Newsgroup: it.hobby.viaggi
Titolo: [PRERECE] Anguilla

A volte qualcuno, purtroppo sempre piu' raramente, scrive una belle
RECE appena tornato, personalmente non vedo l'ora di sentire da NB al
telefono la versione audio del "tour delle andamane" rece; e che Vincio
vada a sopralluogarmi Lencois....
Per cambiare un po' ho deciso di fare una Pre rece, ovvero scrivere una
parte di quello che ho cercato e trovato sulla mia prossima meta.
Vi traduco con fatica un pezzo di un bell'articolo che a fine post
riporto in lingua originale nella sua versione completa (ma a me ha
colpito la poesia delle prime righe)
I segreti di Anguilla (dietro le sue spiagge, Anguila offre piaceri
inaspettati) di William G. Scheller
... Il perimetro sabbioso di Anguilla e' pettinato, mordicchiato
dall'atlantico e dal mar dei caraibi in un crescendo in circa 30 baie
verso la via della perfezione in serenita' e spensieratezza, della
scala umana.
Per un conoscitore di spiagge, l'isola e' un buffet a prezzo fisso dove
puoi mangiare tutto quello che riesci.
Ci sono spiagge dove sei solo, e spiagge con hotel adiacenti, spiagge
col reef pieno di pesci, e spiagge ondose, spiagge dove puoi cenare a
lume di candela ascoltando Nat King Cole, e spiagge dove la salsa del
barbecue gocciola dal tuo mento mentre ascolti una band locale.
Da qualche parte tra Limestone Bay e Upper Shoal Bay; tra Cove bay e
Sea Father Bay, iniziai a recepire l'idea che Anguilla era vera, una
natura arrendevole l'aveva guidata nel creare un posto dove gli apetti
sregolati della storia e della geografia sono stati eliminati,
lasciando un panorama di spiagge assolate e perfette, dove la sola cosa
a cui pensare fosse quando entrare o uscire dall'acqua....
Anguilla's Secrets
Beyond its maginificent beaches, Anguilla offers unexpected pleasures.
By William G. Scheller
I snorkled along after the parrotfish until it ducked into a nook in
the coral and then let a little school of sergeants major lure me into
shallower water. Smaller fish succeeded smaller fish, drawing me closer
and closer through the dappled shallows to the Anguillan shore, until I
had nearly beached myself like some Devonian sea creature contemplating
adaptation to dry land. It wasn't a bad evolutionary move. The sandy
perimeter of Anguilla is scalloped, nibbled by the Atlantic and
Caribbean into a skein of some 30 crescent bays that vie for perfection
in serenity and an easy, human scale. For a connoisseur of beaches, the
island is an all-you-can-eat buffet.There are beaches where you are
alone, and beaches with hotels attached; beaches with fishy inshore
reefs, and beaches with a rousing surf; beaches where you can dine by
candlelight while listening to Nat King Cole, and beaches where
barbecue sauce dribbles down your chin while you listen to a local
band. Somewhere between Limestone Bay and Upper Shoal Bay, between Cove
Bay and Sea Feather Bay, I began to get the idea that on Anguilla,
sheer will and a compliant natural environment had finally managed to
create a place where the more unruly aspects of history and geography
have been eliminated, leaving a perfect sunny beachscape where the only
thing to think about is whether to get in or out of the water.
Take Scilly Cay - or Gorgeous Scilly Cay, the nom de commerce used by
its proprietors, Eudoxie and Sandra Wallace. Scilly Cay is an islet
about the size of a baseball diamond, just a few hundred yards out from
Island Harbour and accessible via the Wallaces' ready-when-you-are
motor launch.
It is a beach with a restaurant and bar attached, a place with hardly
any walls and absolutely no need to change attitude or attire from one
moment, when you are looking a live fish in the eye, to the next, when
you are addressing a broiled lobster. (A grain of salt is recommended,
though, when listening to Eudoxie, a man who claims he swims in
Anguillan waters only from August 15 to August 20, because "the rest
of the year it's too cold.")
I ate my lobster, then settled back with one of Eudoxie's rum
punches. These are sneaky devils, which he crafts with a healthy dollop
of amaretto and a heroic belt of rum. Two put reality nicely in
perspective, and a third would knock you on your Scilly Cayster.
Actually, five or six of Eudoxie's potions could hardly enhance the
lotus-eating attitude that all those beaches inspire. But six or seven
beaches into my stay - it must have been something I read - I threw my
snorkel and towels in the back seat of the jeep and started looking
around.
What I found was that Anguilla is a place with a lot more texture than
I had initially appreciated, a necklace of beaches attached to a
singular inner landscape, held together by some remark-able
individuals.
