Diana McCaulay

Imagine a river, its source in a place where forests are still abundant. Down it comes, shaded by the forest canopy, twirling around tree trunks and big rocks, forming deep pools and chattering rapids. The land is steep, the vegetation is relentless, verdant. The sounds are of falling water, the chirps of birds and the scratchy sounds of insects. Even in heavy rain, when the river swells and fills the narrow valley, the water is clear.

Near the coast, the river enters a narrow ravine, some artifact of geology, and so there are waterfalls and even deeper pools and caves. The path up the side of the river is muddy and yes, there are mosquitoes, and it’s hard to talk over the rush of the water. The shade is dense and there are few flowering plants. As the river reaches flat land, it spreads out into a wide, shallow pool, and water lilies colonize one corner. It must once have meandered to the sea, perhaps there was some kind of fording, but after the coast road was built, the river disappeared under the road and then completed the short straight final stretch to the sea.

Despite the closeness of the waterfalls to the road, imagine that few people climbed the muddy path to the highest waterfall – oh some local people knew of it, of course, and caught janga under the big rocks, and sometimes guided visitors to the top. The athletic plunged from the top of the highest waterfall into the largest pool, more than 30 feet deep, the sedentary sat in the shallows. Eventually, the waterfall was named and a rickety sign was erected and a few more people visited.

At some point the land was sold, and they buyer had a bank loan, and then the waterfall became a commodity, and had to earn its keep. And that meant crowds were needed, people who were prepared to pay an entrance fee. But no one wanted to pay an entrance fee to walk up the muddy trail, to marvel at the simple beauty of a waterfall. No, if crowds were needed, the waterfall had to become an attraction, and that meant a car park with an attendant, and an entrance kiosk with a cashier, and a concrete pathway with railings (so no one would slip and file a lawsuit), and buildings for people to shelter in the frequent rain that nourished the river and the waterfalls, and the owner had the idea that there should be flowers, so the original vegetation was cleared and flowers planted, but the flowers failed to thrive and the formerly thick bush had bare patches, and the river became more muddy, and the people who had booked to have their weddings there objected to the look of the water in their photographs, and the offices who took their staff members there for a day out objected if the water was muddy, and demanded a proper swimming pool, with mosaic tiles and a painted bottom and chlorinated water, maybe even a swim up bar, and music of course, and there had to be food for the crowds to eat, so there were jerk chicken stations, and naturally there had to be bathrooms and changing rooms, although it was never very clear where the effluent from the bathrooms went. And everyone supported these changes, because now the waterfall was bringing jobs to local people, who before had complained that nuttn naa gwaan, and the people who visited were happy to paddle in the chlorinated pool, and you could still climb to the top where the highest fall was, and you could still see what had been there, if you stared only straight ahead.

And it seems to me that this is the story of how every remaining natural feature of the world will become a venue, an attraction, because they cannot simply be, they must pay their way,  and most people don’t want the nature that scratches and bites and turns to mud in the rain, most people want an idea of nature that is built around the preferences of people for seats and railings and comfort and the certainty of a pool that will never turn muddy, ever.

Is there another way, I ask myself, as I imagine the lines of people waiting to get in to the new waterfall attraction, the bank loan being paid off, the families supported by the new jobs? Could we convince people to risk an uncomfortable climb to witness a spectacular place, to simply admire and be soothed, to pay for that privilege, and then to go somewhere else for the music and the food and the pool? And who should pay, should it be anyone who wants to enjoy a waterfall, whether or not they can afford it, so that no poor people can go there, or should it be a government, who collects taxes from those who will pay them, from all kinds of economic activities, and uses the revenue to protect a simple treasure, whether or not the taxed and the visitors agree that this is desirable?

Perhaps the only answer is to build the kind of places people want to visit, a much sanitized version of nature, to keep people away from the real places, to leave the real places alone. But still, I know that land does not remain unsavaged by human beings, soon the trees will start to be cut, and animals will be brought to graze near the river, and the water quality will deteriorate, and perhaps near the coast a source of river sand or stones will be needed for construction, and one way or another, the river will become something else.

