Yellow Submarine comes to St. John
by Gerald Singer SeeStJohn.com
Back in January of 1995, I was returning from an agricultural fair on Jost Van Dyke and pulling into the Cruz Bay Harbor, and came alongside what could best be described a little yellow submarine, totally enclosed and very low to the water, with the exception of a small covered cockpit that rising to about three feet above the waterline with plexiglass portholes and an overhead hatch. Several flags flew from two short masts and on the hull, in large red lettering was the name “Seiko da Grindelwald.”

Standing up in the cockpit was an Asian looking man, with a goatee, wearing a blue woolen watch cap and smoking a pipe.

Now St. John is a place where you meet a whole lot of interesting people, and this guy was bound to be one of them. My curiosity piqued, I pulled alongside, greeting him and asked where he came from.

“Switzerland,” he answered.

Now that certainly was interesting. I presented him with a stalk of sugar cane and some of the native fruits I had bought at the Jost Van Dyke and we arranged to meet later on at Chilly Billy’s so he could tell me his story.

The Story
Originally from Japan, he worked for the Canon Corporation, a job that enabled him to travel to many places in the world. On a trip to Switzerland, he fell in love and married a Swiss woman who own and managed a hotel in Grindelwald in the Swiss Alps. It was a famous hotel that had been around since 1885, but was starting to fall into a state of decline. Together they put the hotel back on track, fixing it up and implementing a marketing plan that brought many guests from Japan.

Seiko da Grindelwald
His name was Seiko Nakajima, but upon adopting and falling in love with the town of Grindelwald as his home he changed it to Seiko da Grindelwald. Seiko now knows more about the history, culture, back roads and trail of Grindelwald than most of its native inhabitants. This is something I could relate to having adopted St. John as my home and falling in love with it.

Anyway, sometime early in 1994, Seiko saw the movie Yentl with Barbara Streisand and was inspired by the line “nothing is impossible.” Sometime after pondering this thought, Seiko, 61 years old at the time, came upon the idea of a “voyage of personal challenge and fulfillment.”

Seiko designed an ocean going, one of a kind, one man motor boat. He made models and tested them in his bathtub. He obtained sponsorship from the Tohatsu Outboard Company and within five months had built the boat which he planned to sail from Basel, Switzerland to Miami Florida for the Miami Boat show and then on to New York City and then back to Switzerland.

The Boat
The boat Seiko constructed holds one person, is 21 feet in length, with a five foot beam and a two foot draft, weighing 440 pounds empty and 1100 pounds fully loaded. Powered by a 2.5 horsepower Tohatsu outboard engine, it has a fuel capacity of 159 gallons of gasoline. He calculated that it would burn 7.4 gallons of fuel per day enabling him to travel 140 nautical miles per day with a total range of from 2,100 to 3,000 miles. The boat is watertight with the hatches closed and self righting in the event that it would capsize in rough seas.

There were three 2.5 horsepower outboards, one that only operated in forward gear, mounted inside the cabin was for ocean going. The second, mounted externally was for navigating within harbors and a third was stowed away as a spare, just in case.

Navigation was accomplished with a hand held GPS, some charts, a compass and an auto piolot. Carried aboard were some tools and spare parts, personal effects, food and water. The food consisted of a trail mix of dried fruits, grains and nuts, onions, apples and canned milk, which would be supplemented from time to time with raw fish he hoped to catch while underway.

He carried no books, no music and no VHS radio.

The Journey
Seiko launched the “Seiko da Grindelwald” in the Rhone River in Basel Switzerland on September 10, 1994 and before completing the first mile he had crashed into a bridge, scarring the bow of the boat. The damage was cosmetic and undaunted Seiko continued down the Rhone towards France and the Mediterranean Sea, then stopping at Corsica, Ibiza and Gibralta. Passing into the Atlantic, his next landfall was the Canary Islands and then on to Cape Verde where he met his wife and son.

