An Embarrassment of Mangoes

by Ann Vanderhoof

  We only need lobsters from Desperado, though, since we’d stopped at the produce market yesterday to stock up before sailing out of Bequia. Every morning, the dreadlocked Rastafarians—members of a religious sect who regard blacks as the chosen people, smoke ganja as part of their religion, and believe Haile Selassie (once called Ras Tafari) is God—arrive with their produce on the ferry from St. Vincent. The Rastas are all over potential customers like flies. Aggressive and pushy, each one insists that you look at his table, then demands that you buy. “What do you need from me? What do you need from me?” “You bought from him—what will you buy from me?” Fending off one after another invariably leaves me irritated and out of sorts.

  Then I learn the secret: Shop in the afternoon. By mid-afternoon, the Rastas don’t care whose tomatoes or avocados you buy. By then, they’ve smoked enough “holy weed” to be substantially . . . mellowed. Their banter is lighthearted, no longer insistent; they flirt rather than threaten. When I ask one of them why his christophenes are white rather than the usual pale green, he takes my arm and holds it next to his: “Just like you and me,” he says. “No difference under deh skin.”

  Whatever the time of day, Steve enjoys the parry and thrust of doing business with the Rasta men; he dishes the banter right back and buys a little from each. But he has a ready strategy when anyone tries to hound him into buying too much. “No, no,” he says. “I can’t. You have to ask my wife.” They nod understandingly—and focus their attention on me.

  Desperado returns, the bottom of his boat awash with live lobsters. “Dey very big.” He hefts a pair by their antennae to calculate their weight: five pounds, he says, for $75 EC, or about $30. Sounds good, although I have no idea what the price should be, because we’ve yet to buy a lobster. Until now, they’ve always been delivered on the tip of Steve’s spear or as a gift. But price isn’t the real concern: I’m worried about squeezing these two into my big pasta pot.

  Several hours before sundown, Myrna inquires, “Which of those rum drinks will you be mixing up tonight?”

  “She was born to be a cruiser,” Steve whispers.

  With the wind still almost nonexistent, we decide to spend a second night in the cays, at nearby Mayreau, a slightly larger, slightly inhabited (three hundred people) island with a stunning beach for walking. More importantly from my point of view, it has a charming restaurant, on top of a steep hill on the windward side. Walking there is out of the question—I know the trail from Saltwhistle Bay, our leeward anchorage, is too rugged for Myrna and Murray—but a water taxi around the island can be arranged.

  Our guests have settled into our way of life so beautifully that we forget how new they are to all this. “Water taxi” is a euphemism for a small open wooden boat like Desperado’s, with a couple of planks for seating and a tiny decked area at the bow, where a bit of gear can be stuffed.

  The ride back will be in the dark, of course, a minor detail that Steve and I had overlooked. There’s no moon, no stars, and the water taxi has no lights. As we walk back down to the dock with our flashlights after dinner, Myrna and Murray are holding hands, a sure sign that Myrna is already nervous.

  The bartender—who doubles as the water-taxi driver—sets his course by following the steep, rocky shoreline. Myrna and Murray aren’t saying a word, just huddling together on one of the benches, clutching hands. That’s when the squall passes overhead. Within seconds, the ocean, which had been pancake flat, is kicked up into short steep waves and rain pummels its surface. The boat bounces and the guiding shoreline disappears. “I don’t have a clue which way we should be heading,” I say quietly to Steve, hoping like hell the bartender/driver hadn’t been sampling as well as pouring. “He’s heading the right way,” Steve answers loudly, but I can see Myrna and Murray are petrified.

  A couple of minutes later, the bartender’s helper, a scrawny kid of about eleven, dives under the small decked area at the front of the boat and starts tossing out life jackets. Now Myrna and Murray are certain the boat is sinking. Myrna clasps her hands and starts to pray.

  But the kid is merely clearing himself a place to burrow, out of the driving rain. “Relax, everything’s just fine,” Steve says cheerfully. “Just a little rain.” In fact, the rain is pounding on the ocean and the boat is slithering up and down the waves like a drunken snake.

