Voyager

by Russell Banks

  At the Red Hook Charter offices we dealt with a bearded man who said his name was Animal, who looked like a wolverine in cutoffs and booked for the dozens of fishing boats operating out of the marina. Animal sent us out for dolphin and yellowfin on the Over Easy with Captain Frank Griffin, a Florida Keys dropout. We swam at nearby Sapphire Beach and picked up the New York Times at the drugstore in Red Hook and in our pavilion watched the Cincinnati Bengals beat the Buffalo Bills in an NFL playoff game on cable TV. It was indeed like the Florida Keys. And this, you understand, was not bad—but it was also not what we came for. St. Thomas is where the United States ends; it’s not where the Caribbean begins. For that, in the Lesser Antilles, we’d have to go to St. John and St. Croix and beyond.

  And so we soon moved on. The ferry from Red Hook Bay on St. Thomas to Cruz Bay at the west end of St. John took twenty minutes, but it carried us to a very different world, thanks mainly to Laurence Rockefeller and his family, whose donated land and determined efforts to limit tourism on the island had turned two-thirds of St. John and many of the reefs that surround it into the Virgin Islands National Park. The whole island was meticulously clean and had been developed with overriding concern for the environment, both land and sea. There were hotels, even fairly large ones, led by the famed Caneel Bay and the new Virgin Grand, and guesthouse and camping accommodations, too. But without an airport or deepwater port, there was no way to accommodate package tours, no way to facilitate large-scale tourism, and no evident desire to do so.

  With an enlightened, affluent population of only twenty-nine hundred and an area two-thirds that of St. Thomas, St. John, too, had a U.S. flavor, but one more like that of Aspen or rural Vermont than Key West. Instead of McDonald’s, it was Ben & Jerry’s. We took our breakfast at the Buccaneer Restaurant in Cruz Bay, where our slender waitress wore white-girl dreadlocks and Earth Shoes. A Windham Hill space music tape played in the background, and a rooster pecked in the dirt a few feet from our table—a strange mash-up of postmodern Mill Valley and prewar rural Caribbean. There were signs advertising foot massage and health food and acupuncture and low-impact aerobics on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and everyone looked healthier, younger, prettier than me and Chase. Tanned blond Americans and Nordic-looking Europeans with candy-colored nylon packs attached like marsupial pouches to their lean bodies strolled the narrow streets of Cruz Bay and hitchhiked the road to the Maho Bay campgrounds and trekked across the hills to ponder the mysterious Arawak Indian petroglyphs carved into and daubed onto the limestone rocks and walked on for a swim at Reef Bay. The slender, fit, tanned blond ones were here for the hiking and camping, snorkeling and scuba diving, and of course for each other—here to view and be viewed and to move freely as perhaps nowhere else in the Caribbean through the extraordinary natural beauty of the mountains and the sea, as if visiting a theme park.

  On St. John, that ten-thousand-acre theme park was the work of aggressive private philanthropy and the U.S. National Park Service, a collaboration between a Rockefeller and a Roosevelt. Elsewhere in the Lesser Antilles, where national parks existed at all, as in Dominica, Guadeloupe, Tortola, and Martinique, they seemed to have been established merely because there was nothing more immediately profitable to do with the land—they had come into existence by default, usually on hinterland tracts of wooded mountainside where escaped slaves once hid out and where no tourism, agriculture, industry, or housing seemed possible. Nobody wanted the land, so why not make a national park out of it?

  Why not, indeed? One was grateful for the preserves and public set-asides, no matter where they appeared or what the motive, no matter how casually or poorly run. The parks were, after all, protecting the remnants of an extremely fragile ecosystem in the midst of uncontrolled exploitation and pollution. One suspected, however, that on most of the islands—but not, of course, here on St. John—if a new source of bauxite were discovered beneath the rain forest, making the land commercially valuable, or an international consortium wanted to put up a three-hundred-room beachside resort hotel, the national parklands would quickly shrink or disappear altogether. And, given the dire need of foreign currency in many of these tiny, severely indebted, overpopulated island nations, who could argue with a decision to let their parkland shrink or disappear?

