A Rocky Island Picture Show - Part Three

There were rocks we used to climb and play on when we were kids. There was one at the end of of Trunk Bay. It would be located in the foreground of this picture but is not visible.

We kids called it Mush and Porridge Rock. How, why it got that name I have no idea. It was probably a good six or seven feet tall.

At high tide the water swirling around it was deep enough that we could jump off it. But we did more than just jump.


We had a game. We took turns being "it." Whoever was it called out the jump that had to be made. It went like this, "Mush and porridge, cannon ball!" And everyone would have to do a cannon ball. Then the next person would say something like, "Mush and porridge, dancing girl!" And you'd have to see how many can-can kicks you could do before you hit the water. Then it might be "Mush and porridge, belly flop!" Or "Mush and porridge, do the twist!" Or "Mush and porridge, sit like an Indian!" The object was to see how many different ways we could jump off the rock before we ran out of ideas. The first person who repeated him/herself was "the looser."

There is up at Gifft Hill a huge massive tumble of giant stones. It is hidden in the bush. The stones are like a huge cairn and form a cave. One slab-like rock is the floor. On either side of the bottom slab are boulders taller than a man. Resting on top of them, at an angle, is another huge slab. Imagine a clam, it has that kind of shape. The cave formed isn't all that big, but still, it's a cave. Our neighbor Old Man Heber Thomas told us slaves who had escaped into the bush (called maroons) used to hide out there.

It was easy to imagine. The rock cave, though uncomfortable, would have provided some shelter from rain and storms. Down the steep hill-side, not all that far away, is the ghut my sister and I explored that has water in it year round. Maroons would have had access to the water. They could even have grown a few food plants. Near the cave we found an iron hoe used by the slaves in the fields with a genip tree growing through the place where the wooden handle would have been. If the tree has survived I suspect that hoe has been completely encased. I seem to remember there being a aura about the place of people, of things having happened there.

On the North Shore Road of St. John is a large volcanic granite boulder called Easter Rock. Legend has it that early every Easter morning it climbs down the hill and takes a bath in the sea. But you have to up very early, and it happens so fast (faster than the blink of an eye) you can miss the event. In fact no one has ever seen Easter Rock go down to the sea for a sea bath, except the one person who first told the story. But that was so long ago no one remembers the name of the person who saw it happen.

Then there's Carvel Rock, probably named after its resemblance to a caravelle or carvel, a type of ship in the 1700s and 1800s. It's a huge mass of rock, 67 feet tall and 65 yards wide.


Carvel Rock is our family headstone. My grandmother and father are out there. Next year my sister Erva and I will put Mom (who died in April) out there as well. When it's our turn we both plan to be out there too. We'll be with good company, Dr. Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty are out there along with several other people we know.


No flowers needed, no grave up-keep, no concern that someone might come along and vandalize your headstone.

A giant natural cairn.

It'll be there for a long, long time.










Friday is Blog Action Day. The topic is WATER, that wonderful mysterious substance that makes up about two thirds of our bodies and covers about two thirds of our planet. (Coincidence?) So far there 3,224 bloggers registered in 122 countries, with a combined readership of over 25,000,000 people. (That's twenty-five MILLION!) The White House and the UK Foreign Office will also be participating. Come and join me in this world wide GIANT BLOGGING EXPERIMENT. You can register here. It's painless, I promise.

Happy - Part One

No two dogs are alike, even dogs of the same breed. And anyone who has had dogs usually has stories of at least one that was tail and ears above the rest; a dog that was special. Maybe the dog was particularly smart, or loyal, or adventuresome, or just plain cute.

In our family, Happy was such a dog. I've mentioned him a few times. Most recently in the adventure Erva and I had discovering and exploring The Ghut. He was such a unique and interesting dog he is a character in my MG novel, A Lizard's Tail. (No doubt he will turn up in other stories.)

I was the one, who at about 6 1/2 years old, was allowed picked him out of the litter, so I'm the one who can be blamed for our having such a growlsome, ornery, smart, and totally devoted dog. We pretty much agree he was born ornery because he was born with a broken rib. His mother was a small nondescript tailless mutt named Heidi. His father, on the other hand, was a big yellow cur with a great sweeping tail. He could leap straight from the ground into the bed of a dump truck. So Happy was big puppy and in the process of being born one of his ribs broke. For all of his life we could feel it under the skin at the back of his ribcage near the hip, a rounded, pointy piece of bone. I suppose if I had been born with a broken rib I'd be ornery too.