Just recently, I heard boulders were being mined in the Hope River for the Palisadoes Roadworks. So the attorney at the Jamaica Environment Trust visited the site and there indeed was the work – the National Works Agency calls it desilting, and the sale of the boulders is therefore only a by-product, and de-silting does not need an environmental permit – and our attorney met the contractor. This is what he said – Hope River? This is not a river. This is a gully.

And it is true, the Hope River is no longer a river, it is a man made watercourse, and people have even built their houses where the river used to flow, and of course this is dangerous in the hurricane season, but the people have no choice, at least some of them have no choice, nowhere else to go, and the others have memories that are so very short. I think about a world without rivers, a world without waterfalls, I think about the world as venue, a world eaten – yes, that’s the only word I can come up with – a world devoured by human beings. And I’m glad I’m not 20, and I’m glad I was one who saw the waterfall with the muddy path, before its venue-ization. I suppose you do not miss what you do not know, and I cannot find an economic argument for the waterfall, I can only find the conviction of my heart, that we will be sorry, we will bitterly regret it, when all rivers are gullies, and waterfalls are domesticated and all of them, every one of them, has a gate with a cashier at the entrance.

For those of you who asked, here is a photo of the new beach in Blue Lagoon taken in March 2011...

Two weekends ago, before the Big Rain, I kayaked with friends into Blue Lagoon in Portland. It was afternoon, the sea was calm, the light was lustrous, and our kayaks skimmed over the seagrass beds at the entrance. One of us was a visitor, seeing Jamaica for the first time – where is it, she asked, because from outside the Lagoon, it’s hard to imagine that somewhere up ahead, there’s a deep blue hole in both land and sea. We paddled through the narrow entrance, with the tiny hump of rock on the northern side, we called it an island when I was a child, and once we climbed it and claimed it with a flag. The impulse to ownership, to private property, starts young. I had driven along the main road earlier, hoping to show my visiting friend Blue Lagoon from above, in case we weren’t able to borrow kayaks. I didn’t feel safe going down the road to the Lagoon, what with all the recent press and unpleasantness. But from the road, we could not see the Lagoon, just a few tantalizing glimpses of a colour difficult to describe. Royal blue, navy in some lights, teal in others.

There were two men on the fake beach, so we didn’t go close. Following the long delayed enforcement action by the regulators, everything had been removed, except for the low retaining wall and the sand, but the beach glared white among all that tangled green. I can’t believe they allowed that, my friend said. Believe it, I said. In fact, it’s being said the sand was always there. It’s being said that this improves the Lagoon. I thought of the screaming billboards and hotels of Niagara Falls – a place I hope never to set foot in again. I thought of our own tourism advertising – clean, empty beaches, cascading waterfalls, deep green rivers. So very far from the truth.

The two men on the beach dived into the water and swam in our general direction and I dug my paddle into the water, sending the kayak away from them. I didn’t want to scare the others, but we were three women alone and they were two big guys. There have been threats issued about Blue Lagoon, warnings to back off, references to the vulnerability of our families. One previous owner of part of the land around Blue Lagoon had sold it because of the threats. The men didn’t come any closer. Perhaps they were just tourists.

There was a rowdy group of young men on the western side, playing football, smoking ganja, pushing and shoving each other, shouting, somersaulting into the water. You had to admire their athleticism, but I felt as if their antics were taking place in a cathedral. They shouted at us to retrieve their football, they were afraid of sharks, they said. I wanted to tell them – barracuda live in Blue Lagoon. Not sharks. When the water was clearer decades ago, we used to see the barra all the time, hanging motionless in the water, suddenly gone with a flick of their tails, which were really their whole bodies, appearing like ghostly silver swords somewhere else. I threw the ball back to the men and boys. Be quiet, I wanted to say. Just sit. Just look. Or float in the water and feel the chill of the fresh water springs on top, the warmth of the Caribbean sea below. Stare at the sky and muse on the mystery of the colour of the water.

It got me thinking about the value of beauty, about finding the words to make an argument for the intrinsic value of places like Blue Lagoon – not the value of the tourist dollars that could be earned, or the livelihoods that could be supplied by a restaurant and bar, by tours, by vendors selling john crow beads at the entrance to the Lagoon. What does it matter, if a place like Blue Lagoon becomes a venue, especially if people who now cling to the margins of making a living improve their circumstances? Why is it important that we have natural places, unspoiled places, views that make us gasp, simple pleasures like watching a sunset, bathing in a river, floating with arms outstretched in a deep blue lagoon?

