Adventure Part Six: Jamaica III, Home
The following day, then, Konrad and I made our way to whence we would start our mountain climb. To do this, we got dropped off at a bus stop in a bustling Kingston area, and took a bus hence to a village about an hour’s drive into the mountains. This was the first time I’d done anything in Jamaica without Fiona, and I was pretty scared: in Jamaica, where everyone is black, and where being white means that you’re rich, this was enough to make me feel extremely uncomfortable, both because of how much I stood out, which is itself unpleasant, and because of how liable to mugging I felt. And this was legitimate – we’d been told not to carry too much money or any valuables, and Konrad had taken the memory card out of his camera and put it in a discreet pocket so that if we were robbed, at least he wouldn’t lose the pictures he had taken on the trip up to that point. But nothing happened while we were waiting on the pavement or in the idling bus; the 14-seater bus eventually filled with about seventeen people, mostly schoolchildren, and, after the driver fixed the door that wouldn’t close properly with a spanner and a few kicks, we set off.
We were taking the bus to a village, whose name I forget, about halfway to the guest-house, whence we were to be collected and brought to Jah B’s guesthouse, where we were to stay the night. The narrow, often-unbarriered road there wended around the sides of mountains, and the bus went at them at ferociously, beeping its horn – which was, either because of age or because it makes it harder to ignore, connected to the alarm siren – as it raced around the blind corners. It was good fun, actually.
We arrived at the village and were picked up by Rasa. The road from here on in was atrocious, so we rarely got above a crawl. Had we not been in a jeep, we could never have made it. The scenery, though, was beautiful: because of the mountainous terrain, there was always a verdant valley to one side of the jeep, and always beautiful mountains in the distance. After about an hour of this, we arrived at Jah B’s. He greeted us with some of his own coffee, which was incredible, and we got to know each other a little. Jah B is a Rastafari organic-coffee farmer as well as the owner of his guesthouse, and is very likeable. He is also a superb cook, not least because he grows most of what he cooks. He gave us an amazing lunch, I played with his cats, and then we slept for a while – the altitude, I think. When we awoke, one of Jah B’s employees, an old, old man with a myriad lines on his thin face, took us for a walk around some of the farm; he showed us bananas, coffee, plantain, pineapple, coco (a root vegetable), guava, and, of course, ganja. We took a bit of this with us and made some extremely good white tea from it when we got back. But before this we followed the old man to the local shop – such a low-key affair as I’ve never seen before – and shot the breeze with the shopkeeper and the odd other customer. We got a lift back to Jah B’s on the back of one of the man’s friends’ pick-up.
All this while, the sky had been darkening, and at around this time, it started lashing rain. This was of course terrible news, because there was no way we could climb a mountain in that. But the weather changes fast in Jamaica, so we stayed in, reading and listening to reggae, while dark closed in. We had dinner and went to bed early, as we had to be up at two a.m. for the hike, so that we might reach the top by dawn.
Happily, we awoke to a perfectly clear sky, and, after a cup of coffee, started walking, led all the way by Rasa, who listened to music all the way. The hike was long, dark and tiring; it was also pretty slippery at points, and I was pretty worried that I would fall down into the big empty blackness to my side now and then. There wasn’t much to see on the walk, but we did stop once or twice to look at the stars – clear as could be – and distant Kingston.
We reached Blue Mountain Peak, which is 2256m (7402 ft) above sea level, about forty minutes before dawnbreak. We spent our time on the peak looking at the growing light hitting the distant clouds, its streaks reaching up into the sky, the light changing as we moved our gaze from East to West; eating chocolate, climbing the peak marker, taking photographs, mocking the elfin forests (there’s heat and moisture enough for trees; but not air enough for them to grow above about six foot), shivering in the pre-dawn chill (but not shivering as much as Rasa (Jamaicans do not like the cold)), and generally marvelling and joking.
We saw more on the return trip than on the way up, naturally: fern trees that were a hundred years old, and the amazing vibrancy of tree-covered distant hill-faces. But it’s hard to describe such things.
When we got back, we slept slightly and had breakfast; we bought some coffee beans from Jah B (I’m hoping that Taste, the coffee shop where I work, will buy some from him, so I bought some for Jan, the manager), signed the guest book, and got a lift from Rasa back to Kingston. This, of course, meant that he drove along some of the good (“good”) roads that we’d taken on the bus on the way up – and I had no idea someone could drive so insanely. We were driving along the roads schoolchildren were using to walk home (there was no sidewalk), and Rasa’s method of getting past them was to beep his horn when someone was in his way, and then drive hard at where the child was, knowing that it would have moved out of the way by the time he got there: which worked except for the one who had headphones in; he came within an inch of being hit. By some miracle, we got back to Kingston safely, and got a much more calmly driven taxi back home.
