St. Vincent's Remedy

It’s not the cure-all for the deficiencies of mankind but it does its best. There are island choices, whether to read a book or sit on the balcony in the sun and surrender, sublimely, to the translucent waters of Indian Bay. Beyond, aqua fading to deep blue is the channel before Bequia, the first island in the Grenadine chain. There exists no obstacle that can obstruct beauty: it’s a reminder. The view can hypnotise, there.

When inactivity becomes entirely too inactive the beach is just a few strides away, to swim or with flippers and snorkel to greet the fish, multicoloured, striped, with long snouts or googly eyes. It’s to be observed that the postcard paradise continues underwater. Lucelle, meanwhile, might be taking her husband for a dip; but there’ll be no crowds to contend with, there.

Things to think of are not absolutely absent, don’t misunderstand: it’s best not to swim out too far lest Bequia’s currents sweep you away, and don’t get caught up, irretrievably, in the dreamy pink palette of the Caribbean sunset, either.  But it’s not much to worry about. There’s a lot of goodness in St. Vincent to find you. Life won’t bother you much, there.

Lucelle doesn’t have guests. It’s one of the first things she says, that at her laid back hotel she only has friends. Even if you’re new friends, arriving at her little patch of Indian Bay fresh from the airport, just in from Grenada, you’ll understand it easily that she’s not only saying that. When she learns you have no car it’s unimportant because in her older model, brown car she takes enjoyment from showing her friends a lot of the little main island. Lucelle is proud of her West Indian nation, independent since 1979 and homeland to 120,000 people, her SVG.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines: she sees so much goodness in it.

You’ll wonder if it was Lucelle who added the final touches to island calm or if the island brought its kindly disposition to bear on her. There’s an inkling of the sound of the waves in her demeanour and the soft crunch of beach sand in her pace. Or perhaps it’s merely the sort of gentleness to be expected from a diplomat’s wife.  

By narrow road into the green hills away from the coast she took us to the gardens of Mesopotamia. We strolled and chatted among a bounty of fruit, patterned leaf and orchid flower; and the conversation flowed as simply as the stream, there.

Yet it’s no cure-all. Wherever there are humans there are problems and we can see this by the black sand beaches of the east coast. Lucelle wanted to show us the tunnel dug under the hillside by African-origin slaves, at the time when the British engaged the island in sugar production. There aren’t natural harbours on the east side so the tunnel was a convenience through which trolleys of cane could be hauled and loaded aboard small boats and anchored ships. The British ordered the landscape altered, there.

But there exists no obstacle that can obstruct beauty, according to St. Vincent, and what should have been a morbid site of slavery’s remodelling, wasn’t. A melange of colour and shade, the walls of whitish rock were covered in lichen in bright red and fluorescent green, turning a horrific history toward art. Over time St. Vincent’s remedy had done its best, making new beauty with a little weathering. We should remember people’s goodness and struggle, and not only their suffering: it’s a reminder.

She drove on, north, to colonial looking Georgetown, which seemed to be trying to be more of a town than it really was. Beyond was the light forest of tall palms among the cane fields, the banana and guava orchards. It was an inching lane of warped bitumen that raised us to the shady turnaround at the start of the volcano trail.

Above the clouds, Soufrière’s active bellybutton peak in the island’s north is out of view; it’s the skyward tip of the painted parasol of an island and it can erupt, and disrupt, again. Yet it’s true, St. Vincent would over time remodel any catastrophe, to make new beauty, with a little weathering.

Wherever there are humans there are struggles and Lucelle tells us of youth unemployment and the fear that her SVG could fall into the trap of drugs and crime that has already beset some of the neighbouring island nations. But she shows us the new schools the Vincentian government has built and the site of a proposed larger airport that could accommodate larger planes to help the tourism industry to bloom. She considers if her SVG couldn’t become the IT hub of the Windies. She sees a bright future, there.

Meanwhile beyond the capital Kingstown on the west coast and another day the older model brown car drove to the little bay of the Hollywood treasure chest, where the movie Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed. Swashbuckling sets, warehouses and coffins are still, there. And in the small town of Barrouallie we stopped to meet her relatives; because although they’d never know it, you can’t simply drive on. SVG is not that sort of a country.

