College . 05/02/2008 01:47 AM . Tim Raveling

Sleeping on a tiny island just of the north coast of Bermuda, Stewart awoke in the middle of the night to the low drone of a boat’s engine moving very close and very slowly past our little haven. A moment later, Lily awoke as well—and then, as Stewart began to move, another boat droned into view.

“Max,” Stewart said, “Wake up! Pack your stuff!”
Max jerked awake, bleary, and started to get up.
“No!” Stewart hissed. “Stay down!”
“How am I supposed to pack my stuff,” Max hissed back, “if I can’t get out of my bag?!”

I, meanwhile, slept through the whole thing, with a blissful ignorance that will probably get me robbed one day. Not this time, though; the boats moved off and left us alone to sleep.

When we awoke the next morning, the sky was clear and the breeze already carried a hint of warmth. It promised to be hot. This was the fifth day of our adventure in Bermuda, and we’d spent a total of about an hour on the beach, and a windy hour at that. We were ready for the island experience.

The nearest beaches were all the way on the other side of the island, due south of us. As the morning sun slowly played over the park and our island, we packed and made the chilly portage back across the water to the mainland, where we changed back into dry clothes and headed for the nearest bus stop.

The Bermuda buses are pink, fast, and offer service everywhere on the island. We only had to wait a few minutes before one rolled around the bend and hissed to a stop for us to board. It was early, and there were only a few bored-looking passengers aboard, locals, headed to work in Hamilton. The bus center is there, serving as the hub for passengers looking to, say, get from St George to the Dockyards on the opposite side of the island in Sandy’s Parish. A ticket to anywhere is only four dollars a person.

We made the transfer in Hamilton and, at last, were headed toward the legendary beaches. The day was warm and sunny, and all four of us were tired of walking and ready for some time in the sun. We started to pass the parks, the wide nature reserves that surrounded the long beaches, and stepped off the bus a short walk’s distance from the South Shore Park.

There was one last problem, though, before we could enjoy ourselves. We were out of food and, more importantly, water. There are no fresh water springs on Bermuda; buildings are required by law to install rain traps in their roofing systems, storing fresh water in reservoirs every time it rained. What this mean for us was that there was no fresh water available right on the beach; we had to buy it from the nearest grocery store, and at the moment none of us had any idea where that would be.

Max’s feet were raw from his sandals, so I offered to go on alone and buy groceries. Stewart went with Max; Lily opted to go with me.

We found the grocery store, finally, after walking a mile or so and asking directions from some locals. Here, at last, was the fabled “local” grocery store; a parking lot full of small European cars and scooters out front, a lagoon lined with motorboats in the back, and prices easily competitive with their American counterparts. We bought rye bagels, a dollar for a bag of five, cucumbers, ranch dressing, locally-grown bananas, peanut butter—“This,” I said to Lily as we walked up and down the aisles, “is what happens when you go into a grocery store hungry.”

Loaded heavy with groceries we walked back over the hill, through the rainbow array of the Bermudian neighborhoods between the store and our park, and down onto the fine white sand of the beaches, where we found Stewart and Max and at last sat back on the beach.

So it began. The rest of the day was spent sleeping, reading, and eating, a formulae that was to be doctrine for the next few days. That we were college students (and preppy aspiring intellectual ones at that) could be seen in our reading list; The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, The Plague by Albert Camus, the Tao Te Ching, Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and Christ and Apollo by William Lynch were a few examples.

We slept that night in a secluded cove only a hundred yards or so from the beach itself, high up behind a boulder field and overhung with coastal scrub and sandstone. We’d keep the same place for the two nights after that as well, leveling out the ground and generally digging in for more comfort.

The next two days passed much the same. My journal entries from that time have titles like “Order,” “Abstraction and Paradox,” and “Group Psychology,” subjects gleaned more from the books I was reading and the people I was watching on the beach rather than the locale itself. We read, slept, and grew brown, blithely exposing our skin to the burning sun for the tan that would be our mark of distinction upon returning to the pale masses of cold northern Virginia.

On the third day on the beach we finally dredged up enough energy to drag ourselves from our sandy seats and walk up the coast to some of the more famous beaches further west. Horseshoe bay, the most famous of Bermuda’s beaches, was lined with tourists even this early in the season, and the pink wall of a hotel rose above the palm trees just behind the beach. We’d been walking among the locals for so much of our trip that to be here, among other Americans and rich visitors from Europe, made us feel out of place. We didn’t stay long.

