alike. The clutter of garbage and trash overflowing the municipal containers, uncollected for days, was far worse along the sea wall surrounding the harbor area than around the banks and stores further back.
Travel ads proclaim St. Thomas a pristine Caribbean paradise. People I know who lived there years ago say it was, and will talk for hours, telling stories of wild times around the submarine base, of Frenchtown parties with frogmen and beatniks whooping it up together. They describe the harbor and beaches when the island was clean and free of the crowds that have come with the tourist boom. Many of those storytellers now live on St. John, or in the British Virgins. A few have come to independent British islands such as St. Ursula or migrated a few miles west to the Puerto Rican islands of Culebra and Vieques.
For years I’ve kept Vieques in mind as a backup if St. Ursula gets too crowded, or ever follows through on its occasional threats to kick non-natives off the island. The Puerto Rican island is not as spectacularly beautiful as St. Ursula, or St. John in the American Virgins, but it is lovely and filled with real life villages and businesses, instead of being built around a tourist economy. Of course, it has the Navy, shelling, bombing and polluting a large part of its landmass. I can sometimes hear the shells exploding from St. Ursula. The military presence has kept the island a backwater, a stay against the development, big hotels, condos, golf courses, strip malls and shopping centers that would surely come should the government pull out. One thing Americans know how to do is ruin an island.
I wandered along the waterfront, watching people, envying young couples walking hand in hand and chuckling at the poor saps in cars, wrestling with their work clothes, impatient to get home. A motor launch snarled in from a huge cruise ship moored at the mouth of the harbor. As I watched, it tied up next to me. Thirty or forty people climbed out, the men wearing slacks and tropical shirts, the women in brightly colored dresses, many of them with their hair in beads and corn rows, all tanned, many already slightly tipsy. They climbed into one of three open sided buses marked with the logo of a prominent real estate developer.
They laughed and joked with one another about the free cocktail party and dinner they were going to get. I wondered how many of them would wake up in the morning wondering just how in the hell they had been talked into becoming timeshare owners of a mountainside condo twenty minutes up a winding road from any beach.
At the ferry dock two hustlers urged me to take The Yellow Bird, while others pushed The Bomba Charger and The Native Son, jostling one another good naturedly, each insulting the seaworthiness of the others boats and the sobriety of their captains. The competition for full boats and tips was part of a loud and carefully staged drama they put on each day for tourists’ entertainment.
Before deciding which boat I was going to take I walked around the dock to check them out. The Yellow Bird was nearly loaded with packages and baggage, passengers already lining up by the gangplank. I was glad it was closer to leaving than the other two. Tired of hanging around St. Thomas, anxious to get home, I would have taken the first boat out, but The Yellow Bird’s topside open air deck is far more comfortable than the enclosed passenger sections of the other ferries, where diesel fumes and cigarette smoke, combined with the pounding of the engines below deck, give me a splitting headache.
The ride from St. Thomas to St. Ursula takes about forty-five minutes to an hour, depending on the sea. My trip over in the morning had been unusually rough, swells knocking passengers into one another, throwing several off their seats scattering their belongings through the cabin. Judging by the relative calm of waves in the harbor, the ride home would be smoother.
The large green and white ferry was half filled with uniformed school children and people returning to St. John, the British Virgins and St. Ursula after a day of working or shopping. The kids laughed and joked with one another, happy school was over for the day. The older local people, tired and cranky from a day’s work or shopping talked among themselves about their jobs, wages and prices, like commuters everywhere. They took seats in the enclosed deck, stretching out to nap on their way home, using as pillows their handbags, sneakers, shopping bags, anything they could find.
Once we were underway, I leaned my elbows on the rail on the sundeck. The day was still warm, the air filled with salt spray. Below me waves crashed and slapped against the green bow as it broke through the water, the engines pounding, the rhythm of their deep thrum rumbling in my chest and gut. I wandered to the stern and watched the white foam of the boat’s wake spreading out and fading into the blue water of the channel. I watched St. Thomas slip into the distance.
The only other person on the upper deck was a woman with auburn hair, curled, wild around her head. In her late thirties or early forties, she wore a white batik sun suit with a red frangipani flowered design, a white headband tied around her hair in an attempt at keeping it under control. It didn’t work. The wind ripped the curls out, cracking them around her face like ginger lightning. From the looks of her skin it was clear she hadn’t been in the islands very long. It was freckled and white, the kind of white you usually see in the islands around Christmas time when the first of the snow birds start coming in for their winter vacations.
I watched her for a while, thinking if I could get a smile or even momentarily attract her attention, I would walk over and start a conversation. Life in the islands breaks down the barriers we normally throw up around ourselves. It’s easy to talk, trade histories, discover common interests and, often, common acquaintances. However, it’s never easy for me to start. I don’t move in and just start blabbing. I need a brief unspoken meeting of eyes first, something to assure me that I won’t be intruding, or at least appear to be.
The woman on the sundeck stared down at the water, oblivious to me, absorbed by the Caribbean’s shifting patterns, dark blues broken by sudden bursts of turquoise above masses of coral. She was there, on the boat, yet as distant from The Yellow Bird as I was from my winter lifetimes in western Massachusetts. Suddenly she took what appeared to be a wedding ring from her finger and dropped it overboard. Rubbing her eyes, she tapped her foot and leaned heavily against the rail, eyes still fixed on the waters below.
I struggled against the wind to light a cigarette and settled into a seat to read a month-old issue of Time. We pulled into the harbor at St. John where the school kids got off and ran down the dock toward the park at the center of Cruz Bay. Moments later we were again underway, past Caneel Bay, Cinnamon Bay, through Drakes Passage. We stopped at West End, Tortola to drop off more passengers and a number of crates of food and dry goods for the shops there before heading south to St. Ursula. The islands were beautiful green mountains, rising from the Caribbean, the late afternoon light yellowing their lush green vegetation. Pelicans swooped and dove around us and frigate birds soared high above, graceful primitive creatures riding the thermals to heights where they were nothing but black streaks against the sky.
I looked back. Far off, St. Thomas was lovely in the dying afternoon. Overcrowded, often crass, an ecological and political disaster, the island looks like an enchanted fairyland as lights flicker on its hillsides and brightly colored sails move in the surrounding waters. My friend Chance keeps telling me my feelings about St. Thomas are the result of my attempts at escaping the complications of life. St. Thomas is just a place, he keeps reminding me. Like Massachusetts, he says, just a place with all the problems of places where we human critters dwell, too many people, not enough money, politicians with sticky fingers, tongues full of lies and no real answers, nor any desire to find any. He should know. He came to St. Ursula from St. Thomas.
Ahead, near St. John and British Virgin Islands, St. Ursula rose from the sea, the outline of a nearly completed microwave relay station at the peak of Wise Mountain looking like a stark giant spider against the sky. Soon it will collect television broadcasts from the American islands and Puerto Rico, as well as from stations in Chicago, Raleigh, Atlanta and New York, bringing the events and fears, the ever coarser visions and attitudes of the States to the homes of St. Ursula. Some people are pleased by the prospect.
Sitting
