A good time to revisit Bahia Mar Marina and Travis McGee's colorful adventures

Travis McGee's still in Cedar Key, that's what ol' John MacDonald said.

Jimmy Buffett

One of the best things I like about summer is summer reading. As a youngster, I looked forward to the summer reading lists with their recommendations of books that were supposed to be fun and enlightening for students. I'd read a couple of those each summer, along with my favorite monthly comics that always had large-size summer specials — like Captain America, Batman and Detective Comics, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Fantastic Four, and Tomahawk (the '60s version).

As I got older I worked on my own reading lists, which included a bit racier material suitable for the hot Texas summers. It was great to run around all day, take care of chores and then, in the evening, enjoy the cooling breeze of oscillating fan while escaping to new worlds and adventures.

I'd read westerns and adventure stories — especially ones with action-packed covers featuring the rugged hero in a dangerous jam and usually with a voluptuous damsel in distress. That, along with too much time at service stations and garages, helped inspire my appreciation for pin-up and pulp art. Science fiction was a good summertime escape, too.

But it wasn't until I was in college that I discovered my favorite summer author and his hero — John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee. Travis McGee was a beach bum living at Fort Lauderdale marina aboard a houseboat, The Busted Flush, that he'd won in a poker game. He considered himself semi-retired, but did work as a "salvage consultant." While he ostensibly was hired to recover something that had been stolen or lost, the stories often involved him helping people recover a part of themselves they'd lost, too. Travis McGee was a knight in tarnished armor, not above bending the law or seeking revenge, who followed his own code of honor to defend people who had been shafted.

It was easy to get lost in MacDonald's glorious descriptions of living on a houseboat at a marina, and he often made Florida, the Everglades, and many of his settings seem like characters in his stories. I have to admit, the allure of living aboard a houseboat where you could haul anchor and go anywhere on water you wanted was appealing. And I had a particular fondness for Miss Agness, Travis McGee's vehicle — a classic Rolls Royce that had been converted into a pickup truck and painted a particularly unusual shade of blue.

Colors were key to the Travis McGee stories with each book's title containing a color — The Deep Blue Goodbye, The Quick Red Fox, Darker Than Amber, The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, The Turquoise Lament, Dress Her in Indigo and so on through a total of 21 books.

It's been a while since I visited Bahia Mar Marina, and a Facebook friend's recent posts about picking up a couple of John D. MacDonald books brought back memories of those visits and summer's past.

I still have the Travis McGee paperbacks I started acquiring in college, quite aged by now with the aroma of old books, but stories still enjoyable to read. With a rainy summer weekend forecast, this might be a good time to pull out one of those old classics. While much of my reading now is on a Kindle, cracking open an old paperback filled with adventures, mystery, a bit of philosophy and lots of memories sounds like a good idea.