BARBADOS AND THE GOOD LIFE

For all the pyrotechnics of the classic movie Apocalypse Now, the scene I remember most was the opening scene with the Martin Sheen character’s stream-of-consciousness… and that ceiling fan. Fans like that have followed me throughout my life, silent stalkers of the memory. That ceiling fan symbolizes more than tropical climes, hot and muggy, Spanish moss watching like dirty old men from Mississippi out beyond the window. Those ceiling fans symbolize something existential, flickering consciousness, thoughts and images struggling to maintain a speed of thirty frames per second so as to imply continuity. In these hot humid climes you’re lucky to maintain anything, including yourself erect. A short walk in the midday sun can mean a drenched shirt and a decreased will to live and an excuse for an unscheduled nap. A cloudy day might offer some cooling shade or it might offer something else. In the south Caribbean it doesn’t just rain… it precipitates. Expecting storms maybe? The air thickens until it reaches 100% humidity and then water just seems to ooze out from everywhere like someone squeezing a sponge. And that ceiling fan just keeps slapping air around as if to keep the mosquitoes honest. I lie here exhausted, finally succumbing to a higher power, that fan turning in my mind’s eye.

The book says the rainy season should be over by now and the dry season beginning. Tell it to the Equator, which is more than just some imaginary belt holding in the Earth’s midriff bulge. The same forces that widen the belly and flatten the poles also dump torrents of rain in the center and create desserts along the tropics, gravity and inertia and Coriolis forces spinning off. It’s no accident that the Amazon and Congo Rivers and the Sumatran rain forest lie smack on the line. Air currents suck humidity off the flanks and dump it on the center in a pattern that defines our existence, extending through the atmosphere almost to the stratosphere. Flight attendants will ask you to fasten your seat belts when flying over the Equator without even consulting Mr. Doppler. It comes with the territory. Talking about a ‘dry season’ along the equator is probably a whole lot like talking about a ‘rainy season’ in the desert. It’s all relative. That’s all behind me now anyway, the sweat and the constant rains and the swamps.

Barbados is the Caribbean proper again, a pleasant change after all the rough edges and inconsistencies of the Guyanas and Trinidad, itself geologically if not geographically part of the South American mainland. The beaches are sandy not muddy, and the air is fairly dry at this time of year. It seems fairly clean and serene, a bedroom community of mostly middle-class residents, without the grinding poverty and crushing crime of some of its ‘edgier’ neighbors. It’s also a country of religion, the Christian sort, though whether that’s cause or effect of its overall liveability I couldn’t say. Gospel music here rates equally with reggae and soca and hiphop in popularity and is commonly heard in places where you wouldn’t expect it in, say, Mississippi, arguably the home of such with its Malaco recording studios among others. There is a genuine friendliness in the people, not fawning like Jamaica or aggressive like Dakar, but just a genuine connectability that doesn’t necessarily include or exclude you on the basis of race. There’s even a standard line in Jamaica where the hustler approaches you because ‘you’re obviously not a racist’. This itself is racism of course, just like Thailand’s over-friendliness to ‘Farangs’, usually more meretricious than meritorious. The very existence of a slang term for a people is the best proof of racism towards them, however benign or even superficially friendly it might appear.

Barbados is prime Leeward Islands acreage, clear turquoise waters as far as the eye can see. You can take the bus from Black Rock to Speightstown and see nothing but sandy beach on one side and grassy lawns on the other. Much of the beach is public, too, but that seems endangered with luxury beach homes literally on the rise all over. They haven’t totally displaced the locals, however. Small gingerbread cottages line the other side of the road and locals congregate at a myriad of local pubs without resentment nor rancor towards the half million tourists that find their way to the island every year, notable considering the locals themselves only number a quarter million.

There are only a couple problems. For one thing Barbados is pricey, not just US pricey, but more like Manhattan pricey. Ironically I’ve got my best deal of the trip here- room with kitchenette for under $50. So regardless that meals are Buenos Aires café prices, I don’t care. I cook at home. Cable TV’s decent here too. Then there’s another problem- I don’t know if they want me here. Package tourists, yeah sure, I’m sure they’re welcome, as long as they’ve been bought and sold like slave-ship chattel being led to auction, but independent travelers like me, dropping in and hanging out, and then moving on as the mood strikes, well I’m not sure. Maybe they’re scared that if they let people in on their own, they just may not leave, as is a major problem in Thailand right now. Here’s the story:

On my walk through downtown Bridegetown, the capital, yesterday my first full day here, I just happened- quite accidentally btw- to pass by the office of Air Jamaica, the airline I return to Jamaica on. On a whim I decide to drop in.