Swiss Bureaucracy
Seiko’s journey was beginning to receive some publicity not only through the efforts of the Tohatsu Company, but also through the nature of the voyage itself.

It seems that someone at the Swiss Government, reading about the journey in a newspaper, realized that the nature of the registration and licensing of the “Seiko da Grindelwald” only permitted its use in inland waters. The small size of the vessel prevented it from having ocean going status. Switzerland is a place where everything is on time and everything goes by the book, so this departure from the norm needed to be rectified.

So it was that government officials got in touch with Seiko’s wife to inform her husband that due to these regulations Seiko would not be permittted to fly the Swiss flag and, furthermore, that if he attempted to sail the improperly registered vessel back to Switzerland, he would be refused entry.

Notwithstanding, Seiko was also informed that upon the successful completion of the voyage that government would be proud to display the “Seiko da Grindlewald” at the Swiss National Museum of Transportation in Lucerne, where it would join an exhibition of “firsts.”

Seiko complied. He took down the Swiss flag, changed his plans to sail back to Switzerland opting instead to ship the boat on a cargo vessel and continued on into the open Atlantic.

Spiritual Journey
According to Seiko, the trans-Atlantic crossing turned out to be a spiritual journey as well as a physical one, full of exciting and insightful discoveries. Never having a great fear of death, he had assumed that his life was his own, but during one particularly frightening storm at sea, he was driven to reflect on the very real possibility of his own death, he realized this not to be entirely true. His life also belonged to those who loved him, especially his wife and son, who would be sad if he were gone. His life belonged to them also. The enormity of the ocean, his solitude and the absence of distractions led him to reflect on the existence of God and the wonder of life.

“The journey is my life,” said Seiko.

On to St. John
Seiko’s first stop after crossing the Atlantic was the island of Barbados. From there he headed up the island chain and on to St. John, which would be his last Caribbean port of call.

It was on St. John that Seiko provisioned the “Seiko da Grindelwald, topped off the gas tank, took care of customs formalities and prepared for the voyage across the Caribbean to Miami.

I offered to take him around St. John, before he continued on his way.

Seiko accepted the offer and we took a boat ride around the island on my boat at the time, which was quite a bit faster than Seiko’s vessel. We also drove around the island and had lunch at Miss Lucy’s restaurant in Coral Bay on the east end of St. John.

We hiked down to Reef Bay Trail to stopping at the Petroglyphs, the ruins of the sugar works and the Par Force estate house before walking back up again.

Miami, Annapolis and New York City
In letters and newspaper accounts, I was able to follow Seiko’s journey. He arrived in Miami and attended the boat show. From there he motored up the inland waterway to Annapolis Maryland, from where he went to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC in order to see the airplane flown by Charles Lindbergh in the first solo flight across the Atlantic.

Seiko reached New York City in May of 1995, eight months after leaving Basel.

In a letter I received from Seiko in April of 1996 he wrote, “From New York my boat  was shipped back to Europe and presented at the Dussledorf and Zurich boat shows. According to my wish it has now gone to the Swiss National Museum of Transportation in Lucerne where it will remain for the next thousand years, I hope!!!”

Back in Switzerland, Seiko wrote a book about his journey, which unfortunately I couldn’t read because it was written in Japanese.

Last Communication
In a letter I received from Seiko in December of 1997, Seiko oulined his plans for a new adventure: “…in two years time (age 65) I would like to go somewhere where there are no roads. Perhaps to Canada. I hope that I can find a good place which is far from any village…to be alone and to be by myself without any information…”

The following is an account of a blog reader’s experience of coming to St. John in the late 1990s. He promises to have more installments soon:

From the big city to St. John
When I was in my early 20s, I was living in down town Manhattan. A friend of mine from high school had opened up a bar. It wasn’t very much to look at, very simple in fact, pool table, juke box, some tables scattered about. Pretty much your typical dive bar, cheap drinks, fun bartenders and good music.

