An Embarrassment of Mangoes (25 page)

4. Add the chicken stock and the tomatoes. Return chicken pieces to pan, cover, and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer, covered, for about 20–30 minutes. Check the pot occasionally and stir. The pelau is ready when the chicken is cooked and the rice has absorbed all the liquid and is tender. (Add more stock or water if the liquid is absorbed and the rice is not yet tender.)

5. Sprinkle with the chopped peanuts and serve.

Serves 6

Return to Sweet Grenada

. . . to the hairdresser cutting her mate’s hair [she said]: “Córtele el culo.” She meant: “Cut off his ponytail.” She really said: “Cut off his ass.”

KATHY PARSONS,
SPANISH FOR CRUISERS
, 2000

For someone who had followed the same hairdresser from salon to salon around Toronto for years to be assured a certain look, getting haircuts while cruising has required a bit of an adjustment.

During the early going, in the United States, I’d peer in shop windows, scrutinizing the cutters and their clients for signs of stylish proficiency. I’d ask other well-coifed cruisers, of course, who usually would tell me about the great cut they got in a port several hundred miles in the wrong direction. In Charleston, I even chased a woman and her teenaged daughter—total strangers—down the street. “Excuse me,” I said when I finally caught up. “Your hair is fabulous. Where do you get it done?” “In Tennessee,” said the woman. “We’re tourists.”

Beyond the United States, some cruisers let their spouses do the job. Even though I promised never to say a word whatever the results, and even tried to bribe him by letting him off dish-drying duty, Steve flat-out refused.

By the time we had reached Boquerón, Puerto Rico, a cut was long overdue. Eight of us piled into Raoul’s van to be driven to nearby Mayaguez, the official port of entry, to check into the country. Afterward, Raoul dropped us at the Mayaguez Mall for the shopping spree he was certain all newly arrived cruisers would want. Not me. I bypassed the Wal-Mart and made a beeline for Rita’s “Centro de Belleza.” Could the beauty center cut my hair
ahora mismo
? Right now? “
No hay problema, señora
.”

No problem, except this “family hair-care center” resembled the beauty parlor my mother had frequented in the beehived sixties. No problem, except my Spanish wasn’t up to the challenge of telling the hairdresser what I wanted. And his English didn’t extend beyond, “You like?” which, as his work progressed, I was sure I wouldn’t. By the time he washed, cut, moussed, dried, styled, and sprayed my hair firmly in place, I had a perky bouffant number that made me look like I was on my way to the prom, circa 1968. “My, you’re brave,” the other women commented when I returned to the van. Somehow I don’t think that was a compliment.

In Trinidad, I don’t have to worry about mousse, hairspray, or blowdryers. Margot simply plunks me down in a folding deck chair, wraps me in a smock, wets my hair with a spray bottle, and sets to snipping.

Before she and her mechanic husband gave up their jobs to sail south, Margot had been a hairdresser in North Carolina and, for a modest $10, she’s happy to give cruisers cuts. To set up an appointment, you simply call her on the VHF and ask for a “session”—never a haircut—then arrange a time and an inconspicuous place to meet on shore. On most islands, including Trinidad, visitors aren’t supposed to work, so she needs to be discreet. (A cut on the boat itself is a really bad idea . . . unless you want to spend a week cleaning up afterward.)

Fifteen minutes after she starts, I’m on my way again—perfectly satisfied. No hair hanging in my eyes or leaving sweat trails down my neck? Thanks, Margot. I schedule sessions in both Grenada and Trinidad.

When I next need a haircut, Steve and I are in Bequia, and Margot and her husband are still in Trinidad—150 miles away. “Go see Joelle,” I’m told. “She cuts the hair of everyone in the island’s ex-pat community.” Joelle is an attractive, stylish Frenchwoman, who came to Bequia via Jamaica, and her “salon” is the living room of her house, overlooking the harbor. Before she starts, she holds up a mirror so I can see the back of my head—a refinement missing from my dockside cuts—and points out a very weird spot where a large, V-shaped chunk has been removed. “Someone must have slipped with the scissors,” she says. I never noticed.

C
ruising is a lifestyle, not a vacation.

