Give me a beach, a little pocket of beach, alive with a congenial crowd but far from where the cruise ship tours dump their loads. Give it a white sand apron, a few reefs off the shore, some swells further out to tempt the surfers. Give it a little open-air bar or two, a place to grab a beer as the smell of barbecued meat wafts down to the water. A couple trees to hang a hammock, a gentle breeze to sway it; let me melt into the beach, suspended in paradise.
I write these lines in a hammock on Hull Bay on the north shore of St. Thomas, in the United States Virgin Islands. The world intervenes to befoul an attempted cousins week here, but cousin Rob and I join Uncle Chuck and Aunt Monica for a few days at L’Esperance. I have been to St. Thomas seven times now, and my last time here, an extended stay, gave me some lay of the land. I am now a capable left side of the road driver, comfortable running the one stoplight all the locals ignore and no longer in a state of terror shooting up Flag Hill on a one-lane, two-way road with no guardrail between the rental car and a dramatic plunge. I know the ins and outs of some of the beaches, and I almost know where to find the dishes in the L’Esperance kitchen. These islands have become my most regular destination outside of my usual Upper Midwest haunts.
The Virgin Islands are predictable in their unpredictability. This time, here with the villa’s owners, I get a sense of just how much work it takes to keep up L’Esperance in a place where island languor seems so very real. Refrigeration is a struggle, repairmen do not show; the invasive plants slither inward. The power cuts, the solar panels and battery walls pressed into service. A venture to the grocery store takes on an air of intrigue: just what will be in stock today? But every glance at the view is a reminder of why we do it.
Paradise comes with a price, as all fine things must. A spin through the center of the island drives home how much the territory remains a colonial outpost, an outside world dropped on to hilltops and beaches and the rest put to its service. The locals are agreeable but operate on their own timetables, by their own values. The continentals who have settled here bear a sun-weathered satisfaction, resigned to their fates as things move slowly and break and occasionally get wiped off the map by a hurricane, but content with where they are. The siren song of tropical bliss echoes across the hillsides, audible often enough to sustain an eternal dream. That lotus-eating life would leave me restless on a longer stay, but over a week I find just the right level of contentment here.
Neighboring St. John remains a garden of beauty, a reason I would return here even if I did not have L’Esperance in my life. On our first full day on the islands together, Rob and I ferry over and do part of the hike that most mesmerized me four years ago: Leinster Bay, Windy Hill, and up over the sharp ridge on the Johnny Horn Trail down to stellar barbecue and a beer at Johnny Lime in Coral Bay. The sweat pours out on the return march over the ridge, and we take the plunge at Maho Bay to rinse it all away. We are waylaid by goat herds in both directions on our hike, including a dozen lounging at the start of the climb up from Leinster Bay and a leisurely family chewing its way along the lower reaches of the Johnny Horn on the return journey. New meaning for running on island time.
On a second visit to St. John we fill a 14-passenger van with people who think getting scratched up by catch-and-keep while sweating in the tropical sun is fun. Our crew has signed up to clear out the ever-advancing tropical brush on the Bourdeaux Mountain Trail, a path running from the island’s high point to the sea down the hotter, drier south side of the island. Frank, a sharp kid from Colorado and a volunteer coordinator with the Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park, appreciates the weirdness necessary to aspire to such action, and we hack away to free future hikers from encroaching thorns. Rob and I chat up some younger women who have traveled here together, spending a week in a camp at Cinnamon Bay to follow Frank’s commands. The talk fixates on adventures past and future and Rob notes our shared masochism, this pursuit of sweat and exertion to uncover new paths under the tropical sun.
Trail work is my only labor during my time in the islands, and I otherwise succumb to island routines. I burn my skin, apply the aloe, rinse in the pool. The happy hour bell dings and we assemble in the great room for cocktails or wine as the sun plunges into the horizon beyond the Charlotte Amalie harbor. We alternate eating in and venturing out to some restaurants that deliver the goods: Mims, Oceana, Cuvee, with special credit to those who offer elevated cuisine and good wine in a place at the end of the supply chain. Conversation winds down and we turn to books or word games or a few rounds of Rummikub. Stay up late, sleep in a spell, use the exercise room or swim some laps to avoid total sloth. I get some time to think, to write out some stray lines, to ponder how best to meld passions and realities.
