Bahamian Bird Tuesday

In honor of this being my 692nd post and it being Tuesday (and because I can) I hereby declare today to be Bahamian Bird Tuesday.

This is a male Western Spindalis, known in birding circles as Spindalis zena. It's a large (16.5cm), forest-dwelling bird and there's some heated debate among birders and taxonomists over whether it should be classified as a tanager or a finch. I side with the tanager partisans on this one, though that is not a popular view.

Despite the hoopla surrounding its classification, there are few thrills to compare with seeing one of these guys alight on the branch of a Gumbo Limbo tree while you're enjoying a quiet cup of coffee as the sun comes up.

Witch moth or money bat?

This is Ascalapha odorata, known in The Bahamas as a bat moth or a money bat. A. odorata is the largest moth in the western hemisphere and it can be found across Mesoamerica, the Caribbean and The Bahamas. Sometimes, they show up in the extreme southern US, though I have never seen one here.

A. odorata has a wingspan between six and seven inches, so they are hard to miss. Just about everywhere they're found, they're commonly called such names as witch moth, black witch, death moth and death butterfly. They are considered to be a harbinger of doom and in rural Mexico, getting one in the house portends the death of a member of that household. Pretty macabre stuff to attribute to a harmless moth.

Well, in The Bahamas they are everywhere. Inside the house, outside the house, day and night, they are as much a part of life on the Out Islands as land crabs and mosquitoes. In what I take to be a profound commentary on the very essence of Bahamian culture, these moths are treated as a welcome guest.

Bahamians call them money bats and having one fly into the house is a very good thing. In fact, having one come in means that you will come into an unexpected windfall. Having one hit you on the face as it comes in is even more lucky. In the last week, I got hit in the face by enough money bats that I ought to be rolling in the dough in a matter of days.

For a group of people who have been and continue to be so completely shafted by the world events that swirl around them, I think it speaks volumes about their national character. I went to a self improvement seminar ages ago and the speaker kept urging us to "choose what's so." It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me at the time, but in the years since I've come to see it as a really great thing to practice. If I can't change something about my life or the role I play in it, why not treat that something as if I chose it rather than moaning and wailing about having it forced upon me? If I'm surrounded by black moths with six inch wingspans and I can't do a thing about it, why not welcome them in? Why not indeed?

I may be completely out to lunch with this, just another stupid American who's hopelessly out of his element there. And so what if I am? It's a great honor to be granted a peek into the culture and lives of a group of people who are located closer to me than Atlanta is, yet who exist in a world I can barely imagine.

Sunday mornings with Father Jerome

It's Sunday morning and my brain is jelly. In a week I'll be completely unplugged and unreachable in my idea of paradise and I am dying to get out of here. My great pals at My Out Islands recently produced a video about my beloved Cat Island and watching it isn't helping me concentrate on what I need to get done this week.

They did a fantastic job and it really captures the off-the-beaten path spirit of the place. Cat Island and the rest of the Out Islands are everything The Atlantis Resort is not. The Ministry of Tourism refers to the Out Islands as the real Bahamas and I can't agree more. Life's hard out there and as a visitor, the payment for the hardships endured is a nearly hallucinatory quiet.

That video's interesting too in that I know everybody who's in it. Tony Armbrister owns the house where I stay and Captain Tom lives next door. I love it too that they show some scenes of Cat Island's glamorous and exciting night life. Well it's glamorous and exciting if your idea of a good time is a guitar and a bonfire on the beach.

The video doesn't explain the story of Father Jerome and the Hermitage very well though. The Hermitage is the name of the ruin on the summit of Mount Alvernia (elevation 206 feet!) the hostess is walking around toward the end of that video.

The Out Islands of The Bahamas maintain their history orally and what follows is the story of The Hermitage as it's been told to me. I have scoured the Internet looking for more information on the man embodied in those stone structures, but alas, I think the story of Father Jerome and his Hermitage exists only in the late night stories of the people of Cat Island.