Well for the first couple of months it was pretty much empty. Maybe some people from the surrounding neighborhood would stop in for a beer or a quick game of pinball and that would be it.

Then as if out of nowhere some how, this dark, little nothing bar became the ”place to be” and there was now a line outside and it went down the block. Besides the three bouncers, it even had its own beat cop permanently placed out front. Inside on any given night you could find various examples of New York City’s glitterati: movie stars, television stars, sports stars, supermodels, famous and up and coming authors, performance artists and drag queens. Even the people you didn’t recognize seemed to be “somebody.” Whether they were fashion designers or make up artists or future dot com multimillionaires, they all seemed to gather at this no frills watering hole. I imagine it was similar in many ways to studio 54 in the seventies.

The club was soon listed in all these, “where to go and what to do in New York” publications and before I knew it, there were people from the hinterlands of the United States, Europe and beyond were lining up to get inside. We had become a “must do” stop on the tourist trail.

Things continued like that for several years. Very long story made very short, the lifestyle became all too much for me. I was up all night and sleeping all day, spending my money as fast as it came in and suffering many of the other nasty side effects that go along with this type of career choice. After a while, I had had enough. I decided I needed to quit, or at the very least, take a long vacation.

I got rid of my two bedroom New York City apartment, which I had personally renovated and went to St. John with really no plan in mind.

Arriving on St. John, I moved into what was described as an eco tent, which was basically a small wood framed structure that was screened in to keep out the hordes of mosquitos. There it sat in the middle of a lush dense beautiful tropical, garden, set amongst the soursop trees and bird peppers. There was an outdoor cold water shower and an outdoor composting toilet. I had no vehicle, no television, no computer, no radio and no phone, cell or otherwise. There was a light bulb, however, and I had lots of books.

It was about a two mile walk to town, half of which were on small trails through the brush, and if you chose to take that walk on a moonless night you had best bring a flashlight just to see what little path there was. More than one night I had over stayed my daylight welcome only to stumble back to my glorified tree house in the bush, blind as a bat all, alone, no sidewalks, no streetlights, no fabulous New Yorkers cheering on my every move, just the occasional creepy mongoose glaring at me with is beady eyes. as if it were thinking “what on earth are you doing here?”

When I finally made it back home to my eco cottage, I would douse my self with the highest amount of deet insect repellent that was legal. I would read and sometimes sketch by the 60 watt bare bulb. Outside you could here the insects hitting the screen walls in a desperate attempt to get inside. There was blood in that tent and they knew it.

I would finally fall asleep at around 9.30, which was the time I would be normally be getting into the shower to go to work and I would wake up at the crack of dawn, which was the time I would normally be getting home.

There was no Starbucks coffee, no New York Times, just some homemade bush tea and the local weekly newspaper that was as about as informative and exciting as a high school newspaper in a make believe high school.

My mind clearing, chakra aligning, Buddhist monk retreat was starting to feel like a visitors pass to Guantanamo Bay…

Gerald Singer www.SeeStJohn.com
Like I was saying yesterday, St. John is really a beautiful place to be. The above photo was taken yesterday afternoon from my deck overlooking Chocolate Hole Harbor.

Winter is here. On St. John the change of seasons is subtle. It’s definitely cooler than during the summer and the sultry days of the hurricane season, when often there is hardly a breeze. No more need for air conditioning, but no need for sweaters either.

The water is colder also. Probably something that visiting tourists wouldn’t notice, but for native St. Johnians and long time residents whose “blood has thinned,” the water seems cold and those that like to “take a soak” in the late afternoon, don’t stay in the water nearly as long as they would during the summer.

The trade winds are stronger than any other time of year, as the jet stream dips to the south. We call these brisk winds the Christmas Winds, and they’ve been piping up over this last week. Whitecaps dominate even inland waters and here on St. John people say, “the sheep are in the meadow,” when describing the rough state of the usually more tranquil Caribbean and Atlantic waters.

