Livin' Like Travis McGee

The Backstory

Before I knew what kind of man I wanted to be, I knew what kind of man Travis McGee was. He came to me the way the best things come to a boy: sideways, through somebody else's hands. My grandfather kept a stack of paperbacks wedged between a tackle box and a bottle of Coppertone on the shelf above his boat bunk. Same McGee spine. A color in the title. A man against water and sky. He had read them until the covers went soft as old leather. He never told me to read them. He just left them where I could find them. That was his way.

John D. MacDonald wrote more than seventy books, but the twenty-one Travis McGee novels are the ones still tied to the dock. He was a moralist in a crime writer's shirt. He saw Florida before the brochures finished lying about it. The bulldozers. The con men. The retired folks getting skinned clean by charm. The smooth men in sport coats who could ruin a place and call it progress. He wrote lean because he saw clean. No perfume. No begging. Just truth with sunburn on it.

McGee lived on the Busted Flush at Slip F-18 in Bahia Mar. Won it in a poker game. Drove Miss Agnes, that strange robin's egg blue pickup with the Rolls-Royce body. He had no steady job and no taste for one. What he had was a code. He called himself a "salvage consultant." When somebody had been robbed of more than money, and the law had gone soft or blind, McGee stepped in. He recovered what he could. Kept half. Got shot, stabbed, drugged, dragged, lied to, loved badly, and left with things he could not put down. He kept walking.

That is what the books are really about. The cost of carrying a code through a world that thinks codes are for suckers. McGee took his "retirement in installments." Time on the water. Sun on his back. Useful work when it came. No leash he could not cut. That sounds romantic until the bill shows up. It always does. He lost people. He carried them. He did not confuse comfort with peace. He did not call surrender wisdom. That is why he still matters. Maybe more now, in a time when men build brands and call them souls.

I wrote this song thinking about my grandfather and those soft paperbacks, about MacDonald's Florida getting eaten, and about every reader who found something in McGee they did not know they were looking for: water, usefulness, refusal, and the stubborn duty to stand up for somebody who got taken. MacDonald died in 1986, and with him went any more McGee novels. But Jimmy says McGee is still in Cedar Key, and I don't see much profit in arguing with that. Maybe he left Slip F-18 after the coast got too polished. Maybe he found a quieter dock. More pelicans than planners. Coffee going cold. Shirt gone soft. Watching the water. Waiting on the next bad hand.

- Echo Thatch (2024 - Fort Lauderdale, FL)