The two or three days we had left in our trip passed more relaxedly; we went jet-skiing again one day, swam a bit, read some; the only other tale I want to recount is of Bruce’s friend, Freddie, who is an audiophile (“An audio file?” “No, with a p-h!” “Oh, right”, I said, relieved, before we met him). Being an audiophile means spending tens of thousands of dollars over many years on audio equipment for the sake of a stereo system which sounds as good as live music. Freddie has silver wire, strategically placed curtains and carpeting, reflecting walls, and a bench placed in the acoustically optimal place in the room he’s dedicated to all this. He sat us all down on this bench, and, with the lights off because light waves interfere with sound waves, played us some music. Ironically, the effect of all his money was not so much to blow us away with the quality of the sound (although it did that too), but to highlight the poverty of recorded as compared to live music. When you evaluate recorded music as you evaluate live music, it doesn’t compare – the sound is massively poorer, and the sense of communication and life non-existent.
This, along with other experiences I had this trip, such as the Caroline Chocolate Drops/Luminescent Orchestrii gig, has moved me very close to a conviction that the ‘point’ of music, much more so than the creation of beautiful works of art, is about communication; which is always best done by real people who are alive and in the same place. Which means that listening to famous dead composers or famous pop music is pro tanto bad, as compared to going to gigs by peers whose names no-one but the people at the gig know. Of course, this is not saying that such things are bad on balance, which would be nuts. But it does mean that if I was in charge of music spending or music education policy, I would spend most of the resources allotted me on giving people instruments and helping local bands, and not so much on educating people in the classical repertoire. I expect something similar happens for literature and the other arts, too. Of course, it’s going to be a matter of degree: no-one’s going to claim either that classical music is all-important or worthless; but my current thinking makes it seem very difficult to get people to understand what music is all about, and to see why it’s so possible to fall in love with it, through a classical-music education; and very easy to get them to see this by letting them play with the music that they already understand, and which is alive.
Home
Konrad and I flew together up to JFK; he got a flight back to Germany a few hours later after we’d gotten dinner in the airport. I’d gotten a flight the following day because it was cheaper, so I went to my hotel then.
I got up early the following day and spent a few hours in Manhattan. I didn’t do much: I just wandered around for a few hours. I did stop by a bookshop near NYU that was playing Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, which was a nice surprise; and I found somewhere nice for lunch. Then to Newark airport; then to Heathrow; then by train and taxi to St. Andrews, where I arrived home at 1 a.m.
We were taking the bus to a village, whose name I forget, about halfway to the guest-house, whence we were to be collected and brought to Jah B’s guesthouse, where we were to stay the night. The narrow, often-unbarriered road there wended around the sides of mountains, and the bus went at them at ferociously, beeping its horn – which was, either because of age or because it makes it harder to ignore, connected to the alarm siren – as it raced around the blind corners. It was good fun, actually.
We arrived at the village and were picked up by Rasa. The road from here on in was atrocious, so we rarely got above a crawl. Had we not been in a jeep, we could never have made it. The scenery, though, was beautiful: because of the mountainous terrain, there was always a verdant valley to one side of the jeep, and always beautiful mountains in the distance. After about an hour of this, we arrived at Jah B’s. He greeted us with some of his own coffee, which was incredible, and we got to know each other a little. Jah B is a Rastafari organic-coffee farmer as well as the owner of his guesthouse, and is very likeable. He is also a superb cook, not least because he grows most of what he cooks. He gave us an amazing lunch, I played with his cats, and then we slept for a while – the altitude, I think. When we awoke, one of Jah B’s employees, an old, old man with a myriad lines on his thin face, took us for a walk around some of the farm; he showed us bananas, coffee, plantain, pineapple, coco (a root vegetable), guava, and, of course, ganja. We took a bit of this with us and made some extremely good white tea from it when we got back. But before this we followed the old man to the local shop – such a low-key affair as I’ve never seen before – and shot the breeze with the shopkeeper and the odd other customer. We got a lift back to Jah B’s on the back of one of the man’s friends’ pick-up.