Oh I know about the research that says access to green places reduces violence between people, and I have heard the arguments about the value of the ecosystem services that nature provides, that reductionist argument, making nature quantifiable, something decision makers can find a frame of reference for, a cost/benefit analysis that tells when nature can be annihilated. I know the justification for national parks, how it used to be that rich people alone could own beauty, how they simply bought the best places and fenced them in, and how leaders way ahead of their times said no, there should be places where everybody can see beauty. But what happens when the people glance at the beauty and see it not, feel it not, and prefer to play football with the radio blasting, and will throw their garbage into the still waters of a lagoon without a second thought? Is this a matter of education? Of culture? Of modernity run amok? Of lives lived too close to the edge to care about abstractions?

We paddled under the trees that hang out over the water, into light turned green. I showed my friends the almond tree we used to climb to dive into the water, into the deepest part of the Lagoon, the scary part. Perhaps we were noisy then; I suspect we were. I know we learned to waterski there and the ski boat was up and down all day.  But I also remember gliding in my rowboat under these same branches in the very early morning, and letting the boat bump up against the trees and come to rest, and bringing the oars in and lying down in the small boat, and staring up at the underside of the canopy. I remember dreaming. Even though more than four decades have passed since then, I remember the peace and awe I felt in my little dinghy, under the trees in Blue Lagoon.

***

We kayaked over to the fresh water springs, where a little pool had been made with stones, and we looked at the old buildings on the hill, built by one of the first owners – it is said Norman Manley would not let him build anything bigger – now in ruin. What has happened to the intellect and imagination of our leaders, as we approach the 50th year of our independence? What has happened to their souls? And we went over to that secret place we knew as children where there is a tower of rock and silt that comes up out of the depths of Blue Lagoon to about 17 feet from the surface. To find it, the light has to be right so you can see the faint light shadow in all that blue, and I told the others how we would dare each other to dive down and pick up the silt, to prove we had really touched this weird feature. Back then, I told my friends, I could free dive 17 feet – at least once or twice – because I remember many failed attempts.

What measure of gift is it to know a place like this, to have played in its waters, to have dreamed in its shadows? What kind of person is nurtured by such experiences? What words can describe the elusive benefits of understanding our insignificance in the nature of things, in the span of time, of knowing humility, of holding respect for the complexity and vastness of the earth, and yet of the intimacy of our relationship with it? What would happen in our hearts, I asked myself as we left the Lagoon, if we Jamaicans were really to love where we live?

My husband and two sisters gave me a Kindle for my birthday last month, along with a $50 book voucher. Some context: I am not a lover of gadgets. Once, my husband gave me an electronic Sudoku gizmo and I was never able to figure it out – caused a certain amount of domestic strain. I refused to carry a cell phone for years after they had become common. I finally acquired a very basic job with a phone card, for use only on dark country roads on the occasion of a flat tyre. It never had any credit. When my friends had graduated to smart phones, my phone remained as dumb as a rock – functional, but inflexible. I have graduated to a BlackBerry (the very name grates), but most of its little icons remain a mystery. Every time my computer demands an update, I’m annoyed. New software means weeks of gritted teeth. You get the picture.

So I’ve resisted the electronic book, even as I’ve accepted its inevitability. Just not for me, I thought. Give me real books, I thought, as I browsed in bookstores. Give me real books – ouch! My back! – I thought, as I carried a full backpack on trips. OK, maybe an e-book WOULD be good for travelling. I picked them up in big bookstores – sterile things, I thought them. Then I considered the trees that had fallen for the paper books I loved, the air miles clocked to deliver them around the world. In short, I dithered.

And then my family took matters in hand (thank you, guys) and my Kindle arrived. It has a salmon pink cover with a neat little strap to hold it closed. There is a light which slides into one corner for reading in a power cut. (It’s not for that? Really?) The Kindle is light – much lighter than some of the books I buy. There’s a little switch on the bottom that you slide to wake it up – happily there’s a little message to remind you of the procedure when you open the cover. Before it wakes up, the screen has a picture, often of a dead white author – Agatha Christie, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain. Sometimes the picture is of an unknown machine – is this a subliminal message, I wondered, from the machines? We’re good people… believe in us… you are getting sleepy… sleepy.

