Seventh Ocean, 22nd Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Helios): Seventh Ocean, the 144th day of the year, although this is a leap year in the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar and we leapt over the 60th day so it's actually only the 143rd day this year. But still, an auspicious date, and there's a joke in there somewhere about the "grossest" day of the year, but we're better than that, aren't we?

Let's see if we can't use this occasion to wrap up the story of my adventures in Barbuda. It's Day Three of this memoir, and I haven't even gotten to the island yet! 

Tuesday morning, the day after I had arrived in Antigua, I met my client, the Atlanta developer Charlie, at the restaurant for breakfast. His entourage at breakfast turned out to be even larger than I imagined. There were about a half-dozen of us on the private plane down to Antigua, but there were at least a dozen more at the restaurant. Men and women, all relatively young (generally under 40), and all well dressed in appropriate island-casual clothes. It seemed to me that I was likely the only one at the table who hadn't previously spent an evening at a high-end Caribbean resort. 

I ate a proper English breakfast, and as the meal ended Charlie called me over and told me to go to the airport to meet the pilot who will take me over to Barbuda for the day. Neither Charlie nor anyone else from his entourage would be joining me. I took a taxi to Coolidge International Airport (it became V.C. Bird International the next year), and found the pilot, a not-altogether-reliable looking gentleman who appeared to be working off a hangover. But he had a single-engine Cessna and, with me as his only passenger, we flew the 40 miles from Antigua to Barbuda under clear blue skies, the Atlantic on one side of us and the Caribbean on the other.

Eventually, Barbuda came into view, a flat green spot out alone in the blue water. In 1984, Barbuda didn't yet have a modern airport like the current Burton–Nibbs International. We flew into the former Barbuda Codrington Airport, which had one, 500-meter runway. We came down for a landing, but to my surprise we only swooped down for a low-altitude flyover and then headed back up into the air again. "Goats," the pilot explained. "We have to chase off any goats that may be on the runway before we can land." He banked the plane around,  made a second decent, and we finally touched down on Barbuda.

I disembarked, and the pilot told me he'd be back around 5:00 to take me back to Antigua. He took off and left me there all alone in Barbuda. That was to become our routine for the rest of week - each morning, I met him at Coolidge Airfield in Antigua, and each day he ferried me back and forth between Antigua and Barbuda. Each time we strafed the airfield in Barbuda for goats before landing, and he never once looked 100% sober to me.   

Barbuda. The only town, more of a 'settlement" really, on the island is Codrington, population 756 (2011, it was probably even fewer back then). It's one of the most laid-back places I've ever been to. Nobody seemed to "work" - even the people with jobs, the storekeepers and so on, were in a state of near-perpetual leisure. People survived on subsistence fishing and handouts from Antigua, no one passed up an opportunity for recreation, and everyone was nonplussed over the sight of a white boy with a knapsack and a duffel bag full of sample jars, measuring tapes, and notebooks schlepping his way from the airport into town.  

In Codrington, I asked a shopkeeper if he knew of any wells or anything on the island I could look at. He suggested I go talk to the guy from the Peace Corps (incidentally, the only other non-Black person on the island). I think it says as much as anything about conditions on the island that the Peace Corps had a presence there. I also learned that there was a well-drilling rig on the island on loan from the Republic of Vietnam, and I was more surprised that Vietnam, not even 10 years after the fall of Saigon, was already in a financial position to lend aid to a seemingly random Caribbean island. 

I went to the guy's house and knocked on the door. After a longish wait, be answered, an American in his late-20s, shirtless, and seemingly awakened from an afternoon nap by my knock. But he was happy to see me - hey, he had something useful to do that day! - and invited me in to talk. 

Remember, my trip was supposed to be an intelligence-gathering, reconnaissance-level evaluation of the groundwater resources of Barbuda, but without any clearly defined strategy for gathering that information. The Peace Corps guy turned out to be quite the asset to my nebulous mission. First, he gave me a topographic map of the island, something I didn't even know existed but was a most valuable tool for my investigation. He also had been taking rainfall measurements for a couple of years, and was glad to share his readings with me. Rainfall measurements are essential to quantifying the water budget for a site of any size - the input, the amount of water entering the system.

As I was looking over the topo map, I noticed a symbol with the words "Spanish Well" next to it. He confirmed that there were several old wells - presumably dug by Spanish explorers centuries ago, but who knows? - scattered around the island. Studying the map further, I found several more of the wells marked. Wells, to a groundwater hydrogeologist, are the essential, fundamental observation points. The depth to groundwater can be measured at a well and samples can be taken for chemical analysis. Incredibly and improbably, all the pieces for an actual groundwater assessment - a detailed map, rainfall records, and well locations - were all falling into place. 

I asked him how I could best get to the well locations, so he took me outside and introduced me to Bully. I think his name was "Bully" - that's what it sounded like to me, but it could just as easily been "Billy" or "Pulley" or something else entirely due to his thick island patois. To be honest, we could barely understand each other speak but with the assistance of the Peace Corps guy, made arrangements for him and a friend to take me around the island in a jeep starting the next day to lead me to the wells. We settled on a "wet" (gasoline included) rate of $20 a day. 

Flying back to Antigua late that afternoon, I couldn't believe my luck. What seemed like an ill-conceived and foolish plan to "somehow" assess the groundwater resources of a distant Caribbean island was somehow all coming together, and I still had three more days to go. 

I was excited and tried to tell Charlie about my success at dinner that night, but he was much more interested in the conversations with the rest of the entourage than listening to my nerdy science talk. I think I got it across to him that I was happy with the way things were going, and that was enough for him. 

