Jamaica Nice

I teased the weed from the stalk, unravelled the seeds, rolled a joint and lit up, on the porch of colonial tyrannies past, Cinchona's Great House, where once were Brits, now sagging, yielding, to Jamaica, leaks in the roof, rotting holes in the floor, paint flaking from the walls, dust settling. The chimney and fireplace still held strong. I knew the script, had seen enough vestiges, along the Potomac river, and in the Shenandoah Mountains, to know that the chimney would stand to the end, long past when the walls and roof fell in on themselves, rotted away, vines sagging into sunken delineations. The wood and paper would fade, leaving broken glass scattered among the foundation stones, as the forest closed in, while the slow-eroding pillar of the chimney remained, a century later.

I lit and smoked, overlooking the garden, archaic vestiges, of Britannia, where the tides of Imperialism had washed and then receeded. The garden rolled out genteelely below me, close-cropped lawn and arboreal esotericae, absurd eccentricities of trees. A reminiscence of Kew Gardens, of that Victorian Glorification of the exotic, when the one of the best tributes to an expanding world of science and knowledge and culture was a good garden, filled with Seussian exotica.

Jamaica was one of Britain's exotic outposts - surely seeds and trees and plants and cuttings had been brought back from here, to Kew. And conversely, those Brit exotics, the expats, had sought to grow here, in their exile, a garden in the image of Kew, a similarly enlightened, tastefully selected, display of the wonders of the natural world. Cinchona had actually started as a quinine plantation, Cinchona the tree from whose bark a cure to malaria could be extracted.

The fad faded, when more efficient sources of quinine were found. But the gardens remained. And granted, for as much as I prefer my nature natural, undisturbed, uninvaded, I appreciate the impulse that seeded and watered and maintained these grounds. The rolling lawns overlooked Kingston, a hazed concrete miasma that sprawled and wrapped against the sea, a few thousand feet below. Up here, the air was clear, wet-pure with forest, and the water too. There were villages below, but none above.

H was absorbed by the library, but I was restless now, stoned and inspired, so I took up my machet', and struck out, upslope, past the gardens, the beds of orchids, the cleared lawns and tended trees, heading for the top of the hill, up into the bush, where an unacceptably overgrown traillessness existed. "Yu wan bush to de top?", one of the gardeners had asked me earlier in the day, "Dat a go tek some time. Das hard bushin'. Dey ain no trail up deh.", suggesting that he could get me there, for $15. There had been hurricanes a few years back, and the paths to the top had since been overgrown.

As a general rule, I don't pay other people, to blaze my trails. I don't *want* other people, to blaze my trails. I'd rather err on the side of error. And so when someone tells me, that the top of some dinky *hill* is inaccessible, an impossible destination, without professional assistance, that gets my blood up. And so I hacked and slashed, dew-soddened, fell and tripped and struggled, fought up and through, impelled by an analogous drive, to that of the Colonials, the Brits, the Civilizers, to triumph, over that brute green. Because there is an implicit challenge, a natural defiance, in a landscape that hasn't been ascended. A Conradian moment.

I love the focussed intimacy, of being stoned in Nature. And it's even better, to be immersed in the tropical, with a machet'. I felt like a young samurai, learning The Path. The weeds and vines grew high, tangled overhead. Beyond, I caught glimpses, of the trivial top of the hill, a few hundred feet ahead. There were, truly, no trails - I skirted thornbushes, clamber-balanced the sogging rot of logs, when possible, fell, slashing, wet-strangled, and thorned, by the growth. I've never worked so hard, to get through a landscape - neither bogs, nor swamps, nor forest undergrowth, has ever opposed me, so intensely, so indifferently.

And blundered on, sway-staggering, sometimes slow-rolling, across the canopy of vines, and sometimes dropping down, penetrating the green, a 5 or 10 foot drop down to the earth, through the canopy, crawled within the root density, short-slashing with my blade, the stems before me, in what seemed like the right direction, struggling upslope, through the green, the leaved tangle, to the light. At one point, while grub-crawling, along the earth, I realized that there-scattered, among the vines, were trees, young saplings, conifers. They'd somehow persisted, despite the overhead smother of vines, were the young spawn, of foreign cedars, and pines, growing on and up, despite the inimical smother, of the local plants.

