Pelican Bar
Your post-apocalyptic drinking establishment
In a world where nuclear war has destroyed our international infrastructure, beer will cost $5,000 (payable in BitCoin) and the sole remaining bar will be a few kilometers off the coast of Jamaica. Its power source will be the trusty generator running off the tank of gasoline ferried out once every two days. Its foundation will not be cement; this last bastion of Red Stripe and rum will rest on wood anchored to the reef offshore. Jelly fish, doctor fish, and blue tang will circle it. Seagulls and pelicans will be its animal denizens.
The last remaining bar on earth will be Pelican Bar. This is Pelican Bar:
The Place
Pelican Bar rises over the waves a mile or so offshore of Parottee Point on Jamaica’s southern coast. It is a protean construction of bamboo, hardwood, and palm that is reimagined and rebuilt after every major storm. Some years it has an outdoor promenade and patio, other years it’s just a covered circular room. There is a small ladder for arriving guests, carved benches, and a generously thatched roof. Visitors sign the ‘guest book’ by carving their names into the wood that makes up the bar. With frequent coastal storms, the wood doesn’t last long and the oldest carvings were names from 2015.
Getting There
Is not easy. We asked our host family to ask local fisherman to take us on a 45 minute ride from Treasure Beach out to the bar. The fisherman beached his boat on the sand by our house, we boarded, the captain arranged us on the boat’s three benches, and we were on our way. The journey out was an adventure, with swells often higher than our boat, and the breeze at our backs as we sped out toward Pelican Bar.
At the Bar
The offerings are fairly simple. There are a few refrigerators holding Red Stripe and other beer, kept cold by a small generator and then there’s a small gas cooktop for preparing the fish and lobster brought in by various boats. Gasoline for the generator is brought in every day by fisherman with a five gallon tank.
Pelican Bar is buzzing. There are older Jamaican men playing dominoes, slamming them down and shouting various taunts at each other. There are young rasta entrepreneurs with t-shirts for sale. There was even a group of young Jamaican men and women with a drone they had brought to film their outing. The drone’s rotors started spinning and it lept into the air, keeping a 35+ degree angle to hold steady in the stiff breeze.
Coming Home
The journey back was even more exciting. The stiff Christmas Winds had picked up and were blowing in our faces, creating much higher swells that we had to sail into for the return trip. Each swell blew water into our faces and less than 10 minutes into the trip, we hit a series of large swells that tossed us from our benches into the bottom of the boat.
The last swell was so large that we were tossed into the air and came back down so hard that one of the benches broke and Kate injured her tailbone. This made the remainder of the bouncy trip a little more stressful, but we got the bonus of three boat shards as souvenirs of our memorable voyage.
