Home by Another Way

by Robert Benson

  The trade winds blow across the island and manage to leave a set of clouds on the volcano in the center of the island that rarely dissipate. So it is not unusual to be awakened from your nap by the sound of the rain on the roof or by a mist blowing in on your toes. I was reminded once, when I was something less than happy about the sunning round being rained out, that these are the tropics, after all. Fortunately, unless you have failed to adjust the shutters and therefore are in danger of being drenched, the appropriate response to rain on the roof during the napping round is to go back to sleep until it is time for the sunset round.

  The sunset round begins in the mid-to-late afternoon. The length of it is predetermined by the length of the day’s sunning round and the plans we have made for dinner.

  The sunset round begins with the two of us standing in the pool and reading a book. A lot of people have never considered doing such a thing, much less attempted it. But we seemed to have mastered it.

  You need a book, of course, and you need a hat, and you need sunglasses. Something cool to drink is always a good idea as well.

  Next you find a spot in the pool where the ledge around the pool is at exactly the right height for you to rest your elbows comfortably and still stand as deep in the cool water as you can be. If, instead of reading, you are going to work a crossword in the big New York Times crossword book you cleverly brought especially for the trip, then you have to be closer to the shallow end so you have enough leverage to move a pencil.

  Either way, you need one towel to spread on the tiles along the edge of the pool so you will not scratch your elbows. You need a second towel so you have a place to dry your hands and arms and face, because you will need to put your book down between chapters and sink into the cool water. If the sun is very hot, it may be required between paragraphs. Conversation is allowed during the dipping moments. You cannot read very fast this way, but then, if you are in a hurry, you have come to the wrong island or certainly the wrong bungalow anyway.

  Sometimes the sunset round begins as much as two hours before the sunset actually happens, occasionally less. The time passes with reading and paddling around and talking about what you have read. Or about what you want to read next.

  You keep an eye out over the railing around the pool deck, checking the western sky from time to time so you can be ready to move when the sun starts down. You have to be sure that you leave enough time to get out and dry off and take up your place in one of the chairs. When the time comes for the sun to make its daily plunge into the sea, you do not want to miss it.

  Miami is twelve hundred miles away straight over the straits to the north, and London is four thousand miles away if you turn your head a little bit to the right. Look left off the corner of the pool deck, and Mexico City is out there somewhere behind the spot where the sun is about to disappear.

  Take your binoculars in hand, and you can see the last ferry heading into the harbor before darkness overtakes it. You can see a water taxi make its last daredevil sprint across the straits before the darkness closes it down for the evening. The last of the day’s six incoming flights drones overhead, and you can see the lights of a cruise ship now along the horizon and gloat a little bit because you know this island is too small for the ship to stop here. The sugarbirds are hurrying to their nests, and the seabirds make their long, last fishing flights for the day. The mourning doves begin to coo and call, looking for each other, and the tree frogs begin to strike up their chorus.

  The sky begins to streak red and pink and then orange and blue and gray. The breeze freshens just a bit as the air cools, and you pull on a shirt and wrap a towel around your legs. When there is nothing left of the sun save a white line on the horizon—no red streaks in the sky, no long golden fingers coming across the sea in your direction—the sunset round is over.

  For dinner we sometimes go down the hill and down the road to one of the restaurants. Sometimes we cook at the cottage.

  Either way, these are dinners where you take your time between courses and you linger over coffee. For when dinner is over, unless you have to drive back to the cottage or wash the dishes, there is not much to do. It is glorious. No telephone, no television, no early appointments to get ready for. Not much more than cards and quiet talk, books and gentle laughter, and the stars and the moon. You can even go to bed at sundown if you like; there is nothing to keep you from it.

  The surf crashes below on the rocks, the breeze comes through the windows, and the ceiling fan creaks. There is the occasional cheerful honk of a car horn on the road below, and sometimes the laughter and the music will filter up the hill from the hotel restaurant down at the beach. The tree frogs sing their peaceful two-note lullaby, the evening hymn of St. Cecilia. And then sweet sleep comes.

  When the time comes for you to buy a beach, I recommend you pick one facing directly north or directly south so that the sunrise and the sunset are on your right or your left as you look up and down the beach. Then in the morning you can get up to watch the day begin and to scribble and to have your coffee—all of which you will be required to do if you have been blessed enough to buy a beach. You can watch the day end as well while the breeze freshens and the fishing boats hurry home and the last rays of the sun warm your skin. And you can watch the seabirds as they slowly fly their way along the shoreline toward the sun.

  They are fishing. I do not know the science that goes with this—whether they are drawn to the light or the warmth, or if the breezes are more helpful for them to cruise along slowly in the air when the sun is close to the horizon, or if the angle of the sunlight enables them to better see the shape of a snack that is swimming below. I only know that when you are up at first light and you watch the sun as it rises, you will see them flying along the shoreline, heading toward the sun.

