Maria

Maria

    Hurricane Maria tore through the Eastern Caribbean as just one of many storms in the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. Back in my home in midwest America, the news was centered around the ruination of Puerto Rico. The loss of electricity. The audacity of America to not care for the people there, the lack of water and food, the scarcity of resources. Much quieter was the destruction of the small island country of Dominica. 

    My grandfather and I arrived in Dominica a year before Maria hit, on the sixth of June in 2016. I was nineteen and had been out of school for exactly a year, which I’d spent working, saving, sleeping. I accompanied him out of both curiosity and boredom. It was grandpa that got us there, inviting himself and his Minnesotan granddaughter along on Mark Hauser’s excavation in the Caribbean. Mark was a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, and Grandpa knew him through a friend of friend, though the two had never met until we landed in Dominica. We were scheduled to be there for two weeks of the three month long excavation. Neither of us knew anything of archaeology, but we arrived willing to learn. 

    It took about two and a half hours to travel the 19 miles between the Douglas-Charles airport and our hotel on the southern part of the island. I made the trip twice during my time in Dominica, once when I arrived, heading south from the airport towards the town of Soufriere and then again on that last morning of the trip, back north to the airport. That first car ride, I hadn’t slept in 48 hours, I was sick from the motion of the car conforming to the will of the mountains. Out the window, everything was green. There were abandoned cars painted bold colors sitting in tall grass. Big spanish style homes separated by rows of modest houses stacked along the road, all of them clearly lived in - laundry hanging from the roofs, children sitting on front steps in shorts with bare chests. My grandfather, looking tired, sat next to me, with Mark Hauser in the front seat, still a stranger. Mark was telling us tales of being a white man in a black country. I tuned him out. 

    The second time I made the trip, on my last day in Dominica, we were heading back to the airport. That day, the drive passed quickly. It was early morning, my grandfather sat in the front now with Mark, no longer a stranger to me at all. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before; imagining the leaving. I was fighting off the urge to panic. The mountains were still green, interrupted by sporadic concrete pillars and beautiful walls of bright flowers dripping down red dirt cliffs. I had become accustomed to the naseauting sway of the winding roads. Something about the island felt temporary, as if once I left my return would be impossible. I could not speak to the men for fear I would have no voice, every mile we drove north further silencing me. 

    Hurricane Maria hit the small island country of Dominica in the Lesser Antilles on September 18th of 2017, just 15 months after I stepped onto the flight that took me from the island to a six hour layover in San Juan. In some ways, my fear of what I knew being temporary was correct. Huge parts of Dominica were wiped out in a night. Around 90 percent of rooftops on the island were at least partially torn off. Thirty one people died, but a local source reported that two months after the storm, 34 additional people were still missing. In a country of only 73,000, several thousand were left homeless. 

    Our small town of Soufriere was located on the southwestern end of the 30 mile long island. The house in which we stayed sat on a steep incline, as nearly all houses in the mountainous country must. Down the hill of our street and to the left was the small collection of buildings that made up the town center and then, the ocean. Cocoyea, the restaurant we ate dinner and drank beer at every night, sat 30 feet from the sand. The town church stood in a green field right beside it, the lawn cut off on the northern end by a relentlessly steep mountainside. There was a roadside stand around the corner that made tasty bakes: fried dough sometimes filled with cheese and onions that we ordered when dinner hadn’t satisfied our greedy stomachs. Down on the beach the sulfur hot spring that cosied up against the ocean made it smell of rotten eggs, and we sometimes sat and drank in the spoiled fresh air of the ocean. 

    In the mornings, we were at the excavation site by seven. I spent most of my time lugging 50 pound buckets of dirt from one end of the yard to the other and then shaking the dirt through a fine screen to see what was left. Mostly there was pottery, little shards of hardened clay, sometimes painted, sometimes intricate. These pieces were what we were looking for - signs of slave life. The site we were excavating had been slave quarters, back when the island was colonized by the British, and we were searching for the memory of them there in the land. In the afternoons, we would head to the lab and sort the artifacts as well as sift through dirt samples with a finer eye. There we would find fishbones, teeth, tiny chips of pottery that were difficult to make meaning out of. But there everything was, laid on the kitchen table. A categorized sheet of memory and life. 

    Most of the locals that worked on the project stayed at their own houses and rarely joined us for meals or gatherings, the exception being Edward, who stayed with some of the other men for the duration of the excavation at the lab. Edward was a quiet man, 6’ 4” with a bald head and the most beautiful, lilting voice that would break into calm song at unexpected moments. A note in my journal from this time reads  “A feeling I want to remember: Closing my eyes in the backseat, or in the living room of the lab, trying to separate Edwards voice from the music.” One night, as we passed around a bottle of rum followed by a bottle of fruit punch on the hot eggy beach, Edward told me the story of Erika, a tropical storm that hit Dominica a little less than a year before my time on the island. Edwards village, Petite Savanne, was hit the hardest by the heavy rainfall, and most of the 30 people that were killed in Erika were from his village. Afterwards, Edward moved to Roseau, the capital, and was put in charge of relocating the thousands from his village that had been displaced by the storm. He was also in charge of the funerals. In a place so vulnerable to destruction, Edward’s life had become the slow process of recovery. 

    I felt I had memorized the island by the end of my two week stay. The goat in the big yard, the asphalt lot which always housed at least one rhinoceros iguana. How chickens and dogs alike fell asleep in the middle of the road, unperturbed by the few cars that approached. The climb up the steep mountain that brought me to the most fantastic view of the ocean and town. The smell of our clothes, mildew rich even on the hottest days (the air too humid to properly dry them). The narrow bridge where 5 men came running at our car to tell us that one of the cars wheels was falling off, who helped push the car off the bridge so we wouldn’t block traffic. The walk through the botanical gardens, the parking lot of the car rental place where we spent several hot afternoons waiting for various repairs. I memorized only moments of an entire country, and came to love it. 

    Likely, most of the parts I might recognize were destroyed in the hurricane. 

    Hurricane Maria killed 32 people and ravaged the entirety of the island. When news of the storm hit, I looked for Edward on Facebook to see if he had updated anything since the storm started, to see if he was alive. I thought of a little girl I had seen several times, who walked up and down the street with a book balanced on her head, and the men who moved our broken car, and the woman who sold us three fans one day and later a fourth. I thought of their families, and their homes, and wondered how the water had hit them. What they would do now, with no home to pace in front of, no bridge to cross, no electricity to run a fan to sell to tourists. 

If I dream of Dominica, it is of that last car ride to the airport. The silence and the green. The hot morning air. The knowledge of my own temporality, that the weeks I had spent there were only a blink, that the memory of them would leave the island as I did. Months later, I watched Hurricane Maria hit Dominica as if it were a movie. Would there be people, many years from now, who would dig around in the dirt of those mountains and find this destruction there? Sheets of roofing, entangled with tree branches. Entire homes plunged into the ground. People, still missing, their bones hidden by whatever the storm managed to throw at them. I wondered, or maybe I hoped, that the people who might excavate the island of Dominica would be able to piece together the story, to understand the memories, of what laid before them in the dirt. 

- Ariel Johnson