The Hermitage was built by a man from Ireland once named John Cyril Hawes but known later as Father Jerome. John Cyril Hawes was an architect and Anglican Priest who came to The Bahamas in 1909 by way of Australia to build churches for the Church of England. In Clarence Town on Long Island, he oversaw the construction of what became his final Anglican church, the Church of St. Paul. Something happened to Hawes during that construction project and exactly what happened is lost to history. What is known is that as soon as his Anglican church was completed, Father Hawes converted to Roman Catholicism and began to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood. He entered the seminary as Father John Cyril Hawes and he left as Father Jerome.

Once ordained, he sailed back to Long Island and broke ground on a Catholic Church in Clarence Town. Father Jerome's Church of St. Peter was completed in 1939 and still stands in sight of John Cyril Hawes' Church of St. Paul.

Father Jerome's Church of St. Peter, Long Island, The Bahamas

Father Jerome then sailed onto Cat Island. He set about immediately to build the still-standing Church of the Holy Redeemer in Freetown. Shortly after its completion he started construction on his Hermitage, which is where he would live out the last of his days in seclusion. Father Jerome died at the age of 80 in 1956.

The Hermitage, as it's come to be known, is a monastery in miniature. Father Jerome built it by himself with stones he carried, one by one, to the summit of Mount Alvernia. To climb up the stairs he cut into the hillside, to follow the Stations of the Cross he carved into his nearly vertical walking path, to stretch out on the stone cot where he slept is to look deep into the character of a man. It's not possible to walk away unaffected. Because the Hermitage is located so far from anything, some of his personal effects are still up there. The Tabernacle he carved and painted sits just where he left it on a small altar. His inscriptions, in Latin and Italian, are as legible today as they were when he carved them.

Cat Island seems to have cast the same spell on Father Jerome as it has on me. Every time I go back, I can't shake the idea that I should somehow just drop everything and go hide out on an island hillside somewhere in the Atlantic. But then I look around at everything Father Jerome built and realize that I just don't have it in me. I'm not made of the same stuff. So I go back again and again and I listen to the stories and I marvel at the land and I sit and I watch and I just let it be.

OK, who's ready for some of my vacation photos?!

This is looking down the footpath Father Jerome used to carry up the stone from which he built his Hermitage.

I am looking up at the back of the Hermitage from about three-quarters of the way up Father Jerome's path.

The last step on the path features a final word before entering The Hermitage proper, "Weep not for me but for yourselves and your children."

The Hermitage. The bell tower still has Father Jerome's bronze bell in it and the tower's attached to his one-room, one-pew church.

This is me standing at the rear of The Hermitage. Father Jerome's church is connected to his living quarters and food storage rooms.

This is one of Father Jerome's majolica plaques that's been mortared into the wall of his church. In Italian, it reads "Praised be to you Lord through the moon and stars."

When Father Jerome knelt to pray in his church he faced a window and here's what he saw.

This is the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Freetown, Cat Island. It was the last church built by Father Jerome.

Father Jerome's work shows a really strong Moorish influence and it's unmistakable in this detail shot of the Holy Redeemer Church.

The Narthex of the Holy Redeemer Church is decorated in primitive frescoes. The frescoes were painted by Bahamian villagers under Father Jerome's supervision. They are fading now and I think it's a riot that someone taped up a home made welcome sign.

At the risk of being indelicate, I need to gush about a product I just discovered

As I mention all the time, I've been going to an isolated island in The Bahamas for the last couple of years, and I'm headed back there in a couple of weeks.

I'm fortunate in many ways, and one of them is my great friend JD. JD's who got me hooked on Cat Island in the first place and I owe my recently acquired love of flying to him too.

This is JD's plane. It's a single prop, four-seater. It's stable and powerful and handles like a sedan. It's a great plane and one of my life's great joys is to buzz around in it. This is also the plane we fly to Cat Island.

