is already rising, more than what other people are saying. I hear talk
about a centimeter every certain number of years, but it seems as
though it’s more dramatic than that. You can see along here, we used
to have much more sand. Now it’s low tide, and the water is fairly close
to the edge there. It’s not just that sand has been eroded, but that the
water level has risen quite a bit. That’s the same for a lot of places
around Antigua.”
I look around the shoreline, at the sea grape trees with their big
round yellow leaves that leave a pungent sweet-and-sour flavor in your
mouth. At the century plants with the yellow and white flowers bloom-
ing at the top. At the bushy, land-growing black mangroves. At the wild
sage you mix into “fish water” in cooking your fresh-caught red snap-
per. I look, and I wonder, wistfully, what a visitor to Great Bird Island
will see in 50 years.
On our trip back, beyond Guiana Island and its surfacing green
turtles, beyond a white egret diving for crabs over a tidal pool, we pass
near the original hotel that Fuller’s grandfather constructed in 1950.
“They closed after Hurricane Luis hit in ’95,” Fuller says, “and rebuilt
just in time for Hurricane Georges in ’98. The hotel got wrecked again,
but my cousin spent a lot of money fixing it up. Last year it reopened.”
Fuller is silent for a time, steering us past exclusive Long Island
where England’s Lord Sainsbury, English author Ken Follett, and tele-
vision’s Robin Leach from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famoushave their
homes. Then Fuller offers what he has been quietly musing about. “We
had a hurricane in November as well. That’s another thing that never
happened before, hurricanes that late. That was Lenny in ’99. Luckily,
it died down just before it got to us. So we didn’t have a lot of wind, but
we had 23 inches of rain in 24 hours, the highest rainfall we ever
recorded, causing landslides all over Antigua. On the main island over
here, big pieces of hillside just dropped off.”
BARBUDA: HALF ANISLAND?
The isle of Barbuda is 27 miles north of Antigua. There is evidence the
two were joined in recent geological times, but today in some ways
Barbuda could be on a different planet. Although about two-thirds the
70 Dick Russell