Sketches of Saint Lucia
Faint impressions from a quiet corner of the Caribbean
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I once boarded a bus in northern Greece and noticed two enormous eyes peeking out from a cardboard box set near the driver’s feet. The eyes belonged to a small and stunned owl. It had been struck by the bus earlier in the day and the driver was waiting until his shift ended to bring it to a vet. While he was sorry for hitting the creature I could tell he also enjoyed its company. If you too feel stunned and unsure where you’re headed, I’m pleased to share that you’re on the bus bound for the May edition of Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer, strategist, and backseat birder Zander Abranowicz.
Roving Desk
A note from the field
Sketches of Saint Lucia
In 1636 a promising 24-year-old painter named Frans Post ducked an outbreak of plague in his native Haarlem and boarded a ship to New Holland, the Dutch colony in northern Brazil. The atmosphere that greeted him in the Americas must have felt hallucinatory. Dense walls of tropical foliage extended to the horizon and set the kaleidoscopic plumage of birds of paradise and other alien flora and fauna in psychedelic relief. Overtopped by shockingly blue skies and occupied by Amerindians and African slaves, every frame likely overwhelmed the young painter, so accustomed to somber scenes of Holland and the preference for desaturated colors that defined the school of painting in which he’d been trained.
Lacking either the supplies or the style to faithfully reproduce what he was witnessing — or compelled to graft a certain Dutchness upon territories his benefactors were keen to dominate — Post made 18 exquisite but curiously solemn paintings during the seven years he spent attached to a scientific expedition in New Holland, epitomized by his 1637 View of the Island of Itamaracá. Seven remain, the majority held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Like Post, I too am limited by a meager palette during six days in Laborie (pronounced “la-bree”), a fishing village on the southern coast of Saint Lucia a few thousand miles northwest of the bony shoulder of South America briefly haunted by the artist. There are too many plants and flowers and trees and fish whose names elude me, too much slang I fail to decode, and most fatally, too little time to ask the right questions, let alone offer answers. I feel like a ghost struggling to grasp the world through which I’m traveling, an eye straining to record what I see. I’m left with scattered impressions, as tentative as faint pencil drawings, that resist assimilation into a coherent composition.
With empty eyes set wide in malformed skulls, stumpy legs, and wiry fur where mange hasn’t stripped their coats, the mongrels soliciting scraps outside Mama Tilly’s look like they just crawled out from The Garden of Earthly Delights, the masterwork of another Dutch artist. They pause from gnawing at the ochre marrow of chicken bones to scratch away fleas with black lips curled in ghoulish smiles of relief, congregating on the street just beyond the point where the glow from the multicolored string lights of the restaurant succumbs to the hungry tropical darkness.
My camera, notepad, and pen rest on the table beside a dwarven bottle of Piton beer that sweats on a woven placemat. Mama Tilly sits at the next table, Argus-eyed in a plastic chair overlooking a corner where two streets meet. Braided women and languid old men pass and chirp “Hey Mama Tilly” in warbling Antillean accents. She responds with a sing-song “Hello darling.” A pickup roars by. She scolds them. They holler back lovingly. Workers trudge up the hill in stooped silence, bristling with rusted pruning shears.
I savor a plate of jerk chicken cooked over coals in the humble grill that crackles on the open-air patio that wings out from a shingled structure that houses Mama Tilly’s kitchen and tiny bar, everything shielded by a corrugated metal roof that looks like it’s weathered its share of hurricanes. Before me are salad, rice, beans, fried plantains, and boulette, a sweet and savory dough dumpling. Classic Creole fare, it is seasoned by the many swirling strains that comprise Caribbean culture: Amerindian, African, Spanish, Indian, French, English, American.
I’m dazed, having been catapulted over the course of hours to this faraway isle where life was always broadcasting but I’m only now tuning in. The geologic history of Saint Lucia extends back tens of millions of years, when a suboceanic volcano pushed a cordillera up from the earth’s fractured crust. The peaks of that range eventually spiked above the sea’s surface, cleaving the Caribbean from the Atlantic and forming the island chain today called the Lesser Antilles, bound by Anguilla in the north and Grenada in the south. Saint Lucia’s human history opens at the dawn of the common era, when Arawak Indians arrived in dugout canoes paddled from South America. They lived peacefully for eight centuries until the warlike Caribs (for whom the Caribbean is named) came ashore and conquered the island, only to be wiped out themselves by European sword and smallpox and replaced by African slaves ported halfway around the world to hack plantations from the jungle by the French and English, who exchanged dominion over Saint Lucia 14 times before she settled in British hands.
