An Embarrassment of Mangoes

by Ann Vanderhoof

  Before that, though, she intends to teach us a thing or two about the island’s history, which revolves around Lord John Rolle, who imported cotton seeds here in the late eighteenth century. As was the custom, the slaves who worked his fields took their master’s name, which is why Christine—and almost half the island’s other 3,600 residents—have the surname Rolle. Two of the island’s settlements are named for Lord John, too: Rolleville at the north, Rolletown at the south. By the early nineteenth century, however, Rolle’s new crop was proving a failure, and with emancipation looming, he decided to deed his 2,300 acres to his about-to-be-freed slaves.

  “That land, called generation land, was to remain common property for all Rolles, passed down through the generations. It can never be sold to outsiders.” And with a pointed look at Steve in her rearview mirror, Christine adds, “If you want to become part owner of this land, you would have to get rid of your present wife and marry me. I’ve had no offers, so all I can think is that no one knows the value of this land, or the extent of my talents.”

  Which she soon begins to demonstrate with an “herb lesson.” Pulling from her pile, she points out leaves that are boiled to make teas that ease toothache, cure dizziness, relieve fever, bring on labor, and soothe stomachache, back pain, and broken hearts. In the tough times, prickly pear leaves substitute for shampoo, she says, and the velvety leaves of the glove plant can be used to wash dishes: They make suds when rubbed in warm water. Sturdy featherback leaves are natural spoons—useful in “the back days when we had no silverware.” She hands out small red berries that we’re to rub on canker sores so they will heal more quickly, and divvies up branches of avocado leaves so we can brew our own cooling tea on our boats.

  But her pièce de résistance is love vine, the bush medicine equivalent of conch. “For men with a weak spine,” is how she tastefully puts it. You boil the vine and dose your lover with the resulting tea, “and he will hold to you as the love vine holds to the tree.” She grabs a red-faced Steve to demonstrate. Love vine, like conch, is well established in Bahamian lore. “Makes Viagra seem like a Flintstone vitamin,” another Bahamian—this one male—subsequently tells me.

  Of twenty children born to her mother, Christine was one of only five to survive. She was orphaned at an early age, dropped out of school in fourth grade, and set to work. Eventually, she started driving a taxi because she saw the possibilities of tourism and liked meeting people. Her shiny air-conditioned minibus is a real sign of success on this island of dented rattletraps and dusty minibikes. Now, she’s even put out a little book, a slender guide for visitors called Bahamian Bush Medicine.

  At the end of the trip, she passes out homemade coconut candy—and mentions casually that the recipe is in the book. I can’t resist, and we buy a copy. She hands our purchase straight to Steve, with a big smile. The book is inscribed “Love always, yours, Christine Rolle.”

  Steve is a popular guy here in George Town, the largest settlement in all the Exumas, and not just with Christine. Darry calls him “Sugarbunch,” and Mom gives him a big hug every time she sees him. Darry is short, squat, and thirtyish, with a fabulous gap-toothed smile and coal-black hair that sticks out from her head in all directions, as if she’s had an unfortunate encounter with an electric socket. She sits under a big pink-and-blue umbrella in the straw market, just down the road from where Christine parks her minibus. Truth be told, Darry calls out, “How ya doin’, Sugarbunch?” to all her friends who pass and look like they might be enticed into a chat—and Steve never lets her down. The man who used to describe himself as antisocial loves to stop and buy a couple of tomatoes or a cucumber—she sells a bit of backyard-garden produce along with her embroidered baskets and placemats—so he can gossip with her for a few minutes, usually about her family or the weather.

  Mom, on the other hand, is more reserved. Three days a week, her blindingly white late-model van rolls into George Town from the south end of the island and parks on the shoulder of the main street opposite the dinghy dock. A plumpish woman in her late sixties with a large gold cross hanging down her ample front, Mom unfolds herself from the van and settles into a chair next to it, ready for action. The back of the van is lined floor to ceiling with racks holding trays of her baked goods: white bread, soft and sweet; whole-wheat, just as soft but perhaps a touch less sweet; and, usually on Wednesdays, crusty (compared to the white and whole-wheat, anyway) French sticks. Then there are the sugary muffins, the glazed and filled sugar doughnuts, the cakelike coconut bread, and the overweight cinnamon crullers that drip sticky white icing.

