Voyager: Travel Writings (2 page)

At the time, my divorce from my third wife, Becky, was working its slow way through the legal system, and though Chase was living in Tuscaloosa and I was commuting between a Manhattan sublet and my classes at Princeton, we had been lovers and all but husband and wife for nearly a year by then. Even so, I was still courting her—perhaps to a greater degree than at the beginning of our love affair the previous spring. Between the onset of the madness of falling in love and the sobering formalization of that state later through cohabitation and marriage, there usually unfolds a long period of mutual courtship. It’s the period when lovers disinter their secrets and show them to each other, making it possible for both sets of secrets to be mingled into one. That’s the usual need, anyhow; and the plan. Sometimes courtship continues well into the period of cohabitation and marriage. Courtship has even been known to extend beyond the end of one marriage and get paid forward into yet a new marriage—as if one were courting one’s
ex
-wife or
ex
-husband as well, retroactively.

Unlike fantasies, secrets don’t lie. They erupt from the depths of one’s subconscious mind and harden like lava into the topography of one’s character. Neither willed nor consciously shaped, secrets are epistemologically different from fantasies. They are not who we were or want to be; they are who we become. In revealing one’s secrets first to oneself and then to one’s lover, one makes a bond that
is deeper and, one hopes, longer lasting than any tie established by merely falling in love.

The more difficult is the first part—dredging up and silently revealing one’s secrets to oneself alone. It can be embarrassing. They will likely turn out to be those old longings for escape, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold; those erotic and narcotic and sybaritic dreams of fresh starts, high romance, mystery, and intrigue. Which can lead one, as I had learned by now, to commit acts of betrayal and abandonment, and thence to shame: one’s secret character writes one’s secret history. Thus embarrassment leads to shame. Then comes the second part, revealing one’s secret history to one’s beloved aloud, i.e., courtship, which runs the risk of casting a cold light on what’s supposed to follow—cohabitation and marriage. Courtship is both self-revelation and public exposure and can be dangerous.

And so, for the first time, Chase and I became travelers together. Not tourists. Travelers. Most Americans and Europeans who fly or sail to the Caribbean islands are tourists. They go for a week or two and manage to visit and explore no more than a single island or, if they’re lucky, a single cluster of islands. Sometimes they visit and explore no more than a single hotel. They rarely go like the starship
Enterprise
where no package tour has gone before, and consequently, no matter how many voyages they make, they remain tourists, satellites circling their home planet in low orbit.

Our voyage was designed to last most of the winter into the spring of 1988 and touch down for a brief stay on each of thirty-two of the Lesser Antilles, from the U.S. Virgins off Puerto Rico, east through the Leewards, and south along the Windwards, looping back toward the continent by way of Jamaica—the island that a decade earlier I had almost called home. We mapped out a spiral nebula of islands circling the blue-green Caribbean Sea. After a week of exploring the Florida Everglades and Keys, we would jump off the continent at Miami, travel by jumbo jet, by seaplane
and tiny STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft, by freighter and ferry and fishing boat—island-hopping in the grand tradition.

One tries not to arrive anywhere at rush hour. Landing on St. Thomas at 5
P.M.
was like arriving at JFK at 5
P.M
., only worse, especially if you had to travel cross-island from the airport to the East End, where most of the hotels, beaches, and marinas were located. There was no way to get there except by crawling in line by car through the town of Charlotte Amalie, a maze of alleys and narrow one-way streets built by the Danes for donkeys and pedestrians before Denmark sold the Virgins to the Americans in 1917, clogged now with Japanese and German automobiles and American and British trucks and open-air sightseeing buses and hawkers of souvenirs for cruise-ship passengers.

In 1988 four or five cruise ships a day in season were putting in at Charlotte Amalie, and the entire town seemed to have organized itself around the cruisers’ insatiable need for ceramic ashtrays and funny T-shirts, perfume, watches, jewelry, and liquor. It’s a free port: $800 worth of duty-free goods allowed per person. They packed the streets—mostly Americans doing the buying and locals the selling, with barkers on sidewalks and in the doorways of shops pitching the goods inside as if working the crowd in front of topless bars on Rampart Street. As Chase and I crept along in our rented car I wondered why we hadn’t stayed in Key West, where we’d spent the weekend before, where exhaust-emission controls were enforced and at least the chances of carbon monoxide poisoning were not so great. We shut the windows, sealing ourselves in, cranked the air conditioner to high, and scowled.

