Life Proceeds

I missed the most exciting thing to happen in ages. Alex came out to close the garage door after I left for work—eyes straight ahead—and he was alerted by loud splashing just beyond the seawall. Six manatee were cavorting in front of the house. He called María. She rapidly realized that their great leaps out of the water were a mating dance. They assumed there were three pairs, but learned later from a woman at the Fisheries Department that they it was one female and five males.

María called our major TV station, begging them to send a camera crew. They were late, arriving just in time to see—in the words of the announcer—“the departure of the horny manatee.”

(Note: It is my impression that manatee is both singular and plural. I have used it that way. I may be wrong.)

July 2000

Life has been pretty routine except for the annual French Embassy Bastille Day cocktail party.

The French Ambassador is stationed in El Salvador, but covers Belize. She arrived with an entourage of large, brilliantly uniformed military and naval attachés. The party was in a large room at the top of the Villa Hotel, across the side street from the Fort George and now owned by it.

All was routine until lights began flickering during the official speeches. I had taken a small plate of French bread and the gorgeous cheeses these parties always offer, and was at the long bar-table at the back of the room, asking for a refill of red wine. The bartender was handing me the wine when the lights went out for good. Fortunately, I had a good grasp of my glass.

I felt my way along the table to the end. I found a little space between the edge of the bar-table and the rows of clean glasses, just wide enough for me to set down my glass of wine. I stood in the darkness and polished off my bread and cheese in obscurity.

When I finished, I picked up my glass of wine and felt my way back along the bar-table to the far wall. I eased my way along the wall, praying I would not trip over an unseen foot and that I would recognize a familiar face in the dark. I did—María’s and Alex’s, faintly illuminated by the tiny flame from a votive candle.

We stood for a time visiting with friends. No one in the great mass of vaguely seen black forms crowding the room appeared to move. I felt myself becoming faintly claustrophobic from the lack of air conditioning and the sense of being packed in the dark with some 150 unrecognizable bodies. I asked Alex to take me home. He and María were delighted.

There was no way we could locate and identify either the Ambassador or our host, the Honourary Consul for France in Belize, to make proper adieux. We felt our way toward the lobby. The elevator, of course, was out of service. By the light from a single bulb, we found our way to the staircase and started down. We had illumination for the first flight. From then on, we descended slowly and carefully to avoid plunging into the abyss. We met light from the lobby as we completed the five flights.

Outside the Villa, we were met by an hotel employee with a flashlight, who guided us to Alex’s Trouper. I asked if the hotel didn’t have a generator and was told that it had not been serviced that day.

We drove down the unlighted Marine Parade and into our dark garage. Just as Alex turned off his headlights, the power came back on citywide. We learned later that the blackout bad been caused by a serious problem in Mexico. Most of our Belize City power now comes from the Mexican grid.

So much for life in the boondocks.

August 2000

I had a thrill last week. When I came home for lunch, I heard a familiar but unidentifiable noise. I discarded the idea that it was a boat. It sounded more like a fan, but there was no fan likely to be running near the front porch.

The dogs and I started up the front stairs. When I got to the landing, I saw that the noise was the buzzing of thousands of killer bees swarming on the porch near my front door. I bellowed to the dogs, and fortunately, they turned and came back down instantly. With their short coats, Missy and Shadow were at risk of being killed by the bees.

I hurried the dogs into Alex’s apartment for safety, then went up into my house through the kitchen. I grabbed a tin of bug spray and exhausted it aiming at the porch as best I could through the library louvers. I could see the wind dissipating the spray almost as soon as it reached the porch. However, the concentration of bees appeared to thin somewhat.

By the time we had finished lunch, the bees seemed to have vanished. Being of little faith, I went back to work through the kitchen door. I risked the front door on my return—cautiously. No bees and just a few dead ones on the deck. I hope the spray was enough to convince them that this was not a good place to establish a hive. Through it all, the little dove remained on her nest, apparently unconcerned. Either she knew that bees don’t attack birds, or she was dedicated to protecting her eggs.

 

When the killer bees invaded Belize six or seven years ago, some settled into the decaying old building where our office then was. They built a hive between the ceiling of our back utility room and the floor above. We had the health department out several times, but they were not successful in dislodging them, so we learned to coexist. There always were a few buzzing around the fluorescent light. We kept a tin of flying-insect spray near the door so anyone could zap the bees on his way to the bathroom. No one ever was stung.