Mama Tilly commands respect around here. She serves as observer and enforcer from her panopticon perch when she’s not in the kitchen preparing lobster, conch, or fish caught daily by the anglers who congregate at rowdy bars along the beach playing dominoes, sipping rum, and discussing wind. This is her domain. I hear vanloads of tourists often ask to be dropped here for a proper meal before being carted away to walled resorts elsewhere.
Laborie is an anarchic composition of clapboard and plank and plastic, concrete blocks and dovecotes and clotheslines where perfectly white linens appear preternaturally clean against the rough tangle of the built environment. There’s a general air of manicured decrepitude. Every surface is cracking, splitting, rotting, or baking, nothing spared in humidity’s total war. Walls are painted a confectionery of colors and peel like sunburn. Chickens scramble, chased by children. Cats doze on discarded doors and elders rest on wooden chairs along the street. Time passes at half-speed, the sedate pace disrupted only by muscular trucks tattooed with decals and running on pure testosterone, and the many tiny bars serving rum in plastic cups and transmitting the fast rhythms of soca, or “soul of calypso,” the ubiquitous genre pioneered by Trinidadian artist Lord Shorty in the 1970s.
The Wailers pipe in through the speakers on Mama Tilly’s patio. As I eat I acknowledge my good fortune, having apparently stumbled into the arms of one of the great chefs of the Caribbean, situated not ten minutes by foot from the cottage I’m renting on the edge of town. Mama Tilly is a bit guarded at first but as the days pass she softens and greets me with a smile and her “Hello darling,” pointing to my table, bringing a beer, and reciting the day’s fare.
Mama Tilly’s goat curry is a revelation and her company is even better. We spend many hours making small talk. One night she asks to see pictures of my wife and admonishes me for traveling without her despite my attempts to explain that she’s working. Another night I arrive to find her with a stylish young woman and two young men, setting up a television in the bar and connecting to a livestream of Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre reading the annual budget to the parliament in Castries, the capital up north. Mama Tilly grills Pierre: “But what about our hospital?” When his speech ends the others leave. She flips to The Young and the Restless and we watch an episode before the evening crowd arrives. On the screen a dapper old man threatens to cut his daughter (or wife?) out of her inheritance. Or something like that. I’m missing about 50 seasons of backstory. Mama Tilly laughs when she finds me there an hour later, still watching the soaps, sipping a Piton, perfectly content.
The final morning of my trip I turn down an offer from a new friend to drive up to viewpoints atop the mornes (the old French word for foothills) so I can spend my remaining hours with Mama Tilly. My wallet is empty and impossible to replenish, as Laborie has no ATM. She hands me a Piton anyway. We snap a picture together and I take her portrait standing in the doorway of her bar: the lady of Laborie, general of jerk chicken, protector of stray dogs like me. Hanging above her is an exquisite wooden sign, hand-painted by an octogenarian artist who lives up the hill. It bears colorful bottles and a smart red grill breathing delicate wisps of smoke.
No writer has cultivated my need to ramble and find places like Laborie like the late English author, soldier, and linguist Patrick Leigh Fermor. A letter from Fermor to my father (the other great traveler in my life) sits in a frame above my desk at home, and he is a welcome specter in my work and life, especially on the road. Fermor turned his wandering eye to the Caribbean in 1947, perhaps to take some time and process what he’d seen in the Second World War as an Irish Guard and member of the nascent Special Operations Executive. Among other adventures, he is famed for kidnapping the Nazi general Heinrich Kreipe in a daring raid on the Greek island of Crete in 1944. Marching up Mount Ida by moonlight with his abductors, the captured kraut is said to have mumbled a few lines of Horace: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum. “See Soracte’s mighty peak stands deep in virgin snow.” Fermor instantly responded with the next lines: Nec jam sustineant onus silvae laborantes, geluque flumina constiterint acuto. “And soon the heavy-laden trees their white load will not know, when the swiftly rushing rivers with the ice have ceased to flow.”
