ISLAND FANTASY = ISLAND REALITY
Who is lucky enough to have family who live in paradise? I am!, a spousal benefit of being married to John the Hublet, as he shall be known in these pages. So, off to the Virgin Islands to visit John's first cousin, Archibald Gracie Ogden, and Ella, his Israeli wife. The third of our retirement-victory-lap trips, (there was only supposed to be one) we determined to see the British Virgins as well.
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Brewer's Bay, St. Thomas, Spring Bay, Virgin Gorda, Cinnamon Bay, St. John,
Trunk Bay, St. John
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Now, we usually go to Hawaii. I am a Hawaii-ho. I never ever want to come home. How many people do you know who can state they have been to every island? More than once? So, going to the Caribbean felt very East Coast to me. Striped cabanas, pink sand, panama hats, madras, ...50's Bahama tourist fantasies sprouted great seersucker wings as we planned to snorkel every bay I found.
FASHION for Humid Tropical Climes
requires a new sun hat, found so easily at J.Crew, a Cuba-fantasy style made of real Panama fibers. However, windrainsun quickly returned me to my eco-style green Tilley - it straps onto your head, won't blow off, comes with a return guarantee even if you lose it. The lovely Panama hat I reverentially toted around, and wore once, on Collins Avenue in Miami.
The two-hat problem - fashion forward or fogedda bout it. Manichean choices, always. Such a bad deal! -"Just make it work", would ya - can I mate Patagonia and J. Crew to get something fashionable? Choices that worked for me: linen, J. Jill, J. Crew, Land's End, L.L. Bean, loose dress, linen shorts, O'Neill long sleeve surfing T with SPF label for snorkeling, rubber flip-flops, 1-piece quick-dry swimsuit you can really swim in, light 3/4 cardigan for air-conditioned rooms, a light cashmere hoodie, and stuff-stack rain shell.
And gobs and gobs of sunscreen - don't forget your eartops and backs of your knees. For the hublet - top of the head, the only thin reality left as we embrace foodie-ism.
ST. THOMAS, VI : OUR FAMILY
Ella and Archie, the hublet's first cousins, live high over the Atlantic side of St. Thomas, with a view that was a trope for all the ocean and sky views to come. Islands lay at rest, as if God had tossed out green ribbons to float upon the turquoise waters. Shorelines curved, opened inward to lovely bays and inlets. Hawaiian shorelines face one to Pacific Vastness; these islands nestled close and friendly.
CARNIVAL IN ST. THOMAS
Surely a trickster was about, though - instead of dreamy guitar slides, falsetto, and ukelele strums, and endless songs about beaches and kapu'a, I give you the steel-pan band. It was Carnival time, and we were off to a joyously raucous concert. The most pulsing, compelling, surprising musicality is produced from sets of different size drums of all depths and widths. The concave lids, when struck in a specific place, sound notes, enabling tuneful play. Loud, louder, astonishingly, painfully loud, as a 3-car two-deck trolley full of children and drum sets was driven into the stadium. How did they play like that? Where was the conductor? Who writes this music? LA, urban mixographia, - we missing something here?
And the people - how beautiful, warm, and gracious, love to laugh. Families are extended, close, many one-parent family stories. One must greet those one meets with "Good Morning", "Good Afternoon", or Good Night", before asking for help or chatting - it's rude not to,we learned from our ebullient host. ("Good Night" is the greeting, not "Good Evening"). For days after returning I greeting everyon LA like this, instead of my usual more informal manner. The change behavior program I'd initiated didn't log off. "Good morning" sounds vernacular, but not "Good afternoon" or "Evening" - bit stiff, but then, perhaps acceptable coming from the older woman I forget that I am.
