Daydreaming of Islands, Day 2

March 20, 2010

by

  Post A Comment

Though it is officially spring in the Hudson Valley, my mind is still wandering to the Caribbean. I spend a lot of time with maps and atlases, mostly studying places I don’t yet know. I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time tracing fingers up and down the Caribbean islands, trying to find one that somehow has previously escaped notice, one that hasn’t been completely consumed (and overrun) by its nearest neighbors. It’s tricky. My fingers, and memory, keep taking me back to St. John, specifically to a hideaway of white canvas tents hidden deep in the green.

Ultimate recycling: Turning used bottles into art

Given its history of wildness, the 114-tent-and-boardwalk resort known at Maho Bay Camps is a perfect fit on St. John, as close to a true eco-resort as any I’ve seen around the world. Which surprises no one more than Stanley Selengut, the camp’s owner who put up the initial 18 tents in 1976. “That phrase – eco-resort – didn’t exist then,” says a longtime Maho Bay manager once explained to me. “Stanley and a bunch of his friends were down here and someone said, ‘This would be a great place for some tent platforms.’ Typical for Stanley, it may not have been his idea, he was the one that figured out how to get things done.”

In these days when any hotel that encourages you not to wash your towel every day wraps itself in a green banner, Maho Bay Camps is the real thing. Recycle-reuse-reduce is its watch-phrase. Showers are communal; potable water accessible in just a couple locations in the 14-acre compound; the restaurant is self-serve; urinals water-less; much of the energy needed to run 114 tents, reception, restaurant, internet solar-produced. In its art studios –open to all guests — glass is recycled by the glass-blowing studio, waste paper by the textile-makers and aluminum cans turned into pendants.

There is definitely a hippie-ish feel to the place, from the tie-dyed batiks made in the textile room to the “volunteers” who come for month-long stints, trading work for a free place to stay. During high season the place fills with families who’ve been coming now for two generations.

The last time I visited I stayed in tent-cabin, A-6, anchoring the far end of the boardwalk, closest to the beach at Maho Bay. It’s perfect for me. Through cracks in the deck flooring I can see the jungle below. The stove is propane, the refrigerator an Igloo cooler filled with ice, table and chairs made of plastic. A box fan whirs, thanks to 24-hour electricity, necessary to keep the mosquitoes at bay. As I write, a frigate bird lands atop a palm just outside my window and white-tailed tropic birds and brown boobys flit and soar. Inside, small anole lizards — gecko-like, with colorful, leaf-like dewlaps — do push ups in front of me, reminding me that this is their territory.

Letting the screen door bang behind, I find the head of Maho Goat Trail and wander down to the beach. From here it’s a mile-long walk to the start of one of the most beautiful of the park’s 22 official trails (there are countless unofficial ones, the former detailed in a variety of guidebooks and park service handouts, the latter marked with stone cairns and cryptic, handmade signs). I’m open to following any trail here since the only native mammals on the island are bats and there are no venomous snakes. The only surprise in the woods is the occasional wandering deer or donkey.

Later that one I hike down Cinnamon Bay Trail, lured by its reputation for having an incredible lookout over Maho Bay. Inside the forest is dark, tropical, intensely green thanks to recent rains. The trail is narrow and steep to the downhill; you don’t want to slip. Strangler figs, kapok, cocoa, mango and bay rum trees are thick and tall, the undergrowth heavy with star-like teyer palms, sweet lime and anthurium. Turpentine trees – what locals have dubbed tourist tree – expose a pink skin beneath peeling bark. Guts, natural rocky drainages criss-cross the trail channeling water downhill; man-made swales – lines of strategically placed rocks across the trail – are angled to divert the rainwater and prevent erosion.

As I walk down, slowly to avoid slipping, a solitary black bat leads me. Small lizards, imported to the island centuries ago to help kill insects, run across the trail; a variety of snails meander. Yellow & black bananaquits dart among the trees, many of which are home to giant termite balls built in the low crotches. Halfway down the 45-minute hike the trees open up, exposing a western view from the island, over Cinnamon Bay to Trunk Bay and beyond.

