Listening to the Island

I am currently packing to leave in a few days. As always, its bitter sweet- I’m just growing accustomed to being here, just feeling comfortable, feeling part of my own little social circle and community. There is still so much I haven’t told you about the island! What is the most disappointing about trying to relate life here is that all I have is words, typed, not even scrawled in my loopy half-cursive penmanship. Sometimes I can post a picture or two, but usually I lack photographs of those things that I really saw, that are in my mind. But here on St. John, like everywhere, there is a soundtrack to life. For instance, when I’m sitting at the Tap Room, especially on a Friday Reggae Night, when instead of closing at 9 the place comes alive at 9, and Lang, Cheech and Austin DJ, mixing it up between old, worn vinyl albums that have been painstakingly collected and the mp3s ripped from the internet onto a state of the art computer system, I know I’m going to hear “Cherry-O”, a truly old-school reggae song that I adore. Everything about the Tap Room is rolled into that song for me- Friday nights, getting a lecture on reggae music from Cheech, eventually helping to close the bar down as the conversation deteriorates into the history and politics of the island. Saturday night, Beer Pong night, where the song is always absent, and instead we hear Top 40 from the early 90s, and it always feels eerily like a middle school dance. Sunday nights Cherry-O is back on the play list, and I hear it when I was the only person in the bar, my laptop and papers spread across the back corner table, Meaghan feeding me handmade root beers and a pale ale or two while I write frantically, trying to finish a chapter for an edited volume that I had too much hubris to decline, Tim and Kevin being kind enough to distract me by wandering over to talk to me now and then. Sometimes Jess joins me with her computer, and John calls us dorks from the bar, where he is watching the game (really any game that happens to be on).

Reggae is a part of the island now in a way that it hasn’t been in the past- people like Austin, Lang and Cheech are actively trying to create a “scene” on St. John. It definitely represents a different political mindset for the younger generation of St. Johnians, people in their mid-20s to early-30s who are starting to take part in the economic, cultural and political institutions of the island and don’t like the direction its been heading over the past decade. But Reggae isn’t the only sound on the island; nor is it the only musical politicking that is occurring. The island is rapidly becoming Spanish, and, as in many other places, it is creating tensions and new communities that have to be engaged. In recent weeks my neighborhood has required moniker “Little Santo Domingo”, or just the “Barrio”. This neighborhood has been Dominican for a long time, a little ripped up road that floods in big storms where concrete “shacks” have quickly sprung up. I live at the end of the road, up the infamously steep driveway, and throughout the day and long into the night the conversations of everyday life floats up the hill, and underneath it are catchy, sometimes peppy songs, the chatter and lyrics always in Spanish. In another nearby neighborhood little shops and hang outs have sprung up in just the last month or so in cargo containers, and on Friday and Saturday nights the competing music is so loud that you can hear it down into Cruz Bay, where it is only drown out by the two competing Dominican bars, one of which sprung up just a couple weeks ago across the street from what was originally “the (only) Dominican hangout”, Caps.

Many of these Dominican residents are illegals. St. John has long had a problem with illegal immigrants using the island as entree into the US mainland, but it has picked up since I have been coming here. The Park recently recovered a large, but rickety, boat on Brown Bay, the Merci Jesus that is estimated to have brought as many as 30 people to the island. On survey I often find the discarded clothes and shoes of people who jumped ship and changed after swimming to shore. Sometimes we find the people themselves, trying to make their way to St. Thomas. My neighbors, always pleasant in passing, cooled to me for a while when a couple of months ago one of the Rangers drove me home in the big SUV with the blue lights on top. I think he was nearly as uncomfortable being there (my neighborhood is out of Park jurisdiction) as my neighbors were with having him there, turning down their radios and going inside until the federal vehicle had left. If he, or the other Rangers, find them on Park property they undergo documentation and complicated ICE processes that fall outside my realm of knowledge as a Park Archaeologist.

Its not just the music or the sounds of people that are part of this soundtrack. This island is never silent- the crows and clucks of chickens punctuate everything, every couple of weeks accompanied by the peep of day old chicks scurrying after their mothers, looking for food. Dale and I decided they were the island equivalent of pigeons, eating everything people discard. As you walk on a trail or near brush, you hear constant scurrying, which are the lizards and the soldier crabs- sometimes the latter clank against rocks as they fold up into their scavenged periwinkle shells and roll down the hill. The louder crashes are iguanas, terrified of people, rushing to get away as quickly as possible, sometimes scrambling awkwardly up a tree. If they are already in a tree and you freak them out, then they crash the other way- towards the ground where you’re standing. You never hear the bush cats running through the brush, but you hear them fight or mate, or sometimes feed. Several evenings ago I was coming home at dusk and turned up my driveway only to come face to face with 9 bush cats who silently watched me as I walked by. Since the beginning of August, and the incessant rain that comes with the height of hurricane season, the frogs have gone crazy. After the sun goes down the tree frogs and coquie, invasives from Puerto Rico, are deafening, drowning out the Dominican’s songs and my neighbors conversations. Even drowning out the TV. The other sound that comes with hurricane season is the sound of rain on the broad leaves of the banana trees outside my window, a little “pop” sound that gets amplified 100-fold as the heavens open up and give us the water that is supposed to last in our cisterns through the coming dry months.

Last evening Susanna, Kaete, Carey, Jess and I started at Happy Fish, then met a bunch of the Rangers and Kevin and Tim at the Tap Room, where we made Drew the bartender put on the presidential debate (what’s geekier than a group of NPS employees? Apparently nothing). One by one my friends straggled home and Jess and I ended up at Larry’s Landing, as we so often do, John tending bar. I like Larry’s; I usually don’t have any friends there, other than Jess, so I get to sit back and observe, hear stories, blend into the crowd without having to interact with anyone too much. And that’s where I realized how much I would miss the sounds of St. John as much as the sites and the people, the feel of the sand and salt water and sun. Cruz Bay was busy last night, busier than it has been in weeks as people are arriving back home, anticipating the end of slow season. Larry’s was literally the only game in town last night; Tap Room closed at 10 when we left, and every other bar in town is closed for cleaning and/or maintenance until the tourists come back. Some baseball game was on the 3 television screens, shots were being purchased, stories were being told. The guy next to me, Matt, was slowly pouring the beer his friend, Patrick, had bought him into a plastic cup that he had hidden behind a napkin dispenser. The IPod finished playing a “mainstream” reggae tune, replacing it with a Radiohead song. As the song started Matt was at the corner of the U-shaped bar with his girlfriend Emily; Elton had taken up Matt’s seat next to me, completely solitary in his beer. I sat at the top of the U with Jess, who was talking to Patrick, laughing at some blond girl we didn’t know telling a couple of West Indians across the bar who we did know, including Patrick the bouncer, to go back to Puerto Rico. The song was a bit slow, a bit somber, as a lot of Radiohead is. And for some reason, as the song progressed, more and more people were singing, so that by the end of it, even the blond had stopped screaming racial epithets long enough to join in on the chorus. But like so much on St. John, what in other circumstances would have caused a brief moment of communitas in this circumstance didn’t; there was no sentimentality in the singing, no bonding. Everyone seemed lost in the song completely on their own, or with their immediate companion. Those not singing in the bar didn’t seem to be affected one way or the other. People just sang, or they didn’t, which in the end seems to be the general fabric of the island. When the song ended, John switched off the IPod and announced last call. And then the bar was silent.