  In the context of Caribbean economics, St. John’s Virgin Islands National Park was a luxury, like a private club in the Adirondacks. Unfortunately, it was also a necessity. The island was essentially defined by the park, and given St. John’s easy access to the international airport over on St. Thomas and to North American investment capital, with spectacular beaches and deepwater bays and lovely forested hills that clambered to the sea as if to drink, its hundreds of species of birds, tropical flowers, trees, butterflies, and other insects, its miles of rich underwater reefs and dozens of tiny, beach-rimmed cays and matchless views of the sea, St. John without the Virgin Islands National Park in a decade would be overwhelmed by day-tripping visitors from the mainland and the other, larger Virgins.

  But for all its natural beauty, the island felt like a tableau vivant. Chase and I looked, at least to ourselves, like mannequins, props, fashion models dressed up like white middle-aged parents in a high-end ad for Abercrombie and Fitch resort wear. After half a day, we canceled our hotel reservations and caught the late ferry back to St. Thomas, where we didn’t feel as much a part of the picture as its ironically detached observers.

  The following morning we were at St. Thomas Harbor at Charlotte Amalie boarding The Goose, the seaplane shuttle to St. Croix. The flight took twenty minutes. Taking off and landing was a little like high-speed waterskiing, but the rest of the flight was a low-altitude scenic cruise above sailboats and tiny cays and islets. The sea glistened below us in the morning sun like hammered tin. As we approached St. Croix, we saw the east end of the island first, low and pale green, almost arid looking. The west was higher and more lush, and the rolling hills were dotted with Senepol and Brahman cattle, and here and there we spotted the ruins of sugar mills. In the late eighteenth century, thanks to these same low, fertile hills and the labor of more than thirty thousand slaves, St. Croix was one of the richest sugar islands in the Caribbean. Having by now grown used to my compulsion to explain the history of nearly everything and still finding it faintly amusing, Chase, my beloved, rolled her eyes and smiled.

  Even from three thousand feet we could see that the island was halfway to losing its tranquillity. But St. Croix, unlike St. Thomas—despite the cruise ships disgorging tourists in Frederiksted and the usual feeding frenzy and condo developments on the north coast in and around Christiansted, the larger of the island’s two towns—might still be saved by its more diversified economy, also visible from the air: cattle, oil refining, bauxite processing, rum, and even a cluster of small cinder-block manufacturing plants, industries that can save an island from total dependence on tourism. Though there were nonetheless a number of new or expanded four-star hotels and resorts, like the Carambola Beach and the Buccaneer, the place didn’t seem to have the same obsessive, needy fix on tourism as St. Thomas. Besides, St. Croix is more than twice as large as its sister island, with approximately the same number of inhabitants, so there was still room—and air—to breathe.

  Later, tooling across the island in a rental car, I felt, for better and then for worse, a much stronger sense of the rich and bloody Caribbean past on St. Croix than on the other U.S. Virgins, especially in the towns of Christiansted and Frederiksted, where rows of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes and public buildings had been carefully preserved, many of them under the protection of the American National Park Service. And when we drove into the countryside, we saw the sugar plantations, almost all of them in ruins now, like overgrown, tumbledown, remnant fortresses from an all-but-forgotten colonial war, photogenically recaptured in one, the Estate Whim Plantation Museum, which had been meticulously restored by the St. Croix Landmarks Society.

  In some ways, the more nearly perfect the restoration and the
more informative the tour through a complex of buildings and machinery for growing and refining sugar, the more depressing I found the whole thing. Where are the slaves? I wanted to ask the kindly white docent lady. Where, madam, is the grief, the horror, the shame? These restored plantations in the Caribbean are almost always designed to provide aesthetic pleasure and value-neutral historical and economic information, but I wanted them to be offered up instead as somber shrines, as dark memorials to man’s incredible, shameful inhumanity to man. They should be preserved the way Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ground Zero at Hiroshima have been preserved. Instead, they’re laid out to educate the mainland visitor about the manufacture of sugar, with slavery treated, if at all, as a slightly embarrassing by-product. These tasteful, expensive restorations dishonor the dead and humiliate the living. Their lies about the past disguise the present.

