Jamaica Nice

I was seven when I had my first real adventure. I climbed Blue Mountain. I was much too young. My family had ridden up to Whitfield Hall with another family* in a Landrover, forded a wide river, so high that the water came up over the tires, an adventure in itself, and driven up into the hills overlooking Kingston. Whitfield Hall was a vast sprawling mansion that we spent the afternoon and evening exploring, crawling through the dark attic, wandering from room to room, and exploring the grounds, while the adults sat and talked in the dining hall. There were rabbits and chickens and kittens, and once the sunset, it was unnaturally cold. I'd lived most of my conscious life in Jamaica, considered myself Jamaican, could climb coconut trees barefoot and twist off the nuts like a local, was an expert in beaches and waves and seashells and sunburns and lizards and snorkelling and tree climbing.

To climb Blue Mountain, you started early in the morning, 2 or 3 am, so you could reach the peak by sunrise, and be back down before it got too hot. It was an arduous trek - the two older girls were definitely going, but the younger brother, and my younger sister V were definitely not. V sulked petulantly over this, it violated her sense of justice that anything be denied her. I was careful not to exult over my slight chance at the peak - as the older sibling, I'd won a reluctant concession from my father, after a careful campaign - If I woke up when the others did, to climb the next morning, I could come along.

When the sky is clear, you can see Blue Mountain Peak from Kingston, where we lived. The mountain range runs east-west, forming the backbone of the island. Blue Mountain Peak is one among many, but as Jamaica (and the Caribbean)'s highest point, it held a clear aura of grandeur. It was one of the national points of pride that we learned about in school, along with the seven national heroes (from memory, Sam Sharpe, Marcus Garvey, Paul Bogle, Sam Bustamente, Nanny of the Maroons, mmm, and...ok, it was a long time ago. Maybe it was just five national heroes...), lignum vitae, mahogany, the doctor bird, the bauxite industry, the national anthem - Eternal Father bless this land / Guide us with thy helping hand / Keep us safe from Satan's power..., the Arawaks, the national motto - "Out of many, one people".

And I'd climbed mountains before. Well, not to the top. In Austria, we'd done day hikes with my father's family, up in the Alps. And in Canada, while visitting my mother's family, we'd been in snow. So I was ready. On top of that was the pure simple fact, that despite my age and smallness, I was unstoppably and infinitely capable of surmounting any challenge. As long as it didn't involve bees or army ants. So I was ready. I'm not sure whether I slept that night. But when the others started moving around, murmurring to each other, muffled flashlights, I climbed down from the top bunk and started getting dressed.

I knew that if I showed hesitation or uncertainty, I might be left behind. And so when my dad looked me in the eyes, asked if i really wanted to do this, I was assertively affirmative. I don't remember much of the hike. It was mostly in the dark. As the dawn greyed and then brightened, I remember a never-ending sequence of false peaks - "It's just around the corner", H would say. The others were ahead, out of sight. I believed him the first few times. When I'd walked as far as I possibly could, was completely exhausted, ready to sit at the side of the trail and wait for them to come back down, we ate some cheese, a bit of chocolate, and H carried me the rest of the way on his shoulders.

I remember much more the exultant sense of accomplishment, or grownness, than any real visuals from the peak. It's likely that I imagined a more dramatic experience of my first actual mountain peak. Like being able to see the whole world from the top, while golden angels hovered and danced and sang. As a kid, you're always climbing, trying to *grow*, get higher, win the next concession from those well-intentioned but clueless adults who don't think you're yet ready to use a machete, or drive a car, or fly a kite by yourself. So that's what climbing Blue Mountain meant to me. And admittedly, I especially savoured the fact that I'd done something that V was too young to do.

V missed out on this climb, too. I think we texted her from the top. It was pretty fing cold. I was surprised when we reached the top, had been expecting more arduousness. The accounts that I'd read on the internet suggessted a hard painful misery of a climb. And yes, it was a challenging walk, up the steep winding gullies of Jacob's Ladder, and we'd huddled shivering on the doormat of the ranger's cabin at the pass, sheltering from the wind for a half hour or so, but the closest thing to actual suffering was the wind and the cold. I hadn't packed too many thermal layers for a trip to the topics, so when we got to the top, and stopped moving, I got cold fast, shifted into hibernation mode on a bench in the half-wrecked shelter at the top waiting for the sun while H wandered around, excitedly anticipatory of a beautiful sunrise.

I'd wander out every now and then, just to show that i could handle it. But I knew I was going to be miserable until the sun actually started doing it's thing. Which was a much slower, less dramatic event than either of us were expecting. In the dark, the moon, or a swath of stars would crest through the blackness, as the wind ripped a gap in the clouds over the peak, and then it would darken again. When the sun actually came up, we didn't actually see it for awhile, but the wind-dwarved trees and bushes of the peak became more visible, greying and then greening, fading in and out of sight as the dense mist of clouds sworled past us.

I'd pulled my arms into my jacket and sweater, wrapped tight around my body, shivering and cursing as we walked between the viewpoints. The clouds above us pinkened, oranged, reddened, as they ripped past. I hadn't ever quite appreciated how liquid clouds are, in the wind - the peak reminded me of the Potomac River, of water butting and sworling at over and past a rapid, a hard rock. We'd get quick shots of the sun, visuals that would fade and blur within seconds, the landscape below would open up for an instant, and we could see all the way down to the sea, green hills and grey-white clots of roads and buildings, Kingston, the harbour, the Grand Ridge, a forested valley, and then the clouds would rush back in.

After an hour or so, a certain rhythmic pattern to the wind and clouds became apparent, until I could sense when the sun was about to rush back, and I'd yell for it, encourage it, wanting the warmth, the pleasance of it breaking through. We found berries in the bushes, strawberries, rastaberries, and when it finally brightened sufficiently, I took a nap in a sheltered pocket, warming finally.

