Voyager: Travel Writings (15 page)

Until recently, Aruba had been a prosperous offshore oil refining and transshipping point. In the late 1970s, the whole island had been an Exxon and Shell company town. When, in the early 1980s, the oil companies cut back production in the region, it devastated the economy, and Arubans responded by rapidly, single-mindedly, developing large-scale tourism. By 1988 almost all the hotels, and there were many of them, were large, new, full-service resorts. The town of Oranjestad was a free-port shopping mall with newly constructed, cutesy neo-Dutch buildings stuffed with tax-free liquor, lace, china, and jewelry. Aruba was once again prosperous. The environment suffered less now from oil pollution than from overbuilding—it’s a small island, arid, low, without much fresh water, and with little capacity for handling waste. Aruba appeared
to be turning itself into a beached cruise ship, and one felt that one was a late-arriving guest at the end of the final party there.

The saddest irony in the Caribbean is that without large-scale tourism the islanders starve; but with it, the islanders destroy the very thing they promote and package—beaches, coral reefs, wildlife, mountainous rain forests, desert landscapes, natural wonders that have filled visitors with something like religious awe for thousands of years, since the first humans paddled north along the chain from the Orinoco basin. The whole archipelago, from the Netherlands Antilles just off the shoulder of South America north to the U.S. Virgins, is a highly complex and fragile ecosystem. The vitality and warmth of the people and the beauty of the land and sea and sky are what draw and heal us. Yet our very presence in the numbers that almost every island needs for economic survival contaminates the source. The people become dead-faced dealers and their land and sea and sky a shabby, second-rate, smoke-filled casino.

Aruba’s closest neighbor, Bonaire, may well one day walk the same big-time tourist path to environmental and cultural degradation, but it will be years before the necessary infrastructure and trained personnel are available. Meanwhile, it remained perhaps the best island in the Lesser Antilles for serious scuba diving. But not much else.

Like Aruba, Bonaire is parched and flat, with long coral beaches and low hills in the hinterland covered with cacti. Because Bonaire was the only island in the region where it was forbidden to fish with spearguns or remove coral from the fabulous reefs that surround it, the shoreline waters were essentially an unspoiled underwater garden. There were endangered species of birds and lizards that thrived here and nowhere else, and more than 13,500 acres had been set aside in the Washington Slagbaai National Park. As a result, until recently, the usual visitors to Bonaire were ornithologists, marine biologists, and serious scuba divers. But in the late 1980s that was changing rapidly, and in spite of numerous gov
ernment and private studies urging restraint, there was a whole lot of beachfront building going on.

The third in this trio of Dutch islands, Curaçao was the most cosmopolitan and populous. It has a long history as a transshipping point—first, slaves (nearly half the slaves destined for the Caribbean passed through Curaçao, where they were “rested” and then distributed to the other islands); then goods from the Dutch colonies in the Pacific brought through the Panama Canal; then Venezuelan oil; and now free-port luxuries. Owing to its location and the aridity of its soil, Curaçao has always been more of a trading outpost than a producer and exporter of goods—a quiet, calculating middleman among the islands.

When we were in Curaçao, there was an ambitious, ongoing attempt to develop tourism, especially along the southwest coast below Willemstad, and there were some wonderfully diverting attractions up and running, such as the Curaçao National Underwater Park and the Seaquarium. But the beaches were short and often man-made, and most of the hotels seemed better suited to the needs of business conventioneers than families on vacation or couples gone a-courting.

For us, after Aruba’s beach-resort glitz and Bonaire’s rustic simplicity, the city of Willemstad on Curaçao was a welcome change. It was a real international city, a deepwater port, one of the largest in the world, with good restaurants, mainly French and Indonesian, attractive seventeenth- and eighteenth-century town houses and public buildings, bustling narrow streets that wound around the port and crossed from one side to the other on lovely bridges. All day long, people of all races, from all continents, pushed along the crowded sidewalks with an urgency you rarely saw in the Caribbean—there were deals to be made here, goods to buy and sell, numbers to move from one column to the next.