All this while, the sky had been darkening, and at around this time, it started lashing rain. This was of course terrible news, because there was no way we could climb a mountain in that. But the weather changes fast in Jamaica, so we stayed in, reading and listening to reggae, while dark closed in. We had dinner and went to bed early, as we had to be up at two a.m. for the hike, so that we might reach the top by dawn.
Happily, we awoke to a perfectly clear sky, and, after a cup of coffee, started walking, led all the way by Rasa, who listened to music all the way. The hike was long, dark and tiring; it was also pretty slippery at points, and I was pretty worried that I would fall down into the big empty blackness to my side now and then. There wasn’t much to see on the walk, but we did stop once or twice to look at the stars – clear as could be – and distant Kingston.
We reached Blue Mountain Peak, which is 2256m (7402 ft) above sea level, about forty minutes before dawnbreak. We spent our time on the peak looking at the growing light hitting the distant clouds, its streaks reaching up into the sky, the light changing as we moved our gaze from East to West; eating chocolate, climbing the peak marker, taking photographs, mocking the elfin forests (there’s heat and moisture enough for trees; but not air enough for them to grow above about six foot), shivering in the pre-dawn chill (but not shivering as much as Rasa (Jamaicans do not like the cold)), and generally marvelling and joking.
We saw more on the return trip than on the way up, naturally: fern trees that were a hundred years old, and the amazing vibrancy of tree-covered distant hill-faces. But it’s hard to describe such things.
When we got back, we slept slightly and had breakfast; we bought some coffee beans from Jah B (I’m hoping that Taste, the coffee shop where I work, will buy some from him, so I bought some for Jan, the manager), signed the guest book, and got a lift from Rasa back to Kingston. This, of course, meant that he drove along some of the good (“good”) roads that we’d taken on the bus on the way up – and I had no idea someone could drive so insanely. We were driving along the roads schoolchildren were using to walk home (there was no sidewalk), and Rasa’s method of getting past them was to beep his horn when someone was in his way, and then drive hard at where the child was, knowing that it would have moved out of the way by the time he got there: which worked except for the one who had headphones in; he came within an inch of being hit. By some miracle, we got back to Kingston safely, and got a much more calmly driven taxi back home.
The two or three days we had left in our trip passed more relaxedly; we went jet-skiing again one day, swam a bit, read some; the only other tale I want to recount is of Bruce’s friend, Freddie, who is an audiophile (“An audio file?” “No, with a p-h!” “Oh, right”, I said, relieved, before we met him). Being an audiophile means spending tens of thousands of dollars over many years on audio equipment for the sake of a stereo system which sounds as good as live music. Freddie has silver wire, strategically placed curtains and carpeting, reflecting walls, and a bench placed in the acoustically optimal place in the room he’s dedicated to all this. He sat us all down on this bench, and, with the lights off because light waves interfere with sound waves, played us some music. Ironically, the effect of all his money was not so much to blow us away with the quality of the sound (although it did that too), but to highlight the poverty of recorded as compared to live music. When you evaluate recorded music as you evaluate live music, it doesn’t compare – the sound is massively poorer, and the sense of communication and life non-existent.
This, along with other experiences I had this trip, such as the Caroline Chocolate Drops/Luminescent Orchestrii gig, has moved me very close to a conviction that the ‘point’ of music, much more so than the creation of beautiful works of art, is about communication; which is always best done by real people who are alive and in the same place. Which means that listening to famous dead composers or famous pop music is pro tanto bad, as compared to going to gigs by peers whose names no-one but the people at the gig know. Of course, this is not saying that such things are bad on balance, which would be nuts. But it does mean that if I was in charge of music spending or music education policy, I would spend most of the resources allotted me on giving people instruments and helping local bands, and not so much on educating people in the classical repertoire. I expect something similar happens for literature and the other arts, too. Of course, it’s going to be a matter of degree: no-one’s going to claim either that classical music is all-important or worthless; but my current thinking makes it seem very difficult to get people to understand what music is all about, and to see why it’s so possible to fall in love with it, through a classical-music education; and very easy to get them to see this by letting them play with the music that they already understand, and which is alive.
Home
Konrad and I flew together up to JFK; he got a flight back to Germany a few hours later after we’d gotten dinner in the airport. I’d gotten a flight the following day because it was cheaper, so I went to my hotel then.
I got up early the following day and spent a few hours in Manhattan. I didn’t do much: I just wandered around for a few hours. I did stop by a bookshop near NYU that was playing Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, which was a nice surprise; and I found somewhere nice for lunch. Then to Newark airport; then to Heathrow; then by train and taxi to St. Andrews, where I arrived home at 1 a.m.