Island Tour

      Last week's blogs included highlights of my vacation in Martinique – actually I took two trips there, each at the end of a cold Buffalo winter – 1979 and 1980. The stories mentioned earlier took place on that first trip.

       The second year I had two room-mates, one was a woman about my age from Canada, I think her name was Daphne, and the other was a younger woman, probably no more than 20 if that old, from the States who would get up at sunrise to go to the regular, not-nude beach, and she would lie there all day sunbathing topless! How revealing is that of me to admit that is all I remember about her after all these years? We all did our own thing and didn't really hang out together.

       I recklessly managed to get incredibly sunburned my second day of my second trip to Martinique, and after that I spent most of my time sitting in the shade and reading – I had taken four books with me and was finished with them in four days! The main lobby had a library, that is, books on shelves behind the desk where the tour guide sat, that we could borrow – but when I got up the courage to go take a look, I instead signed up for a bus tour of the island!

       The highlights I recall of the tour include the hurricane damage that occurred a few months earlier – trees down, buildings in need of repair. There were pineapple farms – awesome – but the United States gets all its pineapples from Hawaii, and Martinique has to sell its crops elsewhere. Our visit to the rain-forest was timed such that we would be there when the sunshine to rain ratio for the day would be optimal – and the nature was truly beautiful.

       The place that has stuck with me the longest however, was the original capital city and its volcanic Mount Pele. When Pele erupted one day in the early 1900's – the mayor did not evacuate the people because it was election day, and when it was over, there was nothing left of the town - even the bricks of the buildings had disintegrated from the heat of the volcano, and the only human survivor was a prisoner in an underground cell!

       I remember a postcard I sent to my lab at Roswell - the job I was at Martinique on vacation from – the picture on the card was of fishermen on the shore with a huge net – snaring fish in the net and pulling them in from the water. In the background was Mount Pele looking as hungry as Vaal in a familiar Star Trek episode. I likened the postcard picture to life in the lab – the techs throwing our nets out every day hoping to pull in good data to feed to the hungry mountain of a boss researcher every afternoon. It was not a perfect parallel, but the boss seemed mildly amused by it anyway.

       Proof that I needed a vacation.

       But the sunburn I got on that vacation? oh I'll be paying for it some day – I know I will because absolutely everyone, total strangers included, told me so!

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