H and I had the idea that it would be cool to walk part of the ridge. The initial plan had been to climb Blue Mountain with full packs, tents and camping gear, and then wander through the wild for a few days. I'd unfortunately somehow forgotten to pack the tent, but we had tarps and sleeping bags. Everyone we'd asked had said that there weren't any trails, but both H and I mistrust naysayers as wimps. Until we actually encountered Jamaican Bush. Drop either of us in your average North American wilderness, with modestly adequate gear, and we can probably get through it, trail or no. Neither of us had realized just how severe tropical wilderness is, until the day before, when we'd gone for a casual walk and ended up struggling desperately through a half mile or so of high grass and tangled ripping prickles. It took us a painful sweaty hour.

The humiliating part of that experience had been, that we weren't actually going through wilderness, just an apparently innocent overgrown pasture. When we finally brushed onto an actual trail, we realized that one doesn't just wander around in Jamaica's wild areas. I'd been concerned about stumbling onto ganja plantations, hostile locals, but hadn't considered the possibility that mere vegetation could be insurmountable.

So we'd scaled back on our trekking ambitions, had treated Blue Mountain as a day hike. There are historical accounts of walks along the Grand Ridge, so we explored the peak, under an intermittent sun, followed the fading blazes of an apparent trail through wet forests of stunted trees, gnarled and struggling with their burden of bromeliads and Spanish moss. Birds were calling to another in the warming dawn, and I played at echoing them. H speculated that they were singing about love. I suggested that they were marking their territory with brutal threats - "I'm going to find your nests, and crap on your eggs, peck them open and and dance joyously while ants feast on the shuddering fetusses (feti?) of your unborn young". The human science of ornitholinguistics has not yet attained a sufficient level of sophistication to resolve our difference of opinion.

We were heading to a nearby peak, maybe a 1/2 mile away, but the putative trail lost it's resolve as we staggered and swaggered through the brush. We may have reached the next peak, but the growth was too dense to provide an actual Aussicht, a view. Peaks are pointless without some kind of clear visual assertion of altitudinal dominance. And the bushwhacking across a relatively level landscape had been sufficiently challenging to convince both of us that hiking a few miles of the Ridge with full packs would be pure misery.

On the way back to the peak, we stopped to watch the clouds from an overlook, a tight patch of clear ground cut into the ridge just large enough for a tent. The clouds were hypnotic, dancing like wraiths. I was reminded of a dance that I'd seen a decade ago, in Ecuador, Atacames, on a beach where a ship full of slaves had washed ashore several hundred years prior, a region so tropically brutal, dense mazes of mangroves, that the survivors had managed, through a combination of their and the landscape's viciousness, to repel all attempts at outside conquest.

The culture had stayed pure, so pure that when I first arrived there, sleep-dulled by a long curl-thrash of an overnight bus trip from Quito, the first memory that I have of the area was of watching bats in the dawn, flying upriver, while several 10-year old boys mock knife-fighting with sticks. I immediately resolved not to piss off the locals. And then one night, after a half-day of drinking at a little palm-thatch hut on the beach, I the last gringo standing, the music shifted over, from cheesy reggae tropicalia, to a different drumbeat, and a few locals (who were black, slave-black, as opposed to your average Ecuadorian beige-brown blur of indio and criollo) danced, tall and lithe, limber, a dance I've never seen before or since, centered on a scarf, a swath of silk that the man held.

The fabric carried the dance, and the dancers echoed it. They never touched, never touched the scarf, but the scarf carried the dance, the desire, the passion. I watched this once, drunk false compare, under the background wash of soft waves, open sky of stars. And I knew I wasn't really supposed to be there. And even now, writing about it, I have no idea whether it really was anything, beyond the maundering drunken romanticism of a rhythmless gringo.

But regardless, it impressed me. And as the clouds sworled and wafted, dancing between the mountains and the wind, ethereal but densely present, washing past and through and over us, I remembered that dance. The hike back was uneventful, landscaes opened up before us that had been dark emptiness on the way up. At whitfield Hall, Tiger hand-roasted and hand-ground a pot of Blue Mountain coffee for us. We bought a few extra pounds to bring home, richly fragrant. Tiger's brother was going to walk us over to Cinchona, the next morning, and as we lulledly waited for dusk and dinner, I browsed through a pile of books on a table in the main room.

They were guest books, going back through thousands of visitors, back into the 70's. A historical archive. I got distracted, trading machetes with Tiger, but H found the book from 1982, that we'd signed on our first visit. "I glad I could make it. Kris Unger 7 years old.", I'd written in awkward cursive, and in Jamaican. This blog will likely contain dialogues where I slip into "Jamaican" grammar. It feels a bit awkward to write like that now, but this entry allows me to argue that my appropriation of local grammar is vestigially authentic. Jamaican was, for me at the time, a language among others. My sister V and I could talk the local patois so well that our parents (at least pretended) not to understand us. On this return trip, I slipped back into it, and to the credit of the locals, no one questioned why I was talking "Jamaican, like dem." . Out of many, one people.

V signed the guest book also. In somewhat wavering caps. She made no explicit claim to have climbed the mountain. But neither did she explicitly explain that she hadn't. So this entry is dedicated to her, for her Determination, for her Will, for her Constant Ruthless Struggle to Equal if not Best me, when we we both were young.

V, I have nothing for you but Respec! You're bigger and stronger and better than Blue Mountain. Climbing it would be for you like a firefly, illuminating itself. Effortlessly incandescent. I have no idea where that metaphor comes from. But burn on, sweet stubborn determined angel!