We fly directly from here and it's a two-and-a-half to three hour flight. Here's where the indelicacy comes in. Either I have the most efficient kidneys on the planet or I have a bladder the size of a peanut. Or both. Four-seater airplanes don't come equipped with heads and when the urge strikes and I'm 10,000 feet above the open Atlantic, I have no option but to hold it until we land. Few things unsettle me more than a full bladder and no way to relieve it. Before too long, water bottles and travel mugs start to look like viable means of alleviation.

We've been back often enough that Mr. Gilbert, the kind soul who works in the immigration trailer at the airfield in Cat Island, knows to let me rush past him to get to the bathroom before he stamps my passport.

Anyhow, when JD and I flew over there a month ago, we were equipped with a new tool that I lack enough superlatives to describe. It's called the Travel John and here's a video that describes how it works.

Oh how they work and thank God for it. After one use I became their biggest fan. These things are fantastic and I can now say without hesitation that I will never set foot on a small plane without a supply of Travel Johns again.

King of somewhere hot

I'm back after my all-too-brief sojourn in the Out Islands of The Bahamas. It was hard to say goodbye, but I know it's not forever. I'm going back to same spot next month, only for a week next time.

This was my sixth visit to Fernandez Bay, Cat Island, my sixth visit in two years. The lone immigration agent who works at the New Bight International Airport knows me by name and that's really cool.

Life there happens at a much slower and irregular pace, and yesterday morning I was up pretty early as I'm wont to do. Call me crazy, but I think it's fun to wake up early when I'm not even required to. Anyhow, the sun rises in that part of the world just a little before six, and I was the only one up. I love having the world to myself for a couple of hours. Having the world to myself in a place like the Out Islands take on a whole new meaning though. Although it's only 350 nautical miles southeast of Miami, it's another world in every sense of the word. All the birds are different, the trees are different, the sights, the sounds, the ocean itself --it's all completely foreign to what I see normally.

So I boiled some water and took my coffee supplies out onto the rocks to watch the sun rise and the tide roll out. I had a three-mile beach to myself, just me with a French Press and the birds and the fish and the millions of hermit crabs who call that rock formation home.

After a couple of hours, the sun was up and so was everybody else. I couldn't have been any more content.

So now it's back to life.

Many, many thanks to Melody, Franki and Kelly for taking over around here in my absence. They did great and it was a real thrill to come home and see what had been posted to this blog. So starting on August ninth, I'm throwing this back open to anybody who want to give it a whirl. I'll make another announcement in early August, but in the meantime, give it a thought.

Away away

I'm taking off tomorrow morning and entrusting the care and feeding of this blog to Melody McFarland from I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does, Kelly James from DesignTies and Franki Durbin from Life in a Venti Cup. I have no idea what they are going to write about or even when they plan to post for that matter. Letting go like this is a lot more freeing than I thought it would be.

This is a short trip. I'll be back in circulation and posting away again starting on Thursday morning. So in the meantime, enjoy these guest posts. I'm looking forward to coming home and reading them, almost as much as I'm looking forward to loosening the reins for the next couple of days.

I'm off to a place where kitchen design doesn't matter and that's kind of cool. Ciao!

Pining for a vacation on a Sunday morning

It's nearing the end of April already and I am in dire need of a break. However, times being what they are, all of my vacation plans for 2009 have been shelved. Poor me, right? Anyhow, I went to dinner with some friends last weekend and we did hammer out a plan for a get away at the end of August.

One of the perks to living in Florida is our proximity to the Windward Caribbean and The Bahamas. So in an effort to streamline and economize what have been growing into some ambitious (and expensive) vacations, we're going back to The Bahamas. Specifically, the Out Islands of The Bahamas. Depending on where you are, that may sound extravagant, but it's really not. Our target, Cat Island is only 350 miles away. 350 miles to get to another world entirely sounds like a good deal to me.

The Out Islands of The Bahamas are the islands farthest east of the US and they're anchored by the larger islands; Cat Island, Eleuthera and the Exumas. I have been to Cat Island six times in the last couple of years and it is a paradise beyond my ability to describe it. The Out Islands Promotion Board just produced this video extolling the many virtues of this heaven on earth. As an added bonus, I've been to all of the locations in this video and a lot of it was filmed on the very beach where we stay over there. Pay attention to the next to the last scene and you'll see an empty hammock slung between two palm trees.