Anguilla, a long, irregular coral outcropping that doesn't seem to
fit its name ("eel" in the language of its discoverers - Spanish,
French, or Italian, according to conflicting stories), lies at the
northern tip of the Lesser Antilles. It is an island with a history
quite unlike that of any other in the Caribbean: Aside from a couple of
abortive French attacks during the 18th century, it was never dislodged
from the British colonial orbit.
The island even staged a bizarre anti-independence revolution 30 years
ago, when Britain tried to cut the apron strings.
So arid that plantation agriculture was never really practical, the
35-square-mile island could not support a slave economy. Which is not
to say that there were no slaves, simply that those on Anguilla
didn't have enough work; by some accounts, they had four days a week
off so they could tend their own small garden plots and attend church
on Sunday.
Forty years ago Alec Waugh wrote that Anguilla "has never known
prosperity." But accurate as that observation may have been at the
time (the island still lacked electricity and telephones in the late
1960s), the opposite was also true: Anguilla had never known the sort
of poverty associated with overpopulation (the census hovers at around
10,000), urban slums, or crashes in the sugar market.
Anguillans fished and farmed, built boats, and took off-island jobs so
they could send money home. Other islands may have had an underclass;
on Anguilla, just about everyone belonged to a hardscrabble yeomanry.
The landscape left by 350 years of such unentrepreneurial settlement
has been capped in the last three decades by carefully planned tourism
centered upon a dozen or so luxurious but discreet low-rise resorts.
But beyond the beaches, beyond the dooryard gardens of folks who by now
must all have at least one desk clerk in the family, extends what
botanists call "evergreen bushland."
Evergreen bushland is what the rest of us might call "scrub," and
scrub the interior portion of Anguilla has probably always been. There
were no dense forests here to cut for shipbuilding or to clear for
plantations; the soils that overlay Anguilla's limestone foundation
were too shallow ever to allow trees to grow very tall. Mahogany was
introduced here and failed. Scrub it was, and scrub it has remained.
So I made my way into the evergreen bushland along whatever rutted
tracks wandered inland. On Anguilla the ticket seemed to be to head
north out of the capital, a loosely strung, centerless center called
The Valley, and then veer into the bush on a dirt road just south of
where kids hawk beach chair rentals at Uncle Ernie's bar on Shoal
Bay. My route even included an archaeological destination - a cave
called The Fountain, once frequented by Anguilla's native Arawak, a
peaceful people now extinct.
As soon as I got off the blacktop, the indicators that I was on a wild
goose chase were all around me. Or maybe a wild dove chase:
Anguilla's national bird, celebrated in a "Love Our Dove"
campaign, is the turtledove.
Posters give dove-friendly advice about not cutting brush, not filling
in ponds, and not releasing cats and goats in the wild. (Maybe the
souvenir shop I saw giving out free goatskin key chains was a pro-dove
operation.) But this back road, like so many others on Anguilla, was
lousy with doves.
What the doves accompanied me through, and to, was...more scrub. The
brush was impenetrable on both sides of the narrowing road, now little
more than an uneven slab of exposed coral rock. No side trails led
anywhere. It was a landscape that might have pleased Brer Rabbit -
thickety, thorny, scrubby brush, carpeting a terrain that rose and fell
hardly at all.
I thought of a conversation I had overheard, about a proposed golf
course for this end of the island, and threw my remaining
environmentalist credentials to the breezes by deciding that this was
the kind of landscape that would be vastly improved by 18 holes and a
clubhouse.
Then I stopped and got out of the jeep, and in all that green scrub I
saw the damnedest thing: a perfect white blossom eight feet up on a
gnarled, leafless shrub that otherwise showed absolutely no sign of
life. The solitary flower was proof that even the dreariest, most
monotonous landscape offers its epiphanies, jewels best appreciated at
a walker's pace. I recanted my golf-course heresy and drove back to
the main road.
I never found The Fountain, but I didn't have to delve into the scrub
to see Arawak relics. I simply had to visit Colville Petty, who has
assembled a number of pre-Columbian artifacts as part of a museum of
Anguilla history, adjacent to his home, which he plans to open to the
public.
Petty is a tall, bearded man, a historian who was once the island's
acting deputy governor. He has spent many years putting together his
collection, a systematic Anguillan mini-Smithsonian, which starts with
the Arawak and the days when the island was known by its native name,
Malliouhana, and continues through the tumult of Anguilla's unusual,
fatality-free revolution.
The collection includes conch shell knives, coral tools, and fragments
of pottery found at The Fountain and at several other places where the
Arawak lived a life based on agriculture and fishing. Not surprisingly,
those activi-ties were also the primary pursuits of the people who left
behind the 19th- and 20th-century artifacts now in Petty's
possession.
