the hills in the general direction of the top of the volcano at the center of the island. We started out just trying to look at a pretty house on a ridge that we could see from our balcony. We have driven up or down nearly every little lane on the island now.
Driving one of those lanes entails going pretty much straight up, with an occasional switchback. Itinvolves keeping a sharp eye out for cars coming down the hill toward the sea as well, for most of the roads are only one lane wide, and you have to keep looking ahead for a place to pull off to the side of the road if necessary and to keep remembering how far back to the last wide spot it was in case you have to back up to make room. Going slow helps, which is not hard to do since boulders and stones get washed down into the lanes during the rains.
We are little-hidden-neighborhood sort of people at our house. Some folks like to live in subdivisions with big lawns and brand-new streets and trees that came from a nursery. We are drawn to little blocks of sidewalks and old cottages, the ones with the old trees that have been there for decades and the front porches that people sit on in the evenings. To find such places on St. Cecilia, we have to drive the little lanes.
The first few hundred yards or so going up, generally speaking, we find newer houses in developments of five to ten houses or so. Built of cinder block and stucco, they are homes for middle-class St. Cecilians.They have verandas and galleries to catch the breezes and landscaped yards surrounded by fences to keep their ruminants in and someone else’s ruminants out. The houses are brightly colored for the most part—pinks and yellows and blues and greens—colors that look perfectly natural here but would make us drive off the road if someone painted his house that color in our neighborhood back in the States.
In the last few hundred yards, where we come to the top of a ridge and run out of road and begin to hope for some reasonable place to turn around, we stumble on the retirement and vacation homes for wealthy Westerners. The lawns are large and manicured, there are swimming pools hidden by walls draped in bougainvillea, and the palm trees that line the driveways have lights in them that come on automatically when it is dark.
In the middle is the St. Cecilia to which we are drawn. In the middle we are often winding our way through land that was once home to sugar plantations. There are remnants of sugar mills and waterwheelsand storage barns and stone fences. There are little hamlets and villages of just a few houses. The hamlets have names like Chicken Stone and Hard Times and Stony Hill and Middle Works, all testifying to the history of the island and to the difficulty of making a home of it over the years. Sometimes there is a chapel or a little store that serves as the center of village life.
These simple hamlets and their simple houses, surrounded by the remains of the great plantations, make up a St. Cecilia that fires my imagination. If I stop for a moment and get out of the car and sit on a stone and feel the breeze and listen to the birds and stare out at the sea, I can feel myself being transported to another time.
I know this because it happened to us the last time we went riding around. A road we were on was being worked on, so there was a detour to connect us to another road to take us back down the hill toward the main road. We were oohing and aahing our way through some old cane fields at the time and oohed and aahed our way right into a dead end.
It was at the point of a ridge, high up the side of thevolcano. It was not the highest point on the island; you have to go up to the top of the volcano for that, something that requires hiking around instead of riding around. Hiking around is not one of our gifts.
So we took our lives in our hands, the very hands that were white-knuckling the steering wheel, and turned the car around. And once we had done it, the view took our breath
Driving one of those lanes entails going pretty much straight up, with an occasional switchback. Itinvolves keeping a sharp eye out for cars coming down the hill toward the sea as well, for most of the roads are only one lane wide, and you have to keep looking ahead for a place to pull off to the side of the road if necessary and to keep remembering how far back to the last wide spot it was in case you have to back up to make room. Going slow helps, which is not hard to do since boulders and stones get washed down into the lanes during the rains.
We are little-hidden-neighborhood sort of people at our house. Some folks like to live in subdivisions with big lawns and brand-new streets and trees that came from a nursery. We are drawn to little blocks of sidewalks and old cottages, the ones with the old trees that have been there for decades and the front porches that people sit on in the evenings. To find such places on St. Cecilia, we have to drive the little lanes.
The first few hundred yards or so going up, generally speaking, we find newer houses in developments of five to ten houses or so. Built of cinder block and stucco, they are homes for middle-class St. Cecilians.They have verandas and galleries to catch the breezes and landscaped yards surrounded by fences to keep their ruminants in and someone else’s ruminants out. The houses are brightly colored for the most part—pinks and yellows and blues and greens—colors that look perfectly natural here but would make us drive off the road if someone painted his house that color in our neighborhood back in the States.
In the last few hundred yards, where we come to the top of a ridge and run out of road and begin to hope for some reasonable place to turn around, we stumble on the retirement and vacation homes for wealthy Westerners. The lawns are large and manicured, there are swimming pools hidden by walls draped in bougainvillea, and the palm trees that line the driveways have lights in them that come on automatically when it is dark.
In the middle is the St. Cecilia to which we are drawn. In the middle we are often winding our way through land that was once home to sugar plantations. There are remnants of sugar mills and waterwheelsand storage barns and stone fences. There are little hamlets and villages of just a few houses. The hamlets have names like Chicken Stone and Hard Times and Stony Hill and Middle Works, all testifying to the history of the island and to the difficulty of making a home of it over the years. Sometimes there is a chapel or a little store that serves as the center of village life.
These simple hamlets and their simple houses, surrounded by the remains of the great plantations, make up a St. Cecilia that fires my imagination. If I stop for a moment and get out of the car and sit on a stone and feel the breeze and listen to the birds and stare out at the sea, I can feel myself being transported to another time.
I know this because it happened to us the last time we went riding around. A road we were on was being worked on, so there was a detour to connect us to another road to take us back down the hill toward the main road. We were oohing and aahing our way through some old cane fields at the time and oohed and aahed our way right into a dead end.
It was at the point of a ridge, high up the side of thevolcano. It was not the highest point on the island; you have to go up to the top of the volcano for that, something that requires hiking around instead of riding around. Hiking around is not one of our gifts.
So we took our lives in our hands, the very hands that were white-knuckling the steering wheel, and turned the car around. And once we had done it, the view took our breath
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