Well, here's that same hammock, only it's occupied by my great friend JD. I think it's a sign.

On a Rolle

On Monday, I wrote about a great Bahamian breakfast I had at Kermit's Airport Lounge in Exuma and the great conversation I had with the Lounge's proprietor, Kermit Rolle.

Kermit is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the history of The Bahamas and he's a man who's very proud of his heritage. He has ample reason to be so, and a cursory Google search of his name shows that the Rolle clan is a pretty influential bunch in both The Bahamas and in the U.S. In addition to bringing us the likes of Esther Rolle and Estelle Evans, a number of Rolle descendants have risen to great heights in the world of professional sports. So much so that two years ago, Sports Illustrated ran a great feature on the Rolle family in the Bahamas and in the world of U.S. professional sports. SI sent a reporter to spend a day with my new pal Kermit and here's what he had to say:

WE ARE coming to the point where my father took me as a little boy," says Kermit Rolle, after the car, rolling along Queen's Highway on Exuma, has passed Jacob Rolle's Christian Academy, Rolle's Chat and Chew restaurant and nurse Lydia King Rolle's clinic and jounced through two bumpy detours around floods caused by Tropical Storm Noel. Sunlight blasts through the windshield. He motions the driver to slow. Kermit is 72 years old, but for a moment he is young again. The turquoise sea flashes through the trees. To understand anything about the Rolles, you must begin right here.

Kermit was nine or 10 that day. His father took him to this spot in Steventon to retrace the route of a slave named Pompey, one of hundreds working five settlements owned by an Englishman, Lord John Rolle. In 1829 the physically imposing Pompey led a protest against a plan to move a group of Rolle's slaves from Exuma to another island in the Bahamas . Pompey and others seized a boat and took it to Nassau to plead their case with the colonial governor. They were caught and whipped, after which Pompey escaped and famously ran five miles to Rolleville to warn other slaves that British soldiers were coming to seize them. The slaves "put hell" on the soldiers, Kermit says, laughing. "Pompey knocked them down left, right and center."

Pompey's rebellion earned him a place in history; he is credited with sparking the Bahamian antislavery movement. For the Rolles, who in the custom of the day took the name of their owner, Pompey is an icon of resistance: He didn't take servitude passively; he stood up and fought. A document from the time tells how soldiers were constantly being called out to quell the Rolle plantation workers. "They were always troublesome," says Gail Saunders, a historian and former director of the Bahamas ' national archives. "They wanted their freedom."

"Maybe that's how we get some of the strong players in the U.S. today," Kermit says. "My father always said of someone who's big and strong and healthy and runs fast: 'That could be one of Pompey's.'" Kermit, a restaurateur and businessman, is one of Rolleville's most prominent figures, a living repository of history. His great-grandmother, the daughter of a slave, told him that Lord John's overseers whipped any slave they caught trying to read and that some slaves risked their skins to secretly teach each other the alphabet.

During that walk with his dad on Pompey's route, Kermit also learned about the source of the Rolles' distinctive pride: Lord John's benevolent deed. Legend has it that, instead of selling off his land after the British fully ended slavery in the Bahamas in 1838, John Rolle willed the 5,000 acres in perpetuity to his freed slaves. Not one clod of that prime Caribbean waterfront land could be bought or sold. It could only be handed down to other Rolles.

This alone, Kermit says, makes Rolles different from other Bahamian blacks, not to mention their counterparts in the U.S. Kermit worked for 14 years in the postwar U.S. , shuttling in and out of the Bahamas on the Contract, and never understood the acceptance of second-class citizenship by many African-Americans. "John, Lord Rolle, was a perfect man," Kermit says. "That's why we ask God to bless him: His mind was so clear that after emancipation, all the lands he had he willed back to his people. That made us the most happiest people, because he treated us as human beings. He set you up in such a way that you can be proud, and there's still that proudness. The other slave owners? They just turned those people loose. [The freed slaves] didn't know where to go. They don't know where they are. But my father showed me the boundaries—and within those boundaries, the land belonged to our people."

