Life is Good

Sometimes that's all you can say. Life is good.

Monday morning I got an e-mail about a lionfish trapping project taking place at the Frederiksted Pier. I'm including a link to the story I wrote so I don't have to give a lot of background. If you don't want to read it (it's an interesting story, I think) just remember lionfish = bad.

The message gave a time of from 1 to 3 p.m.

I didn't know what to expect, but I figured a short little spiel for the press. They'd show off the traps, give the "lionfish = bad" rap, answer a few questions and go to work. So I drove down to the pier after lunch. Got there at 1 p.m. on the dot, but forgot to factor in parking. Ended up having to park three blocks away, and walked onto the huge concrete cruise ship pier at 1:07.

And saw a dive boat pulling away. Literally, 30 seconds later and I'd have been right there. But in life as in comedy, timing is everything. Assuming that was the lionfish project, I had just missed them.

I stood thee and stared, waving a little, hoping someone might glance back. Another boat pulled up to the pier, this a small, yellow inflatable motorized kayak looking thing. A young guy, mid-20s, got out and tied up.

"Do you know if that's the lionfish project out there?" I asked, pointing to the dive boat, which seemed to be stationary, about 100 feet off the end of the pier.

"Yeah," he said.

"Damn," I said.

He looked at me funny and I explained I was a reporter who had just missed my story.

"I can take you out to them," he said.

"Great! Let's go."

I scrambled down into his boat, which he explained was used for diving, and was designed for Navy SEALs, which would explain the large opening in the bow. The SEALs could enter the water without having to go over the side. He zipped it up, and we were off. The photo shows the nose of our boat with the dive boat dead ahead. That's what the picture shows, the approach to the dive boat.

Just moments later we were circling the dive boat, where a couple of the people aboard recognized me and waved us over. With permission to come aboard, I transferred my phone and camera to the safer Velcro pockets of my cargo paints and reached for the proffered hand that helped me step up into the dive boat. It turned out the hand belonged to a friend of Millie's, MacKenzie MacQueen. She's a senior at Good Hope, and a certified diver. The trapping project is actually her project for the school science fair, which is a very big deal at GHS.

Along for the ride were her dad Neil, who I've met before and is an interesting guy, the young lad Alex, another friend of Millie's from GHS, Dr. Coles from Fish and Wildlife, the guy piloting the boat, and another diver, Pete, hereinafter referred to as "the ancient mariner," not that he's any older than me, probably not quite as old and certainly in better shape. He's a real lionfish zealot, says he's personally killed more than 14,000 of the bastards.

The whole project is described in the article linked to above and I won't bother going over all that here. I could have shot the whole thing from the pier, watching as they circled around dropping the traps in specific locations, and gotten the information after they came back, or in a phone call.

But who wouldn't want to spend a chunk of the afternoon out on the water, sun shining but a breeze keeping the temp down. The water so damn blue I can't describe it. It was as bright as the blue of a particularly clean swimming pool, but a much darker shade.

And this way I got the story in a casual way, in bits and snatches of conversation rather than a more formal interview – not that there's anything terribly formal about my interviewing style. My very favorite interview of all time was when I got to interview a Nobel-prize winning physicist and started our talk by saying, "I have no idea what you do." He was so startled by my candor – and such a gentleman – that he tried really hard to explain his work and what it meant. Really nice guy.

But back to the point, they kept trying to convince me that I had to take up diving. I kept explaining that I'm not much of a swimmer, that if I go in the water and don't drown, that counts as swimming for me. They claimed that you don't have to know how to swim to be able to scuba, but it sure seems to me like something you ought to know before you take up diving. Maybe I'm missing something, but you're in the water, right? Like, way underneath it? I'm not convinced.

Anyway, in no time at all the traps were in the water and we headed back to the pier.

Being a reporter has its plus sides. Along with the usual crap, I've got to watch a couple of rocket launches, interview some celebrities and high muckety muck politicians and that Nobel winner and walk through a forest fire with a firefighting team. Met a lot of interesting people in interesting places. Got into Disneyland free several times.

But I'd have to put that hour on the water up there with any of it. Even given the serious subject matter (lionfish = bad) it was just a great, great way to spend the afternoon. And I got a good story out of it.

Doppleganger

So who is that in the picture on the left? Me, or that other guy?

I mentioned earlier that on several instances since arriving on St. Croix I had been mistaken for another guy who apparently looks just like me. His name is Winegar, presumably that's his last name. People have called out the name to me as I drove by, walked up and asked if I remembered them, people who thought they had worked with me (him) sometime in the past.

They're convinced I'm him, surprised – even shocked – when they find out I'm not.

Well, it's still going on. It's happend three more times just since the first of the year, bringing the number of "Winegar incidents" to well over a dozen. I am, of course, guessing about the spelling of the name based on the pronunciation.

