The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  Men outnumber women and children, but not to the extent I would have guessed; this is no mere fishermen’s retreat. Ilet a Brouee is more like a factory: many people are out fishing during the day, dotting the surrounding horizon with sails and pirogues, but others remain on the island, working all day repairing boats; mending nets, hooks, and traps; processing and preparing thousands of fish for shipment to Île-à-Vache and Haiti. Most of the kids seem to spend their days swimming.

  As is sadly common throughout Haiti, the landscape is harsh. Most of the shoreline isn’t beach, but rather makeshift levees of conch shells, broken concrete, and old tires, sometimes held together by fishing nets and much too jagged for unaccustomed bare feet. The island’s only natural feature, a coconut tree, was snapped in half by Hurricane Matthew. The trunk was used to build a ladder to the toilet, elevated over the sea just off the northern edge of the island.

  There are a few wells around the island—perforated plastic buckets dug a couple feet into the sand. They don’t provide drinking water, but supply water clean enough for bathing. Drinking water is imported from mainland Haiti in plastic bags. Each bag costs about a nickel, and contains 200 milliliters of clean water. Cisterns are not used.

  After a few minutes of walking around, I came across one of the many canopies people congregate under as they work in the midday heat. Except that this one was different: it had an empty chair, right in the middle. A chair meant for me. Welcome to the conversation—time to explain myself.

  A man began by telling me he’s very happy to see me here because if “someone like me” is coming to their island, it means I must be planning a project to help. He was keen to know my background and my religion—questions I wasn’t expecting nor eager to answer, knowing full well my answers probably weren’t the ones they were hoping for.

  There was that sinking feeling again. If I could have picked any group of people in the world to avoid disappointing, it would have been these people.

  I feebly explained that I’m not here to help, at least not right now, and not in that way. I’m not with an organization or a church, and I can’t plan a project. I tried to explain the unsatisfying fact that I’m just a guy with a fondness for Haiti who came here partly on a hunch that this might be the most crowded island in the world, and partly out of exasperation that I couldn’t learn a damned thing about this place otherwise. After all, I wanted to say, how could anyone plan a project here when the outside world barely knows Ilet a Brouee even exists?

  Instead, I asked them, if an NGO were to come plan a project, how could they help?

  The answer was as simple as it was tragic: metal roofs and a toilet.

  The roofs are mostly thatch, and impossible to waterproof. The difficulty of keeping dry—a fundamental problem that plagues contemporary Haiti—is inescapable here. In a thatch house with a sand floor a few feet above sea level, how do you store the precious documents that establish who you are and what you own? Add to that the contribution to disease caused by excessive moisture in the home, and water is, perversely, a major problem for this place that has none to drink. Some people live in tents inside their houses, some put plastic tarps over their houses, and some install metal roofs and hope they hold out against the corrosive sea spray.

  The toilet, meanwhile, is a makeshift structure built over the water, so uncomfortable that people often use the adjacent beach instead.

  I thought, Who could be content with a world where these people, living on an island without power, water, sewer, medical care, or schools, complain only about a toilet and leaky roofs to the rare foreigner who passes through? But that’s not a question for these people; that’s a question for me.

  Instead, I asked: Roughly how many people live here?

  As you might guess, it depends. The fish and the rains cause the population to fluctuate during the year. Some children leave the island to board with family elsewhere and attend school; others don’t. Some people have family over in Haiti—the name they give the mainland proper. The people who own boats are more likely to have another place to return to; others wind up on Ilet a Brouee to work, and this is it for them.

  I was told there are 97 houses on Ilet a Brouee. Adding up all the residents, including the children who stay with family elsewhere to attend school during parts of the year, Ilet a Brouee is home base to around 500 people.