Also during this last week, we’ve experienced ground seas, large swells generated from North Atlantic storms and low pressure systems, that come ashore on the north side of St. John and break on the exposed coastlines. Not so great for swimming, but great for surfers, who head out to the surfing beaches of Tortola and St. Thomas.

(For those of you who would prefer gentler seas, I suggest visiting some of our south shore beaches like Lameshur and Salt Pond Bays.)

Also during the winter, bird watchers can find species that come down from the north and pass the winter on St. John and people watchers can find a species of human beings called snowbirds doing the same thing.

During the slow months of the Hurricane Season, mid July to mid November, I seem to know just about everyone I see in Cruz Bay. The restaurants and bars, the ones that remain open are often nearly empty and town is quiet. As the Chritmas and New Years season approaches, Cruz Bay and St. John are transformed. Town is bustling with (comparatively) well dressed tourists. Restaurants are full, and excitment is in the air.

Another season, another day in Paradise – St. John US Virgin Islands.

One of the best things about living on St. John, and there are many “best things” is being surrounded by beauty. Whether it be the almost unbelievable vistas from overlooks and beaches or the views of the interior mountain valleys, the tropical forests or just looking abut while walking down just about any road, path or trail.

Today, walking through our property in the Chocolate Hole, Great Cruz Bay area of St. John, I noticed that many of our orchids were in bloom. I took some photos, which I’d like to share:

This one is special. I believe it’s the only native orchid on St. John. They grow and thrive in the most inhospitable environments. For example, at the end of a windswept point, exposed to the winds and sun.

Here, on the southwest side of St. John, the conditions are similar, we are a dry part of the island and only the heartiest of species survive without the helping hand of human beings, drip irrigation, gardners and fertilizers.

But if you walk up the Great Sunset Road that runs high up the hill overlooking Chocolate Hole Harbor, you will see dozens of these orchids wherever the land has been left in its natural state.

Orchids – St. John Virgin Islands

This one is not an orchid. It’s a species of Night Blooming Cerius called Lady of the Night. It produced a small fruit (too small to eat really) and blooms at night like its cousins.

I’m new to the blog writing game, so I just discovered one of its benefits. It focuses you on a subject. Specifically in this case it focused me on the St. John Beach Guide and the relationship with the National Park, which has been stormy, starting with that ridiculous banning of the first edition.

The thing is that I wrote in the blog that subsequent editions of the St. John Beach Guide have been approved by the Park Officials and that the book was for sale at the St. John National Park Visitors Center. Well, I have to take that back.

The St. John Beach Guide was updated and reprinted in early 2006. At that time I submitted the book for approval to be sold by the National Park. In January it will be three years since I made that first request and the book has still not been approved.

Unlike the first edition, there was no official reason given for the lack of approval. All I’ve been told is that the approval process has not been completed and that it takes time.

But come on – three years! In my experience with other books sold at the park, including St. John Off the Beaten Track and Tales of St. John and the Caribbean, the approval process was completed in about one month.

The newest St. John Beach Guide is a combination coffee table book and guide book, which will certainly by helpful for visitors to the island as well as providing a great keepsake of their visit and one of the only ways of conveying to friends and family the beauty of the St. John experience. I promise that there’s nothing controversial printed anywhere in the book, not even any half naked ladies or good-natured donkeys.

We now have six titles, St. John Beach Guide, St. John Off the Beaten Track, Tales of St. John and the Caribbean, St. Thomas, Vieques and the translation of the Pedro Juan Soto Novel USMAIL. Sales are brisk and we have many outlets so a whole lot of attention has not been given to the approval of the  St. John Beach Guide‘s by the park.

I can’t say I know what’s happening, only that writing about the first St. John Beach Guide jogged my memory about the situation of the newest edition and I intend to follow it up to see if I get some kind of definitive answer, which I’ll share with the blog readers.

So come on National Park. Please approve the St. John Beach Guide.