A vast simplification? Perhaps. But Kermit is right about the psychological heft a prize such as Lord Rolle's can provide. In a recent essay, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. cited lack of property as a key reason for the growing wealth gap between poor and middle-class African-Americans. Studying 20 successful African-Americans, Gates found that 15 are descended from families that obtained property before 1920. By then, the Rolles on Exuma had been in possession of their land for more than 80 years. "People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society," Gates wrote. "They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not."

In the Rolles' case, the slave owner's gesture imbued its recipients with a sense of grace. "I heard that story about Lord John Rolle," says Florida State 's Myron Rolle, who was born and raised in the U.S. "Something like that just makes life more fulfilling. It makes you feel more connected with who you are, knowing where you came from and the people who came before you."

Amen Kermit.

Follow this link to read the rest of this article.

Composting toilets in paradise

When I was poking around the Cat Island Boathouse last weekend, I was surprised and happy to find that it uses a composting toilet in its bathroom. Ordinarily, someone in such a remote location would use a septic system and be done with it. However, The Cat Island Boathouse sits a few feet away from a pristine mangrove wetland and salt creek. No matter what anybody says, siting a septic tank anywhere near a wetland like that will have an adverse impact on both the wetland and the well that's the source for potable water at The Boathouse.

So the folks behind The Boathouse made a smart and efficient choice by installing a composting toilet. The model at The Boathouse is a Centrex 1000, made by Sun-Mar. Sun-Mar's Centrex 1000 system uses a one pint per flush flushing mechanism that's operated by a foot pedal. That it's a flush toilet makes it seem less strange to users. Compare that single pint of water with the 1.6 gallons flushed away by a supposedly efficient, standard flush toilet and do the math. Products like the Centrex 1000 are the future folks.

The Centrex 1000 is a model specifically designed to deal with the waste generated by a vacation home, but as you go through Sun-Mar's website, you'll see that they have a model for nearly any situation.

So hats off to The Cat Island Boathouse and three cheers for Sun-Mar.

More Bahamamania

On 21 August, I wrote a post called Bahamamania and in it I talked about a gorgeous rental house I'd been alerted to recently, The Cat Island Boathouse. Well, I was there last Saturday and I was impressed mightily. Utterly missing from what I knew about the place beforehand was an awareness of just how isolated it is. There is a group of other beach houses to the north and south, but their presence was completely unfelt as I stood in front of The Boathouse. The house sits by itself at the end of a dirt road that winds through a marsh.

To stand on the wraparound porch and look to the north, to the east and to the south is to feel what it is to be alone in the wilds. Amazing, really.

The Cat Island Boathouse is beautifully appointed and at $1350 a week is a real bargain. If you're up for some serious R&R in the blissful quiet of the Bahamian Out Islands, do yourself a favor and contact The Cat Island Boathouse.

I will never complain about palmetto bugs again

From Saturday:

This my friends, is what tries to sneak through the sceen doors in the middle of the night. Sheesh!

A Bahamian breakfast

Here's what I had for breakfast on Sunday morning with my new pal Kermit Rolle.

Kermit is the 74-year-old proprietor of Kermit's Airport Lounge in Exuma. I told Kermit that I wanted to eat like a Bahamian and that I had a some time to kill. So he pulled up a chair, got me some sheep's tongue souse and johnny cake and proceeded to tell me his life story. Sheep's tongue souse is incredible by the way and I'm looking everywhere for a recipe but alas I am striking out. Anyone? Anyone? I know it was made with the boiled entrails of either a sheep or a goat, lime juice, potatoes, onions, allspice and Bahamian Bird Peppers. Man, who knew boiled organ meats could taste so good?