  In the evening we flew The Goose back to St. Thomas, splashing down in the harbor at the edge of Frenchtown, where we had plans for dinner. I decided first to check on the car, the rented silver Toyota Corolla that we’d left parked all day in the unattended lot next to the terminal. As I approached the car, it looked fine, untouched. I reached for the driver’s-side door, the key extended to unlock it, but, strangely, the door was not locked and swung open at my touch. The vehicle had been vandalized. Worse, it had been attacked. It was ripped to shreds inside. Someone had broken into the car and had gone mad or simply, as if desperate and enraged beyond all capacity to say why, had reacted to this piece of machinery like a Luddite, smashing the steering wheel and shift lever, kicking in the padded dash, leaving the radio dangling from its wires, the seat backs broken, the upholstery slashed and gouged. The shiny new sedan, from the outside still intact, seemingly untouched, had been violently destroyed inside. Nothing had been stolen: the radio and speakers, yanked from their moorings, were there; the ignition hadn’t been jimmied or jammed; Chase’s forgotten rain jacket lay crumpled on the floor in back. The attack seemed purposeful—a warning to the owners of the vehicle, specifically to me and Chase, and what we represented. We saw ourselves as we were seen, and we were suddenly eager to leave these American Virgins.

  We’d try the British Virgins instead. We’d start with Tortola. Only fifty-nine square miles and about ten thousand people, it’s the largest and most populous of the more than fifty tiny islands and cays that make up the group. The main islands, other than Tortola, are Virgin Gorda (the “fat virgin”) and Anegada, with fewer than three thousand people between them. The waters that surround and connect this cluster are among the best yachting waters in the world, with hundreds of short crescent-shaped beaches and shallow bays nestled between volcanic cliffs that, if you can get there, make you feel indeed like a latter-day Robinson Crusoe.

  On the palm-lined northwest coast of Tortola, when I parked our replacement rental car at the edge of the otherwise deserted beach and stood in the shade of a casuarina tree and watched the waves break on the trackless sand, I indulged in clichéd suburbanite fantasies of dropping out of the rat race. Indulged isn’t the right word. It’s a compulsion, it’s what I do, make up narratives and narrators, stories and storytellers with voices that sound like mine, but mine as heard on the radio or a recording. The voices in my head never shut up. What the hell, I could sell the house in Morristown, quit the job on Madison Avenue, wave good-bye to the bewildered spouse and kids, and split—the kind of get your ya-yas back fantasies that harried American men and women were induced to conjure fifteen or twenty years earlier by the long, white, deserted beaches of Jamaica’s Negril, by the abundance of local fish and produce, by the sexy interracial ease, and, yes, by the easily accessed mind-busting ganja. Before cocaine and crack and guns and AIDS. Before the economic collapse of the seventies and the desperation and rage of the eighties. Before the names Negril and Jamaica got linked to easy drugs and exotic interracial erotics and armies of local hustlers. Before I grew weary and wary of white Americans bewitched by Jamaican patois and reggae and cigar-sized spliffs and chillum pipes and Rastafarian logic and ital cooking—that is, before I grew suspicious of people like me. And, okay, yes, before my second ex-wife, Christine, married a handsome, dreadlocked Jamaican man and made her permanent winter home there.

  A breathtaking drive—over the mountains from the bustling old-time port village of Road Town, through the primeval rain forest of Mount Sage National Park, down narrow, precipitously winding roads to the coast, past banana groves and small country villages—led us finally to Apple Bay, where an enterprising Rastaman named Bomba had built a driftwood-and-thatch shack on the beach, stuffed a cooler with ice and beer, collected a bunch of reggae tapes and a boom box, and hung out his roughly lettered shingle, BOMBA’S SURF SHACK. Another sign said, SUNDAY REGGAE PARTY, and a third, SURF UP BEWARE UNDERTOAD [sic].

  Offshore, long rollers coiled in rows near the horizon and grew in height and volume as they neared the beach, where, bobbing in the water, a half-dozen suntanned surfer dudes caught an alpha wave at its crest and rode their boards gracefully in. We cracked open a pair of Bomba’s cold Red Stripes, listened to Peter Tosh and Ziggy Marley on his boom box, plus a lot of reggae musicians we’d never heard of, and admired Bomba’s eclectic collection of flotsam, animal bones, Rasta carvings, hubcaps, and American street signs dangling from the walls and ceiling and the thicket of sea grapes outside. In a sweetly humorous way, it was blissful and calm and outside of time.