With fifty thousand people, St. Thomas is the most populous of the three U.S. Virgins (St. Croix and St. John are the others). It’s small, barely thirty-two square miles, and therefore very crowded, especially from December to March. It was a tart of an island, hardly
a virgin, with
FOR SALE
signs everywhere and headlong, heedless development. It had a “U.S. flavor,” as the guidebooks say, which meant that Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald had set up shop. Triplex movie theaters and minimalls and, all over the East End, wherever there was a piece of land with a sea view, high-rising condominiums were breeding like bunnies.

But like every Caribbean island, especially the mountainous, volcanic isles where the land rises quickly from the sea, St. Thomas—once we got out of town—was still beautiful to look at. The prismatic Caribbean sky opened up exactly as I remembered it, lyrical and turbulent and erotic. West of the airport and north of Charlotte Amalie, the narrow road wound into the hills, giving spectacular views of glistening emerald-green slopes and long ridges and craggy peninsulas tumbling into an azure sea, dotted near the horizon with islets and cays. This was another reason I’d come back to the Caribbean: the sheer physical beauty of the place, the land and sea and sky, the Edenic firmaments above and below, and the bright green firmament between. I’d come back for the bone-clear light and the depth and power of color and the abundant, tumultuous play of forms. I was here, accompanied by my friend and lover, for the sake of my eyes. I said to her, I simply open my eyes and
look,
and I start to feel healed from a sickness I hadn’t known I was afflicted with.

St. Thomas, because of its U.S. flavor, which meant decent roads and adequate up-to-date services as much as it did minimalls and Mr. Pizza, might be a nice place to live—and, indeed, a lot of affluent white Americans seemed to have retired here—but unless above all else one liked crowds and shopping, it was not the most enjoyable island merely to visit. Rising expectations combined with rigid racial and economic barriers had created the kind of racial and class antagonisms that in the 1980s one associated with inner-city life on the continent. Yes, there were lovely white sand beaches—Magens Bay, Sapphire Beach, and Coki Point—and many fine resort hotels where one never had to step outside the gated compound,
especially at night. But package tours and cruise ships had come to control the economy, with the usual results—overbuilding and pervasive commercialism and abuse of the environment and a stunned, sullen, somewhat deracinated local population. We averted our gaze from the surly faces of the young black men hanging out on the streets of Charlotte Amalie and the edges of the Havensight shopping district: faces that seemed to say,
How can you who are so vulgar and rude to us be so fucking rich?
And:
Tell me again why I’m condemned to need you?

Near Red Hook Bay, where there was a sprawling marina and ferry service to most of the nearby islands, we checked into a small hotel in the wooded hills, accurately named Pavilions and Pools. That’s what it offered—suites, each with kitchen and small garden (the pavilion) and a private pool the size of our rented Toyota Corolla where we could skinny-dip. At night we lay in the darkness beneath a slow-turning fan and in bits and pieces told our stories to each other—our childhoods and love affairs and, in my case, marriages, three so far, and divorces, three so far, and who and what we had loved and the aspects of ourselves that scared us and those we admired: some of it we embellished and some we invented, more to meet the needs of narrative than merely to impress. Some we left out. And we made love together and with each passing night woke in the bright morning light increasingly entangled. I told her what I knew about the childhoods of my four daughters, and she told me what she knew about the childhoods and lives of her two adult sisters and her nieces and nephews. We described our parents’ marriages and divorces. We exchanged stories and appraisals of our mutual and separate friends. All a part and consequence of courtship.

At the Red Hook Charter offices we dealt with a bearded man who said his name was Animal, who looked like a wolverine in cutoffs and booked for the dozens of fishing boats operating out of the marina. Animal sent us out for dolphin and yellowfin on the
Over Easy
with Captain Frank Griffin, a Florida Keys dropout. We swam
at nearby Sapphire Beach and picked up the
New York Times
at the drugstore in Red Hook and in our pavilion watched the Cincinnati Bengals beat the Buffalo Bills in an NFL playoff game on cable TV. It was indeed like the Florida Keys. And this, you understand, was not bad—but it was also not what we came for. St. Thomas is where the United States ends; it’s not where the Caribbean begins. For that, in the Lesser Antilles, we’d have to go to St. John and St. Croix and beyond.

