If Pellew Island cannot be kept in its natural state, what can?
Showing posts with label Jamaica. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jamaica. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
Losing our Treasures III - Pellew Island
I dreamed all night about the island, the Little Island, we called it when I was a child. It had many names. My parents called it Monkey Island, although there is another Monkey Island in Portland. Its real name is Pellew Island, a corruption of Peleau, named for a shadowy French hermit, who reportedly lived there, on coconuts and seafood, until he was drowned in a storm surge.
Pellew Island was given a title in 1953 – part of the land titling of Goblin Hill and San San Bay. The original plan was that there would be gracious houses on the land, each with a title to a small coastal plot, where the owners could have boathouses or cabanas. Decades of official disregard for the intentions of these titles have allowed cabanas to become mansions more or less sitting in the sea.
The Portland coastline is one of the most gorgeous in Jamaica, edged as it is by the soaring Blue Mountains. And the San San coast is nothing short of stunning, curving from Alligator Head to Whale Head and Blue Lagoon, with the jewel of Pellew Island set just offshore.
The early advocates for tourism saw this beauty and immortalized it in a 1960s Jamaica Tourist Board poster, the caption of which said: “In a world of bad air, poisoned water and litter, there are still a few virginal places. Enjoy. Quickly.” Serious t’ing.
Generations of Jamaicans – not just Portlanders – have stopped at the side of the road and looked out at the island, generations of Jamaicans have swum or rowed or rafted to the island, over the shallow seagrass beds to lie on the tiny beach, or to climb to the top and look over the miracle of the reef, and listen to the surf, rolling over and over and over.
Pellew Island is a jewel, and like a jewel, it has been privately owned - mostly by women - since the 1950s. It was bought by Baron Heinrich Thyssen in 1953 for 60 pounds Sterling, as a valentine’s gift for his fiancée, Nina Dyer of New York. The marriage didn’t last, and they divorced two years later. Nina then married Prince Saddrudin Aga Khan. I remember the island when it was owned by the Princess Aga Khan – Princess Island, was another of its names – she built a bamboo raft to one side of the little beach and scandalized everyone by sunbathing nude there. Even when owned by a Princess, though, the island was undefiled by concrete and there were no gates or security guards to keep people off. The Princess committed suicide in 1965, and in 1983, Betty Estuvez, a close companion of the Princess, bought the island for US$7,000. In 1995, the island was sold again to its current owners.
Now Pellew Island is to be “developed.” The owners seek to construct two villas – one seven bedroom and one four bedroom – on this steep, fissured, forested, fragment of limestone in the Caribbean sea. There will be decks and plunge pools and a bathroom for every bedroom, and electricity and water will have to be taken to the island via underwater conduit, and somehow a barge like boat will take the construction materials across without any damage to seagrass beds or corals, although the draught of the boat exceeds the depth of the water close to the island. The island is said to be “lightly vegetated” and virtually no trees will be touched, no land clearing will be done in the rain, there is little diversity of flora and few birds, although those who are fortunate to gaze out on the island every evening report many flocks of birds. A plateau at the summit of the island will be used – but there is no plateau worthy of the term, just a small, flattish area in a grove of bamboo. Promises, promises, I thought as I sat in the public meeting, hearing all this.
But the island is privately owned, and as we understand it, the private ownership of land conveys the right to do anything at all to that land. The Government of Jamaica could, of course, acquire the island for the public, deem it part of a scenic coastline, and keep it in its natural state for all of us. The GOJ purchases land all the time when what is needed is a road or a bauxite mine. But for a natural asset – I doubt the GOJ has ever done it.
So here’s what I’m thinking. The Tainos "owned" Jamaica until the men in Columbus’s ships took it and killed off the Tainos. And then the British captured Jamaica. There’s been a fair amount of taking and capturing, and I figure I have as much right to do some capturing as anyone. So I’m gonna invade Pellew Island with my flag of Taino symbols and I’m gonna declare it mine – mine; and the world’s. Ours. Ours to see and love and visit and snorkel the waters around and lie on the beach and sit in that grove of bamboo and hear the wind in the trees and the surf on the reef and the solider crabs rustling in the dead leaves. Ours.
I know my invasion will be symbolic rather than real; but it will be my statement that some things belong not to a single person, no matter how monied, but to humankind. Pellew Island is one such thing, and so, while we’re on the subject of Portland, is Blue Lagoon. Anyone who wants to join my invasion can e-mail me at dmccaulay@cwjamaica.com And I will accept all suggestions for other precious places, whether private or public, in dire need of similar invasions.
