Home by Another Way (9 page)

The other traffic to keep your eyes open for is the herds of goats and sheep that wander the island. I read
somewhere that there are 2.5 ruminants for each St. Cecilian—
ruminants
being a fancy word for a class of animal that includes sheep and goats. I did not meet the people who did the census, but I am assuming that they know.

People tag their sheep and goats and put bells on them and then turn them loose to wander the island. Who knows how they find them again. Perhaps there is such a thing as a homing goat. Perhaps they do the same thing that we do, just start out along the main road and keep going until the circle of the road brings them home again. We did meet one old St. Cecilian who claims that he gets his goats to come home at night by giving them treats, but he may have been pulling my leg.

The goats and sheep work their way up and down the island, grazing along the roadways, chasing their young ones out of the traffic, and occasionally stopping to nap in the sun or have a group meeting in the lane in which you are driving. I am thinking of recommending that our neighborhood association explore using
goats and sheep as traffic-calming devices in our neighborhood back in Tennessee. It works well enough on St. Cecilia that there is not even a single stoplight.

According to the official rules of riding around, one does not stay on the main roads. Riding the blue highways is what you do when you really want to explore a stretch of countryside, whether you are in the plains of the Delta or the hills of Tennessee. So by our second or third trip to St. Cecilia—armed with maps and history books and other information—we were riding up and down every little lane and track that led off the main road and back into the hills in the general direction of the top of the volcano at the center of the island. We started out just trying to look at a pretty house on a ridge that we could see from our balcony. We have driven up or down nearly every little lane on the island now.

Driving one of those lanes entails going pretty much straight up, with an occasional switchback. It
involves keeping a sharp eye out for cars coming down the hill toward the sea as well, for most of the roads are only one lane wide, and you have to keep looking ahead for a place to pull off to the side of the road if necessary and to keep remembering how far back to the last wide spot it was in case you have to back up to make room. Going slow helps, which is not hard to do since boulders and stones get washed down into the lanes during the rains.

We are little-hidden-neighborhood sort of people at our house. Some folks like to live in subdivisions with big lawns and brand-new streets and trees that came from a nursery. We are drawn to little blocks of sidewalks and old cottages, the ones with the old trees that have been there for decades and the front porches that people sit on in the evenings. To find such places on St. Cecilia, we have to drive the little lanes.

The first few hundred yards or so going up, generally speaking, we find newer houses in developments of five to ten houses or so. Built of cinder block and stucco, they are homes for middle-class St. Cecilians.
They have verandas and galleries to catch the breezes and landscaped yards surrounded by fences to keep their ruminants in and someone else’s ruminants out. The houses are brightly colored for the most part—pinks and yellows and blues and greens—colors that look perfectly natural here but would make us drive off the road if someone painted his house that color in our neighborhood back in the States.

In the last few hundred yards, where we come to the top of a ridge and run out of road and begin to hope for some reasonable place to turn around, we stumble on the retirement and vacation homes for wealthy Westerners. The lawns are large and manicured, there are swimming pools hidden by walls draped in bougainvillea, and the palm trees that line the driveways have lights in them that come on automatically when it is dark.

In the middle is the St. Cecilia to which we are drawn. In the middle we are often winding our way through land that was once home to sugar plantations. There are remnants of sugar mills and waterwheels
and storage barns and stone fences. There are little hamlets and villages of just a few houses. The hamlets have names like Chicken Stone and Hard Times and Stony Hill and Middle Works, all testifying to the history of the island and to the difficulty of making a home of it over the years. Sometimes there is a chapel or a little store that serves as the center of village life.

These simple hamlets and their simple houses, surrounded by the remains of the great plantations, make up a St. Cecilia that fires my imagination. If I stop for a moment and get out of the car and sit on a stone and feel the breeze and listen to the birds and stare out at the sea, I can feel myself being transported to another time.

I know this because it happened to us the last time we went riding around. A road we were on was being worked on, so there was a detour to connect us to another road to take us back down the hill toward the main road. We were oohing and aahing our way through some old cane fields at the time and oohed and aahed our way right into a dead end.

It was at the point of a ridge, high up the side of the
volcano. It was not the highest point on the island; you have to go up to the top of the volcano for that, something that requires hiking around instead of riding around. Hiking around is not one of our gifts.

So we took our lives in our hands, the very hands that were white-knuckling the steering wheel, and turned the car around. And once we had done it, the view took our breath away.