Sometimes Lucelle would come to us and we’d sit in lazy chairs on the balcony overlooking Indian Bay’s deep blue. She spoke of her life in easy, palm frond sentences, about her own troubles of the sort that can be found wherever there are humans.

She remembers the parties of Europe back in the diplomat days and smiles, and I won’t tell the whole of it but I did want to mention about her husband, who suffers from dementia. She helps him to the beach and back twice a day, for a swim; and he needs a lot of care, not always knowing who she is. Sometimes in the not-knowing he can act with violence.

So when Lucelle worries about his safety, when she worries he might wander off and finds it hard to speak of these things; when she says ‘He was very good to me,’ it’s really something to respect. That there’s a kind of entwining in this world that can overcome any obstacle: it’s a reminder. Sometimes we need reminders and Lucelle was an exceptional one: we saw so much goodness in her.

One day, she said, she walked into a bank in Kingstown and was shocked: there was no movement, as though time had stopped, customer and staff silent and frozen. It was the final stages of a cricket match, it turned out to be, and all those Vincentian eyes were glued to the TV set and Lucelle willingly did the same, more than willingly. For the several final minutes breaths were held, stomachs in throat until suddenly there were screams: in the bank the customers jumped about, she said, they woke up in spontaneous cheers and applause. Hurrah! The Windies had triumphed!

SVG is not the cure-all for the deficiencies of mankind but it does its best.

* I * S * L * A * N * D * S *

Cyprus 
Taiwan 
                             Malta 
                                            Hatiya 
                                                Hongdo 
West Indies 



This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: St. Vincent's Remedy

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

The Red Bird

Eudocrimus ruber.  Adults measure 55 – 63 centimetres in length with males slightly larger weighing about 1.4 kilograms.  Wingspans are 54 centimetres and nests are messy stick constructions built well above the waterline.  Flight is nimble and the curved bills of the males are 22% longer.  Let’s talk of waders.  Let’s remember Caroni.

And there was Eid on its way.  And there was Diwali on its way.

‘Take my number,’ she said, ‘and if you’re not busy for Eid, call me and you can celebrate with us.’  Just as once there had been a coincidental meeting with a Dhakaiya businessman aboard a Bangaon train, there was that young woman in the Miami terminal, waiting as we were for the flight to Port of Spain.  We’d asked her of her country and she’d said a few things.  You know a country has to be good when the first invitation is granted before arrival.

She had no way to know there’d be knobble-kneed Shazam in Bermuda shorts and t-shirt to look after us.  Neither did we.  It was our very first trip to Trinidad.

Shazam was used to tourists because he was the driver at the guest house in Diego Martin.  He’d spent the week before us with a wealthy American woman who’d had shopping to do and he’d enjoyed that.  He knew the tourist routines of the north of the island and he’d heard all the tourist complaints.  He was used to the sometimes fussiness of foreigners.

Shazam was expert enough indeed to dutifully ignore the instructions of the guest house manager regarding the ordering of the sites.  The main trouble seemed to be with Maracas Bay, a postcard beach on Trinidad’s northern shore where the manager may have thought about the tourist-friendly sunset, telling Shazam to go there last.  Shazam thought about the traffic and the narrow winding road.  Despite working as a driver, he was nervous in traffic and on narrow winding roads.  You could tell this by the way he jerkily swung to the side on occasion as a speedier vehicle passed; and because he said as much.

It was hot in the middle of the day at Maracas Bay, perfect for a swim and a lunch of the battered shark in roti dish called shark-n-bake.  And it was just as well to do things the Shazam way.

I’m not sure why Shazam thought we’d be delighted by the modest modern shopping malls of Trinidad.  Perhaps that’s where some of the other tourists liked to go to feel at home; maybe he’d been there with the American woman the week before; but it didn’t take much time and he was pleased to show us, in between the British colonial blocks of the Trinidadian capital, so we didn’t suggest anything different.

