WHY ST. JOHN & WHY DOESN'T THE ISLAND FLOAT AWAY?

The first time we visited St. John we said we were doing research for a novel. When we left Helena, Montana, that day in late November, 1996, it was minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The moment we stepped off that airplane into the warm, moist, 80-degree F air, we were goners. The next thing you know, we were no longer wearing underwear. And we were drooling slightly out of both sides of our mouths.

By the end of our ten-day visit, during which time we forgot to do book research, we found ourselves pondering life’s big questions: how could such a small piece of land sustain so many feral cats, goats, safari taxis, bananaquit birds, roosters, and massage therapists?

Life’s big questions remain a mystery, but I have uncovered some facts and made some observations. For instance, the number of visitors to St. John during the last 20 years has ranged from 700,000 to 1 million a year, many of them doctors and lawyers and such. If your personal physician or legal advisor was among them, he or she probably experienced “vacation brain,” the way we did. This syndrome is caused by the cells’ reaction to the sudden change of climate, especially when said cells have been working overtime to keep the host body alive in a frosty climate. After encountering a big red rooster wandering out of an open shop door, visitors from The City have been known to say, “Oh . . . I didn’t know you had peacocks here.” Or, standing knee-deep in the ocean, he or she might look puzzled and blurt, “Where are we in relation to sea level?” It’s true. Perfectly intelligent human beings, including those who claim status as the valedictorian of their high school graduating class, have asked, “So, what keeps these islands from floating away?” The Tradewinds newspaper police log once reported that a visitor renting a villa at Peter Bay, where the millionaires stay, called to report a dinosaur on his deck. Don't let this happen to you. Those prehistoric-looking creatures are iguanas, and they’re quite harmless unless you're wearing I’m Not Really a Waitress Red toenail polish.

The 2010 census registered a population of 4,170 (plus or minus) assorted human beings on St. John, including Fred the Dread, Boiler Al, and Hermon Smith, characters you’ll meet if you hang out on the island for a while.

There are many reasons people come to live on this nipple of land in the Caribbean. Some of those reasons are, obviously, weather related. I’ve read that if you are a person of character, you’re not so apt to be needy when it comes to climate. But why not be somewhere consistently warm and moist and welcoming? Why not live where gentle rains caress your body, and tree frogs and other strange noises tickle your ears in the night? Why not be surrounded by a turquoise sea as warm as bath water to swim in, among green turtles and bright blue fishes, and lie on warm sand the color of honey?

According to a quote by Captain Phil of the s/v The Wayward Sailor in an article in Tradewinds by Allison Smith, “Some people are looking for their destiny, some are looking for their truth, and others are just looking for a parking space.” Others manage to engineer their own witness relocation program, although I enjoy substituting witless for witness. On our second visit to the island, in January 2001, Tom and I rented a car one day, and gave a Bordeaux Mountain resident a ride. He told us that police still come looking for people on the island by their alias or nickname, and that you don’t always get to know someone’s real name until after they die. Then you might learn they’re on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Occasionally, the secret that someone is hiding from the rest of us is the same secret he’s hiding from himself.