  The twenty-minute trip is taking forever. The bartender doesn’t say a word. “Shouldn’t we be there by now?” I whisper. “Almost there, everybody happy?” Steve answers loudly. I can’t believe it. I think he’s having fun.

  After an eternity, the lights of the boats at anchor in Saltwhistle Bay come into view, and for the first time the bartender speaks: “Which one?” I don’t have a clue, but Steve points through the raindrops with certainty, and the bartender heads that way. As we get closer, my flashlight picks up the reflective T at the top of our mast and Myrna unclutches her hands. Her turquoise shorts and yellow hooded windbreaker plastered to her body, her sodden hair flattened on her face, she looks like a tropical parrot caught in a hurricane. Murray, recognizing a good story to take home, is already grinning from ear to ear.

  On board, in dry clothes, I unearth bottles of aged sipping rum and a rum liqueur from Trinidad. Myrna doesn’t hesitate.

  More common cruising wisdom: Never let your guests know that anything is out of the ordinary. Whatever happens, pretend it’s just part of the cruising life.

  The next morning dawns sweet, the sky again flawless, the surface of the water sugary in the sun. But the wind is up, way up, and the forecast is for more. In two days, our guests will fly home; we have to return to Bequia. Today.

  “What a great day for a sail,” Steve exclaims for the umpteenth time. Even with both sails reefed, we’re making 7 knots, and Receta is heeled well over. We take turns delicately hand-steering the boat up and down the waves, trying to keep the ride as smooth as possible—a difficult job with 6-foot building seas and 20-knot gusts—and trying to keep Myrna and Murray distracted with the constant babbling of a tour guide on speed. “Ooh, look at the flying fish! Did we tell you they’re delicious? Keep an eye out for dolphins! And whales! Ooh, look, more pelicans.”

  Murray exits the cockpit and disappears below for an exceptionally long time. Uh, oh, party’s over, and the cookies will soon be overboard. But he reemerges, looking fine.

  Back anchored in our old spot in the relative calm of Bequia’s Admiralty Bay, he and Myrna talk happily about how great and how fast the passage was. They never knew they were supposed to be seasick. Meanwhile, Steve and I are exhausted.

  Forget Murray and Myrna. We’ve had enough adventure for a while.

  For their last morning onboard, I make a proper breakfast instead of the usual papaya, mangoes, and toast: eggs and hash browns—made from boiled eddoes, a knobby brown root with a creamy white interior that tastes a bit like potatoes; my latest experiment. Halfway through, Steve slides wordlessly off the settee and disappears into the cockpit. “Annie, can you come up a sec?” I follow him topsides. “So, uh, you think we’re dragging?” he whispers rhetorically. Yikes. No question about it. Receta is drifting back, and the distant boat Myrna had worried about while showering is now perilously close. In fact, unless we spring into action immediately, we’re gonna bounce she, as our friends in Grenada would say—slam right into our anchorage neighbor.

  I start the engine and Steve springs to the foredeck. “We’ll be back down in a minute,” I call inside, as if we start the engine every time we sit down to eggs and eddoes. In fact, it is the first time we’ve dragged anchor, and had Steve waited another minute between sensing that the boat was moving differently and checking, we would really have given the parents something to remember their trip by.

  Ten minutes later, we’ve reset the anchor and killed the engine. “Aren’t these eddoes just terrific?” Steve says as he slides back onto the settee.

  With Myrna and Murray back home safely and Christmas approaching, the Christmas winds kick in for good. The b
oats anchored in Admiralty Bay skate back and forth, outlined at night in dancing red and green lights, which form Christmas tree shapes between mast and rigging. Steve has scoured Bequia and totes home a package of Christmas lights which he strings around Receta’s cockpit. He’s already rewired the end so it will plug into our 12-volt socket before he notices that in a misguided desire to save two bucks, he has bought lights intended only for indoor use. The wire is as thin as angel hair, and it breaks whenever I absentmindedly walk into a strand of lights—which is frequently. By Christmas, loose strands dangle on all sides of the cockpit, and festive gray duct-tape repairs adorn the intact sections. But all the lights still work, though we don’t trust the weather or the wiring enough to leave them on when we’re off the boat. Our Grenada-bought Christmas tree—a 12-inch-high foldout of green, gold, silver, and red metallic paper—sways from the oil lamp above our cabin table, sparkling as it catches the light, awaiting a delivery from “Soca Santa,” as he’s called in one popular island carol. (A couple of mixed religious backgrounds, Steve and I are equal-opportunity celebrators; a week earlier, we had lit Hanukkah candles onboard.)

