Nine Days of Grenada

Life has gotten away from my ability to write about it. During the past month, we’ve been all over the place with friends and family who have visited here. To catch up, I’m going to post nine installments over the next few weeks, not in chronological or ranked order, but with each piece centered on a place, an experience, some history, and some thoughts. Nine Days of Grenada.

Day One: The Leapers

In the beginning, there were volcanoes. Starting around two million years ago, volcanic eruptions emerged from the ocean about 500 miles north of today’s Venezuela. They rose to over 2,500 feet above the sea formed the 120-square-mile island of Grenada into peaks and folds and crater lakes.

Then, plants and animals arrived from South America, finding home on the now-dormant volcano. Rain fell heavily in the higher elevations, so rivers tumbled down the mountains and rainforests grew. In the lower coastal areas, leguminous trees and cactus species adapted to drier conditions.

The first people on Grenada were Taino (or Arawak), an indigenous South American people who arrived maybe three thousand years ago. Around 1000 AD, the Kalinago (or Carib) people arrived and either killed or absorbed the Taino. The Kalinago people guarded the island when Columbus first glimpsed it in 1498, and they chased off the British attempt to settle here in 1609.

In 1650, the French arrived. They spent the next seven years taking the island from the Kalinago people, who put up a strong resistance. It culminated in the French pursuit of the last small group of Kalinago women, children, and men to a precipice over the sea at the north end. When the French closed around them, they jumped to their deaths to avoid capture. This cliff and the town that grew up around it bear the name Sauteurs (sah-teers)—Leapers.

We decide to take the bus the length of the island to stand at that spot. Leaper’s Hill. We hail a number one bus to St. George’s terminal, then get on a number five bound for Sauteurs. The bus passengers include several small children and one baby, all with their moms, as well as a few young men and one older woman who snoozes in the backseat beside Andrew, also snoozing. The ride takes almost an hour and a half, long enough to feel some sort of camaraderie with our fellow passengers.

It’s after noon when we tumble out on main street, Sauteurs. The sun is hot and wind is fresh and salty. I walk out on a long pier to photograph Leaper’s Hill from below. Then we find lunch—a couple of chicken rotis (bone-in) and some bakery items including a meatloaf (flat bread with a thin layer of maybe pepperoni in the middle of it) and a piece of fry bread folded like a taco filled with shredded saltfish, cabbage, and carrots.

We carry the lunch up to the St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church cemetery, which fills the space up to the cliff edge. We sit at the base of the Leaper’s Hill monument, chewing our food and thinking of the people who jumped from here.

The story’s specifics vary. Maybe it was thirty people; maybe the men took the children into their arms as they leapt. Their voices fell from the narrative, so we cannot know. I imagine their despair. Their desperate choice.

Today, my fried saltfish bread taco is delicious. We rinse the roti from Stella’s fingers before walking back to town via the ruins of a previous structure, a crumbling covered deck overlooking the same leap. From there, it does not take long to walk the length of Sauteurs to Irvin’s Bay, where Andrew spent a childhood summer. Stella fiddles with hermit crabs until we’re ready to head home.

On the road south, our number five bus driver handles the bus like a go-kart, at maximal speed with plenty of steering wheel action. A few months ago, this ride would have twisted me into spasms of panic. Now I am grinning as I flop around in the very back corner. I am loose and relaxed, catching air on the bigger bumps.

We careen along the coast between Sauteurs and St. George’s. The driver lays on the horn, passing another bus, then a car, then whipping around a curve. Everything rattles. Reggae fills in the cracks. The bus stops to lose or gain passengers, a sack of potatoes, some crates of beer bottles. At one stop, a woman reaches out the window to hand off two tickets for Reggae-fest to a waiting teenager.

A man climbs aboard with a gleaming hand-carved wooden cane and greying locs. He grins and rants about music and The White Man, then he seat-dances with dramatic arm and hand poses and big facial expressions until all of us sitting behind him are smiling.

When the bus comes to a stop at the St. George’s terminal, I feel like I’ve been in a vigorous massage chair inside a sauna. I walk up to the market for onions and callaloo, which come with a marriage proposal from the old man selling them from a grocery cart. I continue down the street and buy a squash and fresh thyme and a pineapple before getting the relatively placid number one bus back to our neighborhood.

Later, I see that although I walked less than a mile today, my phone has recorded 4.4 miles of turbulence. It seems accurate. Distance has been traveled.