But then night fell, and the city of Willemstad turned into a quiet, languorous Caribbean port where folks strolled slowly past their neighbors’ doors under moon-silvered palms or sat and gos
siped over rum in dimly lit taverns or, later, before bed, opened the shutters of their rooms to the cool evening breeze and gazed across the sea at the dark coast of Venezuela’s Paraguaná Peninsula and the continent beyond and contemplated the tangled, bloody history and destiny of the tropics. I imagined Arawak families, fishermen and farmers, emerging from the South American continent’s muddy rivers and deltas and crossing the silvery sea in their long canoes in a northerly direction, moving island by island up the chain, building villages in the bays and worshiping their gods in secret hillside caves. I watched the fierce Carib warriors come along behind them, conquering and pillaging and eventually being absorbed by the culture of their victims. Soon, from the east, came the Spanish in their galleons, searching for gold, enslaving the people they mistakenly called Indians, for they were lost and thought they had landed in India, and in their blind lust for gold they soon exterminated the entire native population. Behind them came the privateers and corsairs of other European nations, some of them landing and setting up as traders and planters, but most of them sailing farther west to steal stolen Spanish gold and topple Spanish power on the continent. Gradually, the Europeans agreed to divide the islands among themselves, and they enslaved and imported Africans, and began to plant spices, tobacco, coffee, and then sugar, one of the most labor-intensive industries known to man, requiring more and still more slaves to work the fields and turn the green cane into white powder and rum, until the entire region was caught in the eye of a cruel economic storm that swirled from Africa to the Caribbean to North America back to Europe.

In time, the North Americans and Europeans ceased to need the Caribbean for sugar, and the storm broke up; the African slaves, replaced by impoverished workers from India, were no longer transported here, and the long decline into desuetude and abject poverty began; until modern times, when the islands became small, more or less independent nation-states themselves, and once again a new economic storm began to swirl, and the region filled with
North Americans and Europeans again, not conquerors this time, but visitors whose needs could be met only to a point before they threatened these azure seas and emerald-green isles, destroying their environment and dissipating their culture.

Who can bear this history? Who can stand it? My heart fills with admiration for the people of the Caribbean, who have loved and clung to these islands and insisted, against all odds, that this place is no dream, no fantasy, no self-indulgent racial or sexual projection, for in this place they are at home. As much at home as I in my Adirondack village and the city of Miami. Or more.

Chase and I had come to the end of our passage through the Lesser Antilles, this long, complex voyage that had reconnected my imagination to the part of the world that I once loved more than any other. We had but one island left to visit, Jamaica. I knew as we boarded the plane that in returning to Jamaica I was going back to where I first learned how to do that, to love a people and a place other than my own. It was where my imagination first revealed itself to me. It was what I meant by the very term
imagination
.

All over the cavernous, crowded terminal at the Sangster Airport in Montego Bay there were uniformed soldiers carrying automatic weapons. Their cold eyes scrutinized us as we passed through. Was there some danger of invasion that I somehow hadn’t heard about? I thought suddenly of Grenada and Operation Urgent Fury. Then remembered: Jamaicans had recently held an election, and after nearly a decade Michael Manley and his left-of-center People’s National Party were back in power; and as Manley had learned last time, to stay in power he had to depend on Washington’s goodwill. He was showing the Americans and possibly the ganja growers and dealers that this time he was obeying his master’s wishes and had gotten serious about “cutting drugs off at the source,” as they say.

We drove southeast from Negril to Ocho Rios along the north
coast and saw little evidence of the previous year’s devastating hurricane. But it soon became apparent that since I was here last, other terrible things had happened. There were many more undernourished wandering children and unemployed young people, and they all seemed to have come to the cities, Kingston and Montego Bay, and to the resorts where the tourists were waiting for them. And there was much less money now than there had been in the 1970s. No one had any money at all. No one. Except us, the outsiders. But since so many of the children and young people were trying desperately to sell us ganja, or more often cocaine and crack, one tended to conclude that the problem was drugs, not economics.

It was easy to confuse effect with cause. The Jamaican dollar was worth two-fifths its value of a few years before, less than $0.20 U.S. and dropping. Manley was dealing with a $4 billion U.S. foreign debt that annually cost 51 percent of Jamaica’s foreign exchange. He had been forced to eliminate a tax on the banking industry and make it easier to import cars from nations that manufacture cars; at the same time, he had removed price supports from flour, cooking oil, and other basic foodstuffs. All this pleased the business community and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But the minimum wage hadn’t increased, and the people were enduring price rises of up to 50 percent.