  Ilet a Brouee is almost exactly 4,000 square meters, or .004 square kilometer—just under an acre, after losing 20 percent of its landmass during Hurricane Matthew. If the locally given population of 500 is taken at face value, that implies a population density of 125,000 per square kilometer, somewhat ahead of Santa Cruz del Islote’s 1,247 people living on .012 square kilometer. I later got in touch with Île-à-Vache’s mayor, Jean Yvres Amazan, who estimates the population of Ilet a Brouee at 250. Either way, if you’re going to talk about the most crowded island on earth, Ilet a Brouee belongs in the conversation.

  Another question I couldn’t help asking the islanders: Have you ever heard of Caye de l’Est? They chuckled politely when I told them that’s the name by which the world knows their island. Each foreigner must be entitled to a few ridiculous statements.

  After asking and answering a few more questions, I returned to wandering around on the island and talking to as many people as I could. The buzz of the foreigner arriving was dying down, and I was only accompanied by a throng of curious children. A blan in their tiny world.

  I saw people busy processing hundreds of small fish; napping in the church or under canopies in the midday heat; mending nets, lines, and hooks. Powered by private solar panels that have become ubiquitous in Haiti, Western pop music and kompa took turns drowning out the soft hum of waves breaking on the levees and the workday banter.

  When they think of it at all, developing world poverty bothers most people who live in first world comfort. They react to it differently, but for compassionate people, it’s important to hold out hope for improving the lives of the world’s poor.

  What about the people on Ilet a Brouee? I’ve racked my brain, before visiting and since, thinking of how to support those living there, of how to make Ilet a Brouee look more like the micro-island success story the papers peddled about Santa Cruz del Islote.

  But the contradictions on Ilet a Brouee are intractable. Who can sell a Western-friendly development vision in a place where sewage and trash go into the sea? What economic development plans exist for an island where the only possible economic activity is plucking the ever-smaller fish from an overfished reef? And what about sea level rise, and the fate of most of the other sandy cays in the Canal de l’Est?

  To call Ilet a Brouee endangered is neither abstract nor hyperbole. Sandy cays are extremely sensitive to sea level rise; a few extra inches of water can increase erosion and ultimately doom an island. Google Earth shows the tragedy in real time. Off the north coast of Grand Anse, in a different archipelago from Ilet a Brouee, satellite images show that multiple islands inhabited as recently as 2014 have been wiped off the map.

  Should outsiders step in to reinforce the sandy banks of the island? Or perhaps restore the island to its former size, while they’re at it? This reef is less overfished than the others—that’s why people go to such lengths claiming a plot on this island.

  The hardest part of Ilet a Brouee for me to confront is the why, on a larger scale. Why do people live on a spit of sand in the ocean, with no water, no electricity, no sewer, no medicine, no services of any type? The sad reality is that the conditions on Ilet a Brouee aren’t all that different from what Haitians must endure across the country. Most Haitians lack these things; what difference does it make if you’re doing it on a sandbar a few miles out in the ocean? At least you’re in the middle of a big reef that’s a comparative bonanza of protein.

  Modern society uniformly condemns the historical kidnapping and enslavement of African people. At times, we’re even willing to have conversations about the economic subjugation of developing nations and the
blatant extortion of Haiti in the early nineteenth century. However, questioning the ongoing effective imprisonment of Haiti’s inhabitants remains the domain of only radical thinkers.

  Humans, especially poor ones, must remain in their homelands. Haitians need a visa to travel to most nations on earth, let alone work in them—this includes the Dominican Republic and every nation with nonstop flights from Haiti. Haitians are confined to their overcrowded island, forever paying the price of the kidnapping and extortion of their ancestors for the benefit of foreigners.

  Faced with life in a land that can barely feed its inhabitants, many Haitians flee to parts of the world where food, water, electricity, and medicine aren’t in critically short supply. There’s a saying in Haiti: A rich man travels, a poor man leaves. But this option is closed to most, and the peril Haitians face abroad is well documented. From the 1937 Parsley Massacre perpetrated against Haitians in the Dominican borderlands, to the dehumanizing status many Haitian migrants suffer today, especially in the United States and the Dominican Republic, economic migration is a dangerous endeavor, and the supply of Haitians hoping to work abroad overwhelms the willingness of foreign countries to host them.