The situation went out of balance when honey began dripping down from the ceiling. We had to have the carpenters in at the same time as the health people to tear out the ceiling and disperse the bees. It was one hideous mess—wood dust, honey, shreds of wall board, in a great pile / pool on the floor. My mind refuses to dredge up details of the smell and the mess and the process of putting the office back together. Needless to say, that was shortly before we moved the office.

Not much later, a hive was established at a corner of my front porch. We tried to get rid of the bees without success. Then another swarm established their own hive. Guess what—honey in the ceiling and complete re-roofing of the entry. Same song, second mess. This time, the carpenter sealed it so that there was nowhere for the bees to get back in. I fondly hope that is one reason the new swarm left without taking up abode. I really am not in the mood for another round of killer bees.

 

Through all our trials with them, only one person was stung—once. Me. I was washing my underthings and thought that, improbable as it was, a straight pin must have gotten mixed in with them. When I looked at my finger, I saw the stinger. As I slushed my stockings, the dear little dead bee washed to the surface.

Last September – Early October 2000

Hurricane Keith came out of the blue. It was a minor depression off the coast of Honduras. Just before I left the office Friday noon, José came in to tell me that we had a hurricane about a hundred miles off the coast. It simply did not occur to me that it had time to build up into anything significant. The Meteorological (Met) Office reported that it was moving north-northwest and that it was expected to go ashore in the Yucatán.

Everything considered, Saturday (September 30th) was as pleasant a hurricane-threat day as I remember. We had power. My telephone died early in the day, but aside from its preventing me from sending email, I was not inconvenienced.

By Sunday, we knew we were in for it. Our power went off briefly late in the afternoon. As soon as it came back on, not trusting it to remain, I decided to bathe while I could see. My bathroom is on the northwest corner of the house. The louvered windows do not seal tightly. A light mist blew in with each heavy gust of wind. I showered in hot water and was gently basted at the same time with a gentle spray of cold. I did not even dare leave my gown, robe, and slippers in the room for fear they would get wet.

María and Alex braved lashing winds and rain to come up to make sure I was all right.

The one charming note during the worst of the storm was having about 200 little birds perch on the grills on my living room windows. I counted them, both on the grill, mostly clustered near the top of each window, and eighty-plus of them perched on the railing. Many of them were the dear little ones with bright yellow breasts. Others were flying back and forth, in and out. When Missy saw them, she went on alert, utterly frustrated at not being able to get at the birds.

It was much less pleasant when the power went off, as the wind and beating rain increased. I never was worried about safety, but still, the noise and consciousness of the storm made it very hard to get to sleep. I became so accustomed to carrying my black umbrella into the bathroom that it stopped feeling incongruous.

Monday was less boisterous. The radio station gave steady, first-rate coverage throughout. The Met Office gave excellent, detailed reports every three hours, then answered specific questions from announcers. Lack of power was a nuisance. The high point of the retreating storm was the moment I went into the bathroom and realized that it no longer was raining in, and I could put the toilet paper back in its holder. It is not convenient having it in a sheltered location at the other end of the room.

Monday was a frustrating, wasted day. With wooden blinds closed against the rain, there was almost nothing I could do. Without power, I could not fill in time writing letters on my laptop. I went to bed with relief at 7:00 pm and slept until daylight woke me this morning.

Tuesday started out all wrong. The power was still off. I could not seem to light a top burner on the stove to heat coffee. The only matches I could find were limp and useless. I discovered that there is nothing wrong with a cup of room-temperature coffee. I went without breakfast because I couldn’t think of anything that would not have involved opening a refrigerator or freezer door.

The day was dedicated to cleaning up. Just sweeping the front and back porches and stairs was a major job. My poor Pride of Barbados outside the front stairway was stripped naked, and the stairs were liberally decorated with tiny oval leaves. Five of María’s carefully tended hibiscus bushes had been uprooted by the storm.

Every pan I own was positioned on three shower curtains in the middle of the living room to catch the water coming through the ceiling. All that had to be picked up—very carefully so as not to spill more water on the rug. Some eight bath towels and my bathroom rugs had to be put out to dry. Without power, the water pump did not work. I rather enjoyed washing dishes using a minimum of water in the way we used to do in the past.

Alex came up and did a major maintenance job on the generator. He remarked that he thought it had not been run in fifteen years. He got it running smoothly and hooked up only the refrigerators / freezers—including his own, thanks to a long, heavy extension cord. While he was up here, he checked my stove, which worked perfectly for him.

Alex gave the refrigeration equipment about an hour’s worth of juice. Not long after he turned the generator off, the power came on. And then it went off. And then it came back on. It has been most frustrating. It went out again briefly a couple of paragraphs ago. Still no phone.