by bob Thompson

I

Bay

t was our first evening on St. John.

The four of us lingered on the dining pavilion at Maho Bay Camps, gawking at the blue-green sea below us, basking in the Caribbean moment. But I was having trouble separating present

and past. Sunset streaked the darkening sky — but

weren’t the reds and oranges brighter on our first Virgin Islands trip? Lights dotted the slopes of St. Thomas, the island to our west — could it really have been so crowded back then?

Cats stalked the pavilion in search of scraps — were they new to Maho, or had we fed their ancestors two decades before? In the spring of 1988, Deborah and I had chosen St. John

for what would turn out to be our last vacation before we got married. We’d signed up for a week at Maho, a cluster of eco-friendly tent cabins on the island’s northwest coast. Neither of us had been there before. Now we were back, with 19-year-old Lizzie and 17-year-old Mona for company. We’d flown from Dulles airport to St. Thomas to find

that the funky terminal of our hazy memories — it looked like something out of “Casablanca” — had been rebuilt. On the ferry to St. John we’d been soaked by spray, but nobody cared. At Maho, we made our way across the hillside board- walk to tent cabin A-18. It had two beds, a couch, a cot, a fan and screens all around (we didn’t immediately notice the iguanas in the trees). “Steps to Beach: 118” read the sign on the boardwalk, so

down we climbed. Fish leaped. Pelicans cruised and dived. Dads launched

themselves at small children like surfing sea monsters. Little Maho Beach will never make the best-in-the-world lists on which Trunk Bay, a few miles down the road, routinely ap- pears, but it’s a genuine white-sand Caribbean affair none- theless, and it felt wonderful to be there. Still, I remembered fleeing it, 20 years ago, in search of

more exciting St. John shores. Little Maho was for families. “What was it like when you guys were here before?” Mona

asked at dinner. She may have just wanted to know about the salad bar or the hungry cats, but I took her question in its cosmic sense and mumbled something about how there’d been fewer of us back then. It’s not easy to explain how parenthood remolds one’s world. What I might have said was: “Two decades ago, you and your sister didn’t exist. Then you became the absolute center of our lives. Now that you’re

Twenty years later, he was returning to St. John, where — it was clear — his life had changed more than the place Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166