MY SAILBOAT WAS a 48-foot ketch, just like Long's, and in the late fall of 1997 I hired another captain to deliver it from San Francisco to Panama while I finished a semester of teaching at Stanford. My plan was to pick up the boat in Panama and continue to the British Virgin Islands, where I would run winter charters. This boat, Grendel, was my business and my home.

But the captain I'd hired, an accomplished sailor in her thirties, took on some bad diesel in Acapulco, diesel with water in it, and limped into the town of Puerto Madero on a bit of wind. For some reason, she waited a week before calling me. Then the cook took off on another boat for la pura vida in Costa Rica, and took my $2,000 in emergency cash with him.

None of this made any sense, of course, and it was the beginning of the most outrageous four months of my life. I arrived in Puerto Madero figuring I'd be on my way in about a week. But soon enough, I was the center of attention in the town's backwater shrimp port, a tiny village of its own, without a name. I'd fallen down the rabbit hole, into a place where, everywhere I turned, I heard newer and less believable stories, and they were all about me.

My sailboat was large and broken, tied to the one crumbled chunk of concrete on the shoreline, visited by rats, snakes, begging children, prostitutes, the police, the navy, drunken fishermen, and the crooked port captain's men. At first I tried to have the engine fixed, but a mechanic with a disco shirt, gold chains, and a group of thugs at his shop held the high-pressure injection pump for ransom, demanding $900 instead of $100 for the repair. So I tried a new tack, spending $3,500 to buy a used engine and have it trucked down from California. This engine was stolen before it ever arrived, only to reappear mysteriously months later, a 500-pound hunk of metal dumped on the beach in the middle of the night.

The outboard engine for my dinghy was also stolen, a theft I came to believe was arranged by my one friend in port, a young Guatemalan named Santiago who was also my interpreter. When I alerted the port captain, a formal and evasive man in his sixties, he told me I could report my stolen engine officially or unofficially. Officially meant he'd have six agencies come strip-search me. Unofficially meant he'd do nothing, even though I could tell him who'd stolen the engine and where it was being kept.

As a week turned into a month, I started paying protection money to Gordo, a Buddha-like crime boss, but even then I was threatened by his own toughs, who beat a prostitute nearly to death right in front of me. I was harassed constantly by a Nicaraguan guy who had an imagined rivalry with me over a waitress at the port's only restaurant, a misunderstanding based on one nervous smile. Almost every day at dawn, a Mexican navy captain came aboard to search my boat and give me advice on how to do my hair, which was already so short it was almost military. One morning, his men bound my hands and beat me as he looked for drugs.

Ultimately I spent four months in Puerto Madero, out of options and out of money. I was referred to locally as "the ATM machine," bleeding cash, on the edge of ruin. Even when I'd take a taxi from Tapachula, the larger city 15 miles inland, the drivers knew who I was and every detail of my story. They knew the mechanic and his men. They knew what I paid Gordo. They knew who had my outboard. They knew I had tried to escape once, putt-putting away at one knot on a broken diesel engine belching black grime into the water, and that pirates in pangas had rammed my boat and threatened to board it for drugs. They knew I had sailed straight to sea that night like a coward with my lights off, then limped back into port to go through it all again. In other words, I became familiar with Puerto Madero. By the time I finally left, I was enraged and terrified. Ten years later, when I heard about Long, I knew I had to go back, as much to resolve my own story as to find answers to his.