Adrift on St. John (11 page)

Of all the creature sounds Alden had come to know and love, it was that of the insects he found most endearing. Their soothing, buzzing hum calmed his nerves each night and sang him off to sleep.

This fanciful lifestyle was not without its spoilers. While the vast majority of the bug population had no interest in the eco-resort’s human residents, the jungled forest was home to a certain species of biting gnats that posed a constant nuisance. The screens that covered the cabin’s windows were no impediment to these nasty pests.

Alden kept a can of bug repellent within arm’s reach, and the burnt-out stubs of a half dozen citronella candles filled the counters near his desk. A tattered flyswatter hung from a nail in the door frame, a weapon of last resort.

Alden hated to be the cause of any living being’s destruction, but he had long since assuaged his conscience when it came to the island’s infamous no-see-ums.

He scratched absentmindedly at the top of his knobby left knee, brushing a piece of fuzz tickling his skin. Beneath the wooden desk, two of the outlawed insects hung in the air, scheming as they swooped to avoid his large calloused hand.

Alden didn’t know it yet, but a rash of small red welts had begun to rise on his hairy shin. The line of microscopic bite marks spread from the soft flesh beneath his ankle all the way up to his knee.

As his hand returned to the desktop, the tiny gnats circled his leg, proudly surveying their work. They weren’t called “no-see-ums” for nothing.

Alden was a tall, lean lumbering man whose wild, unkempt beard conveyed the wooly look of someone who camped for a living. The top of his head, in contrast, he kept closely shaved.

After many years of experimentation, he’d determined that this was the optimal grooming combination for the island’s hot, humid conditions. He couldn’t care less that his friends told him he looked like a coconut on a stick.

Together, Alden and his wife, Sherry, had opened the Maho Bay eco-resort back in the early 1970s. They’d started with fewer than twenty elevated tree house tents, but the concept had proved so successful that the resort now boasted over a hundred units. The eco-minded campground was known throughout the Caribbean for its environmentally sensitive footprint as well as its close proximity to St. John’s seven-thousand-acre national park.

The resort’s infrastructure was laid out along a labyrinth of stairs, ladders, and elevated walkways that the guests navigated to reach their treetop lodging quarters. Each tent unit sat atop stilts similar to the ones beneath Alden’s cabin. The walls of the tents were covered with interlocking screens and thick waterproof canvas—barriers that were, despite
all bug-proofing attempts, still easily breached by the tiny gnatlike no-see-ums.

Meanwhile, the nefarious pair beneath the desk had finished up with Alden’s left leg and had begun planning their attack on his right one.

The campground’s network of stairs and elevated walkways led down the hillside toward Maho Bay’s scenic beach. The round, protruding bulge of Mary’s Point curved out from the northwest side of the area, sheltering it from the larger waves that sometimes hit St. John’s north shore. The calm water was safe and easy for kids of all ages to swim in and explore, a perfect fit for the family-friendly camp.

Alden, Sherry, and their crew of similarly minded outdoor enthusiasts provided a daily offering of water sports and arts and crafts activities, frequently supplemented by nighttime gatherings and star-gazing programs. Meals were served throughout the day, cafeteria style, in a circular restaurant with a partially tented open-air roof.

Alden leaned back in his chair, squinting his left eye. He thought he felt the slight twinge of an itch somewhere on his body. His hand reached down and brushed against his right leg, but his thoughts drifted elsewhere.

Hovering about a foot off the floor, the naughty pair of no-see-ums continued their feast.

The eco-resort boasted some of the island’s least-expensive lodging. The nightly rates weren’t cheap, by any means, but they were far less than that of the rest of the available vacation housing. Given the camp’s greater financial accessibility, it hosted a much broader range of visitor types than seen at the island’s pricier establishments.

Alden and his crew were an easygoing, laid-back bunch, and he generally managed to get along with all of his guests, no matter how strange or bizarre the personality. Any problems arising in that department he left to his wife,
Sherry. In their thirty years of running the eco-resort, no one had ever dared to cross her.

Alden preferred to sit back and observe. After decades of practice, he had developed a keen eye for outliers—that’s the term he used to describe his more eclectic guests. These were folks who seemed to float along, oddly detached from the regular threads of society.

Outliers, as carefully defined by Alden’s well-honed analysis, lived by a different set of rules than the rest of the campground’s patrons—their “unique” lifestyle choices frequently warranted extra staff attention. They marched to their own drummer, so to speak, in a way that was both frustratingly unpredictable for his role as site manager and maddeningly intriguing for his far more dominant biologist persona.

Conrad Corsair—outlier exhibit number one, Alden thought as he scrolled through a list of guests who were scheduled to arrive in the coming days.

Conrad was the sole reason Alden had devised the outlier term in the first place. The crazy hippie from New York had been flying down once a year ever since the eco-resort first opened.

Alden sighed ruefully. He could already hear the little man’s twangy voice. For some reason, the moment he stepped off the plane, Conrad began layering his sharp New York accent with a strained, drawling affectation.

“How-dee, Eddy. How’s it hangin’?”

Alden ran his fingers over the shaved crown of his bald head. He had never been able to convince Conrad—or, for that matter, anyone else on the island after Conrad started the trend—that Edwards was his last and not his first name.

