An Embarrassment of Mangoes (29 page)

Friends in publishing send her the books, and she in turn operates an informal lending library for friends on the island, Sue explained, as we sipped Dennis’s excellent rum punch. She’s also got an adult literacy program going, and already has a couple of graduates; she’s not just teaching people to read, but also teaching a few islanders how to teach reading. Dennis, meanwhile, helps other ex-pats build their houses. And clearly these are people who love to entertain, with a house meant for entertaining.

Still, the old Ann would never have dreamed of imposing on virtual strangers for Christmas dinner. But when Sue reiterated the invitation on our return to Bequia, the new Ann accepted with alacrity.

Fourteen of us gather at The View on Christmas, an eclectic assortment of ex-pats who live here and visitors who’ve been coming to Bequia during the holidays for years. Dennis has been smoking a turkey over mango wood since early morning, and the smell rising from the barbecue is insanely delicious. By the time he’s moved it to a big platter on the kitchen counter to carve, everyone is gathered around him, to sneak bits of crisp skin and moist meat. The rest of us have brought the accompaniments, a combination of traditional North American Christmas-dinner dishes and island cuisine. There are mashed potatoes, gravy, and cranberry sauce—and baked christophene with cheese, and rum punch—and French wines.

As the sun sets and the harbor darkens, Christmas lights blaze from the boats. Filled with holiday optimism that there would be no sudden squalls, we had switched
Receta
’s indoor-only lights on when we left. Now, I can pick out her colored pinpricks far across the harbor. Our beloved home.

“Thank you for the loveliest Christmas,” Steve says as he kisses me goodnight. It
was
the loveliest Christmas—and I had been worried about it being lonely and disappointing, far from family and friends. But in our phone conversations back home, everyone, to a person, had described how hectic the season was: how rushed they were, how tired, so much to do, the shopping, wrapping, baking, decorating, cooking, partying. And I realized that only by sailing a couple of thousand miles away had we succeeded in gracefully escaping the usual competitive celebrating. Instead of doing frantic last-minute holiday preparations, we went to the beach on Christmas Eve afternoon, where we blissfully swam (and finally painted our registration number on the new
Snack
). I baked just one type of Christmas cookie, not dozens, and—limited by what I could find in the local markets and
Receta
’s storage lockers—made unelaborate goodies to take to a Christmas Eve gathering on a neighboring boat, and to Sue and Dennis on Christmas day. People still gobbled them up and asked for the recipes. This was the simplest Christmas ever, and we loved the feeling.

W
e’ve declined invitations to go out on New Year’s Eve—Old Year’s Night, it’s called here—opting to see the new year in alone together on
Receta
. This year has given us a closeness—a pleasure in each other’s company—that I know many couples yearn for. We trust each other too, in a different, deeper way. After all, day in and day out now, we’re regularly trusting each other with our very lives. Steve has confidence in me—he’s told me he trusts my boat handling and sail handling in all sorts of weather and waves, whether he’s asleep or strapped to the mast, tucking another reef in the sail—which in turn gives me confidence in myself.

We talk together more, about more things. The past. The future. Our hopes, fears (still mostly mine), dreams. And the weather, always still the weather. We discuss, in detail, what we’re seeing, and what we’re reading. (Our worst choice for onboard reading material so far: Sebastian Junger’s
The Perfect Storm
.) I laugh now at one of my concerns before we set off on the trip: Without the stimulus of our related jobs, I worried that Steve and I would have little to talk about each night at dinner. Ludicrous. Removed from the breathless pace of our old life, we have created space for a breadth of ideas and interests. Music. Food. Fish. Stars. Trees. Birds. Insects. Shells. Coral. Flowers. I am more aware of the moods and rhythms of the natural world around me than I ever have been, or probably ever will be.

This trip is allowing the sides of ourselves we like best to flourish.

Perhaps most amazingly, I have slowed down. Time has become more fluid, less rigid. Our days unfold; they don’t just
bing-bang
, do-this, do-that happen. I lime. “I’m content to do
nothing
for stretches,” I write in one of my last journal entries of the year (shortly after the one where I clock the Christmas winds at 40-plus knots and describe a wakeful night of boats dragging all around us). “I can just lay on the settee with my legs stretched out in front of me, watching the sky through the hatch. I can stare at the water for hours, utterly content.” Me. Unbelievable. How will I cope in the real world?

