Seeing the Mountain

Once there were 13,000 inhabitants on the island of Montserrat.  Once there was a small capital called Plymouth, with 4,000 residents…

Wake up.  The alarm clock is ringing.  The Earth is calling.  The sun has risen over the waves of the sea to say that the time of unconsciousness is ended.  It is morning.  Dreams are to take rest and memory processing to cease, even on the idyllic shores of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, a British territory smaller than Bhola. 

People are opening their stores in the main street of Plymouth.  Mothers are walking their children to the school gate and a fisherman by the seaside has already cast his line.  At the dock a yacht is pulling in; at the meagre airport a plane is anticipated; and someone is writing a letter in ink, with a pen.  All the usual things must’ve been, in the days before they looked up to see their mountain again.

 

Imagine.  The circle of the sun, the gravity to hold them, the energy of food and the physics of human movement: the many life-defining forces that bring predictability and comfort.  The routines of sea breeze and season; the ebb and flow in the tides; the phases of the moon; and the greeting of friend and neighbour: all the natural systems to promote a laid back sense of continuum.  There must’ve been that usual perception of lives languidly evolving, in small steps barely discernable, like the leeward waves spreading out on the sand. 

It’s an easy matter that the Montserratians didn’t see their mountain, because a mountain that sits nearby all the time will with certainty fade into invisibility.

All the years of growth and change, from childhood to old age, the whole of a human lifetime: for the ocean and the land it’s just the blink of an eye.  The Earth has its own cycles and ambitions that last ages and eons rather than months and years.  On 18 July 1995 it was time for the mountain they call Soufrière Hills to wake up. 

There were signs.  For three years there had been stirring, seismic yawning to indicate the final stages of a slumber that had endured since prehistory.  But you know how minor tremors are: they reverberate through the ground and on into human gossip, what one was doing at the time and a whole series of ‘what ifs’, only to disperse from consciousness once more as the forces, the going to work, the fishing and the writing of a letter with a pen reclaim their centrality. 

They knew it was a volcano.  But with the thick of the forest covering the slopes it must’ve seemed a rather friendly one.  Yet when a mountain chooses to move, finally, there are none that can deny it. So it was when Soufrière Hills erupted.

Plymouth wasn’t directly affected at first, but a month later, on 15 August 1995, their mountain brought fifteen minutes of darkness to the day, as a large ash cloud descended on the town.  Plymouth had to be abandoned in the following year.

Wake up.  The volcano is waiting.  It’s 2006, the day we’re going to Montserrat.  The little plane with propellers will take us, there and back across the short stretch of Caribbean from Antigua to the new airport in Montserrat.  We’ll see what they call the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean: the forested north, the planned but soulless settlements where one-third of the evacuees from the island’s south now live.  We’ll drive to vantage points to collect our thoughts in view of the exclusion zone, the half of the island given in to rubble and mud.  We’ll see their Soufrière Hills spewing forth boulders that tumble down the hillside leaving tails of dust.  From the distance those rocks look as pebbles, so easily are they tossed.  We’ll see the great brew of their cloud and smoke that as far as Antigua changes the colour of sunsets.  It’s the ash and cinders the vulcanologists call tephra, the airborne fragments called pyroclasms.  We’ll hear their mountain: a continuous, distant rumbling is the voice of the Earth. 

The old airport, it’s down there, only a minor patch of tarmac left.  That’s the end of the runway with white lines still painted on it.  See it!  The control tower looks as an archaeological relic protruding from the mud. 

On the leeward side we’ll go as far as we can towards abandoned Plymouth, where pyroclastic flows reached the town and the port in 1997.  We’ll see the tree trunks, bare and lifeless as sculptures to destruction, upon the lower hillside; and we’ll see homes snapped like twigs with the force of the volcanic earthflows.  There!  To the distance is Plymouth, like a long forgotten shelf in an attic, covered in dust and memories.  It’s as they left it, so the locals say.  There are family photos hanging on walls; there’s a pen on a desk with a half written letter covered in dust.  Their mountain made a museum of exhibits but no visitors.

On a red tile at a safe distance we will leave our handprints in the dust that covers everything, there too, as we hear how the Montserratians occasionally need face masks when the wind blows northward, when the volcanic storms that fertilise the surrounding islands of the West Indies and far across the Caribbean, keep busy their brooms.

We will stop in the green north again to drink from a small spring on the hillside.  There’s a sign that reads: ‘If you drink from this burn, you will surely return.’  But for the two-thirds of Montserratians who left for surrounding islands and Britain, it’s a promise that’s unfulfilled.  Perhaps the return at the burn follows a longer cycle.

