Home by Another Way (3 page)

The emotional stakes are high for a tenth-anniversary trip to a romantic island in the West Indies, and I was beginning to feel some pressure. Here I was, incurable romantic and hopeful lover and shy bumbler and sometimes less-than-thorough trip planner, hoping against hope for an idyllic and magical and golden journey. What I seemed to have gotten us into was a tiny airport
in a foreign country smaller than the town we live in, and we were standing in the rain in the dead of night. I had very little confidence in my ability to do the things it would take to get us on to where we were supposed to be next. And we were cold and hungry and tired, and I was ready to weep.

“Do you need a taxi?” one of the men said to me.

I know that is what he said, because he had to say it four times before he got it slow enough for me to understand it. I am from the South; I have trouble understanding people from West Chicago, much less the West Indies. “I am looking for Ricky,” I said lamely.
I am looking for a miracle
was what I was thinking.

“Ricky is not here. He left. But I can take you.”

I was not sure this was a good idea, but having no ideas of my own and not wanting to end up like the two folks sleeping on their luggage, I told him where we were headed. It was something he seemed to already know. Before long, he had rescued our luggage from customs and loaded it into the back of his van, and we were off. We were tearing down a two-lane
road in the dark, driving far too fast on what seemed to me to be the wrong side of the road to boot. He was giving us a guided tour, though we could not understand him. And he was talking on his cell phone and honking and waving to other cars and taxis that went by and listening to the radio—all at the same time. Into his hands I had committed my anniversary.

Ten minutes and seventeen nervous glances later, we had been delivered to a dock where we stood in the drizzle and the dark and waited for the boat to take us across the lagoon to the place where we were to stay. I looked hopefully for lights across the way in the mist, and I watched nervously for the boat, and I thought, in general, that if we did not stop traveling soon, I might collapse.

The chugging of a diesel engine announced to us that the boat had arrived. It turns out they kept some of the boats left over from those black-and-white movies too. It was an old wooden boat, low slung, with a window-wrapped cabin in the center of it. A man stood in the bow with a powerful flashlight, and a man steered the
boat by turning a big wooden wheel. Stepping onto the boat was like stepping onto
The African Queen
. I remember thinking we might see Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart if we paid attention. The romantic in me had clearly begun to recover somewhat.

We chugged along through the mist, and we began to see the lights along the hillside where cottages were spread out through the trees. And then the beach came into view and a dock. As we got closer, we could see that a little parade was forming.

The first person in the line was a tall, striking-looking young woman in a long linen dress, holding a very proper and very large umbrella. Next came two men in pressed khakis and floral-patterned shirts. They, too, held umbrellas, one over their heads to keep the rain off and another, still furled, at their sides. Then there was a man with a luggage cart, attended by a man holding an umbrella over both of them and their cart.

As the boat eased into the dock, the woman introduced herself as the manager of the resort and began to say welcoming things to us. The two spare umbrellas
were unfurled with a flourish and handed to us as we started along the path from the dock.

We strolled along in the front of this little parade, listening to the manager explain things to us, like what times the meals were served and that someone would ring a bell to remind us when the dining area was open. She told us that we could get a two-page faxed summary of the
New York Times
by coming to the office each morning and that a steel band would play on Friday.

Every twenty or thirty yards or so, a bright and happy person said, “Good evening,” as we passed.

“Would you like to have dinner?” the manager asked.

“We are just really tired, I think.”

“They will not be dining,” she whispered to a young woman as we passed by a table that had been laid for us just in case. I realized that they had held a place for us for dinner and someone to cook it and serve it, though we had arrived too late for the dinner hour.

“We will have a little something sent to your cottage, then,” she said.

We walked through the trees to the end of the path
in the corner of the property. Right by the beach was a cottage, two rooms and a bath, with a swimming pool of our own and a view back across the lagoon on one side and a view out to the sea on the other. The magical visit to paradise for which we had hoped suddenly seemed to be within our grasp.

There were a few moments of instructions and information from the manager, and then she said good night and went out the door. A moment or two later we heard a knock at the door, and I went to open it, and the little something came in, both trays of it. And then we were alone, and we began to giggle.

It has been a number of years now since the evening we rode through the rain in
The African Queen
. We have found another place to stay, a place that suits us even better than the first place we visited. But we keep coming back to this part of the world, at least in part because on a given night, in the rain, at the end of a
long journey, we were made to feel welcome and treated as though someone not only knew we were coming; they were looking forward to it.

