Abacos
Mother Nature, the masterful artist of our world, employs her earthly medium to create the wonders of the Bahamian cays, a landscape etched on the fabric of time. The breath of Mother Nature, the wind, wields its modeling tools of ocean and sea with precise repetitive tics and, by turn, creates, shapes, changes, re-creates, as if seeking the perfect element for its creatures.
This is a place where harvested conch shells waste at the water’s edges, where lobsters live in underwater condos as man occupies those edging it. The colors of the Abacos are shades of greens & blues, often reflected off the bottom of soft clouds floating in from the Atlantic. A place where fish replaces beef and fermented cane-squeeze lords over whiskey and the crawfish are huge. Here reef sharks out-number the gentle stray dogs or “potcakes” as they are known and blue holes replace swimming pools. Where the red sand in stone comes from another time and the Sahara. Where African beans fetch up on island beaches. The dead coral of the cays supports life for the ragged, scruffy landscape as the living reefs give contrast to the vast plains of underwater desert of the Abaco banks.
Just now a sweetness about the place struggles with itself. There is a vacant quality that rings empty like a furnished house with no people. The islands, long ago stripped of their indigenous wealth of flora and fauna now replaced by the poverty of low lying coral skeleton scattered with sand and plant detritus too thin to plow, renders farming a foreign concept here and industry non-existent.
The locals, no longer aboriginals, but descendants of slaves and the remnants of crown Loyalists from the original American colonies, supplement the current tourist economy as hunter-gatherers from that which provides for all—the ocean waters. As in many poverty venues the people make do and develop their own system of trade and barter, and, as in many modest tropical settings, they do so slower than more plenteous cultures. The Bahamians recognize their exotic home is their primary product through tourism and understand they must share its virtues. They do so without complaint; yet I believe their mellow demeanor is more than understanding. Why is it that poor countries often seem to engender gentleness in their people? Is it the tropical clime, the need to work collectively or the commonality of life’s struggles? The Bahamian people are nothing if not genuinely nice people.
The government of the Bahamas is typically third world with nepotism and cronyism being an adjunct of the weak political system, which wields power whimsically, often with tepid results. Yet they continue to try and that is good.
