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  There were a couple of folks asleep on their backpacks; how long they had been there was hard to say. I worried that they were waiting for Ricky too and had been doing so for some time. There were two uniformed airline employees behind the counter. And a policeman and an immigration official with a desk full of rubber stamps and yellow cards. There were five or six taxi drivers sitting on the curb, laughing and telling stories. They were easy to spot, because the airport was a big open-air shed sort of affair. But there was no Ricky.

  The emotional stakes are high for a tenth-anniversary trip to a romantic island in the West Indies, and I was beginning to feel some pressure. Here I was, incurable romantic and hopeful lover and shy bumbler and sometimes less-than-thorough trip planner, hoping against hope for an idyllic and magical and golden journey. What I seemed to have gotten us into was a tiny airport in a foreign country smaller than the town we live in, and we were standing in the rain in the dead of night. I had very little confidence in my ability to do the things it would take to get us on to where we were supposed to be next. And we were cold and hungry and tired, and I was ready to weep.

  “Do you need a taxi?” one of the men said to me.

  I know that is what he said, because he had to say it four times before he got it slow enough for me to understand it. I am from the South; I have trouble understanding people from West Chicago, much less the West Indies. “I am looking for Ricky,” I said lamely. I am looking for a miracle was what I was thinking.

  “Ricky is not here. He left. But I can take you.”

  I was not sure this was a good idea, but having no ideas of my own and not wanting to end up like the two folks sleeping on their luggage, I told him where we were headed. It was something he seemed to already know. Before long, he had rescued our luggage from customs and loaded it into the back of his van, and we were off. We were tearing down a two-lane road in the dark, driving far too fast on what seemed to me to be the wrong side of the road to boot. He was giving us a guided tour, though we could not understand him. And he was talking on his cell phone and honking and waving to other cars and taxis that went by and listening to the radio—all at the same time. Into his hands I had committed my anniversary.

  Ten minutes and seventeen nervous glances later, we had been delivered to a dock where we stood in the drizzle and the dark and waited for the boat to take us across the lagoon to the place where we were to stay. I looked hopefully for lights across the way in the mist, and I watched nervously for the boat, and I thought, in general, that if we did not stop traveling soon, I might collapse.

  The chugging of a diesel engine announced to us that the boat had arrived. It turns out they kept some of the boats left over from those black-and-white movies too. It was an old wooden boat, low slung, with a window-wrapped cabin in the center of it. A man stood in the bow with a powerful flashlight, and a man steered the boat by turning a big wooden wheel. Stepping onto the boat was like stepping onto The African Queen. I remember thinking we might see Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart if we paid attention. The romantic in me had clearly begun to recover somewhat.

  We chugged along through the mist, and we began to see the lights along the hillside where cottages were spread out through the trees. And then the beach came into view and a dock. As we got closer, we could see that a little parade was forming.

  The first person in the line was a tall, striking-looking young woman in a long linen dress, holding a very proper and very large umbrella. Next came two men in pressed khakis and floral-patterned shirts. They, too, held umbrellas, one over their heads to keep the rain off and another, still furled, at their sides. Then there was a man with a luggage cart, attended by a man holding an umbrella over both of them and their cart.

  As the boat eased into the dock, the woman introduced herself as the manager of the resort and began to say welcoming things to us. The two spare umbrellas were unfurled with a flourish and handed to us as we started along the path from the dock.

  We strolled along in the front of this little parade, listening to the manager explain things to us, like what times the meals were served and that someone would ring a bell to remind us when the dining area was open. She told us that we could get a two-page faxed summary of the New York Times by coming to the office each morning and that a steel band would play on Friday.

  Every twenty or thirty yards or so, a bright and happy person said, “Good evening,” as we passed.

  “Would you like to have dinner?” the manager asked.

  “We are just really tired, I think.”

  “They will not be dining,” she whispered to a young woman as we passed by a table that had been laid for us just in case. I realized that they had held a place for us for dinner and someone to cook it and serve it, though we had arrived too late for the dinner hour.

  “We will have a little something sent to your cottage, then,” she said.

  We walked through the trees to the end of the path in the corner of the property. Right by the beach was a cottage, two rooms and a bath, with a swimming pool of our own and a view back across the lagoon on one side and a view out to the sea on the other. The magical visit to paradise for which we had hoped suddenly seemed to be within our grasp.

  There were a few moments of instructions and information from the manager, and then she said good night and went out the door. A moment or two later we heard a knock at the door, and I went to open it, and the little something came in, both trays of it. And then we were alone, and we began to giggle.

  It has been a number of years now since the evening we rode through the rain in The African Queen. We have found another place to stay, a place that suits us even better than the first place we visited. But we keep coming back to this part of the world, at least in part because on a given night, in the rain, at the end of a long journey, we were made to feel welcome and treated as though someone not only knew we were coming; they were looking forward to it.

