Three dolphins flipped and tumbled, as our ship leaned into the dragon’s mouth, a strange new land emerging on the iridescent horizon. It was end of July, and I was headed along the coast of Trinidad on the Buccoo Reef, a passenger vessel that bore the name of the fishing village in which my father was born and to which, once we dropped anchor in Tobago, I would journey. The curious land ahead was not our final destination. But, as it came into view on the port side, a throng of passengers rushed over to the opposite side of the vessel, more interested in the islands that mark the western limits of Trinidad, the watery stubs of the island’s great northern range, as it sweeps down to the sea.
From East to West, the hills of Trinidad’s Northern range tell a story of a small island into which the entire world seems concentrated. Caribs from the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community, descendants of the original Amerindian inhabitants, live at Arima. The village of Lopinot, set deep in the misty hills, is a hub of Venezuelan culture and of Parang, a Spanish-language music played at Christmas. In Curepe, Indo-Trini vendors hawk doubles in the early mornings—two baras (flatbreads) folded around curry chana (chickpeas). There are the great cocoa plantations of Santa Cruz, and climbing deeper yet into the range, heading north, past where bubbling rivers of red mud burst their banks, then down and round a gentle slope on the northern coast, framed by waving palm fronds, is the popular Maracas beach.
Laventille, on the Eastern fringe of the capital of Port-of-Spain was the birthplace of the steel pan, but today resembles a jumble of unkempt homes teetering off a hillside, a reminder of the stark and cruel stratification of race and class that still blights this country. Past the capital, as the island tapers into a narrow crocodile’s head, the Petit Valley cuts into the range, splitting it almost in two, the deep thickets on its slopes populated by prosperous Syrian enclaves. After Chaguaramas, the range drops into the ocean but seemingly staggers on through the glass blue sea, rising here and there as clumps of verdant rock, the channels between which are known as the Boca del Dragón—the Dragon’s Mouth.
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