  Steve is always good for a loaf of bread and something sweeter, and Mom pulls herself to her feet and gives him a big hug along with the goodies. “Praise the Lord,” she always says—at least once. Sometimes, too, she’ll tuck a muffin in Steve’s bag and wave off his attempt to pay. But Steve really isn’t special: Mom hugs all her customers and their spouses. Though her van says “Mom’s Bakery,” everyone calls it the Hugmobile.

  George Town’s long, lovely Elizabeth Harbour is sandwiched between Great Exuma Island to the west and Stocking Island to the east. On the protected leeward side of Stocking, the shelling is superb. The water gently folds over on itself when it reaches the beach and recedes in sparkling half-moons, leaving a line of jewels behind. On its raw windward side, the surf chews up most of the shells and spits them onto the sand in slivers, but we head to this side to body surf and take long solitary beach walks. The shiny black rocks have been sculpted smooth by the waves, the scrub-covered sandy hills bitten away by tide and wind. At the island’s eastern end, the sea surges through a narrow cut, exploding with a roar out of blowholes in the rock, sending saltwater geysers frothing into the air. There’s a stretch of sand on the leeward side where the sociable swim, schmooze, and play volleyball, but elsewhere you can sit and stare at the ocean for hours scarcely seeing another soul. Across the harbor are the conveniences—such as they are—of George Town itself: a few stores, the straw market, a supermarket, a laundry, the telephone company where laptops can be plugged in to pick up e-mail, and a handful of restaurants.

  It’s no wonder that cruisers—in some years, as many as six hundred boats—arrive here and stay for months. Which is also the drawback of this idyllic spot: At times it seems suspiciously like summer camp for the whole family, a sort of self-run Club Med, an endless round of organized activities and communal drinks and meals. Morning aerobics classes on the beach. Volleyball every afternoon. Organized beach walks. Seminars on everything from relationships to religion. “Who wants to beach walk in a crowd?” I crab in my journal. “And aerobics? In paradise?”

  The VHF radio bleats incessantly as people organize yet more fun. I’m tempted just to turn it off—but of course I’m afraid I’ll then miss something good.

  Like an old-fashioned party-line phone, the VHF allows others to listen in. Cruisers call it “reading the mail.” Since everyone knows there’s always somebody eavesdropping, VHF conversations tend to be practical, and pretty tame. But it’s taking me a while to remember that.

  “I desperately need a bikini waxing,” I lament on the radio one day to Belinda, announcing the fact to the entire anchorage. “I guess I’m going to have to use that do-it-yourself kit we bought in Florida. Have you tried yours yet? Over.”

  The next day on the beach, a woman I barely know looks me up and down and offers her own solution to my personal grooming woes.

  Belinda eavesdropped one night on a conversation between two women, one asking the other if she had a can of corn, for a recipe already in progress. The answer was no. “I had a can of corn,” Belinda told me the next day, “but if I broke in and said so, they would have known I was reading the mail.” She was saved from her dilemma by yet another eavesdropper who broke in first.

  Elizabeth Harbour may be beautiful, and protected from the violence of the ocean outside, but it’s not calm. The winter weather pattern in the Bahamas is one of a progression of northers blowing through every four
to six days, and they kick up the wave action even inside the harbor. In this El Niño year, the northers come more often, and more fiercely, and the water inside the anchorage rarely settles down. With his 6-hp Evinrude, little Snack simply isn’t up to the task of powering over the waves—he just plows into them—and the half-mile trip from our anchorage to town is guaranteed to leave us and everything in the dinghy caked in salt and soaking wet. The trip back, when poor Snack is invariably weighed down with groceries and full jugs of fresh water or diesel fuel, is usually worse.