Yesterday’s post dealt with how and why  the first edition of The St. John Beach Guide was banned by the St. John National Park in part for printing an illustration of non-threatening donkeys grazing on a field on St. John. This at a time when the park wanted to portrait a negative attitude about donkeys, which were proliferating to such an extent as to become  an environmental problem.

The following which appeared on the Cinnamon Bay bulletin board takes it to the evil nature of the beasts: “(they) will kick and bite without warning…. forcing their way into tents, eating campers food, travelers checks and even air line tickets…”

Andy Rutnik’s Donkey Story
The park’s opinion of donkeys was shared by at least one of my friends on St. John, the former Commissioner of Licensing and Consumer Affairs, Andy Rutnik, who was operating a nursery at that time that he told me this story:

“They’re spiteful creatures,” Andy told me. “They’re demons, devils and evil spirits. They hate us.”

And Andy went on to tell me this story:

Guavaberry Farms, Andy’s nursery, was and still is a place of beauty. And Andy loved his plants. He had this one mango tree, still small, but he had grafted several of his most favorite varieties to various branches of the same tree, so that this one tree would eventually bear four or five different mango species, one more delicious, sweet, juicy and less stringy than the next.

One day Andy’s employee, Robert, called, “Andy, come quick, There’s that donkey coming.”

Now donkeys can be very destructive to plants and they are certainly not welcome visitors, but this one in particular had caused a lot of havoc in the past, knocking over plants and biting off branches, flowers and fruits.

Andy ran to the scene, arriving too late to frighten off the donkey, who had stripped a prize plant down to the bark and then running away before Andy could get there.

The very next day Robert cried out, “Andy, he’s here again!”

Andy sped off to the nursery. There was the donkey. He had almost all of the branches of Andy’s small prized multi mango tree in his mouth. Andy yelled for the creature to get away.

The donkey stopped. He turned to Andy, his mouth full of devastated mango branches. He turned toward Andy and defiantly and forcefully spit the devastated mango branches on the ground, then he picked up his head, looked Andy right in the eye and said in perfect English, “F–k you, Andy!”

Banned Beach Guide
As discussed in our previous post, the first edition of The St. John Beach Guide was banned by the National Park on St. John. The reason for the banning was that someone in power at the St. John National Park found fault with two illustrations in the book.

(note subsequent editions of the St. John Beach Guide have not suffered the same fate, and the latest one can be found for sale at the National Park Visitors Center in Cruz Bay.)

St. John Beach Guide - First Edition

St. John Beach Guide - Second Edition

St. John Beach Guide -Third and Latest Edition

Promoting Nudity

The first one was the drawing of a young lady sunbathing on the beach. She had apparently taken off the top of her bikini and as she raises (back turned) from her beach blanket, she sees a pelican flying off with the top half of her swimsuit.

Possibly, because nudity at Salomon had been an recent issue, someone took a hard line and found the whimsical illustration to be “promoting nudity.”

The Offending Donkeys
The other offending illustration is of two donkeys in a field and to understand how this benign picture could be problematic we will need to provide some background information.

At the time of the writing of the St. John Beach Guide first edition (1994), the National Park was taking an aggressive stand about the many donkeys that were roaming about St. John. The park ‘s position was that Donkeys were a non-native species and their proliferation in the wild would be destructive to the environment and dangerous to humans.

Others  took the position that donkeys have been around for a long time, that they are cute and had formed part of the cultural landscape of St. John, pointing to how often tourists take their pictures and express such fondness for the creatures.

When there was talk about the “evil park” reducing the numbers of donkeys by shooting them, “donkey lovers” expressed an emphatic opposing view.

A war of letters to the editors and coconut telegraph messages over the donkey issue began to be commonplace.

