18 August 2009
Bahamian Bird Tuesday
17 August 2009
Witch moth or money bat?
02 August 2009
Sunday mornings with Father Jerome
25 July 2009
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.
02 July 2009
King of somewhere hot
28 June 2009
Away away
19 April 2009
Pining for a vacation on a Sunday morning
06 September 2008
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.
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.
04 September 2008
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.
03 September 2008
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.
01 September 2008
I will never complain about palmetto bugs again
This my friends, is what tries to sneak through the sceen doors in the middle of the night. Sheesh!
A Bahamian breakfast
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.
21 August 2008
Bahamamania
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.
19 August 2008
I'm famous!
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!
13 August 2008
Time for another break
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 cottage. I like this photo.
This is looking past a tree at the porch with the azure seas lapping in the background.
Ahhhh.