ISLAND FOOD
Street food, the burger of the islands is pate; it's chicken, conch, or saltfish, dough-wrapped and deep-fried. Another special: a whole small fish, baked with vegetables, called "boilfish". Feral chickens run about. If one ends up as Sunday dinner - it's called "homechicken". Boilfish at Cuzzin's, a charming restaurant with local cuisine, was a triggerfish, (called "old wife"in the VI, but in Hawai'i, "humuhumunukunukuapuaʻa") served with fried plantain. Breadfruit was a new breakfast treat. Fungi, I discovered, is not a mushroom,but a carbo side dish of okra and cornmeal. The word also refers to VI music scratch bands, with some homemade instruments in the mix, who play at island festivities. |
| breadfruit and mangos |
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| piña colada |
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| oilfish |
BUTTERFLIES, FLOWERS, & BIRDS
Tropical birds, plants, fishes, sunset, music - all are a delight to me; oh,butterflies need to go on the list too. St. Thomas has a butterfly "farm", where one can go to see tropical specimens. The admission sum I paid to see 8 species came to $1.87 each (lacewing, paper kite, blue morpho, sylvia, owl, orange-tip,batman, and postman), not so dear, but the quantity seemed skimpy,after the bounty of the Pavilion of Wings at LA's Museum of Natural History. However, among the butterflies I saw was one I have longed to see but never thought I would, the
Blue Morpho. Wings as turquoise iridescent as a St. John bay, elusive, concealing that magic silky blue with quickly beating wing-folds, diving among leaves, swooping over paths but never giving me a photo op. So much unimaginable beauty: the parable of the lilies of the field comes to my mind at these times.
SNORKELING THE VIRGINS
What I came for - many years ago I snorkeled some exotic places - Wake, Guam, Okinawa, and Hawai'i, and I've always yearned to do more of it. The plenitude of marine life is endlessly fascinating, of course, and the water - the warm, soft, water, gliding so effortlessly through enveloping teal sparkles, face glued to a horizontal window on the world. Such a feeling of oneness. The fish know that I am there. I sense cognition on their part, awareness of our mutually exchanged glance. They do not let me enter their world without acknowleging me, even as they inevitably fork and dart quickly off.
A surface dive permits me to peer into the meshing coral tips, and find tiny baby fish, juvenile angelfishes, Spanish hogfish, yellowhead wrasse, tang, yellowtail damselfish. A scanning glance at water level shows me gliding barracuda, ugly mouth sneering, ballyhoos and houndfish prepared for 3-musketeers duel with their long beaks. Searching beneath rock ledges yields squirrelfish, huge dark eyes against salmon-pink scales. Coneys, a reddish-brown grouper with blue spots, also hover in the mouth of ledge lips. Careful watching earned me a green moray bonelessly undulating into a new hole, and a small goldentail moray, which I took for a baby spotted moray at first.
A chartered snorkeling trip with Captain Ray of Atlantis Adventures took me to Cooper Island and Haulaway Bay, where Captain Ray found a wonderful porcupine fish for me, and taught me many new species. Swimming like a orchestra conductor with a bamboo branch for a baton, he directed my gaze to see spotfin, four-eyed, and banded butterfly fish, a rock beauty, bristleworms, and puddingwifes. He found meorange-spotted filefish, glassy sweepers, and a trumpet-fish hanging vertically next to a boat-tether in the water, comically pretending he was a rope.
Bays with cliff sides gave me arresting views of large fish - four-foot tarpons, hawskbill turtles looking like shallow upside-down pasta bowls with flippers and wise faces, and tomcat cruising jacks. Schools of blue tang tacked languidly through branching coral, an eerie synchronicity to the school, all knowing instantly which new direction had been chosen.
The most exquisite fish for me are still angelfish, and the most spectacular is the queen angelfish, which Archie, ever vigilant, found for me on our snorkel trip on St. Thomas to Sapphire Beach, the only time I'd get to see it. He also spotted a small flotilla of squid - they really do look like the huge and frightening monster I saw on the submarine ride at Disneyland at age 12! The award for most comical fish goes to the spotted trunkfish. The body is actually a wedge shape, like a softened triangular handbag. His small fins move rapidly, and his powerful tail propels him about. He, too, likes coral ledges. I found them lurching across the top of them, but staying close.
A catamaran charter trip with Captain Paul out of Tortola took us to Thatch Cay, where small moon jellyfish floated past and about us like the season's first snowfall. Rock hind and rainbow runner were new fish for me here. Off Jost Van Dyke, we saw a group of majestic tarpon cruising, in the especially clear turquoise water of White's Bay.