To which Steve responds, “This
is
the real world.”

Here, to our great satisfaction, we are no longer defined by our jobs. In our former life, we would meet people and one of the first questions would be: “What do you do?” To people in our new world, we have no last names and no professions. We are merely “Ann and Steve on
Receta
”—and that says it all.

We are saying good-bye tonight to a difficult year for first-time cruisers. Its fourteen named storms, from Alex to Nicole, ten of them hurricanes, have given the year a dubious distinction: It has made 1995–98 the most active hurricane period
ever
.

In our old neighborhood, the tradition at the stroke of twelve on New Year’s was to go out on the front porch and bang spoons on pots and pans. If we banged pots and pans in Admiralty Bay at midnight, no one would hear us. Here the boats sound their horns, long loud lavish blasts, and shoot flares into the sky, maritime fireworks. A man-shaped silhouette sends up a flare from a nearby sailboat, but it plummets straight back down onto his foredeck, where it glows like a campfire on the fiberglass until he can scamper forward and douse it. We fill a bucket with seawater—just in case—and cuddle in the cockpit as we watch the flares illuminate the tail end of the year.

Cream of Callaloo Soup

We’ve never met a bowl of callaloo soup we didn’t like, but we were particularly partial to the one made by Jane, the owner and cook at Rosemount Plantation House, part of a working estate at the northern end of Grenada. Unlike more traditional versions, such as the one we had at Daphne’s, Jane’s is a creamed soup, and completely vegetarian. She came out of the kitchen after lunch and was happy to share her recipe—in reality, a skeleton of a recipe that I developed with a little trial and error. I borrowed the decadent crabmeat-and-cream garnish from another version that we also loved.

A swizzle stick—like the one Ed gave us for mixing ’ti punch—is traditionally used to “purée” the callaloo. An electric hand mixer will give you the same texture. You can also use a blender or food processor, although this will create a smoother soup.

And if you can’t find callaloo, Jane suggested spinach as a fine substitute.

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 large onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, chopped

1 stalk celery, with leaves, chopped

1 small cubanelle or green bell pepper, chopped

1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 bunch callaloo, ribs removed and leaves chopped, or about 1 pound spinach, large stems removed

2 cups evaporated milk

1 cup (approx.) vegetable stock or water

4 whole cloves

Dash hot sauce

Squeeze lemon juice

1 cup cooked crabmeat

1⁄4 cup heavy cream or crème fraîche

1. In a heavy saucepan, heat oil. Add onion, garlic, celery, and pepper and cook over medium heat until softened but not brown.

2. Sprinkle with thyme and season with salt and pepper. Add chopped callaloo or spinach and stir to combine. Add evaporated milk, stock, or water, and cloves, and cook over low heat for about 45 minutes.

3. Remove cloves. Purée soup until fairly smooth. (There should still be distinct pieces of callaloo or spinach.)

4. If soup is too thick, thin with additional milk, stock, or water. Taste and adjust seasoning, adding a dash of hot sauce and a squeeze of lemon as desired.

5. Pour soup into warm bowls. Sprinkle 1⁄4 cup crabmeat on each, and swirl in a spoonful of cream.

Serves 4

Spicy Island Gingerbread

Gingerbread always reminds me of Christmas, but this version is quite different from the stuff used for holiday houses and people. It’s a dark, almost chocolatey-looking cake, very moist, and not too sweet. The four types of ginger—fresh, dried, crystallized, and ginger beer—give it a really spicy, almost hot, kick.

3⁄4 cup dark molasses

3⁄4 cup packed dark brown sugar

1⁄2 cup butter

1⁄2 cup ginger beer

2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger root

2 tablespoons chopped crystallized (candied) ginger

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1⁄2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1⁄2 teaspoon salt

2 eggs, beaten

2 tablespoons dark rum

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a 9-by-9-inch pan and cover bottom with baking parchment.

2. Combine first six ingredients in a large saucepan. Stir over low heat until butter melts, then set aside to cool.

3. In a bowl, combine dry ingredients and spices.

4. Stir eggs and rum into cooled molasses mixture, then stir in flour mixture. Mix well.

5. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake in preheated oven for about 30–40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Makes about 20 squares

To Leeward at Last

The Leeward Islands span some 200 miles and include 10 major islands operating as different nations. The variety is unparalleled. Many areas make for easy, comfortable cruising: others are more tricky. There are islands where you need both patience and luck to find a comfortable anchorage.

