Oh Captain, My Captain!

8/10/05 Atlanta, GA to Beaufort, SC to Atlanta, GA

Alright, this entry is a bit out of the ordinary. You may be tempted not to believe what’s coming, but we assure you it’s all true. Even better, if you doubt any of it, we encourage you to go and talk with Robert Brooks to see for yourself. He might like the company.

So just before we left for our trip I ran into a group of friends that had just gotten back from their own road trip, and the first stop they made was in Beaufort, SC. 288 miles directly east of Atlanta. They went to Beaufort to visit with a friend Alex Brooks’s dad’s cousin, Robert Brooks. They went to make the acquaintance of the real Captain Morgan.

It’s true. The man claims his mother’s maiden name of Morgan and the family line that can be traced back directly to a Dutch Buccaneer Captain Morgan. And apparently some time in the mid-eighties the makers of Captain Morgan’s spiced rum took his photograph and rendered the illustration that haunts so many boozers across the nation. He still has the costume and everything from when they put him on a promotional tour across South Carolina.

But the fact that he was a real-life pirate who employed Arrgghs in casual conversation was just the beginning of the richness of this guy’s character.

We made our way back to his house by way of a long series of turns, passing signs issuing warnings like “pavement ends,” and sleepy oaks and willows partnered with spanish moss generously doling out shade to the tepid South Carolina summer afternoon.

A few years back in an accident with a lighter he lost the end of his left index finger, which he happily caps with a metal hook on special occasions. The explosion also cost him the skin on his thumb, which was remedied by a surprisingly common procedure of sewing the damaged area to the chest and then ripping the thumb off once it’s healed. The issue with the Captain’s thumb though, is that when they ripped his thumb from his chest, it took some hair follicles with it. The man totally has chest hair growing from his thumb!

He’s also alarmingly well-armed. The Captain is insured for $70,000 worth of firearms – most of them collectors items that I couldn’t begin to list hear. In addition, he has a home-made trebuchet and a cannon which he uses to trade fire with the Governor of South Carolina on a regular basis. Not to worry, he’s got a fully functioning air-raid siren that he uses to warn the neighbors before he ever fires.

To pass the hours he also invented tree-bowling, a sport involving a stone suspended from a tree that’s swung with the aim of knocking down a two-liter bottle filled with water on the third backswing.

The longer we spoke with the Captain, it became increasingly clear how genuinely lonely he was. He had followed his dream and was living on his family’s land, sewing canvas for sails like his grandfather had done. Yet I couldn’t help but imagine myself in his shoes and how 17 years of living in a house by myself in the South Carolina Low Country would wear on me. A bit chilling not unlike the feeling one gets if you accidentally start to give Napoleon Dynamite any serious thought.

We eventually made our way back out to the car by way of a number of warm and heart-felt goodbyes and booked it back to Atlanta trying the whole way back to debrief a bit and process what we’d just been through.