Happy was one of three pups. When we went to pick him out I wanted the honey colored one with the short tail. But he had hidden himself under the couch so he had to be dragged out from under it. We should have known from his response what kind of dog we were getting. He growled and nipped and was most uncooperative.

The question was asked, "Are you sure this is the one you want?" Oh yes, this was the one I wanted. So that's the one we got.

On the ride home to Gifft Hill Erva and I spread our skirts across the back seat of the jeep. We made a kind of hammock for him so he wouldn't slide through the open space between the seat and backrest. Immediately we started in trying out names.

Because his fur was fluffy (even though it was short) and didn't lie flat we thought of Bear. Names like Rover and Spike and who knows what all else were suggested. But he didn't respond to any of them.

At some point while petting and admiring him I said something like, "Are you happy?" and his funny little tail (that looked for all the world like someone had tried to cut it off and missed) wiggled and wagged. And I said, "That's it! His name is Happy."

So that's how we acquired an ornery dog and named him, Happy. And here we are together when he was four or five months old.

That's our jeep, The Yellow Dragon. The big wooden crate is what all of our "stuff," shipped from California, was packed it. Dad turned it into an "office" where he had his ham radio station and his tools. It looks like this picture could have been taken on a Saturday because Saturday was laundry day and blurry clothes can be seen hanging on the line to the rear left.

Stay tunes for few stories about Himself the Dog.

Remembrances of Gifft Hill - The Ghut - Part Three

Where had it gone?

Our rocky road had simply vanished. Happy, who was exploring ahead, came to the place where ghut met sky and hills, came to the place where the ghut ended. He stood there on one of many large boulders waiting for us. We hurried towards him as fast as we could, drawn to the mystery.

And then...as we climbed over a bunch of rocks we came face to face with a geological phenomena unique to St. John.

Dropping away at our feet, going straight down was a rock fall. I'm not sure how tall it is, Erva thinks maybe 75 feet. And there were the pools of water! The one at the top was maybe 15 feet long and 8 feet wide. And far below us, the pool at the bottom was MUCH bigger, 20 feet long maybe and 15 feet wide. The water, though brown in color was clear and sweet. Yes we drank some and were not harmed. And to our amazement things were living in it, and not just tadpoles. There were crayfish!

It was like being in a cathedral. Even we, two young girls, could recognize, sense, the specialness of the space. I don't remember our talking much. I think we mostly sat on the rocks and soaked up the essence of it all as our feet dangled in the surprisingly cold water.

It was easy to imagine escaped slaves hiding up in the hills; places too isolated, steep, and rocky to have been terraced by plantation owners. It was easy to imagine them gathering water from these pools. Yes, they had been here.

I'd like to think we were the first white people to ever see it. It seems possible.

Erva and I ate our sandwiches as we lounged on the sun bathed rocks. All that could be heard besides Happy panting contently near-by, was the breeze blowing through the trees, the echoing calls of various birds, the rustle of lizards as they scurried about the dead-fall. We were utterly alone in the world. We didn't want to leave, but we knew we had to get back home to The Castle before it got too late. As we didn't have a watch we had to keep track of time by keeping track of where the sun was. There is no long twilight in the islands. When the sun goes down it gets dark very quickly. Down there in the ghut it would grow dark even more quickly because of the steep hills. It was kind of like being in the Grand Canyon. We had to get back home.

We didn't get lost, we found our way out without a problem. But we were changed. We were somehow different than we had been only a few hours before. We knew something very few other people knew about. Not only that, we had experienced something spiritual.

When we got home we were excited to tell Mom and Dad all about what we had found. I think it may have been next week-end we took Mom down to see it. She found rare terrestrial orchids, and we brought home the biggest walking stick we have ever seen before or since, a good 5 inches long, without feelers. It had landed on Mom's shirt and rode on her shoulder the whole way home.

On our third trip, Erva and I took Vince Mrazik, a National Park Service Ranger, and Henry Fafala, the head gardener for Caneel Bay to see that most miraculous place. But we didn't just go to the pools. We went all the way to were the ghut terminates into Fish Bay. We actually climbed down that waterfall by tying a rope to a tree and sort of belaying ourselves over the rocks. We found other pools of water, with crayfish in them as long as my forearm. Remember I was a small child...but still, those crayfish were BIG. We also found an old iron cauldron, the kind used to boil sugar cane juice, wedged into some rocks. At some time during a flood it must have tumbled it's way down the ghut before getting lodge. Dad met us at Fish Bay in our boat the FDO and took us back to Cruz Bay. Otherwise we would have had to have made the long hard climb up to the Monte Catchment before being met by someone in a jeep.

