From the Touchstone Breath, 20th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Deneb): One of my favorite previous dandelions, the 18-year-old me, was a fan of the English rock group Pink Floyd. Not the Dark-Side-of-the-Moon Pink Floyd, that album didn't come out until a year after my 18-year-old dandelion, but the earlier, gnarlier, less harmonious Pink Floyd. Later dandelions would divide the Floyd discography into two categories, pre-Dark Side and post-Dark Side, and much preferred the earlier division, as it was the music of our formative teenage years. 

Anyway, this isn't a post about Pink Floyd, just a roundabout way of introducing the lyrics from their song Free Four (from Obscured by Clouds, 1972), "The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime." Not many rock songs from that era were about aging or old people, and before you say, "What about Old Man by Neil Young?," I said "not many," not "none," and besides, Young was using the old man to assert his own relative youth, not identifying with the old man like in the Pink Floyd song.

But anyway, those lines have stayed with me for years - the whole song, really - and this old dandelion of today can vouch for the truthfulness of those lyrics. "You shuffle in the gloom of the sickroom, and talk to yourself as you die." I'm not in the sickroom, at least not yet, but I do talk to myself and like everything living, I'm also dying, as in, "he who is not busy being born is busy dying" (Bob Dylan).

There are so many memories crowding my head, and like all old people, I'm virtually bursting with stories that no one else wants to hear. The decades-old tales of old people's lives are as irrelevant to younger people today as stories about dreams. Nothing turns off a listener more than the words "So, I had this dream . . ., " which translates to most people as "let me tell you about a bunch of shit that didn't actually happen" (save it for your shrink). An old person saying "I remember back when . . ." has about the same effect on listeners. 

Anyway, this isn't a post about a dream or the song Free Four - that was all just a roundabout way of introducing this old man's memories of deeds from his prime. Further - surprise! - the deeds weren't committed by my 18-year-old dandelion, either. That was all just a set-up to introduce the words of Free Four, a set-up to the set-up, as it were, and I better get on with the story before I start endlessly circling the drain.

The story involves my 30-year-old dandelion, not my favorite incarnation and one that I don't associate with all that much any more. Too materialistic and too self-centered, although not without some redeeming qualities, IMHO. But if you asked me for the most interesting, as in the most entertaining, story in my life, this would probably be my pick. The story involves medieval dynasties, third-world politics, tropical paradises, groundwater geology, skinny-dipping with supermodels, and runways infested by goats, with appearances by Morley Safer and Rossano Brazzi (if you're old enough to know who they are). Also, warning: this might be a long story and could take a couple of posts to complete.

Historical background and context: The Kingdom of Aragon is located in what is now eastern Spain, adjacent to coastal Catalonia. The area was part of the Western Roman Empire until the Romans were displaced by the Visigoths, who were displaced by the Moors, who established a vast Crown of Aragon all along the Mediterranean coast. The Moors were eventually expelled from the territory by the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella of Christopher Columbus fame, and Aragon is now an autonomous region of Spain. 

That's the short version. European history is crazy, with countless monarchs and rulers rising and falling over the millennia, and city- and nation-states appearing and disappearing. Suffice it to say for our purposes that Aragon was once a big deal, among many other big deals, but no longer exists.

Anyway, sometime in the early 1980s, a group emerged from within the jet set of Europe who claimed they were displaced princes and princesses of Aragon, royalty who no longer had a Kingdom. They weren't asking to be given Aragon back - they weren't crazy - but they were looking for a sovereign land somewhere over which they could rule. They probably had in mind some little enclave like Liechtenstein or Andorra (which itself borders Aragon), or if anyone had an island somewhere for sale, they'd consider that. 

Meanwhile, Great Britain had just conceded independence to the Caribbean island of Antigua in 1981, and one of the conditions for independence was that Antigua also had to take the adjacent island of Barbuda off its hands. Barbuda was still relatively undeveloped, just a couple of sustenance-level fishing communities and one remote, ultra-exclusive and ultra-private resort for the ultra-wealthy out by itself on a peninsula. The resort was tiny, but the kind of place that, say, Jackie Onassis might visit to get away from paparazzi and everyone else, while still having her every whim satisfied in luxury. But the rest of island was still wild, just a rugged landscape of limestone cliffs covered by yucca and cacti and the occasional gravel road. In other words, a perfect candidate to be developed into a New Order of Aragon.

The princes were intrigued and discussions were started to negotiate a purchase of the island from Antigua. I don't know how seriously Antigua took the proposition, but a public-relations campaign was started with Italian actor Rossano Brazzi of South Pacific fame selected as the handsome face of the campaign for some reason. The architecture firm of John Portman & Associates was approached with the intriguing, once-n-a-lifetime concept of designing an entire nation from the ground up, including an airport, a capitol district, hotels, beachfront, roads and a power grid to connect it all, and so on. The goal was to transform Barbuda from possibly the last undeveloped Caribbean island into an independent Kingdom of Aragon, with an economy, like many other islands, based on tourism, gambling, and off-shore banking.

Before the development and negotiations got very far, however, some journalists discovered that the "princes" weren't really royals, had no money to speak of, and no claim to any sovereignty. The whole thing, in short, was a con job intended to fleece European jet setters. 60 Minutes even ran a segment covering the scam, having great fun mocking the "princes" along with amusing clips liberally edited in of Brazzi singing Bali H'ai from South Pacific. Hilarious stuff. 

That would have been the end of it all, but an Atlanta developer got wind of the idea, probably from Atlanta-based Portman, and thought that with or without the New Order of Aragon, developing a Caribbean island from the ground up was still a pretty good - which is to say, profitable - idea. He went about rounding up investors and planners and generally promoting the idea of Barbuda as the next big Caribbean hotspot.

Much of the planning centered around a golf course. The beaches were there all around the island, but you can't have a vacation destination without a golf course, and a golf course requires green grass, and green grass requires irrigation water.  A course in that climate needs a lot of irrigation water to first establish a grassy ground cover, and only slightly lesser amounts of water after that to maintain the cover. The problem is that Barbuda is a Leeward Island with most of its rain falling during hurricane season in September and November, with recurrent droughts in between. Further, the irrigation water has to be good-quality fresh water without salt or a lot of chlorides, which is hard to find on a small island surrounded by the salt-water sea. The groundwater resources of Barbuda were not well established, and it was not at all apparent if there were sufficient reserves of suitable water on the island to support a golf course, and if there wasn't the whole idea of a new Caribbean paradise was doomed.

In 1984, while all of this was going on, I was a groundwater hydrogeologist who had just taken a new job with an Atlanta-based engineering consulting firm. My firm won the contract to make an initial evaluation of the fresh-water resources of the island and in only my first or second week on the job, I was chosen to go to Barbuda to perform that evaluation. 

I warned you that this was a long story, and I've reached the limit of what I want to say today. Now that I've intersected with the narrative and am now myself finally a part of the tale, I'll pick the story back up again tomorrow to continue.