In the evening from Antigua, as we eat dinner, we will see the stripes of fire on their Soufrière Hills horizon, bringing light to the night as sure as their mountain once endowed darkness upon the day.

Wake up. It’s 2013.  It’s the other side of the world, in Dhaka, in Bangladesh.  The time for unconsciousness and memory processing are done.  There’s to be action, a stirring of a different sort.  Perhaps it will leave things altered, but not like in Montserrat; rather in a positive, healing way.  Maybe it was always there, you know, the mountain we didn’t see.

The alarm clock is ringing.  The Earth is calling.

From Montserrat. South lies Trinidad where the birds mimic the sun.  Southeast lies sweet, sweet Barbados where the waves speak of liberty.  Southwest, a little far, the Earth offers a blessing.  While on a distant continent, south, very south, extinct volcanoes spell adventure.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Seeing the Mountain

Pura Vida; or, a Coati's Tale

 “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” 

– Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854

(Guest writer: a Costa Rican Coati)

For a good life, take it from me, nothing will surpass a patch of pristine rainforest and a decent sized public rubbish bin.  Sure, a shiny car, ultra-modern, sleek and featuring the latest ergonomics might be enough to make all the other vehicles in the traffic blush.  Sure, a long, tree-lined driveway of pebbles capped by gates in swirling wrought iron might be the envy of friends.  But it’s not pura vida, that quintessentially Costa Rican Spanish phrase that means ‘real living’ or ‘plenty of life’, and is also used for ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’.

Big experiences aren’t necessary either.  While it might be enjoyable to jet off to Cannes for the film festival now and then, to walk the red carpet; or to lounge in the Anguillan sun waiting for chilled refreshments to be brought right to your deck chair, such moments are only fleeting.  Take it from a Costa Rican: keep it simple.

But what would I know?  I’m only a coati and for those who are not quite the mammal experts they might wish to be, think of me as a cousin of the raccoon.

I’m based up in Monteverde, which is sort of in the middle north of Costa Rica about five hours from the capital, San Jose.  It’s not a bad spot: the morning air is crisp and foggy as the clouds roll in over the hills and in the nights there’s a wondrous chorus of insect and frog to promote blissful slumber.  Tree and branch, Monteverde is rich in green, within the 26,000 acres of the Cloud Forest Reserve.  You could say there’s a bit of a backyard at my place. 

 

In pursuit of packaged pura vida the tourists arrive from early morning to take a stroll in our patch of forest.  They’ve made trails for themselves with boardwalks and wooden stairs.  The tourists can be noisy and nosy when they come, but we don’t mind posing for their cameras, knowing that by habit in their backpacks is likely some portion of our lunch.  It’s a straightforward matter to take a break atop the visitor’s centre roof or in a tree, to wait for the tourists to shuffle off into the greenery.

I don’t wish to indulge in needless nationalism but I like being Costa Rican.  Well, I write ‘Costa Rican’ but casually we’re known as Ticos, particularly the humans.  We coatis are Ticos too and it’s not a bad thing to be.  I don’t mean to bore you with facts but our Costa Rica has around 25% of its land area protected in national parks and reserves, more than any other country.  Costa Rica’s been recognised as the planet’s greenest nation and since 2007 we’ve had this little goal of becoming the first carbon neutral country by 2021.  I don’t mean to sound proud, just because our Tico facts are impressive enough to be printed on t-shirts to sell to the tourists.

Anyway, for me and my coati friends it’s rather more the 2012 ban on recreational hunting that’s the favourite, because we do sport rather pretty jackets and it’s not everyone who can let that be.  So we retire to the tranquillity of our cloud forest, and the general dampness and breeziness, let me assure you, is not much of a bother when one has the warmth of fur to rely on.  It’s about dressing appropriately, nothing more. 

If I mention the sifting through trailhead garbage for food, my pura vida might not sound like your cup of tea.  But the tourists are generous in their bread crumbs, shards of vegetables and leftover fruit.  It’s incredible the amount of perfectly good food scraps they discard.  Better still, the rubbish bin is an ecosystem that attracts insects.  It’s a one-stop shop for all the nutritional requirements and the smell isn’t too atrocious on account of the rainforest air.  I’ll tell you something else: it’s tiring to wander the pristine wilds on a daily basis; much better to hang around the rubbish bins.  You can think of it as recycling, as any good Tico would.  Our omnivorous diet is our national contribution.