  In town, traditional carols like “Silent Night”—but set to reggae and soca beats—blare from the stores. Their windows are adorned with incongruous paper cutouts of white-skinned, white-bearded Santas wearing heavy red suits and black boots that would surely give a fat man heatstroke at this latitude. The artificial trees for sale are traditional evergreens—but the poinsettia bushes in full flame on the hillsides seem an entirely different species from the anemic potted plants back home: each one taller than a person, and completely blanketed with dozens and dozens of deep red leaves.

  Admiralty Bay becomes more crowded every day. We tour the anchorage in Snack, checking out the new arrivals; sailboats from the British Isles and Europe—including a large number of Norwegian-, Swedish-, and Finnish-flagged vessels—far outnumber the North Americans. I count only three other Canadian boats besides Receta.

  Maybe that’s why Santa finds us without difficulty. He even leaves a note near the little mound of gifts that has appeared on the table under our glittering Grenadian tree. “You oughta try anchoring a heavy sled a couple of times in these waves,” it reads in suspiciously familiar handwriting. “Took a Carib from the fridge—thanks—and one for Blitzen, too. Ho, ho, ho—Santa.”

  You can indeed have secrets on a 42-foot boat. Steve is speechless (a rarity) to discover the big golf umbrella with the Carib beer logo that he had coveted in Trinidad. I had managed to buy it, sneak it aboard, and keep it hidden through three countries. And I in turn can’t believe he found his way a second time to the obscure backstreet bookstore in Port of Spain to get me the Caribbean cookbook I had regretted not buying. We’ve each received a piece of folk art that we noticed the other admiring—mine, a gaily painted wooden duck from Trinidad; Steve’s, a simply carved wooden humpback whale from Bequia—and a few other goodies. We open the gifts in our bathing suits, very slowly, savoring every little thing, stopping in the middle to sip champagne in the cockpit—and leaving Dingis’s long, narrow package till last. “It’s a pair of candles,” Steve guesses. I’m sure it’s a Grenadian swizzle stick.

  We’re both wrong. Steve carefully unrolls the object inside: a small wall hanging that’s a map of Grenada showing the island’s tourist attractions in DayGlo colors. On black velvet. But it is absolutely right, an absolutely perfect gift. We hang it immediately. “I miss my sweet Grenada,” Terry on La Esmeralda had said last night, when we reached him in Trinidad via SSB to wish him and Nancy a merry Christmas. We know exactly what he means. Sweet, sweet Grenada indeed.

  When you’re in Bequia for Christmas, you must have Christmas dinner with us,” Sue and Dennis had told us last July, when we stopped here briefly on our way south. Not if we’re in Bequia for Christmas, but when. “Everybody comes to Bequia for Christmas and New Year’s,” Dennis had said. “There will be four hundred boats in the harbor, from around the world.”

  Sue and Dennis are Canadians who retired early to live on Bequia. Like me, Sue is an escapee from publishing. We had met by accident on the road that runs alongside Admiralty Bay: She spotted my Ontario T-shirt; I noticed her tote bag with the logo of a Canadian bookstore. A minute’s worth of conversation revealed mutual Canadian friends in the publishing business and led to an invitation to their house that afternoon for drinks.

  They live high above the harbor, in a spectacular place they designed and built themselves called The View. The front is a series of arches, with floor-to-ceiling louvered doors that fold back, entirely opening the living and eating areas to a jaw-dropping view of the water below. The back wall of the living room has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. More books—cookbooks, this time—cover an entire wall in the kitchen, whose centerpiece is a six-burner restaurant-quality stove. A gleaming full-size espresso maker sits on the counter. I’ve been living on a 42-foot boat and cooking in a 4-foot-square galley too long: I had to stop myself from visibly drooling.