We ate that evening in the Swizzle Inn, a popular pub and grill a few miles walk east along the coast from our little cove.

An enthusiastic grin and yell greeted us as we stepped through the door, and before we knew it a big black man was beside us, slapping Max on the back and reaching out to shake his hand. “I know a marine when I see one!” he shouted—clearly a few drinks into his evening—“How you doing, brother?”

Max gave the sort of grin you give when you get the general feeling a grin is called for but haven’t yet been informed why. “Uh, great!” he said, and shook the man’s hand. The man gave another whoop, slapped him on the back again, and headed back to his table of friends.

All four of us burst out laughing. Max had his sleeves rolled up, and his tattoo—which was, after all, in Latin if not exactly “semper fi”—was proudly displayed on his left shoulder.

After dinner, stuffed to the gills, we walked back to our park in the dark and slept the peaceful sleep of the satisfied.

And then our stay on the beach was done. The next day was cool and overcast, and our feet had begun to itch again. So we walked, continuing our trip west, again on the railroad path where it curved down from Hamilton and up through the western arm of the island, ending at the old royal dockyards in Sandy’s parish. Most of the trail was back alley, passing through the endless colorful neighborhoods of the southern parishes of the island. Occasionally we’d cross swatches of woods, sometimes seeing crumbling remains of old signal houses, looking for all the world like bell towers cut off at ten feet high and planted alone beside the path.

As we made the curve north through Southampton Parish we began to slip back older parts of the island. We left the railroad trail at Fort Scaur, an indomitable old stone structure flanked by moats and high walls and still bearing the foundations of the 64-pounders that once guarded the coast from the possibility of attack by the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. One of the shells stood sentinel, thigh high black wrought iron, in a small garden of spring flowers.

We moved north on the roads from there, stopping at a local grocery store to pick up more supplies before heading into the north-most tip of this wing of Bermuda. A series of bridges took us from Somerset Village into Sandy’s Parish, the location of the now-defunct American and British navy bases.

This part of the island held a decidedly more naval feel. Signs along the road offered hull repair, custom boat exteriors, and navigational equipment; masts of sailboats bobbed in the harbors rather than the rusty (and sometimes half-sunk) motorboats that were more common around Hamilton and St George.

It was already late afternoon, and we began looking for a place to sleep early. We headed into one park that looked promising, veering off the trail and through the underbrush before, after only a short distance, emerging on a wide expanse of overgrown, crumbling asphalt. Two rusting basketball hoops, now bare of any netting, faced each other over the weeds. What it was we never found out; neighborhood, community center, school for children of military men on the bases, it was abandoned now, and the forest became a junkyard just beyond it, with piles of trash and old electronics, rotting mattresses, and molding refrigerators discarded in the high grass.

The edge of the junkyard opened on the bay, and across it we could see the dockyard, its cranes and forklifts silent for the weekend. We had plenty of time before dark; we walked back out of the park and up the road into the dockyard. On our left, the old buildings of the military bases were fenced off and boarded up, paint peeling and foundations beginning to sag. The collapse of these bases was a major blow to the Bermudian economy, and these closed and empty buildings were only precursors of others that would begin to appear as tourism began to decline on the island.

The dockyard itself, however, was still open for business and packed with tourists and the shops and restaurants that had crowded into the dockyards to make money off of them. Sailboats crowded the small harbor, some of them drawn out of the water and elevated on blocks for hull repairs. The Clocktower Mall, once part of the naval base’s administrative buildings, now dominated the area and swarmed with tourists. Just beyond, the base’s old glassworks building was now home to both a modern glassworks, selling glass souvenirs, and the home bakery of the Bermuda rum cake.

Being, after all, tourists (if rather bedraggled, sunburned, young, and poor tourists) we bought one. We ate it that night on the west coast of the island, opting for a band of coarse sea grass a few hundred yards from a row of apartment buildings rather than the junkyard park we’d visited earlier. The grass was soft but just firm enough to cushion us from the ground, and we slept well. Our journey was nearing its end—we would only have one more night in Bermuda before flying back to Virginia and the everyday routine of school and work.

To be concluded…

Tim Raveling is a freelance writer.



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