SALE
On Island Time: The Long Way Home
At forty, he sold the cybersecurity company he'd built out of a garage with a business partner and no real plan beyond staying in business one more year — and the check that closed on the last night of 2005 quietly gave him the one thing he'd wanted since he was four years old, standing on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico wondering what was on the other side of the horizon. What follows is what happened when he finally decided to go find out.
It starts small: a beach in Dominica, a sailboat bought on a whim, a decade and a half of quiet island-hopping. Then, one July morning with a packed bag and no itinerary, it becomes something else entirely — a loop through every mainland country in South America, the Guianas, and Venezuela; a return sweep through the wider Caribbean; the Florida Keys; the Atlantic seaboard trailing pirate history from St. Augustine to the Outer Banks; and a stop in Montreal that turns, without warning, into a genealogical detour. An archivist hands him a three-hundred-year-old fur trade ledger with his own family's name half-written into it, and he trades his boat for a canoe to paddle the same route his ancestors once used heading south — a route that, thousands of river miles later, puts him right back on the Mississippi, drifting down through St. Louis, Memphis, and the Delta's blues country by towboat, toward a city his own family reached long before he ever did.
That city is New Orleans, and it's where this whole odyssey finally runs out of road, in a season of gumbo, jazz, football, and a Mardi Gras that closes the story without quite answering what comes next.
Told in the same unhurried, first-person voice that made "On Island Time in Paradise" a cult favorite among readers who'd rather be somewhere else, this is a story about how far one packed bag can actually take a person — and what it feels like to discover, thousands of miles from home, that home had been waiting at the end of the trip the whole time.