An Embarrassment of Mangoes

by Ann Vanderhoof

  Martinique and Guadeloupe were sighted by Columbus on the same voyage that he sighted Dominica, but these held no interest to the Spanish either. As with Dominica, the French subsequently moved in—but here they remained in control, despite takeover attempts (very brief) by the British. Both are still part of France, officially classed as French overseas départements. And this is obvious: They look, sound, feel, and taste different than their mutual neighbor, Dominica.

  Dominica’s Creole roots lie right on the surface—you just have to listen: English is the official language, but it’s spoken with a strong overlay of Creole patois. It feels like a small, friendly, rural, third-world island. Its neighbors feel modern, prosperous, developed, upmarket—and oh-so-very French. There’s a Creole flavor, but it’s got a sleek, sometimes sophisticated, pure French overlay. As one of our guidebooks succinctly puts it, “Often you will feel more like you’re in some part of continental France than in the Caribbean.” You can buy rhum from the local distilleries, and red wine imported from France, both at equally modest prices. You can get lamb colombo—curry made with the fragrant local poudre de colombo (curry powder)—and fragrant Mediterranean-style spit-roasted legs of lamb studded with cloves of garlic. You can get accras—the deep-fried saltfish fritters that are close cousins to Dingis’s saltfish cakes—and flaky, buttery croissants; pencil-thin Creole sausages, and French peppercorn pâtés. The currency is the French franc (until the arrival of the Euro), the roads are wonderful, everyone speaks French (and only French), and the attitude is decidedly Gallic.

  “Bonjour,” I say brightly, as I thump down between a couple of families fishing off a marina dock at the bottom of Guadeloupe. The fisherpeople ignore me. We have just arrived, and this is the tie-up dock, but since no one had made any movement to take a line from us as Receta approached, I jumped ashore, being careful not to land on any of the squid (their bait) strewn on the dock. My accent is atrocious, granted—I don’t speak more than a few words of French—but I have, quite clearly and cheerfully, said good day. Nothing. No response. The Dominicans and the Grenadians would have been appalled.

  At the local boulangerie the next morning, I ask for “deux baguettes, s’il vous plaît.” My pronunciation hasn’t improved overnight, but I’ve said the words clearly. The woman behind the counter shrugs. I repeat my order. She reluctantly puts one baguette in a bag and hands it to me. This routine repeats itself, with small variations, throughout our week-long stay. On the days I ask for “une baguette,” I am given two. I can almost hear the Dominican market ladies tsk-tsking. (They had been sympathetic, by the way—although somewhat mystified—about my report of my inedible tannia. Nothing wrong with my cooking methods, they assured me, though one of them suggested I try frying the tannia after boiling it. She was sure I’d like it that way.)

  Thirty miles apart, night and jour.

  The sky is black velvet, with white stars appliquéd on top. I’m convinced I can reach up from Receta’s cockpit and pluck one off.

  We’re sailing from Guadeloupe to St. Kitts—sizzling through the water, leaving diamonds of bioluminescence glittering in our wake. The night is perfection: the wind exactly where it should be, strong and steady; the ocean kicked up just enough for Receta to show her thoroughbred lineage as she slices through the waves. A curry-colored three-quarter moon rises just before midnight, while I’m on watch, and sits directly above the mountain that defines the ghostly silhouette of Montserrat.

  Ah, Montserrat, “feeling hot, hot, hot/down deh in your belly,” as Trini calypsonian David Rudder sings in his popular lament for the island. The Soufrière Hills volcano, at its south end, had roared to life in 1995 after 16,000 years of dormancy, and since then has continued off and on to be active—an innocuous word for the sporadic eruptions that spew violent ash clouds up to 40,000 feet into the sky, pelt the island with red-hot boulders, and vomit streams of rock and ash down the mountain’s flanks, across the landscape, and into the sea. The bottom half of the island—including its capital, Plymouth—is buried under tons of gray ash, knee-deep in places, and has been evacuated. This is painfully obvious from my vantage point in Receta’s cockpit about 5 miles off the middle of Montserrat’s west coast: The only lights that wink from the island tonight are clustered tightly together in a tiny corner at the north tip. The rest of the island is blanketed in utter darkness—abandoned, off-limits. More than half Montserrat’s population has left for good, dispersed across the Caribbean and even as far as England.

