I have never stubbed my toes more times in two weeks. I am living on a floating home called Shanty II, and her deck has three pairs of square, pointy-edged iron cleats with many uses; among them, keeping the fourteen-ton boat docked during hurricanes. The cleats are excellent boat implements, but they make royal enemies of unprotected toes.
I also have never bumped my head more times in two weeks. You can stand tall in most of Shanty II’s rooms, which lets you get very comfortable and forget that the doorframe clearance between rooms is five feet. Bonk.
Shanty II is seductive and unforgiving. Her masts are dark Canadian Sitka Spruce wood that stand out against the metallic silver of other boats in the harbor. Her additional rear mast (the “mizzen,” in boat-speak) also sets her apart from her plebeian single-mast peers. That mizzen has a jagged metal foothold, used for hoisting and taking in the sail, upon which Sabrina impaled her leg, mortifying everyone except herself and earning her thirteen stitches from the Portsmouth Community Hospital.
Shanty II’s best smelling room is the bathroom. It is well-maintained and an overall pleasant place to do business. The worst smells come from any cupboard, closet, or compartment with access to the inside of the hull. Any time you lift the seating cushions to access the power tools, or open the cleaning supplies closet, or lower yourself into the trunk of the boat to get some rope, it unleashes a noxious, palpably damp, synthetic odor that can only come from marinating an epoxy- and gasoline-guzzling vessel for months in Caribbean heat.
Once, when we ran out of water in the main tank, we had to pull jerry can reserves out from under Alex’s bed. In the one month since the cans had been filled, the hull scent had effortlessly seeped through the jerry can and infused itself in our drinking water. A burp confirmed I smelled like a garbage barge inside and out. I wondered if I wouldn’t start sprouting a dorsal mizzen…
Boat life is like this: you have places to go, but nowhere to be. The seawater, ripe fruits and relentless sun give life a lethargic timelessness to which our punctual Danish captain is an indispensable counterweight.
Despite the hypnotic temptations of island life, Shanty Crew’s adventures in the Caribbean are Strictly Business. We are ascetic tourists, concerned only with hiking the tallest peaks in the shortest amount of time. We are one-dimensional in mindset and Protestant in spirit, sporting identical zip-off shorts and diligently reapplying zinc sunscreen that spreads like honey. We walk in a tight formation and turn the corner at ninety degree angles. We have no patience for chatting with locals, hitchhiking, or drinking cold beer.
In the course of these Strictly Business trips, one thing that has gotten my attention is the velocity and insistence with which Mother Nature retakes old machines. After their inevitable demise, groundbreaking achievements in human housing, transport, and entertainment fertilize the islands’ indomitable gardens.
Garden of Eden
“There are very lofty and beautiful mountains, great farms, groves and fields, most fertile both for cultivation and for pasturage, and well adapted for constructing buildings,” Christopher Columbus wrote in 1493 of an island he called Hispana. “The convenience of the harbors in this island, and the excellence of the rivers, in volume and salubrity, surpass human belief, unless one should see them.”
It’s not hard to see why the Spaniards thought they were in the Garden of Eden. But in Dominica in 2025, the angelic state of nature Columbus described is fused with an jagged, mechanical future of rusting chrome.
Fresh greenery spills from a house’s cracked windows and clambers abundantly from beneath its porch. No sooner are cars abandoned than they are overtaken by vegetation. The Garden of Eden envelops defunct machinery as a colony of ants descends on a wasp carcass, making off with chunks of its insides until only a husk remains. Vines choke hinges, chambers, and ball bearings, twisting and sprouting from their insides out.
The Canadians are building a cable-car line on top of a volcano, and the Chinese are building a resort of subterranean suites in the valley. But there is no mistaking that these immense projects of cable and concrete are on borrowed time from the Garden.
Under the sea, corals retake a sunken ship. The ship is blessed with a second life—its hull is a patchwork of blues, greens, and tans. I equalize my ears again and swim to the bottom of the wreck. The metal frame sinks deep into the sand. Just next to it, garbage—bottles, take-out trays, and even a boot—lies piled under a thick layer of grime. Unlike the ship, the garbage has no second life. It nourishes nothing, reciprocates nothing, gives nothing to the life around it.
Nor, however, is the garbage dead. To die would be to submit to the life around it; to sustain the already-living world; to go willingly to the Garden of Eden. Instead, the garbage refuses to turn itself over, and persists in a state neither living nor dead.
On Shanty II, we are big fans of Pirates of the Caribbean. As the full moon reveals Captain Barbossa’s cursed, undying skeleton in The Curse of the Black Pearl, he snarls: “We are not among the living, so we cannot die, but neither are we dead.” The garbage that swims in the ocean is hideously enchanting for the same reason as Barbossa’s curse. What else lives a single life for so long, without changing in any way or giving life to things around it?
What is the GDP of the Garden of Eden?
At the supermarket, I buy a copy of The Sun, “Dominica’s hottest newspaper.” The inside front page story asks whether Dominica’s economic growth, calculated by the IMF during its recent 10-day visit to the island, is really being reflected in the lives of ordinary people. According to the IMF report, Dominica is doing just fine and is in fact on the up & up, thanks to increased cruise traffic.
I saw the cruise traffic. A floating hotel, taller than the tallest building in the port it docked at, dumped 2,000 people onto a collapsing wooden pier. Then the cruise traffic boarded a green and red choo-choo train with a Mercedes logo the size of your face and paraded around the port.
From the looks on the cruise traffic’s faces, they might as well have been at a wax museum. Which is to say, the cruise traffic watched the streets of Dominica with the rising suspicion that they might be looking at real people in a real life place, and not a scene prepared for the purpose of observation. Then, discarding this useless seed of reflection, the traffic got back on their portable hotel and ate crustless bologna sandwiches in one of 2,000 floating AC boxes.
So, according to foreign economists, the Garden of Eden is doing just fine. The Sun is free to ask where along the line, exactly, this benefits ordinary Dominicans, but with a projected GDP growth of 4.5%, who can really complain?
Cheers from the Shanty Crew!
Until next time,
Lucas