Soufriere, St. Lucia

 

As soon as the summer storms in St. Lucia's mountains arrive with all their thunder, they are gone, and with first light there is sun and there is green.

Everything on the summer road in southern St. Lucia is slow going. It's construction season, and that just makes things worse. The main road is for shit, what with all the construction trucks and mud and potholes.

It is by accident that we've diverted much of the main road. We're lost. St. Lucia is a small island. But with its small roads without names, it's a continent.

We are in an area up in the windward facing foothills, so that rather than being jungly, it is windswept and grassy, rolling hills under rainforests. A lady, standing on the road, thumbs for a lift. Her name is Emerald, she is sixty-two years old.

Her life, in this bisecting of strangers, appears completely ordinary. I am watching her through the rearview mirror while Jane is bent over the front seat, talking story. Emerald is a school teacher. She loves children. She laughs at things that are not funny. She blesses us.

Her accent - called a St. Lucian patois, is part French, part West African. Her eyes though, are thinner, and her skin more brown than your average West African in the Indies. I suspect she is not all black. Likely, she is part Caribe - part native. Like everything and everyone in St. Lucia, her origin and her dialect; everything about her ordinary schoolteacher self is a puzzlework of the history of this strange island whose fate rests on the plants brought and grown here.

By the time we drop her at a bus stop, we have circled and looped from the south of the island to the southwest, again deep in isolated rainforest. We came across a troupe of uniformed school boys walking home. They shout at us, "let me be your guide!" "You pay me, I take you!"

Some ran for our jeep, and one jumped on the back, grabbing the spare wheel, "I take you!" I pushed the gas pedal and the tires hit a rock, sending the boy in the air. Through the rearview mirror, I saw him standing up with an expression of having let the fish get away.

We stumbled our way to a fishing village for groceries. It's Sunday morning, the rain has started again, and the town church is echoing church songs. Two hundred singers belt through the village and a dozen more are eyeing for a quick buck from the Americans.

One was bold enough to approach us. I was conflicted by wanting to hear his story, and being disgusted by so many amateur attempts at cashing in on us.

He called himself Lucas, and he offered us two horrible-looking beaded necklaces. At first I declined, but he said they were a gift and closed them in my hands. The whiteness of his eyes against his black-on-sunburned face was not marijuana, but crack and cocaine and that burned cornea signature of Caribbean vagrants - glaucoma.

He wore torn clothes, worse than a sloppy hippie. He said that like us, he too was a traveler - unlikely in this poor town of Soufriere.

He had been to "Wales, London, Jamaica, Dominica, Puerto Rico."

"How do you get to all these places?" I asked.

"Not the usual way. I never pay for my ticket."

He took the Nedlloyd container vessels and the banana boats - illegally. When he was caught, "they make me go down and wash the dishes. They are mostly friendly, and let me work my way to Brazil or Honduras."

"But not the Americans. They are bad to me," he said. "They ship me back on the first plane to St. Lucia.I am like Bin Laden, nobody can find me. I always go against the imperialism. I can hide, and the people who like me," he sniffed the air, "they help me out."

How do you spell 'psychotic?'

A chicken crossed the road. Some people were looking out windows, watching our conversation. Lucas paused. He looked around.

I looked at Jane.

"Would you offer a small donation for the necklaces?" he said.

I was prepared for this, and prepared to decline his wish. Lucas was an addict in a small fishing village, three hours from the nearest large city. Lucas was an addict in a country that won't understand therapy for another thirty years. He should have been slapped, but, you know.

I gave him three Eastern Caribbean dollars and kept the necklaces. It was humiliating. I knew the people in the windows were laughing at me. All I wanted was to get the guy off our backs. Soufriere was filled with crack addicts and scavengers looking for any way to get a buck off an American.

We were here to fill up on groceries, a stash of food for our drive across the island. The pleasure of gathering food in small third world towns is that it reacquaints you with brands that have fallen out of favor in other parts of the world. An obscure flavor of Laughing Cow cheese. A brand of crackers I hadn't seen since the 1970's. Sunkist soda.

Soufriere is one of the most dramatic towns in the Caribbean, with its steep green mountains sliding into a round bay. It is also the site of St. Lucia's largest botanical collection.

The gardens contain possibly the world's finest collection of gingers and heliconias and birds of paradise - those brightly colored magnificent plants we associate with expensive tropical arrangements in dull office lobbies.