  The volcano is unmistakable, even when it’s sleeping peacefully, as it appears to be tonight, shrouded in gentle clouds. It’s by far the tallest peak on the island, built up by the stuff periodically regurgitated from the earth’s belly. Soufrière Hills is the only active volcano in the Caribbean—if you discount Kick ’em Jenny, which is underwater, about 525 feet below the surface. Jenny is right on the direct sailing route between Carriacou and Grenada. But Jenny hasn’t kicked since the late eighties—and even then it was a restrained little dance step; the last eruption that made it above the surface was in 1974. We figured the odds were in our favor, and we had sailed almost over the top of it on our way to Grenada and back north again.

  The odds are a little different with Soufrière Hills. It’s actively active; it can get cranky any time. Volcano alerts are given daily by the Montserrat Volcano Observatory, ranging from green (volcano is quiet), through yellow, to orange (eruption possible within 24 hours), to red, which means an eruption may begin without further warning—or is already in progress. Boats are advised to stay 10 miles clear of the leeward side of the island during an orange or red alert, as the hot smoke and ash can carry for miles on the prevailing trades.

  Which is why Steve spent the afternoon trying to call Montserrat. A phone book proved as elusive on Guadeloupe as someone who spoke English. Steve’s French is serviceable, but rustic, and not up to the subtleties of climbing over stone walls. The French-speaking operators seemed to feel the number for using our AT&T long-distance calling card from Guadeloupe was a national secret to be protected at all costs, and that revealing any phone number on Montserrat—let alone one for the Volcano Observatory—amounted to an act of espionage. “It would have been easier if I’d tried to yell from one island to the other,” he reported, now swearing fluently en français. Eventually, he pried the numbers out of someone—only to find that the phone rang endlessly at the other end. Unfortunately, we didn’t know whether this meant everyone had fled because the volcano was raging or simply gone to the beach because it wasn’t.

  The bigger the berth we give Montserrat, the more miles we add to our trip, and the more time we spend at sea. We decide to hedge our bets, and plot a course that will keep us a good 5 miles off the southern end of the island, a little less as we move up the coast.

  I know it’s about 11:20 when the smell hits me, because I have just returned to the cockpit after noting the time and a course change in our log. We have just reached a waypoint exactly 5 miles offshore near the middle of the island, and I have altered our course to point us at St. Kitts. A powerful smell of rotten eggs. Very rotten eggs. Oh, Christ, it’s the head. Occasionally, stuff backwashes out of the lines and into the toilet bowl, leaving an unpleasant aroma to waft through the boat. Must be really serious backwash. With the boat riding on autopilot, I unclip my safety harness and go below again, hoping to solve the problem with some vigorous flushing. But the horrid smell isn’t coming from the head and, in fact, is barely noticeable in the cabin.

  Back in the cockpit, my brain translates “rotten eggs” into “sulphur,” a smell I’ve experienced at hot springs that bubble to the surface from deep inside the earth. The smell must be the volcano burping.

  At 11:30, the appointed time for a watch change, I wake Steve. When he comes up on deck, I point out the now much-dissipated odor, then go below to sleep.

  “Ann, Ann—COME BACK UP HERE.” Steve yells me awake after what the clock above my head says has been only five minutes, and I climb
into the cockpit once again. Steve points behind the boat. An iron-gray column of smoke stretches from the top of the volcano to the bottom of the rising moon and then obscures it. As we watch, the column flattens out into an island-sized anvil, then drifts south, blotting out the horizon and the lights of Guadeloupe, completely obliterating the path we’ve just sailed. The air again tastes strongly of sulphur—and ash.

  Two days later, we learn via reports relayed on the radio nets that a “pyroclastic event” had taken place, according to the volcanologists at the island’s observatory. In unscientific terms, this means an eruption: hot gases, rock fragments, pumice, and ash shot from the dome at speeds up to 100 miles per hour. This “pyroclastic event” blasted an ash cloud 15,000 feet into the sky, covering the decks of boats downwind of it in hot ash and turning their sails to Swiss cheese.