So there was a desperate quality to the selling, especially in the touristed areas of the north coast. Whether it was drugs, souvenirs, sex, or food, there was little room for dignity in any kind of exchange. People stood by the side of the road with a handful of bananas or scraps of colored cloth and thrust them out to our car as we sped past. When we stopped at a light in Ocho Rios, our car was surrounded by kids calling, “Ganja, mon, me got good sens, mon, lamb’s-breath! Crack. Anyt’ing you want, mon, me got it!”

Chase and I settled in at Port Antonio, once a favorite haunt of mine, on the eastern end of the island at the foot of the Blue Mountains, where there were few beaches and consequently few large hotels. And, no surprise, the frenzied selling abated. We
stayed at the DeMontevin Lodge, an old down-at-the-heels Victorian manse in the residential neighborhood of Titchfield, at the edge of town. The previous owners had died since I was last here and had been replaced by a young black couple. Except for the presence of a continuously running television in the living room, little had changed. It still seemed to belong in a Graham Greene novel, where the guests were conscience-stricken oddballs and international itinerants.

My few friends in the town, it turned out, had all gone. Port Antonio looked the same, however—an old United Fruit shipping point and fishing and sailing port, with a string of bars and brothels along the waterfront, a central marketplace that my friend George Smith used to run, Navy Island in the harbor, won by Errol Flynn in a poker game, now operated as a cottage-and-cabana resort hotel, and steep hills rising swiftly toward the Blue Mountains behind. Out at the edge of town, Rastafarian squatters had taken over Folly Point, but they had already started camping and holding their “sessions” there in the mid-seventies anyhow. There was a sweet, sad quality to the place, as if I were visiting my own reluctantly abandoned past.

But Port Antonio had always seemed deliciously melancholy to me; it was an essential part of the town’s charm. It was the New Orleans of Jamaica, where tropical lassitude and international intrigue wound together in darkly baroque ways. By comparison, Kingston, the capital, was the New York City of Jamaica—huge, bustling, as rich as a large industrialized city can be and as poor as any third-world ghetto, with little in between but chain-link fences and guard dogs. That was something you could do with ease in Jamaica—compare one part with another, one kind of town or city with a different, contrasting kind. The island was so large and complex and varied that no one place or person or group of persons could be said to characterize it. It was the United States of the Caribbean, perhaps.

In fact, everything that could be found on individual islands
in the Lesser Antilles could be found on Jamaica as well. The long white sand beaches of Negril were still stunning, and often nearly as empty of bathers as the beaches of Anguilla; the towering Blue Mountains were as overwhelming and impenetrable as the mountains of Dominica. The full-service resort hotels east of Montego Bay and in Ocho Rios were as luxurious and private as any you could find on Martinique or Aruba. Small guesthouses in the hills of St. James reminded us of the inns of Nevis. Charter fishing and sailing out of Port Antonio, scuba diving off Negril, windsurfing in Ocho Rios, compared nicely with what we had found in the U.S. and British Virgins. If one was attracted to the historic sites and restored plantation houses of Antigua and St. Croix, one might want to visit Spanish Town and Port Royal and Good Hope and Rose Hall in Jamaica. And if one liked the multiracial intensity of Port-of-Spain, one would love Half Way Tree in downtown Kingston on market day. If Carnival in Trinidad had loosened us up, we could try the Reggae Sunsplash festival in Montego Bay. In all ways, perhaps even the sad and painful ways, Jamaica was the Caribbean.

We had one last journey to make before leaving the Caribbean altogether—to Accompong, the Maroon village in Jamaica’s nearly inaccessible Cockpit Country of Trelawny, where, back in the mid-seventies, I had spent some of the loneliest and most enlightening days and nights of my life. The descendants of the Maroons, escaped slaves, had fought the British to a standoff in a seventy-year guerrilla war during the eighteenth century and had lived in the area’s limestone pockets ever since. There were three such villages on the island, the other two in the east, but Accompong remained the most isolated. Mostly small farmers and artisans who owned their large tract of land communally, with an elected “colonel” to wield civic authority and a “prime minister” to keep the old British treaty and Maroon tales and lore alive, the Accompong Maroons were a remnant people who for more than two centuries had preserved much of their history and significant elements of their West African
culture against all attempts to assimilate them. They had also, with perverse humor and argument and outrageous financial demands, resisted becoming a tourist attraction.