I came of age in a two
week ceremony of illicit rum, charismatic tarantulas, and a desperate
wispy crush on a lithe girl named Molly. She broke my heart with
innocence, but still we drifted over coral reefs, hand in hand, shy
smiles letting water into our snorkeling masks.
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| I have no pictures of my own from then, but was somewhere above Coakley Town |
One of The World'sTen Best Ethical Destinations for 2014 is the Bahamas, and I missed most of what they
said about it (60% of the country's GDP comes from tourism), lost in
a Caribbean drift of recollection.
I owe eternal thanks
to my high school English teacher and a science teacher I never had,
but who somehow knew of me anyway, for nominating me for the Student
Challenge Award, in cooperation with Earthwatch,
an organization that connects volunteers with scientific researchers
around the world.
In my application essay I
mentioned my obsession with sharks, and made some comment about being
willing to go to Hawaii. The example expeditions were in Oregon,
Nevada, and Vallejo, swell places to be sure, but I thought I was
being a tad roguish by mentioning somewhere as tropically idyllic as
Hawaii. Turns out I wasn't aspiring high enough.
They sent me on an
all-expenses-paid two week research trip to an untouristed town in the Bahamas, where we
tested samples of sea sponges for antiviral and antibacterial
properties (did you know sea sponges basically don't get sick?),
sampled and measured the chemical properties of water taken from
various depths of the country's picturesque blue holes, and
accompanied a botany class from George Mason University on their
field walks through the jungle. I remember their professor was
infatuated with orchids, and reminded me of a charismatic Hemingway.
We tagged butterflies for
population estimates, gathered garbage off a remote beach to help
study ocean currents, and heard some living history from a village
witch doctor with projectile teeth no one noticed, since we were busy
not looking at the two gigantic goiters throbbing and wobbling on her
neck.
The woman, speaking
Caribbean English that had to be translated by our program director,
had prescribed herself a local herb as an antidote to a curse placed
on her by a jealous rival. It worked against the curse, but also
blocked her iodine absorption, so now she carried two ripe flesh
mangoes below her jaw.
The curses of obeah, a
Caribbean variant of voodoo, are not to be trifled with. She also
told us about a local millionaire, who, flush with the invincibility
of the hyper-wealthy in a developing nation, raped a local girl then
went on vacation. Little did he know that this girl's mother was an
obeah priestess, and as he was disembarking from his private plane on
the runway in Miami, a powerful wind of obeah justice blew him off
the steps and into the propeller.
We stopped staring at her
goiters and listened respectfully after that. (And drove home past
his former mansion, reclaimed by the jungle, but which had stood
unlooted for years, the expensive possessions within tainted by the
curse, until a hurricane was deemed to have cleansed it.)
That trip was my first
non-family-vacation overseas experience, and exposed me to many of
the truths that have delighted and sustained me since then. The
incomparable succulence of local food eaten in situ
after a long hot day of whatevering. The powerful appeal of foreign
cultures, languages, and customs. And the brazen hospitality of
people who have so little, by western standards of wealth, but who
smile wider, brighter, and more frequently than any of us in the
“First” World.
Poor
arrogant First Worlders. First to what, exactly? First in line to
work long hours to buy stuff we don't need? Come to de islan, dey
goin show you what is impotant.
My experience on the
incomparable isle of Andros, in a town so small they hadn't decided
whether it was spelled Stanyard Creek or Staniard, was an intense
one, which makes it all the more bizarre that the seed of wanderlust
it sowed was dormant for nearly ten years. Instead I worked long
hours...to buy stuff I didn't need. Hell, I didn't even do that, I
worked long hours to foster a bank account I didn't use.
How tragically responsible
of me.
But now, with a few more
stamps in my passport, I can sit back and remember that trip, blow a
kiss to Molly, taste the coconut rice and freshly caught fish, and
laugh at the typically ridiculous kid I was when I bought one of
those colorful woven Jamaican/rasta/Bob Marley beanies and wore it
home like it was the new me. (I still have it, in the suitcase where
I store my extra stuff when I'm abroad. I've never worn it since but
can't throw it away. Anybody want it?)
I remember heat lightning
in the distance at night, land rover rides through the jungle when
the trees sprang up again behind us when we finished running them
over, and the endless rubber chewiness of conch fritters, served in
the house of a town leader, because we needed a third place to eat in
our rotation, and the town only had two restaurants.
Wendy, one of the locals
who helped us out, made me the cake for my eighteenth birthday. I
don't remember what I wished for as I blew those candles out, but in
that place, with those people, there really wasn't a need to ask for
more.
