KJ's WAYS OF BEING (Part 2)
TOCO TALES
Round two years ago, as Covid lockdown eased into June and our St. James rumshops were busying themselves once again, we returned to Toco, fleeing to the artist Eddy Bowen’s retreat in Sans Souci for a last few days of peace. I pulled over between Rampanalgas and Cumana, by the same bridge bridge where, a century ago, Toco travellers broke their fast before footing it to Sangre Grande.
In ’88 my father leased one of the two Breakfast River Estate houses, and there the family passed almost every weekend for the last year and a half of his life. I hadn’t vacationed in Toco since childhood when we spent a week or two annually in this or that house. Patience Bay near the lighthouse was a regular. The drive was interminable, my sister and I and the dog were nauseous and we'd have to stop to vomit. "We reach yet?" we would pester my father until he pointed out a mango tree on a bend indicating the village was only a five-minute eternity away.
The bedraggled, old tree still stands wearily on that hairpin, having outlived the standpipe at its foot.
In the '80s daddy and I became friends after he retired. Together we drove that way sometimes. He was never a talker and those trips passed in a silence that brought us closer. Once we pushed as far as the Catholic Presbytery in Matelot at the end of the road, where Sister Rosario Hackshaw was a saint to the fishermen. She built a school for their children across the river and beyond the electricity and telephone lines, powered by the wind. On the way back daddy spotted a "For Rent" sign at Breakfast River and enquired. A city kid, in his heart of hearts he longed to retire to a small estate in Toco. He took out a two-year lease on the smaller Breakfast River house. I now suspect he had known all along that the place was magical.
The blissful weekends there were close enough to his dream, and it was a happy time for us all. I’d sit above the escarpment behind the house, eyes fixed to the roiling sea as it foamed against jagged black rocks below in a tiny bay. I patiently stalked a glimpse of the turtle that sometimes poked his tiny head out for a deep breath, and for up to an hour my turbulent mind was calm. If I didn't see it, it didn't matter. Meditation must be so, I thought afterwards. Now I think love is too.
Clambering up the eponymous river under dark, overhanging trees was to enter the moody forestscapes painted by Larry Mosca, a close neighbor. Then night would fall when the void above was blacker than anywhere else, with a million glittering stars so far away that you reconciled to your unique insignificance in the universe.
“Everyone seems to feel that the region I had felt was good for work, the northeastern part of the island is good, and all recommend the town called Toco,” remarked the great scholar of African New World culture, Melville Herskovits, of his 1939 research visit. “The packers, on board the ship suggested it, and so has everyone else.”
There the old African gods still roam, and can invest you with powers you never knew you had. Eighty years after Herskovits' visit, bongo wakes are still sometimes held, and there’s a greater concentration of Baptist churches than anywhere else, the inspiration for The Wine Of Astonishment by Earl Lovelace, who is from Matura. Derek Walcott felt the vibes too. “Holy is Rampanalgas with its high, circling hawks,” he wrote. “Holy are the rusted, tortured, rust-caped, blind almond trees.”
Want a woman? Take her for a nice dinner or carry her to a beach and make her laugh: she might spend the evening with you. Take her Toco and she’ll fall in love. The guide brochure for the Toco Museum explains: “The Yorubas of Nigeria use the word Ashe to denote a person, object or place imbued with the power to make things happen, and it is such a place we wished into existence.”
I pulled over that morning to revisit where my family once shared days and nights of laughter and love, the good times when my father was alive and we hadn’t dispersed over three continents. Back then towering balata trees sprinkled the estate with their sticky, sweet fruit. There were two vacation homes, a spacious one and ours, the small one. Not far away the landlord's large and spooky house hid behind a wall of trees. Across the road stood the caretaker's lodge.
That Thursday, 32 years after my father's death, none of it remained. The larger holiday home was reduced to concrete foundations here, a few steps there, a piece of wall peeping through the bush like some ancient Mayan ruin lost in the jungle. More endured of the smaller house where we once played cards and ate too much, which was even sadder. Entire walls remained but leaning drunkenly and the collapsing roof for some unfathomable reason - because it could shelter no one - was covered with tarpaulin.
It was heart-breaking. There was nothing to which my happy memories could cling. I cast around for the majestic balata trees whose fruit I once foraged, but the chaos was impenetrable. I recognized nothing and nothingness. It brought to mind ideas of the collapse of human civilization over the coming decades of climate change, ecological destruction, mass extinction, economic depression, widening income disparities, political upheaval, pandemics, hurricanes, megafires, apocalypse.
Then I spotted a survivor from the glory days. It was a coconut tree I'd once tried to climb. Now it was dying or dead, messy, anarchic, as tangled as a Pollock painting, rampant with nature prolific. Look at it closely and then imagine the alternative: a long, high wall confining the road to protect a hotel or time-share apartments. I thanked God for the bush. It reconciles me to whatever havoc my dying species wreaks, because it will ultimately triumph.
Now the earth reclaims her life. She breathes deep and evokes love through rebirth after rebirth.
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