Geodesic Culture
Robert Hettinga
May 20, 2024
Seafeathers Bay,
Anguilla, BWI
It’s green here.
We’ve been getting a lot of rain here. Well, a lot of rain for the elbow of the Caribbean anyway. You get a lot of weather here in general, the biggest hurricane in Caribbean history happening just nine years ago. Cat five because there’s no cat six, to bowdlerize the joke about a nitro express rifle round. We all learned to see the world at 220 miles an hour that morning. Telephone poles broken off as far as the eye can see, newfound appreciation for reinforced concrete construction and all that.
Meteorology being second only to open sloop racing as the national sport here, my list of weather bookmarks is as long as my arm and all, I eventually noticed what I called the Anguilla bubble. You look at the rain on radar, harder since the closest radome on St. Maarten blew away nine years ago, and rain hits a wall about six or seven miles out and doesn’t fall here.
The resulting climate is, again, neologistically, west Texas with a beach. Tropical savanna with thirty three beaches, to put a finer point on it.
The resulting culture is pretty much West Texan as well, though the calypsonian version of Texas twang (drawls are for Orange you see, not Amarillo, where they twang) is not so apparent here, at least for us non-belongers.
Anguilla is, like West Texas, a tough place. The slaves brought here were first turned loose a couple or three days a week to tend to their provision grounds and fish traps, and, eventually manumitted outright, or certainly abandoned, when actual colonial economics failed outright, through proprietary death by disease, and certainly by drought and the lack of arable land. The running hypothesis here is that Anguilla rose out of the sea as a fossil coral reef by the Caribbean plate shoving up against the Atlantic, currently isolated from its neighbors by one temporarily warming interglacial or another, and that, strangely enough, all the actual dirt got blown here off the Sahara over the ages.
Kinda looks that way when you look at the small patches of agricultural bottom land, dusty and orange, signifying iron, I suppose. Hell, there’s a bunch of bottom land stuck way up in the sky over on Saba, so much so, they named the largest town up there for it: The Bottom.
Most of Anguilla’s bottom, if you will, is situated in the middle of the island, in The Valley, the only town worthy of the name, except maybe for Island Harbor, the rest of the concentrated populations here are villages, and are explicitly named as such. Sandy Ground Village, Pond Ground Village, and so on. Lots of names describing the kind of soil. Where one has one’s provision ground, you see, Stoney Ground, etc.
People have lived here about as long as people have lived in Boston, for instance. Even had commerce with Grand Banks cod fishermen trading salt fish for salt, which can be picked out of various salt ponds, of which there are almost as many as beaches. Behind any appreciable beach is a salt pond, even.
So, for some reason or other, La Nina, most likely, we got a bunch of retrograde rainwater from the Orinoco or someplace down there, and we’ve gotten a lot of rain through the back door of the Anguillian Bubble. So it’s green here.
We have been driving the poor house here to rack and ruin, and only go after the barely-cut bush about three or four times a year. Been about six months, now, and the yard is now festooned with a bunch of locust bushes on their way to becoming trees. Gotta fix that.
Ran into the guy who re-roofed our house after life at 220 mph, loading his pickup at the grocery store. Having fallen off another roof and broken his back sometime before he hired a crew and did ours, it turned out he’s doing gardening now. And the odd construction management job. Being he’s probably 80 years old, that makes sense. Seeing as he’d been raised on a southern Illinois farm on the Kentucky border, he’s not about to stop working, so I’m thinking, okay, Mrs. RAH and I are thinking, that maybe he’d scare up a small army of unindicted co-conspirators and attack our Locust tree infestation. Prolly a good idea. It’s pretty green here, and the yard has gotten outta hand.
Finally, having thrown the requisite dosh at Elon, I figure I’ll try to start writing again. We’ll see how long that lasts.
I’m prompted by yelling at clouds while listening to Bedford and Davidson on Poulos, and Lionel Shriver on Nick Dickson this morning, sitting at the gas station drinking breakfast, consisting of a couple cans of white Monster. Something I do almost every day at seven when they open up. I’ve learned through hard experience not to keep the stuff in the house, or I’d drink it all in vast quantities. ADD and caffeine do compliment each other, but not that much.
Probably not going to talk about the weather in Anguilla much, except when it’s extremely interesting, and maybe not so much about Anguilla even, which is becoming very interesting, but shitting where you sleep has never been agreeable to practice, as the man said...
“... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience.” -- Edward Gibbon, ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’
Cheers,
RAH