  Sometimes God protects the ignorant, even while giving them a good reminder of exactly how ignorant they are: Safe by maybe an hour, Receta was far enough toward the north end of the island to escape damage when, as David Rudder sings, “the mountain beast has come to feast and pain is on the way / lighting up the nighttime sky and flaming up the day.”

  So many of the islands we’ve stopped at have looked to us like paradise. Sure, we know there are social problems and poverty, that one hit from a hurricane can wipe out a fragile economy based almost entirely on tourism and agriculture. But it’s all too easy for visitors like us—and even more so for casual tourists—to ignore the other side of paradise.

  Every once in a while, though, it walks right up to you—shy and giggling and maybe ten years old and wearing a pretty pink dress—and smacks you in the face. And you can no longer pretend it doesn’t exist.

  “This is Valencia,” says Sharon, as she and her partner, Gong, climb aboard Receta, which is tied to a marina dock in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts. You need a compelling reason to tie up here—ours is that we’ve just dropped off a departing set of guests—because the marina has the ambience of a construction site. Hot, dust-covered, and treeless, it (along with the rest of St. Kitts) is still rebuilding from the destruction of Hurricane Georges. A solitary perfect cube of crushed metal sits like a piece of postmodern sculpture on the otherwise barren expanse of land in front of Receta. A few months ago it was a car, until it was reshaped by the mudslide that followed Georges’s torrential rains. It wasn’t the only such cube, but the mudslide, which filled buildings on the waterfront to the height of their first-floor ceilings, bulldozed others all the way into the sea. Just offshore, barges and tugs chug noisily, working to rebuild tourism: Georges also demolished the cruise-ship dock, scarcely a year old.

  “Hello, Valencia. What a beautiful name you have. Would you like a glass of cold juice?” The skinny girl nods timidly, but doesn’t speak; in fact, she seems embarrassed to talk, holding her hand up to her mouth and whispering to Gong behind it. I assume she’s either painfully shy or has a speech defect. I also assume she is Sharon and Gong’s daughter.

  We had met Gong a week or so ago, when we were anchored, with Jo and Mike, our guests, in pretty Ballast Bay. St. Kitts is shaped like a chicken leg, and Ballast Bay is at the bottom of the leg where it flares out in a bony knob. In the center of the knob is a salt pond, with a trail around it and good bird-watching potential. Ballast Bay itself, a jumble of rocks, is good lobstering territory. (A few days ago, Steve had speared a monster there that was big enough—one lobster—to feed all four of us. Lavishly.) We had headed off for a late-afternoon hike, and though we didn’t see much in the way of birdlife, we did spot several green vervet monkeys in the trees and a mongoose crossing the road. Both are introduced species that took to life on St. Kitts exceedingly well; the first green vervet monkeys arrived as the pets of an English plantation owner, while the mongoose was introduced to kill the rats that were eating the sugar cane. Unfortunately, it turned out the mongooses weren’t particularly interested in rats: They eat during the day, and the rats come out at night. They love chickens, though, and nice fresh eggs. Which is why Kittitians now hate the mongoose, a taximan told us one day, as he swerved to run over the one that was crossing the road in front of his car. (He missed.) The monkeys, on the other hand, are tolerated—even encouraged, with handouts of fruit.

  On the far side of the salt pond, an inconspicuous sign pointed down a track that led off the main road. “Gong on the Beach” is all it said, with an amateurish painting of a black-robed, dreadlocked man striking a large gong with a mallet.

  After a few minutes’ walk, the vegetation thinned and the track opened up on a deserted windswept beach that stretched ahead as far as we could see: Nothing but sand and seagrass and one sweet little, fresh-looking hexagonal bar plunked in the middle, the man behind it smiling an invitation to cold Carib. “Mike and I didn’t bring any money,” Jo said with dismay as we approached. “Me neither,” said Steve, who should have known better. Lucky this group has me. Since stumbling penniless on MacDuff’s a year ago, I never leave Receta with empty pockets. I pulled out $20 EC and bought us each a beer.