In the years that followed we took only the most special people to our special place. We learned the pools were deep. Deep enough to swim in. And yes, there was water in them year round.

Below, though yellowed with age are three photos taken at The Ghut in January of 1978.

That's Anna my dog, peeking over the top. She's happy, see that smile?

Here she is again, still smiling, directly above the upper pool.

And this is the upper pool. At center left is an area that looks almost black with white speckles, that's the lower pool with reflected sunlight. It's a long way straight down.

Geologically, the fall was caused eons ago when the earth shifted suddenly along a fault line, some of it falling away, some of it being pushed upwards. The fault still exists. It's possible one day it could shift again.

I have not been back in a long, long time. It's unlikely that I'll ever return as too many people know about it now and I fear I would find evidence of human thoughtlessness, trash, plastic. So I choose, as Erva does, to remember it as it was when we first saw it, a sacred place that gave itself to us and that never harmed us when we visited.

Remembrances of Gifft Hill - The Ghut - Part Two

We were in another world.

We were explorers going where no one had gone before. It was unlikely we'd actually get lost, but going down stream was the safest thing to do, it would lead us to the ocean. So that's what we did.

The hills rose steeply on either side of us, surrounding us, giving a sense of being very isolated and far anyway from everything. The ghut itself was wide. In some places it must have been at least 40 feet across, maybe more. It's hard for me to judge. I was so small when I was 8. I remember things being bigger than they really are. But even when I went down there as a teen and young adult, there were places where that ghut was very wide. A tremendous amount of water gets moved down it.

Most other ghuts we'd ever explored were at most 20 or so feet across, this one was way different. It was so wide there was open sky high above us, places where the overhanging trees and steep sides of the hills didn't block out the narrow band of blue.

We were amazed, awed, stunned by its hugeness and its incredible beauty. It was lush, the epitome of tropical. Huge elephant ear philodendrons (if you scroll down you can see a woman beside a large leaf) grew along the banks, clinging to rocks and trees. Their leaves were large enough that the two of us could stand under a single leaf. They made excellent umbrellas against both the sun and rain. There were anthuriums of various kinds and ferns. As we climbed our way around and over rocks, we were continually met with one spectacular thing after another. And every time we did all we could say was, "We gotta bring Mom here. She won't believe this 'til she sees it."

We had no idea where we really were. We had no idea how far we had to go to find those mysterious pools, or even if we were going in the right direction. But it didn't matter. We had found paradise.

Meanwhile, as we ogled and gasped, Happy explored ahead. He never let us out of his sight. I'm sure if he had stumbled upon a wild girl-eating animal, he would have defended us to the death. Lucky for us, there were no dangerous animals, not even poisonous snakes. The most we had to contend with was running into the web of the copper spider, a member of the orb family. Their web silk is strong and sticky and it's kind of freaky to get tangled up in it. But the spiders, fearsome as they look, are harmless. They can also be kind of big, easily spanning an adult palm.

There was also the real threat of disturbing a wasp nest.
The Monday wasps (also called Jack Spaniards) look like these guys only they're a bit bigger. This is a picture of Friday wasps. Mondays are easily angered and quick to sting first and ask questions later. Fridays are more laid back. If you disturb a nest, they'll fly around it check things out see if there's any danger and if there isn't settle back down. It's like they know the week-end is coming and they're cool. But those Mondays, they are pissed off all the time because it's the first day of the week. They like to build their nests under leaves so as we crashed and thrashed our way through the bush there was a chance we could have gotten zapped. But we didn't.

But we braved them both. Particularly me, who used to be near phobic about spiders.

Eventually we came to a place where the ghut was very wide and curved to the left. Always we'd been able to see the ghut ahead, been able to see it bending to the right or left. But when we came around that bend...we were met with open space and sunlight. We could see the sky and the hills beyond. But here was no more ghut. It had disappeared.

Stay tuned for The Ghut - Part Three.

Remembrances of Gifft Hill - The Ghut - Part One

The Virgin Islands are steep and volcanic in origin. Basically the the whole Caribbean chain is a mountain range, the islands are the tops of those mountains sticking up out of the ocean. St. John rises from sea level to its highest point of 1277 feet at Bordeaux Mountain, boom, just like that. There is no gradual. The hills are all pushed together like a piece of fabric that's been casually wadded up and tossed on the floor. Roads and trails twist and turn and go up and down with very few places that are flat.