  And I know that in the evening you will see them headed the other way. Slowly, languidly, occasionally dropping straight down out of the sky from as much as a hundred feet, face first into the water. It looks as though someone has thrown them from a cliff.

  And sometimes in the evening, if you can bear to take your eyes off the sunset itself, you will see them circle higher and higher, drifting on the currents of the wind in great circles that spiral upward toward the clouds and toward the sun itself.

  We watched one put on a show for us one afternoon at the sunset hour on St. Cecilia. He started out circling the water along the bottom of the cliff, a few feet above the waters of the straits. And then he began making circles and going higher and higher.

  He kept arcing his way back so he was almost over us on each turn. I think he knew he had an audience. After a few minutes we had to break out our binoculars and lie flat on our backs and stare straight up to see him. As the sun disappeared, he did as well, far above us; we lost him in a cloud or the shadow of one. He was circling toward the sun when we saw him last.

  So am I these days.

  One way or another I have spent most of my life watching for certain signs and wonders of the Something Unnamed that is at the center of everything.

  Over the years I have come to see that some sitting still is required if one is to see such things. I think that is why I am drawn to the still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow. And it is why I wait at the railing to watch the sun slip away.

  I have also come to believe that it helps to keep circling as well, which is as good a name for my scribbling as anything else I can think of. So I do, circling round and round, from scribbling round to sunset round, day after day, season after season, year after year.

  I do not know the name of what it is that I will finally come to see. Home may be as good a name as any.

  Four

  Invent your world.

  Surround yourself with people,

  color, sounds, and work

  that nourish you.

  —SARK

  Once we arrive on St. Cecilia, we have only two appointments to keep. The second one, we try not to think about. It is the appointment with the boat tha
t will take us off the island and start us on our journey toward the north and the cold, toward the gray and the brown. Toward the off-season, we baseball people would say.

  The first appointment is the one we look forward to—it is with Victor, the car-hire man. We are not actually hiring Victor; we are hiring a car from him. Which is the same thing as renting a car from him, only if we do not say “car hire,” no one knows what we are talking about here. We do not really hire a car either. We hire one of those small Japanese Jeep things with four-wheel drive and a good bit of space for piling groceries in the back and a convertible top that folds down into the boot. It has windows that zip out and invariably do not zip back all the way into place until after we turn in the car at the end of our stay. Zipping the windows back in properly is not one of my gifts, nor is it a skill I have yet acquired.

  The appointment with Victor is important, because we need the Jeep for going to the market a few times while we are here. And we need it so that we can go to dinner on the days that we decide to tear ourselves away from Seastone. Though, to be sure, we could call a taxi in either case, and someone would be glad to pick us up and drive us around. By my unscientific survey, there are three taxis per tourist on St. Cecilia.

  The real reason that we set the appointment with Victor is that, unless we do, we cannot go riding around.

  Sara is from a small town in Mississippi. She claims that most of the Sunday afternoons when she was growing up were spent in the backseat of a car wandering through the back roads of the Delta. Sunday mornings were for church, and Sunday evenings too. Sunday afternoons were for driving through the countryside, through the farms and villages and fields that her parents had been raised in and on and around.

  After lunch on Sunday, her father would say to her mother, “What would you like to do this afternoon?”

  “Let’s just go ridin’ around,” would be the reply. And they would fill the backseat with kids, and off they would go.

  I never got to ride around with LeRoy, but I did get to go with Mozelle one afternoon before she passed away. She was right; it was a fine way to spend an afternoon.

  We think riding around is a fine way to spend an afternoon on St. Cecilia as well. So we make an appointment with Victor for the first morning we are there.

  Victor is not always on time for our appointment. That is not quite true, now that I think of it. Victor operates on island time, which generally means that whenever Victor shows up is the actual time that had been set, no matter what time had actually been set.

  He pulls up about fifteen minutes after I have called to see if he is on the way. It is a telephone call I hate to make because it reveals that I am not yet living on island time and that my stateside impatience is still with me. “Still twitching like a live wire,” is the way James Taylor once referred to it in a song about a trip he made down this way once.

  When I do finally succumb and make the call, someone assures me that Victor has just left. Which likely means that the person who answered the call will now go and find Victor and tell him that we called. Which is his signal to go and figure out which car he will rent to us and see if it is running today and then drive across the island to where we are.

  He honks cheerfully as he drives up the hill and then comes breezing in and lays out his papers and keys on the table. I have always felt it would be bad form to mention that he might be tardy. I have always secretly wondered if it might affect my discount. The price is always discounted when we show that we are prepared to pay in cash, in advance, and in U.S. currency. It is the size of the discount that is in question.

  We fill out the forms for the temporary driving license. We get a map and a business card with all the telephone numbers that we may need to get hold of Victor when the car breaks down. We make a plan about where and when we will leave the car and where we will hide the key when it is time for us to go home. The car is always parked at the dock, and the key is always in the ashtray.

  “Won’t somebody steal it?” I asked him once.

