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.
