Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands

February 2015

Early last month, the forecast for New York City was in the low-20s and kept dropping, which meant wool-covered ears and too many pairs of tights and a deep breath of courage before stepping outdoors. So it was a good idea, booking a flight to the British Virgin Islands, though we didn’t know a thing about them outside of mental images of clear blue water, cinnamon-sugar sand, and rum drinks with fruit and nutmeg and little paper umbrellas. And those mental images were accurate, for the most part, but really and truly, no amount of ink on any kind of paper can capture that kind of blue. Every moment watching the mid-distance I could understand, maybe fractionally, the immense task painters took to conquer. Maybe fractionally. It would call forth others like it. Paris at dusk. Southern California after a wildfire. The Rockies from a small airplane window.

We spent five days in Virgin Gorda on the North Sound, in a little hexagonal cottage on stilts. According to guide-book lore, the island is so-called because Columbus thought it resembled a fat virgin lying on her back upon his initial approach through the (later-named) Sir Francis Drake Channel.  We contemplated this while riding the ferry back to St. Thomas on our last day, facing backward on the boat's top deck and watching the islands retreat and form shapes from their terrain. We agreed she actually looked more pregnant than fat, and that we loved her just the same.

Two long days of transit bookended the trip: a four-hour flight gave way to layovers and ferry boats and a rather terrifying, probably life-threatening "taxi" ride (read: open-air safari benches outfitted atop pickup trucks—an endearing experience by the end of it, but we were caught off-guard, clutching onto our bags lest they roll down the road and into the seas) winding up and over hills and valleys and blind turns . . . the price you pay for demanding quiet and seclusion. This left us with three happy days of constant warmth, eating too much, drinking even more, swimming with the sea-dwellers, boat-driving, jeep-driving, boulder-traversing, mornings waking to lapping waves, and lazy evenings soothing the sunburns away. And each of the three days, as meticulously planned-out we made sure the whole thing was, eventually unravelled and gave way to languid, sublime, anything-you-want moods. It was all the rum, the sun in our eyes, and hearts full of absolutely nothing, nothing we could name, the kind of nothing hearts tend to feed on when the sun gets hold of it anyway.

Day 1
We took our time getting ready and walked to the Leverick Bay Marina, a five-minute trip down a steep incline, to rent a fiberglass dinghy that admittedly looked like it had seen better days. After a bit of geographic orientation from the boat's owner, a man with a heavy tan and U.S. Army t-shirt, we pulled out of the harbor. The boat's shabbiness stopped at its paint job, because it ran smoothly the rest of the day, speeding up and skipping over waves as we (her, mostly) squealed in half-delight and half-fear, taking us wherever we wanted. Virgin Gorda's North Sound is a peculiar place dotted with beaches and reefs and yacht clubs and resorts that one could only reach if traveled to by sea (no roads connect these places, and many still are on separate islands). Our first stop was Prickly Pear Island, where we tied up the boat (we learned/invented a few knots!) and set up camp on a beach that we shared with about seven people and forty goats. We swam with our snorkels and looked for fish and manta rays and swam some more until we got tired and decided to lie in the sand to read and watch the boats sail by. When we got hungry we drove the boat (I love saying that) across the sound to the Fat Virgin's Cafe at Biras Creek where we checked the scores to the Arsenal game (we were losing 2-1 to Tottenham) and sat on benches beneath big umbrellas while eating conch fritters and drinking beer. We let our cheeks grow rosy from the alcohol and the sun and then took the dinghy around the east end of Prickly Pear Island, waving hello to Sir Richard Branson's private island, and contemplated landing at a yet-unexplored beach. We stayed for all of ten minutes, most of which were spent pulling the boat to shore, before deciding to return to our earlier, goat-friendly stretch of sand, where we sipped on rum cocktails and swam and read until the sun grew low.

Day 2
The commercial heart of Virgin Gorda is on the south end, a twenty minute drive from where we stayed. Though not in keeping with our Quiet and Secluded rule, "commercial heart" in this case is a very light term on an eight-square-mile island of four thousand people. We rented a jeep and drove south-ward (on the left side of the road, right side of the car, no less) to the Baths, a beach with a sprinkling of coast-bound boulders and rock formations from the Flinstones era that looked like pebbles dinosaurs played with in their time of inhabiting the Caribbean islands. The descent through the boulders snaked along a path of makeshift wooden ladders and ropes, all while deep-turquoise water splashed about your feet. We crawled through the person-sized cracks and spaces, keeping our cameras held as high as we could, releasing into rock cathedrals of blues and greys and oranges and yellows and greens.

Day 3
We committed our last day to the North Sound, though this time on the good graces of the free ferries that traverse between Leverick Bay, Biras Creek, Saba Rock, and the Bitter End Yacht Club. The first stop was straight to Saba Rock, an odd semi-island (really more of, as the name suggests, a rock) housing rooms to sleep in, a restaurant, hammocks, big sun beds, fish tacos, and potent rum cocktails that tasted like milkshakes (whose potency we tested, on multiple occasions). We had an extra long lunch and talked about the strange nature of vacations in the American 9-to-5 work life—we'd never taken a real vacation together prior to this, not the kind of vacation that demanded of us only relaxation. Our trips typically prescribe good walking shoes, a train or two, old buildings and churches and architectural studies, and, at the very least, a conscientiousness that kept schedule and sensory overload in check. We think maybe we prefer that, but this was nice too. We hitched a ride to the Bitter End Yacht Club, swam to a floating dock, and then rode back to Leverick Bay for one last sleep in our little hexagonal cottage on stilts.