notion that we can observe and participate in unique aspects of living history, meet people who are the last of their kind, take part in celebrations that are disappearing as the world becomes flatter and smaller, is one of the more thrilling benefits of traveling. It’s not often that you get a chance to dive into those kinds of headlines the way you do when you travel to other countries.

With all the cultural clutter in the United States, it’s hard to clear away the wheat from the chaff and find these dying-breed stories. But trust me, they exist here. There’s the guy in Tarpon Springs, Florida, who makes the last brass, leather, and canvas diving helmets in the world. There’s the eighty-year-old man in Staten Island who gets up every morning, opens up his little pizza
shop, makes fifty pizzas, and drinks a bottle of Barolo at the end of his shift. He won’t hire any employees, and when he can’t work any longer he is simply shutting his doors. That’s a dying breed. The guy who fixes Betamax tape players, he’s a dying breed. There is something about finding these people in their own terroir, characters and places that represent traditions and pathways that have long since disappeared in our country, that makes for memorable experiences and even better storytelling, and the person who pops into my mind most often when I think of these experiences is Tobago Cox.

Tobago Cox was a national-champion weight lifter and bodybuilder, which is how he made his bones fame-wise in the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. In his sixties, he’s got the body of a man at least thirty years his junior, with giant muscles and a puffy chest, chiseled and lean. Despite his intimidating physique, he’s one of the most friendly, humble, and fascinating guys you’ll ever meet. This attraction is only intensified by the fact that he has an incredible day job. He’s the last “professional” conch diver in his country.

The coast off Tobago is home to some of the best conching in the world. Conch are giant, pink-lipped mollusks, and are a highly coveted creature, both for their gorgeous shells and the highly prized meat that can be gleaned from the saltwater snail that lives inside them. They traditionally live in shallow waters, sometimes only ten feet deep, which makes them fairly easy to harvest. As a young boy, I remember heading down to the Caribbean with my mother, who was writing a shell book back in the late 1960s. Despite the boat traffic, which often made inland sea life scarce, you could still walk out into the water back then, put on a snorkeling mask and dive ten feet down, and pull up a big conch. The beach bums would help clean your conch in exchange for the meat, and the tourists would take the shells home as souvenirs. Sadly, you can’t do that anymore. Caribbean tourism has just exploded. That industry now drives the economic engine of the Caribbean,
much of Central America, and the Yucatán Peninsula. Dishes like conch ceviche, conch fritters, and conch chowder have become the quintessential beach bar foods. Tourists clamor for them, and every beach lover wants to take home a conch shell souvenir. Rather ironic, considering that so few will ever see a live conch in their life. The demand for the meat and the shells drives the price of conch up, traffic increases, and
voilà
, they’re a hot commodity. Although efforts have been made in the Caribbean basin to shorten the conch season and set fishing limits, less scrupulous commercial fishermen will take harvests that are well over the legal amount for huge profits. Consequently, something that you used to find anywhere you submerged your masked face is now an extremely scarce commestible.

In a world where giant fishing trawlers drag the waters of the Caribbean Sea for conch, Tobago Cox still does it the old-fashioned way. He’s earned a living diving for conch since he was a teenager, and he’s the textbook practitioner of the ancient art of open-water diving. We spent a day on the water with him, followed by a beach barbecue on a deserted island named No Man’s Land, which lies just a half-mile off the coast of Tobago. The experience of being out in the water with Tobago Cox allowed us the rare opportunity to spend a day with someone who truly is the last bottle of Coke in the desert.

We started off our conch-diving excursion at Tobago’s house, located on the east side of the island, where he keeps his small, rickety, wooden boat. Tobago’s vessel is essentially an oversize wooden dinghy with a small, hand-built, plywood console in the middle that serves as his wheelhouse and protects him from the elements. The wheelhouse looks cobbled together with penny nails, sealing wax, fiberglass, and twine. There is nothing seaworthy about this teeny ship at all, except for its reputation: Tobago has been diving off this boat for more than forty years. I had no qualms about my safety, despite the fact that once again I find myself in a tiny vessel with no radios, no lights, no life preservers,
no radar equipment or navigation equipment, no depth finder—nothing. I guess I just trusted that Tobago’s life experience was all the equipment we needed.

On our way out to sea, putting out of the teeny channel, Tobago explained that he had lived in the same house since he was a child. Growing up, he could literally walk right off his dock into the water, crawl around on the bottom of the inlet floor, and harvest as many conch as he could fit in his bag. He’d then sell them to local restaurants and markets, and that’s how his career started. But over the course of time, he needed to go farther and farther out into the massive channel that separates the island of Trinidad from the island of Tobago. After a two-hour boat ride, which brought us seven or eight miles out from shore, we were finally in a place fit for conching.

In order to find the best spot, Tobago examines the water. I’m accustomed to seeing a lot of equipment on commercial fishing trips, from navigational gear that seems more at home on a NASA space shot, to depth and fish finders designed to pinpoint a single sardine, but Tobago just starts sniffing the air. It’s absolutely astonishing. He checks the current with his hands and eyes, the direction of the wind with his nose, the weather and the navigational position by staring at the sky and the thin line of land on the horizon. He stares down into the water, dons an old Lloyd Bridges-style snorkeling mask, and looks to see if the ocean is too deep, which means no conch. If the current is too swift, that means no dive. He floats a diver’s buoy today, for two reasons: to help us find him better with our cameras as he swims around, and to keep ocean liners, commercial fishing boats, and freighters from running him over. Good reasons.

