{SPRING GE T A W A Y }
to buy the hillside and arrange for Maho Bay Camps to stay open. But there’s no guarantee it will succeed.
‘The person who loves you’
When the day for the long hike came, it turned out
that just Lizzie and I were going. The others opted for more beach time. Half a mile down the North Shore Road, we found the
beginning of the Maria Hope Trail. A steep mile or so later, we huffed across the ridge road that runs through the center of St. John and headed down the green and shady Reef Bay Trail, which ends at an old sugar mill on the south coast. If we’d signed up for the Park Service version of this ex-
cursion, we’d have been dropped off at the height of land and hauled back by boat when we hit Reef Bay, thus avoiding the nasty uphill bits. But that would have been wimpy. Hadn’t Deborah and I walked many miles past Reef Bay — all the way to Ram’s Head, in fact, diagonally across the island from Maho — in 1988? Well, no. We hadn’t. A closer look at the map revealed
just how long a trek that would have been. A memory adjustment con- firmed that I had conflated two trips. So Lizzie and I decided to make for Lameshur Bay instead. It was a few miles closer but promised beaches and views. More important, it would still give us plenty of time to talk, something to which we’ve always found hiking conducive. Lizzie had been good about communicating from college,
sugar plantations, and during the island’s roughly 130-year sugar era, the vast majority of its population was enslaved. On our way up the hill, we stopped to examine an old
platform for grinding sugar cane. It featured a lovely circular wall built with native stone, coral and imported brick, but it was more sobering than charming — especially considering the guidebook entry I’d read about a 1733 rebellion in which nearly 150 slaves died “in battle, by their own hand, or by torture and execution.” Some of the rebels, it turns out, had holed up for a while
near Maho Bay.
A girl who might sail forever
Back in 21st-century Maho, the real world was
starting to intrude. Lizzie had to leave a day early to get back to school. Deborah saw her off on the morning ferry to St. Thomas, extracting a promise that she’d text us from the various airports where she’d be touching down. But Mona and I had one last ex-
cursion planned. We had signed up for a sunset sail
From left, Deborah, Lizzie, Mona and Bob on their Maho Bay vacation.
on the Pepper, a bright yellow 23-foot sloop that operates out of Maho Bay Camps. Fred and Renee, the Pepper’s captain and crew, had traded snowy winters in Massachusetts and Min- nesota for the kind of warm-weather midlife adventure — buy a boat and sail for a living! — that can set even a
but it was wonderful to hear extended descriptions of friends she’d been making and classes she cared about. Topping her list was a Southern literature course for which she was reading “All the King’s Men,” and the day before she had read me a pas- sage about how love makes a person over again. “The person who loves you,” Robert Penn Warren wrote,
“has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person. …” The context, in Warren’s book, is a first, ecstatic love af-
fair. But I found myself thinking that the concept of mutu- ally molded identity applies to parents and children, too. Reaching the bay, we walked out on a rugged, scenic spit
of land where the biggest iguana I’ve ever seen bolted across the trail. After eating lunch near a ruined stone house above the beach, we reluctantly headed back. Stone ruins are everywhere on St. John. “Part of the
island’s charm is discovering its history, sometimes barely visible just off road or path,” a sign at Trunk Bay informs visitors. But “charm” is hardly the right word for the history those ruins represent. Most were part of colonial Danish
22 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | MAY 16, 2010
landlubber like me to dreaming the Caribbean dream. In it, every sail is at sunset. There’s always enough wind. And as you glide past islands with names such as Great
Thatch and Whistling Cay, home to a charming ruin once used by guards to intercept escaping slaves, they are invari- ably bathed in golden light. It didn’t last long, my escapist fantasy, especially after Fred
and Renee started talking about what they have to do to sur- vive. They can’t afford to buy a house: Rent and utilities are ludicrously high; and they were really, really excited about a job they just landed caretaking some rich people’s vacation place. Mona, meanwhile, was looking like a girl who might sail
forever. She couldn’t, of course. All too soon, we would find our-
selves wading back to Little Maho beach and climbing those 118 steps. In Washington, college mail would be waiting, and in six months, like her sister, she would be gone. But as I watched her lean into the breeze in that golden Caribbean light, it seemed foolish to worry about what a return to main- land reality would bring. Look what we’d gained, after all, since the last time we came home from Maho Bay.
Bob Thompson is a former staff writer and editor for The Washington Post. He can be reached at
wpmagazine@washpost.com.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE THOMPSON FAMILY
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