Dinners in Antigua with the entourage each night were interesting affairs. We didn't go out to restaurants so much as book the entire facility for the night so we were the only guests and there were no other diners but us. The cooks, waiters, etc. were all for us and us alone. Food and drink flowed freely, and each night, after a long day out in the sun and heat over on Barbuda, was party time with a bunch of high rollers whose company I otherwise wouldn't have likely shared. It was clear that I was the only working stiff among them - their conversations were about snorkeling that day, or sightseeing, or shopping. Not measuring groundwater depths with Bully. 

One morning, over breakfast, it came out that the plans for the day included topless volleyball at the nude beach on the island. There were few things I wanted to do more that day than play topless volleyball on the nude beach with that group of young, good-looking people, especially the photographer's model with whom I had flown down from Atlanta (word was they were there scouting locations for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue). Searching for Spanish wells on Barbuda with Bully wasn't high among the things I'd rather be doing. But I wasn't the idle rich, wasn't one of the hedonistic yuppies in the entourage, and once again took a taxi to the Antigua airport, met the maybe-sober, maybe-not pilot, landed in Barbuda after strafing the runway for goats, and rode around with Bully and his friend in a vintage International Harvester jeep trying to find the Spanish wells on the map.

Outside of Corrington, the island is a rugged landscape of cactus and limestone outcrops, an overgrown, roadless, uninhabited terrain. I would show Bully the well I wanted to examine on the map, but I don't think Bully could read maps. Nevertheless, he took me to wells that he somehow knew of, had come across and remembered in the course of his long life on the island. The paths, I can't really call them "roads," were so overgrown that sometimes Bully sat on the hood of the jeep with a machete, clearing the route ahead while his friend drove the jeep slowly along the road.

"Wells" to a hydrogeologist means any access point to subsurface groundwater, usually a cased hole in the ground, a pipe extending down to the water table. But the Spanish wells on Barbuda were the classic stone structures beneath a roof and equipped with a bucket and winch to fetch water, sort of like what you might see as decorations in some suburban or rural yards. At each well, I measured the depth to groundwater, used a salinity meter to test the saltiness of the water, and took a sample to bring back to the lab for chlorides analysis. But at most wells, while I was doing all this, wild horses, donkeys, and goats would show up, thinking I was going to fill the adjacent troughs with water for them (there was always an adjacent though). The animals were so skinny, all ribs and matted fur, that it felt criminal not to fill the trough for them, and I always did. 

And so the routine of that week went - breakfast, flight to Barbuda, ride around with Bully measuring water in wells and watering the animals, flight back to Antigua, and then dinner and partying at fabulous restaurants. Hey, it's a living. 

One day, the routine was interrupted. While I was at the Antigua airport waiting on the pilot to sober up pick me up, a black limousine pulled up. A door opened and someone inside requested me to "get in." I was understandably reluctant to comply - I'd seen enough Godfather movies to know how these things turned out. I had no reservations about riding around in the Barbuda backcountry with two men I'd never met before, both armed with machetes, but the person in the limo had to get out and tell me that "Prime Minister Bird wants to talk to you" before I reluctantly agreed to get in. I didn't really have a choice. No one acted in a threatening manner and no handguns were exposed, but when you're told that the Prime Minister of the country you're visiting wants to talk to you, you really have no choice but to talk.

We rode to a unassuming office building in St. John and I was led to a second floor suite where the Honorable V.S. Bird, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, was waiting for me (the current airport in Antigua is named for him). He calmly and politely told me that he knew what I was doing, evaluating the groundwater of Barbuda in consideration of future development there. It's a small island, and word gets around. P.M. Bird offered me his Minister of Natural Resources, who was there with us in the room, for some additional information he thought I'd find useful. He was doing me a favor, I was led to understand.

"We've studied the island already," I was told, "and there are no significant amounts of groundwater to be found anywhere to support further development." He didn't offer me a written report or other documentation to support his claim - I was supposed to just take him at his word. "Thank you," I said, and I should have just left it at that and got out of Bird's office as quickly as I gracefully could, but me and my big stupid mouth just had to add, "However, I may have found a freshwater lens in the Highlands area that looks like it might be usable."

Wrong answer. Both Mr. Bird and his minister frowned, and the minister emphatically stated, "No, there's no water for development. We looked into the Highlands, too, and there's nothing there." They had made their position clear to me - they opposed the development and any feasibility studies to support the development, and they had their eyes on me. They had made their point and with that, they took me back to the airport and allowed me to hop across the water to Barbuda with my sure-he's-probably-more-sober-than-not pilot for another day of well hunting.

At dinner that night, Charlie was furious with me. It's a small island and word gets around. He pulled me aside, which he rarely did, and told me, "I've called Ralph (the President of my company and manager of the project) and he's flying down right now to relieve you. You're leaving tomorrow and you can go back to your room right now." I insisted to Charlie that I had no choice but to get in the limo, and that I merely listened to their opinion about the resources of Barbuda but didn't agree to anything. "Yeah, I know," Charlie laughed. "I'm just fucking with you."

"Ralph's not coming down?" I asked.

"No, Ralph's not coming down." 

I think the whole point, just like with P.M. Bird, was basically to let me know that he knew. Both had their intelligence systems and ways of knowing who was doing what and for whom. They both had their eyes on me.

I'm getting close to the end of this story and can probably wrap it up in one more installment. If it's any consolation, I knew it was going to be a long story when I started, but I had no idea it was going to take this long. Old men and their never-ending stories. . .