In the decades after victory Fermor penned some of the finest travel narratives of all time, from Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese to A Time to Keep Silence, a portrait of European monasteries. Fermor’s prose is impossibly learned and dazzlingly lyrical, saturated with an almost religious reverence for what one might call the “genius of small places.” A walking Wikipedia well before the internet, it’s tempting to classify Fermor as hopelessly nostalgic, holding on to a disappearing world of decorum and costume and dialect blurred by the muddying influence of globalization, that chariot hastened by the dual horses of commerce and war. In fact, he welcomed the postwar world with an open heart, using travel as a vehicle to dispel the illusion that culture is ever “pure” or “static.” He understood concretely that borders are fundamentally porous and kinetic. One can only imagine what he’d make of a term like “cultural appropriation.”
Fermor was in his early thirties when he made his Antillean odyssey, accompanied by his future wife Joan and their friend Costa Achillopoulos, a Greek photographer who documented the trip on film. The journey yielded Fermor’s first book, The Traveller’s Tree, a dense and delightful record of their zigzagging hop through Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti, including a brief visit to Saint Lucia. In his singular way, Fermor absorbed knowledge like a sponge by talking to locals of every rank — from linen-suited landowners to voodoo priests to thoroughly inbred sailors — and poring over libraries wherever he landed.
The library in Laborie is closed during the pandemic, but there are plenty of locals about on a Sunday afternoon, when fishermen stay ashore. A few float in and out of an open-air bar in an alley leading to the beach. The bartender calls out at me so I step inside. The scene is, well, messy. A skeletal old man with bloodshot eyes sits on a stool against the wall, expressionless and silent, rising periodically to smoke fragrant cigarettes in the alley outside. A very drunk woman and even drunker man with few teeth between them shout incessantly at one another and occasionally stumble over to direct their din at me, incoherent but harmless. Little dogs wander in and scan the room with their hollow gaze.
One man seems sober enough and invites me to sit with him in a corner of the bar. He goes by many names: Bobby, or Georgie, or Eustace, or Joseph. He is from Dominica and has eight brothers and eight sisters. He is 51 and a fisherman, unmarried, and the father of twins who live nearby. He loves the sea, even when it’s rough, because at sea his troubles recede to the horizon and he finds the space to pray. His faith guides him and tells him where to catch fish. He favors banjo (local slang, I’ve read somewhere, for fish that jump around the boat) because it fights against the current and passes that strength along to anyone who eats it. He taps my forearm to underscore certain statements, alternating between Creole and English. I discern every few words, enough to respond with the appropriate expression: raise eyebrows, shake head, laugh. Now and then he pauses and says, “I am so glad we are talking.” He clearly has a lot to get off his chest, including his concern that Bill Gates is injecting people with vaccines to keep populations low. He nods convincingly and smiles: “We are having a smart conversation!” We fist-bump. After an hour or so I say farewell to this man of many names and his motley drinking buddies and move on.
As on so many past trips Patrick Leigh Fermor’s voice is a bulwark between solitude and loneliness during my time on Saint Lucia. I spend my evenings reading The Traveller’s Tree and writing on the porch of my cottage, swatting away the insects that decorate my face, arms, and chest with pointillist welts that linger until long after I’m back home in Virginia. Sometimes I glance over the valley, where the opposing hillside is slung beneath the starry sky in the shape of an enormous black saddle. A single light peeks out from the brush, presumably the camp of a figure I see each day through my binoculars setting and tending controlled burns that clear the land for planting, wearing heavy wellies and a sooty red shirt.
I flip through the photographs included in Fermor’s book. One was snapped a few miles along the coast to the northwest, in Soufrière. The port served as the capital of French Saint Lucia until 1814, when the island, known as the "Helen of the West Indies" like the mythic beauty volleyed back and forth between the Hellenes and Trojans, fell firmly into English possession. Independence arrived in Saint Lucia in 1979. Today, the British Empire is on life support in the Caribbean. Barbados, considered the most conservative of the West Indies, cast off the crown last November, while Jamaica is only now extricating herself from the monarchy. A recent tour by Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, was a public relations fiasco marked by anachronistic imagery, like the royal couple riding in an open-top Land Rover through Kingston, William donning full military regalia. According to The New York Times, some locals saw in the event “a caricature of a colonial proconsul inspecting his troops.”