So anyway, my Jamaican sister was pressed into service to get the thing working, she being a computer person (IT Consultant, as she would have it) and we sat at my computer and she pressed buttons and consulted the get-started manual and zipped around website pages, occasionally making noises which, if rendered visually, would involve a question mark floating above her head, while I sat there thinking, there are no such hurdles with buying or reading a real book…

Truth is, I felt inadequate. Like being in a statistics class or one of those elite gyms where the women look like insects with teeny bodies and giant heads. Just not up to the mark.

My sis prevailed and my first Kindle book appeared – Jennifer Egan’s A visit from the Goon Squad. OK, that was kind of a miracle. To sit at home, decide you want a book, press a few buttons, and the book appears in your salmon pink thingy. I turned the Kindle on. I shut the cover. I woke it up. Oooh look, there’s Henry David himself. I turned a page. I turned another page. I insisted on viewing the cover – that involved a few more metaphorical question marks floating around in the ether, more button clicking, more web pages. Eventually the cover was located. “That’s it,” my sis pronounced and departed. I put the Kindle on my pile of books to be read, thinking how it could, ALL BY ITSELF, become my pile of books to be read. “Aren’t you going to read it?” my husband said.

“Soon,” I said. “Soon.”

Last Saturday, March 26th, 2011, I read at the Book Industry of Jamaica’s book festival in Kingston. The reading tent was by no means full. The microphone was more or less a decoration. It was one year to the day since Dog-Heart was launched at Bookophilia.

So I’ve been thinking about all this year has meant. I looked back at all my blogs on the subject, my sometimes euphoric, but more often angst-ridden e-mails to friends, my scrapbook. I smiled at the tracking of the books across the Atlantic, the seizing by customs, sighed at the moment when I first held the book in my own hands. Remembered the launch itself – I will never again launch a first book – the moments of wondering if anyone would show up, if it would rain, the little still life Andrea Dempster of Bookophilia and I made for the table display. And then my friends walked in wearing Dog-Heart T-shirts! And the books sold out!

Looking back, I wondered if the very beginning had been the high point…

Well, no. But it is strange how we move our own goalposts, because here’s what I wrote in February 2010: “Do I dream of fame and fortune? Well, sometimes. Hardly ever fortune, it must be said, but sometimes of fame, however that might be defined. But mostly what I dream of, as I picture my books in their cardboard boxes, is that one day I will see someone reading a copy, maybe they'll be on a plane, maybe on a park bench, maybe in a library, coffee shop, bookshop - and I will see them turning the pages, and when they come to the end, they will close the book and stare off into the distance, like I do when a book has claimed me, unwilling to let the book go, and I will know they were captured and they were moved by my words. These are big dreams, I know…”

Apart from my niece, I haven’t actually seen anyone reading my book, far less staring off into space afterwards. Never seen anyone buying it, actually – except at readings. I still haunt foreign bookstores, hoping to see Dog-Heart on the shelves, even way in the back, where they hardly have lights. I go up to the information desk and ask if they have my book, knowing the answer, trying to take comfort in the invariable response that no, they don’t, but they can order it for me. I long ago stopped checking the Amazon rankings. I still do book fairying in Jamaica – that is to say, I visit places where books are sold and check that Dog-Heart is available, sometimes turning it face out, moving it to eye level, making oh so gentle calls to the distributor if it isn’t there. I’m on long-lost-friend terms with the staff of the bookstore at Norman Manley airport – they greet me with big smiles, yeh man, we have your book, don’t worry.

I also know that Dog-Heart has sold, at least here. I have received many, many e-mails from those who have read it. I don’t know the numbers, because the first year has only just elapsed and my first real royalty cheque is to come. But I do know I am not one of those publishing sensations, those literary darlings, the ones negotiating six figure advances and winning prizes, the ones who beat the lottery-type odds. People like me are called mid-list authors – apparently there is no bottom-list, at least not that anyone will admit. Perhaps Dog-Heart is too literary to be popular but not literary enough for critical approval.

