DIASPORIC VOICE OF HOME

Living in fragrant Jamaica
I would settle at night
in tropical moonlight
on the stone porch
of my nonelectrified
one-room isolated house
on craggy rocky goat hill
and tune in Cats' games
on nostalgia-powered radio
wistfully tuning the dial
finding Cawood Ledford's
rocky craggy yet soothingly
familiar home-grown drawl
on the far Kentucky station
whose signal fast-breaking
through the ionosphere
was my sole nexus
to my Big Blue home.

CARTOGRAPHER IN JAMAICA

One job I had in Jamaica when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer was a stint as a Map Technician, in the Western Regional Office, of the Government of Jamaica Ministry of Agriculture, in Montego Bay. I was attached to a Government of the Netherlands project that had purchased a banana "walk" that was probably the upstream reaches of an old sugarcane plantation, centuries old.

I knew the scion of the planter family who still worked the plantation--over three centuries in his family--and who ran its sugar mill. I experienced the country's extreme social stratification firsthand, hobnobbing with people who had five-bedroom houses with swimming pools and servants; and dirt-floor people in the bush, where I built a one-room house--no water, no electricity--on a high, rocky tor at the end of a goat path, overlooking Montego Bay.

My job was to subdivide the banana property, on a plat map, into viable, smallholder plots to be distributed to peasant farmers, using a formula that included the USDA soil-classification system (includes soil type and land slope) and landscape features including existing roads and the Montego River.

As I think back, I know a problem that the project did not consider: The fact that the meandering river was eroding the riverbank into some plots but not others. Some Jamaican smallholders, surely, have lost valuable bottom land. The durative code of the map--its temporality--was too thin. It was a cartographic snapshot in present tense that did not gaze into the future of that agro-landscape.

I hope there are no machete fights today over property boundaries as I platted them. In this case, map authorship--and blame--is clear: It is I.

SEMI-NEO-LUDDITE LAUDS INTERNET

For 18 months of the three and half years I lived in Jamaica (in an isolated one-room house I built in the bush near Guava Walk, a village in St. James Parish, near Montego Bay) and for the four and half months I lived in a bark house in the rain forest of Costa Rica (on the Atlantico side, close to the coast, near Sixoala), I lived without electricity and running water. Their absence is fairly easy to deal with, especially the absence of electricity. Hey! Did not tens of thousands of us learn this here on the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

But, it is one matter to be simmering in the summer city without water, waiting, hoping, for the bottles to be delivered in the midst of calamity; and another to live in the bush or rain forest with your usual source of water within walking distance. Besides, in Jamaica, but not Costa Rica, I had a good, really good, radio set (Radio Cayman [Islands] was a favorite station.) I learned firsthand how important radio is to the nonliterate world. Now, with Internet, living in isolation would not be so isolated. So, sign me up to live in one of the seven named deserts of the Outback (as long as I was connected to the Web). I know people today who do not have a microwave. In fact, one lives with me. In fact, he is typing this at this very mo....