Independence from England was more than three decades away for the two girls who stand in Costa Achillopoulos’s image, on a cobblestone surface by the placid bay. One wears a wide-brimmed straw hat. The fronds of a riotous palm explode like fireworks behind them and fishing yachts line up neatly along the water. A Piton — as the volcanic spires that dominate Saint Lucia’s landscape are called — looms in the background. It is said the peak wasn’t reached until the end of the 19th century, when a party of British sailors summited, only to die en masse from snake bite on their descent. (In a distinctly Fermorian footnote, The Traveller’s Tree cites that the snake — the dreaded Trigonocéphale, better known as fer-de-lance — arrived from the South American mainland on floating branches emitted from the mouth of the mighty Orinoco River.)
The next morning I climb into a crowded minibus for Soufrière. On the way a woman with painted eyebrows and a skinny man in an Atlanta Braves hat scroll through his phone, pausing on a video of an armless woman in a bikini, dancing. They watch it over and over. I turn to face the forest that hugs the rim of the switchback highway. The radio is on loud, playing local news, and the open windows invite a welcome breeze into the cabin. Old men walk slowly along the highway, so slow the sweat can’t catch them, and screaming children in forest green trousers and white polo shirts flood from squat school complexes onto dusty fields to kick soccer balls around.
This all passes in a meditative blur. I’m glad to be on the move. I put my arm out the window, then think better of it, dreaming up the title of my next essay: “I Left My Limb in Saint Lucia.” The Piton frozen in Costa’s photograph hulks to the left and while the rest of the scenery changes the mountain appears immobile, as if bending perspective to its will. The pastel roofs of Soufrière suddenly appear, spilling down steep green mountains where a volcano sleeps and halting at a coastline mobbed by water taxis and moored yachts.
The mood in Soufrière is a few degrees more hectic than Laborie and as I walk through the port pushy salesmen shadow me for a few steps until I can politely shake them off. I turn left up a street toward the central square and stop to snap a photograph of a VHS store that seems to specialize in the oeuvre of Steven Seagal. A young man grills chicken across the street and a Rastafarian Rip Van Winkle dozes in the shade.
I hear shouting behind me from the direction of the port. A motorcycle engine roars to life and the sleeping Rasta wakes with a start. I look back to see two young men mount the bike, assuming a position that recalls a certain beloved Saturday Night Live skit, tearing up the street so close I feel the air shake. A man dressed in black appears from around the corner. I notice a pistol in his hand and duck behind a car. He raises the pistol and fires a warning shot up the street toward the fleeing men. The loud crack stops time, and when it starts again I’m standing in the VHS store with the owner and a man hunched over a cane, looking at one another in disbelief. “I’ve lived on this street since 1951 and have never seen anything like that,” says the owner. He shakes his head. I reply: “I’ve been here about five minutes — I’m very sorry if I brought bad luck!” We laugh and chat for a while as life returns to the street. Any sense of danger evaporates in the absence of those fleeting figures. Soon the corner is bustling with curious onlookers exchanging stories and pantomiming gunplay.
Fermor wrote of a thermal spring nearby. I set out to find it. The Diamond Falls Botanical Gardens & Mineral Baths are a mile or so inland in a tranquil forest that feels farther than that from Soufrière. Birdsong reports from the upper canopy, and soon I’m strolling through the lush garden that surrounds the spring. Diamond Falls is the six-acre remnant of a 2000-acre plantation deeded by King Louis XIV to the Devaux family in 1713. Lime, coconut, and cocoa were cultivated here in colonial times. Today vanilla, mahogany, golden chalice vine, and firespike flourish. At the heart of the garden a waterfall cascades into a misty pool that changes color based on the composition of volcanic minerals streaming down that day.