My inner cynic, with whom I am in touch far more often than I care to admit, is quick to remind me that such treatment is what I should expect in such a setting. It is quick to point out that I paid good money for all of this and that the least I should expect is to be treated nicely. The inner cynic in you is nodding in agreement. And our inner cynics are right, of course. They always are, are they not?

But another, maybe a better, part of me is coming to understand another thing.

We live in a world where such welcome and gentleness and civility are increasingly rare. Most of the conversation between strangers is terse and quick, and too many times it is cold and rude. It can even be that way, more often than we care to admit, among people who are not strangers. Such is the world we live in that we are almost stunned by hospitality and gentility whenever it breaks out around us. We are drawn to the
people and to the places where we find such welcome in abundance.

The memory of that little parade on the dock is not the only reason we now head this way whenever it is October. It is our anniversary, and we are going to go somewhere, and summer will not end until we do. And when we get to where we are going, there will be sunshine and the sea and solitude, because that is what we like the best.

We come this way to celebrate the beginning of our life together and to mark the end of the summer together, because when we are waiting by our front door in the dark in the morning, waiting for the taxi ride to begin our day’s travel, we know that before the day is through, we will not only be welcome, we will have been welcomed.

We will be at home.

Two

S
ometimes we are able to arrange our flights so we fly directly to St. Cecilia. Other times we have to fly into St. Catherine, a sister island, and wait awhile to catch a plane. I discovered that a boat would take us across to St. Cecilia for about the same amount of money and in about the same amount of time. Instead of waiting on a flight, we get to spend our time riding in a van and then in a boat. After eight or ten hours of travel, it is better to drive through the streets of St. Catherine with Daisy and to cruise across the straits with Captain Christmas (honestly, that is his name) than it is to sit in the airport.

Daisy is the taxi driver who meets us now whenever we fly into St. Catherine. The first time we rode with Daisy, she took us the long way through town before she took us to the harbor. Since St. Catherine was not our final destination and we had a boat to catch, I was ready to get where I was going and stop wrestling luggage and lie down.

She was driving very fast and talking the whole time and telling us what we were seeing on the right and on the left, giving us a guided tour of an island that was merely a way station on our way to where we were really going. Then suddenly she stopped in a crowded street and got out. At first I wondered who was more disconcerted, I or the dozen or so cars lined up behind her on the one-way, one-lane street. It turned out I was the only one who seemed to notice she had stopped and was blocking traffic. Or rather, I should say, the others probably noticed, but it did not bother them.

“I have to check on my daughter,” she said as she stuck her head back in the window for a moment to turn up the radio. Then she strolled across the street and disappeared into an ice-cream parlor.

So we listened to the radio.

The radio stations in this part of the world broadcast everything from music to political discussion to hurricane warnings to sermons to sports updates. The music is anything you might hear in America, plus England and Trinidad and Jamaica. In a twenty-minute set you
can go from Buddy Holly to the Allman Brothers to Bob Marley to Celine Dion to Gerry and the Pacemakers to local calypso artists. Interspersed with Mother’s Day tributes and announcements of the day’s school-lunch menus in season, of course.

It is big-time small-town radio at its best. Exactly the sort of radio you want to listen to when you are blocking traffic in a one-lane city street during rush hour. Exactly the sort of radio you are looking for when you are in a hurry.

When Daisy returned with her daughter Peaches in tow, she explained to us that her son was to walk down to the ice-cream store to meet his sister after school and walk her home. But something had happened to change the plan, and so Daisy had to swing by to pick up Peaches. I think the truth is that Peaches and her mother like riding around together.

We only missed six green lights while she was gone. And it turned out that Daisy had to make only two more stops between the ice-cream store and the harbor where we, the paying customers, were to meet our
boat. I had this odd notion about time being of the essence for the customer in a taxi who had a boat to catch at a prearranged time. It began to be clear to me that Daisy was operating with a very different sense of time than I was.

We were a half hour late to the harbor, but Captain Christmas was still there, and it seemed as though he had not noticed our tardiness, nor was he even surprised by it.

I think I have entered a different time zone
, I said to myself.

When our first water-taxi ride across the straits began, dusk had begun to settle on the islands. We pulled out of the St. Catherine harbor and started out into the straits to head for St. Cecilia. When we reached cruising speed and the bow of the boat raised up high, Sara and I could look back over a stretch of the sea and see the
lights of St. Catherine that began to shine over the water.