Going Home-A remembrance of things past

from the archives

Under the ash, home
By ANDREW J. SKERRITT
Published January 8, 2004

OLVESTON, Montserrat - I finally went home again. Eight years after my last visit, I walked down the gangway of the Opale Express, an Australian-built catamaran, and stepped on the concrete jetty.


Ahead of me the landscape rose sharply in parched bluffs and rock outcroppings. Wooden shacks lined the road from the waterfront. Unfamiliar faces greeted me at the customs house.


My return home was a familiar ritual, to bury family, my father. But on that placid October afternoon, none of that mattered. I was home, even if home was a vastly different place.


Montserrat, the 38-square-mile island where I grew up, had been sliced in two when the volcano rumbled to life in July 1995. It uprooted most of my relatives, friends and former neighbors. Some of them stayed on the island, but most left. You can find them mostly on the streets and in double-decker buses in London, Birmingham, Leicester and Manchester, England, or in New York and Miami.


Those who remained inhabit a truncated world of exclusion and safe zones, ash gray and tropical green, fear and hope.

Click here to read the entire article
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/01/08/Floridian/Under_the_ash__home.shtml

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