The Deteriorating Landscape

Took a drive out to Mayaro recently in the company of my old friend Paul in the middle of the week, breaking Biche from my busy business life. 

We took the Sangre Grande route traveling through Valencia via the Eastern Main Road and the Curchill-Roosevelt highway, and from the beginning Paul kept commenting negatively on the changes in the landscape: the Ponderosa bar no longer exists; the Booznic bar is closed, and the greenery has given way to concrete housing projects.

By my reckoning it had been six years since I last took what used to be a two hour drive each way to Mayaro. 

Mayaro. 

Good old Mayaro, that beloved place. That escape to a different landscape. A truly different place back then in my days as a young boy in Trinidad. Then, it was a place of peace of mind and fun and sand salt and beach and sea and chip chip and small fish which jumped in the waves, a truly comfortable place, an environment in which we were guaranteed safe. Not allowed to drown in the big sea, and wash up on the beach with the seine.

Dark starry nights, and the sound of the surf pounding and then whispering on the beach, and the unceasing sound of the coconut trees, their branches blowing, blowing, a constant rattle on the breeze.

None of that now, or not much anymore. The Mayaro that existed in 1963 is gone. Ma George the proprietor of the store on the corner is probably long dead because the building houses now a renovated rumshop, masquerading. 

A Chinese restaurant and a jazzed- up grocery store which sells anything you may need, including snacks sit right next door.

I believe that the term we used was created by Paul as he whispered to me about the urban sprawl which Trinidad will become in days yet to pass. The man was sad all the way and so was I, lamenting the loss of the Mayaro we used to know. 

There is little charm associated with driving out to Mayaro these days. Much of the heavier, denser vegetation on that drive which I remember as an eight year old, a ten year old, is gone. Gone also are some of the people we knew in those days, and gone are their houses and their dreams. The abandoned buildings are a testament to the unforgiving sea blast of the Atlantic blowing through. Nothing remains to mark a building once named Now For Now. Now for Now is gone for good. 

Paul showed me some stone walls, one thrown over, the only remnant of a viable structure from 33 years ago when he stayed there. He seemed to have fond memories of the place.

We stopped along the way for breakfast and to revisit old places which hardly exist any more. Beaten by the unremitting wind and tide and salt they fade away even as this is being written.

The board and steel bridge which rattled as it was crossed and the so-called silver bridge, named because of it's color, that same bridge which when you crossed it, the radio would fade, (all together listen for it to fade), and when it did you knew you had reached Mayaro.

 

A different Mayaro now from the one I knew in 1963-1965. Sad but true. No charm. No rustic outing and only the sight and the sound of the sea for comfort for a short while on the drive, now replaced by different systems which have no charm. Sangre Grande and the the sides of the road from there to Manzanilla were approaching squalor at some points  and considerable stretches of road are now dominated by multi million dollar stretches of walls; most of the coconut trees in these enclosures are gone. Cocal is no more, just an old hut or two rotting away in the constant breeze. Distressing.

When we reached Mayaro we saw rumshops, and a market thriving, SUVs, shoppers, the whole thing. I might have been in Tru-Valu at Long Circular Mall. The beginning of that urban sprawl which Paul has predicted? Who knows? 

Maybe we will all eventually live in a place where Chinese restaurants and supermarkets are within arm's reach. Happy us.

Now, I can go on and on describing all the old times in Mayaro and all the changes I now see there until I run out of gas, but it will probably not make positive change.

After all, this is Trinidad, the land of nobody who can care, nobody who can make a difference, nobody who cares enough, really cares enough, who may do something to help change the status quo.

Nobody.