CHRIS DOYLE,
CRUISING GUIDE TO THE LEEWARD
ISLANDS
, 1998–99 EDITION

When Christopher Columbus presented the findings of his second voyage to Queen Isabella, he used a crumpled sheet of paper to describe the terrain of Dominica. From offshore at sunset, this island looks like soft piles of emerald crushed velvet, haphazardly dropped by a wanton seamstress. The high, rounded mountains poke through pink-tinged clouds, each peak separated from its looming neighbors by deeply cut valleys.

If only it weren’t for the swell, the constant, almost unseen undulations of the otherwise oily-calm sea, the area south of Roseau, Dominica, would be a perfect—and popular—anchorage. This, I’ve decided, is how God keeps the most glorious parts of the Caribbean uncrowded and pristine: Weed out all but the most committed by first making the beauty spots tricky to enter and then uncomfortable once you arrive.
Receta
is rolling and clanking from side to side in the swell, irritating when I’m onboard, but worse—nauseating, even—when I’m in the water, trying to scrub the sea scum off the waterline during my usual sunset swim.

A local kid is paddling toward me in the gilded late-day light. He’s lying stomach-down on a battered white surfboard, arms windmilling steadily. The board, a scarred remnant of some ancient cast-off windsurfer, coasts to a stop a few feet from
Receta
and the boy sits up. Barely a teenager, wearing just a pair of soggy shorts, he asks shyly, “Do you need bread? I bring you fresh bread in the morning.”

I tread water with my toothbrush in one hand and a sponge in the other.
Of course
we need bread; we
always
need bread. And having just arrived here after a boisterous sail from the north end of Martinique,
Receta
roaring like a freight train across the 26 miles of open water, I’m in no mood to bake. But I’m highly skeptical: What condition will this kid’s bread be in after being transported a quarter-mile offshore on a chewed-up surfboard in a rolly ocean? I decide to pass the buck: “Steve, should we have some bread delivered in the morning?”

“Of course,” he calls down from the cockpit. Given a choice, Steve
always
opts to support local commerce. “What’s your name?” he asks the kid.

“Brian. I be here by seven, half-past seven, tomorrow morning.” And with that he lies down and windmills away.

I’m dubious, but I keep my doubts to myself, not wanting to give Steve another excuse to remind me of Tyrrel Bay, off the island of Carriacou. There, a battered wooden skiff had pulled alongside as we were anchoring at dusk, on our way to Grenada. “Do you need anything?” the older man inside had asked. “Bananas, mangrove oysters, French wine, beer . . .” He’d rowed out the better part of half a mile from shore to see if he could do any business with us. I had already issued orders that we would never eat mangrove oysters on
Receta
, having seen what flowed past them in Luperón. And although we had heard the prices on wine and beer were good here, since it’s usually “duty free”—meaning smuggled—we were already well stocked. Steve, however, was insistent that we buy
something
to make the man’s row worthwhile. “Okay, we can always use some bananas.”

“And how about a dozen limes, too?” Steve added. There were none in the skiff, but the man quickly assured us he would return to shore to get them. Steve paid him for the whole order upfront.

As he rowed off, I bet Steve that we’d never see the man again. But the new Steve believes in the essential goodness of people. He was sure the guy would be back.

Darkness fell. I was making dinner in the galley, and Steve was plotting the next day’s course on the chart. I’d already suggested, twice, that enough time had elapsed for him to pay up. Then we heard the knock on the hull; the rowboat was alongside, and limes were tumbling onto our side deck—way more than a dozen—joining the mound of bananas already resting there. But this was what our money bought, and so this was what the man delivered. I felt terrible, and Steve of course didn’t let me forget it. For my penance, before bed that night I had to sit in the cockpit and obsessively wash a gazillion limes and two-gazillion bananas with my bug-busting bleach-and-water solution. (Note to self: When you’re washing in the dark, never let the sap from the oozing stem ends of freshly picked bananas get on anything such as cushions, hands, or clothes. The rest of my penance was figuring out how to remove the gummy residue, which turned black and stuck around for weeks.)