Here's what I know about him so far, based on what people have said when trying to prove they know me/him:

• He's got two sisters in Phoenix.

• He worked for a while at the Animal Welfare Center

• He worked more recently at the Department of Planning and Natural Resources. May still work there.

• He appears to play a musical instrument, although I don't know what.

• He seems to be a nice guy, very friendly. No one has ever come up to me with a scowl and behaved angry, as if they had mistaken me for some jerk. No, it's always with a smile, as if they're glad to seem him after a long time. No one has ever shook his fist at me or demanded the money Winegar owes him. They're always happy to see him, or they would be if I were him.

And he must just be handsome as hell. After all, he looks just like me, apparently.

The obvious thing for me to do is call DPNR and ask if he still works there. If he does, ask to speak to him and settle this once and for all. But quite frankly I'm afraid to.

What if he does look just like me, but he turns out to be – by any objective standard – funny looking, odd, or old or fat or – you know – ugly? What would I do then? Do I want to take that chance?

A Top Ten List

With apologies to both Dave Barry and Dave Letterman, here is The Top Ten List of things you see or hear often on the island of St. Croix that would also make a good name for a band.

10) Copulating Lizards

9) Sea Glass

8) Sheck Sheck and Flamboyant

7) Wild Dogs

6) Roadkill Iguana

5) Feral Chicken

4) Pothole

3) Dead Horse in the Water

2) Leatherbacks

And the No. 1 thing you see or hear a lot on-island that would make a good name for a band is –

1) I Smell Pot

It's That Time of Year

I'm really not an asshole. Really. I'm actually considered a very nice guy, sympathetic, caring.

But this is the time of year when I particularly enjoy having made the move to St. Croix.

When I'm in the car, listening to the radio, and someone from Oklahoma City says the snow is already up to her knees, I chuckle. When I hear that Chicago (where I was born and lived my first 10 years of life) is bracing for one of the 10 worst snowstorms in its history, I get a warm glow inside. I hear from our friend Larry in Nashville (where I lived five years) that he's expecting snow again there, I commiserate, but I can't help smiling. And when I check the weather in Oregon (where I lived more than 20 years) and see that the temp is 47 and might make it all the way up to 50 today, and it's raining (as if a cold rain in Oregon in February is news – a cold rain in Oregon in February was what made us decide to move here) I feel a deep, deep sense of satisfaction.

Granted, I don't get much kick out of the news from Los Angeles (lived in SoCal 10 years,) where the temp will be in the mid-60s again today. I've got to check the news about freeway traffic and earthquake predictions to get the same smug, self-righteous, innsufferable satisfaction, as if I'm somehow responsible for the weather here.

Right now, at 8:40 a.m., the temp on St. Croix is 77, and is expected to be about 84 by midafternoon. It's always about 84 by midafternoon. There's not a cloud in the blue, blue sky. Tonight's low is forecast at 72, which is a little chilly for these parts.

Sorry – I really, really am not an asshole. Making those comparisons is sort of the point. Yes, there are problems and occasional challenges to living here, but none of them have to do with snowstorms. I promise to write about one of them really soon, if that'll make you feel better.

Or wait until August and September. You can all get back to me while I'm sweating out another hurricane season. Except in parts of the U.S. you'll be sweltering in 100 + heat, and the headlines wll be about heatwaves, and here it'll be about 84 by midafternoon. I'll take that.

An Odd Morning

Warning: This post has a story that the squeamish, and I'm one of them, might not appreciate. Hell, they'll hate it. I sure did.

Sunday morning was odd. Not odd in a "Oh, things are sure different on St. Croix!" way. Odd in a "Dear God! How did that happen" kind of way.

Started when we decided to run down to the beach. Nothing odd about that. We often go to the beach on Sunday morning. Nice and quiet down at Dorsch, rarely more than a dozen people within a hundred yards in either direction on this stretch of white sand that's world-class beautiful. So yesterday we took the three-minute drive, set up our chairs on the sand under a tree, and plopped down.

Then Tori looks up and says, "There's something in the water." Well that's not unusual is it? It's water. There are things in it. But this time she points and says, "Something dead in the water."

"No," I answer, looking at the gray mass on the water's edge about 40 feet away, where the waves are lapping. "It's a rock."

"No it's not," she said.

So I get up to take a look. I really wanted it to be a rock. Really wanted to be right on this one. Walked about 20 feet. Stared. Walked back.

"You were right," I said. "It's a dead horse."

Now, there are often horses in the water at Dorsch. There's a trainer who brings horses down and swims them up and down the beach. It's cool to watch. But this horse sure as hell wasn't swimming and there was nothing cool about this.

