| I knew John Wiley in Aruba, we called him Jack. He was a few years older than I was but in Aruba everyone knew everyone. John worked for The Smithsonian Magazine and wrote the monthly "Phenomena, Comment, and Notes". I believe he was the editor of the magazine. John is dead now. His book was published by University Press of New England and I contacted them and they tell me John was the holder of the copywriters on the book. I contacted The Smithsonian Magazine and was given an e-mail address for one of his daughters who teach, I was told, at Temple University. I tried to contact her but have not been successful. This is such a wonderful story that I decided to put it on the web site and beg forgiveness should it offend any of his family that I used it without permission. I am sure that were Jack alive he would have been happy to have it included on the site. Dan Jensen | |
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I HAVE MADE CONTACT WITH CATHERINE WILEY, ONE OF JACKS DAUGHTERS, AND SHE FELT HER DAD WOULD BE PLEASED TO HAVE THE STORY ON THE SITE. |
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HOME TO ARUBA—TOO LATE |
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By |
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From his book |
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"Natural High" |
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| For years I have had a fantasy about returning to places to wild, taking down homes and taking up street, letting Nature come back at her own pace and in her own way, so that in 10 years or a hundred or a thousand no one could ever tell we humans had once been there manufacturing, consuming, amusing ourselves | |
| In all those hours of daydreaming, often about Manhattan as a new Eden, it never occurred to me that they would start with my house, my street, what was the very center of the Universe when I was discovering variable stars, bird guides, darkroom magic, and the far more magical fact that girls are indeed different from boys. But turn my back for a trifling 18 years and wham! Look what they’ve done. Bungalow No. 415 is gone. The street it was on is gone. So is half the town. Crested caracaras now stalk through the cactus where children once played on manicured patios. | |
| You come into this particular town from the north. After seven or eight blocks, in my day, you came to the tope of a hill with a church on your left and the lagoon in front of you. Down the hill is the beach. We are not talking Los Angeles here. So my friend and I came flying into town in our rusty rental car one day last March. We pull to a halt at the first stop sign. And there, across the street on our left, was the church. Straight ahead was the Lagoon. We had missed most of the town because it to no longer existed. | |
| The rabbits are reclaiming what was theirs. Iguanas scuttle into the thorn bushes, parakeets scream like green rockets through the organ pipe cactus. I should be rejoicing. Part of me is. But where are the school, the commissary, the ball field? Where is my youth? | |
| This once was Lago Colony on the Dutch island of Aruba. The refinery—and the company town—were owned by the Lago Oil and Transport Company, eventually a subsidiary of what is now Exxon. Once the refinery was on of the largest in the world, and the port of San Nicholaas, one of the busiest. But in 1985 the refinery closed for good. Now Lago, or Exxon, would appear to be in the restoration-ecology business. Not only are the streets being taken up, but a sign at the entrance to the colony announces that the whole place is a sanctuary and neither animals nor plants are to be disturbed. | |
| Some trace of a boy’s world remain. The last house we lived in is still there, windows boarded up, yard overgrown. A tree now covers the garage from whose roof I watched the stars; hummingbirds have built a nest in the bottom branch of another tree that now blocks the back door. Other pieces still stand. The Esso Club is still down by the water, on a point between two lagoons. The tennis courts are still there, and a snack bar on the beach where the "yacht club" once stood. But it was monumentally disorienting to drive around a small, familiar town, looking for friends’ houses and other childhood landmarks, and not be able to find them because they have ceased to exist. | |
| It was discombobulating enough for me that we spent the next thee days away from Lago, driving around the rest of Aruba. A 10-mile-long volcanic island encrusted with laminations of long-dead coral reefs, it lies athwart the northeast trades. On the windward side, the surf blasts holes in the coral cliffs, on the other, mangrove-lined lagoons doze under the painful sun. Indians, crossed the 20 miles from Venezuela 4,300 years ago and gathered shellfish in leeward lagoons while, as a brochure from Aruba’s archaeological museum puts it, "at the windward side some real fisherman lived." There is a lot to see, despite the Denver Post travel writer who called Aruba, "the world’s ugliest island. This place is so devoid of anything to do." Michael Carlton went on, "that even Gilligan would flee." Luckily I knew that already, so I was able to ignore the wind surfers jumping the breakers at Boca Grandi, golfers staring down burrowing owls in the sand traps at the Aruba Golf Course, snorkelers mixing it up with French anglerfish and sergeant majors in the staghorn coral off Baby Lagoon, the sailors anchoring off Malmok for a picnic on a miles-long beach, binocular laden eccentrics counting wood storks at Bubali or parakeets in Frenchman’s Pass, time travelers pondering birds and fish the Indians had painted on the rocks in what is now Arikok National Park. | |
