We have planned a hike to the Seven Sisters, a series of waterfalls in the Grand Etang Forest Reserve, a protected rain-forest area high up in Grenada’s interior. Our guidebook says they are the country’s best, most secluded falls—and the most difficult to get to. “You need a guide,” it states unequivocally.
We know guides are readily available, that we can hire someone to pick us up at the dinghy dock, deliver us to the reserve, guide us along the trail, arrange a lunch, and deposit us back at the dock at the end of the day. That would be too easy. We decide to do it ourselves, with two other cruisers.
The bus that crosses the mountainous backbone of the island leaves from the waterfront in St. George’s, opposite the fish market. It’s one of the typical minivans but, unlike the always-crowded short-haul buses—such as the one we just rode into town from Lower Woburn—this bus takes a while to fill. And she not leavin’ ’til she full up. More than full, actually. There’s no way the driver is going to make the trip through the mountains until he’s got enough passengers to make it worthwhile. That’s okay. No one—including us—is in a rush. Island languor has seeped into our bones.
A half-hour after we finally leave the waterfront, we’re bouncing along a narrow roller-coaster road, and the driver is working through the gears as the van strains up hills and careens around curves—some of them so tight that I’m sure we’re going straight into a rock wall. The bus passes right by the entrance to the Grand Etang Forest Reserve, but we’d been told not to get off there, to keep going and watch for a tiny hand-painted sign with an arrow that says “trail to the waterfalls,” on the roadside a couple of hills after the park entrance. “It’s apparently a much easier hike if you start from there,” said our source, who hadn’t. We’d run into him and his wife outside Nimrod’s late one afternoon. They’d just wobbled off the local bus, their legs encrusted with mud. They’d spent the day with the Seven Sisters.
Sure enough, the sign appears, Steve raps on the roof, and the bus pulls over. As we follow the arrow, a woman crosses the road to meet us. This “easier” trail starts on a private plantation, and she is collecting a very modest fee on behalf of the plantation owner. In exchange, she gives us bananas for a snack, tells us we can take anything we want that we find on the ground along the way, and points us toward an assortment of walking sticks leaning against a shack near a triangular red sign: “Notice On Your Own Risk to The Falls.” She is working here to make money for her granddaughter’s schoolbooks and uniform, the woman explains. We know from Dingis that although schooling is free, and mandatory up to age sixteen, books and uniforms must be purchased. This is a huge burden—and a deterrent to keeping kids in school—for families with limited means. It’s clear this woman doesn’t see a lot of business from hikers, and when our entrance fee is a scant $5 EC ($1.90 apiece) we know she can’t be making very much. “I put my faith in God to provide,” she says.
As we start walking through the plantation, we have to duck to avoid low-hanging hands of bananas and sidestep piles of fallen mangoes that are starting to ferment, making me almost dizzy with their sweet, intoxicating smell. As the foliage closes in, I realize that we are walking through a dense grove of nutmeg trees, their branches drooping with yellow-orange fruits that resemble plump overripe apricots. Many have burst open, revealing the nutmeg nestled inside.
Fresh off the tree, a nutmeg is an absolutely gorgeous thing, Nature’s interpretation of a Fabergé egg. Framed in one half of the creamy fruit is the glossy brown shell that encases the nutmeg seed, the part we grate into cake batter and onto rum punch. But the nutmeg tree produces two spices: The glossy shell is covered with a delicate lacy red coat that looks as if it is made from shiny wax. Dried, this lacy coating is the spice mace, used in pumpkin pie and other desserts back home and in curries and cakes here.
It’s hard to walk without stepping on the fragile jewels, thick as fallen apples in an autumn orchard up north. We stuff our pockets, pulling the nutmegs in their bright scarlet coats from the split fruits. The fruit—also called the pod or pericarp—isn’t edible raw, but is made into jam, jelly, and a delicately flavored syrup that is a highly successful substitute for maple syrup on French toast and pancakes, or as the sweet in rum punch.
Farther ahead, a lone man harvests for the plantation owner: He methodically whacks the branches with a long stick, and gathers up the fallen nutmegs, pericarp and all, into a big canvas sack. Afterward, he will separate the mace from the nutmeg by hand, and the raw spices will be taken to one of the island’s processing stations.
