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.