With the wind comes the rain, and with the rain come the snails.
The season starts up in late July, its breezes pushing lacy blankets of cloud over the island for a couple weeks, providing a glorious time when the angry heat is purged from the land and the true tropical paradise before me pulses and fills my lungs with every happy breath.
Blend in much?
But the winds never last for long. The storms begin in the late afternoons, short bursts of precipitation that soon grow into all-night downpours. Tropical cyclones feed off the summer’s heat and cruise through the region. Whole weeks of October are swallowed in miserable clouds and wet. Roads and yards and farms wash down the gullies. The nights ring with the collective chirp of every amphibian awakened by the moisture. The early morning mist chokes every square inch of space between the soil and the stratosphere. It consumes the big mango tree at the bend of the road, shrouds the neighbors’ houses, and drifts through my room, soaking every fabric and otherwise permeable surface I own.
I hang my moldy bed sheets up on the clothesline spanning the narrow chunk of eroding hillside behind my house, only to have them soaked through in the morning, the line converted into a snail superhighway. They vary in sizes, though most average somewhat larger than a golfball. Slate-gray bodies oozing from cement-colored shells, they are completely devoid of color. They stand out against the electric green foliage. A bland army with no concern for camouflage.
It’s difficult to express the utter hatred I have for them. They permeate every space imaginable, crawling up the drainpipes, invading my shower and sink, creeping up the walls and camping in corners until they shrivel and fall to the floor, ending their horrid lives as impromptu cat toys. Like every organism, they poop, every one leaving a tiny chain of slimy mollusk turds in its wake. I spend a few minutes each morning prying them from my walls and flinging them spitefully into the road. The locals are equally murderous, stomping and cracking them with machetes. Still, despite the righteous genocide, this plague of armored slugs haunts the hills until spring, only retreating into the shadows as the droughts set in.
If you can't beat 'em.
Folks say they are a recent phenomenon, appearing after a hurricane a couple decades back. They cause untold damage to crops and property. No animal eats them. No poison or roots-based concoction or obi spell repels them. Ultimately you accept them. They’re just another little sliver of that nebulous construct that consumes your every waking moment, that overarching inchoate zeitgeist that you consistently refer to as the experience
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The synagogue looked like every other old building around Parade; noble and proud with its hand-carved facades encased in a century’s worth of whitewashed grime. The spiritual leader wasn’t an actual rabbi, but no one seemed to mind. He was a nice guy with a flair for the dramatic. He proudly showed off their Jewish Community Center and Museum. He described how Sephardic Jews fled Spain and somehow ended up here, first settling in Spanish Town, then Kingston and Port Royal.
Among other things, he hypothesized that the skull and crossbones of pirate fame may have come from the Jewish tradition of using ossuaries, and led us outside to view several Jewish tombstones from the period that seemed to support his theory (although it could have also come from the Spanish imagery to denote cemeteries and death). Still, it piqued my interest, so I’ll definitely look for his book when it comes out in November.
TiJ 