Down the road a bit the tourists like to watch the hummingbirds that come, attracted by the nectar trays hung out.  They’re small birds, hummingbirds, of several species in Monteverde, all with delicate curved bills suited to nectar-feeding.  But it’s neither their size nor their shiny feathers that impress the tourists, I suppose, as much as how rapidly they can flap their little wings to hover, mid-air, while they eat, if they wish.  At the other end of the scale in terms of speed are the two and three-toed sloths that tourists like to spy on night hikes.  They’re so slow that moss can grow on them.

In every respect Costa Rica is a wildlife haven.  Being in Central America, species that developed in both the North and the South, separately, learnt to intermingle here when the land bridge formed and the landmasses joined.  As I said, our cousins the raccoons prefer up north while in South America are other coati species.  As a result, while our Costa Rica might account for only 0.25% of the planet’s land surface it has 5% of the world’s biodiversity, right here!  Ah, but I sound like I’m boasting.  I would only mention how I like living in a cosmopolitan, multi-species cloud forest society.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect to our lifestyle is how attracted the foreigners have become to our Tico ways.  It’s not a decent habit to eavesdrop but I once heard these American girls, mid-twenties at a guess, talking about a retreat down on our Pacific coast where foreigners try to live in harmony with nature.  There’s no TV there and I believe as much as possible they grow their own food.  I guess even in America the heritage is not only the bright lights of Hollywood, the oil tycoon tiffs of Dallas and the roulette wheels of Vegas.  There’s also Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where Mr. Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth century once tried to live a pura vida of his own.  That’s American heritage too.  A secret: Walden’s back in vogue.

There’ll always be critics, those who find my words too 1970s and hippy.  I’d remind that if we think of the 1970s it was flower power that ended the Vietnam War.  It’s not an achievement to be scoffed at.  Not that we could ever have a problem like the Vietnam War here in Costa Rica, because our renowned President José Figueres Ferrer constitutionally abolished our standing army in 1948, leaving more to spend on health, education and culture; making us the most peaceful and politically stable country in Central America.  Neighbouring Panama followed our example in 1990 so it’s catching on.  There must be another tourist t-shirt in all that somewhere.

I’ll have to leave you there: think I smell some tourist tamale, made of corn, delicious, and there has to be some left on the plantain leaf it’s wrapped in when they toss it out!  Do stop by though, if you’re ever lucky enough to visit Costa Rica.  No appointment needed: we coatis will be right here, hanging out around the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve rubbish bins. Pura vida!

Statistics in this piece researched on Wikipedia here and here.

Algo mas?             

Bolivia en Español?   

Bangladesh en Español? 

Something else?  

Bolivia in English?     

Argentina, Chile or Uruguay? 

This article also published in Star Magazine, 
here:Pura Vida

Sugar

 

"Lick an Lock-up Done Wid, Hurray fuh Jin-Jin (Queen Victoria).
De Queen come from England to set we free
Now Lick an Lock-up Done Wid, Hurray fuh Jin-Jin"

- Barbadian folk song sung on the day in 1838 that full emancipation for the island’s former-slave majority was achieved.[i]

In repetition and without assumption the Caribbean waves fold and sea-whisper, as they slide across the white Barbadian sands.  Like a life for but a short while they linger, before retreat.  And what do they say?

The tides bring the waves higher and send them lower at lunar interval, through azure sky day and pink sunset, through the calamity of each hurricane and Atlantic brewed storm, through the time of slavery and into the enlightenment of independence.  It’s the Bar-bajan story, it is.  Thirty-four by twenty-three, the island nation of three lacs people is a creature of the waves.

They flock in to soak up a few sun rays, they do, as their work leave permits and you wonder at the Europeans and North Americans, what they make of the carefree palm fronds swaying in the breeze.  With careful hands the resort-tourists spread out their beach towels across the sand.  They reach for the sunscreen.  The sea is their recreation for but a short while.  Barbados only lasts a week.

It wasn’t always leisure, it once was wealth that brought them in, the British incidentally, who followed the waves to shore with the desire to add sugar to their Indian tea.  They created their own seas in sugar cane green and at first compelled fellow Britons to work them, indentured labourers bound by their debts; and there were Amerindian slaves to tend the household.  It was later the African slaves were brought and bought, at least the ones that survived the horrific Middle Passage across the Atlantic.  About 360,000 Africans were forced to Barbados to tend the plantations in the course of two hundred years.  They became the majority; their descendants are today’s Afro-Bajan community.

