Soufriere, St. Lucia

 

You create - mistakenly - a monoculture of one species.

Now, with the entire Antilles using essentially the same crop as their one financial crop, one single disease could bring everything down. And, eventually, that would happen.

But sugarcane would suffer two more setbacks. The sweetness of sugar became synonymous with the foul word slavery, and much of Europe began refusing it in protest. And soon after that, man engineered a way to extract the same sugar from beet plants.

Beets grew in Europe. No overseas shipping. No slavery.

The Spanish Caribbean was in jeopardy, but the English were already in cahoots with the sugarcane on an entirely new venture.

The race for Caribbean revenue was becoming more and more a race to utilize an understanding of the botany and commercial value of more specific uses of plants. Monoculture's failure was bringing the Spanish botanists together, here in San Juan, to use science to exploit botany - to engineer new species from cross-pollinations of the world's hundreds of sugarcane variations.

We stop in some back alley restaurant, for fried bananas. For plantains, black beans and pork. This will be our meal, but it will also be the future of the Caribbean.

I wake up, because there is lightning outside. The thunder is booming across the peaks. All the birds, and a bat. They've found refuge in our flat. The thing about where we are staying is that there are no windows. We are staying in a flat in the rainforest, open to the air. And because one giant wall is missing, the moisture of the rain glides through like a mist.

I fix a coffee. It's four-thirty in the morning, and out of sheer excitement, I can't sleep. I rumble about. When the lightning strikes, I see my wife in the mosquito netting, who won't be awake for hours.

When the lightning strikes again, I catch a glimpse of the scrabble board. From last night: the empty glasses of rum. With the flies stuck on. I look at the scrabble board, with the pieces all messed up because of the wind.

I look at my leftover words, how I gave up.

How do you spell "cacao" anyway?

We are so far removed from the rest of St. Lucia that on a thunder-stricken morning in a landscape of rain and fog and the green of giant trees everywhere, it's easy to imagine a Caribbean without human life.

What would it be like here, if the world went bad? A world of poverty and disease, where the air is sooty and most of the animals are dead, where the tourists retreat from the Caribbean in the urgency of life's concerns, and all that is left are hopeless people shitting in plastic pails and salvaging the mahogany of old abandoned hotels.

Lightning strikes again and I see the twin Piton peaks, shrouded in fog. I see them arcing steep into the ocean.

One thing is sure, when the world retreats from the Antilles, only the plants will bear fruit; rooted against the otherwise lifeless rock of its cliff sides, hanging over an empty sea, the surf brushing gently against the rotting machines of the vast empty; yachts and steamers rooted upside down, the vines of sea grapes burrowing through the holes.

It's just an early morning vision of the future; but in a world where we say that the victor writes the history, who can you really say is the victor of the Caribbean? Fidel Castro and his empire of serfs? The Sandals Resort with their bad food? The sunburned yachties with their fish?

How do you spell "chlorophyll" anyway?

That was what St. Lucia's literary hero always warned of. That's what Derek Walcott was afraid might just happen. Islands dependent on external economies. On tourism.

The lightning strikes again and I can see the garbage filled with dead bugs. I had left the bathroom light on last night during dinner. It attracted a swarm of flying beetles, piping frogs, birds and lizards. It was an insect feast. It was a hundred dead beetles on our shower floor. It was one look in the bathroom and a six hundred bug legs dangling about upside down in the air. It was Jane with a broom and me with a, "Jane, I'm on the rum."

It had become comfortable, being here at Ladera, playing Scrabble, eating fish and callaloo soup. Jane naming the piping frogs each time they come into our flat and belch out a melody of squeaks. There was Freddie and Tiny and Betty.

But today we are to begin a multi-day tour of the island, on the back roads without a guide, a map or a clue. We will get lost, we will get stuck, we will find ourselves in some awkward situations. It turns out, along the way, we'll run into some rather interesting plants, and how they take on the English, the French, the Pirates, and another century of destruction and glory in the Caribbean.