In 1784, Baron de Laborie — the French governor of Saint Lucia who lent his name to the district and town — shipped some of this water back to King Louis XVI’s physician in Paris. The doctor certified that the samples bore striking resemblance to the healing waters of Aix-les-Bains in France and Aix-la-Chapelle in Germany. Impressed, Louis had 12 stone baths built at this site to nurse ailing troops to health. One can picture their sorry state: malarial, lousy, sunburnt, homesick, terrified. After the French Revolution the baths fell into disrepair. André du Boulay, the last owner of the estate, restored them for his private use, and his daughter opened them to the public in 1983.
I bus back to Laborie in the afternoon and instantly feel at ease on familiar ground. Kids gather outside a turquoise structure, building stilts for an upcoming festival. Mama Tilly is sitting at her restaurant as I pass on my way up the hill. I drop my bag at the cottage and descend a dirt road that winds through a savannah corridor down to a secluded cove. Slipping into the water, I wash the dust of the day’s travel away. Fishing nets suspended from plastic bottles billow underwater. Storm clouds blow in and strafe the valley with rain. I wait it out neck-deep in the sea. When it clears a man who makes charcoal in a big smoldering pit down the coast walks by with a sack over his shoulder. I watch a wooden vessel motor along, bearded with surf, like a vision from Omeros, the epic poem about Saint Lucian fishermen by the Nobel Prize-winning poet and national hero Derek Walcott:
The boatswain lifted the mattock, and the metre
of the long oars lifted the fanning chrysalis
of the full sails as a wake was sheared by the bow.
When he sailed home to the Netherlands in 1644 Frans Post became, perhaps unknowingly, the first trained artist to bring New World landscapes back to the Old on canvas. Brazil remained his fixation in Haarlem, where he joined a painter’s guild and created some 148 views of the places, animals, and people he’d seen — and many he invented. But something had changed: in his later works the clouds that previously haunted his Brazil paintings abruptly part to expose vast expanses of blue sky. Chimerical beasts feast on ripe fruit. Orchids unfurl in the foreground.
Was it simply that Post finally had access to a full set of paints with which to capture the exuberant scenes he’d encountered? Or did he find that more exoticized works fetched higher prices among his patrons? Maybe both. His prodigious output must’ve exhausted the stock of sketches he drafted in Brazil. In their absence, he improvised, relying less on memory and more on imagination, like stories that accrue new flourishes with each telling. Sometime in the late 1660s, however, he set down his brush and never picked it up again. Some think he became an alcoholic, devastated by the loss of two children in labor. I wonder if the artist had also simply become bored and unsettled as the wonder of his youthful adventures faded. He had access to all the paint in Europe, and yet he was left scraping sediment from the surface of his palette of memories, too faint to render new worlds.
My visit is too brief to bring home a complete picture. But there’s value in first impressions, immediacy to an unfinished sketch. Intimacy takes time, but in Saint Lucia, I learn that to love a place takes little.
Sonic Landscapes
A mix, echoing my old college radio show
To accompany “Sketches of Saint Lucia” I’ve assembled 10 songs to spin while eating papaw, hooking dorado, and hiking mornes. From marches, to soca, to reggae standards, these tunes take the Antilles anywhere.
Lakonmèt Dance — Kwadril ensemble
Pirate Days — Culture
True King of Carnival — Lord Shorty
Plat — Umpa
High Tide or Low Tide — Bob Marley & The Wailers
Don’t Worry Baby — The Beach Boys
Please Go Easy with Me — s e rogie
Tropical Landscapes — Matthew Halsall
Tajabone — Ismaël Lô
St. Cecelia’s Day Serenade; Masquerade — Music of St. Lucia
Rambling Library
A selection of site-specific reading recs
Omeros by Derek Walcott (1990) — This book-length epic poem by the Saint Lucian Nobel laureate elevates a tale of simple fishermen and islanders to mythic heights
The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1950) — The first published work of the English traveler, soldier, and linguist chronicles Paddy’s manic hop through the Antilles in 1947
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean by Edward Kritzler (2008) — The revelations in this book put a cast of swashbuckling Jews at the heart of the complex story of New World colonization
Something You Should Know
A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver
Australian “firehawks” pick up burning sticks in their beaks or talons and drop them elsewhere to start new bushfires in order to catch the small prey that flees the flames