Raping the Northern Range

When I wrote the following piece in May,1979, I thought someone might take notice of what was happening to the Northern Range. I hoped the word “rape” might alert others to the dangers of bush fires. But it didn’t, so, 24 years later, I’ll try again when that word applies not just to the Lady Young that gave the piece its headline, but to the whole Southern Face of the Northern Range from Chaguara-mas to Arima.

Here is what I wrote then about the Rape of the Northern Range. “Ever since Independence, and even more- so since Trinidad and Tobago became a Republic, there has been a move to abolish the old colonial names. Times change yet many of the old names linger to haunt us with memories of Hanoverian kings and queens in Frederick, George and Charlotte Streets (but, no longer, Brunswick Square). Kitchener, Baden-Powell and French are relics of the Boer War and the old West India Regiment fighting in the First World War. The Churchill Roosevelt and Princess Margaret (2003 now Uriah Butler) Highways are reminders of a more recent past.

Nelson had some connection with the West Indies. Lord Harris’ painted statue in his square is (2003 was — courtesy a demented vagrant) a memorial to a long-dead colonial governor — and we have kept the name Columbus gave this island five hundred years ago. However, were I the ghost of Lady Young I’d be the first to congratulate Trinidad on changing the name of the road that bears my name. Why? Perhaps you’ve not travelled that desolate strip of road in the past few weeks? Garbage trucks, trucks hauling logs, sweet drink trucks, trucks carrying sand and gravel and every old crock around Port-of-Spain slow traffic to a crawl on that road.

Eight or ten weeks ago motorists admired the view as they ground up or down the hill in low gear. At various twists and turns on the road there was the panorama of the city, ships in the Gulf, the Five islands, Gasparee, and, on a clear day, Venezuela in the far distance. In the foreground were the glory of the pouis in full bloom, the fresh green leaves on trees and shrubs; grass-grown verges hid the roadside litter. It was devastatingly beautiful (it was, indeed, in 1979 before the blight of squatters’ shacks ruined that scenic route); any Lady would be proud to give her name to such a road.

Today the view is devastatingly drear (but nowhere near as drear as it is in 2003). Weeks of hot, dry weather have given firebugs the chance they were waiting for through the unseasonal rains of March (1979, remember). Scorched fronds of gro-gro boeuf droop in mourning over bare, cremated earth, burned black tree stumps stand out like headstones in a desert cemetery, the high, dry winds scatter the fast-food boxes, napkins, plates and cups. To drive from the first hair-pin bend above the Hilton to the Morvant walk over is to see the abomination of desolation (I wasn’t to know, then, how much worse it could get, it would be in 2003).

Day after endless, hot, dry, windy day the smoke rises from fires set by those intent on destruction for its own sake. The stink of woodsmoke chokes the lungs, ash and dust whirl in wind-eddies. Soon the rains will carry off the soil, sweeping away the shreds of  flesh from the hills, leaving bare skeletons of rock and scree, and dumping tons of silt and debris in city flood-drains far below. To lift one’s eyes to the hills to west and east beyond the Lady Young Road is to see the same holocaust and threatened flood disasters repeated on every mountainside. From Cocorite and Diego Martin to Mount Saint Benedict and beyond, not one mountainside has escaped the wilful, deliberate rape of our land.

Rape is not too strong a word to use for wantonly set, deliberately destructive bush fires. And rape has been very much in the news this past week. So much so that the Attorney General rushed through new legislation on rape — just as last year new laws were rushed through to revive the fire wardens who were going to stop the rape of the land. In our lifetime this land can never fully recover from the ruthless rape of bush fires, just as no woman or girl can entirely forget the horror of violation that can leave permanent scars on both herself and family.

There is a song composed in Britain (but never heard on the air waves in Trinidad) on the theme of violation — the violation of the land and the fury of indignation we all should feel and express towards the fiends who set bush fires. It begins like this: “If they did to our daughters what they’re doing to our land . . .” Here they are doing it to our daughters and our land at one and the same time. How much protection will the laws passed last week give to our daughters when we can see for ourselves what happened to last year’s laws on bush fires and the state of our land today?” No, I’m sorry, I can’t remember the spate of rapes that prompted the 1979 laws. Perhaps a reader can remind me? And we can see, now, that, laws or not laws, fire wardens failed to quench the flames eating up the land and our water resources so that in 2003 the rape is repeated, sure as dry seasons follow wet seasons. In every dry season the rape continues, year after year; for a quarter century there has been, there is gang rape of the Northern Range with fire, with logging, with development and squatter settlements. And the politicians still say we don’t need, can’t afford to lease water bombers to halt the rape of our own country?