In the evening we toured the Hindu fair beyond the city, to the south.  Trinidad’s population is split, about evenly, between Africans and Indians, the descendants of slaves and of indentured labourers, and while the Africans are Christians, the Indians are divided principally between the Hindu and Muslim communities.  It’s the strong Indian influence that makes the island unique in the West Indies.  There were flashing lights and tabla songs on a stage at the fair, because Diwali was on its way.

Eudocrimus ruber.  It was after that I suggested Caroni and Shazam was quite discouraging without exactly explaining why.  I pressed him for the reason and in the end he said he’d taken tourists there before and they said there was nothing to see.  There were too many mosquitoes and Caroni was just a swamp and it was disappointing.  We had to convince him that we’d not be of such an opinion.

He was still in two minds at the dock where the small, open-air tourist boat waited.  He still worried about mosquitoes as we put repellent on.  Politely he made it clear that he’d not recommended Caroni and so if we didn’t enjoy it, it wasn’t his doing.  And we waved as the boat set off.

 At first there were narrow channels with mangroves on either side and the boat had to drive slowly to find passage between the submerged sticks and the shallows.  It was there we saw the python, spiralled tightly in a mangrove branch.  Indeed there were two.  It was there the afternoon sun sprinkled gold among the greenery and brought reflections enough on the water to make tranquillity.  There was a caiman too, a smaller alligator relative, posing in wait amid twig and branch on the channel-side mud.

Well, the channels became canals and lagoons as the sun moved lower, as the sky was decorated with those Caribbean pinks you don’t seem to get elsewhere.  And there were greys too, in the rain clouds that mostly moved around us but occasionally delivered a little light water down upon the boat.  To go further was to better appreciate the size of the marshland: at five thousand hectares it’s not the Sundarbans but it is large enough to feel lost in.

And perhaps there are no tigers in Trinidad but there are the scarlet ibises.  Eudocrimus ruber.  The main attraction.

It’s a diet of red crustaceans that produces the brilliant scarlet of their feathers.  The colour comes about at the time of the second moult, as the younger birds in grey, brown and white learn to fly.  The scarlet ibis is the only shorebird in the world with red feathers. 

As the boat once more returned to smaller channels the first ibises found us.  They were like shots of fire beneath the mangrove canopy, light streaks flashing across the mangrove green and black as they somehow negotiated the entanglement of branches in high speed flight.  What do the pythons and caimans, and all the other animals that sought to blend in, sporting mangrove tones, think of those flashy ibises?

But as soon as the flashes of red, three or four together, were spotted shooting by, so they were gone and the terrain returned to its usual shades.  Was that all we’d see of them?

And there was Eid on its way.  And there was Diwali on its way.  But it was not these occasions, rather Christmas which was still some months away that came to mind as the boat turned to enter a larger lagoon once more.  There was a large tree at some distance, and it seemed to be decorated with dozens of shining red lights.  As the sun was negotiating its last with the Gulf of Paria in the direction of Venezuela, the ibises came in to roost by the dozens, choosing that singular tree, and as each weary air circle was completed and a pair of wings finally folded, one more light was added to the unlikely, everyday, mangrove, marshland Caroni Christmas tree. 

Eudocrimus ruber.  The wader.  The eater of red crustaceans.  The tree decorator.

It was dark as the boat returned to the dock.  Shazam cautiously asked how it was and he was rather pleased with the answer.  He was relieved because we said nothing of mosquitoes, mostly as there weren’t any about.  Caroni was not ‘just a swamp’ and we had no complaints.  Who indeed could be disappointed with the red bird?

On the drive back to the guest house we passed a Christmas tree sculpture of small white lights, and on one side was the outline of a Diwali lamp and on the other a crescent moon.

On the drive back Shazam said to me excitedly, ‘I have met many tourists, but if I ever get the chance to travel I want to travel like you do.  You take things easily, as they come.’  In the car, full voiced, he sang his national anthem, and we sang ours.  And we had no complaints.

Shazam took us to a park on Diwali evening where we lit candles along with local families.  And for Eid he took us to his home, to feast and to celebrate.

Wikipedia sourced photo.

For bird enthusiasts, there are also grey birds of battle to see, while others are more kind of fish people.  There's even something here for the fruit enthusiast.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Red Bird