The rats are staring at me. At least 10 of them, scattered on the hill. It's dark, but I can see their silhouettes lining the trash-piled path. It’s nearly 90 degrees, and I can smell them, too. They stand between me and the after-work beer I desperately need.
A year ago, the rats would have won. I’d have turned around and gone back to my apartment on a dirt road in Dominica, overwhelmed, exhausted, overheated—praying the power was still working so I would at least have lights and maybe even air conditioning.
But not now. Now, I’m an old pro. My pockets are full of pennies, my fingers ready to release them like rockets. I take a deep breath and I trudge up rat hill, flinging this copper currency I once considered worthless at their yellow eyes. Ping! Pow! Plunk.
Out of my way, rats, Number One Tech Reporter in the Caribbean needs a drink. Tomorrow, I leave this strange, beautiful jungle I’ve called home and return to the US. After tomorrow I will work in an office; I will wear pants and not buy electricity with my groceries. But tonight, for one last time on this island, little rats, I drink.
I moved to the West Indies from the West Coast of the US about a year ago. I followed my significant other when he was accepted to a medical school here. I had that luxury because I work for *^*~The Internet*^*~. And all an Internet-worker like me needs to work every day is Wi-Fi and electricity. So, armed with my 27-inch second screen, a primary and a backup laptop, I left my life in the Pacific Northwest and headed to Dominica.
The Commonwealth of Dominica is an independent Caribbean nation, known for its wild natural landscape. If I was picturing working from a Sandals resort for a year, what I found was a place much more wonderful and much more wild. Luxuries like stop lights, an adequate garbage system, and a lot of technologies that I used to not even think about just aren’t available here. Many people long for this kind of "unplugged" living, a complete escape from the rigamarole of suburban life in many parts of America. And for the first few weeks on Dominica, I relished the disconnection the island afforded me. But I wasn't on vacation. As I tried to get on with my job and my life as it had been in the US, the absence of the amenities which I once took for granted was a considerable challenge.
I have learned here how precious fresh milk can be; that it’s possible to edit an iPhone 6 review in the middle of a hurricane as long as you have your trusty Nokia brick phone; that though the Internet is kind of everywhere, you can still be isolated from it when the infrastructure to support connection is not reliable; and above all, that rats and rainfall, blackouts and boa constrictors, and pin worms and pangs of homesickness can be defeated.
I’m back in my island apartment now, packing to leave tomorrow. Listening to the rain pound the jungle outside, I think about how strange this year has been. In many ways, my days were very much the same as any other digital journalist. But it’s the particulars that made the last year of my life so different from that of my friends back home. Alarm? No, I woke when the bird nest outside my window started making “morning sounds." I made coffee on a stove-top pot because it would work even in storms and electrical outages. When I went to the grocery store, I bought more than food: I also bought electricity. When I made phone calls, I either used Google or paid exorbitant amounts to dial from a Nokia brick that I bought at my town’s solitary store—a room I’d describe as “hoarder’s garage sale” chic.
When the Internet went out at my apartment, I wasn't able to just go to the beach and relax. I’d relocate. Sometimes to the mobile units that comprised most of the medical school. (If there was a hurricane, I’d work in the school’s storm shelter.) Other times I’d just head to a friend’s apartment who still had power or Internet.
Again, and again, people—not some built system or piece of technology—would save me. And when you think about it, that's not a bad pattern to fall into these days. Most of my friends were from the expat community; because my town was so centered around the school, most of its population was comprised of people who were affiliated. Besides medical students, there were other transplants here for a variety of reasons: A few worked at the daycare or elementary school, but more were spouses and partners of medical students. We were united by our connection to this strange combination of factors, in a place that most of us never thought we'd visit—let alone call home. What I quickly realized was different about my situation and theirs was the whole 9-5 job thing.
Island Time is a very, very real condition, wherein hours and days float by without any schedule or structure to mark them. Most of my friends acclimated to island time easily, gratefully. I was the weird one: toting a laptop around everywhere, asking for Wi-Fi passwords, insisting on being back from trips by Monday at 8 a.m. Whenever a new friend would ask “what do you do?” I liked to say I was head of WIRED’s Caribbean editorial division (technically true). My response yielded nothing short of, “Wait, but what do you really do?”
Because, of course, how could I possibly run a team of tech reporters from here? And moreover, why would I?