Bad Donkeys
As an example of “Donkey Bad Press, the folowing was posted on the bulletin board at the Cinnamon Bay Campground:

“Donkeys”
“Many visitors call them cute. Others refer to them as a curiosity. By the end of their stay some visitors have vowed never to return because of them. As charming as they may seem and as approachable as they are, the donkeys, which roam Cinnamon Bay Campground, are a nuisance and a safety hazard. At certain times of the year donkeys become very aggressive and will kick and bite without warning. Other problems include forcing their way into tents, eating campers food, travelers checks and even air line tickets, rummaging through trash cans causing sanitary problems and unsightly messes and damaging campground property….”

The St. John Beach Guide Takes the Heat
So into the mix out comes The St. John Beach Guide and instead of an image of snarling donkey holding up tourists on the side of the road demanding food, money and airline tickets, we have those innocuous looking animals minding their own business without revealing a clue as to the evil that possibly lurks deep in their hearts.

Was Gerald Singer making a statement about Donkeys?

For the record, I honestly never thought about the implications of the illustrations, believing them to have no political implications whatsoever.

Newspaper Article written about The St. John Beach Guide controversy

First Edition St. John Beach Guide
The first edition of The St. John Beach Guide written by (the self proclaimed) “the world’s foremost authority on St. John’s beaches,” me, Gerald Singer and illustrated by my good friend and well known St. John artist, Les Anderson was published in 1994.

The St. John Beach Guide was a cute, informal little book that gave directions and descriptions and commented upon “all the beaches on St. John.” I believe I counted 52 of them.

Action Notes
The book even had what I called “action notes,” which were suggestions for beach workouts and athletic challenges. For example, the “Action Note” for Klein Bay was, “Swim along the shoreline from Klein Bay to the sandy beach at Ditleff Bay. The world’s record is 13:30. (Actually set by Jen Cambell who set all kinds of personal records and who beat me in a race up the Reef Bay Trail, and I did say “up,” and, did I mention that she was carrying her young son in a backpack, and that I was determined not to let her beat me. Well, as my friend, Foxy, says, “Such is Life.”)

Controversy
The one thing I never suspected, though, was that The St. John Beach Guide would be controversial. But it turned out to be, so much so that it was banned by the Virgin Islands National Park.

How did this happen?

Beach Guide Banned by National Park
There were two issues, and neither one of them had to do with the text, the controversy centered around two of Les Anderson’s illustrations. Now those of you who know Les are probably thinking, “sexy ladies sans clothing.” Close, but no cigar.

First, some background. For many years, the beach at Salomon Bay was informally proclaimed a “nude beach,” and that it became. Because, I imagine, of its relative inaccessibility and the fact that there are plenty of other beach choices that those offended by nudity might choose and possibly because there were no federal statutes prohibiting nudity, the clothing optional status of Salomon Beach was tolerated.

But beginning around the time of the writing of The St. John Beach Guide, the Virgin Islands National Park started to step up their enforcement of Virgin Islands territorial laws prohibiting nudity.

In writing a guide to the beaches of St. John, I needed to decide how I was going to treat the issue of nudity. Before going on, I consulted with Chief Ranger, Harry Daniel, who was in charge of law enforcement for the National Park. He told me that he would prefer that I didn’t mention nudity at all. And I didn’t. I did, however, mention that “the world record running from Salomon Beach to the parking lot is one minute and 42 seconds.”

Unfortunately, the Les Anderson illustration that appeared following the Salomon Bay chapter was viewed by park officials as “promoting nudity.”

The result was the banning of The St. John Beach Guide in the National Park. (Note: The misunderstandings have been straightened out and both subsequent editions of The St. John Beach Guide are available and for sale at the Virgin Islands National Park Visitors Center.

Stay tuned to learn what was the second controversial illustration…

Sandy Cay has always been one of my  favorite destinations in the BVI. It’s this picture-perfect icon of the deserted Caribbean Island. The white sand beach, the palm trees, the view – it’s no wonder that Sandy Cay has been featured in so many commercials and photo shoots.