This was but one of Conrad’s many endearing quirks. Another was that he insisted on referring to the accommodations at the eco-resort as teepee tents. Alden had given up trying to understand why—there wasn’t anything about the units that even remotely resembled the structure of a teepee.
Conrad apparently thought the teepee reference made his Maho Bay digs sound more alluring to the ladies.

Alden groaned and rolled his eyes. To his knowledge, none of Conrad’s persistent pickup lines had ever panned out. And if they had, Alden thought with a cringe, he’d rather not know about it.

He and Sherry had dealt with countless complaints from the campground’s female guests over the years. The New Yorker’s over-the-top charm could sometimes be a bit too much to take.

Shaking his head dismissively, Alden slid his eyes across his desk to the day’s stack of mail and the legal-sized envelope that lay on top. He felt his blood pressure begin to rise as he stared at the familiar gold-embossed printing on the return address label. It was the monthly notice from his landlord’s lawyers, repeating, for the umpteenth time, the date of the eco-resort’s coming eviction.

Alden scowled at the repugnant envelope. How would he break the news to Conrad? That man lived for his annual two-week trips to the island. He was going to be crushed when he found out.

The fourteen-acre site beneath the eco-resort had been put up for sale several months earlier, in anticipation of the end of the campground’s multiyear lease. The legal envelopes providing formal notice of the termination had been arriving like clockwork every month for the last year to ensure there would be no possibility of legal redress.

Alden tossed the latest communiqué into a file folder packed with similarly embossed envelopes. He didn’t even bother to read the letters anymore. It was just too painful.

The development interests had been circling the property for some time, eagerly anticipating this moment of opportunity. There were few plots of undeveloped land like this left in the Caribbean; there were certainly no others of similar potential in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was the perfect site,
according to those in the business, for an expansive, new, high-end resort.

Alden winced, imagining the transformation. A suffocating mass of concrete and pavement would quickly swallow this forested hillside, carving a permanent scar across the island’s north shore. He closed his eyes, trying to erase the painful vision. It hurt him down to his soul.

The global economic downturn of recent years had deterred several interested buyers; the upheaval in the financial markets had made it difficult to raise funds for the multimillion-dollar asking price. But Alden knew that impediment was only temporary. Time was running out.

It would sicken Alden to see this place, his life’s work, morphed into a monstrosity of condos, villas, and swimming pools, but his hands were tied. In the back of his mind, he had already accepted defeat. This would be their last year in operation.

At the end of the winter tourist season, they would tear down the tents, the elevated walkways, and the stairs leading down to the beach, then, he promised himself, never look back.

Alden shrugged his shoulders dejectedly. As he reached once more beneath the desk, his fingers found the first raised bump on the top of his left knee.

Cursing, he scooted his chair back to survey the damage.
This
was something he would not miss. He pulled open a desk drawer stocked with anti-itch medications and applied a thick coating of alcohol-based gel across the reddening surface of his skin. After propping his gel-soaked leg on a nearby stool, he returned his attention to his paperwork.

Below the desk, the no-see-ums continued their ravenous assault on his skin, their devious work unabated.

Unaware of the ongoing no-see-um activity, Alden scanned through a list of new arrivals and their activity requests, mentally ticking each one off.

First, there was the elderly lady from Connecticut who had signed up for tomorrow’s craft class. Done. Sherry had prepared a stained-glass project for her.

Next was a young married couple from Atlanta. They’d asked to take a day cruise to Virgin Gorda on Friday. He checked his notes. Sherry had signed them up with a charter that serviced the larger resorts.

Alden set his left leg back on the ground as he came to the third entry: Hannah Sheridan. She was working for the next couple of months over at the big resort on the island’s southwest side. He rubbed his fingers into the scruff of his beard, contemplating.

It was too early to know for sure, but he suspected Hannah might fall into the “outlier” category. You couldn’t always pick them out right at first, but she certainly showed some of the signs.

Hannah had been quiet, almost shy when she approached the check-in desk that morning. But not long after they started talking, she began peppering him with questions: about the island, about the eco-resort, and then, most memorably, about the pending termination of the lease.

What a way to start the day, Alden sighed wearily. The whole sordid lease situation was like a persistent cloud that he couldn’t escape. Its lurking black shroud followed him wherever he went. He scrunched up his lips and gazed out into the forest, his mood darkening with an overwhelming sense of defeat.

It was as Alden stared out the window screen, the no-see-ums munching hungrily on his lower extremities, that he sensed a slight uptick in the previously deadened breeze. The tree outside his window rustled with movement. A forest of wooden limbs creaked in unison with a low mournful moan. It was as if a restive spirit had suddenly been awakened.

Maybe, Alden thought wistfully, maybe there is hope after all. He was a spiritual man, in the naturalist sense of the word, and this forest was his chapel. He’d been praying
for months, in his own meager, diminutive way, for some sort of miracle to save it from ruin.

But then, just as quickly as it had started, the stirring in the trees fell silent. The wind evaporated as if it had existed only in his imagination. Alden slapped hard against his right leg, nearly crushing the mischievous pair of no-see-ums, and swore out loud as he saw the second track of welt marks.

Probably just a mongoose, he thought bitterly.

Alden let loose another long sigh, this one laced heavily with remorse. He was really going to miss those stupid mongooses.

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