It was a literary moment, I realized that beyond post-colonialism, beyond the formal expulsion of the foreigner, was a certain struggling stasis, a balance of adaptability. The planters had withdrawn, had surrendered their fantasies of Victorian Gardening, to the resilience of the Jamaicans, themselves an introduced species, an heroic blend, of slaves, and Maroons, Spanish and Scottish, and crossover blends. Out of many, one people. And out of many trees, some optimals.

There had once been, a formal garden here, a Colonial product, a British reminiscence, abandoned once and again, and now preserved, for its touristical historical merits. Hurricanes had washed over, fallen the dominants, reduced them to rotting logs. And yet upsprung, slower-growers, than the vined swarm of local opportunists, conifers, cedar saplings, taking what sun they could, from the smothered canopy, so that now, 5-10 years later, they were still reaching, for the brink of the light, for that burst-opportunity of brightness.

They'd been brought in from Otherness, Other worlds, Other countries. And those unfit, those unadaptable, had already ceded, wilted, died. But yet remained a determined array, an upswelling, a persistence. Some of these itinerant drifters, had stood and held. They were brought here, from harder places, from denser competitions. And in an alien world, they held their own, and scrabbled for more, slight advantages...

I stalked H, on my return to civilisation, once I'd finally given up on reaching the peak, and had fought my way back through the overgrowth. I fell into a pit, a sudden drop into a tangled darkness of vines, a few feet from where the tended garden began. So when I did finally crawl onto the lawn, my ferality index was way up. I had a pretty good idea, that he'd be either napping, or drowsily reading where I'd left him, on the front porch, just inside the main door. So I walked softly, through the garden, crouched when I came up to the front windows, and stealthily half crept up to the door, blade in hand, still-soaked from the bush hack, like a rebel slave, bent on overthrowing the Tyrants of the House. It's surprising, just how easy, a whimsical insurrection might be.

I've read enough colonial accounts, to be able to imagine what was involved, for the invaders, the plantation-owners, the slave-holders to maintain dominance. Jack London and Joseph Conrad come first to mind, in terms of of stories about the hard grit and staunch bravery, backed by superior firepower and tactics that allowed a few brave Europeans to stand against the onslaught of waves of savages and natives. Karl Mays and the European conquest of the Americas come next.

From that perspective, Cinchona's Great House was pretty well designed. The landscape, the gardens have a certain military tacticality to them, clear lines of fire and funnelled approaches. The low rock walls of the immediate gardens would provide adequate cover, for a sniping crossfire defense. And the sloped ramparts interspersed with flat contours above and below the house would slow mass charges, expose the attackers to waves of fire. Who knows if the grounds were designed with that intent, or merely inherited a gardening aesthetic influenced by colonial theories of defense, or whether I'm just rambling paranoid and stoned. The fear was surely there - just as I sometimes play through the hypotheticals of how I'd react to a terrorist attack on DC, so must the Brits then, have at least occasionally pondered, how best they could defend themselves, from an insurrection.

And as a subjugate, to colonial dominance, how would I have responded? Would I not have been constantly searching for weaknesses, for tactical advantages? Why weren't there more rebellions, more attacks, more insurrections? And how easy would it have been, to stalk crouched, ducking under the windows as I approach the main door, machet' in hand, quietly stealthily, and then rush up the stairs, burst in, H napping by the door, as expected, unsuspected, startled by my arrival...

"Oh! I must've dozed off", he says, as I stand there dripping grinning. "Did you get to the top?", he asks. "No, it's crazy up there. I bushed hard, but the bush was harder. But it was pretty killer sweet", I tell him. It's getting cooler, sunset's coming, and now, slow-chilled from the stalk, I start to shiver. H is still drowsily warm. I want to drag him upslope, show him where I was, share the thrill of it. And I want to take a bunch of pictures, am suddenly full-on visual, want to catch it all. Dusk's lighting here is intense, I remember from last night, flowing reds and greens and glowing shadows.

Was it like this every night, back in the colonial days?