Pellew Island was given a title in 1953 – part of the land titling of Goblin Hill and San San Bay. The original plan was that there would be gracious houses on the land, each with a title to a small coastal plot, where the owners could have boathouses or cabanas. Decades of official disregard for the intentions of these titles have allowed cabanas to become mansions more or less sitting in the sea.
The Portland coastline is one of the most gorgeous in Jamaica, edged as it is by the soaring Blue Mountains. And the San San coast is nothing short of stunning, curving from Alligator Head to Whale Head and Blue Lagoon, with the jewel of Pellew Island set just offshore.
The early advocates for tourism saw this beauty and immortalized it in a 1960s Jamaica Tourist Board poster, the caption of which said: “In a world of bad air, poisoned water and litter, there are still a few virginal places. Enjoy. Quickly.” Serious t’ing.
Generations of Jamaicans – not just Portlanders – have stopped at the side of the road and looked out at the island, generations of Jamaicans have swum or rowed or rafted to the island, over the shallow seagrass beds to lie on the tiny beach, or to climb to the top and look over the miracle of the reef, and listen to the surf, rolling over and over and over.
Pellew Island is a jewel, and like a jewel, it has been privately owned - mostly by women - since the 1950s. It was bought by Baron Heinrich Thyssen in 1953 for 60 pounds Sterling, as a valentine’s gift for his fiancée, Nina Dyer of New York. The marriage didn’t last, and they divorced two years later. Nina then married Prince Saddrudin Aga Khan. I remember the island when it was owned by the Princess Aga Khan – Princess Island, was another of its names – she built a bamboo raft to one side of the little beach and scandalized everyone by sunbathing nude there. Even when owned by a Princess, though, the island was undefiled by concrete and there were no gates or security guards to keep people off. The Princess committed suicide in 1965, and in 1983, Betty Estuvez, a close companion of the Princess, bought the island for US$7,000. In 1995, the island was sold again to its current owners.
Now Pellew Island is to be “developed.” The owners seek to construct two villas – one seven bedroom and one four bedroom – on this steep, fissured, forested, fragment of limestone in the Caribbean sea. There will be decks and plunge pools and a bathroom for every bedroom, and electricity and water will have to be taken to the island via underwater conduit, and somehow a barge like boat will take the construction materials across without any damage to seagrass beds or corals, although the draught of the boat exceeds the depth of the water close to the island. The island is said to be “lightly vegetated” and virtually no trees will be touched, no land clearing will be done in the rain, there is little diversity of flora and few birds, although those who are fortunate to gaze out on the island every evening report many flocks of birds. A plateau at the summit of the island will be used – but there is no plateau worthy of the term, just a small, flattish area in a grove of bamboo. Promises, promises, I thought as I sat in the public meeting, hearing all this.
But the island is privately owned, and as we understand it, the private ownership of land conveys the right to do anything at all to that land. The Government of Jamaica could, of course, acquire the island for the public, deem it part of a scenic coastline, and keep it in its natural state for all of us. The GOJ purchases land all the time when what is needed is a road or a bauxite mine. But for a natural asset – I doubt the GOJ has ever done it.
So here’s what I’m thinking. The Tainos "owned" Jamaica until the men in Columbus’s ships took it and killed off the Tainos. And then the British captured Jamaica. There’s been a fair amount of taking and capturing, and I figure I have as much right to do some capturing as anyone. So I’m gonna invade Pellew Island with my flag of Taino symbols and I’m gonna declare it mine – mine; and the world’s. Ours. Ours to see and love and visit and snorkel the waters around and lie on the beach and sit in that grove of bamboo and hear the wind in the trees and the surf on the reef and the solider crabs rustling in the dead leaves. Ours.
I know my invasion will be symbolic rather than real; but it will be my statement that some things belong not to a single person, no matter how monied, but to humankind. Pellew Island is one such thing, and so, while we’re on the subject of Portland, is Blue Lagoon. Anyone who wants to join my invasion can e-mail me at dmccaulay@cwjamaica.com And I will accept all suggestions for other precious places, whether private or public, in dire need of similar invasions.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
In the Shadow of Mountains
I was born in the shadow of mountains; this is an unremarkable fact, as it is true of anyone born in the city of Kingston. But there is a particular mountain that I think of as mine – Jack’s Hill. I never thought it was well named – Jack’s Hill sounds like something from a nursery rhyme, small and unimportant, and my mountain is both serene and imposing. As for Jack – I don’t know who he was.