I constantly have to remind myself of this the week we’re living on the hard—on land, on
Receta
—in the boatyard in Trinidad.
Receta
was lifted from the water in slings and now sits supported on jackstands, her keel and bottom exposed and awaiting scrapers and rollers. She was not meant to be lived on out of the water. We can use neither our seawater-cooled fridge nor our seawater-flushed toilet, which means room-temperature drinks during the day and a bucket at night. (During the day, I can climb down the 10-foot ladder and visit the boatyard bathrooms.) Removed from the water, in the unshaded yard,
Receta
is a bake oven. Like every other cruiser on the hard, we rent an air-conditioner; it works only intermittently. Inside the bake oven, stripped down to my panties and a teensy top, I’m cleaning and refinishing
Receta
’s teak, inch by sweaty inch, a bit each day. To add insult to injury, I’m losing my underwear: The elastic has simply rotted from too much time in the sun and salt air. Life is not all rum and mangoes.

Maintenance on a boat in the tropics is constant. Having the bottom scraped and freshly painted will mean less scrubbing for us to do, but sea life doesn’t restrict itself to a boat’s bottom. An unpleasant smell occasionally wafts up through the drains in the galley’s double sink: the aroma of dying organisms that had moved into the drain hoses. Sea life takes up residence in the fridge filters, too: itty-bitty shrimp, fingernail-sized crabs, worms, seagrass, and the occasional smaller-than-a-guppy fish; plus sand. Neglect the filters for a week—sometimes less—and the fridge will stop. We have to clean things here I never thought of cleaning on land.

And then there’s the toilet, where the consequences of even a little neglect are truly gruesome. Over time, minerals calcify in the hoses and connectors, constricting the flow like a hardened artery and leading to a traffic jam of bodily wastes. To slow down the mineral buildup, I give the system a weekly treatment with “head dressing”—vinegar to counteract the calcium, followed by a tip of vegetable oil to lubricate the seals, with a little warm water and detergent in between. I moved this chore permanently to my side of the boat-work ledger after I caught Steve pouring my precious cold-pressed extra-virgin olive oil into the toilet bowl.

No matter how diligent I am with the head dressing, the sea eventually gets the upper hand and Steve has to disassemble the head. “Look at this,” he says one day, triumphantly brandishing a rock-hard lump of calcium salts in a surgically gloved hand. (We have a box of one hundred disposable latex medical gloves aboard for just such purposes.) He had chiseled the lump out of a valve, and is positively cheerful in the middle of this ugly job. “I’m off the hook tonight,” he says. Any time he has to tackle a head-related problem, he’s excused from dish duty.

Back home, Steve would have called a plumber and I would have loaded the dishwasher. But back home, I can’t put on my snorkel gear, climb down the swim ladder, and watch spotted eagle rays rooting for dinner in the sand beneath me.

Ever since a cockroach escaped from a visiting cruiser’s Scrabble box and tried to move aboard
Receta
, I don’t take any chances—even though Steve nailed it instantly with a direct hit of Baygon, our made-for-the-Caribbean bug spray that delivers on its promise of “fast knock-down.” (I’ve never had the courage to look at the ingredients list. “Use only if necessary,” the can says.) When we acquire books in exchanges with other cruisers, I surreptitiously slip them into Ziplocs, blast in some Baygon, and seal the bags for a few days. When we’re on the hard, I make an embarrassed Steve spray our ladder and the stands that support
Receta
, so bugs don’t stroll over from a nearby boat and climb onboard. And on the rare occasion that
Receta
is tied to a dock, I spray our mooring lines, in case any bugs get it in their minds to scurry aboard and sample the cruising life. One day a fishing boat pulled in next to us. I had heard bad things,
very
bad things, about fishing boats and their burgeoning
cucaracha
populations. So undeterred by the crowd on the dock, realizing that I looked like an out-of-control obsessive-compulsive, I got out my supersized can and sprayed the dock. Steve says we should buy shares in Baygon. I don’t care: What matters is that except for the brief incursion by the Scrabble-box hitchhiker,
Receta
remains a roach-free zone.

My sternest anti-bug measures are reserved for groceries. Cardboard boxes—roaches eat the glue and lay eggs in them—never,
ever
come aboard
Receta
. Before we even leave the supermarket, we jettison as many as possible; the contents of the others get transferred to other containers before they go belowdecks. And every single piece of produce we buy gets rinsed with a bleach and water solution in the cockpit. Dry goods like rice and sugar get double-bagged in Ziplocs. (Steve says we should buy stock in that company, too.) No wonder grocery shopping takes all day.

S
teve finally convinces me it’s time to sell
Snack
. But it’s illegal for cruisers to sell stuff in Trinidad, just as it’s illegal for them to work, so Steve commits a semantic fiddle: He
trades
Snack instead—for a pile of U.S. greenbacks, which he immediately injects into the local economy by purchasing a new, larger dinghy and new, larger outboard.