But I read at Calabash last year, right after over 70 Jamaicans died in a near-war in West Kingston – and now Calabash has ended. I have talked to many book groups, both here and overseas, sometimes on Skype. And I sat in the audience at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies 12th Annual Conference in Kingstonand heard my friend Esther Figueroa deliver a paper drawing parallels between Dog-Heart and Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter.   Whoy, is all I can say. 

I’ve watched the story behind the story I made up play out in the front pages of our newspapers. I believe fiction always has its roots in reality, even science fiction, the meteors and space ships are just so much packaging, human nature being the fodder, the raw material, the catalyst of fiction. So I watched and mourned the arrest of a child I had known and loved, now a man, Jamaica’s most wanted, wearing only his briefs, sitting handcuffed on the floor.

I wrote another novel during the years Dog-Heart was in rejection mode, and when Dog-Heart was finally a Real Book, I found I hardly remembered my first book – it was like something I had read years ago, or studied for a test. Today, the new book, Huracan, was rejected for the fifth time. And I am wondering if I have the stamina for this particular journey, the thick skin, the faith in my own talents, the ego. It takes ego to imagine that I know something worth knowing, worth writing, worth saying. Should anyone, I wonder, have such an ego?

So what to make of it all? Writing books reminds me of the years when my son was a baby and I felt the rewards of that first smile, that gurgle of pleasure at the sight of my face, were disproportionate to the efforts, to the sleepless nights, the worry, the hours spent in doctor’s waiting rooms. The rewards of motherhood were all in the future and when my son was young, I feared they would never come. So it is with writing – the rewards puny in comparison to the work expended and long deferred – perhaps permanently deferred.

I ask myself what I expected. Colin Channer tells a story of complaining about the size of the advance for his first novel. His agent (damn, he has an agent!) took him to one of the chain bookstores and showed him how many books he would have to sell to earn a six figure advance. When you see that many books in one place, you know you will never have that many readers. But still, you hope for it. You hope that your book will be like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin which broke records simply because ordinary people loved it and told their friends about it. You still root around in the back of bookshops – I can tell you exactly where Dog-Heart would be on a shelf , were it ever to make itself there – right beside Cormac McCarthy’s novels.

Things I have realized in my book year – that the best thing I could do for my books would be to migrate. How hard this is to accept, that it really is not possible to promote a book from the place where the book is set; not if it’s set in the Caribbean.

That we are living through a cataclysm in publishing as profound as the one wrought by the printing press. I own the electronic rights and Dog-Heart is available on Kindle and I-Pad, and when a person here and there downloads a copy, the money appears in my bank account within weeks– there is no wait for a year for the print book royalty statement.

That literary prizes are corrosive – yes, potentially game changing – but I hated the way being entered made me feel, the anxiety and hope and despair that attended the announcement of the long list, the envy I experienced for other authors who won when I did not, the tendency to disparage their work, to say, oh it’s who they knew. Or – haven’t they won enough?

As I sit here thinking about art and writing and sacrifice, my Twitter account tells me in 140 characters that the efforts to contain the nuclear reactor in Japan have failed and the radiation is in the sea, where it is deemed to be “safe” because of the dilution effect although there are murmurings about the effect on sea life. The people of Japan still live in a devastated land, their shattered buildings iced with a thin coating of snow, their faces masked, their shoulders hunched against the cold. The radiation circles the globe. And the cobra that escaped from the Bronx zoo has more than 10,000 followers on Twitter. So I ask myself about the self indulgence of art, about what constitutes artistic success, about the privilege of a life that can afford to sit at a computer and turn out words, about the worth of the life of an observer, a storyteller, a commentator – do we need such people, such endeavours? Surely we do, if only to point out the farce of a tweeting snake making news during the same weeks of a nuclear disaster?

And this is what I come to, a simple thing  – I’m glad I wrote a novel and I’m glad I held it in my hands and I’m glad it’s out there in the world.

(Will I have the fortitude to bring another to print? Stay tuned..

My sister, Suzie, her helper, Cherry, and I considered the pumpkin.  It had been cut loose from its vine too early and we feared it wouldn't ripen.  Was it like a banana, which would ripen after it was picked?  Or like a yam, which wouldn't?  Cherry cast a practiced eye - she thought the pumpkin, given the right treatment, would one day make it to table.  And so the pumpkin was sunned, sheltered, wrapped and unwrapped and finally, was cut day before yesterday.  And it was BEAUTIFUL!  But it's a lot of pumpkin - so stand by, friends and co workers - you are about to be blessed with pumpkin.  And I'm thinking of a pumpkin party - everyone will be issued with a bit of pumpkin and you'll have to bring it to the party, transformed by your favourite receipe. 

