I have a long memory that can be short on details. For example, I have this bizarre idea that social media didn’t just APPEAR on the planet in September 2003 or March 2006. For the longest time, I couldn’t imagine why I entertained such an unfounded (and potentially unpopular) theory. Then, a couple weeks ago, I recalled this weird tradition that people have been practicing on a tiny, tropical island in the Caribbean for nearly 40 years. Let me tell you about it:

Photo credit: Click here.

A long, long time ago—maybe 20-some years—I was wandering the Caribbean in a boat when some friends on St. John directed me to a steep little rock in the British Virgins called Jost van Dyke. “Go to the Soggy Dollar Bar in White Bay,” they said. So I went.
In those days, there was a road, no electricity, and no dock at White Bay. (The road and power arrived in 1995. There’s still no dock.) So the only way to get to the sun-bleached shack that was (and still is) the Soggy Dollar was to anchor off the beach and swim ashore. Hence the name.

I anchored. I swam. I wandered up the beach and into the bar. It was easy. The Soggy Dollar is open on three sides and has no doors.

I ordered. And then I looked around and saw that the bar’s back wall—really, the only wall—was covered with dozens and dozens of pieces of paper, in at least a dozen languages, each scrap inscribed with a name. “Barbara.” “Dick.” “Amy.” And a message: “Have 4 of everything on me.”

The bartender explained that it’s a Soggy Dollar tradition. People buy a drink for an absent friend and leave a note on the wall. When the absent friend wanders up the beach one day, the gift and the note are there, waiting for them.

What really impressed me, though, is that the people who wandered into the Soggy Dollar that far-off afternoon invariably checked the wall before doing anything else. It was the same reflex that sent my parents’ generation to check the mailbox out front every afternoon. It was also the same reflex that forces mine and my daughter’s generations to check our inboxes 212 times a day, to check Twitter 2,363 times an afternoon, to check Facebook… You get the idea.

Except, at the Soggy Dollar, the community-forging social medium was ink on paper and the device was a wall. And you had to come to the message. The whole idea was that the message would never come to you. In fact, a critical characteristic of the message was the need to receive it on the beach at White Bay and nowhere else.

I called Tina Chinnerie to fix the holes in my memory. Tina has been operations manager at the Soggy Dollar and the newer, next-door Sandcastle Hotel since 1999. “Oh,” she interrupted as I described the wall, “the Drink Board.”

“Actually, it was the idea of a woman who used to work here. She thought it would be a natural idea that you come and, if you actually have a friend who’s coming later, and you just want to leave them a few drinks, you can do it,” Tina said.

The friends might turn up in an hour. Or a day. Or a decade. Or maybe never. Tina said she has between 300 and 400 notes now, some of them dating back to 1998. “Enjoy my island,” one old one says.

But the important thing was that if you did show up one day, the note would be there on the Drink Board, welcoming you and naming you an official member of the Soggy Dollar community. If you never show up, it's still good. You can sit in your third-floor walk-up in Buffalo in December knowing that your name is on the Drink Board and your Painkiller (the bar's signature rum and juice concoction) is on the bar, sweating cooly in the afternoon heat of Jost. Waiting. Either way, you're part of the scene.

Social media is now faster, of course, and more ubiquitous. But the power of the Drink Board to attract and form a community is certainly no less awesome than Twitter’s similar, but more virtual power.

I love Twitter. But I adore the Drink Board. I told Tina I was heading back soon to check out the Board and see if anyone’s left me a message and a Painkiller in the last 20-odd years.