“How can I say I’m lonely without saying it?” a student asked.
We had been on the island of St. John for a week for the immersion portion of English 210, a workshop course on travel writing. We were sitting in an open-air pavilion after listening to a lecture on the invasive lionfish, an aggressive nocturnal carnivore that was decimating populations of indigenous reef fish. We learned all the statistics, watched videos of algae-covered coral and oversized lionfish, saw photos of juvenile damselfish bursting from their sliced bellies. The marine biologist giving the presentation told us about the CORE foundation, how we could alert his divers to lionfish by dropping washers into the ocean with red ribbons tied to corks: “Give us a call and we’ll be by within the hour. And don’t worry about them moving. They’re very territorial.”
I had been looking forward to this lecture all week. Before the trip, I had researched the lionfish, learned how its presence had spread through the Caribbean, and how few of the local governments were equipped to deal with it. It seemed emblematic of the problems in tourist-based economies. And indicative of how a travel writer could find a niche, an approach to a place through finding a significant subject, an angle, or a theme. Now the students and I were sitting around, talking about the presentation and the task of writing up their experiences during the week.
“You can tell us you’re lonely, but it will be much more interesting if you find some way to externalize your emotions,” I said.
The student was having difficulty with the writing assignments I had given him. I proposed a variety of models based on the readings we had done during the semester. They could go on a quest like Tom Bissell’s “Looking for Judas” or engage in cultural criticism or parody like David Foster Wallace’s “Shipping Out” or Garrison Keillor’s “Take In the State Fair.” They could find a very specific audience, like Avi Davis’s vampire-based “The Undead Travel,” or write an essay about travel itself.
But many of my students wanted to write about themselves, how their own personal world collided with others in this new space, the Virgin Islands bearing once again the taint of another tourist’s presence. So this student was lonely. He had just broken up with his girlfriend. And everything—the naked trunks of palm trees, the fierce sunsets, the water lapping
the shore—reminded him of her absence.
“Remember T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative?” I asked.
“But I still want to tell people. I mean, I’m lonely. What’s wrong with just saying it?”
“It’ll have a lot more impact if you find a referent in the physical world.”
The student wanted an example. Perhaps it was Eliot’s Prufrock speaking through me, those “ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” because the image I came up with was a hermit crab. The first night in my tent cabin, I had heard rustling through the leaves under the simple wood walkways. My tent cabin was in “Iguana Alley,” so I imagined the great spiny-backed lizards foraging for grubs. But when I punched on my flashlight, I saw fist-sized spirals and red-brown claws wobbling their way to the sea: soldier crabs, the islanders called them, giant hermits in search of ever-larger shells.
“If you’re lonely,” I said, “describe your surroundings with enough care, and the emotion will emerge. Like say you’re on a cot and a singular hermit crab winds its way past you to the beach; you’ve got an image that conveys your feeling of solitude. And it’s much more powerful than if you told us outright.”
The student asked me to repeat the example to the rest of the group. This is it, he seemed to be saying—what he had been looking for this whole trip. He finally had an image, a metaphor from this place to help him communicate his emotions to an audience.
This was one of many small triumphs for me that week. It had in some ways been a difficult trip; hours of preparation had gone into it, from arranging outside lectures on postcolonial theory to preparing readings on ecotourism to teaching students how to snorkel in Wabash’s own Class of 1950 Natatorium. But not everything had gone according to plan. And it had been a hectic semester for me personally, with my third child, Inga Marie Freeze, being born days before the trip.
On St. John I saw students engaged with the environment beyond a surface level. The Maho Bay Eco-Resort —with its limited-hour cold-only-shower huts, its bourgeois granola demographic, and its low-impact buildings made of recycled materials—turned out to be the perfect petri dish for my students to explore issues of ecology, privilege, and sustainability, to confront the political and environmental forces of travel
as well as their own selves.
But nothing was more successful for me that week than seeing changes in their writing, helping them find new language and images to refigure the world.
Yet I also wondered at times whether I was helping or harming them.
On the last day, I went to Salt Pond Bay to go snorkeling. After searching the reefs for hours for my poisonous lionfish, carrying my bobbered ribbons to mark the spot, I decided to go for a walk. I needed some terra firma after all the watery discouragement. Maybe the lionfish’s absence was a positive sign that Karl’s CORE foundation program was working.
I skirted the arid beach with its cacti and dry grasses. It was a different ecosystem than the lush northern half of St. John where Maho was located. As I approached the center of the bay, what looked like a lure skimming the surface of the ocean whizzed toward me. I searched for someone reeling in a cast. Nothing. Then it did it again. I could see it more clearly now, the tiny dorsal fin of a needlefish emerging from the water until it hydroplaned, sending spritzes of water to each side. The needlefish lunged again. And again. And finally, it beached itself at my feet. Huh? I thought. Its gills opened and closed in the dry air. I nudged it back into the water.
That’s when I saw the barracuda lurking in the shallows.
I wasn’t sure what to do. The needlefish continued to beach itself after every attempt to go deeper in the water. Its fear was strong enough to make it behave irrationally—a prolonged death by desiccation on the beach was preferable to being dispatched quickly in the Barracuda’s jaws. Then there was my own resistance to the potential violence of the thing, a big fish eating a smaller fish, like all those diagrams I drew when I was a kid. Great white sharks with triangles of teeth.
Still, I kept nudging the needlefish back into the water. It zipped along, trying to find some angle that the barracuda hadn’t anticipated. After five or six suicide drives up onto the shore, its energy was lagging. The needlefish banked right, switched directions, and then in a lunge quick as you could snap your fingers, the barracuda chomped and swallowed the much smaller fish. I watched the barracuda depart, its back a silver arrow heading for deeper water. I could barely catch my breath.