On my final full day I head to Hull Bay a second time. Through some great failing I have left my writing tablet back in Minnesota and so I am consigned to pen and paper, allow my thoughts to drift in slowly like the bay’s gently lapping waves. I return to past writings and mantras, write them anew, wonder if I can distill them into some sort of credo or code for moving through the world. I feel like I am circling a destination on a windy island road, sometimes driving on the wrong side but nevertheless getting closer, ever closer.
Over lunch at the bar, unenthused by the prospect of talk with my neighbors who have taken one-way tickets to Margaritaville, I find myself on the Wikipedia page for Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog and fox analogy. I am of course a full-on fox, fascinated by many things and a skeptic of simple theories, content to hold a whole heap of complex thoughts within me and marvel at all of it, even the pickled retirees of Hull Bay. I can, through words, continue to pull things together. In due time. For now I finish my beer, pull my cap into place, tug off my shirt, appreciate the progress my gym time has coaxed out, and reassume my pose as a boy on a beach.
The pandemic may drain people away from the crowded shopping streets of Caribbean islands, but life prostrate on a towel has the same allure it always does. Here we are free to get sand all over ourselves and glug mouthfuls of saltwater, to sweat unnecessarily and court the inevitable sunburn. This is, of course, the point. During my two weeks on St. Thomas, I sample beaches both old and new to me in my ventures outward, plus add two days of hiking on neighboring St. John. Each venture ends with a seat in the sand or a swim in the sea, a beached state of bliss that kills worries nearly as well as the rum.
On one of my first free days on the island I head to the far west end of St. Thomas. Here, the arching island tumbles down to a gated community kind enough to allow the unwashed masses to sign in at the guard hut. From there, it’s a little over a mile by foot down the road past some obscenely large houses to the westernmost point on the island. Its name is the Mermaid’s Chair, and while I never quite figure out if I should be looking for seated mermaids on the spit of land that gets covered at high tide or beneath the lone palm tree on the little isle connected by the spit or on the rocks where waves crash beyond it, the place provides a serene respite. The sunset here is sublime, and the waves crash harder than anywhere else on St. Thomas. It’s not really a beach in the traditional sense, but I find some shade behind a rock and wade into a small inlet and along through the surf, alone here at the seeming end of the earth.
My second St. Thomas beach may not be a pristine beauty, but it has the best vibe of the ones I’ve sampled. Hull Bay on the island’s north shore sits somewhere between the solitude of a St. John beach and the built-up resort offerings. If the beachside bar hadn’t been sadly shut down, it would have taken me back to Puerto Escondido. When I arrive late morning, the only occupants seem to be locals. I chat with a commercial fisherman who is measuring out his kite and learn the basics of fishing these waters. Two men with metal detectors make their way up and down the beach, while a child associated with them digs a hole to Tibet in the sand. I join two middle-aged surf bums in incredulous gawking as a pristine-looking yacht tender plows straight into the beach so it can disgorge a few picnickers. Nonplussed, its pilot and an assistant work their way off the sand with some haphazard pushing and rocking, and in time head out on their merry way. “The year is only ten hours old and we have a contender for dumbass of the year,” says one of the surf bums.
Hull Bay has a reputation as a surfing beach, though only two people venture out while I’m there. The first is a teenage boy who looks every bit the surf star with a shock of sun-bleached curls, but after a few tentative steps into the breakers he settles for swimming out into the calmest part of the bay and riding his board back in on his chest before calling it quits. The second is a greying stand-up paddleboarder who stays out on the larger swells for at least two hours, bobbing away on the horizon. Score one for those of us advancing in age. The fisherman says I look like a surfer; in a different life, perhaps, I muse.