“I’m flying to Montego Bay on the 12^th. Do I need to re-confirm?” I haven’t re-confirmed a flight in years, though frequently change return dates to Asia, so similar in effect.

“Yes you do,” the nice man said almost condescendingly. “The 12^th of this month?” He looks up at my dumb nodding stare. “That flight’s been cancelled. You’ve been put on the flight for the 11^th. They tried to contact you.”

“Not by e-mail they didn’t. I checked yesterday.” Isn’t it logical that a flight booked by Internet would notify of changes by e-mail? Where would they call anyway?

“Is the 11th okay?”

“Do I have any choice?”

“Not unless you want to go on the 15^th.”

“No, that won’t work.” I’m supposed to be flying from Jamaica to Cuba on the 15^th, and anyway, I don’t know if Barbados Immigration gave me enough days for that. Later I decide to check. After searching for about an hour, I finally found the stamp. If I’m reading it correctly, they gave me one day. Huh? I had asked for five and had a pleasant enough chat with the nice lady, so assumed everything was fine. Did she make a mistake? I knew I only got one day coming through, but I only needed one day then, so didn’t think much about it. Maybe it’s a good thing my trip got cut a day shorter, since at worst, now I’ve just got a two-day overstay to account for, hardly the stuff of police action. Hell, for all the hassle Trinidad just gave me in transit- as if somehow they KNEW I was winging it (luckily I booked an onward flight by Internet the day before), checking my itinerary twice at la migra going and coming, once at the airline counter- at least they gave two days in the country JUST TO MAKE AN ONWARD CONNECTION THE SAME DAY. I remain optimistic, just like I was at the ferry crossing from Suriname to Guyana, what, some four days ago? It seems like four months. By analogy to Einstein’s theory, I guess time slows down when you travel at the speed of light.

So I sit in my room eating corn pone, I born in the Caribbean periphery some fifty-odd years ago and not even knowing it, eating the food and talking the talk. Annie’s soul food kitchen in downtown Brandon, MS would be right at home here, as would Big Daddy’s catfish parlor along San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. Those old connections, however far-flung, are dying of course as Afro-Americans enter the mainstream more and more. No one talks about the ‘Ebonics’ language any more, nor should they. Though Northerners and Southerners, including Blacks, may still accuse each other of ‘talking funny’, any problems of mutual intelligibility are long gone. TV and rising education levels will do that to you.

Regardless of Immigration’s final disposition toward me I like Barbados and feel cheated at only getting a few days. It’s better for your visit to be a couple days too long like Guayana and Suriname was for me than too short like Barbados. That way there are no regrets. Maybe I’m right and they don’t want you to think of their azure waters as your waters. A country of a quarter million people could get overrun by foreign bozos quickly. The irony is that two of the three countries in the world where you can buy citizenship outright and legally are here in the Caribbean, Dominica and St. Kitts/Nevis. Can’t guess the other? How about Austria? Cambodia’s another story, subject to negotiation, and they’re probably not alone. As always it’s the people who make the place, and they seem genuinely nice here. It whets my appetite to see more of the Caribbean, especially the Leeward Islands, and see what I’m missing. Maybe I WILL buy citizenship somewhere. What’ll Immigration tell me then? Si se puede.

So I pass through Immigration bpam bpam bpam (that’s Thai) without a word, so who knows: do they not know that maybe I overstayed? Do they not care? I didn’t want to ask for fear of getting the wrong result, so the mystery will remain so, at least until the next time. Still it’s bothersome. The last thing a traveler wants to worry about is his Immigration stamp. But that’s okay, since otherwise I’d feel pampered. If I admit to having AC, can I still keep my street cred? Without it that ceiling fan would have to be a Havilland Dash-8 turboprop to keep the air moving, like the one that kept the air moving beneath me last Thursday on the flight back to Barbados. Hell, I haven’t been without AC since Christmas in Guyana. Most of the places have cold showers, though, I swear, at least not very hot anyway. The TV really sucked, honest. Sometimes I disgust myself.