The plantation eventually gives way to dense rain forest—a crush of trees with pillow-sized leaves and thick twisted vines. Outrageous flowers—the kind of elaborate tropical blooms sold for a small fortune by high-end florists—poke through the greenery: wild purple and orange birds of paradise, tall elegant spikes of wild red ginger, yellow and red heliconia that look as if they’re molded from plastic. When there’s a small clearing, we grab vines and swing, hooting and hollering; forty-six years old and I’m playing Tarzan. Mostly, though, the trail is narrow, steep, overgrown, unmarked, and slippery. When it disappears, we backtrack until we pick it up again—rather, we backtrack until all four of us agree we’ve picked it up again. Yesterday’s showers have mixed up a nice greasy batch of mud, and we pull ourselves and each other up the steepest, slickest sections using branches, vines, and the walking sticks. Steve is the first of our foursome to join the muddy-butt club.
Eventually, a vista opens, and a waterfall tumbles down the rock face ahead. I splash my arms and face and dunk my kerchief in the cold milky pool at the bottom before we head on to Sister 2. Above the first falls, the trail begins to crisscross the stream, and we have to pick our way across on the slippery rocks. Eventually, I pull off my hiking shoes and wade.
Only three hours later—although it seems triple that—we’re back at the Grand Etang roadside. My legs are aching and filthy, and I’m convinced there are at least thirteen vindictive sisters, not the paltry seven advertised. I pick the mud out of my fingernails so we can stop in St. George’s on the way home for a very late roti lunch.
When you orchestrate your own outings, whether they’re to a rum estate or a forest reserve, the discoveries are hard-won—but each discovery seems yours alone. Days later, I can still hear the huge stands of bamboo creaking, still smell the sticky fragrant gum that seeped from the rough-barked gommier trees, still see the determined lines of leaf-cutter ants carting home jagged pieces of leaves like outsized green umbrellas, to use as fertilizer to grow the mushrooms they will feed their young. And I still have the seeds I picked up on the forest floor, deep-brown polished things called “donkey eyes,” as cool and smooth as river stones. And of course I have my nutmegs.
Back on board, we peel off the lacy red mace and put it in a flat pan to dry. A couple of hours later, I can crumble it with my fingers, and it’s ready to use, its brilliant scarlet already faded to a soft yellow-orange. The nutmegs need to dry for about six to eight weeks in a warm, dry place, according to the wrinkled, pipe-smoking lady I had consulted at one of the processing stations. There, the shiny brown seeds are spread out to dry on flatbed wagons that can be rolled into the sun during the day and back inside at night or when it rains. I pop mine into the cupboard over Receta’s engine and forget about them.
At the processing station, the nutmegs go to cracking machines once they’re dry, and workers then separate the kernels from the shells by hand. The kernels are dumped into water tanks to separate the floaters, which have a high oil content and are sold for processing, from the sinkers, which have less oil and are sold as spice. Some of the floaters are destined for the nutmeg oil refinery at the north end of the island. Commercially, the oil is used as a flavoring and in soaps and moisturizers; but locally, some of the nutmeg oil will be sold as a “condiment” to relieve rheumatism, arthritis, backaches, joint pain, and the congestion of coughs and colds.
More than six weeks later, I crack one of my
nutmegs open with pliers and grate the seed onto our rum punch with a stainless-steel rasp. The warm woody flavor calls up a day in the mountains, sunlight filtering through thick green foliage, falling water, oversized leaves, outrageously painted flowers. And mud.
Steve’s ’Ti Punch
Much experimentation was required before Steve achieved what he thinks is the perfect balance of strong, sour, and sweet. Judge for yourself.
11⁄2 ounces rhum agricole (see Tips, below)
1⁄4 ounce pure cane syrup (see Tips, below)
1⁄4 ounce freshly squeezed lime juice
Combine the ingredients in a measuring cup. Stir with a swizzle stick and serve over 1 ice cube in a small glass.
Makes 1 drink
Tips
• To be perfectly authentic, a ’ti punch should be made with clear rhum agricole, which gives the drink a distinctive taste. However, in a pinch you can substitute any white rum.