Lunch on Jost Van Dyke was a ribald, raucous and surely an advanced training ground to achieve party animal's highest rank. In order to qualify, you must lunch at the Soggy Dollar Bar and Restaurant, drink rum shots along with the ubiquitious VI cocktail, the Painkiller, and soon you will find yourself behaving most extraordinarily foolishly, hopefully before noon. (The Soggy Dollar bartender contends that the nutmeg he grates generously to top a Painkiller is actually a form of Viagra.) Of course, watching is fun, too.
The Sapphire Bay Dive Shop on St. Thomas thoughtfully recommended a small waterproof pocket guide instead of the plastic cards sold in beach and dive shops. I tucked my underwater Baedeker under my suit at my side hip, and swam about with it, teaching myself the names of fish I saw, checking their complex markings at leisure. Other fish of note: fairy basslet, yellowfin grouper, yellowmouth grouper, yellowtail snapper, peacock flounder sergeant major, hogfish, stoplight parrotfish, both phases, rainbow parrotfish, juvenile blue tang, ocean surgeon, goatfish, filefish, French grunt, bluestriped grunt, black durgon, cleaning goby, palometa, trumpetfish, clown wrasse, bluehead wrasse, honey damselish, houndfish, sanddiver, orange-spotted filefish, and bristleworm.
I became familiar with coral formations, too, as I swam, thinking of the purity around me and the ghastly swill flowing through the Gulf of Mexico from BP's oil rig catastrophe.
These innocent beings, living in the blessed spin of time and tide, who will stand for them? Who will guide and keep them, if not ourselves? The Divine's creation has been left in stewardship to us, and we cannot fail the new dimensions of this task, revealed to us in the glory of our modernity.
ARCHITECTURE IN THE VI
Synagogue, St. Thomas
Archie and Ella are members of this famous, historic Reform synagogue, the oldest synagogue in continuous use under the American flag. (I remember visiting Touro Synagogue in Newport Rhode Island, dedicated in 1763). Founded in 1796, nine Jewish families were charter members. In 1492, Spanish Jews became subject to an Edict of Expulsion if they did not convert to Catholicism. They left with New World dreams of opportunity and freedom, and some settled the Caribbean colonies, especially the Dutch colonies.
Many who stayed behind practiced their faith in secret basements with sand-covered floors to muffle sound. The floor of the Congregation is covered with sand today, in memory of this. We met Rabbi Moch, who took time from his busy day to share some temple history and traditions with us.
This Torah is a Sephardic Torah, the word of God written with calligraphic perfection, lest a careless mistake misrepresent this word and give rise to religious error. Another Torah in the collection was the holy book of a Czechoslovakian synagogue in Budin, one of so many destroyed by Hitler. Found in a warehouse 20 years after the war, it had been stored with thousands of others by the Nazis for a future "museum of extinct races". The Torahs were meticulously repaired, then placed on loan to other synagogues across the world, until the former congregations might one day read from them again. When it is read, surely this is a most powerful antidote to forgetfulness, and a loving memory of that disappeared sister-spirit congregation.
THE SUGAR MILLS
Like Hawai'i, the taste for sugar defined the Virgins, and sugar plantation and mill ruins cling, extrude, and crumble from and among the green-clad cliffs. The challenge to build on these remote islands gave us poetic ruins Romantic painters would wish they'd seen.
English sailors about to cast off for the Caribbean with empty holds went out into the streets of port cities and removed street stones, bricks, cornerstones, and wall stones for ballast. These, along with stones and lava chunks local masons could find, became the "bricks" of sugar mills, homes, and the synagogue, too. The "mortar" was lime, salt, molasses, and sand, and the high humidity caused these walls to deteriorate rapidly unless they were plastered. (www.vinow.com/stjohn/nationalpark/annaberg_plantation.php )
On St. John, at Caneel Bay Resort, the sprawling, gently rolling grounds holds dear ruined factory walls, towers, and floors where slaves labored to feed the sugar vampires.
We're back in our huge sprawling city again now. The long slow landing into Southern California reveals the smoggy veil we all must don as a price of life here in the golden state.
It's a layer of perceptual diffusion; peer through it and that's your new normal. It's dryer, cooler, and of course, there's that wonderful feeling of walking in the house after travel: "we're home". Things make more sense, it's easy to let down. And my city is a place millions of people want to visit, too. I think I'm more like a tourist in my own city than many who live here. I intend to be that way, a fresh edge to encounter the waiting experience.
