Everything here-from the starfish, the mangroves, even the island’s shape-makes me thing of limbs: fingers, toes, legs, arms, branches, roots, etc. And I seem to have lost my shoes. Cancún and Isla Mujeres linger only vaguely in my mind; all my attention now surrounds my feet. The thick padded soles of the locals here have inspired me to shed my sandals and join them. My toes look gangly and white compared to their stubby appendages, and I’m sure my delicate stride ousts me as a tourist, but I cannot resist this rare pleasure.
Caye (pronounced “key” despite all phonetic logic) Caulker stretches north and south like an arthritic finger along the Belize coast, twenty kilometers offshore at the cusp of this world’s second largest barrier reef. The brightest hues of blue and green Caribbean surround us in every direction.
Hurricane Hattie tore the island in two, near the geographic equivalent of a most distal knuckle, just north of the island’s village in 1961. The Split, now a Windex-blue swimming hole no more than one hundred meters wide and three meters deep, remains as a reminder of nature’s eerily precise destructive power.
There are no paved roads and only one full-sized automobile in the village-a truck that seems to belong to no one but the island itself-driven by a different person each time I’ve noticed it. The laziest of tourists, the police and other civil servants all whir about in electric golf carts. The rest of us resort to Communist manufactured Nankon steel beach cruisers and pedestrian modes of transport, though mobility hardly takes priority here.
Hard-packed sand builds up Caye Caulker’s three main drags, appropriately named Front, Middle, and Back. Wooden ramshackle buildings rise above the island on stilts like soldierly spiders, stiffly bristled with the anticipation of torrential floods. In contrast, rotund black plastic cisterns squat stolidly, turning their hungry mouths to the sky in hopes of rain.
On the southern end of the village we discover a footpath named Barefoot Alley. Hand-painted signs pounded into the ground with wooden stakes warn “Go Slow” and “Betta No Litta” in local kriol dialect, a vague rivulet of English incomprehensible to my ear but nonetheless pleasant to hear. The Garifuna rastafarians on the island chatter together behind their vendor tables of handmade jewelry, their dreadlocks lightly tapping their shoulders. Their obsidian skin completes the darker end on a diverse spectrum of black, brown, beige, and tourist red that wanders slowly over the landscape.
Human bodies-tipping onto the back legs of wooden chairs against snorkel hut storefronts, swinging in hammocks, holding down barstools-seem integral to the architecture of the island. I watch one man lean against the stilt leg of his plywood shack for so long that he appears to do so out of structural necessity. I convince myself that he must be holding the shack up with his own weight, his endless lounging a requisite buttress against the collapse of his home.