There isn’t much in the way of surfing on Magens Bay, the giant bite out of the north side of St. Thomas and its most famous beach. It’s a busy one, but large enough that people can strew themselves out along its length and splash around in the gentle turquoise waters. I traipse from one end to the other and admire the bodies on display, skimpy bikinis and pretty boy swag, plus some things that people would be better off putting away. It’s been too long since I last sampled humanity in this way. That night in bed, I feel the rocking sensation of the bay’s waves carrying me off to sleep.
Secret Harbor, which protects its secrets with about 40 speed bumps and a parking lot unnecessarily atop a hill nowhere near the beach, is an intimate stretch of sand, the sort that would be great with a group but leaves me feeling exposed when there alone. Snorkelers work their way out to its convenient reef, and the blasé servers at the seaside restaurant eventually get around to feeding me. I vaguely regret heading here on my final full day instead of ponying up for the ferry to neighboring St. John for a third time, but a little unfulfilled desire can’t hurt. I’ll be back for Maho Bay some other day.
A second stop that day, Smith Bay, restores me to my beach equilibrium. Sure, my newly developed beach snobbery leads me to conclude it’s nothing special. But there is plenty of shade, and both local and tourist families splash about in its waters and snorkel out to its buoys. Sailboats work their way back and forth into the bay, and I wrap up a book in peace and solitude. It’s a fitting final destination, though not this trip’s apex. On the drive back, I cast one last look of longing toward the island where dreams and reality blurred on this trip.
That place would be St. John, a sparsely populated isle half an hour to the east of St. Thomas by ferry. The city of Cruz Bay, its main gateway for ferry traffic from St. Thomas, is a couple of clusters of shops near the docks, and then a series of villas clinging to the hills up above it. Beyond that, the majority of the land is devoted to the Virgin Islands National Park, and after I escape the ferry traffic, I head straight for the hills.
St. John’s roads are even more painfully tortured than those of St. Thomas; I’m not sure whether to admire the engineers for their accomplishments or recommend them to the asylum. Being a driver on St. John deprives one of some marvelous scenery, since one’s eyes are always fixed on the next hairpin turn and leerily checking that tailgating garbage truck in the rear view mirror. Additional obstacles include a leisurely herd of goats, a monstrous feral pig, and some burros who look miffed when a car traveling the opposite direction gets too close. The pace of life on St. John is a world apart.
The Reef Bay Trail is one of the island’s best-known hikes, and it plunges some 900 feet from Centerline Road along the spine of the island to its namesake bay on the south shore. Ruins line the route: pull back the jungle on St. John and you find a less serene part of the Virgin Islands’ history than its pastel buildings and its cobblestone streets. Like most of the Caribbean, they were once a hub of the slave trade, and the ruins of its sprawling estates litter the landscape: a crumbling wall here, an old storehouse there, a cluster of old homes back in the thicket. Right before the Reef Bay beach is an old sugar factory, whose owners kept it going on steam power after abolition. And for truly deep roots, a side trail leads to a trickling waterfall and a pair of pools beneath some petroglyphs from the pre-Columbian Taino, who drew themselves a cartoon squid his crustacean friends. On the way back up I see how fast I can move in tropical heat, my sweatiness unnerving some not-particularly-fit hikers I meet near the top of the ridge.
On the far southeast end of St. John, a crowded trailhead leads down to the Salt Pond Beach, an idyllic, calm cove that hosts a small armada of snorkelers. I join a family who has sailed here from Georgia for a few false starts further down the beach as we seek out the Ram’s Head Trail, which climbs over to a rocky beach before ascending a bluff that juts out into the sea and gives 360-degree views. There’s little shade, and when I get back to Salt Pond Beach, I am content to lounge in the shade away from the water’s edge, a second sweaty journey of the day complete. Yes, I think, St. John is worth the hype.
