There once was a beach

JUST AFTER you pass Las Cuevas, there is a windy little road that leads down through a hilly village. It has streets with names like “Success Road”, and even has an ancient house built entirely from mud. There is a pretty little church perched above the road and a little railing where people tend to sit and lime. There is also a standpipe where usually a number of bare-bottomed children are bathing. It is a very rustic little setting, like something out of a tourist magazine. The road leads down to a small school on the right hand side, a basketball court on the left hand side, and a small shady bay, which is cleaved down the middle by a massive almond tree growing horizontally out into the sea. Its huge trunk lies on the sand, and its long arms make for good jumping points into the sea. Where the road ends there is a little known historical landmark – Fort Abercromby. The fort itself is not as impressive as Fort George, for example, and there are only a handful of petite cannons, but a fort nonetheless it is.

But for many, the fort is not the real attraction of this sleepy village. For the handful of people who know the area, there is a very special and relatively unknown spot of interest. If you walk down a little dirt path, you come across the “Fishing Rock”, a large section of rock that juts right out into the sea. From that height the view is beautiful. Sometimes you get a glimpse of some marine life – a manta ray, a turtle, a large school of fish – all swimming around below you. But there is only one way to get into that beautiful crystal clear water beckoning you below… and that is to jump. The jump from the rock is a fairly decent height of about twenty feet or so. It is not something to do during low tide, and sometimes during the change of the tides the water is too rough to jump in. Once you take the exhilarating plunge, the swimming is great, and you can swim all around the small bay, over to little sandy beaches, and through tiny caves. How do you get back up, you may be asking? Well, climb back up the wall of the rock, of course! 

Once in the water, the best part of this beautiful spot was a hidden cove that housed a small beach that you could swim over to. On the tiny beach you could sit and chill out when you needed a rest from treading water, or you could crawl through the caves during low tide. Every person I ever took there felt as though they had spent the day at their own private paradise. It really was a very picturesque and special place. “Was”? Why am I speaking about it in past tense? Well, it’s because one day, when some visitors were in town and I wanted to take them to the special spot, we arrived at the rock and could not believe our eyes. The beach was gone. See, to get to the fishing rock, we used to pass through the yard of an old house. But the old house had been knocked down and some sort of new building was being constructed. I believe it was supposed to be an information centre for the fort, or something like that.

But during the demolition and renovation of the plot of land, the contractors or workmen had decided they were going to take the easy (and cheap) way out in terms of clearing up the mess. So, a huge pile of bricks, concrete stairs and general rubble from the old house simply got pushed right off the side of the cliff – and right onto the perfect little beach below. When we stood up on the point and looked at what used to be one of the most special spots in Trinidad, all we saw was a sad little cove piled high with chunks of an old house. The beach was no more. When I saw that I was naturally upset. Instantly my mind started racing. What could we do to restore the beach? Could we maybe carry out some of the rubble and dump it further out into the ocean? Could it maybe be hitched up the side of the cliff to be disposed of properly? But how can you move big piles of concrete? Maybe we could load some of it onto a boat? Was there anything we could do?

And of course the answer is no, there is nothing you can do, because once you go and mess around with nature, it’s gone for good. It can never be the same. What is it with this island? Why is it we take our natural resources for granted and simply shrug our shoulders when something gets destroyed? Do we even have an understanding that when it’s gone it’s gone forever? Or do we only ever think in the present tense? My theory is that we as an island have a serious inferiority complex. We could and should be the ideal tourist destination, but for some reason we think places like Barbados are far superior to us. Why? What does Barbados have that we don’t have? So we don’t have turquoise blue waters and white sands. Big deal! We have beautiful emerald green waters because we have beautiful emerald green mountains everywhere. Ever been to Barbados? Ever seen how flat and boring it is? Turquoise is all they’ve got, and they milk it for what it’s worth.

On the other hand, we have everything on this island – mountains, rivers, waterfalls, springs, pools, beaches, lakes, swamps, wetlands, forests, endemic species, endless flora and fauna, parrots, macaws, iguanas, we have giant turtles dragging themselves onshore to lay eggs, we have howler monkeys in the forests, we have everything a Caribbean island could hope of having and what do we do to protect it? Nothing. Instead we bulldoze a house and dump it over a cliff. We let oil companies put a 56-inch pipeline through a public beach. We pollute everywhere we go, we destroy everything we touch. But if nobody cares about some obscure little beach in some obscure little village, why should anybody care if our caring Government paves a so-called “Eco-Highway” right through the last unmolested piece of pristine virgin forest and coastline we have left? But alas, I’ve run out of space, so more on the Eco-Highway another day.
Email: emilymdickson@yahoo.com