Vacation in fantasy land

Well, I'm back from my week of respite in Barbados. Though, truthfully, when your suitcases are packed full of children, respite is a funny word to use. We had lots of illness, pestilence, heat intolerance, prickly rash, teenage hormone surges, and some surprisingly intolerant and unfriendly hosts and hostesses at times. So it wasn't the idyllic 'escape from it all' that the tourist brochures might have promised. On the other hand, that's probably ok. The reason that we chose to go to Barbados as opposed to some other island in the south seas is that our perception was that at least to some extent, in spite of its horrible history in the hands of Europeans, this was an island that actually worked. Most people have some means of holding life and limb together. The gigantic resort operations that move into tropical zones, pave them over, erect huge barbed wire fences around vacation compounds filled with obese tourists looking out furtively through the bars and hoping they will hold up so that the "locals" on the other side, filling their stomach with mud pies (literally) to stave off the pain of starvation can't get in to take back any of the coconuts filled with rum and limeade that they might otherwise covet. Barbados is a long way from perfection. There are far too many cars. Far too much of the food (at least the food we were able to find) comes from somewhere else. At one point, I found myself sitting in front of a bowl of granola consisting of fruit that had been picked locally, shipped to Belgium to be mixed with European grains, and then shipped back to me. I thought I could actually taste the diesel. But for all of its postcolonial ridiculousness, it seems to be a country that stands a chance of surviving the century.

It's telling that now when I find myself in a place away from home, I start trying to assess the resources and future potential of the place. When the shit really hits the fan, which now seems to be happening with a slightly perceptible uptick in pace, how will these people do? The answer in Barbados is that they will do much better than we will. Their climate is year round perfect for avoiding the early devastations of climate change. They haven't had a hurricane since the 50s. They have lots of highlands. The ground is still fertile, though I have to wonder about the legacy of hundreds of years of sugar cane crops. The coral base of much of the island serves as a huge built in water filter. The place is small and the population is fairly low.

I passed some time reading what turned out to be not so restful a book -- Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe. I thought it a brilliant choice at the time. Clarke and I share an agent so I already knew a bit about his background but when the time came to buy the connected literature for the trip something made me think first of Patrick O'Brian. It was only at the last minute that I remembered that Clarke was not only from the Caribbean but from Barbados itself. The book, though, was achingly sad and fairly brutal and left me wondering how it was that blacks and whites in Barbados were able to live together on the island without killing one another.

I drank vast quantities of Mt Gay Rum. In fact, when it became clear that we would be spending much of our holiday trapped in our "villa" (which, yes, did have an electric gate around it but at least not any barbed wire) I confess that I laid in an ample supply of the stuff and considered it fair holiday behaviour to pour my first rum cocktail some time between 9 and 10 am. This worked reasonably well until about the third day, when I discovered that I had triggered a wicked gout attack--a lifestyle ailment which I richly deserve and which makes it almost impossible for me to walk.

I had some nice interactions with local Bajan down-and-outers. I'm not sure what it says about me that when I travel I always have the best of times hanging out with people who have nothing. There's a certain kind of wisdom that comes from destitution. Maybe it's nothing more complicated than that when you hit bottom there's so much less left for you to try to defend that you enjoy a certain kind of clarity that those puffed up with possessions are lacking.

I don't know.

But now I'm back, slowly injecting myself back into the fray of my usual life, putting thoughts of early retirement that have strayed through my head for the past couple of days into the deep background. The news is filled with ugly portents. At a time of year when we're normally planning the garden and summer vacations, we're now wondering whether we should stock up the pantry with bags of rice and pots of cooking oil. But while all of this is going on, much of our ridiculous way of life continues unabated. We're pouring massive resources into repaving huge highways that will likely never see as much use as they have in the past. We're digging huge holes way outside of town so that we can plonk down more gigantic estate houses on half-acre lots covered with Kentucky bluegrass.

It makes it harder and harder for me to imagine any gentle landing into a state of realism where the truth slowly dawns on us that we're spending the last of our easily-gotten resources in the worst way imaginable. I hate to even think it, but some days it sure feels as though we won't wake up to what's coming until the last bit of potential food has been choked down the gasoline hose into the last SUV that's standing.