Paradise lost, found again

The taxi slows a little so that the occupants can take it all in. There’s not much. The vegetation has taken hold of the single-floor cottages and stores that once made up Cork Hill’s main street. Tin roofs are corroded or have caved in. Even the island’s ubiquitous feral goats and chickens seem to have given up on the place.
At the bottom of the hill there is a junction. A right turn reveals a rare sight on the mountainous island of Montserrat: a straight stretch of level road. But it is empty. There is nobody. There is nothing going on. It’s as if all human life was seized and deported to another place.
And in a way it was.
Down the straight road a bit and the landscape changes. It has been green up until now. Suddenly it is gray. And the air smells funny.
This is the Exclusion Zone on the island that still holds fast to its claim of being the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean.
The driver, Georgie, points to a few columns of metal sticking out of the ash. This was once a gas station.
It looks like a scene from post-bomb Hiroshima.
But that was only one blast.
The scientists who keep an around-the-clock watch on Montserrat’s Soufriere Hills volcano will tell you that an atomic bomb is an inadequate indicator of the power that lies deep beneath the earth’s crust and is venting through the rock pile puffing away not much more than a couple of miles to the west of the gas station.
This is the outskirts of Plymouth, once the capital of Montserrat, its commercial heart and cultural soul. Now it’s dead, abandoned, and it looks like a Pompeii in progress.
Apart from that it’s just another beautiful day in paradise.

Natural partition
The Montserrat volcano has been erupting on and off for nine years. It has managed to upend the island’s economy even as it has, writ large, the tiny British dependent territory in headlines and learned journals on volcanology, geology and other scientific disciplines.
More than half the island’s 39 square miles is now off limits to residents and tourists alike. The population, once about 12,000 souls, now numbers fewer than 5,000.
Those who have stayed behind are a resilient lot. A new island motto, seen on T-shirts, hats and bandanas, sums it up: “Standing Tall, Enduring All.”
There is a spirit about the people on this island, an air of acceptance and unabashed pride spiced up with more than a little dark humor. You could call it an Irish streak, if you want. Most would simply describe it as Montserratian.
The island of Montserrat is a dot on the globe. A little over 12 miles long by about 7 miles at its widest point, it rises from the ocean as one of Leeward Islands, which are in turn the northerly spur of the Lesser Antilles chain.
In his recently published book, “The Road to McCarthy,” travel writer Pete McCarthy devotes an entire chapter to Montserrat. He describes the island as being pear, or perhaps pearl shaped. Given recent history, an observer would be forgiven for perceiving the shape of a teardrop.
But that’s looking at it on a map.
As you approach the island by boat, in this case the fast ferry from nearby Antigua, the island’s three distinct ranges of hills look like great, sculptured dolphins arching out of the water.
The highest mountain on Montserrat is at the island’s southern tip, in the Soufriere Hills. It is called Chances Peak and reaches from sea level to about 3,000 feet. The next summit, just a little to the north of Chances Peak, varies in height. It seems to have a permanent cloud hanging over it. Upon closer inspection, this companion reveals itself as the Soufriere Hills volcano.
Columbus passed this way on his second voyage in 1493. The volcano was asleep that year. The Genoan named Montserrat after a monastery in Spain. But he didn’t land on it to say a prayer, or plant a flag for his Spanish royal sponsors.

The Irish edge
The first European settlers stepped ashore in 1632. They were mostly Irish from the nearby island of St. Kitts. Early Irish arrivals also came from the colony of Virginia.
It was these first arrivals, and their descendants, who would give Montserrat its distinct Irish edge, one that the visitor is immediately made aware of when his or her passport is stamped with a green shamrock.
Visitors, even first timers, are treated like long-lost friends these days. An active volcano is all very well on a large landmass, but on a small island it’s not the ideal spur for mass-market tourism.
But Montserrat was never like that anyway.
Even before so many of its people were evacuated, Montserrat’s tourist board worked to get across the idea that the island was the way the Caribbean used to be: a laid-back place, a bit too quiet perhaps for those who like their vacations action packed or sprung straight from a Club Med brochure.
With the capital largely under a volcanic ash blanket, the island has lost more than one selling point, not to mention most of its hotel accommodation. But the Irish isle angle is holding fast and that part of the island that has survived the worst ravages of repeated ash falls and pyroclastic flows is green. Many shades of it.
The first Irish fared better than their compatriots on other Caribbean islands such as Barbados, but that’s not to say that life on Montserrat was easy. The island did have Irish governors and plantation owners, but most of the early Irish were indentured servants.
The fusion of Irish and African cultures on the island resulted in part from intermarriage. The widespread presence of Irish surnames to this day also stems from the abolition of slavery in 1834. Many freed slaves took the names of their planter masters, men with names such as Roche, Farrell and Riley.
If you lifted a map of Montserrat and superimposed it on a map of Ireland, many island place names would not look out of place.
There’s the aforementioned Cork Hill, but also Roche’s Mountain, Sweeney’s Well, Farrell’s Mountain and the village of Fogarty.
The capital, Plymouth, speaks of the island’s English heritage, but it is, or was, flanked by the villages of Kinsale, St. Patrick’s, Broderick’s, Galway’s and O’Garro’s, a name derived from O’Gara.
While the Irish influence was evident everywhere on the island, here was its historical centerpiece.
The southern end, as well as being the main port and administrative center, was also the island’s agricultural district.
Now it’s a moonscape.

