I woke up at 4:48am to pee and the full moon was spilling across the passage between St. John and Tortola in a column of rippling light. Absolutely gorgeous. I set up the camera and tripod and struggled unsuccessfully for half an hour to capture the scene. I realized later in the day that I metered the scene incorrectly, kicked myself for missing a great shot, then forgave myself for being so muddle-headed - I had only got up to pee and it was before five am, after all.
Throughout the course of the year, The Debra and I receive several glossy catalogs from companies like Backroads and Country Walkers. The catalogs feature, among many other places, biking trips through Ireland, hiking trips through the backcountry of Morocco, and Himalayan treks in the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan. One trip that is not listed in those glossy catalogs, however, is a summertime Hiking-in-the-Bloody-Hot-and-Humid-Hills-of-the-US-Virgin-Islands trip. Having done said hike, we understand why it is missing from the repertoire. Not only did we hike through humidity thick enough to choke a cow, but we got rained on, too.
The Lind Point trail loops out of and back to the town of Cruz Bay on St. John. Spurs run down to a pair of beaches, Solomon Beach and Honeymoon Beach. We took both spurs, ambling down the hillside to the shore. Thinking some water might cool her down, The Debra dunked her hat in the water at Solomon Beach. Subsequent dispatches reported a distinct lack of cooling.
After an hour or two of intense heat and humidity we passed onto the finely manicured and well-appointed property of the hoity-toity Caneel Bay resort. The dirt trail became a paved path which ran directly to the resort’s seaside bar and dining area where men in starched polos and creased khakis enjoyed mid-afternoon drinkies with their wives, mistresses and girlfriends. By this time, The Debra and I were intensely hungry and thirsty.
“Hey,†I said. “Let’s pretend we’re staying here. Maybe we can get a bite to eat and something to drink.†The Debra turned her head toward me as I spoke and when she did I laughed. Her hat-wetting experiment from Solomon Beach had unknowingly gone horribly wrong. She not only came up with a wet hat, she also came up with a hat full of sand – sand which was now plastered all across her forehead like a relief map of the Sahara. Tiny dunes had drifted down to rest on her cheeks, and a stray swath of beach dusted her chin. There was no way we were going to convince anyone that we were guests at Caneel Bay. “You’d better go clean up before they throw us out of here,†I said, laughing.
“That was a lot of sand on my face,†said The Debra when she came back from the ladies’ room. We hiked out of the resort and considered continuing the trail up and over Margaret Peak and Caneel Hill. Instead, we decided that was a stupid idea and took a cab back to town for well-deserved ice cold beers. At JJ’s Texas Café I photographed the boot I had blown out on the hike and I made an offhanded remark to our waitress about quitting our jobs and moving to the USVI. That inspired the following joke from the waitress, a woman who ran away from home eighteen years ago to join a carnival of crooks and thieves, ended up homeless, and now works on St. John’s:
A guy gets his wish to tour Hell before he dies. When he gets to Hell, Satan shows him around to all the best places. The air is pleasant and warm, pretty girls are running around in bikinis, and there are buckets of iced beers everywhere. The man, liking what he sees, decides that he wants to go to Hell when he dies.
When he returns to earth, the man tells his wife that Hell looks pretty neat and that he has decided he wants to spend eternity there, so he kills himself. Once in Hell, he finds the air searing hot, the ground is made of molten lava, the girls are grody and there is no beer. The man finds Satan, pulls him aside and says, “Hey, what gives? This is nothing at all like what you showed me yesterday!â€
Satan replied, “Yesterday you were a tourist. Now you live here.â€
So two things we learned today: we aren’t quitting our jobs and moving to the islands and we are not recommending any summertime day hikes in the Caribbean.
