It breaks like a giant gray wave in the sky;
The wind and rain are the weapons it wields.
I stay inside and watch as it passes by–
It moves across the bay as over an open field.
The rain comes falling like a hail–
Sometimes it hammers, sometimes it pounds,
Falling sideways, driven by the gale.
Somewhere nearby a thunderclap resounds.
The wind: those invisible fingers of persistent strength
Whose touch is chilling and will is on mischief bent,
Whispering and howling until at length
The storm recedes with power drained and anger spent.
Such magnitude without body and without shape!
The creation of such a thing comprehension does escape.

You are standing in front of a large yellow van parked on a high mountain road. You are tired and muddy from a four-mile hike through the jungle. It is past seven o’clock, and the sun is beginning to sink below the horizon. You and the other hikers pile into the van, and you take a window seat on the left side. The driver, aptly named Yellow Man, gets into the driver’s seat on the right side. He is wearing a yellow shirt, yellow pants, yellow socks and shoes, and a yellow rubber band in his long beard. He starts the engine and the van begins to roll down the slope. For no particular reason, you slide back the window and stick your head out in to the evening air.

The wind is warm on your face, carrying with it the smell of damp vegetation and, occasionally, goats. You also catch a faint whiff of rotting mangoes. Over the rushing air, you hear the almost-electronic peeping of thousands of tiny frogs in the jungle. The road winds through the mountains, looping back and forth through the valleys and slopes. Sometimes your view is blocked by a wall of volcanic stone, and sometimes the rainforest drops away, revealing the whole island spread out before you like a wrinkled green quilt.

You pass through a small town. The houses are painted all manner of colors: powder blue, bright pink, mango orange, and banana yellow. Reggae music blasts from a small pub where local men talk and play pool. Occasionally, a car rushes past in the opposite direction. Because you are seated on the left side of the van, you do not have to worry about your head being forcibly removed by on-coming traffic, but you do have watch out for branches sticking out into the road.

At one point, you pass a landfill. You smell it long before you see it in the fading light: the stench of burning rubber. The huge piles of garbage have been burning for years, rendering this beautiful valley entirely uninhabitable. You are very relieved as the van drives away, and start to breathe from your nose again.

The van gradually makes its way out of the mountains and into the capital, St. George’s. It is well past eight o’clock and the sun is long gone. The only light comes from the orange street lamps, and the van’s own headlights. By this time, your neck is very sore from holding it outside the window for over an hour. You briefly pull your head back into the vehicle, but you just can’t stand the inanity of the conversation from the back seat.

You are beginning to feel sleepy by the time the van drives through the marina gate. You hear the sound of tires crunching over gravel as the vehicle comes to a halt, and draw your head back through the window for the last time. Yellow Man kills the engine, hops out, and opens all the doors. The seventeen occupants of the fifteen-passenger van all tumble out. You gather up the bag of muddy shoes, and say good night to the other weary hikers. As you walk down the dock toward home, calypso music drifts across the water from faraway hills.

I remember quite clearly the first time I asked for directions in French. I was a sophomore in high school, visiting Quebec with some friends of my parents, Peter and Linda. Linda is French Canadian, and we had struck up a bilingual friendship the previous year when they had come to visit us in Florida. I had taken one year of high school French in a part of the country where a large segment of the population speaks Spanish. As is often the case, one small decision—like which language class to take—leads one down a long and surprising path.

We were in a restaurant in the old city, and I asked for directions to the ladies’ room. Evidently, my ability to ask basic questions surpassed my ability to comprehend the answers, as the hostess responded with a long and very fast explanation involving only a few words of which I caught—something about “stairs” and “to the right.” Too proud to admit my ignorance, I smiled and thanked her and went looking for some “escaliers.” (I eventually found les toilettes.)

Peter and Linda lived in a rural village 20 minutes south of Middlebury, Vermont and that summer visit whetted my appetite for both language immersion and, coincidentally, Middlebury College. Two years later, I found myself conversing awkwardly at the French table in the Middlebury Chateau Language Café, out of my league with students who had had four years of French in prep school and a score of 5 on the French AP exam. Beyond French I and II with my Egyptian teacher, Madame Assaad, at my public high school, the only speaking practice I had had was with the Quebecois on my summer trip and Haitian refugees in my hometown. But after 2 years and a semester abroad at Middlebury’s Paris campus as well as many fun weekends in Montreal, I had even begun to dream in French—the holy grail of language-learners.

After Middlebury, my opportunities for language practice were only occasional, but often essential. I worked for several years as a teacher in an Atlanta-area public school where my training at Middlebury and my ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) certification were quite helpful. The school was about 80% non-native-English-speakers. Translators for parent-teacher interactions were hard to come by, especially for the Vietnamese students, but lucky for me, and thanks to French colonialism, many of the Vietnamese parents had grown up speaking French in school, so I was able to help find common ground with a group of people who often felt alienated in their new country.

