The next day, I visited the 40-acre Botanical Gardens where Rhys had played as a child. Now it was scorched and empty. No sign of staff; no tourists either. I visited an endangered Sisserou parrot in the aviary and took pictures of a flattened school bus, still pinned beneath a giant African baobab tree felled by Hurricane David in 1979. “Fortunately, the bus was empty at the time,” read a sign.
I wandered around Roseau, looking for evidence of my idol. I visited the Carnegie Library where Jean went as a teenager, brand-new in 1907, now underfunded and drably renovated. Elsewhere, I found a couple of dusty, hole-in-the-wall bookstores containing very few books. Now and then, I asked people about Rhys. A policeman shrugged apologetically. A woman selling souvenirs said, “I don’t read. I don’t like to read.” Others didn’t know or didn’t care who she was—possibly the same reaction tourists would get in Canada if they asked about Mavis Gallant.
On days when a cruise ship was in port to pick up fresh spring water (Dominica famously claims to have 365 rivers and dozens of waterfalls) and drop off thousands of day trippers, I’d blend in with the crowd. Other days, I was often the only white person in view, and my casual shorts and T-shirts made me stand out even more. Dominican society is a conservative mix of English rectitude (the country gained independence in 1978, but uniforms and the Queen’s English are still de rigueur in schools) and relics of French rule in the 1700s (the island’s 69,000 inhabitants are 77 percent Catholic and speak a French Creole to each other). The women don’t wear shorts or halter tops or miniskirts. They wear long pants, skirts, and a lot of carefully buttoned suits, while the men, in loose trousers and neatly pressed shirts, look like Nat King Cole. T-shirts with logos are a recent phenomenon; much of what’s on sale here is from China, a country that has lately been sinking millions into Dominica—a bribe, my cab driver had told me, to encourage the island to vote with China against recognizing Taiwan at the UN.
Four days into my two-week trip, I gave up on the Jean Rhys angle and decided to focus on the travel-story angle—but not a conventional travel story. I would avoid organized tourist activities and independently seek out original material. The next morning, I headed away from Roseau, catching a bus south to Scott’s Head, a fishing village whose nearby bubbly ocean waters are caused by underwater volcanic gases.
Dominica consists mainly of volcanic mountains that shoot up from the sea and are covered in dense vegetation, including the largest island rainforest in the Lesser Antilles. When Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand asked Columbus about the island (which he’d sighted and named in 1493), he described it by crumpling up a piece of paper. My point is that the roads are narrow, twisty, and frightening. As the minivan careered wildly down the coast, I nervously asked if there was a speed limit. The three other men in the van, who in typically reserved Dominican fashion had been politely ignoring me, now glanced at each other, then burst out laughing. At least it broke the ice. As he dropped me off, the driver said there were no more buses that day, but he might be by again in an hour or so. Terrified of missing a ride back, I considered staying put for an hour but finally decided to quickly tour the town.
There wasn’t another tourist in the entire village of 800. The locals openly stared at me. “The Canadian,” I heard someone say. I resorted to my stranger-in-a-strange-land thing, striding purposefully along, as if I knew where I was going and didn’t have the time to stop and look at anything. Except there was nowhere to go. The short road petered out onto a rocky shore and the empty ocean. Without missing a beat, I spun around and marched back up the road, eventually veering away from curious eyes by cutting through a graveyard. I noticed the whitewashed headstones’ inscriptions were intriguingly hand-lettered in what looked like Magic Marker, but I didn’t dare stop to read any for fear of missing my ride.
I stood at the edge of town and contemplated the local architecture—some nice homes, but mostly lean-tos and crazily patchworked sheds made of debris from the last hurricane. And yet even around the smallest shacks there was a profusion of colourful shrubs, sinuous vines, flowering trees—as if the owners had mistakenly blown their entire construction budget on the world’s most expensive landscape architects. After almost a week in the place, I still couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. Dominica was supposed to be a poor country, the Third World, a “developing” nation with a failing banana industry, 23 percent unemployment, and an airport that couldn’t accommodate the jumbo jets of a desperately needed international tourist trade. But people looked clean and happy and healthy. With a literacy rate of 94 percent, they were uniformly well-spoken and polite. I saw no homeless people, no beggars in rags. Standing there in Scott’s Head, I felt not only lonely and self-conscious, but also profoundly aware of how ignorant I was about how the world worked.
In the interests of getting a story—any story—I decided to act like a regular tourist and signed up for a guided tour to Titou Gorge, where you can swim into a cave with a waterfall inside. The group included three married couples from Fresno, California, a French-speaking mother and daughter from Martinique, and me. I’d become used to mystified people asking me, “Are you alone?” but now the guide evidently assumed I was looking for company. “Vanstone,” he said, checking his list. “That’s a Dutch name. I usually have luck with Dutch women.” I decided to start telling people that I had a big, husky, armed husband waiting for me back at the hotel, but actually nobody asked me again. The most interesting thing at Titou Gorge was a woman who broke out in hives due, she said, to the extreme coldness of the water, which in fact was tepid compared with Georgian Bay.
I even went whale-watching. A German lady lectured us about the seven species found in these parts while we chugged back and forth on the sickening swells under the relentless tropical sun. Finally, after forty-five minutes, we found pilot whales—puny things that resembled dirty grey dolphins more than majestic Moby Dicks. They leaped alongside the boat. The boredom was excruciating. I stared fixedly at the faraway shore, wondering if I could swim back, and if the German lady would let me. Tiny glasses of free rum punch were circulated, but after I’d gulped down a couple, the tray disappeared, and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by asking for more. Besides, what if I got drunk, and started crashing about the boat screaming obscenities at people, like Jean Rhys? It didn’t look like a literary crowd; I’m not sure they would have got the reference.
I still had many days to go when I decided one morning to stick around the hotel and relax. I got a box of Melba toast, a jar of peanut butter, and some Red Rose teabags. After three calls and then a visit to the front desk, a pretty young clerk came to my room, stared at the kettle’s non-functional plug, then jammed a wooden match into the outlet to act as the grounding prong, after which the kettle worked fine. Without a functional remote, I spent a lot of time standing in front of the TV holding up one arm to change channels until all the blood had drained from it, then switching to the other arm. Eventually, I would settle on a movie, any movie, and—as one day stretched into two, then three—I ended up catching quite a few films that I might otherwise have missed. Like First Blood, which features the memor-able line, “He eats things that would make a billy goat puke.” And a teen date-movie with Keanu Reeves. And a teen date-movie with Ashton Kutcher, in which he tries to stop a girl’s bleeding head wound from dripping on the furniture in his boss’s house. I guess travel does expand the mind, because I had never before appreciated how funny and talented Ashton really is.
