The Unhappy Waiter and The Bioluminescence
Like everywhere on the islands, Saman Tree is a large open air restaurant. Ceiling fans spin lazily, and all tables face the spectacular view of the red ceramic-tiled terrace with gleaming blue-potted plants, the sparkling bay just beyond. I look at the menu and see why the chef tried to explain himself to us before – it’s badly typed, misspelled, and more appropriate to a beachside café than to this wannabe 5 star restaurant. The place is still priced like a five star – but instead of “frisson of celery essence distilled over a sliver of Chilean octopus with a white wine cream sauce,” I’m paying thirty bucks for “BBQ Sandwitch.”
We aren’t all that hungry, so when handed our menus by a willowy, gap-toothed islander named Mandy – who turns out to be the only capable employee of Saman Tree – we choose the sandwiches. We’re getting a little weary of eating out, a little weary of paying outrageous sums, and it irritates somewhat that we aren’t even getting a “frisson” of anything for our money. But we pick our orders and wait cheerfully for the server. And wait. And wait. At long last, a lanky and efficient Asian man sails in to take our orders, then sails over to the kitchen. We never see him again. A much older native islander with close cropped white hair and tense shoulders comes past us and refills our water glasses. Minutes pass, and we chat, take a few swallows of water. I have ordered a glass of wine but it doesn’t seem to be forthcoming. The older waiter comes back and refills our water glasses again. A few minutes later he’s back with a bread basket, and another refill, though we didn’t drink anything since the last refill so he just kind of mimes the act. I ask after my wine, and he says “He not bring you your wine??” I’m a little startled, and say, “Um, no, not yet” – as is clearly evident by our wine-glass-less table. He knits his brow in a black look of utter loathing and starts to mutter under his breath in the general direction of the kitchen, where we presume the Asian waiter is still hanging out. He heads to the wine fridge, pulls out a bottle, and pours me a very full glass – does all of this without once tearing his eyes from the kitchen door. I think he might be casting a hex or something.
Forty five minutes after we ordered pulled pork BBQ sandwiches and fries, a third server, an older woman, thwaks our heavy plates onto the table without a word to us – she’s too busy carrying on a shouted conversation with someone in the kitchen. Our water filler is back again, still cherishing his grievances and casting black looks at his fellow staff – all told I think he refills our glasses at least ten times. We eat, tensely, a little afraid of our unhappy team of waiters, and then wait another twenty minutes for the bill. When our water filler comes back with his pitcher and we request the bill and say no thanks to more water, he looks at us like we just called his mother a whore. He slams down the pitcher, stalks over to the register, and prints out our ticket. He gives the Professor point oh two one seconds to write in a tip, and actually tries to pull the bill right out of the Professor’s hands. “Well, that’s over,” I say as we speed away from the restaurant, and exhausted from our long day of island hopping and our wrestling match with the bill, we go to bed and fall asleep to bad tv.
The next morning we have a similar experience with breakfast – in fact, it takes so long we miss all shuttles into town and are forced to spend the day on the isolated resort. But that isn’t such a bad fate. The beach at Carambola is a Corona ad, and we are pretty happy to lounge on it, reading. This is the day, the first and last day, that I forget to put sunscreen on my lower legs. The rest of me is fine but my legs are burnt crispy by the time we pack it in and go back to the room. In the early evening, we have made arrangements to take a dusk kayak tour, so we change and prepare for that, and then call ourselves a taxi.
Salt River is our destination, the place where Columbus landed in 1493, the only spot where he ever set foot in what is present day U.S. territory. We are dropped off at the Sea Adventures Tours office where we meet our young guide. He’s a surfer/skater dude but totally without angst, a laid back red-headed kid with a freckled face and peeling nose. Bryce is his name, and he is a St. Croix native. While we wait for the rest of our group he talks about the islands he’s seen, where the good surfing is, the jobs he’s had over the years. A family of six appears – two little girls, a 10 year old boy and 12 year old girl, and their startlingly tall parents. They have brought sugar cane, and Bryce shows us all how to peel and eat it while we wait for the final two of the group. They arrive at last – stunningly dressed and good-looking, and speaking a foreign language. We pair off into two-seater kayaks – except the Professor and I each take a single. It’s getting dark as Bryce leads us through the small cove and into the mouth of the Salt River. We pass a grove of trees just full to bursting with nesting sea birds, and he stops and tells us that they nest there because it’s out of the wind and protected. I don’t realize the import of that statement until we start to paddle out across open water, and are smacked with a forceful wind.
We paddle past a boat graveyard, a place where years ago Hurricane Hugo wreaked havoc. Some float, anchored but mastless, rotting in the salt air – some are on their sides in the mangroves – one is just the tip of a mast sticking out of the water, the rest of it out of sight under the black water. Bryce tells us about the mangroves, their roots, their ecosystem – he shows us an osprey, which is hard to see in the deepening dark – tells about the waste from the sugar factories and how it raised the river floor by twenty feet – pulls us up near a listing boat and asks us what we think it’s made of. “Bricks,” shouts one of the little girls from up in the air (because her much heavier dad is in the back of the boat and riding very low, it’s pretty funny). We all laugh at her answer, but Bryce says she’s not far off – it’s actually made of cement. As he talks about the evolution of boat-making materials, I look at the exposed cabin of the wrecked boat and think of the family that once owned it, the tragedy of its early death in the mouth of the river.
As we head once again into open water, Bryce tells us about the sunken boat with just the mast sticking up – its owner was only a part-time St. Croix resident, and years ago when he returned to the mainland after an island holiday, he left the windows of the boat open. Rainwater and waves filled it up, and when he returned his $300,000 investment was chilling on the bottom of the river. Bryce laughed uncharitably. I wondered why none of the other boatowners closed his windows for him.
A long and difficult paddle through fierce waves and wind takes a lot of my energy, and I worry about the small children but they seem to do all right. On the other side of the bay we stop at a small island where a half-finished resort building languishes, and Bryce tells of New York crooks who dug up a native cemetary to build their resort, and were jailed for their unholy crimes. The resort will never be finished, but it looks satisfyingly creepy during Bryce’s story – of dead bodies floating up from the bottom during construction, and the unscrupulous New Yorkers who tried to hide them under the walls of the resort. One other thing the New Yorkers did was dig out a little bay, and it is here that we go next. This bay is the crown jewel of Bryce’s tour, and the reason that we are paddling around in the dark. Dip your paddle or your fingers into the water, he says, and see what you see. I do, and I see a million little sparks light up, almost like the sparks when you bite into Wintergreen lifesavers in the dark. We all exclaim with joy and surprise, and he explains that millions of microscopic jellyfish live in this bay. When you hit them, their response is to light up angrily – not sure why this is helpful to them evolutionarily speaking but it is pretty stunning to see. We paddle around in circles, bopping the poor little guys with our paddles and our hands, and Bryce tells us more ghost stories.
At last it’s time to go home, and our paddle back across the open water is with the wind this time, and much easier. We pull ourselves out of our boats, sopping wet, and head over to the small bar for dinner. The foreign couple decide to eat, too, and we end up talking together. Nadia and Nikolai are Danish, and have a time-share at Carambola, so after a very pleasant meal and conversation they drive us home. We agree to exchange email addresses but never do, and head to our separate rooms with friendly smiles. The Professor and I fall asleep instantly.