I don’t need much convincing, actually: I had long ago become tired of the cruising affliction known as dinghy butt—the salty wet bum that results from traveling in an underpowered dinghy on an overactive body of water. The only thing I need convincing about is the expense.

For the first time in my adult life, I don’t have a paycheck. All I see is money going out. I know the bank statements that catch up with us sporadically show the accounts are healthy: The house is happily rented, the cruising guides we publish are continuing to sell. But
still
. Cruisers—even the wealthy retired-for-life types—wear frugality like a badge of honor. In Toronto, we had heard about “gold star days”: cruisers proudly putting a gold star in their logs any day they hadn’t spent a cent.

I’m in charge of keeping track of our finances onboard. So I carefully note every peso and dollar we spend—from the $2 EC (77 cents) we paid for a round trip for two to St. George’s from Lower Woburn, to the $766.90 TT ($124) for a major provisioning in Port of Spain. (There are an appalling number of entries marked “beer.”) At the end of each month, I tally it all up in an Excel spreadsheet on the laptop, and report how we’ve done compared to our plucked-almost-from-thin-air budget back in Toronto.

Early on, the monthly bottom lines are scary—mostly because of the equipment category, as Steve continues to find stuff that
Receta
absolutely
has
to have. But by the time we reach Grenada, the bottom lines have swung the other way, and for a few months we’re actually well under budget.

T
he 75-mile crossing from Trinidad back to Grenada is ugly.

We leave about two in the afternoon, with the new
Snack
on deck, knowing we’ll be watching the sun rise as we approach the anchorage at Hog Island. But a succession of squalls—nowhere in the forecast—starts soon after we are through the Boca, the mouth leading out of Trinidad’s protected inshore waters. The 2
A
.
M
. note in the log is a succinct one-worder: “Awful.” We have to reef the sails because the wind is so strong—but between squalls, it slacks off, and we corkscrew limply up and down the waves, lacking enough drive to slice through them. This jerky up, down, and sideways motion is too much even for iron-stomach Steve. We take turns steering and leaning over the side to puke, attached to the boat by our safety harnesses so there’s no danger of losing one of us overboard along with our lunch.

I had been looking forward to making the passage on this particular night, when the Leonid meteor shower is passing overhead. But watching the sky for any length of time exacerbates the seasickness: When I look up, the only obvious light is the one at the top of our mast, describing huge arcs across the heavens. Baaaacccckkk and forrrthhhh. Baaaacccckkk and forrrthhhh.
Blech.
I don’t look up very often.

And this is how I arrive back in Grenada, where the sun is rising on a glorious tropical day: dehydrated and exhausted by a night of vomiting, and seriously depressed. After my bow-to-stern, every-inch-of-woodwork cleaning in Trinidad, the boat has been trashed. Not only is there wet clothing strewn everywhere, but waves found their way—yet again—through the leaky forepeak hatch.

“
Receta, Receta
. This is
La Esmeralda
. Welcome back to Grenada.” We’re still a mile offshore when the radio booms to life.
Receta
’s shape has been spotted on the horizon, and the call from
La Es
is followed by other welcomes. We’ve come home.

T
he road to Dingis’s house is as steep as ever. But now, in late November, after another month-and-a-half of the wet season, the landscape is an even denser green. The flamboyant trees, blazing red a few months ago, now sport 2-foot-long pea-green pods; a few months from now, they’ll be “shak-shaks,” hard and brown, their seeds loose inside, perfect for shaking to a soca beat. The air seems freshly washed, with the unreal clarity of a retouched postcard. The wet season doesn’t mean gray days of constant drizzle; the sun still blazes most of the time, with rain dancing down for only an hour or so in the afternoon. Then the sun returns—with such ferocity that the potholes steam like volcanic craters. Perhaps because we’ve been away and haven’t seen it in a while, or perhaps because we’re just so glad to
be
here, the road seems lovelier than ever.

Gennel had turned fifteen while we were in Trinidad, and we’re eager to deliver her birthday gift. We had thought hard and lingered long over its selection. What would a fifteen-year-old girl like? What would a fifteen-year-old
Grenadian
girl like? Eventually, we settled on a wide woven copper bracelet, made by a Trini craftsman; we both agreed it would look lovely against her skin. Of course, we have a souvenir for Dingis, too, a brightly painted ceramic jar decorated with Trinidad’s national bird, the scarlet ibis.