We decided two things. We didn't want to stay at the beach, and someody needed to be called. We didn't know who, but somebody needed to be called. I figured I'd call 911, because if they weren't the right one, they'd know who was. But I'd left my cell phone at home. So we packed up and headed back. We were almost to our house when we saw a front-end loader coming up the street.

"Follow him," Tori said. "I'll bet someone called and he's going to pick up the horse."

We did, and sure enough he pulled over and started onto the beach, right toward the horse. We didn't stay to watch, because – DAMN. But at least we knew it was being dealt with.

We ended up driving to a different beach, about a half mile away, just to try to get the image out of our minds. Ony partly successful – I can still see it. And that's where the second odd thing happened. Odd, but not nearly as disturbing.

We were rinsing the sand off our feet at the shower pole. At a nearby table, four guys were playing dominoes (big game here, and people play it very aggressively. The sound of the tiles slapping onto the table is loud.) and two or three other guys were fiddling with what turned out to be a pressure cooker on a barbecue. Never saw that before, but neither of those were the odd thing.

They had a sound system set up – again, not unusual. The first thing many groups do when they get to the beach is set up a concert-sized sound system with a generator. Usually they're playing reggae, rap or some version of calypso.

Not these guys. They were listening to country music. I'm talking old school country, with the twang and the steel guitars. It sounded like something from about 1958, like some guy gunning to be the next Hank Williams. I'm not describing it well, but it was very distinctive, you'd have snapped your fingers and gone, "Oh! Nashville, Tin Pan Alley. Opry. Got it." Never heard anything like it on the island, certainy not on the beach, where a half dozen or so locals were enjying dominoes and getting ready for whatever was in the pressure cooker.

Between those two moments – the dead horse and the country music (that could be the name of a country song right there, "Dead Horses and Country Music") there was a moment that was distinctive, not odd. We looked up and a rain squall was blowing over the beach to the north, out of a little rounded bay. It was a gray curtain, opaque, with tendrils blowing out of the clouds and coming down to the water. Behind it the greens of the hills were muted, and the cloud's shadows cast a rippling darker shades up and down the slopes.

I lived half my life in Oregon, so I've seen lots of rain. Lived the first 10 years of my life in the Midwest, so I've seen lots of really hard rain. This was nothing like either.

It took maybe 10 minutes to pass, maybe 15, and we watched it the whole way as the clouds blew out to sea. It looked like shafts of darkness traced through the sheet of rain, although that's obviously backwards. It was large shafts of light, but it sure looked like the darker columns were the aberration. Meanwhile, the shadows of the clouds marched up and down the hills like an army, then drifted away leaving nothing behind but the green glowing hillsides.

The rain was falling, of course, approximately where we'd left the dead horse. As we drove by on our way home we had to stop to see what had happened. Because all we had seen was the front-end loader. What was he going to do? Drive back to where he'd come from with the thing in his bucket? Bury it in the sand? What?

When we passed by, the loader was still there, parked on the sand. The tire tracks led down to the water's edge. But there was no sign of the horse, or the driver. All we can figure is a truck must have been coming along behind him. They loaded it up, took it wherever you take such things, and were busy hosing out the bed of the truck.

At least I hope so.

We have no idea how the horse got there. No idea how long it had been there. but surely it couldn't have been there much longer than early in the morning. It's just one of those mysteries.

It was an unusual Sunday morning – not unusual just for St. Croix but really unusual anywhere, I've got to think. All of that, plus a pleasant time on the sand, took about an hour, hour and a half at most.

There's a T-shirt you see here all the time with slogan, "Just another day in paradise."

Sunday wasn't just another day.

Long Time

Long time.

It's been a long time, almost six months, since anything has been posted here.

It's not like nothing's happened. Quite the contrary. It's been too full.

• Tori's mother, Janet, died.

• Daughter Alex moved off island, back to Oregon.

• Got a new used car, and have spent about $600 on various things, brakes, starter, tires. You know - things.

• Got through hurricane season relatively unscathed.

• Our cat went away and never came back.

• Started a new blog, solely about writing.

• Tori directed a play at the school that is widely regarded as the best show this island has seen in years.

All of those might have been the meat for dozens of blog posts, but we didn't post. Some were too hard to write about, some too transitory to have time to think about. Things are settling down a bit. I think I'll try to take this up again and do what it was supposed to do – talk about a family making this crazy move.

And things are still crazy – well, maybe not crazy, but certainy different than life was in Oregon. Still have things to sa o the subject. But in a sense I feel like I'm starting over.

So here I go. At least one post a week - short, but it'll get done.

Two Years

Two years ago today I went to the Henry Rohlsen International Airport here on St. Croix and met the plane Tori, Max and Janet were on. I'd arrived the day before with Kate, Alex, Millie and a very pissed off cat. So today marks the two year anniversary of the start of our adventure.

No regrets. None.

jb