  Ilet a Brouee and islands like it tell another, less visible story of people who fled a country unable to feed itself. Instead of migrating to foreign lands, these people fled Haiti and built a town on one of the last sandbars in a dying archipelago. Suffering from overcrowding, dwindling food sources, and even questions about the viability of sustaining life on the island in an ever-fiercer climate, Ilet a Brouee became a microcosm of Haiti itself. In the long-standing debate about whether foreign aid helps or hurts recipient countries, foreigners smugly assert that Haiti has a “culture of dependence” on foreign aid and charity; the extremes to which the residents of Ilet a Brouee resort to feed themselves and their country debunk this patronizing label.

  It is a perversion of conventional human rights that freedom of movement is granted for capital, but not for labor. Anyone who believes that a child born anywhere in the world deserves an opportunity for a stable, healthy life must advocate for steps toward freedom of movement. The only alternative would be a world where all states are truly on an equal footing, and that went out the window with gunboat diplomacy, with systematic looting of the developing world through debt, with colonization, with the slave trade itself. These misdeeds shaped the world as we know it. We cannot ignore this history and assert that feeding Haitians is just Haiti’s problem. Humans should have the right to migrate, especially to the places that benefited so much from the historical exploitation of their homelands. By barring free movement, we guarantee countless tales of people resorting to desperate measures to survive.

  I’ll stop short of claiming a superlative, of claiming that Ilet a Brouee is actually the most crowded island on earth. After all, if as obvious a candidate like Ilet a Brouee is beyond our readily shared knowledge, what else might be out there?

  We talk with derision about the “discoveries” of European explorers, and the contradiction of discovering a place already well within current human knowledge. Now, with most of humanity exchanging information in an open-source, global forum, it’s tempting to think that we’ve integrated the knowledge of earth’s many places and peoples—that if somebody knows about it, it’s probably easily knowable by everyone.

  This appears to be untrue. On a smaller scale, “discoveries” are still being made: take Somoto Canyon in Nicaragua, a stunning 150-meter-deep crevice that’s only 10 meters wide, which flew under the radar until 2004; or Fort Drouet in Haiti, a military fort and coffee plantation that contains the only known ruins of slave housing in the country, which was forgotten until a road was built nearby in 2009. These are both in densely populated parts of their respective countries, a short walk from farms and villages and well known to generations of locals. Not only is our planet surprisingly poorly understood, but we’re also less adept than we might guess at gathering these threads of local knowledge and experience, scattered across the globe and frayed by borders, language, and economics, and weaving them into our collective understanding of the human experience. Our understanding of life on this planet is still mainly projected from narrow, elite corners.

  JEFF MACGREGOR

  Taming the Lionfish

  from Smithsonian

  None of this had to happen. Not Florida. Not the ibis’s beak. Not water. Not the horseshoe crab’s empty body and not the living starfish. Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely.

  —Jane Hirshfield

  Friday

  We were somewhere around Pensacola Pass, on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, when the over-the-counter drugs failed to take hold.

  Just after sunrise the seas are running two or four or six feet and at the mouth of the Gulf where the bay opens up and the tide meets the wind from the east and the west and the north and the south is a washing machine of razorback crests and sub-basement troughs, waves running horizon to horizon, some as big as houses, whitecaps peeling off the long rollers, the water every blue and every green, the rise and fall of our little boat a series of silences, groans, engine noises, and cymbal crashes as we pitch and roll and the whole boatload of gear works itself loose from the fittings, the tanks and the spears and the wet suits and the vests and the fins and the buckets and the coolers and computers and the compasses and regulators and the backups to the backups to the backups, every dive system three times redundant now soaked and streaming, bobbing in the bilges, and the waves coming over the side, the top, the stern, the bow, all of us pitching and yawing and rolling and moaning and swearing and all that gear floating at our ankles with the bags of white cheddar popcorn and the wasabi and the Red Vines, all of us grabbing for the gunwales or the rails or each other, Captain Andy at the wheel calm as a vicar, Barry with his feet planted, singing at the top of his lungs, “Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends,” and the planetary surge of 500 quadrillion gallons of angry water pouring through the tiny nautilus of my inner ear on its way to my stomach. I lean over the side and throw up again. Doubled over the transom, John casually does likewise. The motion-sickness tablets do nothing.