Twenty years have passed since I first asked for directions in French, and though I don’t get many chances to practice, the French language is deeply embedded in my memory. After sailing from Dominica, we anchored near the village of Saint Pierre in Martinique. Jay and I had to locate the café in which to fill out the customs paperwork, the Digicel store to buy a SIM card so we could have internet access, and a bank to withdraw some cash in Euros. A few days later, we took Le Petit Train Tour, which runs all over Saint Pierre, describing its former opulence and showing its devastation by Mt. Pelée; because the tour was in French, I had to act as real-time tour translator for the kids. Somehow, despite twenty years of vocabulary loss and imperfect grammar, I navigated all of these tasks in French, and also found the three things I’d been looking forward to in Martinique: le vin, le pain and le fromage! We even made friends with a French family anchored in Fort-de-France. These experiences make me feel so grateful for Middlebury’s immersion program and the gift of a second tongue. I hope the exposure to French and Spanish in the Caribbean will do for our kids what a visit to Quebec once did for me.

Last week we went on a taxi tour of Grenada. The first stop was Concord Falls. It was a waterfall about 55 feet high. There were stepping stones across the pool below, and then there was another waterfall below that. I am looking forward to swimming there another time.

Then we went to the nutmeg factory. They process and prepare nutmeg for shipping all over the world.

Next, we went to the Jouvay Chocolate company. We saw how they sort, roast, grind, melt, and mix chocolate. We got free samples; my favorite was the 60% dark chocolate. We also stopped at Carib’s Leap where the natives jumped off a cliff rather than becoming captives of the French.

Last, we saw how they make rum the traditional way at Rivers Rum Distillery. The vats of fermenting cane juice were disgusting!

Finally, we drove back to St. George’s through the Grand Etang Rain Forest, but we did not see any of the Mona Monkeys that live there. It was a long day!

It is hot in Grenada. Hot, hot, HOT!  At mid-morning, with the door and windows closed, the temperature in the cabin would be around 99 degrees Fahrenheit. A good breeze brings the temperature within tolerable limits. At anchor, the trade winds provide a consistent source of…well, wind. However, tied to a dock in Port Louis Marina, the breeze is both blocked by a mountain and hitting us at the wrong angle. Cooking only compounds the problem. Unless you were born in the tropics, or the Sahara Desert, you will be unable to function efficiently.

We are pretty tough. Six years ago, we survived a summer in Boot Key Harbor, baked by the relentless sun and besieged by the relentless mosquitoes. We lived through that by spending the heat of the day lounging on the trampolines under a shade tent, doing nothing. Needful to say, now we’re older and have school and chores to do, so lounging all day is no longer a viable solution to our little problem. The frustrating thing is that we do have air conditioners capable of bringing the temperature below 85 degrees, and shore power is available. It’s just very, very expensive; 62 cents per kilowatt hour may not sound like much, but it adds up. We could run the generator all day, but that doesn’t bring the cost down much, and it’s annoying.

Despite the various roadblocks, we are winning the battle against the summer heat. Here are some of our strategies:

1. Shade awnings. We have four large mesh awnings stretched over the cabin top and foredeck by fiberglass broomsticks, and held taut by a complex web of small-diameter lines. It may seem low-tech, but it really helps lower the temperature.
2. Ice cream. Every week, when mom goes to the store down the road, she brings back a 1-gallon bucket of ice cream (along with the other groceries, of course). This doesn’t directly help keep the cabin cool, but it raises morale while temporarily lowering the body temperature.
3. Breeze Boosters. This is a special type of wind scoop that does not require the constant use of a halyard for suspension. We have four, and position them over the bedroom hatches in an attempt to funnel whatever wind there might be in to the boat.
4. Going to the pool. As a general thing, I do not like pools, and this marina’s pool is no exception. However, sometimes it’s just too hot to object, even if the water is lukewarm, cloudy, and feels like you are swimming in lubricating oil.
5. A/C. We typically run the generator from 7 to 11 PM, to make water and power, so we also run the air conditioners. This counteracts the added heat from mom cooking dinner, and allows us to go to bed nice and cool (I like my room at a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit). We close up the boat, and keep it closed even when the A/C goes off, trying to keep the cold in.
6. The poor man’s A/C. Take cold shower. Turn on fan. That simple.

If all these methods fail, a visit to the air conditioned marina bathroom, grocery store, or taxi tour will provide some relief until the sun goes down. In the tropics, you have to learn to take the heat.