And so we soon moved on. The ferry from Red Hook Bay on St. Thomas to Cruz Bay at the west end of St. John took twenty minutes, but it carried us to a very different world, thanks mainly to Laurence Rockefeller and his family, whose donated land and determined efforts to limit tourism on the island had turned two-thirds of St. John and many of the reefs that surround it into the Virgin Islands National Park. The whole island was meticulously clean and had been developed with overriding concern for the environment, both land and sea. There were hotels, even fairly large ones, led by the famed Caneel Bay and the new Virgin Grand, and guesthouse and camping accommodations, too. But without an airport or deepwater port, there was no way to accommodate package tours, no way to facilitate large-scale tourism, and no evident desire to do so.

With an enlightened, affluent population of only twenty-nine hundred and an area two-thirds that of St. Thomas, St. John, too, had a U.S. flavor, but one more like that of Aspen or rural Vermont than Key West. Instead of McDonald’s, it was Ben & Jerry’s. We took our breakfast at the Buccaneer Restaurant in Cruz Bay, where our slender waitress wore white-girl dreadlocks and Earth Shoes. A Windham Hill space music tape played in the background, and a rooster pecked in the dirt a few feet from our table—a strange mash-up of postmodern Mill Valley and prewar rural Caribbean. There were signs advertising foot massage and health food and acu
puncture and low-impact aerobics on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and everyone looked healthier, younger, prettier than me and Chase. Tanned blond Americans and Nordic-looking Europeans with candy-colored nylon packs attached like marsupial pouches to their lean bodies strolled the narrow streets of Cruz Bay and hitchhiked the road to the Maho Bay campgrounds and trekked across the hills to ponder the mysterious Arawak Indian petroglyphs carved into and daubed onto the limestone rocks and walked on for a swim at Reef Bay. The slender, fit, tanned blond ones were here for the hiking and camping, snorkeling and scuba diving, and of course for each other—here to view and be viewed and to move freely as perhaps nowhere else in the Caribbean through the extraordinary natural beauty of the mountains and the sea, as if visiting a theme park.

On St. John, that ten-thousand-acre theme park was the work of aggressive private philanthropy and the U.S. National Park Service, a collaboration between a Rockefeller and a Roosevelt. Elsewhere in the Lesser Antilles, where national parks existed at all, as in Dominica, Guadeloupe, Tortola, and Martinique, they seemed to have been established merely because there was nothing more immediately profitable to do with the land—they had come into existence by default, usually on hinterland tracts of wooded mountainside where escaped slaves once hid out and where no tourism, agriculture, industry, or housing seemed possible. Nobody wanted the land, so why not make a national park out of it?

Why not, indeed? One was grateful for the preserves and public set-asides, no matter where they appeared or what the motive, no matter how casually or poorly run. The parks were, after all, protecting the remnants of an extremely fragile ecosystem in the midst of uncontrolled exploitation and pollution. One suspected, however, that on most of the islands—but not, of course, here on St. John—if a new source of bauxite were discovered beneath the rain forest, making the land commercially valuable, or an international consortium wanted to put up a three-hundred-room beachside resort hotel, the
national parklands would quickly shrink or disappear altogether. And, given the dire need of foreign currency in many of these tiny, severely indebted, overpopulated island nations, who could argue with a decision to let their parkland shrink or disappear?

In the context of Caribbean economics, St. John’s Virgin Islands National Park was a luxury, like a private club in the Adirondacks. Unfortunately, it was also a necessity. The island was essentially defined by the park, and given St. John’s easy access to the international airport over on St. Thomas and to North American investment capital, with spectacular beaches and deepwater bays and lovely forested hills that clambered to the sea as if to drink, its hundreds of species of birds, tropical flowers, trees, butterflies, and other insects, its miles of rich underwater reefs and dozens of tiny, beach-rimmed cays and matchless views of the sea, St. John without the Virgin Islands National Park in a decade would be overwhelmed by day-tripping visitors from the mainland and the other, larger Virgins.