(This is part of a storytelling experiment called WELCOME TO YOUR QUARTER-CAREER GAP YEAR)
The ambient noise of a metropolis can be a unnerving thing.
The choking gearshift of large commercial trucks. The honking of impatient brow-furrowed taxi cab drivers. And the general din of people shouting, walking, breathing, and knocking their heels on the cement.
It can all wear on you after a while.
So if you hear it for twelve years straight, then going to a place filled with the ambient noise of waves softly crashing can be a welcome relief.
Until it isn’t.
Until all that lack of noise pollution has you fiending for being in the general vicinity of large groups of people again.
This is the kind of mood that hits you after two and a half weeks in Antigua.
You’ve settled into a rhythm of waking up, exercising on the empty, off-season beach, spending four hours of helping your cousin, Fawnie, with her backyard organic farm, and then returning to the solitude of writing on the porch or at Malone's beach bar ten minutes from home.
But you thirst for more human activity. New relationships. Maybe even some flirting.
So you decide to take a walk into the city of St John’s, twenty-five minutes away from the rural and beachy Fort James area where your cousin lives.
The walk into town is an adventure in itself. You’ve been into town before, but you drove there, and you weren’t paying much attention to the different streets and landmarks that signal whether you’re going the right way.
Fawnie tells you to “turn right at the green house, and follow it all the way into town.” Seems easy enough. And from your passenger-seat recollection, that sounds about right.
But there are a few variables that you have to contend with. The first is that the road by the green house is a winding road that forks four or five times in such a way that you have to guess which road is the real road you need to be on. As a result, you could just as easily end up far west of the city, as you could right where you want to be. If you were in the U.S., naturally, you could whip out Google Maps and figure out where you’re going. But in Antigua, without an international data plan and a photographic memory, a general sense of direction is your only friend.
Another variable is the heat. A thirty-minute walk in 80- to 90-degree weather wouldn’t be so bad, but you decide to wear pants and a backpack loaded with a laptop and a bunch of bulky books. Easy for the first 10-minutes, and then oppressive for the next 15.
Eventually, you make it to town and look forward to settling in at your first destination, a tiny coffeeshop in the Redcliffe Quay (pronounced "key") shopping district called Cup of Wonderful. It’s air-conditioned, right by the water, and the pleasant seen-it-all owner, Teresa, is great to talk to. (You briefly stopped there with Fawnie a few days earlier.)
But the shop is closed. You curse the heavens.
(To be continued…)
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