As I walk I try to make out the stone terraces that once divvied the island into 100 sugarcane plantations. Everything was clear-cut then, except for the mangoes and cocoa trees. Men, women and children slaved over the farms, in tropical heat.

At the bottom of the trail, just across from the long sand beach at Cinnamon Bay, sit the ruins of a two hundred year old plantation. Buildings, like the terraces, were constructed from stone, brain coral and occasionally imported red and yellow bricks from England and Germany. Tall stone columns, still standing, at one time supported the big room used to store brown sugar, molasses, barrels of rum and crushed and dried sugarcane stalks. There was a boiling and distillery house next door, where they used to make St. John’s Bay Rum (cologne, not alcohol!). Sitting on one of the stonewalls, sweating from the hike, nearly meditating thanks to the quiet of the forest, I can almost see and hear the young children climbing the bay rum trees, carefully stripping the leaves, putting them into sacks and carrying them off to be distilled.

The tents of Maho Bay Camps, hidden in green above the sea

The Plastiki Floats!

January 14, 2010

by

  10 Comments

I spent a recent afternoon at the marina in Sausalito aboard David de Rothschild’s just-launched Plastiki, the 60-foot catamaran he plans on sailing from San Francisco to Sydney … very, very soon. A sailboat made nearly completely from plastic? The idea came to him four years ago – How to use adventure to draw attention to the world’s rapacious consumption and waste of plastic? – and it’s taken that long to figure out the design, construction and sail-ability of a completely novel craft. Sixty-seven percent of its buoyancy comes from empty plastic water bottles; its strength comes from a brand new plastic – SR-PET – which unlike most other plastics is 100 percent recyclable. The idea is to use the sailing adventure to draw attention to the plastic accumulating in the ocean, and on land as well, and then tear the sucker apart and turn the whole thing into new plastic products once it arrives in Sydney.

The Plastiki’s role model? Thor Heyerdahl’s Kontiki, the balsa raft the Danish explorer sailed from Peru to French Polynesia in 1947, to draw attention to his notion that that part of the world was first explored from South America. Though his theory was debunked, Heyerdahl’s adventure was a huge success; at its height, his book about the expedition outsold the Bible. David’s media reach has proved impressive; now he just needs to get the boat onto the water, test it as thoroughly as he can within the reach of the San Francisco Bay, and then he and a crew of a half-dozen are off, hopefully around the end of February.

“We began by looking at bamboo, which stayed within the theme of the Kontiki expedition, but decided an all-plastic vessel was more fitting for our needs. A bout with recycled plastic lumber proved it wholly inappropriate due to its density and lack of stiffness. Over time the troubles we faced during our search for the right material pushed us toward the path of least resistance. It was a path that was going to see us melting down all the bottles and losing the imagination grabbing iconic image that we were trying so hard to preserve.

“With outright stubbornness and determination we stayed true to the vision of our dream. But to do it we had to engineer a new product dubbed self-reinforcing polyethylene terephthalate (SR-PET), which is a proprietary plastic evolved from plain old PET plastic. Had we taken the easy route we would have of lost the biggest breakthrough for the Plastiki project and more importantly a possible real world solution for our plastic problem. Simply put the structural skeleton of the Plastiki as well as the majority of the boat is made entirely out of the same plastic used in soda and water bottles, the same material that ends up in our oceans! The two could co-exist within the same waste cycle and feed into each other’s production. Just as long as the plastic flows back into factories, not our backyards and coastal waters, it would be a model referred to as ‘closed loop.’ ”

No matter how the sail goes, David already feels like the Plastiki’s message has already been heard. He and the boat have gotten great press, from the New Yorker to the Wall Street Journal. “If all that comes from these past four years is that people think more about where that water bottle they buy each morning comes from – and where it’s going – then we’ve succeeded,” he says.

Standing on the deck of the plastic ship, it’s small cabin like some kind of hexagonal dome grown slightly wild, I try and imagine what it will be like to sail it in a big Pacific Ocean storm.

“I’ve gone back and forth about our route,” its captain explains (not a sailor himself, David’s hired a good one, Jo Royle, to command the ship), “initially I thought we would take our time and make lots of stops. Now I’m thinking we just go straight through, really test the boat and ourselves.”