February Heat. Wilson Roberts
for having settled on the independent British island of St. Ursula when I left the long winters of Massachusetts behind me.
I parked the Jeep in front of the rental agency next to the Bank of Nova Scotia. Trash overflowed the rubbish containers along the side of the street, cans, bags, bottles and paper collecting in small piles in the gutter.
“Hey, Frank, nice day to cruise around with the windshield down.” Eddie the rental guy came out of his office, hand reaching for my papers.
He’s one of the few people on St. Thomas who knows me by name. A former high school band director from a small town in the Adirondacks, he came to the islands in the mid-Seventies for a winter vacation and never left. Deeply tanned, he was tall and thin, almost gaunt, with sun streaked blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, a silver dolphin on a chain resting among the chest hairs visible through his half buttoned lime green guayaberra shirt. I followed him indoors and we leaned on our respective sides of the counter yakking as we always do about how little we like the ways in which the island has changed over the years we’ve known it.
He took my credit card and filled out a charge slip. “It ain’t like it used to be. Now it’s all cement and tourists, which is just fine for my bank account. You get any interesting mail, Frank?”
He grabbed a couple of beers from a cooler behind the counter, passing one to me. Taking it, I shook my head, giving him a sour grin.
“Nothing, Eddie. A Hustler, a six month old issue of Poetry, couple of Times and Newsweeks, half a dozen rejection slips from obscure poetry journals published by obscure English professors at obscure little colleges scattered around the States, and an invitation to subscribe to a collectors’ edition of silver coins with pictures of the Presidents on them.”
He didn’t say anything as he shook his head, returning my grin. We never talked about it, but from his unspoken sympathy whenever I mention my poetry, I figure Eddie must have at one time considered himself a professional musician and dreamed of a career blowing his horn. He’s not bad with it. He and a couple of other guys have a little jazz band and play at some of the local clubs on St. Thomas and St. John on Friday and Saturday nights during the tourist season. With tips they don’t make more than fifty to a hundred bucks a night. They’ll never make much more, and Eddie doesn’t seem to care. I love to see Eddie’s eyes closed, his skinny body swaying like beach grass as he plays “My Funny Valentine,” or “Send in the Clowns,” or even a really dumb tourist pleaser like “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” Sometimes, late at night, after enough vodka and with a good audience, he’ll rip out his own piece, “Eddie’s Blues.” People everywhere should hear it.
I scrawled my signature at the bottom of the credit slip, finishing the beer as Eddie and I discussed the details of the latest mugging spread over the front page of the Virgin Island Daily News. He leaned on the counter, rubbing his hand along the side of the cash register.
“It’s a mess here.” He took two more beers from the cooler, popped the tabs and slid one over to me. “Downtown gets hotter the more asphalt they lay down. The traffic gets more intolerable. People get more frustrated and ticked off. The garbage piles up. I tell you, Frank, this place is going to explode one of these days. It’s reaching critical mass.”
I chugged the beer. It tasted good, the cold carbonated liquid tickling my throat.
“It’s no worse than the rest of the world.” I said between chugs. “There’s too damn many people and they all want what they think is a fair share of the pie.”
I didn’t want to push the discussion any further. I keep my mouth shut whenever someone in the American islands starts complaining about the deteriorating quality of life there. Life on St. Ursula is so much more pleasant, I’m afraid if I told my acquaintances on St. Thomas about its cleanliness, its quiet and safety, they would be flocking there and things there would begin deteriorating more quickly than they will once the inevitable tourists and developers finally do arrive. Besides, St. Thomas no worse than any other city and it has the advantage of being surrounded by lovely beaches and a climate that has earned the U. S. Virgin Islands the sobriquet of America’s Paradise.
The second beer gone, I chucked the empty into a trash barrel and said good-by to Eddie. Leaving the rental agency I walked along the waterfront to the ferry dock. Traffic on Veterans Drive was heavy and slow. Angry drivers sweating, honking, cursing one another, their radios blasting reggae, country music, rap, rock and roll, and 101 Strings into the competing dissonance of racing engines and horns. I could see them ripping off ties, wriggling out of suit jackets, and drinking cold beer behind the wheels of their cars as heat waves rose from the sheet metal surrounding them, the pavement beneath them.
The sidewalk between the road and the sea was filled with tourists wearing straw hats, sunglasses and brightly colored shirts. They pushed by one another, shiny new binoculars and cameras swaying from straps around their necks, arms filled with packages of whiskey, gin and vodka or chic liqueurs such as Kailua or Irish Cream from Sparky’s, bags from the A.H. Riise gift shop, the Down Island Traders and other shops along Main Street and the Waterfront, or those crammed into what the travel brochures describe as “the planted and picturesque passages and walkways between.”
An elderly couple stopped me, asking if I would take their photograph as they posed in front of The Pride of Tortola, a rusting barge filled with building supplies for the British Virgin Islands.
“Sure,” I said, taking the camera as he put his arm around her sunburned shoulder.
I studied them through the viewfinder. She wore a white sundress, sandals, and gold. Lots of gold. Gold rings, gold bracelets on both arms, gold necklaces. She was a mugging waiting to happen. He was wearing a blue cotton shirt with white palm trees silk screened on it, white trousers rolled at the ankles, boat shoes with no socks, several gold necklaces and rings. His white hair, parted at the back of his head, was swept forward to cover a balding forehead. He was next in line for the mugging.
I snapped the picture.
“Better take another one,” he said. “Just in case.”
After I took the second picture the woman said to him,
“Give him a dollar, Wendell.”
“He’s not a native, Ellen,” Wendell said, turning to me. “You’re not a native, are you?”
“We’re all natives, Bub.” I spoke out of the side of my mouth as I handed him the camera and walked away, pleased with my poetic archness, leaving them to wonder if they had been insulted.
THE BLUE-GREEN water of Charlotte Amalie harbor was filled with cellophane, pieces of cardboard, orange peels, trash dropped from boats and tossed from the roadside by tourists and locals alike. The clutter of garbage and trash overflowing the municipal containers, uncollected for days, was far worse along the sea wall surrounding the harbor area than around the banks and stores further back.
Travel ads proclaim St. Thomas a pristine Caribbean paradise. People I know who lived there years ago say it was, and will talk for hours, telling stories of wild times around the submarine base, of Frenchtown parties with frogmen and beatniks whooping it up together. They describe the harbor and beaches when the island was clean and free of the crowds that have come with the tourist boom. Many of those storytellers now live on St. John, or in the British Virgins. A few have come to independent British islands such as St. Ursula or migrated a few miles west to the Puerto Rican islands of Culebra and Vieques.
For years I’ve kept Vieques in mind as a backup if St. Ursula gets too crowded, or ever follows through on its occasional threats to kick non-natives off the island. The Puerto Rican island is not as spectacularly beautiful as St. Ursula, or St. John in the American Virgins, but it is lovely and filled with real life villages and businesses, instead of being built around a tourist economy. Of course, it has the Navy, shelling, bombing and polluting a large part of its landmass. I can sometimes hear the shells exploding from St. Ursula. The military presence has kept the island a backwater, a stay against the development, big hotels, condos, golf courses, strip malls and shopping centers that would