  But even on sunny, funky, laid-back Tortola it can cloud over and rain, and it did, and soon a chilling wind blew in from the south, and the surfer dudes paddled to shore and turned out to be mostly stoned or from habit talked like they were, while Chase and I stood shivering under the dripping thatch and wished we were someplace else, someplace clean and dry where the sun was shining and there was somebody intelligent or at least sober to talk to. In the Caribbean there is not much distance between the height of ecstasy and the slough of despond. It’s the constant contrast between the overabundant physical beauty of sea and land and sky and the grinding poverty of most of the people who live out their lives here. One is either too high to think straight or one is suicidally low. Finding an emotional middle ground is as difficult in the Caribbean as finding the middle class.

  The cold wind-driven rain persisted, until even Bomba gave up. He locked his cooler, tossed his boom box and tapes into the bed of his rusted-out pickup, and rumbled off. The surfer dudes cradled their boards and, staring opaquely out to sea as if all the way to Malibu, waited for the rain to stop, and Chase and I got into our car and moved on to the yacht basin at West End, had lunch at a sailors’ café, and arranged an afternoon’s fishing. Later we checked into Fort Recovery Estates, a sand-in-your-shoes complex of cabanas built around the ruins of a seventeenth-century Dutch fort. Evenings, we walked the narrow streets of Road Town, a busy old-time Caribbean port; days, we combed the beaches, fished, or drove the ridge road for unending mountain views. Driving and walking and lying in bed in our cabana at Fort Recovery Estates, in my day-and-night courtship of Chase I had come to the chapter that described my first marriage, a subject and a period in my youth that I usually tried to skip over, as if my late adolescence and early adult years had been pretty much the same as everyone else’s.

  But, of course, they hadn’t. No one’s adolescence and early adult years are like anyone else’s. And mine had been unruly and turbulent and reckless, even for a troubled adolescent and young adult, and in long-lasting ways they had proved harmful—to myself and to a young woman and a baby girl, my first wife and daughter, who were much less deserving of harm, certainly, than I. To Chase, my newly betrothed, here is what I revealed. The young woman’s name was Darlene; years later, after attending many annual gatherings of the Rainbow Family, she would call herself Morning Star. In the spring of 1959, when we first met in St. Petersburg, Florida, she was an eighteen-year-old girl, and I was a boy about to turn nineteen who had washed ashore in Miami that winter on a politically romantic pilgrimage to join Fidel Castro and
his bearded band of revolutionaries, who were holed up in the Sierra Maestra mountains of Cuba—a partly fictional story I’ve told many times many ways elsewhere. In January 1959, Castro and his men marched in triumph into Havana and no longer needed the services of a beatnik dropout from New England who spoke no Spanish and had no idea how to get from Miami to Cuba anyhow. Thanks to a modest artistic talent and a sketchbook of schoolboy drawings and pastels, I landed a job as an apprentice window trimmer at a Burdines department store in Miami, then quickly got myself transferred to a slightly better window-trimming job at the new St. Petersburg branch on the Gulf coast and bought a battered bottle-green 1948 Studebaker sedan and moved into a rooming house there.

  Darlene, less than a year out of high school, worked as a salesgirl in women’s sportswear on the second floor of the store. She was strikingly beautiful in the way of gingery blond, blue-eyed, peaches-and-cream southern girls of the 1950s. She modeled one-piece bathing suits in the weekly Burdines shoppers’ fashion show and if she had been a few inches taller could easily have been a beauty contest winner, a Miss Florida or Miss Georgia. She lived with her parents and two younger sisters and brother in a cinder-block ranch house in a new housing development in Pinellas Park, and like them she was kind and gentle and sad and Christian. In her large, innocent, naive eyes, I was the dark, dangerous, unattached stranger from an exotic place far away, like Hal, the William Holden character in the 1956 movie Picnic. Darlene, played by Kim Novak, was Madge, the cloistered small-town girl who secretly writes poetry and longs to escape her destiny before it becomes her fate and believes that only a dark, dangerous, unattached stranger like me or Hal can make that escape possible.