For now, here is a still life of our pumpkin, along with some of Cherry's world famous pumpkin rice - the onions I put in for aesthetic reasons, didn't grow those.  As I see this photo - a ground-breaking event in itself as it was taken with my cell phone - I realize I should have put the pumpkin rice into something a bit more pleasing than a plastic container.  Oh well.  Martha Stewart I'm not...

This morning, I’m thinking of my friend, Katy Thacker. Katy was an American – yes, she died – who came to Jamaica in the 1970s fleeing a painful divorce. As she told me the story, she was in court with her soon-to-be ex husband trying to divide their possessions. She started to cry and the judge called a recess. Katy went to the washroom to try to compose herself with the list of possessions in her hand. “The food processor, Diana,” she said. “I realized we were in a war over a Cuisinart.” She said she ripped the list to shreds, went back to the courtroom and told her husband he could have it all. She had survived cancer at a very young age and she knew about priorities.

She went to Jamaica on holiday and fell in love with the island. She was a nurse by training, and she got a job at the Black River hospital – and there she faced the realities of health care in a rural Jamaican hospital. She said she became overwhelmed one day after she had started an IV on a patient, only to have to the IV stand taken away for another, more urgent case, and she became the IV holder, standing beside the patient, with one arm raised. She began managing property in Negril and eventually moved there. Then she learned how to SCUBA dive and started her own small dive operation.

When Katy started to dive, the coral reefs in Negril were healthy and teeming with life. And then she saw them start to die. Along with others she founded the Negril Coral Reef Preservation Society in the early 1990s and that’s how I met Katy Thacker – a small, sunburned, blonde woman who hefted SCUBA tanks as if they were made of Styrofoam. By then she was a Jamaican citizen and everyone in Negril knew her – hoteliers, fishermen, craft sellers, taxi drivers. She took me around Negril to the dangerous beaches where the drugs came in and where there will still the fresh water runnels from the morass carving their channels across the beach, into the morass itself on foot, warming me to look out for crocodiles;and she took me diving to the places where the coral reef was completely covered in algae from improperly treated sewage. Throughout the 1990s she fought for the coral reefs in Negril, she lived in a one room house with her dog and she had the life I thought I wanted.

Then she got sick, cancer again, she left Jamaica, and our contact became irregular. Once I went to see her, she was in remission, living in Davie in Florida, writing, staying alive. I was still working in the private sector then and had the kind of disposable income that would allow me to get on a plane to see a friend, my son was almost through college and I was wrestling with what I wanted to do with my life. Katy lived in a tiny rented cottage on an organic farm and she had chickens for pets. Her eyes were bright but she was emaciated and there was little she could eat – her intestines were in a tangle from the surgeries and from the radiation she had undergone when she was a young woman. She was broke. She walked with me across the farm and let me into the main farmhouse to spend the night. There was a raging thunderstorm and I huddled under slightly doggy blankets in a stranger’s house and imagined being terminally ill, broke and alone. Did I really want Katy’s life after all? We said goodbye the next day at the airport and I knew I would never see her again.

I went to Seattle for graduate school and soon my e-mails to Katy went unanswered. I thought she had died, and I mourned her in Seattle’s misty rain, but Jamaica seemed far away and her loss did not really bite.

And then in the final days of my time in the US, I received an e-mail from her – she was in remission again. And we revived our e-mail correspondence. I went home and she helped me with grant proposals and reviews of Environmental Impact Assessments, and there were times when she was back in hospital but she always came out – until the time she didn’t. Katy Thacker died on Earth Day in 2004. I had never met any member of her family, knew nothing of her life in the US, but she was a shining light to me, an example, a true Jamaican hero I knew would never be acknowledged as such.