  My inner cynic, with whom I am in touch far more often than I care to admit, is quick to remind me that such treatment is what I should expect in such a setting. It is quick to point out that I paid good money for all of this and that the least I should expect is to be treated nicely. The inner cynic in you is nodding in agreement. And our inner cynics are right, of course. They always are, are they not?

  But another, maybe a better, part of me is coming to understand another thing.

  We live in a world where such welcome and gentleness and civility are increasingly rare. Most of the conversation between strangers is terse and quick, and too many times it is cold and rude. It can even be that way, more often than we care to admit, among people who are not strangers. Such is the world we live in that we are almost stunned by hospitality and gentility whenever it breaks out around us. We are drawn to the people and to the places where we find such welcome in abundance.

  The memory of that little parade on the dock is not the only reason we now head this way whenever it is October. It is our anniversary, and we are going to go somewhere, and summer will not end until we do. And when we get to where we are going, there will be sunshine and the sea and solitude, because that is what we like the best.

  We come this way to celebrate the beginning of our life together and to mark the end of the summer together, because when we are waiting by our front door in the dark in the morning, waiting for the taxi ride to begin our day’s travel, we know that before the day is through, we will not only be welcome, we will have been welcomed.

  We will be at home.

  Two

  There is a virtue in slowness which we have lost.

  —GRAHAM GREENE

  Sometimes we are able to arrange our flights so we fly directly to St. Cecilia. Other times we have to fly into St. Catherine, a sister island, and wait awhile to catch a plane. I discovered that a boat would take us across to St. Cecilia for about the same amount of money and in about the same amount of time. Instead of waiting on a flight, we get to spend our time riding in a van and then
in a boat. After eight or ten hours of travel, it is better to drive through the streets of St. Catherine with Daisy and to cruise across the straits with Captain Christmas (honestly, that is his name) than it is to sit in the airport.

  Daisy is the taxi driver who meets us now whenever we fly into St. Catherine. The first time we rode with Daisy, she took us the long way through town before she took us to the harbor. Since St. Catherine was not our final destination and we had a boat to catch, I was ready to get where I was going and stop wrestling luggage and lie down.

  She was driving very fast and talking the whole time and telling us what we were seeing on the right and on the left, giving us a guided tour of an island that was merely a way station on our way to where we were really going. Then suddenly she stopped in a crowded street and got out. At first I wondered who was more disconcerted, I or the dozen or so cars lined up behind her on the one-way, one-lane street. It turned out I was the only one who seemed to notice she had stopped and was blocking traffic. Or rather, I should say, the others probably noticed, but it did not bother them.

  “I have to check on my daughter,” she said as she stuck her head back in the window for a moment to turn up the radio. Then she strolled across the street and disappeared into an ice-cream parlor.

  So we listened to the radio.

  The radio stations in this part of the world broadcast everything from music to political discussion to hurricane warnings to sermons to sports updates. The music is anything you might hear in America, plus England and Trinidad and Jamaica. In a twenty-minute set you can go from Buddy Holly to the Allman Brothers to Bob Marley to Celine Dion to Gerry and the Pacemakers to local calypso artists. Interspersed with Mother’s Day tributes and announcements of the day’s school-lunch menus in season, of course.

  It is big-time small-town radio at its best. Exactly the sort of radio you want to listen to when you are blocking traffic in a one-lane city street during rush hour. Exactly the sort of radio you are looking for when you are in a hurry.

  When Daisy returned with her daughter Peaches in tow, she explained to us that her son was to walk down to the ice-cream store to meet his sister after school and walk her home. But something had happened to change the plan, and so Daisy had to swing by to pick up Peaches. I think the truth is that Peaches and her mother like riding around together.

  We only missed six green lights while she was gone. And it turned out that Daisy had to make only two more stops between the ice-cream store and the harbor where we, the paying customers, were to meet our boat. I had this odd notion about time being of the essence for the customer in a taxi who had a boat to catch at a prearranged time. It began to be clear to me that Daisy was operating with a very different sense of time than I was.

  We were a half hour late to the harbor, but Captain Christmas was still there, and it seemed as though he had not noticed our tardiness, nor was he even surprised by it.

  I think I have entered a different time zone, I said to myself.

  When our first water-taxi ride across the straits began, dusk had begun to settle on the islands. We pulled out of the St. Catherine harbor and started out into the straits to head for St. Cecilia. When we reached cruising speed and the bow of the boat raised up high, Sara and I could look back over a stretch of the sea and see the lights of St. Catherine that began to shine over the water.

  We were headed west and south out of the harbor and into the sea. After a few minutes, there was nothing at all to the west except water. On the right there was the headland of the southernmost tip of St. Catherine. By the time we passed the headlands, the sun was gone, gone to spend the night with the other side of the world.

  Eventually we got out around the headland and then turned south and then east to hook our way into the bay at Bluewater Beach on St. Cecilia. There was this moment when we could no longer see the lights of St. Catherine, and the angle of the boat made it impossible to see the lights of St. Cecilia.

