Deep South October 1
The Uriah Butler Freeway, formerly the Princess Margaret Highway, connects the northern and southern coasts of Trinidad, and it is modern in every sense—multi-lane spaghetti bowls, intrusive billboards, and endless construction delays. It nevertheless reduces what used to be a 3-day journey over jungle hills and mosquito plains to a drive under three hours.
The “deep sout’,“ as it is called, forms the heart of the oil region, and its capital is San Fernando, Sando for short, the island’s second city, as well as the hometown of Tubal Uriah “Buzz“ Butler, who, in 1937, rose from his Baptist pulpit and preached mobilization to oilfield workers for “the heroic struggle for “British justice for British Blacks in a British colony.“ At the time, white South Africans ruthlessly managed the oilfields and had established a sort of apartheid system. Afro-Trinidadians were suffering at home and dying at work, and Butler was the man that organized them. When a cop named Charlie King tried to arrest the leader in the village of Fyzabad, near Sando, he was beaten and burned alive in petroleum. Butler was convicted of agitation and incarcerated until 1945. Yet he received a hero’s funeral in 1977, and Princess Margaret lost her highway. Meanwhile, Charlie King got a calypso song:
“Everybody’s rejoicing, how they burned Charlie King,
Everybody was glad, nobody was sad,
When they beat him and they burned him, in Fyzabad.“
The deep south ends at a western point called Icacos, at the Serpent’s Mouth of the Columbus Channel. Across the strait, the Orinoco delta of Venezuela spews sediment and muddies the sea, ultimately convincing Columbus in 1498 that a continent lay ahead, for no island could form such a mighty waterway as the Orinoco. Columbus made a bizarre attempt to impress the Arawak when he met them on the south shore of the island, banging drums and dancing like mad. The Amerindians interpreted the disturbed act as a threat of war and launched an unsuccessful arrow attack on the ships. At night, the anchors were somehow damaged, and Columbus became spooked by the natives. He quickly sailed his Eldorado expedition away from Icacos Point, and he strongly encouraged Spaniards never to return to the island of Trinity—and they barely ever did.
The sea is brown here, resembling a silty lake or, in this case, the River Ganges. Hundreds of small metal urns, ceramic crucibles, and intricately carved, meaty coconuts mingle in the lapping surf, on a sharp bed of white-calx shells. Each item once served as the final vessel of a loved one, along the water’s edge of a village called Waterloo, on the grounds of what used to be an expansive British sugar and cocoa plantation. This little town is almost entirely Hindu, descendants of East Indian indentured servants who were shipped here in the 19th century, but only after African slavery had been abolished in the 1830’s. The miserable toil and suffering under colonial rule was so great that some defiant believers erected a shrine to the Goddess of Sadness. Here was where the ashes of beloved mortals were offered to the ocean of time, as they are even today.
The estate masters were unhappy with the Hindu eyesore, so they demolished the small temple, over and over again, and jailed its builders and dispossessed their families, but the Indians persevered until finally they built one on the sea, literally, just off shore, atop a pile of rocks and shells—an ethereal maritime place, which no man could claim as his own.
More than a century later, in 1995, Temple By The Sea was recognized for national protective status. Today a modest gravel jetty connects the octagonal shrine to land. Signs remind visitors not to pick the flowers, to always dress and behave respectfully, and not to take pictures without permission. I suppress an urge to pose nude for a selfie with a Jamaica Hibiscus behind my ear and a small urn raised to my lips, British tea-pinky fully extended.
Even the gravel parking lot, as the site of the original temple, is honored by pilgrims with humble offerings, while chickens and dogs range freely among bougainvillea blossoms and royal palms from empire times. On the nicely tended lawn beyond, the old Anglican cemetery has converted to a Muslim one, for those Indo-Trinidadians who choose not to cremate their dead. Divergent yet adjacent, Hindu and Islam thereby share a parking space for their most sacred plots of earth.
If San Fernando is the heart of oil country, La Brea forms its bung. Pronounced Lab-ray, the tiny village sits on Pitch Lake, where oozing crude oil, organic mud, and flatulent volcanism have churned and simmered for millions of years, producing the finest asphalt that nature can provide. The smooth spongy texture is of superior quality and can be found on airport tarmacs, expensive driveways, and, most famously, Buckingham Palace, where Sir Walter Raleigh presented a chunky stool of the stuff to the Monarch in 1597 and named it “black gold.“
Lunch at Wally’s Smokehouse: $45 TT. A tour guide is required to navigate the mushy tar trails about the lake’s industrial site. Buoyant tree stumps centuries-old float on the pyroclastic goop, while denser rainwater trickles through crevices, and sulfurous methane bubbles. The dark brown asphalt stretches like taffy to the touch—a sticky quagmire is never more than a step away. Rusting trolleys and other mining equipment must be moved regularly across the surface, lest they sink into an oblivion of recycled brimstone.
Everything is in motion here, at the pace of a disabled snail, including roads and buildings. Paved streets undulate and splinter. The old concrete water house used to sit at the top of a mound some thirty feet away. Decades later, it still has not found its angle of repose, as one corner of the foundation is steadily swallowed by viscous soup.
Cyril stands beneath the vast shade of the largest mango tree I have ever seen, with a knotted trunk maybe eight feet across. He says it’s the oldest tree in Trinidad, and, by the look of his age spots, he should know. Cyril is a grizzled Rasta-man with a giant Tam and a tangled history in La Brea. In 1998, he found a local man stuck up to his knees in pitch while picking cashews. The good samaritan ran for help. Within an hour, the tar was up to the harvester’s neck, but they managed to pull him free, bathe him in kerosine, and take him to hospital. Cyril still keeps a picture of the guy, covered in glistening tarmacadam, to commemorate the “blessing“ that saved his life.
“God is a little man, like me and you,“ he says, “not a big man, not all full of himself. He don’t look like much, but he’s pow-a.“
Cyril is happy to provide guidance for navigating the trails of life in this treacherous world. He shows me treasures from a lifetime on his strange lake: polished, swirling specimens of La Brea tar, resembling licorice rope; turtle shells and bones from the millennia; a two-hundred year-old wine bottle filled to the brim with the special stone; and a 1977 reggae record actually made of the stuff. Cyril swears it still plays like vinyl, and he sways as if he is listening to it. He then advises me to eat more green figs, for the protein value and for increased virility, which he estimates I could use, “‘specially with the pretty missies. And don’t forget to tank God. Ev’rydey. He’s a little man, rememba, just like me.“ And as black as the pitch.