Everywhere, ash
Looking deeper into Plymouth, through a fog of volcanic cloud being blown over the town by the trade winds, it is still possible to see the spire of St. Patrick’s Church rising from the ash. Most of the rest of the building is buried.
What passed for the normal world ended here. It is a depressing and fearful sight, a reminder that nature cares not a whit about human foibles and concerns.
The general vantage point for this view into the silent downtown is a hotel that was once the gleaming and prosperous Montserrat Springs.
The specific vantage point is the center of the hotel’s swimming pool. It is filled to the brim with ash.
The gray ash is hard on the surface but scrape it with your fingers and it’s like talcum powder. It looks like the stuff that the Apollo astronauts once bounced over. A moonscape indeed, though one under an azure sky.
Montserrat’s present run of ill luck goes back to 1989 when the island took a direct hit from Hurricane Hugo. The island was just about back on its economic feet by 1995 when the sleeping giant of Soufriere Hills caught fire — for the first time in about 400 years, according to geological studies.
The date after which all was to change so utterly was July 18.
A couple of years after the first eruption, the island was naturally partitioned. Plymouth and its surrounding villages succumbed to the relentless flows and showers of lava, pumice stone, mud and hot ash “surge clouds.”
The worst of bad days fell on June 15 of that year. Nineteen people were killed by a wave of explosions and pyroclastic flows.
The lights went out in the shadow of the biggest fireworks display in the Western Hemisphere and the map of the island was redrawn to accommodate a zone of exclusion, and one that includes the remaining population and the island’s hopes for a better future.
Nine years later, the volcano is still doing its best to keep the island on tenterhooks and nobody is betting their last Eastern Caribbean dollar as to when it might take its next long nap.
Best then, if you want to sell the idea of a relaxing vacation on the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean, you try to make a virtue of what nature has imposed.
And that the Montserratians are doing with one eye on the world beyond and the other on the fiery hill that, if it doesn’t completely let loose, is itself one hell of an attraction to travelers who want a little more in their vacation than what mere human hands can provide.
The island’s tourist board Web site sets the tone with a greeting familiar to the Irish everywhere: “A Hundred Thousand Welcomes.”
The volcano and its erratic personality are fully acknowledged on the Web site, the pages of which point to shopping, accommodation and the island’s growing reputation as a haven for eco-tourists.
In sharp contrast to the volcanic landscape, there is rain forest in the hills at the island’s center. It is home to the rare and elusive Montserrat Oriole.
Superimposed on this natural beauty, and volcanic drama, are the designs of the island’s government and people.
The last couple of years have witnessed an accelerated effort to open the island to more visitors. The volcano wiped out the airport and so a new one is being laid down at the island’s northern tip. The main contractor behind the airport project is a Belfast company, Lagan Holdings.
Presently, visitors arrive by either ferry or helicopter from Antigua.
While they come for a variety of reasons, there are some, like author McCarthy, who are seeking out the island’s Irish story. McCarthy’s visit a couple of years ago coincided with St. Patrick’s Day, a cause for celebration on Montserrat that lasts for a lot more than just 24 hours.
St. Patrick’s Day is a public holiday on the island. The only other place on earth that legally closes for March 17 is the Republic of Ireland.
Montserrat puts on a week-long festival devoted to the marriage of the island’s Irish and African heritage. There is also a political twist because March 17 is a bit like Easter Monday in Ireland, a date remembered for a rebellion.
On St. Patrick’s Day, 1768, slaves on the island rose against their masters. The revolt was crushed.

Living with the volcano
It never really had a chance. It was a classic Irish-like tale of hope betrayed. The plans for the rebellion were revealed to the authorities by what Brian McGinn, writing in Irish Roots magazine some years ago, described as a “talkative participant.”
Just about everyone on the island these days is a talkative participant in the debate over how to live with the volcano.
The scientists at the Montserrat Volcano Observatory are charged with monitoring the beast around the clock. As is often the lot of science, people become impatient when it cannot provide all the answers in jig time.
Dr. Peter Dunkley of the MVO speaks of a “whole list of criteria” that must be met for 12 months before an all clear can be given and the exclusion zone reopened.
Many on the island want to reoccupy part of the zone now. There is a feeling, or at least a hope, that the volcano has done its worst, at least for the next few hundred years.
Carol Osborne and her husband, Cedric, are proprietors of the Vue Point Hotel, an island institution that sits on a hill only yards from the line of exclusion.
Below the hotel, the island’s finest golf course lies buried beneath the debris of a huge pyroclastic flow, one that also managed, in an ironic twist, to extend the nearby beach by some considerable distance into the cooling Caribbean.
Osborne is an O’Driscoll from Cork on her Irish side. Tied to a fixed business she might be, but she exudes the eagerness of a homesteader.
“We should be able to get something done in the daytime entry zone [the part of the exclusion zone where can visit during the daytime hours]. We’re well used to high volcanic activity and ash fall,” she said.
Osborne is not impressed by some of the ways in which the island’s plight has been played up in the world’s press in recent years.
“The problem is the perception that the island has been evacuated. The island doesn’t need too many people to make our tourism plan viable and the volcano is our attraction now,” she said
On the Saturday evening following St. Patrick’s Day, the Vue Pointe’s restaurant and bar is packed. This is not a squeeze as the restaurant is open to the world beyond on one side.
The occasion is the St. Patrick’s Day Dinner, the culmination of the week’s celebrations. A warm breeze wafts in from the Caribbean and in one corner a local vocal group, The Emerald Singers, is singing and swaying to “The Fields of Athenry.”
Everything is as it was in years gone by and Carole Osborne is in her element.
But in the darkness beyond the hotel there is a presence that adds more than a hint of uncertainty to this, and every other party on the island.
The story goes that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. If he turned up on Montserrat now he would be handed an even bigger job and that would be to still the belching beast that has stolen half of paradise.
(The Montserrat Tourist Board website is www.visitmontserrat.com.)