In between all the folds of hills there are ghuts (pronouced "gut".) Ghuts are dry washes or gullies. (I don't know where the word ghut comes from it's not in my big dictionary. It might be Danish.) When it rains little ghuts feed into large ghuts which feed into big ghuts that carry the water to the sea. When we have heavy rainstorms (floods) in the islands we call them ghut washes. But no matter how hard it rains, a ghut never runs for long. Once the rain is over, the flow stops within a few days and the ghut dries up within a week to ten days. My sister and I, along with various friends, explored many ghuts as it was exciting to discover either where they originated or where they ended. They were most fun to explore after a good rain because when the ghuts were running, there were small waterfalls and pools full of tadpoles. They are transformed from dry rocky stream beds into a wet magical fairyland. We could sit in pools and have water pour over us. We could pretend we were in Hawaii or the Amazon or some other equally exotic wet place.

When Heber Thomas finally showed me and Erva where the trail was that led to a ghut he said had water in it year round, we were determined to go exploring. It just didn't seem possible that anything like that could exist. Year round pools of water? No way.

One Saturday Erva and I were left at home to our devises, something that didn't happen too often. Mom and Dad were probably working at The Garage in Cruz Bay. It was the perfect opportunity. We decided to take off into the bush in search of what was to become known in our family simply as The Ghut. Erva was 12, I was 8.

Erva, being a girl scout, brought along her girl scout knife and a canteen of water. We also made a couple of sandwiches. But most importantly we took our dog, Happy. We knew he would lead us back home if we did get lost. Happy was one of those dogs, if he took it into his head that he didn't want to be left alone at home, would track us down. He'd found us several times, at The Garage, at Trunk Bay. These places weren't just down the road, they were three to five miles away. He'd just suddenly show up, all happy to see us and demanding to know, "Why didn't you let me to come too and go get me some water I'm thirsty." So Erva and I felt very confident about charging into unknown territory when we had Himself with us.

It's difficult to describe what we saw, what we experienced, as we pushed our way down the steep trail that was partially overgrown mostly with wild pineapples and catch-n-keep. The wild pineapple, locally known as ping wing, is a bromelliad. It's two and three foot long leaves have spines all along the edges. The tip of the leaf is needle sharp. The whole plant can grow to three and four feet across and that tall as well. From their centers, like regular pineapples, a flower stalk will form, but instead of producing a single fruit, these plants produce a large cluster of almond-shaped fruits about the size of a kiwi. They turn yellow when they're ripe and are edible but extremely astringent. They cause your mouth to dry up and tingle. These plants grow in big massed clusters and are just about impossible to get through. I wish a had a picture to show you.

Catch-n-keep, an Acacia, is a viny bush. It drapes itself over anything that gets in its way and is a predominate plant in the bush. From a distance it is quite pretty with its feathery emerald green leaves. And when it blooms, as in the picture below, the hillsides are covered with large patches of white. It can look for all the world as if there has been a dusting of snow.

But every inch of it is covered in tiny hooked barbs.

It ain't called catch-n-keep for nothin'. The thin, flexible, vine-like branches catch hold of whatever brushes against it and the more you tug in an effort to pull away, the more those little hooks dig in. There are only two ways to become untangled. One is to cut off the offending branches and gently pull them off or to carefully go forward into the bush so the hooks are loosened and gently extricate yourself. It is rather like those Chinese finger cuffs where the harder you pull to release your fingers, the tighter it becomes. You have to push the ends together to get free. It's the same sort of principle with the catch-n-keep. The only thing is, no matter how careful you are, you are bound to get scratches.

Erva and I, being either stupid or brazen bush-babies wore shorts and sneakers and probably sleeveless shirts. Suffice it to say Erva did battle with the ping wing and the catch-n-keep using her knife to cut away the spiked leaves and clawed branches but neither of us was spared a few sharp pokes or long scratches.

After we broke through the needles and thorns the trail opened up a bit. Now it was lined with maran bush (a wild sage) with its dusty silvery somewhat itchy leaves that were used for scrubbing pots. Down and down and down the hillside we went. The farther down we went the more open and the less tangled with bush the trail became, the more trees appeared. The trail was probably kept open by cows and goats foraging for food. Eventually we came to place where the trail crossed a small wash. We could see where it picked up on the other side but debated about whether to follow the wash to the left, or continue on the trail which sort of went to the right, but more straight ahead. We chose to follow the path. Since this was a fork in the "road" Erva made marks in the trees with her trusty knife.

We were now in a different environment. We were under a canopy of trees, genips mostly, but also mompoos and towering gre-gre trees. (Couldn't find a link.) There was also lots of wild tamarind and crumberries. I believe crumberries and guavaberries are the same thing. The crumberry trees produce dark blue-purple berries that look like a blue berry. They are delicious too. Wild tamarind is a member of the Mimosa family. It is very prevalent and can be kind of obnoxcious but at least it doesn't have thorns.

