I was on my way this morning to my weekly non-profit visit to Chenay Bay Beach Resort. For the past few weeks, I have been going out there one or two mornings to set up my massage table and hope for some business. I haven’t had any, hence, the “nonprofit” status.

It’s not a bad place to hang out and get a little reading done. But, I digress……On my way out to Chenay, as I was driving along the road that goes from Estate Sight toward Cheeseburgers, a deer stood in my lane a few hundred feet ahead. I slowed and the deer looked at me, nonchalantly turned toward the field behind her, and gracefully bounded into the bush. She was beautiful and I silently wished her well, as I do with all animals I see near our roads.

My hour and a half at Chenay was pleasant. It was quite breezy with swells coming in from the north. I watched the boats anchored and moored off the beach being tossed by the murky surf. Most of the chairs on the beach were occupied by people facing the sun rather than the water and reading paperback novels. I read a book called, “What to Eat”, a very interesting expose on the food industry which makes me want to eat only mangoes and guavas and coconuts from my own trees and farmstand produce from Southgate and the Saturday mid-island farmer’s market.

A little after noon, I started packing up my stuff. On my way out, I met a guy who says he “comes down off the hill” to volunteer his expertise and services to the hotel. He had been digging a trench to lay some PVC pipe all morning. He felt bad for me, since I’d had no business, took a couple of promotional items and promised to “talk to the guests”, to try to get them to book a massage with me. I was not feeling sorry for myself, but I guess he thought that if I showed up, I should get some business. Fine by me.

A friendly neighborhood iguana

On the way home, on the same stretch of road where I saw the deer earlier, there was a van idling on the right hand side of the road, and another car passing slowly by. I could see an animal in the road and hoped that it hadn’t been hit. The guy from the van was walking toward it waving his arms. As I approached I realized that there was an iguana (a good sized one, too!) moving slowly toward the bush in my lane. The guy seemed to be herding it. I slowed as I neared, smiled and said,”Do you have a license to herd iguanas?” He mumbled something about just wanting to get it off the road, since it had almost gotten run over by three cars. I said, “Good work!” and drove happily home, knowing that two of nature’s children were safe from the evils of cars and traffic. For the time being, anyway.

Tags: St. Croix

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 10:28 am and is filed under St. Croix, Terry Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.