If you have read this far, you might be wondering why I am writing about Katy Thacker today. I am thinking of my friend Katy because the newspapers are full of ads and PR pieces about a new housing development in Little Bloody Bay in Negril – renamed Little Bay – the word “bloody” does not, of course, give the right impression. I am thinking of the day Katy took me there by boat, how we pulled the boat up on the sand and sat where the waves turned over, feeling the itch of sandflies, until we went into the water to escape them. “This will be a kept like this, Diana,” she said, “in its natural state. It’ll be a fish sanctuary, the seagrass beds will be kept, and the coastal vegetation, and folks will be able to come and see the way Negril was.” She also told me that she got the funding to manage the Negril Marine Park when she took the Delegate for the European Union to see Little Bloody Bay.

But like all such funding, it came to an end. And Katy died. Little Bloody Bay was “slated for development.” And now the advertisement for Little Bay Country Club, a gated community of 171 residential units, has a fish the size of a sailboat (also pictured) leaping out of the water. There is no natural coastal vegetation in the artist’s impression, it’s all lawns and landscaping with a few coconut trees, because that is our unreal vision of a tropical paradise, there is no jetty for the sailboat, but there will have to be a jetty, so that means dredging, and the beach is wider than it really is, so that probably means “beach nourishment” – read, sand taken from somewhere else. And it will have the right Keep Out signs and state of the art security systems. And it has its approvals from all the regulatory bodies, environmental and otherwise, because not one of them has ever encountered a block of concrete they did not think was of much greater value than a jewel of a cove, with lapping shallow water, and dark green seagrass beds, and seagrape trees trailing their leaves in the water…

Now, anew, I miss my friend Katy… although I am glad she does not know about Little Bay Country Club...

On Thursday, we noticed the leaves of the pumpkin vine begin to wilt. 

"It's been cut," my husband said.

"Nonsense!  It's just doing its wilting thing; it's telling us the pumpkin is ready to be reaped."

Today we discovered the vine had been cut.  A mystery.  Had it been cut by the same neighbour who told us about the pumpkin?  Or did the vine originate with a different neighbour, who having not been blessed with a pumpkin, nurtured anti pumpkin feeling?  We retrieved the pumpkin from its aerial nest.  We stood looking at it.

"Doesn't look like a Jamaican pumpkin," I said.   There was a photo of a prize Jamaican pumpkin in the papers this morning - oval and smooth, weighing 37 lbs.  Our pumpkin looked like a giant version of those decorative gourds Americans have at Halloweeen or Thanksgiving, am not sure which.  Perhaps a migrating bird had brought us a foreign pumpkin?  Perhaps even an invasive pumpkin?

We sought advice as to whether or not the pumpkin would continue to ripen if cut off from its nutrition.  No, was the consensus.  The pumpkin has already given its all.  Still, I refused to bring it inside; left it in the sun.  After all, bananas ripen after they are picked... perhaps the pumpkin would do the same.

"Suppose it never ripens?" said my husband.

"Then we look for recipes for green pumpkin on the Internet," I said.  "We have a pumpkin party.  We offer prizes for the most innovative ideas for ways to use a green pumpkin.  We paint it and call it garden art."     

My husband looked panicked.  I could see he was envisaging six months of green pumpkin fritters.  "Would you be happy with a picture? he said.

So here it is - the aerial pumpkin, brought low.  Along with the other abundance of my garden...

“The neighbours left a message,” said my husband on our return from Seattle, checking our voice mail. Generally, this is not a good sign – such messages usually concern neighbourhood petty crimes called “incidents” in our neck of the woods.

“What, the hose thief again? I said.

“No,” he said.

“The orchid thief?”

“Uh uh…” he said, shaking his head.

“The box lunch dumper?”

“Shh!” he said, holding up a finger. Must be serious, I thought, and stopped going through the bills.

He hung up the phone. “We have a pumpkin,” he said.

“A pumpkin?” I said. “On the doorstep? Did someone donate it?”

“On the roof of the back patio. The neighbours were calling to make sure we knew about it, so we could watch it and make sure it doesn’t get stolen.”

Flashback to farmer ex boyfriend – his sister asks: How do you know when a pumpkin is ready?

Farmer ex boyfriend: When it’s gone.

“Well, that’s novel,” I said. “How’d it get up on the roof?” I envisaged the kind of prank that leads college students to throw toilet paper over trees or laced up running shoes over power lines.

“It’s growing up there,” my husband said.

