Cheesy Grits: And Onward to the Beaches of St. Croix [Updated]

Truth be told, I hate the beach. You get slathered up with suntan lotion and are all sticky. Sand gets into everything and sticks to everything. There are flies. They bite. Hard. It's too bright to read. If you have food, the seagulls steal it. You go into the water to try to get into the spirit of things, but you've been baking in the sun so the water feels like ice water. Your parts pucker and retract. You step on something underwater and—Egad!—it moves! The water washes all the suntan lotion off. When you come out, you have to put it all back on again. Now you've got a paste of lotion, salt residue and sand all over you. You lie down on your sandy towel again, only now it's all wet, too, and you shiver until you notice that your feet are turning pink because you forgot to put lotion on them. The sandy crud is everywhere: in your shoes, your socks, your underwear, your ears, your hair, your personal crevices. It's all over your car seats and floormats. Gremlins come into your hotel room and sprinkle sand all over the bathroom floor and into the bathtub. And you're supposed to get up the next day, find clean towels, and do it all over again. What fun! Give me a library or an archive any day.

The Virgin Islands beaches (and the attached inlands) are just east of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico:

Caribbean Sea with the Virgin Islands lying just east of Puerto Rico
Image from Wikimedia Commons

And here is a closer view:

St. Croix is at the lower right. It's less than 100 miles by air from the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
St. Thomas and St. John, the other two islands are north of St. Croix. Charlotte Amalie is the capital.
Image courtesy nationsonline.org

There being no direct flights from Washington to St. Croix, we flew first to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and from there took a puddle-jumper for the half-hour (or so) flight from San Juan to St. Croix. I remember looking out the window at St. Croix beneath me and thinking "Wow! I'm in the tropics! I never thought I'd be in the tropics."

St. Croix certainly looked tropical from the air—at least, it resembled the pictures of tropical islands I had seen: brilliantly turquoise waters, palm trees, and so on. I was a bit surprised by the steep hills. They were almost mountains—but after all, these islands are mostly volcanic in origin [Excepting St. Croix; see update below], and where you have volcanoes, you have mountains. I would find out later that the highest one rises to about 1100 ft.

And so we landed in St. Croix and taxied to the terminal. Forget the San Juan airport with its air-conditioned jetways: the St. Croix airport has no jetways at all. We climbed down some steps and out into the open air to walk across the pavement to the terminal.  That morning in Maryland, March had been its usual self, a cold gray, wearying chunk of dead space between the winter and spring. But in St. Croix, March was nothing like that at all: it was instant summertime: we were sweating almost immediately. Cheesy Grits and Shoofly Pie had landed in the tropics.

We picked up our luggage and our rental car and a piece of the weight of St. Croix history landed on us: the cars on the island may come from the U.S. and so have the steering wheels on the left side; but the Crucians nevertheless drive on the left, i.e, the "wrong" side of the road! Hard to imagine an odder souvenir of the brief time that the Union Jack flew here centuries ago.

Souvenir or not, driving on the left was so nervewracking that Jane simply refused to do it; I had to remember to always keep my left shoulder to the grass (curbs? what curbs?) alongside the road. If my attention wandered even a little bit, I would find myself drifting back toward the right side of the road and generally into oncoming traffic. Pulling into and out of parking lots was comedy veering toward tragedy if I failed to remember to keep to the comedic left. I kept looking in the wrong places for directional and stop signs. And I never did see the huge iguana—in St. Croix, they can grow to nearly five feet long—alongside the road that had Jacob shouting like a madman when we were just outside of Frederiksted one evening: I was too busy staying in my lane. I think the 8 1/2 miles from the airport to the hotel took us nearly 45 minutes, mainly because I don't think I drove over 20 mph. Even that speed felt risky.

Of course, when we got to the north shore, where we were staying, this is pretty much what we saw:

St. Croix's north shore.
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Not so bad, eh? Jane and Jake were smitten. My concern was driving the twelve or so miles to the public library in Christiansted, where I would resume my search for this tropical island branch of the family tree. I mean, beaches are everywhere; the ancestors aren't. I didn't find out until later that there was at least one quite singular and fascinating thing about the beaches along this north shore of St. Croix. It was almost fascinating enough to get me to go into the water.


[Update: Although very many Caribbean islands are indeed volcanic in origin, St. Croix is apparently an exception. If I understand this NOAA report on the geology of St. Croix, the mountains of St. Croix are made almost entirely of sedimentary rock.]