Saying good-bye on a Jamaican road trip

I have just returned to Kingston after ten days driving around Jamaica with my son and two of his friends. I call my road trips D-Tours; I try to take visitors to Jamaican places a tourist rarely sees, places still authentic and unspoilt. We bounced around in a rattling Suzuki on roads long reverted to dry, stony riverbeds, we scorched our skins in open canoes and on shade-less beaches, we hiked in the rain in a wet limestone forest to see the exodus of bats from a cave at sundown, we snorkeled in a deserted bay to find a shallow reef reported to be in unusually good condition for the north coast - we had to abandon that search as a lightning storm forced us to leave the water in a hurry - we ate bun and bullas in the car, we stayed in basic accomodation and sometimes in luxury, we went to a farewell party for a woman leaving Jamaica after decades, and there we heard two self-taught sixteen-year-old twins drum a rousing, complex duet in an empty house on a hot August night. We came back sunburned and bitten by mosquitoes, with images of unforgettably beautiful places to sustain us in other, greyer days. For my son and his friends, it was a holiday. For me, it was a pilgrimmage, a journey of farewells, a time to grapple with a profound sense of having failed my country and myself.

(You know, I'm not sure about the "my country" business, because it seems the idea of the nation state has got the human race into a lot of trouble. What is it that makes a Jamaican anyway - an accident of birth? Of race? Of history and culture? Jamaicans who live abroad still identify themselves as Jamaicans; as we watch our magnificent success at the track and field world championships in Berlin, we point out the atheletes running for other countries who have Jamaican parentage. "She a Jamaican," we say of US runner Sanya Richards. "Don't him have a Jamaican father?" we wonder about the Panamanian sprinter Edwards. Despite my pale skin that suggests some other nationality, I have always fiercely loved this island of my birth, loved the physical place itself, the mountains, the sea, the beaches, the rivers - all of it. Yet I don't idealize Jamaica, I don't belong to the posse that rejects unpalatable truths as negativism; we can be a difficult, noisy, aggressive people, in many ways we have failed ourselves and squandered our opportunities. Living here is not easy. And I have often thought of leaving, and I know well what benefits that would bring, but I also know that if I am not here in Jamaica, I am in exile.)

So I came back from the road trip to find in my In Box one of those e-mails sent to multiple and growing lists of addressees, sparked by a news story about the closure of a beach in Cancun in Mexico as a result of the theft of sand. Here in Jamaica, we had a large and well reported theft of sand from a north coast beach last year - see my blog of November 28th, 2008 at http://snailwriter.blogspot.com/2008/11/gleaner-discovers-sand-issue.html - and the thread of e-mails emphasized the need for inland tourism, asked questions about the Jamaican sand case and suggested an environmental summit as a solution. The list of addressees included government ministers of both political parties, civil servants, business people, academics and a few folks like myself, working in the environmental non profit sector. Here we go again, I thought, discussing the placement of deckchairs on the Titanic. Not even moving them, you understand, just talking about them. So I sent this e-mail to that list - I've slightly edited it:


Folks,
I received this thread (about sand being stolen in Mexico and sold to a hotel in Cancun - authorities closed the beach) with the mixture of anger, cynicism and sadness that is a daily feature of working for an environmental non profit agency in Jamaica, perhaps in the world, I don't know. The sand case (in Jamaica) is in court, where it will wind its way through the justice system, witnesses will be hard to find, lawyers will have other cases, the police will not turn up to give evidence, and after many years, perhaps - PERHAPS - the people who drove the truck that stole the sand will receive a small fine. The real crime - that of politicians, government agencies, boards and officials giving environmental permits to hotels on coastlines where there is no beach without the first idea as to where their sand was to come from - will remain unpunished.

I have just come back from ten days driving around Jamaica with my son and visitors, in effect saying good bye to some of our gorgeous natural assets - Pellew Island, ironically immortalized on a Jamaica Tourist Board poster in the early days of our tourist industry, about to be villa-ized; the luminous lagoon near Falmouth, to be risked by a mega cruise ship pier of the most dubious economic benefit; Treasure Beach, on the edge of "development," trying to cope with a disastrous drainage canal constructed with public money, never finished, and without a shred of environmental due diligence undertaken; Cockpit Country - who knows - we still await the GOJ's decision on the boundaries years after the commissioned study was completed and now that bauxite is uncertain, limestone mining is about to be considered our savior with no doubt dire consequences for our forests, air quality and aesthetics. I went in a fishing boat right up the Black River, such a lovely trip, but a place which used to be a small bar and swimming hole had been venue-ized, all the vegetation cleared and is now a place for fetes. I went to the Coral Spring beach from which the sand had been stolen, most of that coast privately owned, with only a small protected area left, a stunning white sand bay with forested headlands to the east, and due to some trick of the wind, the kind of silence that is no longer available on the north coast. There, the swimming is shallow, and I am sure the owners will legally dredge it, and groyne it, and marina it, and the forest will be replaced by landscaping, and perhaps in a decade, there will have to be a study of what happened to the beach at Coral Spring and environs. On the culture side, I went to the ruin of Stewart Castle, also on privately owned land, no evidence of any protection by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, and the land around it had been cleared by fire and bulldozers.

While I was on my trip, I learned that Dornoch Head (River Head, some people call it), the source of the Rio Bueno, has had the trees cut down, and I was sent photographs of the large cuts in the Blue Mountains, allegedly to build a mountain biking track without, apparently, the knowledge or intervention of the National Environment and Planning Agency.

An environmental summit is not going to help us, even if we could stir ourselves to organize it. Were we to get it off the ground, the people who need to be in the room will either not come or simply give greetings and go about their business. We have had many such meetings in the past. Basically, the problem we have is that except for the few small, exhausted voices that have been raised over the years, hardly anyone thinks this issue is of sufficient importance, let alone understands it. Hardly anyone in the PNP, hardly anyone in the JLP, hardly anyone in business, hardly anyone in the civil service, and hardly any ordinary Jamaican thinks the sacrifice of our natural assets for a few short term, low paying jobs is a decision we will BITTERLY come to regret.

I know many people on this e-mail list do have concerns – but I regret to say that these concerns have too infrequently become action and our collective failures – and I include myself in that collective– are all too apparent.

I'm sorry to write at such length - but truthfully, this email is actually short, in comparison to the many words and great sadness in my heart.

Diana McCaulay
August 22nd, 2009

The e-mail made its rounds and some people wrote to me with words of encouragement and support, words I tried to hear, over the drumming of a different internal narrative of personal failure. I have been an advocate for the natural environment for more than twenty years, left my private sector job to work first as a volunteer and then as full time CEO of the Jamaica Environment Trust, an agency I helped start, and now I must face the fact that still, after all the effort, our natural resources are put on the auction block, day after day, and the price we accept for our irreplacable assets is a rock bottom, last chance sale price, a going out of business giveaway.

Pellew Island. Cockpit Country. Falmouth. The Luminous Lagoon. Dornoch Head. The Black River Morass. Treasure Beach. Coral Spring. The Blue Mountains. These I saw over the past ten days, all up for grabs, these I said good-bye to, hiding my tears from my son and his friends.

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.