"Even before emancipation, some Anguilla plantation holders gave up
and sold parcels of land to their slaves," Petty told me. "So
Anguilla had a jump on becoming a free society."
A free society, but one that long lived at a subsistence level the
Arawak could have understood. It was fascinating to poke through the
household odds and ends Petty had amassed and realize that the age of
kerosene and raw muscle ended on Anguilla barely 25 years ago.
Items as commonplace as postage stamps and a license plate cue the most
interesting part of the Petty collection, having to do with the events
of 1967 through 1969. Until that point Anguilla had been lumped
together with St. Kitts and Nevis as a British colonial unit - an
arrangement that was to have continued with the grant-ing of
independence in 1967.
"The 'CN' on an old Anguillan license plate stands for St.
Christopher [St. Kitts] and Nevis," Petty told me. "Anguilla
wasn't even recognized. It was the same with the postage stamps you
see here."
Fed up with the third-class status that they anticipated in a St.
Kitts-led federation, the Anguillans rebelled, setting in motion a
complex and sometimes almost farcical chain of events in which Great
Britain and St. Kitts never looked good, and which climaxed with a
bloodless, unresisted British invasion of Anguilla in March 1969.
The Anguillans finally got what they wanted in 1980, when their
separation from St. Kitts and Nevis and ratification of their colonial
status became official. But even before then, de facto separation and
an influx of development funds began the orderly transformation from a
subsistence economy to one based on tourism.
The whole story unfolds in Petty's exhibits. The centerpiece is a
rifle confiscated from the Kittitian police, who were rousted from
Anguilla in 1967; the surrounding walls tell the tale of a festering
resentment against St. Kitts that dates back at least as far as the
1820s, when Anguilla first petitioned Britain against being lumped in
with the larger island.
A progression of handbills, newspaper clippings, photographs, and other
revolutionary paraphernalia culminates fittingly with a British
soldier's caricature of a member of his regiment, with golf clubs
slung alongside the rifle on his shoulder. (Anguilla, however, still
doesn't have a golf course.)
Since the anguillan revolution happened so recently, there are plenty
of revolutionaries around. One of them is Jeremiah Gumbs, whom I found
relaxing, his impressive white beard flowing down his broad chest, on
the veranda of the hotel he built nearly 40 years ago at Rendezvous
Bay.
Jerry Gumbs was in the thick of the fray back in 1967, sometimes
pleading his native island's case at the United Nations in New York.
Meeting him was like being able to talk with Samuel Adams, before he
turned into a beer.
"The first goal I had in mind, when the revolution came along, was
improving the lot of the women and children on the island," Gumbs
told me in his slow, deliberate baritone.
"They had it the hardest in the old days," he went on. "The men
went away to work on the other islands or in the United States; the
women and children were left with the menial farm tasks. Every family
had a cow, some goats, and a fishing boat."
The octogenarian knows the story firsthand: He left Anguilla to work in
the Aruba oil industry in 1929, when he was only 16; later, he
emigrated to the United States, where he raised his family and founded
a successful fuel oil business in a part of central New Jersey where
many Anguillans have settled.
The Anguilla to which Jerry Gumbs brought his family in 1956 was much
the same place he had left years earlier. His wife, Lydia Gumbs,
recalls ironing clothes with a charcoal-filled iron called a
"goose," a device that might easily find its way into Colville
Petty's museum. "But when I got here," she said, "I thought I
was in heaven."
Jerry Gumbs began building his hotel "with a pick and shovel and the
island's first stone crusher" in 1959 and opened it three years
later as the first real resort on Anguilla. It is a serenely
old-fashioned place, compared with the sleek new properties that have
followed, but it is bright and cheerful still: As I talked with the old
man, a worker rolled sunny yellow paint onto the airy veranda's
stucco columns. Along with the newer places, the hotel still fits Jerry
Gumbs's vision of economic development as a goal of the revolution he
once helped steer.
Anguillan agriculture has also taken a turn from the days of the
one-cow farm. One day as I was heading back to The Valley from the
harbor village at Sandy Ground, I saw a row of low, arched, tentlike
structures, like see-through Quonset huts, and drove over to
investigate.
I had stumbled onto an operation called Green Cuisine, a hydroponic
farm that ships lettuce not only to most of the better restaurants on
Anguilla itself, but also to other islands in the northeastern
Caribbean.
As we walked between rows of crisp, blemishless Bibb and curly-leaf
lettuces, proprietor Noureddine Salouane related how he and his wife,
June, raise their crop in long trays of circulating, nutrient-enriched
water and about how they plan to add cucumbers, strawberries, tomatoes,
and herbs to their line.
Hydroponics is popular in Salouane's native Morocco, but it wasn't
lettuce that brought him to Anguilla.