Once we find some promising areas that are about thirty-five to fifty feet deep, over the side goes Tobago. His diving methods adapt to the change in water depths. If the water is only twenty-five or thirty feet deep, he’ll free-dive with nothing but a bag of empty conch shells to help pull him down deep enough, the way a
diver uses small lead weights. Down on the bottom he swaps each live conch for an old shell, balancing the “weights” to help him stay down. When he’s in fifty feet of water, in a ferocious six- or seven-knot current, he uses a lead belt and oxygen tank. Once he sinks to the bottom, he’ll pull himself along the ocean floor, an old spiky shell in each hand, his fingers curled inside and using the rough exteriors of the shell to grip the muddy, sandy bottom. The current is strong while he’s literally pulling himself hand over hand, searching for conch. It takes him three or four dives and a couple of hours to find about ten conch and four spiny lobster. He always carries a spear gun—not for safety’s sake, but just in case he happens upon something a little more interesting to wrangle into his net. This guy is one tough dude.

His son, Elvis, served as first mate today, helping circle the buoy as Tobago dove to the ocean floor, but typically Tobago takes to the sea alone. Like The King (early movie-star Elvis, not the 1970s drug- and booze-addled bloated version), this Elvis was a handsome, strapping man. Over six feet tall with movie-star, Michael Jordanesque good looks, this guy was the type of hunk you’d expect to see in fashion magazines, not helping his dad pilot his little old rust-bucket. Turns out this wasn’t Elvis’s bread-and-butter gig (which I will get to later), he was just there to steer the boat as a favor to his old man and help us with our gear. In fact, he had almost no water skills to speak of. Between dives, Tobago would snap, barking orders at his clueless son. Elvis was like a fish out of water, unable to tell his port from his starboard.

After a few hours, the clouds started rolling in and the wind began to whip up. Tobago surfaced and told us the conditions were too rough and dangerous for him to continue diving. Storm clouds were gathering, and he really wanted to get back to No Man’s Land and fire up the grill. On our way over to the island, I asked Tobago if his son ever wanted to keep the family conch business running. Tobago explained that there was no money in it. Most of the conch sold to big hotels and restaurants is now imported, or farmed in
Asia and cheaply sold in cans or in frozen bags. The market for the fresh stuff, as delicious, fantastically sweet, and succulent as it is, hardly exists anymore. There’s too much labor involved in shucking these massive beasts. Additionally, the youth of the Caribbean are more interested in becoming music producers, soccer stars, or workers at the local hotels. I guess the life of a humble fisherman isn’t as sexy as it used to be. The humorous experience of watching this father and son argue all day turned poignantly bittersweet once I realized that when Tobago goes, the local conch-diving industry goes with him. I asked Tobago if he knew of anyone else who still dove anymore for these mollusks. He smiled at me and said, “No one, mon. I’m da last one.”

I’m not sure what it is with the
Bizarre Foods
crew and boats, but it seems whenever we get on one, the shit hits the fan. What had been just a bit of bad weather morphed into a white squall within fifteen minutes. The wind and the rain became so fierce you couldn’t even see the tip of the boat. My internal compass was off. I was soaked with spray and rain, nervous we were heading in the wrong direction. We were in the middle of the Caribbean Sea sans navigation equipment and unable to see our landmarks, but Tobago just smiled and told us not to worry, he knew exactly where we were going.

And he was right. He could have threaded that boat through the eye of a needle, despite the fact that the seas were pounding away at the boat, my cameraman got seasick, and the entire support crew in the chase boat was throwing up every ten minutes. It was a horrific afternoon at sea, and getting back to land took much longer than we had anticipated as our little outboard bucked against everything the sea could throw at us. Finally, after a very rough crossing, we pulled into the calmer waters a mile or so off No Man’s Land, putted into shore, parked the boats about twenty feet off the beach, and waded toward the palm-lined pink sands, holding our gear high over our heads and thanking God we had made it.

Tobago’s buddies had arrived about a half hour earlier and were waiting for us with a woman. The lady turned out to be a lonely, forty-something British divorcée who was staying at the hotel where Elvis worked. Apparently, Elvis made a living on the side as an opportunistic, resort-roaming gigolo and spent the rest of the afternoon lying next to her on the beach, helping her get her groove back. As the crew and I set up gear and blocked out the rest of our day, we couldn’t help but be impressed with young Elvis, and we constantly peeked over our shoulders to see what he was up to and how he was working his mojo. He lovingly caressed his gal pal’s stomach, played with her hair, nuzzled her neck and nibbled her ear, occasionally whispering sweet nothings into it. She loved it! Just try to make a TV program while the art of seduction, one that we later discovered was bought and paid for, is going on. I kept craning my neck, half expecting Benny Hill to pop up out of the sand dune. Sometimes you forget that the world still works in some pretty strange ways.

Back on the G-rated section of the beach, Tobago introduces me to his friends. First, there was Captain Frothy. To most of his buddies, he’s just Frothy, but if you’re on his boat, you refer to him as Captain Frothy. Next, we had Captain Frothy’s nine-year-old son, Adrian, a very able-bodied young lad. And there was Skinny. Skinny was Captain Frothy’s sidekick. Skinny ran just over six feet tall and had to weigh at least three bills. Frothy, Skinny, and Adrian had phenomenal cooking skills, and better yet—they all loved to eat. They were seafearing adventurers of the highest order. Captain Frothy’s day job was running a waterborne adventuring company that took tourists on all sorts of different aquatic activities around the islands, but his real passion was food. Tobago asked him to join us to facilitate the chow side of things, and I was grateful to have some help. I certainly wasn’t going to get any from Elvis.