  Friends in publishing send her the books, and she in turn operates an informal lending library for friends on the island, Sue explained, as we sipped Dennis’s excellent rum punch. She’s also got an adult literacy program going, and already has a couple of graduates; she’s not just teaching people to read, but also teaching a few islanders how to teach reading. Dennis, meanwhile, helps other ex-pats build their houses. And clearly these are people who love to entertain, with a house meant for entertaining.

  Still, the old Ann would never have dreamed of imposing on virtual strangers for Christmas dinner. But when Sue reiterated the invitation on our return to Bequia, the new Ann accepted with alacrity.

  Fourteen of us gather at The View on Christmas, an eclectic assortment of ex-pats who live here and visitors who’ve been coming to Bequia during the holidays for years. Dennis has been smoking a turkey over mango wood since early morning, and the smell rising from the barbecue is insanely delicious. By the time he’s moved it to a big platter on the kitchen counter to carve, everyone is gathered around him, to sneak bits of crisp skin and moist meat. The rest of us have brought the accompaniments, a combination of traditional North American Christmas-dinner dishes and island cuisine. There are mashed potatoes, gravy, and cranberry sauce—and baked christophene with cheese, and rum punch—and French wines.

  As the sun sets and the harbor darkens, Christmas lights blaze from the boats. Filled with holiday optimism that there would be no sudden squalls, we had switched Receta’s indoor-only lights on when we left. Now, I can pick out her colored pinpricks far across the harbor. Our beloved home.

  “Thank you for the loveliest Christmas,” Steve says as he kisses me goodnight. It was the loveliest Christmas—and I had been worried about it being lonely and disappointing, far from family and friends. But in our phone conversations back home, everyone, to a person, had described how hectic the season was: how rushed they were, how tired, so much to do, the shopping, wrapping, baking, decorating, cooking, partying. And I realized that only by sailing a couple of thousand miles away had we succeeded in gracefully escaping the usual competitive celebrating. Instead of doing frantic last-minute holiday preparations, we went to the beach on Christmas Eve afternoon, where we blissfully swam (and finally painted our registration number on the new Snack). I baked just one type of Christmas cookie, not dozens, and—limited by what I could find in the local markets and Receta’s storage lockers—made unelaborate goodies to take to a Christmas Eve gathering on a neighboring boat, and to Sue and Dennis on Christmas day. People still gobbled them up and asked for the recipes. This was the simplest Christmas ever, and we loved the feeling.

  We’ve declined invitations to go out on New Year’s Eve—Old Year’s Night, it’s called here—opting to see the new year in alone together on Receta. This year has given us a closeness—a pleasure in each other’s company—that I know many couples yearn for. We trust each other too, in a different, deeper way. After all, day in and day out now, we’re
regularly trusting each other with our very lives. Steve has confidence in me—he’s told me he trusts my boat handling and sail handling in all sorts of weather and waves, whether he’s asleep or strapped to the mast, tucking another reef in the sail—which in turn gives me confidence in myself.

  We talk together more, about more things. The past. The future. Our hopes, fears (still mostly mine), dreams. And the weather, always still the weather. We discuss, in detail, what we’re seeing, and what we’re reading. (Our worst choice for onboard reading material so far: Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm.) I laugh now at one of my concerns before we set off on the trip: Without the stimulus of our related jobs, I worried that Steve and I would have little to talk about each night at dinner. Ludicrous. Removed from the breathless pace of our old life, we have created space for a breadth of ideas and interests. Music. Food. Fish. Stars. Trees. Birds. Insects. Shells. Coral. Flowers. I am more aware of the moods and rhythms of the natural world around me than I ever have been, or probably ever will be.

  This trip is allowing the sides of ourselves we like best to flourish.

  Perhaps most amazingly, I have slowed down. Time has become more fluid, less rigid. Our days unfold; they don’t just bing-bang, do-this, do-that happen. I lime. “I’m content to do nothing for stretches,” I write in one of my last journal entries of the year (shortly after the one where I clock the Christmas winds at 40-plus knots and describe a wakeful night of boats dragging all around us). “I can just lay on the settee with my legs stretched out in front of me, watching the sky through the hatch. I can stare at the water for hours, utterly content.” Me. Unbelievable. How will I cope in the real world?