The above photo is me in one of those photo shoots. A team of photographers were shooting in the Virgin Islands and had hired me to take them to Sandy Cay for a shoot. At the time, I needed some photos for my brochure for my boat charter business, so we traded services.

The male model didn’t show up. The shoot was for a  “mature” couple on the beach. Now “mature” means “old” and old in that world means over 35. The qualification for the male model was simple – over 35 and “no paunch.” Luckily I fit the bill and I was asked to fill in for the absent model.

It wasn’t as easy as I thought. I looked nervous, I was nervous, I was walking funny. The “mature” female model helped me out and eventually, I kind of got the hang of it. Let me tell you though, I had a lot of fun!

About Sandy Cay
Sandy Cay is a six-acre island located just east of Jost Van Dyke. At one time the island was owned by  Laurance S. Rockefeller, who kept it as a sort of private botanical garden. For many years, Nippy from Jost Van Dyke had the enviable job as caretaker of the island. Shortly before his death, Rockefeller donated Sandy Cay to the BVI and the island is now a nature preserve.

There is a nature trail that encircles the island from which you can enjoy dramatic views. The trail is relatively easy and the walk arount the entire island can be completed in about 20 minutes.

The following true story is an excerpt from our book, “Vieques, A Photographically Illustrated Guide to the Island, Its History and Its Culture,” by Gerald Singer

As far as I know, this is the only written documentation of this wonderful  story in existence.

The story was obtained by interviews with Maria Velásquez, the wife of Carmelo Felix and Charlie Connelly and Myrna Pagán, the editors of the “Vieques Times.”

The Bees of Monte Carmelo

During the 1940s and 1950s, the US Navy expropriated three quarters of the privately held lands on Vieques. They fenced off this land and used it for an ammunition dump on the west side of the island and for a bombing range on the east. In addition, they claimed ownership to large tracts of land adjacent to these fences that were unused and unmarked. The exact limits and boundaries of these parcels, which the Navy called buffer zones, were ambiguous.

People living in crowded resettlement camps began to build homes, unopposed by the Navy or anyone else, on these spacious empty fields. Such was the case of a tract of land today known as Monte Carmelo.

Carmelo Felix, his wife Maria Velásquez and their family decided to build a home on top of a hill just to the west of the Navy range.

They cut a mile-long rugged road up the steep hill, brought in construction materials as best they could and made do without normal government supplied facilities such as water or electricity. They raised their family, planted trees and a garden, kept animals and cultivated honeybees.

There the family lived for several years undisturbed, until one day four Federal Marshals arrived from San Juan. They had come to Vieques to evict the Carmelos, claiming that they were trespassing on what was claimed to be Navy land.

Now in San Juan an eviction goes like this: The Marshals arrive, serve the evictees with papers from the court, and if they don’t leave on their own accord, the Marshals will remove all their personal effects from the residence and deposit them at the nearest public area, usually the street in front of the house. The residents will then be forced from the premises and they will have to scramble to take care of their belongings.

But the Marshals found a different situation when they came to the home of Carmelo and Maria.

The family refused to move out of their home, claiming that the Navy had no right to the land, hadn’t identified it and that there were no signs, fences or other indications that the land upon which their humble house sat belonged to the United States Navy.

As was mentioned before, the Felix home was at the end of a very rough mile-long dirt road beginning at the public highway below. The Navy was claiming that all land east of the highway was theirs, so that would make the nearest public area some distance from the house. It would be impossible for the four Marshals, without a proper vehicle, to effect the eviction in the usual way, that is, they couldn’t carry all the stuff on foot, down the hill by themselves.
So the Marshals served the papers, got into their vehicle and went down the road to the Navy headquarters to explain the situation.

Meanwhile, the community at large became aware of the Felix family’s problem and friends, family and supporters began to arrive at the Felix home by the carload.