The first thing you need to be a tech writer from the island of Dominica is enough electricity to keep the Internet on. I learned this in my second week on the island, when on a Sunday, I found out that our electricity was running low. OK, I thought, what now? Well, it turned out that in Dominica, you purchase electricity like you would phone minutes or a data plan. Most stores allow you to request, say, $200 EC (should last about a month). Around 2pm, I realized I wouldn’t make it through the next day without upping the supply. I walked to every electricity salesperson (the store, the school, the minimart one town over) asking if they would sell me electricity, only to be given the same refrain.
“We’re out.”
How is that possible?! And as my lights and refrigerator and Internet went dark the next day, I recognized, truly, how much I’ve always taken the most common technologies around me for granted. I packed my backpack and relocated to powered ground for the first time. It would not be the last.
I think about this as I put a pair of formerly green, now brown sandals into my suitcase. They remind me of one morning a few months ago when all that stood between me and work was a giant, unmoving cow. With huge horns.
It’s 8:15, and the sun is already beating down on me. I can feel my un-sunscreened flesh burning and my thin shirt drowning in sweat from the 15 minute walk. My backpack is filled with the essentials: Laptop, charger, headphones, converter, mosquito repellent, sunscreen, iPhone, Nokia brick phone, each phone’s respective charger, and two filled water bottles.
Standard WIRED gear, right?
My Wi-Fi went out that morning and so there I am on the long trail (appropriately named Moo Cow Trail) to my friend’s apartment. It is rocky, dusty, and uneven; I should have worn tennis shoes but in my haste I slipped on sandals, a choice my ankles regret.
I look into the cow’s eyes to see if he’ll give. But no, he is unafraid and, I realize a second later, ready to knock me off the trail if I come too close. I scramble up the side of the road, closer to the river, adding a few minutes to the walk to avoid the bovine trail guard.
As I place those same sandals into my bag, I look down at my sun-browned feet and try to understand how it’s possible that come next week I will be sitting in a real office in San Francisco, in real clothes, at a real desk.
Going to work every day here has been like living a strange double life. When I passed that cow and made it to *The Internet,* I immediately entered a different world: the insular tech industry and even more insular tech-journalism community. In that world, everything is innovative, fast, convenient—the opposite of Island Time. And yet even as I was as far away from the reality of Silicon Valley as you could be, it was the wonders of technology that let me keep working (Facebook, Skype, Viber, Google Hangouts and Voice, Messenger, WhatsApp, VPNs, iMessage—the freaking Internet, man!)—the very things I wrote about each day.
When people ask me what the most challenging part of living in the Caribbean has been, I do not pause. I do not blink. I do not stutter: food.
When I get to San Francisco next week, the first thing I’m going to eat is cheese. The next thing is bread. And then probably more cheese.
There are three real, legitimate grocery store on the island, and only one was possible for me to get to in less than four hours. If you ever saw me there, you’d think I was a prepper. I learned to buy four jugs of yogurt and freeze some in case none showed up for two months. On every trip I weighed the risk of spoiled food (which I would probably end up eating anyway) against the chances a shipment delay resulted in the inability to purchase any at all.
And it's not like I knew when the food was showing up, either. I had to be on the lookout. Every day, I followed the same food routine. First, in the morning, I checked one of the various community Facebook groups to look for news on a shipment, which were haphazard and inconsistent as to their contents. Every day, I'd scan the group: Was there frozen fruit? Was lettuce delivered? Were there black beans? And the ultimate question: Was there a dairy shipment!? If the answer to any of these questions (but especially the last!) was yes, I'd throw on my giant backpack, and walk-run to the store. I knew that time was of the essence: If there had indeed been a decent-to-large delivery, that place was going to look like a Best Buy on Black Friday.
The problem was that store employees unstock while customers are shopping for reasons unbeknownst to me, and a sort of crowd-and-grab strategy is deployed in order to be sure you acquire one of the 40 or so pieces of zucchini that won’t reappear for at least a month. Once something is gone, it’s really gone. (There was a dark period at one point where shipments were delayed four weeks; a community meeting/witch hunt with the grocery store managers had a panicky, riotous air to it.)
I will try to slow my roll when I get back to the States, but I now approach grocery shopping like a combat sport, so if you see me in the aisles of Trader Joe's, be warned.
There were many times I broke. When someone stole my shoes off my porch, I broke. When I went on a 10-hour hike, forgot a flashlight, and ran into a giant boa constrictor, I broke. When friends and family would post pictures of what they were doing back home while I waited out long, boring days in which it was too sticky-hot to go outside, I broke.
