Diary of a mothering worker. July 17, 2018.

Post 293.

On dewy mornings, my mother’s white car slowly crept under the Poui trees. They were mostly lilac and pink, but sometimes yellow. I lay on the backseat on a pillow listening to 1950s music, and looking up at the endless blue sky out of the back windows. I was eight years old, and the traffic from St. Augustine to Port of Spain meant being guided for a little way by the soft colours and even softer petals carpeting the hollowed grass between north- and south-bound lanes.

Along the highway, the Pouis towered like hallowed deities surely no one would put God out of their thoughts to desecrate. Thousands of people passed them each day, twice, their wearied spirits lifted by the flagrant flounce of such exuberant blush and dry season bloom.

Those trees were a backdrop to my childhood. I knew their scalloped, slender bark, and their branches reaching like a breath of fresh air, like oxygen for bodies and minds slumped and dying in daily exhaustion, tension and car fumes.

The resilient green of the Northern Range filled the landscape on the right, Kay Donna slowly inched closer and then past on the left. Poui trees lined the middle, reliably beautiful like ladies bejeweled in yellow afternoon light, or like the sweetness of being serenaded by your beloved on lavender-hued evenings of patient, gentle courtship.

I don’t know if the past gifted you these memories, but that’s all they are now. The Pouis are gone, the gutted scars in the ground where they once stood tell a story of loss of the sacred for the generations for whom these trees were as close as family, a rare thing in a country which finds common solace in concrete.

It’s the same neglected promise of care that lets Port of Spain’s most beautiful buildings collapse under the weight of modern ambitions, and abandonment of beauty as a public good. It’s the same disregard that would have Pres-T-Con replace iconic iron bridges with slabs that stubbornly block the pleasure of looking at the rivers as families drive over, as if nothing matters in the entire surrounding ecosystem but the authority of soulless engineering.

It’s the same disinvestment in a higher good that meant Maracas is somehow uglier, the view of the sea shortsightedly blocked from those passing the beach, and the mangroves abandoned like cheap trash rather than rehabilitated with science displays for children to run through with sandy feet, and a small boat tour that can explain why trees are more sacred than contractors’ profits.

The Pouis, torn from the ground for a planned interchange, feel like any one of us is dispensable, without mercy, nostalgia or tears. In the normal, crushing march of progress, it’s just a matter of when your time comes. And, when it does, will anyone care?

Did you ever bring us beauty? Did your soft petal fingers gently stroke thousands of heavy hearts trying to get through a hard day? Did we know you like we know our own childhoods as you stood by, pink, lilac and sometimes yellow, for decades?

A whole generation of little children will never share these memories. Maybe it’s better they will neither understand or care what they’ve lost. It’s unlikely any Pouis will ever be planted again along our highways unless their planting was budgeted in the interchange’s plans. That aesthetic is for long-time, like an old Hunter Hillman car which today would feel quaint and obsolete, or like a teacher riding a bicycle to school in the cool, early dew.

I don’t know when I reached the age when nostalgia aches in your chest, but I now know how it feels. Perhaps, thousands of others also look at the emptiness left, unprepared for the turn of time from colour to black and white. Once, I could renew my childhood memories of lying in the backseat of my mother’s white car every morning, connect to a small self that once looked up at the sky.

Those moments were already in the past, and the Poui trees were all that was left. Now, when I look, I still see them, like mourning ghosts, though there’s nothing there, but my own soft grieving.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 31, 2016.

Post 230.

Weekends are for rivers and forests. I want Ziya to value the place within which she is growing, and all that it bequeaths, as part of learning to value herself and her identity. Getting out of walled buildings and urban spaces is important for emotional and mental health, and though Zi may wonder why I’m dragging her around the country, when she’d rather stay home and snack her way through the day and the cupboards, I know that familiarity with our landscape will define her self-understanding in ways that school cannot.

We were at Turure Falls, walking reverently through the river collecting natural crystals. There were no others tramping through the bush, just breeze and light. Then, we came to the rockface where water cascades into pools. There, scrawled across the entire rock were the names of men who thought it was right to scar a natural setting, an hour’s hike away from civilization. Their names were everywhere, chiseled deep, like the defacing of a cathedral.

This happens because the state has no regulatory mechanisms for monitoring who goes into our forests and what they do while there, no records of names, no permits, no penalties, and no real conception of protection of our natural resources. That is a fact,  discernable whichever coast one is on in the country. We collected a bag of garbage on our way out, and there was more we left behind.

What did Zi learn from this? She could look around her and see for herself why the environment needs protection. She could read the details of how governments fail. She could be confronted with how quickly pristine spaces can be destroyed, and therefore the urgency with which her generation must act to change everything from education to policies.

