Part I: View from a Leproscarium

Well, here I am on St. John again, this damn island.

I left without really saying goodbye, stealing away for the Caribbean without even attending the end of the year party, (for the second year in a row, I know. In fact, it appears I'll miss the beginning of the year party again as well. Sigh). I had good reason this time, laid up in bed during my final weekend at home, with a hurt back of all things. (When did I get so old?)

I'm renting a small apartment in Cruz Bay off of Enighed Estate- they call the little road "The Valley"- with one of the biologists at the park, Jessica. The neighborhood is active, and you can generally hear people speaking spanish late into the night, until they are drowned out by the tree frogs and insects dripping from the vegetation that seems to engulf everything here. Just so I'm not too home sick, I'm usually woken by the chickens that run wild across all these islands, or by the feral cats, or by the epic age-old battle of chicken vs. cat that takes place outside my window as dawn breaks. Fred the Iguana also lives nearby, and early some mornings he is basking on the driveway as I leave for work.

The last month has come and gone- the speed with which time passes has become so cliche that I just can't come up with a witty metaphor tonight. Most of the time has been spent on Hassel Island, a hot, dry little spit of land that lays just across the harbor from Charlotte Amalie. It's mostly uninhabited, except for just a few intrepid souls such as the lovely old sail-maker named Manfred. We all had our reasons for being there- Vibe and Andreas were searching for the earliest sites of occupation, Mandy is investigating the Quarantine hospital (from where I get the name of this section), Casper was researching ship wrecks and anchors, and I was...well, I guess I'm just the muscle.

Hassel is its own special place, isolated and overgrown. We spend our days literally cutting our way through thick bush, with machetes, clippers and anything else we can get our hands on, careful to avoid the christmas bush and catch-n-keep, the first of which is poisonous and the second which is painful. We collect artifacts that are laying on the surface, record the rubble that used to be houses and factories. We occasionally dig holes, although not as often as one would like being an archaeologist.

In the evening we drag our sore and tired carcasses to the Tap Room or Beach Bar, for a bite to eat and a drink, and then are usually in bed early- like grade-school kids early. We have more fun on the weekends, hiking, swimming, sleeping in late. And then its always back to Hassel, to the leproscarium that sits on the hill overlooking downtown Charlotte Amalie and the cruise-ship tourists that invade nearly every afternoon. Its deceptive, the view of the town from the Leproscarium. There is the town, today as it would have been one hundred and fifty years ago, the sounds of the people carrying across the water. The water, at the base of the island, is a royal blue, abutting a thin strip of light tan sand. It seems as if it should be ideal. But there is nearly no breeze; by the time the early afternoon hits it is nearly unbearable there. No swimming in the water just below, no reprieve from the people across the way. In the mid to late 1800s it seems as if individuals with a variety of diseases- leprosy, small-pox, yellow fever- were quarantined on the side of this hill, watching the people in the town and the boats passing just below. The patients there were probably utterly miserable, except for the friends there with them.