T
he soft knock on the hull comes shortly after 7. Brian, again clad only in a pair of wet shorts, hands me a perfectly dry bag, with five miniature soft-crusted baguettes inside, still warm from the oven and giving off the most wonderful smoky aroma. Their arrival seems magical: How had he managed to keep them warm, completely dry, and in perfect shape on a
surfboard
?

Almost the whole bag disappears at breakfast, the fragrant bread slathered with Trinidadian pineapple jam. The short loaves are like French
ficelles
—skinny baguettes—but their narrow ends grow plump in the middle. They have clearly been shaped by hand and baked in a wood-burning oven. I imagine Brian’s mother forming them in the early-morning darkness, so they’ll be ready for him to load on his surfboard at dawn. For bread in the islands, they carried a premium price—about $3 for the bag of five—but I would happily buy them again and again.

Therein lies the problem. At sunset, I keep an eager eye for Brian’s surfboard as I swim. But he doesn’t paddle by. We look for him and his board on shore the next morning. “Do you know Brian, the bread boy?” I ask at the hotel where we tie the dinghy. The answer is a definite, even quizzical, no. “Maybe his mom’s baking stuff to sell at the market,” Steve suggests; it’s Friday, and Saturday is the big market day in Roseau, Dominica’s capital.

No luck. The Roseau market is a profusion of flowers. People cradle enormous bunches of leggy birds of paradise and hold aloft long stems of ruby-red wild ginger like fanciful umbrellas as they make their way through the crowd. Obscene crimson anthuriums, with waxy erect spikes, poke out of yellow plastic buckets, next to fuschia bottle-brush flowers, which look like the kind of cleaning implement a fairy godmother would use. Much of Dominica is rain forest—the mountains trap moisture from the trade winds, giving the island at least 300 inches of rainfall a year in parts of the interior—and more than 1,000 species of flowering plants grow furiously here. There are more tropical flowers on a single market day in Roseau than I have ever seen.

But there are no long, thin, dark-crusted loaves.

On subsequent days, we poke our noses into the little shops that line the road into the capital, hoping to find Brian—or at least his mom’s rolls. We buy several bags of lookalike loaves. None has the same smoky taste.

C
hristopher Columbus named this island for the Lord’s Day,
Domingo
in Spanish, because he discovered it on a Sunday. His brother Diego, meanwhile, gave the same name for the same reason to part of the island of Hispaniola, to the northwest. To avoid confusion, one is officially called the Commonwealth of Dominica and the other, the Dominican Republic. It doesn’t. Mail is sometimes misdelivered 600 miles in the wrong direction. Both islands, too, have a nasty way of enticing people to spend longer than they planned.

Dominica is the southernmost of the Leeward Islands group, which includes Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Antigua, Nevis, St. Kitts, Statia, St. Barts, Anguilla, and St. Martin as it proceeds north. More so than the others, Dominica’s precipitous slopes and incised valleys continue below the sea, creating an underwater landscape with towering pinnacles and steep drop-offs that hold as great a profusion of life as the rain forests on the mountain slopes: hundreds of species of sponges and corals, moray eels poking out from rock hidey-holes, seahorses floating under ledges, arrow crabs with legs no thicker than a needle, and the rarely seen, comic-looking frogfish. We spend one day diving, and then another, flying weightlessly between the mountains that extend beneath us into infinite blue. One dive site is called “Abyme” in Creole: the Abyss.

By the time
Receta
reaches Portsmouth, at the north end of the island, it’s Saturday again, hooray, another market day. We dinghy into the beach without breakfast—we’re out of bread, of course—so I’m hoping we’ll be greeted by the smell of baking. Instead, we’re greeted by the smell of frying fat. “I can’t believe I’m eating this, and so early in the morning,” I tell Steve, my mouth full of greasy, crispy, hot-peppery fried fish cake and fried (of course) bake.

“Yeah, wonderful, isn’t it?”