  Although it’s a sun-drenched morning, we stuff the laundry into a double layer of heavy-duty garbage bags and tie them tightly closed. (I wash the smaller, lighter stuff onboard in two buckets and hang it on the lifelines to dry, but in a nod to convenience and the local economy, we take towels and sheets to the laundry.) The laptop makes the trip to town first sealed in a big Ziploc freezer bag, which is then zipped into a carrying case, wrapped inside another heavy-duty garbage bag, and stuffed into a backpack, which Steve wears. We put on foul-weather jackets over our shorts and T-shirts. My own backpack contains several more garbage bags, to protect whatever we buy in town on the trip back. “Cruiser’s luggage,” the bags are called.

  After town, we invariably need a shower to wash off the salt from the trip, but the routine is a swim first. Boris, however, has been getting in the way of routine.

  Boris is a 3-foot-long barracuda who lives in the anchorage and has started appearing punctually every afternoon, just as I’m ready for my dip—as if he’s punching in on his jobsite time clock. I get on the swim ladder, and Boris tucks his pointy nose out from behind the rudder. I know what the books say—he won’t bother me if I don’t wear any shiny jewelry and if there’s no blood around—but Boris has the look of someone who doesn’t go by the book. It’s hard to convince myself he is benign when that big mouth full of teeth is so close to my tender tush.

  But I finally settle on a plan: I make Steve go in the water first and keep watch.

  We planned to stay in George Town two or three weeks. We stayed three months.

  George Town is known as “Chicken Harbor.” Many cruisers come this far, and decide it’s far enough. From here on, if you’re continuing south and into the Caribbean, the sailing gets harder, and the islands get a lot farther apart. No day-hopping from anchorage to anchorage anymore, skimming along the shallow Bahama Banks in sunlight, protected by the cays from open ocean. From here on, night passages are inescapable. From here on, you’re heading almost directly into the incessant trade winds—on the nose, sailors call it—which means hammering endlessly headlong through waves. The island-hopping route from the Bahamas south to the heart of the Caribbean is called the “Thorny Path” for good reason. It’s tough on the boat, tougher on the crew. With longer distances and more-off-the-beaten-path destinations, self-sufficiency also becomes more critical: an adequate supply of spare parts and the confidence to deal with boat breakdowns, emergencies—and each other.

  In fact, by the time some couples get this far, relationships have started to fray, if not unravel, another reason to turn around and head north. Southern Florida is littered with fully equipped cruising boats for sale, their brand-new equipment scarcely used, the evidence of dreams gone sour. Most often, it’s the woman who delivers the ultimatum—me or the boat—tired of taking orders from a partner who knows more (or thinks he does), tired of feeling incompetent, tired of discomfort and fear, missing home. And—this is a big one—tired of her spouse’s company twenty-four hours a day.

  For some, there’s no decision to be made: Whether it’s a once-in-a-lifetime cruise or an annual cycle, they never planned to go any farther than the Bahamas, and George Town is the turnaround spot. Others, planning to carry on, find one excuse or another to delay departure: one more potluck to attend, one more round of sundowners on the beach, one more piece of equipment to fix. They let one weather window slip by, and then another, until they finally turn north—homeward.

  For us, George Town is where we need to decide if we want to continue cruising for a second year. It’s late March; we left Toronto just seven months ago. But if this is to be only a one-year cruise for us, we’re more than halfway through and it’s time to turn around and start back. Thanks to El Niño, I feel like I’ve had only the barest taste of idyllic cruising life—and already I have to decide whether I’m ready to commit to more, and harder. Though neither Steve nor I will admit it as we mock the organized routines of Camp George Town (“let’s organize a beach walk with scheduled stops for shell-collecting, aerobics, and a religious discussion”), stopping here has been a relief. By the time we arrived, we were ready for a rest, ready to settle into a routine, a word that hadn’t been in our vocabulary since we left Toronto. And even though we’ve been here almost a month already, the time for decision-making and moving on still seems to have come much too soon. Dithering isn’t an option: The coming of hurricane season demands a decision now; we have to be either much farther north or much farther south by the time it arrives in June. Steve is nervous but ready to go.