My family lived on Sandhurst Crescent when I was a baby, in the shadow of Jack’s Hill. We moved to Stanton Terrace – in the shadow of Long Mountain. And then when I was ten, we went to Liguanea Avenue, to a rambling, inconvenient house that was dominated by an unconstrained and close up view of Jack’s Hill. I was home.
It is a triangular shaped mountain, like the three fat middle fingers of a green giant, the lower reaches and folds still forested, the upper slopes grassy and bare of all but a few trees. It burns several times a year because careless people light fires or discard cigarettes, and it turns black and like a small, angry volcano, sheds ash on the houses of the rich people below. A Jack’s Hill address is one of the best in Kingston.
I got to choose my bedroom when we moved to Liguanea Avenue – I was the eldest child. So I chose the room without air conditioning – which was an amazing novelty at the time – because it had a view of Jack’s Hill. I moved my bed under the window, so I could wake up and look out and see Jack’s Hill before I did anything else. It is my earliest recollection of a sense of wonder.
Sometime in the 1960s, a developer cut a road across the green and pleasant face of Jack’s Hill. I remember my father saying the ugly scar would be there for twenty years. In fact, almost fifty years later, the destruction is still discernible, although not as raw as it was when I was a teenager.
There has been construction on Jack’s Hill – some houses are barely visible through trees, others are large concrete boxes without aesthetic merit clinging to ridges. Last week I waited in a doctor’s office on the third floor of a high rise building in Kingston and all around me I could see the mountains I had grown up with – the far away heights of the Blue Mountains (assaulted by clearing for coffee and failed plantation forests), Long Mountain (much defaced by housing), Dallas Mountain (chopped up by limestone mining and charcoal burners), and Jack’s Hill, cleared to bare dirt in places to make fire breaks around million dollar homes, to plant crops, and cleared for clearing's sake. It must be that we who live in the shadow of the mountains no longer see them, because if we did, if we felt that sense of awe and wonder I first encountered as a ten-year-old, we would never have allowed what has happened to them.
I went once to a place where no building was allowed on the hills around – these were hills, not mountains, not like our mountains. It was Santa Fe in New Mexico and it was in the 1980s – so things could have changed. But then no one could build on the hills, the forests were protected, and when you stood in the city, all around you could see unblemished vistas. Not even a movie star had managed to change the minds of the planners. Here in Jamaica, if you talk about protecting a view from “development” you are considered certifiably insane.
I had to leave Jamaica to experience a forest. Before I went to the Pacific Northwest, I thought a forest was simply an assembly of trees, and I used to talk about the importance of planting trees to replace the ones cut down. But when I climbed into the Hoh Rain Forest of the Olympic National Park in Washington State, I understood for the first time what the term “forest” really means – it is not merely a tree farm planted by humans, but a complex organism of ferns and mosses and birds and lichens and insects and trees of different ages and sizes and types. I saw a nurse log in the Hoh Rain Forest and it was explained to me how when old trees died, they crashed through the forest opening up areas to light, and how seeds found root in the rotting bark of the fallen tree and started to grow there, and then the nurse log would rot and there would be an arch in the roots of the young trees who had found their start on the nurse log, a straight line of arches, showing the ghost of the fallen tree. I came back to Jamaica and went up into the Blue Mountains and unless you really get off the beaten track, found an utterly ruined forest.
I’ve been thinking about what brings Jamaicans together. I know all about what divides us – race, class, history, income, wealth, address, language, born yah, ex pat or returning resident, ghetto pickney or uptown bwaii, donkey man, bicycle man, Prado man, fisherman, ganja man, helicopter man, politician, businessman. The list is long and seems to grow ever longer. And what unites us? You might say Usain Bolt or the Reggae Boyz - until you see how quickly we turn on them if they stop winning. Then it struck me that it is our land that truly unites us, the physical place, this island. Pretty much every Jamaican, resident or migrant, will assert that Jamaica is a beautiful country – even the most beautiful in the world. This is something we will all defend, if only in theory.
And yet – we do our best to make this near universal source of Jamaican pride – a lie. We chop down and dig up and develop and misguidedly “beautify” until we no longer see where we really live, in the shadow of towering mountains, at the edge of a deep, murmuring sea.
