Home on the Waves
Photo by Nathan Cowley via Pexels
I grew up in the little apple. At least that's the English translation of the town Manzanilla. To get there you'd have to go to the far east of the island.The trip in my mind really started when you got to Sangre Grande. At the edge of the bustling town, you could take a taxi for seven dollars and they would take you straight there. I always had the order of the towns memorized. It went - Sangre Grande, Sangre Chiquito, Plum Mitan where my father once tried running a roti shop, Lower Manzanilla and then, then you'd get to the beach.
You'd know you were close when the roads started turning upwards and the air became crisper, fresher. At the tippy-top of the hill was "First and Last Bar,” never failing to burn my eyes with it's horrible mustard yellow colour. From there however, you would get your first glimpses of the ocean. It was always a humbling experience for me as a child. I was well read, the scenes described in my books, I woke up to almost every day.
At the bottom of the hill, when you first met the ocean face to face, you'd make the first left turn on my home street, Calypso Road. I took a lot of joy writing that as my address growing up (lot #22 Calypso Road, Manzanilla) .The catch was that we never received mail directly to the house so we had to go into Grande to pick up anything or pay bills.
We lived directly on the coast, the ravenous ocean nipping the buds of our home's feet. The way my teenage memory recalls the drive, it almost always felt like a straight road, no weird turn offs or anything. It was notorious for claiming tyres though, and then my father's temper.
My father, Anil, operated a small beach house on the coast of Manzanilla beach with my mother, my aunts and his six children. Tucked into a small private settlement, he called it Amelia's Beach House, named endearingly after me. Our Home on the Waves.
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In the beginning, the private settlement was very scarcely settled. We had a small advertisement posted on Lonely Planet that attracted foreigners, mainly Europeans and Americans, to the quiet setting. My mother and her sisters would do the cooking and cleaning while my father simply chatted with guests, did small repairs and handled the money. I suppose that was customary in Caribbean households back then, having the women do all the hard parts of the domestic work. Profiting off of it. The constant influx of visitors I think was the saving grace for the women. A shield of sorts. In the months of June - August, while school was out, this reprieve was most available. The visitor count would go up and it was for one particular reason: leatherback turtles.
“I suppose that was customary in Caribbean households back then, having the women do all the hard parts of the domestic work. Profiting off of it.”
My childhood is filled with memories of strange accents and foreign faces. Our backyard, filled to the brim with sand, sported two towering almond trees and many "chinee" coconut trees. Sometimes the tourists camped outside their rooms rather than stay in because of that. Along with the fact that they would get some action from the nefarious sea breeze. Dinners of crab and dumpling, curry duck and goat, shark and bake(with freshly caught shark), dhal galore and sitting face to face with people who came from many parts of the world. Huddled up in our tiny living room, laughing and connecting, all to see these majestic turtles create life.
The uninhabited settlement was very dark at night and if we were lucky, sometimes the turtles came right up to the front of our home. One time we even had orcas (killer whales) beached on shore! Most nights however, the tourists and my father would venture out under the beautifully starlit sky, trek along the dense, soft sand and seek the egg-laying giants. I don't think I've ever experienced anything as enchanting as those nights since.
As I got older and changed, the world around me began changing too. Slowly but surely. In the coming years, more homes and beach houses would start popping up in the area. One by one they went up and stayed up. Each with their own set of new bright lights and faces, ready to capitalize on nature. The fields of grass were suddenly being cut to lawn level, the trees torn down, animals displaced, the coconut trees raided, damaged, chopped. I don't think I have to say it, but our small family run business was now going to have some serious competition, and we did. Our number of visitors dropped drastically in months ahead and so did our income.
The changes brought more changes and then, my aunts left, no longer able to survive in the beach house setting. The shield of visitors they once had, were now few and far between. My father's temper and his violence coupled with the frustration of a declining business, destroyed the women, inside and out. They left and the duties of the beach house would be passed around from mistreated immigrant to mistreated immigrant until my father finally decided to pass it on to his daughters. My mother, who married my father at 16, and was completely illiterate, simply could not and would not disobey her husband, "So said, so done".
The next change would come with the rising tides and the onslaught of global warming. Another translation for Manzanilla is Chamomile, which is very fitting, because the beach has some of the shallowest waters in Trinidad and my father used to joke that it was impossible to drown in it. Like everything else, this too changed. Without warning, the front yard of our house began to crumble and erode to the tides. It would be years of reconstruction and reinforcement, boulder after boulder and the purchase of heavy duty machinery before it would be stable again.
The next thing that would go, would be our lovely almond trees, gutted and tossed aside. The bearer of our wooden swings and climbing competitions, forsaken. The sandy backyard was replaced with concrete and a swimming pool, because we needed more customers right? The coconut trees went too and new buildings were constructed in place. Everyone else was doing it anyway to him. The business was renamed and our ad placed in local newspapers instead : "Manzanilla Beach House with pool"
“My mother, who married my father at 16, and was completely illiterate, simply could not and would not disobey her husband, “So said, so done”.”
Eventually, the leatherback turtles stopped coming to the beach. The houses and the lights and the people were all too much. I suppose it's better that way anyway. I'd seen too many locals riding them, as though they had not just given birth to life not minutes before. I would miss them dearly though.
The stars were no longer visible at night. The nightlife and parties made everything lively for the few able to enjoy its luxuries I'm sure, but the night sky would never be the same. It never was. I never saw the stars for long again after that. Not unless the electricity was cut.
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The sea breeze stank with the aroma of rotted seaweed, piled on the eroded and littered shore. Dead fish and mutilated sea life were a norm. The waters muddy from the polluted river mouth after every rainfall gave it a rinse. The tourists stopped coming. Peaceful dinners turned to drunken parties held by locals who didn't care to leave the beach the way they got it.
Happy interactions with new faces and cultures became fending off sexual harassment while cleaning up after old men. My rose coloured glasses were cracked and barely holding themselves together. Just like me. Just like the beach. Just like the women around me. I'd live to see anything that graced that place destroyed, battered and bruised.
Right before I turned eighteen, I moved out, taking all of my father's misogynistic ideals and tossing them into a fire. The family proceeded to fall apart and everyone went their separate ways.
The beach house was reclaimed by the bank, my father and mother had accumulated over a million dollars in debt trying to save the house from damage done by the rising tides. No longer is she our Home on the Waves. She sits abandoned, unloved and unwanted, waiting for the ocean to break her down and wash away all the sins she bore witness to.