40 in 40: Cody Martin

Cody Martin? Oh sure, I remember the name. Hell, I remember the face. Met the boy while I was searching for caves of gold and shipwrecks old in the Caribbean some years back. Rumor had it that a certain small island full of turtles and turquoise boulders had the lost chests of one Senhor Cienfuegos and his Twenty Ships. While the search was fruitless, despite a few rare seashells I later squandered in a game of fiddlesticks, I met Martin just days later.

It was twenty-o-leven and we had bunked up on a Spanish schooner piled to the gills with gold doubloons. We were sailin' from Antigua Bay to a place named Atlanta back then, hearin' that there was some sort of noise about a rush of gold in Sanny Franny Cally Forn-E-A. The plan was to take the boat straight from a resupply in Atlanta to the land of milk and honey, The Bay Area.

Everything was set and good when we sailed from Georgia to California and the claim that Cody staked was a fair and pleasant one once we arrived. We was near the Land of Oaks and the seabreeze felt something free and mighty whenever the fog cleared. He tossed rocks in the time betwixt sifting the silt-bedded rivers and cricks. Yet, something happened when the summer came to its close. He started mumblin' oft about going to a port town northwards named See-attah where there was another, bigger vein of the yellow riches. He'd have to brave the cold, but the fish were nice and rumor had it that you could throw them ‘round in a local market. He did love to throw.

So it was, that one fine morning as fall was bleeding into winter that Cody Martin left my life with no kind words or so much as a handshake and a goodbye. I lie awake at night, wondrin' where he is, if he made it, or where he could have gone on his quest for gold and silver and the riches of El Dorado. I became quite distressed and my guitar-strummin' suffered something mighty from the great fret and worry that Cody had left in my life. Did I allow this veritable-stranger-turned-friend-turned-great-hurler-of-items to suffer at the hands of Mother Nature in his quest for fame and the mighty galleon?

All was lost in worry and muddled in stressful thoughts. I contemplated often, aloud to maself, "Where in the world is Cody Martin?" I never had naught like a clue or a hunch. Until I found this map, locked in an old chest he left behind.

Now I'll spend this coming spring and summer figurin' out, where in the world is Cody Martin.