  And that’s how we get to meet the loquacious, charming Gong, purveyor of beer and burgers on Sand Banks Beach. He’s just erected his tiny gazebo-like structure, after the hurricane took the old one completely away. In exchange, Georges left behind mile-long cornrows of seaweed, driftwood, and ocean debris. But no problem, mon: Gong just uses it to fuel the bonfire at his regular full-moon beach parties. On our next visit, we meet Sharon, who moved to St. Kitts from Vancouver, and now, on Receta, we meet shy young Valencia.

  She’s followed me into the cabin, where I am getting snacks and drinks. Hoping to make her feel a bit more at ease, I introduce her to Curious George, my stuffed monkey. George has been with me since childhood and has traveled on Receta every mile of the trip—my loyal confidant when the going gets rough.

  In a corner of the cabin, Valencia begins to carry on a full-fledged, full-volume, completely comprehensible conversation with George. “Do you think Valencia pretty, George?” she asks him, dancing him on his feet. “Do you like Valencia’s dress?” I know George will tell her exactly what she wants to hear, so I leave the two of them and retreat to the cockpit, where I tell Sharon that Valencia is starting to feel at home. “Poor kid,” she says.

  “She lives in a children’s home on the outskirts of Basseterre. When she was a few years old, her mother sold her to a woman on St. Vincent for a couple hundred dollars, and when that woman no longer wanted her, she ended up back on St. Kitts, at the children’s home.” Though she looks only nine or ten, this endearing kid is fourteen, and carrying enough emotional baggage for a roomful of adults. Four or five years ago, Sharon took her under wing, and though she still lives in the home, she spends weekends, and other times as well, with Gong and Sharon. “She’s much, much better now than when we first met her.”

  Mothers who can’t afford to keep their kids. Kids who can’t afford to go to school. We’d heard stories of it on Grenada, too, and there, wanting to give something back to the island that captured our hearts, we made a tiny step toward getting involved.

  Newlo—the New Life Organisation—overlooks the ocean halfway up Grenada’s leeward coast and provides a “second chance at seventeen” for disadvantaged kids who never made it further than primary school. They learn a vocational skill and what Newlo calls “life skills”—high among them, self-esteem. Those without any other option can live right at the school. It’s a warren of rickety stairways and cramped rooms that reminds me of the shoe inhabited by the old woman in the nursery rhyme. A bit of concrete wall rises tentatively in one spot, under construction by kids in the masonry program; in another area, the guts spill out of ancient fridges, in the midst of repair by the kids learning refrigeration. Up another twisting stairway, we’re shown an office, straight out of the sixties, with young men and women concentrating hard at manual typewriters: the office skills program. “We’re trying to get computers,” Ann David-Antoine, the director, tells us, “but right now the
duties are too high to bring them into the country.”

  Newlo gives us a warm feeling. In the Dove Café, students in “hospitality arts” get to practice on real customers at lunchtime one day a week. They take what they’re doing seriously—very seriously—and we’re served with gravity and impeccable manners, one hand behind the back and ladies first, no matter what. The menu is carefully handwritten and photocopied on colored paper: a choice of golden-apple juice or pineapple juice; pumpkin soup or chicken soup; stew fish or stew chicken. Students do all the cooking—from the warm yeast rolls that arrive first to the Jell-O and pound cake for dessert—under supervision of their instructors. The food is simple, just homestyle cooking, but with a few stretch-their-wings flourishes: The steamed carrot batons that accompany my stew fish are carefully arranged in a hollowed-out round of cucumber. There’s an incentive to do well here: A lucky few will be placed in an internship on a cruise ship—an unimaginable opportunity for these kids.

  “In three weeks I have done so many things I never did in primary school—talk about myself, stand up in front of the class and talk,” one young trainee told the director.

  “Miss, look at me. I okay now,” said another.

  “Miss” writes us a few weeks later with an update. She’d used the check we’d left behind to buy one promising student a set of his own carpentry tools, a second, his own tools for electronics repair. A third young man, she tells us, she’d found hanging around the school long after class was over. He simply had no money for bus fare to return home at night, so she made him a resident at Newlo “and he is making a valiant effort to use wisely the opportunity.”