• Cane syrup can be found throughout the West Indies, as well as in parts of the southern U.S. It too has a distinctive taste—imagine a light golden, slightly smoky molasses—but simple sugar syrup is an easily made substitute: Combine equal parts (by volume) of sugar and water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar goes into solution. Cool and store in the fridge.
Steve’s Favorite Plantains
(a.k.a. Fried Plantains with Nutmeg and Rum)
Fried ripe plantains sprinkled with just salt and pepper are a common Caribbean side dish. One day I added a squeeze of lime, a splash of rum, and some freshly grated nutmeg—and from then on, I never made them any other way.
I like serving these plantains with grilled chicken or chicken curry. But in Steve’s eyes, they go with just about anything. He was also particularly fond of the version I made with my homemade spiced rum.
For this dish, you want really ripe (but not mushy) plantains. Plan on half a plantain per person—unless that person is Steve, in which case, a full plantain per person is barely adequate.
Ripe plantains
Vegetable oil, or a combination of oil and butter, for shallow frying
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Freshly grated nutmeg
Fresh lime
Rum
1. Cut the plantains in half crosswise and peel. (See Tips, below.) Slice each half lengthwise into 1⁄4-inch-thick slices.
2. Heat a few tablespoons of oil or a combination of oil and butter in a large, heavy skillet over medium heat. Sauté the plantain slices until golden on both sides, about 4 minutes per side, sprinkling each side with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
3. When the plantains are almost done, squeeze a little lime juice over top and add a splash of plain or spiced rum. Serve hot.
Tips
• Plantains are more difficult to peel than bananas. To do it most easily, trim the top and bottom off each plantain and cut the plantain crosswise in half. Then peel off the skin by hand.
• To make your own spiced rum, have a drink out of a bottle of light or white rum to make room for the spices. (Light rums will take on the flavor of the spices better than dark rums, which often have a more pronounced flavor to start with.) Add a cinnamon stick, a whole nutmeg out of its shell, a few cloves, and perhaps one or two slices of ginger. (I have also stuffed in pieces of whole mace—but don’t use the ground stuff, which is the type you usually find in North American stores.) Although some patient types allow their spiced rum to steep for months, you only need to let a few weeks go by before trying it.
Mr. Butters,
the Mysterious
Breadfruit, and
Monday Night Mas
No doubt our productivity would have been affected. . . . Probably, this week may have seen a great number of people taking the remaining work days to recover after consuming too much alcohol, or being fatigued from the constant long sleepless hours over the days of festivity.
EDITORIAL ENTITLED “NOW THE CARNIVAL OVER,” GRENADA
INFORMER: THE FEARLESS WEEKLY THAT TELLS IT AS IT IS,
WEEK ENDING FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 1998
The beach on the mainland side of the Hog Island anchorage—a tiny patch of sand by two derelict, half-submerged Cuban gunboats, relics from the 1983 invasion—is diagonally across from the Hog Island beach and a minuscule fraction of its size. If you squint away the rusted hulks as you approach, the scene is what winter-weary tourists dream they’ll get when they book their Caribbean holiday: a little beach all their own with soft white sand, swaying palm trees, and brochure-blue water under a flawless sky.
We’d seen cruisers dinghying into shore there only to return an hour later with arms full of watermelon and bags protruding with eggplant and squash. To us, the new kids on the block, it was a mystery, there being no sign whatsoever of habitation near that beach; certainly no market or store. But soon, through the cruisers’ grapevine, we learn of Mr. Butters.
“Pull up your dinghy on the sand and follow the path from there,” Terry and Nancy tell me. We had got to know them in George Town, and their sailboat, La Esmeralda, had arrived at Hog Island about a week before Receta. “The path will lead you right to his shack.”
Mr. Butters used to make rounds of the anchorages on this stretch of Grenada’s coast by boat, they had been told, selling his fruit and vegetables. But no more: Now, if you want to buy his produce, you have to go to him. Mr. Butters (as everyone respectfully calls him) has been squatting on the hillside behind the beach for the last seventeen years and cultivating the soil—by hand, without benefit of tractor, rototiller, or harvester.
