Where I Live and What I Eat

The Quill

The Botanical Gardens were established nearly fifteen years ago on the southeast corner of the island. The house we live in is tiny, three small rooms with an outdoor sink and outhouse. One half is a big room with two beds, and the other is a small bedroom and an indoor kitchen.

The tropics, as you probably know, tend to take their toll on everything. The humidity, rain, high temperatures, it all makes paint peel and wood warp. The bathroom doors are more curved than they are straight, and there’s less paint than chipped paint. But like everywhere we live, even the most dilapidated places become home. I’m quite used to it now, and enjoy the breeze coming up the hill from the water, and the crickets singing me to sleep. They do, however, compete with the generator that is our main source of power since the solar powered batteries blew up about three months ago.

This brings us to another island quirk. There’s nothing here. Nowhere to get supplies, or groceries, or backups. You have what you have. And Statia doesn’t have batteries for a solar setup. So we don’t have power. At least until they get shipped in from a company in St. Maarten. Of course there’s no internet or phone either, and the radio is broken so we’re cut off from the rest of the island. The groceries arrive once a week by boat in large shipping containers and more often than not I hear, are closer to going bad than they are to be ripe. The other day I bought two peppers that were starting to mold by the next morning. Fresh and Caribbean islands don’t go together. Especially this particular island.

Our kitchen and garbage can

Cereal is in the $5 range. Peanut butter is $8.25 a jar. Rum is cheap of course because this is the Caribbean. Pasta is $2 a box, not $1. Grapes are around $6 a pound. Peppers are $1.35 a piece. Bread is $6 a loaf so I’ve been making my own. Quite a bit cheaper that way, although much more time consuming. I wanted an adventure and it turns out I’m getting more of a temporal one than a geographical one—back to the 1800s for me. Looks like I’ll be baking bread and living on rice for the next few months. Scurvy is a distinct possibility.

But back to the gardens. They’re located on the south side of The Quill volcano. It’s quite pretty and, as anyone who lives on a lake or the ocean will understand, it dominates your landscape, quietly looming over us as we cook dinner and feed the dog. Foxy, our yellow lab mutt, is ancient as the hills, and quite blind, so he barks at people, lizards, invading cows, the cat, and us, usually because he forgets for a second that he know who we are. Vinny, our cat, is a proper monster. He steals our food, has more attitude than any person on earth, and tends to get underfoot just to trip you up. He’s gray, with green eyes, and the blackest heart of any animal I’ve ever met. At least once a night I wake up swinging when he lands on my face.

The front of the house that faces the visitors' pavilion

My room is in the back corner, across from the kitchen and looking out towards the volcano and backyard (seniority will bump me up in three weeks to the front room). My mosquito net gets tucked in every night to keep out the wildlife, and when it doesn’t, I get out of bed looking like I have chicken pox. The lizards tend to stay out of the house, but I can’t say the same of the cockroaches. 

My window and the blue water jugs

Our water comes from a cistern, and the other night it ran dry so we had to wait until morning to get someone to come up and refill it so we’d have water. Our drinking water we bring up from town in 5 gallon jugs that we pour into water coolers. We each have a box for dry goods, and the fridge runs (sort of, everything seems to always be melting) off of gas cylinders we have to change every few weeks.

The gardens are everything else. Our place is about 5 km from town, down a single-track road that only trucks can maneuver. It washes out, or blows tires, or requires 4-wheel drive to get through. Driving in Peru and Cairo looks tame in comparison. The upside is that the other day I was told I’d be good in a desert road rally. Cows and pigs and goats just add to the obstacles. We’ve had two flat tires since I’ve been here (I wasn’t even in the truck), and there’ve been two accidents since January. A road crew was digging up the road all week so we had to either navigate a moat to make it out alive, or more often, head in to town before they started work. Our trucks are a twenty-year old Nissan and a twelve-year old F-150 that is out of commission this week due to another blown tire and bent rim. We wave when we drive by because there’s no way to move it except by hauling it out of the brush (Liv ran over a tree) with another truck. Waving is quite normal, though, since everyone on the island knows each other. It’s rude if you don’t wave.

Our table and the blue bench I spend my time on

Down below the house is the sensory garden with separate sections for taste, smell, touch, sight and sound. I make tea out of the white cinnamon tree leaves, and like to smell the frangipania growing near the driveway. Below that is the lookout garden, where my pictures from last week were taken. It looks out over the channel between here and St. Kitts, and I like to sit on my bench at night watching the clouds change as the sun goes down behind The Quill. After that, I usually head back to my little blue bench by the kitchen to sit and watch a movie or read.

So now you know where I live and what I eat. Next up, the time I was asked to play for a national soccer team and my housemates.

Welcome to Statia

St. Kitts as seen from the lookout garden where I live.

St. Eustatius is around eight square miles with a population of about 4,000. But islands lend them selves to a sense of isolation, or, at their worst, entrapment. To me, the Caribbean looks like the moat keeping the rest of the world at bay while I focus on something I think is important. Sometimes leaving is the best way to appreciate what you have at home, and as much as I love Washington, I think I appreciate it more when I’m not stuck on the green line, wedged in between a thousand other people on their way home from work too.

So here I am in my Caribbean kingdom. I’ve been here about five days now and it’s already starting to feel like home. It’s slow in a disconnected sort of way. How you feel when you go camping or on a long road-trip. As I said, everything seems so distant that I’m already losing track of time. My schedule doesn’t help either.  During the week I do morning patrols every day along the beach. And some nights I patrol as well. In the morning, it’s easy—down and back, either they left a nest or they didn’t. But at night, it’s not so much a stroll as a night of turtle hunting. Starting at nine and going until midnight (or however long it takes), we walk patrol the beach. Once down and back, sit for a half an hour, and repeat. Turtles leave tracks that you can hardly miss. Especially in wet sand when it looks like a truck drove up out of the waves. A full moon makes things easier, but once you get an eye for it, there’s not much in the way of doubt when you see them.

Oranjestad & Gallows Bay with the Quill Volcano in the background.

Zeelandia, the main nesting beach, isn’t exactly ideal for nesting. For one, it’s somewhat narrow. The sand pushes up against the cliffs, which means that wave action tears up the beach and what you recognized one day, could be entirely different by the next. The second problem is more of the human sort. Zeelandia sits below two things, one, the town dump, and two, the low plateau between the two higher ends of the island, one of which is the Quill (a dormant volcano that we live on) and the other, which is a series of hills. The issue, then, is that rain storms tend to pour down on the island and split to one side of the other, mainly the eastern side where Zeelandia is located because the west side has a higher elevation. So as everything drains over the cliffs (often with trash in tow), it creates even worse erosion that sweeps topsoil, sand, and sometimes nests, out to sea.

So now you know the island and where I work. Next up, what I eat and where I live.