  We all laugh.

  We’re here to hunt lionfish.

  Before we get to the marine biology, this has to be said: the lionfish is one of the most beautiful animals alive. With its bold stripes and extravagant fins, its regal bearing and magisterial stillness, every lionfish is a hand-lacquered eleventh-century Japanese fan. It is a diva, a glamour-puss, a showoff. If you ran a hedge fund in Greenwich or Geneva or Tokyo, the first fish you’d buy for that 100,000-gallon aquarium in your lobby would be a lionfish. It is in every respect spectacular. And in this hemisphere it is an eco-killer, a destroyer of worlds.

  Four hundred twenty-two words of marine biology boilerplate, a NOAA crib sheet, and a warning:

  In the southeast US and Caribbean coastal waters the lionfish is an invasive species. It competes for food and space with overfished native populations. Scientists fear lionfish will kill off helpful locals such as algae-eating parrot fish, allowing seaweed to overtake coral reefs already stressed by rising water temperatures and bleaching. Lionfish kill off other small cleaner fish, too, which increases the risk of infection and disease among sport fish and cash fishery populations. In US waters, lionfish stocks continue to grow and increase in range. Lionfish have no known predators here and reproduce all year long; a mature female lionfish releases roughly 2 million eggs a year, which are then widely dispersed by ocean currents.

  Two million eggs a year.

  Scientific name: Pterois volitans (red lionfish)

  Unscientific, badass nickname: devil firefish

  Identification: Lionfish have distinctive brown and white or maroon and white stripes covering the head and body. Tentacles protrude above the eyes and below the mouth. They have fanlike pectoral fins and long dorsal spines. An adult lionfish can grow as large as 18 inches.


  Native range: The South Pacific and Indian Oceans, where natural predators, including grouper, keep their population in check.

  Habitat: Lionfish are found in the tropics, in warm water and in most marine habitats. Lionfish have been found in or on hard-bottom ocean floor, mangrove, sea grass, coral, and artificial reefs at depths from 1 to 1,000 feet.

  Non-native range: Since the 1980s, lionfish have been reported in growing numbers along the southeastern United States coast from Texas to North Carolina. Juvenile lionfish have been collected in waters as far north as Long Island, New York.

  Lionfish are eating machines. They are active hunters that ambush their prey by using their outstretched pectoral fins to corner them. If lionfish are unable to adapt to declines in their prey, their population might decrease. In the short term, however, they will turn to cannibalism.

  Warning! Lionfish spines deliver a venomous sting that can last for days and cause extreme pain. Also sweating, respiratory distress, and even paralysis. Lionfish venom glands are located in the spines on the top and the sides and the bottom of the fish. They can sting you even after the fish is dead. The venom is a neurotoxin. Once the spine punctures the skin, the venom enters the wound through grooves in the spine. If stung, seek medical attention immediately.

  The guys on the dock will tell you that the sting of a lionfish is like “getting hit hard by a hammer, then injecting the bruise with hot sauce.” Wear gloves.

  How they got here no one really knows. Like giant shoulder pads and the music of Frank Stallone, some things about the 1980s remain inexplicable. The arrival in American waters of the lionfish is one of these mysteries. There are a couple of recurring stories, but they don’t really add up to a truth. The first is that some home aquarium owner emptied a few of them into the ocean one night—the narrative equivalent of the New York City alligator-down-the-toilet story. Another story suggests a big resort hotel in the Caribbean mishandled the filtration setup on its giant destination aquarium and pumped them out into the sea. Or that a breeding pair escaped during Hurricane Andrew. Maybe they arrived here in the water ballast of big cargo ships from the Pacific.