Credit: YouTube, Bob Marley
Searching for a homebase. 1980
In August of 1980 I fled Iowa – having found the people warm, the winters inhospitable, and the summers one long debate about whether it was the heat or the humidity. Two years of domestic violence work had taken their toll and now I had my sights set on the Caribbean. In the words of Jimmy Buffett in ‘Tin Cup Chalice,’ ,
I want to go back to the islands
Where the shrimp boats are tied up to the piling
Give me oysters and beer
For dinner every day of the year
And I’ll feel fine, I’ll feel fine
© Let There Be Music
A lucky encounter. While I was working for Legal Services and quickly burning out, I was sent on a trip to Washington, DC for a training and I met Debbie Ozga whose brother Marty worked with me. Debbie and i kept in touch afterwards; she came to Des Moines to visit her brother, and when I was completely fried and ready to dodge the law, Debbie agreed to embark on an adventure with me to the Caribbean
We planned to live in Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas in the American Virgin Islands because it was a magnet for cruise ships, and rumor had it that there were plenty of jobs for people like us.
When Debbie and I arrived in the Virgin Islands we found that everything we had heard was true. It was warm and beautiful and exquisitely unfamiliar.
Everywhere we looked vivid colors, flowering trees, and the breeze was filled with exotic aromas. And there were, indeed, always plenty of jobs for young, good looking Americans and Europeans because several cruise ships arrived in Charlotte Amalie each day.
And it wasn’t hard to tell when the ships arrived because sleepy Charlette Amalie suddenly was bursting at the seams, it was like when they opened the gates at Disney World and the tourists poured in and all the park’s actors took their positions and started playing their roles as waiters, and bartenders, and tour guides, folks for the tourists to envy because they had escaped the grind back home and now lived in paradise.
Traveling with Debbie made the adventure fun, calm and peaceful because we both loved to read and write, and we could enjoy long stretches of flipping pages or silently scribbling. Debbie had experience as a waitress and was very pretty; I was trained as a bartender, and as a woman at an Iowa rodeo had recently commented as she handed me a beer, I was easy on the eyes. I would have been a snap for us to get jobs.
Debbie Ozga and the man who accompanied Debbie to the Caribbean.
Note: That picture of me is from my 1980 passport, back in the days when they let you show some character and your photo didn’t have to look like a mugshot.
Because of the cruise ships bringing so many tourists, as we were checking out the labor situation, we saw that all the good jobs were filled with expats in their 20s and 30s. They were happy to be spending their days working in the shops, restaurants and hotels, and their nights drinking and dancing to the music of Bob Marley in the bars along the sea.
But in chatting with the local Blacks, there was an undercurrent of anger and resentment because they had been left out of the tourist boom. The local business owners assumed that the tourists would be more comfortable dealing with people who looked like them, i.e., not Black. I knew in my heart of hearts that taking a job that should have belonged to a local did not seem right, a clear violation of my ‘Justice For The Poor’ philosophy.
In addition, I had envisioned living in a Caribbean paradise, not working in an amusement park as a bartender outside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
But after a week of checking out the scene, and with our finances dwindling as we were spent $30 a night to stay in a campground, my moral high ground was crumbling
A cautionary note about adventure doldrums. In my experience, there is a point in every adventure where the wind goes out of your sails. You embark in high spirits, brimming with enthusiasm because there is nothing but possibilities on the horizon. Then once you arrive at your dream destination, endless possibilities are rapidly narrowed down by hard reality, and you begin to wonder if this was such a good idea after all. Having embarked on many adventures since this one, I have learned to expect this time in the doldrums, and I have found that eventually, thank goodness, everything has worked out, although never as I expected it to. You just need to patiently hang on. And hope.
But as we looked around the American Virgin Islands, hope was fading.
Out for Justice 