St. John’s greatest gems may be on its north shore, the white sand beaches of Hawksnest, Caneel Bay, Trunk Bay, Cinnamon Bay, and Maho Bay. The road here is stupidly pretty; the second-best North Shore on earth, I crack to friends back on another one now covered in snow. My birthday destination, however, is the end of the road at Annaberg, where the ruins of St. John’s largest plantation sit in repose over Leinster Bay. I follow a trail along the beach for a bit over a mile and briefly thrash around the ruins at the base of the hill where the trail turns away from the famed snorkeling spot of Waterlemon Bay. I first found this trail when volunteering with the Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park, on an outing for which we chopped out some of the brush along the trail and the ruins here; now, the jungle is encroaching again. Sufficiently scratched up by the undergrowth, I switch up to the ruined foundations of the Windy Hill House, the estate that once lorded over this whole expanse.
From there, I set out on a loop that takes me over the ridge from the north shore to the large southeastern bite out of St. John named Coral Bay. I follow the Brown Bay Trail further along the shore to another small beach a bit over a mile beyond. I have this one to myself, and tuck in beneath its encroaching undergrowth for a few minutes of shade. I only see one person on this entire trail, a relentless trail runner with whom I share a sweaty grin as we crest the hill with views both north and south. A few more ruins lie off the side near the end of the trail, which dumps me out on a road that runs along the East End peninsula. From there, it’s another mile along pavement through the hamlet of Zootenvaal, the easternmost reach of the United States.
I come to crossroads of Coral Bay, a collection of houses up on the hill and rundown shacks along the road, placid in the midday heat. I’d hoped to stop for a snack and to down some water next to its historic Moravian church, but the burros have occupied the spot beneath the one shady tree. Resigned, I turn and march 500 feet directly up a relentless grade; this is allegedly a road, but I’m not sure any vehicle could survive this thing. Naturally, the sun comes back out for its most intense burst of heat of the day while I’m slogging up. I crest the hill and saunter down the Johnny Horn Trail, which carries me back to the Windy Hill Great House.
I stop for lunch on a shaded set of steps on the ruins of the estate. The old house’s perch may be unbeatable: Leinster Bay and its sailboats to the left, Tortola of the British Virgin Islands across the Sir Francis Drake Passage to the right, shapely Great Thatch and quaint Little Thatch in front, and beyond it, Jost Van Dyke. The ruins are shrouded in pink flowers (which are, alas, an invasive Mexican creeper), its past lives as an overlord of slaves and a boarding house and a reform school now taken back by the wilds of St. John. A light rain pushes through, and I welcome the cleansing shower. I snack away, sip at a flask of rum, jot down a few notes, and attain something resembling nirvana.
At the bottom of the hill, I strip off my sweat-caked shirt and wade into the bay. I edge out gingerly, leery of urchins, and then strike out to a depth where I can float and tread water in peace. A few fish flit past my ankles, and I peer into the depths in this snorkeling haven as well as I can without goggles. A few motorboats come and go. The sun drifts in and out from behind the clouds. Hikers process up and down the beach in no real rush. I wonder just how long I can tread water, even though I know I must move on.
When a large family occupies the beach directly next to my bag, I decide it’s time to leave Leinster Bay behind. I do so with great reluctance. I stick with flip-flops for the beachfront stroll back to the car, where I change out of my sweaty hiking gear and take a brief spin through the Annaberg plantation. On a previous visit, it was packed, with docents and a little booth where a woman served juice from the plantation’s old kitchen; today, it is just me and a picnicking couple. Last time, I remember standing here, transfixed by a vista through the branches of a tree toward the sea; today, I find that spot again and internalize it as deeply as I can.
I make my way back into Cruz Bay. After a parking odyssey, I find the St. John Brewing Company’s tap room, which is tucked away on an upper level of the labyrinthine Mongoose Junction shopping area. The beer does the job, and I befriend Jim and Kate from Connecticut at the next table, the three of us reveling at the joys of dining in a restaurant and working remotely. How we’ve all missed this spontaneity, this liberation afforded by the most pristine of Virgins.
I take the ferry back at sunset. I’m at once hungry for more and fully satisfied: I could spend weeks on St. John, most likely, but I drank enough from its well on this trip to keep me going for years. How can I miss a place that provides a window unto eternity?
A Patient Cycle 