  “This is a small island. Where are they going to take it?” he replied. “Besides, everyone on the island knows these are my cars. Someone will call me and tell me they have seen my car in someone else’s driveway. Then when I need it again, I will go and pick it up.”

  Then we chat for a few minutes as though we are old friends. He asks me about the things that we will do while we are here, and everything I mention brings a recommendation to patronize a business owned by one of his family or close friends. I have a hunch that his discounts at those establishments are affected by how many visitors he sends their way.

  Then there is another cheerful honk in the driveway, announcing that Victor’s ride is here, and he is off. Our first appointment is concluded, and we pretend the second one—the one where the boat starts us off toward the winter—will never come.

  At least once during each week on St. Cecilia we will forgo the sunning round and go riding around. We put the top back on the Jeep and mop up the water that came in when I could not get all of the snaps done up before the daily rain. It takes less energy to bail out the Jeep than it does to figure out all of the snaps and zippers that hold the roof on. What we cannot bail out, the sun and the wind take care of.

  Sometimes we have a destination in mind; other times we do not. We grab some binoculars and the camera and the map, and off we go. We wander our way down the hill and along the little lane that leads to the main road. And then we make a choice—right or left.

  St. Cecilia is not a very large island. It is only thirty-six square miles altogether, and a fair portion of that is rain-forest-covered mountainside that falls down around a volcano in the center of the island. The crater of the volcano is about thirty-two hundred feet above sea level. Rugged spines of hills—the shoulders of the volcano, so to speak—run down toward the sea and eventually spread out into flatlands.

  There is only one main road, and it circles the island, pretty much hugging the shoreline from north to south, the leeward side of the island, and then running along the edge of the mountain back from south to north along the windward side.

  The majority of the people and the shops and the restaurants are spread out along the western coast, protected from the winds by the volcano and its surrounding hills. Along this leeward side of the island, the breeze is gentle, and the Caribbean glistens peacefully in the sun. It is also the side of the island where the road is smooth and well paved.

  The eastern side of the island has a wild and desolate feeling. The wind blows hard and straight; the windward beaches are lined with rocks and not sand; the reefs cause the surf to crash wildly into the shore. The road has been neglected over here. There are potholes and bumps, and the speed-limit signs, which are ignored on the other side of the island, are unnecessary here.

  The map of St. Cecilia is as much fun to look at for what you cannot find as it is for what you can find.

  There are no shopping malls and no movie theaters. There are no water parks and no stoplights. There are no four-lane highways and no big discount stores. There are no restaurant chains and no casinos and no city-block-sized duty-free shops.

  On the other hand, according to the symbols on the map, there are two places to get ice cream, two places to shoot pool, three ATMs, and an egg farm.

  At the stop sign at the beginning of the journey, we most often choose to turn right and head south down the leeward side, hugging the shoreline, headed toward Princetown, remembering our way around the island.

  In only a couple of minutes or so, we pass by the Galley Door and then Cassandra’s Café and Domingo’s Beach Bar and Miss Lil’s Famous Cuisine. There are forty restaurants on the island, and we are eating our way through them. It is research that must be done, and we believe that we are up to the task.

  We skirt the shoreline for a while, rolling past houses that sit by the bay, and then take the sharp curve that leads to the hill that leads up to St. Peter’s Anglican Church. It is where we go to church when we
are here. Like the other four big Anglican churches on the island, it is a great stone structure that has been here for hundreds of years. Each of them sits at the center of one of the parishes that make up the island, and each one is an official hurricane shelter. And each one takes your breath away when you see it.

  Soon we pass the entrance to Three Palms, the one large Western resort on the island. It has large villas and a few thousand transplanted palm trees and enough restaurants and lounges and satellite televisions and day spas and tennis courts and tee times to ensure that the people who stay there never have to visit St. Cecilia. They come from the airport in specially marked vans and disappear into the gates long before they get to Princetown. It has all the comforts of the suburbs with better weather. It is a cruise ship with bigger staterooms and a golf course. It is like visiting another island, maybe another country, but it is not like visiting St. Cecilia. It is also the reason there is virtually no unemployment on St. Cecilia.

  A little straight stretch of road through the palm trees that hide the bay from view and suddenly we are in Princetown, the capital city. It is an old city and a small city, with narrow streets and low buildings. It bustles with life. For the most part it looks more like a village in the English countryside than a village in the English countryside.

  We go through the town and through the roundabout on the other side and start up the hill toward the highlands. We are headed east now, and we are up in the hills on the southern part of the volcano. This is old plantation-inn territory here. There are a dozen or so of them, lovely vacation spots hidden in the rain forest and built in and on and among the ruins of once-great sugar plantations. We are too far up in the hills now and too deep into the trees to see the water anymore.

  The last stretch of good road drops down the long hill into St. Andrew’s Parish, and at Midway the road changes, and so does the island. We are on the windward side now, and when we look to the right, we can very often see the Atlantic stretched out. Sometimes the view is so breathtaking that we stop the car just to look.