Back at Navy headquarters, Navy brass recruited a group of five enlisted men, who apparently were in the middle of a basketball game, to help the Marshals with the eviction. They also put at the disposal of the Marshals a flatbed truck with side panels and a smaller panel truck. In addition, telephone calls were made to Roosevelt Roads Navy Base in Ceiba, to the US Marshals’ headquarters in San Juan and to the Vieques Police Department.

When all the pieces were in place, the four original federal Marshals, armed and in uniform, joined by a higher up from the Marshals’ Office and the Judge Advocate General (JAG) from Roosevelt Roads in San Juan both wearing suits and ties and the five unarmed enlisted men wearing their basketball shorts and T-shirts, made their way up to the top of Monte Carmelo with the two vehicles.

They were jeered by the crowd that had gathered and was continuing to gather around the Felix home.
The Vieques Police Department, to their great relief, citing lack of jurisdiction on what was now said to be federal property, refused to participate in the eviction.

The Marshals came to the door once again, read their papers demanding that the Felixes leave the premises, and upon receiving a negative response from Carmelo, entered the home. Inside were four generations of the Felix family, from great grandmothers to kids to babes in arms.

The Marshals and Navy men started loading up the family’s belongings bringing them to the truck parked outside, where they were booed and insulted by the crowd. After the heavy stuff like the furniture that Maria had just bought and hadn’t paid for yet was loaded, the Navy team loaded smaller items onto bed sheets and carried them to the truck all the while trying to ignore the tears of the women and children and the consternation of the grandparents and the family.

The panel truck could be seen filling up with chairs and tables, baby cribs and beds, lamps and kitchen stuff, Bibles, books and the new set of encyclopedias that Maria had also just bought and hadn’t yet paid for.

At some point, someone, no one knows who or at least no one is telling, possibly one of the children, brought two boxes of bees into the house. A box of bees contains one total beehive with approximately 35,000 bees. The boxes are meant to be handled gently so as not to upset the bees.

Through signals, through communications in Spanish, a language that the Marshals did not readily understand and through just a general cultural knowledge of bees and boxes of bees, the Viequenses quietly and without a fuss left the house and went outdoors.

One of the Navy enlisted men in his shorts and T-shirt hefted up one of the boxes and threw it to the next man in line who passed it to the third man. Then the second box was picked up and unceremoniously thrown. The bees did not react for the first 30 or so seconds, but then they did. Seventy thousand angry bees swarmed the Navy men who ran for the door and the road swatting at the bees that were stinging them as they ran. The Viequenses remained calm and stayed still knowing that bees rarely sting you if you remain motionless.

At this juncture, the Chief Marshal in the suit decided it was time to call it a day and bring the trucks and the accumulated stuff down the hill. The flatbed was parked nose to nose with the panel truck and needed to be backed up before being able to access the driveway. As he ordered his men to get into the truck and take it away, Carmelo jumped under the rear wheels of the truck and started screaming that they would have to run him over and kill him before he would allow them to drive away carrying his family’s belongings.

In the midst of all this confusion, jeering crowds, swarming bees chasing Navy sailors, and Carmelo screaming like a madman, someone noticed that smoke was coming out of the panel truck. It was on fire. (How the fire started or who started it is not known. A video tape taken by one of the bystanders, however, shows one of the men in suits lighting a cigarette and then entering the panel truck just minutes before the fire started.)

Carmelo came out from under the wheels and shouted to the Marshals to move the flatbed away from the panel truck before it too caught fire. “No one touches that truck,” was the response and within minutes it too went up in a blaze of fire and smoke that could be seen from almost all over the island.

More people came to see what was happening. The Navy officer radioed for help and soon a Navy SWAT team armed with automatic weapons came up to Monte Carmelo to escort the Marshals and Navy men back to the base.

The Marshals declared the eviction to be completed and order restored.

The Felixes returned to their home, and with the help of friends, family and neighbors they were able to get back on their feet. Carmelo and Maria, their kids and their grandkids live to this day, where the huge Puerto Rican flag flies, on the summit of what is now called Monte Carmelo.