Even with the beauty of the island around me, having a 9-5 job still based on the very different world of US tech journalism kept me stretched between my old and new life. It kept me from immersing myself completely in Island Time and Island culture. It kept me from letting go. I missed driving. I missed using my cell phone outside of Wi-Fi zones. I missed meeting up with friends easily.
On Dominica, once we all leave our apartments, it feels like stepping into a black hole, where you just hope you’ll surface in the respective, chosen place, and your friends would be there. There is no iMessage game of “how close are you?” to be played. I learned that Facebook was the most important way to be in contact with friends on the island. Everything has to be planned. You can’t just happen upon a show to binge-watch with your friend on some random Saturday because you have to take measure to acquire and order or stream a show. There are some local channels, but unless I was in the mood for raunchy music videos or church TV, they rarely hit the spot. So to watch TV, first you need a VPN to escape Dominica's limited streaming catalogues and if it's live TV you're after, mostly you need a good dose of luck.
But, ironically, it was this attention to plotting my daily life that finally gave me a sort of presentness that people seeking island living often want. What I learned is that presentness is more than just “living in the now.” Living in the now would be to succumb to my listless sense of apathy. Instead, I had to actively work at making sure my time was valuable, that it was more than pining to go home. Here, I had to work at making a life. And I did. My friends and I kept notebooks plotted with our activities for the month, annotated with phone numbers of drivers and crudely drawn maps. We planned.
Last week, I sold nearly everything I owned on Island Craigslist. Except, let me explain: Island Craigslist isn’t actually Craigslist—it’s a Facebook group called Craigslist wherein community members save and exchange goods for money. I've now packed what I need and nothing else into these two now-crammed suitcases. My old T-shirts and extra shampoos were bought with delight, because you can’t easily get those things.
I am equal parts thrilled and nervous about going home. The island forced me out of my comfort zone, and I know now that I will miss it dearly.
I’ve been able to wear ratty tanks and gym shorts “to work”; I literally rolled out of bed 15 minutes before “going to” the office (my kitchen), where I sat barefoot and barefaced behind my laptop. I’ve worked from ocean-side bars, friends’ homes, ferries, and four nearby islands. (And also from many, many hallway floors when Internet or electricity was scarce.) My time has been very much my own. While the contents of my workplace, those housed digitally in Hipchat and Wordpress and Gmail and Outlook, remained intense and appropriately demanding, all I would do is look up and be instantly reminded how slow and quiet and solitary the world can be. When I was head-down, staring into “my office,” I could almost hear the humming whir of it, the constant, comforting buzz of a workplace. Look up, and everything went silent.
When I looked out my window, I saw fields, cows, ocean, dirt, trees, mountains. Sometimes a person would walk by, or a car on the one-lane road blared music as it sped past. I know that when I look up and around me in San Francisco, it will be harder to find this calm, to actually separate myself, to give my brain a break. On the island, the literal moment I walked outside my apartment, my iPhone became nothing more than a camera I could play Dots on or listen to my pre-installed iTunes library. I was disconnected. AFK had a truer meaning for me. And there were people who weren’t only crucial to living in Dominica, but became really special to me: Havis, who would sit at a trailhead and wait for hours until I returned from a walk, telling me, “I want to wait here to make sure you get home safely.” Betsy, who knew everything about her native produce, being so patient with me asking her now how exactly does one cook breadfruit…? Also, what is breadfruit?
But I will also feel part of my old world again, a place where my friends have work schedules too—and thus want to see me around said schedules! I will no longer be the odd one typing incessantly, glancing up to pretend I shared in a moment. Whenever there is a birthday or a brainstorm or a “had to be there” moment in the office, I will, finally, be there again. I won’t have to turn down event invites, or explain why I can’t actually go see that cool new thing in real life. I won’t forget what my coworkers’ faces look like, or try and match the voices in conference calls to their names (or worse yet, wait for the pause and interject my voice—oh god, how I miss facial cues!). I will once again experience the camaraderie of actually being there, something I could have never realized the value of before this year.
I’ve made it work. I’ve used everything technology has put at my disposal to “be” as “there” as possible, and I’ve found the value in not being there, too. But it’s time to return, to toss my Nokia, to sit at a table with my coworkers, to use a data plan and text people even when I don’t have WiFi.
It’s time to put on pants, get on the bus, and go to work.