So there we were at the bottom, in a deep narrow valley between the hills. We had survived the claws of the dragon, the itching powder of witches, and had been rewarded for our bravery with cool shade. It was quiet down there, peaceful. The trail wound among the trees for a little way and then emptied itself into...the biggest, widest, most rock and bolder-strewn ghut either of us had ever seen.

Stay tuned for The Ghut - Part Two.

Remembrances of Gifft Hill - Herber Thomas

We were the first white people to live up at Gifft Hill, a rather isolated place, three miles from Cruz Bay. The road to Gifft Hill was a mile long dirt track with deep ruts and places that were more like a rocky stream-bed than a road. We had to use four-wheel drive, low transfer the whole way.

Our nearest neighbors were the Thomases who lived about a quarter of a mile away.

Old Man Heber Thomas was a tall lanky man. He talked very fast and as if he had small pebbles in his mouth. It was often difficult to understand him. It may surprise many to learn that on an island only nine miles long and five miles wide we could tell where a person was from by the way he or she spoke. People from Coral Bay sounded different from those who were from Bethany or Cruz Bay or Gifft Hill.

Heber Thomas lived in a two room shack with his wife Victoria, and Erla a girl who lived with them and helped with chores. They had a glorious view of St. Thomas and Pillsbury Sound. Victoria was bed-ridden. I think it was due to arthritis. Sometimes she was placed in a chair in the doorway to catch the sun, but most of the time she was propped up in bed. Hers was the first "old lady" smell I remember smelling. There was something musky about it, something sour and something sharp. She must have been, in her youth, a pretty woman because I remember her as having traces of pretty still lingering in her round face, peeking out from behind the wrinkles of her smile, and hiding in the tight braids of her thick white hair.

The Thomases shack, like most every one's (for most of the population, including us, lived in tiny wooden homes. We called our shack The Castle) was spotlessly clean. And their clothes, though worn and well patched, were also clean and ironed with a "goose," an iron into which you put charcoal embers.

Old Man Herber ran goats on his property along with a few cows and chickens. He also had a mule. One time either his dogs or someone elses killed one of his pregnant nannies. For some reason I was there a short time after he'd started butchering the goat, which he'd strung up in a tree. I remember seeing the pair of nearly ready to be born kids, still in their watery sacs lying on the ground. It was a sad sight, and Herber Thomas was obviously (even to me at 8 or 9 years old) very upset.

Because we had a kerosene refrigerator we had ice, a luxury back then. Almost every day Erla would walk the quarter mile to our shack with a rum bottle full of cow's milk in exchange for a tray of ice cubes. Sometimes we exchanged ice for eggs.

The Thomases didn't have a cistern, like we did, for catching rain water. What they had were four or five 55 gallon drums covered with cheese cloth and/or lids to keep the mosquitoes from laying their eggs in the water. Another of Erla's jobs was to go down to the "Monte reservoir" or catchment once a week to bring back water if there hadn't been enough rain to keep their barrels full. It was only about 1/2 or 3/4 of a mile away, but the road was very steep and rocky. Going down was easy, but coming back up...it was tough. Once we got our donkey, Erasmus, Erva and I helped Erla with the water hauling. Herber's mule and Erasmus were loaded with dumb boxes each of which carried four, five gallon tins. The tins were lidless. To keep from losing water on the return trip we put branches of genip leaves on top of the water. The leaves acted like a shock absorber and kept the water from sloshing over the sides of the tins. If memory serves me right, we set out fairly early in the morning and got back by noon.

Water was a precious commodity. Conserving it was something everyone did, not because it was the cool thing to do, but because we had to. Rain was our only source. There were no wells or springs, and if it didn't rain for a while, if there was a drought, everyone suffered.

So, when Old Man Herber Thomas told my sister and me that before the catchment had been build there was a place, a ghut with pools, where people had gone year round to get water, we were incredulous. He said slaves had hidden out there when they went maroon and that there were trails to it off of the Gifft Hill road.

Erva and I wanted to know where those trails were, but Heber Thomas kept the secret to himself for sometime. Maybe he was testing us. Maybe he was making sure we were worthy of knowing the secret. But finally, after a certain amount of pestering, he showed us where the trail head was, hidden by spiky wild pineapples and barbed catch-n-keep. As soon as we knew where the trail began, Erva and I vowed that one day we would go exploring. The idea of a ghut with year-round pools of water was hard to believe.

Stay tuned for The Ghut.