But more than the food, Kermit Rolle is the best story-teller I've ever come across. He told stories of a life so distant from mine it was hard to believe. Experiences like Sunday morning's at Kermit's Airport Lounge are why I travel. An hour spent with that man had me bowled over with gratitude for how easy I've had it when I compare my life with someone in the developing world. And at the same time I was struck with a deep admiration that someone could have the life he's had and be so happy and grateful as he looks back on it and talks to strangers like me. His joy ought to be counted as an ingredient in the incredible sheep's tongue souse.

Bahamamania

Someone who goes by the name of Globalnomad left a comment here yesterday and he mentioned a rental house a little farther up the coast of Cat Island from where I stay. I followed the link to The Cat Island Boathouse. Wow. What a place! Check this out:

I think you have to have spent some time over there to realize how truly remarkable the kitchen in the Boathouse is. Getting your hands on those kinds of building supplies when you're on an island in the middle of the Atlantic is an undertaking I don't want to contemplate.

Here's a map of the entire island nation of The Bahamas. You can see pretty clearly how its location relates to Cuba and Florida.

This is a close up of Cat Island itself. Fernandez Bay Village is marked about three-quarters of the way down the west coast of the island. Pigeon Cay and Flamingo Point are a bit farther north on the same coast.



So thanks Globalnomad, you've given me a new place to go exploring next week. And in the meantime, go look at The Boathouse's website. If there's a heaven, it looks like Cat Island, trust me.

I'm famous!

The kids over at Apartment Therapy are running a little sumpin' sumpin' I wrote about Bahamian getaways. The story's complete with the studliest photo ever taken of me in all my 43 years. Thank you JD! Check it out here!

Let me quote myself:

Here are some shots of a slice of heaven I'll be returning to in a week.The Out Islands of the Bahamas are for the most part an undeveloped Eden about an hour's flight east of south Florida. My friends and I rent the same cottage every couple of months on Cat Island at a resort called Fernandez Bay Village. I use the term resort loosely....

There are no hot stone massages or organic meals. Rather, there is a 40-mile long, virtually uninhabited island. There are beaches with no foot prints on them, reefs that aren't charted, nights illuminated by the stars, and a blissful quiet that turns my overworked brain into jelly...

Nothing to do but kayak, dive, swim and read. Ahhhhhh. Having no telephone, no internet acess, no television and zero contact with the outside world for a couple of days is the ultimate tonic; even if it's bitter at first. Having all of that plus daily maid and turn-down service is almost too much to bear!

Time for another break

I spent a bit of time on the phone this afternoon. I was making arrangements to rent a car in The Bahamas. Cat Island in the Bahamas to be exact. I'm making a triumphant return to the land that time forgot in about two weeks and I am so due for a break I can't stand it. Being on the phone with somebody over there today made my upcoming long weekend away seem a lot more real. That's mostly because trying to conduct anything resembling a business transaction on the Out Islands is an exercise in letting go of my American expectations. And for me, that's an important first step in getting out of my own way.

Dealing with this kind of stuff over there starts out like giving a cat a bath but eventually I give in and let it just happen. It's funny, a phone interaction like the one I had this afternoon with an American car rental company would have had me unleashing the wrath of Khan. But since it was with Mrs. Gilbert of Mr. Gilbert's Motor Inn and Car Rental, By the time I said goodbye I was calmer than I'd been in months. I'm still not quite sure I completed my car rental reservation but it will all work out. See? A calm that borders on Zen and that was just from a phone call.

Cat Island is about 40 miles long and a mile wide. Its population hovers around 1000 people. It sits in the Atlantic Ocean about 350 miles southeast of Key Largo. It is the definition of secluded and quiet. There are no phones, no internet access, no TV, etc. Just miles of empty beaches and blessed solitude. Me, a couple of friends, John Steinbeck and I plan to do some serious battery recharging.

This has nothing to do with kitchen design, interior design or sustainability and that's precisely the point. Everybody needs a getaway.

This is the side of the New Bight International Airport on Cat Island

This is the side of the cottage. I like this photo.

This is looking past a tree at the porch with the azure seas lapping in the background.

Ahhhh.