I still love Jack’s Hill. Waking up in its shadow as I grew into teenage and young adulthood made me understand at least one passage in the Bible, when I heard it for the first time in Scripture class – I look towards the hills, from whence cometh my help…
My family lived on Sandhurst Crescent when I was a baby, in the shadow of Jack’s Hill. We moved to Stanton Terrace – in the shadow of Long Mountain. And then when I was ten, we went to Liguanea Avenue, to a rambling, inconvenient house that was dominated by an unconstrained and close up view of Jack’s Hill. I was home.
It is a triangular shaped mountain, like the three fat middle fingers of a green giant, the lower reaches and folds still forested, the upper slopes grassy and bare of all but a few trees. It burns several times a year because careless people light fires or discard cigarettes, and it turns black and like a small, angry volcano, sheds ash on the houses of the rich people below. A Jack’s Hill address is one of the best in Kingston.
I got to choose my bedroom when we moved to Liguanea Avenue – I was the eldest child. So I chose the room without air conditioning – which was an amazing novelty at the time – because it had a view of Jack’s Hill. I moved my bed under the window, so I could wake up and look out and see Jack’s Hill before I did anything else. It is my earliest recollection of a sense of wonder.
Sometime in the 1960s, a developer cut a road across the green and pleasant face of Jack’s Hill. I remember my father saying the ugly scar would be there for twenty years. In fact, almost fifty years later, the destruction is still discernible, although not as raw as it was when I was a teenager.
There has been construction on Jack’s Hill – some houses are barely visible through trees, others are large concrete boxes without aesthetic merit clinging to ridges. Last week I waited in a doctor’s office on the third floor of a high rise building in Kingston and all around me I could see the mountains I had grown up with – the far away heights of the Blue Mountains (assaulted by clearing for coffee and failed plantation forests), Long Mountain (much defaced by housing), Dallas Mountain (chopped up by limestone mining and charcoal burners), and Jack’s Hill, cleared to bare dirt in places to make fire breaks around million dollar homes, to plant crops, and cleared for clearing's sake. It must be that we who live in the shadow of the mountains no longer see them, because if we did, if we felt that sense of awe and wonder I first encountered as a ten-year-old, we would never have allowed what has happened to them.
I went once to a place where no building was allowed on the hills around – these were hills, not mountains, not like our mountains. It was Santa Fe in New Mexico and it was in the 1980s – so things could have changed. But then no one could build on the hills, the forests were protected, and when you stood in the city, all around you could see unblemished vistas. Not even a movie star had managed to change the minds of the planners. Here in Jamaica, if you talk about protecting a view from “development” you are considered certifiably insane.
I had to leave Jamaica to experience a forest. Before I went to the Pacific Northwest, I thought a forest was simply an assembly of trees, and I used to talk about the importance of planting trees to replace the ones cut down. But when I climbed into the Hoh Rain Forest of the Olympic National Park in Washington State, I understood for the first time what the term “forest” really means – it is not merely a tree farm planted by humans, but a complex organism of ferns and mosses and birds and lichens and insects and trees of different ages and sizes and types. I saw a nurse log in the Hoh Rain Forest and it was explained to me how when old trees died, they crashed through the forest opening up areas to light, and how seeds found root in the rotting bark of the fallen tree and started to grow there, and then the nurse log would rot and there would be an arch in the roots of the young trees who had found their start on the nurse log, a straight line of arches, showing the ghost of the fallen tree. I came back to Jamaica and went up into the Blue Mountains and unless you really get off the beaten track, found an utterly ruined forest.
I’ve been thinking about what brings Jamaicans together. I know all about what divides us – race, class, history, income, wealth, address, language, born yah, ex pat or returning resident, ghetto pickney or uptown bwaii, donkey man, bicycle man, Prado man, fisherman, ganja man, helicopter man, politician, businessman. The list is long and seems to grow ever longer. And what unites us? You might say Usain Bolt or the Reggae Boyz - until you see how quickly we turn on them if they stop winning. Then it struck me that it is our land that truly unites us, the physical place, this island. Pretty much every Jamaican, resident or migrant, will assert that Jamaica is a beautiful country – even the most beautiful in the world. This is something we will all defend, if only in theory.
And yet – we do our best to make this near universal source of Jamaican pride – a lie. We chop down and dig up and develop and misguidedly “beautify” until we no longer see where we really live, in the shadow of towering mountains, at the edge of a deep, murmuring sea.
I still love Jack’s Hill. Waking up in its shadow as I grew into teenage and young adulthood made me understand at least one passage in the Bible, when I heard it for the first time in Scripture class – I look towards the hills, from whence cometh my help…
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