  For all our cruising inexperience, Steve and I actually have an advantage: in the couple-relationship department. Keeping a boat running happily is, in many ways, like running a business, and we’re used to working together. We already have years of experience negotiating disagreements and trading off strengths and weaknesses. (I’d learned years ago that it’s embarrassing to cry in front of your coworkers.)

  And so I revert to old form: I schedule a meeting. As the basis for discussion, I sit at the laptop and compose a 1,600-word memo setting out the pros and cons of continuing on versus turning north toward home. Very uncruiserlike, and downright radical behavior in a place so laidback one of the most popular T-shirts in the straw market reads: “Nobody move, nobody get hurt.”

  Our closest friends are going the other way. Elizabeth and Don are returning to home base in the Chesapeake; theirs was a one-year cruise, with the Bahamas the only goal. Belinda and Todd have long since decided to head north, to cruise the Eastern Seaboard and the coast of Maine. “The boat’s not ready to go farther south, and neither are we,” Todd says.

  I’m not convinced we’re ready either, but the meeting does the trick: We made it this far—despite my worries. Which, it seems, are the same old worries I had before we left Toronto. I’d be crazy to turn us back before our time is up.

  The next week is a series of dinghy dashes from one of George Town’s anchorages to another, following up radio calls from people looking to unload stuff that we will now need. We zip over to one boat to get sturdy jugs for the extra diesel fuel we’ll be carrying on the longer passages ahead. Ed, their owner, waves off our attempts to pay with either cash or the bottle of rum I’ve brought as backup currency. “Just do something nice sometime to help out another cruiser,” he says. “That’s what this is all about.” Another cruiser, an American heading home, sells us a brand-new life raft. Yet another boat, this one returning from the Caribbean, has all but three of the navigation charts we need. Steve has spare engine parts shipped in; I take the dinghy and go to Spanish lessons on the beach—to bolster my rusty college vocabulary with phrases such as: “El motor no funciona” (The engine won’t run), “Hay un mecánico diesel que hable inglés?” (Is there a diesel mechanic who speaks English?), and “Mi barco se está hundiendo” (My boat is sinking).

  Dear Belinda and Todd: It’s been almost three weeks since you headed north, and we’re still in George Town. In fact, we’ve tried three times already to leave, but three times things have gone wrong . . .

  The first time, our engine died as we were threading our way out Elizabeth Harbour, leaving us—quite literally—between a rock and a hard place. We had to zigzag our way back and anchor under sail—a little tension-wracked, skill-building exercise, something we had never practiced together before leaving home. First, twenty quick tacks required to keep us in the narrow, twisting channel of safe water, marked only by subtle color changes and landmarks
on shore. With reefs or rocks on both sides, the turns had to be tight, precise, and fast. Steve, at the helm, was uncharacteristically tight-lipped when he wasn’t shouting instructions at me, and my knees were actually knocking as I waited for the next shout into action, knowing that I tended to be clumsy when I tried to be quick.

  As he started each turn, Steve released the headsail, and as it blew across to the other side of the boat, I cranked it in on the winch, grinding it in with the speed of a woman possessed. “More, more,” he yelled each time, and even though the sheet was already taut and groaning, I put all my weight behind the winch handle and muscled the sail in a few inches tighter. Every inch made a difference in how close to the wind Steve could point the boat, and the closer to the wind, the farther from the reefs.

  Then came the act of anchoring—completely stopping the boat in a particular spot without having an engine to throw in reverse to act as a brake on Receta’s 23,000 pounds. As Steve steered her toward an empty area of the anchorage, I furled the headsail—again, using a winch; again, at a speed I didn’t think I was capable of—to slow us down. He then ran forward to the bow to drop the 45-pound anchor, while I steered us directly, precisely into the wind, at which point the mainsail would be ineffective and Receta would essentially coast to a stop. Now to the reversing part, to put a backward pull on the anchor to set it in the sand. As Steve paid out the anchor chain, I backwinded the mainsail by putting my weight against the boom, which essentially started Receta coasting backward in the breeze. Pretty impressive stuff for a rank amateur, but once the hook was set and the adrenaline stopped flowing, I collapsed below for a 10 A.M. nap.