We were in Caroni Swamp yesterday, impressed with the incoming flocks of scarlet ibis, which are truly wondrous to see, along with all the other wildlife, from boas to silky anteaters to a range of birds, from cardinals to herons, egrets, owls and more. But, from the dilapidated entrance sign to the badly kept Visitors’ Centre, what was clearly a site for preservation for seven generations, was suffering from sheer neglect of adequate ecological consciousness and government oversight.

For one, the boats of the tour operators should not produce so much noise or gas fumes. On a boat with about forty persons, at $60 per person, and at least three boats out simultaneously, the main tour operator is making enough to invest in ecologically friendly engines, and those managing the site should insist on them. No wonder the guide said that all the human activity has driven most wildlife to inaccessible sections of the swamp, boatloads of people go in every single evening. There isn’t a day when the Swamp is closed to visitors to allow the animals some respite from the noise, and wardens for the swamp should engage in regular cleaning up of the garbage that hangs from mangrove roots like shed snakeskin. Sitting quietly watching the flocks come in for the evening, I wondered how many of those 18 000 birds will still be there in twenty years, and whose responsibility will it be if they are not. Ours, right? So, I told Zi. Mine, hers and our responsibility.

All along the North Coast, there is garbage, mostly plastic bottles, but also wrappers of all kinds. Along Icacos, there’s a photographic exhibit worth of garbage. Maracas’ ‘upgrade’, seems to have forgotten that a river exists behind the beach, and that this too, not just the range of fish you can fry, is a sign of ecological diversity. Can you imagine if there was a children’s education centre at Maracas? Children could run through, in their sandy feet, while learning about rivers, forests, watersheds, and all the wildlife, from caiman to sharks, that deserve protection from endangerment. Until then, in horror at the ‘development’ of Maracas beach, Zi and I only drive through.

Lloyd Best once said to me, to understand Trinidad and Tobago and what it needs, just walk around with your eyes open. So true. Weekends are therefore for teaching Zi that observing her precious world is what she must first learn to do.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. August 3, 2012

Post 65.

A number of years ago, I hiked through the North coast under about forty-five minutes of downpour. It was overwhelming. Like the forest, thumping its chest, hollered, “You want rainforest, take rainforest in yuh pueffin! I is rainforest all yuh walking through!”

Well yes. My sister was with me, two friends and their family and no one complained. That rain was intense. My glasses were so wet, sometimes I felt I was swimming in a pool, but it was also powerful and earthly – and cleansing.

On the weekend, Ziya went splashing in Maracas in pouring rain. I thought to myself that it would surely make her tougher in years to come. I could imagine her hiking in the forest in similar downpour, and being totally blasé, more man in calf-deep mud than man-self, ready to bring on the baptism.

Maracas is far from clean like Paria streams, but the elements of earth, wind and water were all there when we arrived, like all the goddesses, Ganga, Gaia, Durga, Oya, Yemaja and more, had started to shake and shout. Between the rain and the ocean, there was an unbelievable amount of water, the atmosphere, from the depths of the sea through the rain and into cumulonimbus miles-high, was thick with condensation, despite intermittent blue skies. Under swollen grey cloud, Zi propelled herself into the ocean like a baby turtle running for safety from the government, without a thought to the wind whipping the waves in all directions.

The first time I had overseen such a soaking, my sister was just a teenager. Now my child wasn’t yet two. Zi didn’t complain either. In fact, until she started to shiver, she was having the best time, like champion, like most children.

So there we were. Mummy, committed to the beach on the weekend, sun or rain. Ziya getting tumbled by high-tide waves. Water and wind goddesses in abundance.

Yay for a friend who held Zi’s hands and splashed with her while I stopped the spade and bucket from rapidly ebbing away. This auntie (I now think of all my friends with “Auntie” before their name, ah have it bad) then held her while I bathed and rubbed Zi down with coconut oil, right at the side of the road, just as the rain stopped and we dried off in the sun. Lucky for me, auntie was an adventurer, up for a good time in any weather.

Of course it cleared up into a beautiful afternoon though the forecast had said tropical downpour. But the beach in the rain contains some good lessons about making the best of a down-pouring situation, experiencing the earth and its elements in all their ecological diversity, and feeling warm inside from good company regardless of how shivery the cold wind makes you feel.

I would have preferred a sunny afternoon, like the weekend before when I lay at the edge of the shore with Zi asleep and breastfeeding on top of me, warm like a basking baby seal. That wasn’t to be, but still I came home proud. Come some day in the future, Zi wil be able to say, “Ay! I know rain in Maracas! I out there since I small!”, and make style like some nature-loving bad-john for whom storm is mere sprinkle and coconut oil feels like the balm for all tempestuous conditions.