| Because there was nothing to do, my friend and I walked through the dunes to the cliffs of California Point, past the stone huts of today’s real fishermen and the crosses cemented to the rocks in memory of the drowned. We drove between the edge of the cliffs and enormous piles of broken rock down the coast to Alto Visa, where the first Catholic mission meant the beginning of the end Indians. We drove out natural bridge above the surf, and back through Andicuri, a coconut palm plantation thought to carry the name of an Indian chieftain. We climbed the crumbling concrete steps of Hooiberg ("the Haystack," a conical hill at the center of the island) and the red rock of Seroe Colorado, the lighthouse hill at the southeastern end that looks down on what is left of Lago. | |
| At Boca Prins, in a valley behind a break in the cliffs where a boy camped 40 years ago, we met an American, ecstatic that he had left his asthma back in Washington; and an Aruban casino dealer, ecstatic at the prospect of his upcoming trip to Los Vegas. Another Aruban, just back from the Netherlands, had spent the day on the cliff above us staring at his indigo sea. We met more Arubans, eager to help in four languages, while looking at Siribana for the house of a classmate from long ago. (We finally did find her house, but not her, in another part of the island called Shiribana—I forgot the h.) | |
| On the south side we drove the beaches, walked the mangrove, swamp in green water on pink sand. We drank beer in the rum shops, and ate beef croquettes and chicken pastries in the bakeries of Sint Nicholaas. We ordered nasi goring (Indonesian fried rice) one day in Oranjestad as frigate birds soared over the boats that bring fresh produce from Venezuela; later we dined on fresh fish (caught from the boat tied up next to our table) as the sun set over Spanish Lagoon. We tried the goat stew in an Aruban house, and sipped iguana soup and num beneath the watapana and kwihi trees while the yellow satin and white linen of the Aruba Dance Theater swirled under the stars. Then back to the hotel, huge clouds sailing right under the clouds, stars burning in the gaps, the warm, soft wind almost itself alive, bringing bird noises from the wetlands sanctuary next door. | |
| By the end of the week we were back in Lago, swimming in the lagoons, having a beer in the bowing alley at the Esso Club, even playing a round of golf for old times’ sake. I walked the aboveground sewer pip along the shore of the lagoon, looked for the iguanas that used to leap into the water and hide under the rocks, those I found headed uphill instead. | |
| "One Happy Island," the license plates say, and it really seem to be, remarkably so. Physically, however, I must confess to my Colorado colleague, it is not quite paradise. Things are tough in the best of times on the island, and the past 500 years have not been the best of times. Average rainfall is only about 17 inches, usually in quick downpours from October to December. Plants that do get a start face the salt-laden trade winds. The first Europeans cut down the dyewood trees, and introduced the goats and sheep that are causing murderous soil erosion to this day. Although it is hard to believe, looking at today’s landscape of cactus and bear dirt, the entire island was once used as a horse-raising station. While still under Spanish rule, the island was a source of Indians for slave labor in the mines of Hispaniola. Gold was discovered in the 19th century; parts of the island were ripped up in the frenzy. Now stone quarries and sand and gravel pits scar the land everywhere as the hotel building boom goes on. | |
| A new fantasy takes shape. It is night. A small, twin-engine plane flies low over the sea, without lights. It lands at the old Aruba Flying Club, whose X-painted runway now heads straight for the new prison. A man jumps out of the plane with a rucksack full of old coffee cans. He runs off into the cactus and thronbushes, drops to his knees and tears open the pack. He pulls the lids off the cans, dumps their contents on the ground. Then he runs, crouched, back to the aircraft; the plane leaps off the runway and up into the wind; and disappears back over the sea. Police cars come screaming up; cursing men, with flashlights fan out into the brush. One yells and the others converge; there in the beam of their lights is a dark mass of wet topsoil, compost, and rich loam from an old vegetable garden. The Phantom island restorer has struck again. | |
| May 1989 | |
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