“Growing? How can it be growing? There’s no dirt up there,” I objected.

“The vine came over the next door fence, apparently.” Aaah. That made sense. Our back patio has a wrought iron roof half covered by a vine of unknown provenance delivered by a passing bird. A pumpkin vine had sneaked over the fence recently and jostled with the old vine on the back patio roof, delivering an intense and welcome shade. I don’t go up there; I have a laissez faire attitude to vines. So this new vine had gestated a pumpkin.

We went to look. At first we didn’t see anything. “It’s been stolen,” said my husband.

“I’m sure it’s there,” I said. These are well worn paths of discourse at my house – he’s Eeyore; I’m Tigger.

We stared upwards at the tangle of vegetation. And there it was – a lumpy, dark green, colossal pumpkin, comfortably nestled in a tangle of dead leaves. We were excited. “Is it ours?” asked my husband. “We didn’t plant the vine.”

“I think so,” I said. We became proprietary. We were gonna defend our pumpkin. “Perhaps when it’s ready, we should share it with the person who planted the vine?”

“Sure,” said my husband. “It’s a big pumpkin. How will we know when to pick it?”

“Beats me,” I said, thinking of the farmer ex boyfriend. “We’ll have to seek advice. And climb up there.” I knew it was going to be on my “to do” list.

A Jamaican homecoming, I thought suddenly. Along with the drive through the Palisadoes wasteland, the navigation of collapsing sewage trenches and ever expanding potholes of Kingston’s streets, the radio droning on about Manatt Phelps and Foolishness, the land had awarded us a gift: a pumpkin – organic, accidental, soaking up the sun. A gift to be shared. One of the banana trees was bearing and there was a good crop of mangoes coming in too. I smiled. The bills could wait. So could the newspapers. I put on shorts and took my tea onto the back patio to commune with the aerial pumpkin.

"Thank you Fremont for 22 great years," the sign said. The letter in the window from owner Henry Burton began: "this is the letter I had hoped I would never have to write." The front door was locked. Fremont Place Books in Seattle closed on February 27th. Just another indie bookstore to go to the wall; just another casualty of the juggernaut of market forces.

I can’t claim that Fremont Place Books occupied a huge place in my life – I’ve only set foot in it a dozen times or so. I went in on February 27th, wanting to help, to buy a book, to pay a tribute. Something. The young woman behind the counter was close to tears. So was I. I’m a new novelist and I’ve struggled through the past year of no-budget book promotion and watched the rise of e-books. I planned to go back to Fremont Place Books to give the tearful woman a copy of my book – just in solidarity, to say it’s hard for writers too, to say how much small bookstores mean to those of us who will never get our books on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. But on February 28th, she was gone.

It was, of course, a perfect storm of the recession and the rise of e-books that drove Fremont Place Books out of business. I know the publishing industry is facing a transformation a profound as that wrought by the printing press. My own book is on Kindle, on I-Pad. It was cheap and easy to do and I will be paid almost three times as much for an e-book as for a trade paperback. The economics are irresistible – e-books require no transport, no warehousing, no inventory, no sacrifice of trees. Younger people have embraced e-readers – I’ve seen them mark pages and highlight passages on long flights, just as I have done with a paper book. I remember my backpack, full of textbooks, when I was a graduate student. And I remember the cost of those textbooks forcing me to eat ramen noodles for a month. Are those of us who mourn the passing of the physical book merely technophobes, anti-progress Luddites?

A few days after seeing the Fremont Place Books sign, I went to my favourite bookstore in Seattle, the Elliott Bay Book Company to listen to uber-librarian Nancy Pearl talk about books – and I asked her how she felt about the rise of the e-book. Her face became wistful. She held her own book in her hands and I could see the reverence she felt for the physical object, her passion for its intrinsic value, an understanding that the covers of the book contained more than merely the words. She acknowledged the pros of the e-book and then she said words that crystallized my own discomfort – she said she mourned for the places where books were kept, the buildings themselves, bookstores, and of course, libraries. Soon there will be few such places for book lovers to gather, to browse the shelves, to watch a stranger beside us hold a book we have read, to say to them quietly, it’s good, and see the light of a fellow reader in their eyes.

When bookstores die, it is the community of books and readers we lose…