“Did they say turn right or left?” Steve says as we drag Snack up onto the beach. Expecting it to be obvious, I hadn’t bothered to ask. Once we leave the sand, we’re at the edge of an expanse of more-or-less cultivated fields, hidden from the anchorage by a stand of white cedars and Indian almond trees and stretching a hundred yards in each direction. What’s lacking is a sign that says “Produce stand this way.” Cows moo unseen somewhere on the hillside in front of us. “Rare steak,” says Steve longingly. (He’s learned the hard way that the words “chewable” and “steak” don’t go together here.) We wander right; nothing. We wander left; nothing. We wander right again, by this time wishing we’d brought a water bottle, and finally spot an overgrown, sort-of track snaking through spiky sugar cane.
Five minutes along, a donkey tied to a tree flips his lips at us with disinterest. Beyond him stands a rickety wooden shack. Out front, an elderly man studiously washes eggplants in a bucket of water that’s so muddy it’s hard to imagine the vegetables aren’t emerging dirtier than they go in. “Mr. Butters?” He gestures with an eggplant a little farther up the hillside, where a younger, wiry man in torn, mud-caked trousers is bent over a bed of lettuce plants.
“Mr. Butters?” I’d been picturing a table with a tidy assortment of carefully arranged vegetables like those the market ladies have in St. George’s. But “tidy” is the last word that comes to mind here. Although stuff grows everywhere, it’s difficult to tell what are vegetable plants and what is just vegetation. Partly hidden by all that greenery, discarded sacks, bottles, pieces of wood, and old tires dot the landscape around two more shacks. Aside from the heap of muddy eggplants and a pile of dirt-splotched watermelons, there doesn’t appear to be anything that might be for sale, and I don’t know quite how to initiate business. I decide to take the direct route: “Good morning, we’d like to buy some tomatoes.” With a reticent, eye-averted “good morning,” Mr. Butters gestures for me to follow him into the fields.
I get my tomatoes right off the vines, warm from the sun, along with a thick-skinned cantaloupe, a soccer ball–sized watermelon, and a beautiful bunch of escarole fresh out of the ground, dirt still clinging to its roots. Perhaps in his mid-forties, with a carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and a baseball cap jammed on his head, Mr. Butters is taciturn as we move from row to row and he loads up my arms and my canvas bag (now definitely destined for the laundry bucket). Meanwhile, I
try to keep up a steady patter, complimenting him on his stuff—you can smell the sweetness of the cantaloupe—and exclaiming at the eye-popping view. (From the top of Mr. Butters’s hillside, the entire Hog Island anchorage is visible, right out to where the waves break over the reefs.) He’s uncommunicative, but not unfriendly, and when I oooh over the aroma from a little patch of purple-leaf basil by the shack, he picks a handful for me to take along, gratis.
He becomes garrulous—it’s all relative, of course—only when Steve points to the homemade signs hanging inside one of the sturdier-looking sheds. Like the others, it only has three walls, but one of them is cinder block and the roof is corrugated tin. The signs are pretty much the focus of the interior; the furnishings consist of a crude bench and a couple of rough boards banged into the walls as shelves, which hold a yellow cooler and a pile of smashed cardboard boxes.
Slogans are hand-printed on the cardboard signs: “Land is the basis of our independence. Preserve it.” “Sugar cane industry abandoned for golf course and casino.” “The Mt. Hartman deal. Under the table.” This one is illustrated with a stick-figure drawing of a Grenadian sitting across from Uncle Sam, who wheedles in a speech bubble: “Forget agriculture. We will give you dollars.” And, yes, both have their hands under the table.
“See deh bulldozer?” Mr. Butters points at a piece of machinery overgrown with foliage on the adjacent hillside. “Dey’ve sold my land for a golf course.”
We’ve heard the rumor floating among boats in the anchorage: The government has sold the strip of mainland on this side of the anchorage and all of Hog Island on the other to the Ritz-Carlton chain, which plans to link them with a bridge and put in a luxury hotel and golf course. Mr. Butters and his farm are a casualty of the deal, and he’s being forced to leave.
An Embarrassment of Mangoes Page 16