Caye Caulker, Belize, 2012
by Will Watters
The sun came up. I didn’t.
That’s how I remember it now. A blur of salt and sweat and rum-sick mornings peeling themselves off the concrete like something feral trying to stand. We weren’t supposed to be there long. A month, maybe less. Off-season ski bums chasing warmth with whatever tip money hadn’t already been swallowed by bar tabs and gas station burritos. Belize City was the cheapest round-trip on the board. We booked it without thinking, packed rods and feathers and whatever scraps of fly-tying gear we could smuggle past TSA, and flew south with the kind of naïve optimism you can only summon when you’ve already said fuck it to everything you were supposed to be.
Caye Caulker doesn’t look like much when you first step off the ferry. A cracked spine of concrete and coral, patched together with sun-faded signs and too many bars per square mile. The streets aren’t streets. Just sand and bikes and the occasional lost dog looking for shade. Perfect, we thought. Small enough to vanish. Cheap enough to stay.
We found a house — if you could call it that. Four walls, no AC, a fridge that leaked, and a hammock strung where a dining table should’ve been. We paid next to nothing and it still felt like too much. That’s how it starts. That slow recalibration of what you need, what you want, what you can live without.
Days were spent chasing fish we barely knew how to catch. Tarpon. Bonefish. Permit, if we dared. We poled canoes across flats so shallow the fish seemed to float between water and sky, the horizon bleeding into both until you weren’t sure where the ocean ended or if it ever really began. We tied flies out of necessity and desperation — bits of fur, stolen feathers, beer tabs when we got creative. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes the fish laughed at us. Either way, we kept casting.
Nights were something else entirely.
There was the bar where we sandbagged for free drinks when the hurricane warnings rolled in. Evacuate? No. Stay. Drink. Bail water until the sky cracked open and the ocean tried to take the island back. We drank with locals who could outfish us, outfight us, outdrink us, and still make it to work the next morning without apology. We got robbed on a water taxi so slow it felt like penance. We almost got stabbed in a bar we were told not to enter. We made friends anyway. Friends who pulled us from water when the crocodiles got too curious. Friends who taught us how to speak without words, how to listen when someone older and saltier than you starts a story with “back when things were worse…”
We rode rusted bikes across sand and stone like we owned the place. We didn’t. The island let us borrow it, same as the sunburn and the hangovers and the half-memories strung together by rum and bad decisions. We learned how to slip past the airport fence and cast flies into the flats between landings, dodging prop planes and shouting like kids who still thought they’d live forever. We caught tarpon from runways, bonefish from canoes, and more trouble than we were qualified to handle.
We drank too much. Slept too little. Ate what we could afford, which was mostly nothing. Somewhere in there, we taught ourselves how to saltwater fly fish. Or maybe the island taught us. Hard to say.
What I know is this: you don’t leave a place like that clean. You leave with scars. With stories. With a new language carved into the parts of you that don’t show up in photos.
I came back broke. Bruised. Sunburnt past recognition. Fluent in things I shouldn’t be — patience, mostly, and how to tie knots drunk in the dark.
The sun came up. I didn’t.
And for a while there, I think that meant I was finally living right.