"I was trained as an artist," he told me. "I've worked for the
king of Morocco and on restoration of the Alhambra in Granada."
I mentioned that there was extensive and elaborate Moorish-style
plasterwork at my Anguilla hotel, which had originally opened under the
name Casablanca.
"I did that," he said.
"You used molds, right?"
"No. I did it the old way."
I had a vision of Salouane supine, Michelangelo-like, beneath the
arches of the hotel's public spaces, incising the intricate geometry
of his ancestors into fresh plaster. Then I looked around
at all that lettuce. Few of us get to make such drastic career jumps.
Later I visited another artist, a 28-year-old Anguilla native named
Cheddie Richardson, at the classic, wooden Caribbean-style studio he
built near the island's west end.
Cheddie is a woodcarver. He works in mahogany and walnut and even casts
some of his works in bronze; but his favorite medium is driftwood,
usually buttonwood or cedar.
"It takes a while to decide what to carve from a piece of
driftwood," Cheddie told me. Looking at some of his pieces, I
wondered if perhaps the wait depended on how long the wood took to tell
the artist what it wanted to reveal. Birds, fish, mythical sea maidens
all leap almost alive from the complex sinews of the flotsam he chooses
to carve. It was impossible, after leaving his studio, not to see
living shapes and faces in every dead tree and tide-tossed knot of
cedar I came across.
Just down the road from Richardson lives David Hodge, an artist who
works with wood in quite a different way. Using white pine, Douglas
fir, Grade A marine plywood, and epoxy - no metal fasteners - he turns
out the lovely, single-masted sailing vessels that evolved in the
Anguillan fishery and that now are prized as racing craft. Sometimes,
he captains his boats himself.
A lean, serious man with a black goatee, David Hodge has been building
boats for 25 of his 39 years and doesn't mince words. He calls his
business David's Art Gallery. Who's to argue?
"I am always trying to exceed what I've done before," Hodge says,
taking a moment out of a 12-hour day to relax in the cool shade of his
building shed. "If I have a boat that wins races, I try to build one
that will beat it.
"Sailing before the wind is easy...," he tells me before going back
to work. The unvoiced conclusion is that one does not always sail
before the wind.
Toward the end of my stay in Anguilla, I made another attempt at
getting off into nowhere - not into the strange desolation of the
evergreen bushland, but to a nowhere with snorkeling beaches.
I followed a road that paralleled the coast along the northeast
extremity of the island, and after I passed the last cluster of new
villas, the last goats browsing in dooryards, the road dwindled down to
a single track. When I found a place to pull off to the side, I
followed a short path to a blue crescent bay where there was no one.
The snorkeling wasn't up to the splendid standards of the rest of the
island - what I'd thought was a reef was really a patch of kelp - so
I body-surfed for a while and then, drying off, noticed a little green
building, barely more than a shack, near the tip of the next point of
land.
It turned out to be the Palm Grove Bar and Grill at Junks Hole Bay, the
archetypal Great Good Place at the End of the Trail, where proprietor
Nat Richardson understands that a fellow likes a couple of johnny cakes
with his Red Stripe while he is waiting for his red snapper. That
snapper, served whole and aswim in its garlicky pan juices, may have
been the single best fish I've ever eaten.
The plain little room was open to the sea air and a view of the beach,
just a few feet away, where two or three people were snorkeling on a
shallow reef. After lunch I joined them for a half hour or so, then
hopped back in the jeep, content that food and beer were served at the
end of the world but still a little curious to see what lay beyond.
After Junks Hole Bay, the terrain began to resemble high moorland.
I was reminded of the beautifully desolate bayberry-covered dunes on
the ocean side of Cape Cod near Provincetown. But the landscape soon
turned Hebridean, and I switched into four-wheel-drive. Finally, by the
time I was nearing Anguilla's northernmost extreme at Windward Point,
it was almost a moonscape. The low, scrubby vegetation gave way to
nothing more than scatterings of Turk's cap cacti, their sweet, pink,
corn-kernel-shaped fruits nipped clean by unseen goats.
I got out of the jeep and climbed over jagged coral to the top of the
hill. At the flattened pinnacle, perhaps 75 feet above the point where
Atlantic and Caribbean waters merge, stood a ruined steel light tower.
Looking back across the island I saw the mountains of St. Martin and,
beyond, the distant hills of St. Barts.
I lowered my gaze to the foreground, to the scalloped bays and interior
scrub of Anguilla, a place conjured up yesterday out of unprepossessing
yet sturdy resources, a place where dead trees grow blossoms, where
peaceful revolutionaries build hotels, where sculptors work in
driftwood and artists build boats, and where the man who grew your
salad knows the ornamental secrets of the Moors.

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