  I had thought the whole trip would just take a few minutes, as it is only two and a half miles or so. But it took almost an hour because of the strength of the current in the straits. The Atlantic has been running hard and unimpeded by land since Africa, and it pours through the gaps between these small islands with a considerable amount of speed. We were crossing the straits at a perpendicular angle, and the current fought us the whole way. We were trying to get to St. Cecilia, and the sea was pushing us toward the coast of Mexico as hard as it could.

  Finally we could see it: Bluewater Bay and the lights that line its shore. We could just make out the shape of the hill that ran up and away from the beach and the lights from the bungalows scattered up the hillside. The hill is called Windbreak, and under one of those lights was Seastone, the bungalow that was to be home to us for a time. The rest of St. Cecilia was hidden in the dark. In an hour our world had been reduced to one boat, one beach, one hill, and a string of lights scattered along it.

  In that hour it was as though one world went away and another world came into view. And time changed at the same time. We went from Central Standard Time to Eastern Standard Time to Atlantic Standard Time while we were on the airplanes all day. But by the time we got to St. Cecilia, somewhere between the ride through the streets with Daisy and the ride on the water with Captain Christmas, we had gone to island time.

  Water taxi is a relative term, I think. Most of them are actually deep-sea fishing boats. I have not been on one to go fishing, of course, but I know a fishing boat when I see one.

  I gave up fishing when I was eleven. After my grandfather took my brother and me out one day, I discovered that if, in fact, you catch a fish—which can take nearly all day—then you have to grab the thing to take it off the hook. That was when I discovered fish have scales and teeth, and they bleed some, too, while being removed from the hook. They stare at you the whole time you are trying to take the thing out of their mouth that was used to trick them into being your supper. I have heard rumors that before you cook them and eat them, they have to be cleaned as well, and the cleaning involves more than soap and water.

  If I had realized that I was someday going to visit this part of the world, I might have attempted to overcome my squeamishness and continued fishing. They say that people who love to fish really love to fish here. People fish for the big five in these waters—tuna, wahoo, marlin, dolphin, and sailfish. Which to a fisherman is evidently akin to climbing all the big peaks of the world or playing all the major golf courses in Scotland or going to the World Series or something.

  People also say that if you like deep-sea diving, this is a good place too. It is only about ninety feet down to the thermal vents, where water comes up out of the ocean floor at one hundred degrees or so. Which explains why the water is so warm, though it does not explain why anyone would want to go down ninety feet into the ocean to check on it.

  You can also windsurf here, and you can snorkel, and you can sail. You can also just stay on the porch with your binoculars and watch all of these things take place while being glad that you are not grabbing a fish by its gills or being eyeballed by one down near a hole in the ocean floor leading to a thermal vent that connects to the center of the earth.

  You can just sit still here. You are on island time.

  Other than the pace of the English language, which is used at breakneck speed here, and Tombow, a water-taxi driver who gave us a ride once when we could not get hold of Captain Christmas, one does not encounter hurry very often on St. Cecilia.

  Tombow is trying to set a speed record for crossing the straits, I think. I do not know if our last trip across with him was a personal best or not, but I do know I was bounced out of my seat about every twenty yards for two miles. I was more than a little afraid that my luggage or myself or both were about to visit the thermal vents. I suspect Tombow spends a lot of evenings telling stories to his friends about how much fun he had that day bouncing gringos, or whatever the calypso word for gringos is.

  Sometimes early in the morning I will
hear a boat speeding across the straits toward St. Catherine and beyond to the fishing grounds. I always look to see if it is Tombow or one of the other small boats that make up the fishing fleet on the island.

  Tombow may well have been a fisherman before who has decided it is more lucrative and more fun to terrify tourists instead. And perhaps to fish for them when they fall out of his boat.

  It could be the heat, of course, that slows everyone and everything down. That is one of the prevailing theories about the fact that life in the southern United States, where Sara and I live, is slower than life in New York City or in Chicago. Centuries of moving slowly to avoid wilting in the humidity of a Mississippi June or an Alabama July or a Tennessee August may have affected our collective genetic makeup in some deep way. It could have happened here too, as warm as it is.

  There are three seasons here. The two long ones—high season and low season—are named for the times when there are many visitors and when there are not as many. The third one is hurricane season, named for the time when the storms come howling across the Atlantic from the east. The storms operate on their own calendar, of course, which makes us feel right at home.

  Generally speaking, though, there is only one sort of weather here—warm and sunny with occasional interruptions of rain. There is a saying in St. Cecilia that the weather is ideal for cricket 340 days a year; the other 25 days are reserved for rainstorms.

  Just as there is only one sort of weather, there is only one pace. It is a pace that is perfectly suited to life on the island. Island time is the proper pace for life in such a climate.

  On island time, most things go slow. You hardly ever see anyone racing around. The only racing around on St. Cecilia, as near as I can tell, is connected to sports.