This market meanders through the streets of town: People set out whatever they have for sale on groundcloths or tables at the roadside—a pile of grapefruit on one cloth, some wedges of West Indian pumpkin on the next. Although the market covers more territory than the one in Roseau, it’s much smaller, much more of a local affair, like a friendly neighborhood street sale. The lady at one table, from whom I’m buying a cabbage, doesn’t have any change. She points Steve toward another vendor, who not only breaks the small bill, but gives him a bouquet of parsley, on the house. Not to be outdone, the cabbage lady then insists I take along two sweet potatoes and a shaggy brown rooty thing free.

I don’t have a clue what the shaggy rooty thing is, with its coarse brown hair growing between a series of circles inscribed around its girth. I’ve seen them before, but the truth is I still can’t tell one gnarled rooty brown thing from another.

I’m fairly certain it’s not a yam or a sweet potato, two other gnarled rooty brown things. Although the two names are used interchangeably in North America, they are two entirely different vegetables in the West Indies. A cruising friend discovered this to his dismay after he asked for yams in the market and used them to make a traditional family recipe for a cruisers’ potluck Thanksgiving dinner. From firsthand experience, I can report that tropical yams are a very odd mix with marshmallows. (One could argue, as Steve did privately afterward, that marshmallows are a bad mix with anything except a campfire and a stick.) If you want the tuber that’s sweet and orange, you buy sweet potatoes; if you want the tuber that’s white, bland, starchy, and fairly dry, you buy yams.

“What’s this?” I hold up the rooty thing. “Tannia,” the market lady says. “Just boil it, like a christophene.”

A little farther down the street, a woman squats behind a tarp covered with more hairy rooty things. They look like large tannias. Maybe they
are
tannias, and she’s just a better gardener. Even though I don’t want to buy any—the tannia I have is enough to experiment with this week—I have to ask. “Dasheen,” she tells me, the tuberous root of the plant whose heart-shaped leaves are callaloo. And she launches into a dissertation on its preparation. “Wear gloves,” she says. In her strong Creole-laced speech, it’s not exactly clear why, but it seems to have something to do with fibers. It’s also not clear what I’ll be doing with the spoon she tells me to use. I hope I’ll be able to figure it out once I cut inside—because what is clear is that I
will
be buying a couple. Once I’ve got it cleaned and cut into pieces, she says, just boil it and serve it as part of provision—“with a little liquor before,” she adds, with a wink at Steve.

“And you be sure and come back and tell me how you like dasheen.”

A couple of nights later, I decide to cook the hairy rooty things to make my own provision to accompany citrus-marinated chicken. Before I tackle the dasheen, I pull on a pair of our disposable latex gloves. But it seems perfectly inoffensive, and I can’t figure out why I’m wearing protective clothing and wielding a spoon. My cookbooks are no help, though the one Steve bought me for Christmas offers the following: Vegetables that grow below ground should be cooked with the lid on; those that grow above, with the lid off. I cut the dasheen, the two sweet potatoes, the tannia, and a big green plantain into pieces, and—majority rules—boil them all, lid on, until they’re soft.

The citrus chicken, done in the oven, is excellent, the sweet potatoes are good, the plantain is rubbery, and the dasheen, to put it charitably, is an acquired taste. The tannia is completely inedible. Clearly, more study with the market ladies is called for.

S
ail a scant 30 miles and be catapulted into another culture. The effects of geographic proximity are overridden in the West Indies by the effects of history: the results of the power struggles between European nations. And nowhere is this clearer than in the contrast between Dominica and its neighbors to the north and south, Guadeloupe and Martinique.

The “discovery” of Dominica didn’t particularly excite Columbus, and Spain never showed much interest in settling the island—no doubt deterred by Chris’s crumpled paper and the understandably less-than-welcoming attitude of the fierce Caribs who already lived there. French settlers eventually arrived in the early eighteenth century and imported slaves from Africa to run their sugar plantations. During a series of spats in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the island passed back and forth between the French and British, until 1805, when French warships made their last attempt to enter Roseau’s harbor—disguising themselves as British by flying the Union Jack—and were defeated once and for all. Dominica remained British until it was granted independence in 1978.

Martinique and Guadeloupe were sighted by Columbus on the same voyage that he sighted Dominica, but these held no interest to the Spanish either. As with Dominica, the French subsequently moved in—but here they remained in control, despite takeover attempts (very brief) by the British. Both are still part of France, officially classed as French overseas
départements
. And this is obvious: They look, sound, feel, and taste different than their mutual neighbor, Dominica.