But before even the British the Portuguese had spied her, and they had called the island ‘Os Barbudos’, the bearded ones, in reference to the shaggy hanging roots of the coastal Bajan fig trees. (ii)

You wonder at the Scottish-inspired Bajan accent and the old man, that Euro-Bajan who sits about on the veranda at the guest house.  He’s neither guest nor employee, just an islander who won’t stop talking.  Barbados is the world’s most developed developing country he says with pride, and there’s no wishing it developed as being developing has advantages, although he’s not sure what they are. 

In petite Bridgetown the cruise ships dock and the cruise-tourists find their way along Broad Street, they do, swinging into the various shops and locating an upstairs terrace for lunch.  They mingle with some of the locals who also stroll about in summery fashion.  After lunching, out on the street the cruise-tourists fiddle, with money belts and camera lenses, pausing, stepping to find an angle, focusing and snapping.

There’ll be a picture of the petite thirty-seat Parliament Buildings that were built in the 1870s, but how many could say that Barbadian independence arrived in 1966 or that its first assembly met in 1639?  There’ll be a picture of the Chamberlain Bridge that crosses the Careenage where the yachts shelter, but how many could say that the first bridge was probably made by the Taíno people who called the island Ichirouganaim, the ‘Red Land with White Teeth?’  There’ll need to be a souvenir too, to impress the friends back home; it should be something that screams ‘Island in the Sun’ and it’s all a bit rushed since Barbados only lasts a few hours.

You wonder at the Zed-R shared taxi stand with a few petite buses in the mix, at the top of the Bridgetown centre.  There’s reggae music pumping and locals bustling about in bright clothes and casual voices.  They’ve come in from Speightstown, Holetown, Bathsheba and Oistins, from the Parish of St. Lucy and the Parish of St. George.  From all across the island they’ve come and you’re amongst them; you came squashed inside one of the Zed-Rs too, facing the Barbadian jams that aren’t exactly the image of the island.  But it’s a densely populated place.  You wish you could make contact to talk to someone seriously about their history and their ideas of life but everybody’s got something to do, so instead you make your own way to see the Nidhe Israel Synagogue at least from the outside, since it’s one of the oldest in the western hemisphere.  You see the churches too.  There are a handful of small minorities in Barbados: Chinese Bajans, Gujarati-Muslim Bajans and people from other Caribbean islands.  You suppose the most developed developing country is something like the Zed-R stand, the promise of activity pulling the people in.  

The old man at the guest house, you wonder if his ancestors rode chestnut geldings and wore broad-brimmed white hats, if they lived in one of the manor houses surrounded by the sugar-seas that can still be seen in the island’s interior.  Or perhaps they were like the majority of Britons in Barbados, indentured labourers, his forebears.  Whatever his precise heritage he won’t stop talking and is it the history in the waves he fears, what he might hear when the silence comes?

One of the newer arrivals is Brenda, the guest house guest, who has hopes of finding a job serving tourists in a restaurant or a hotel.  She packed up her life in Jamaica to come, bringing her own sunbaked accent, the one from among the archipelago of accents that happened to settle upon Jamaican shores but sounds altogether foreign in Barbados.  Barbados can mean a wage and a future; and she’s worried for her children’s futures.  She frets for them.  

You wonder at the abolitionists and the end of slavery across the British Empire in 1834, at the foresight and statesmanship and at the liberating not only of the slaves but of their masters, who might once again comprehend the idea of human dignity and expunge the stain of slave-owning from their souls.

You wonder how it was, that greatest Bar-bajan day in 1838 when full emancipation of the then 70,000 Afro-Bajans was realised, after four additional years of harsh, indentured service.  They took to the streets and sang they did.

And when you’re from a country of human rights poverty like Australia, which practices mandatory detention for asylum seekers including children and unlimited detention based on clandestine bureaucratic decisions for some refugees, mainly Sri Lankans, you wonder at how almost two centuries ago the Bar-bajans implemented the benefits of minimum standards in how we treat our fellow human beings.  How so long ago they achieved emancipation for one and all.  It’s impressive, it is.  Perhaps one day Australia could learn the Bar-bajan story, it could.  

It’s already evening and at the beach the resort-tourists are packing their things.  They’ll be heading off to the laid back restaurants for pasta or pizza while the waves of the Caribbean carry on.  And in the silence, what is it they sea-whisper, the waves?  Is it ssslavery?  No, wait.  I think they say: liberttty…

With only sugar there's not much to do.  You need a cup of tea or coffee or forget about the beverages altogether and go wandering in the mountains of the Philippines. 


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Sugar

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[i] From www.barbados.org/history1.htm
(ii) some say it was the Spanish who found 'Los Barbudos'.  I'm not sure which is correct.