One does not often get to stand somewhere and see the edge of the whole world. But it seemed as though we did that day.

The hills lay before us, gently rolling their way down to the slivers of beach that lined the shore. The lush green of the trees and the vines and the grasses that cover the landscape were dotted with the bright colors of the houses along the hillsides. There were the deep greens and the blues of the sea itself, dotted by the white sails and gleaming hulls of the boats out in the straits, and the dark greens and grays of the other islands far away. The little town of Princetown could be seen in the distance and the ferries tied up along the
pier. There were the clusters of brightly colored fishing boats scattered across the coves and the ribbon of the road that encircles the island.

There were dark patches in the sea where the reefs hover below the surface and the shadows of the clouds being pushed along in and out of the sun’s rays. The sun sparkled over it all as far as the eye could see and then beyond that, the light of it finally dying off into the faint white line of the horizon, marking the edge of this world that is new to us.

“Look at our world,” proclaimed Sara, looking at the view.

It is not our world just yet, of course. And perhaps it may never be. There have not been many moments in my life in which I ever imagined the life that I am living now, and so I am cautious about predicting what may or may not happen to me next. The best things in my life have all been a surprise to me, and I have learned just to be still and be ready.

But these little islands have long been someone else’s world.

As I sat on that ridge, my mind began to wonder its way through the history of the island. In my mind’s eye I could begin to see the Indians who came across those waters that lay out below us to the west, arriving here from South and Central America some two thousand years ago. I could see the sails of the fleets of the Spanish and the French and the British and the Dutch as they slipped through the straits and out of the Atlantic, seeking the shelter that the lee of these small islands could provide, seeking fresh water and fortune and power.

The old town down in the bay and the stone-wall remains of forts and plantations and mills called to mind the tragic trade in sugar and slaves that fueled the European economies for hundreds of years. Those waters below were home to pirates and smugglers, colonizers and explorers, traders and merchants. They were witness to galleons full of gold and ships full of slaves. I thought about the stories I had read as a boy, stories of Christopher Columbus and Horatio Nelson and the
rest, and realized I was looking down over the waters that once made up their world.

I have been a beach person all my life. I have stood on a lot of beaches in my time.

When you stand on the shoreline back home, be it the Atlantic beaches of Florida where my parents used to take me when I was young, or along the Pacific where I went to school for a while, or along the Carolina shores where Sara and I celebrated our wedding, or the Gulf Coast where we took the children for vacations for years, the land always seems larger than the sea. It is not true, of course, but no matter how vast the sea looks stretched out in front of you, you know that behind you is this huge expanse of country that goes on for thousands of miles. In an odd sort of way, the sea seems small in comparison.

But it is not so on St. Cecilia. Here, from certain
spots, like the ridge where we were sitting that day, one can see what amounts to the edges of the entire world. Which, on the one hand, made me instantly remember how small a part of the world I actually am—whether I am sitting on the ridge looking down over the edges of a small island in the Caribbean or standing on the Outer Banks or sitting on the stoop of my studio back in Tennessee.

It occurred to me that if I lived here, if St. Cecilia were my home, then I could stand here and see all of it. I could see its edges; my whole world would be in sight.

For some reason that I cannot yet name, the thought brought me some measure of comfort. It made me feel less like a tourist and more like a native. Less like someone who was visiting and more and more like someone who belonged, someone who was at home.

On the other hand, it reminded me that within the boundaries that are set by the limits of my vision, there is, or at least can be, a whole world in which to learn to
live a life that is as interesting and astonishing as is the whole wide world itself.

I do not yet understand all of what that means to me. I am beginning to believe, however, that somewhere in between those two notions is where I am to make myself at home. That, too, when I sit still and think about it, can take my breath away.

The first time we went riding around on St. Cecilia, we circled the island on the ring road in a couple of hours, including a stop for lunch, and were home for the napping round. The drive is not much more than twenty miles altogether. It takes us longer each time we go now; sometimes it takes two or three riding-around days per visit.

We have to see how they are coming along with the restoration of the old hotel up by the hot springs just above town, and we have to make sure that no one is
sneaking a big new resort onto the windward side of the island yet. There have been rumors that someone is planning to build condos out at Three Kings Bay, and so we ride out there each time to make sure we get to see it the way it should be before someone comes along and “improves” it. They are adding to the school near the church in the parish where we stay most often, and we want to see how the work is going.