Black Point Settlement - The Garden of Eden

So Monday morning we decided to go ashore again to check out the rest of the town and visit Willie Rolle's sculpture garden. It was a little after 9 am and daily life in the settlement was in full swing -- one of the main industries here is straw work so we saw lots of women sitting in their front yards in the shade braiding straw. Everyone we saw along the way had a friendly "good morning" and a smile for us. Willie met up with us at his sculpture garden, which he calls "The Garden of Eden", and apparently we were the first tourists to arrive. It is tough to describe the garden without photos, we will load them when we can. But I will try to give you an idea. Willie goes into the bush here and sees shapes in the twisted dead wood that litters the forest floor. He brings these back to his front yard and puts them together to make sculptures from his imagination. There were probably more than 100 sculptures, ranging in size from 2 feet high to 7 feet, and Willie walked us through his interpretation of each. There was an eagle, a couple dolphins, a mermaid, a woman with one leg and no head, a scorpion, etc. With each one you had to use your imagination, if Willie wasn't there to explain it you probably would've just thought that it was a twisted piece of wood. It was kind of like looking at shapes in the clouds; some of his sculptures it was obvious what they were supposed to be once he told you while others were more of a stretch. We could "see" his vision for most of the pieces but some of them were a little more prone to interpretation. Kevin smirked that there were one too many "snakes" which he said wouldn't be too difficult to "sculpt" since long sticks of wood resemble snakes anyway. But here in the Bahamas I imagine they don't have a National Endowment of the Arts, and Willie's art (whether real art or just for the tourist crowd) is a unique diversion. So we "endowed" him with a small tip for showing us around, I imagine he makes much of his living this way.

The best part of the tour was when he took us to his backyard and showed us his vegetable and fruit garden, which was amazing. His house is small and set back from the road. It is brightly painted but has no running water inside. They have a spigot outside connected to a PVC pipe that runs along the road supplying water to all the residents. The house sits on a good-size plot of land, but you can't really call it land since the whole yard is a limestone rock littered with holes like a slice of swiss cheese. The holes might be a few inches in diameter all the way up to 10 feet wide and five feet deep. It is in these holes that enough soil and moisture collects so that things will grow. It's kind of like growing crops in moon craters. He had a little bit of everything: native plants like papaya, tamarind, guava, mango, banana, pigeon peas, and cassava root grew alongside carrots, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, corn, okra, aloe, and even a cactus. Each plant eked out its living, most of them surviving without irrigation. In the smaller limestone craters only one or maybe two plants grew, while in the larger ones Willie would have one or two trees or several rows of different vegetable plants. I enjoyed it because he stopped at each plant told you what it was, what it was used for, and how to tell when it was ripe. So now I will know guava vs. papaya when I see it. The tour of the sculptures and the garden took two hours and by lunchtime we were back on the boat and off to White Point anchorage a few miles south.

Another Manta catamaran, "Paragon", decided to come with us down to White Point and we had them aboard for drinks at sunset. We've been kind of following each other since Staniel Cay. We gave them a tour of our boat and they noted the differences between their boat (a newer model) and ours. It is like seeing someone whose house has the same floorplan as yours -- everyone does something different with decor and color scheme to make it their own. We loaned them our SSB manual (they have one but no manual and they have a photocopier on board so they wanted to copy ours) and they brought us some fresh baked bread that they bought in Black Point. A pretty fair trade I would say. The anchorage here is extremely rolly though so I think we will just stay here one night and then retrieve our manual and head on further south.

Where we are:
Lat: N 24 01.574'
Long: W 76 21.648'