THE SEA INSIDE - thoughts on circumambulating the inner bay of Rif St. Marie

(a chapter in "Speaking Papiamentu - Reflections on Photographing Curacao" a collection of essays in-the-making)

By Rita Mendes-Flohr

The flamingos stand undisturbed in the shallow waters of the inner bay, keeping a safe distance from the spot where the road nears the shore and tourists in cars and buses will stop to take pictures, later in the day. These bright pink, almost-orange birds have been photographed so much, and yet I too fall into the temptation of the multitudes as I zoom in on the strikingly colored birds, framed by the walls of the saltpans and contrasting against the dull gray waters and the dark, flat-topped hills that surround the bay. As I click away, it is not the end result I am concerned with, doubting I will ever show these flamingo pictures - but it is the act of taking the photograph, of seeing. Perhaps looking through the lens has become my way of plunging into the mood of the hike, wading into the landscape, in my mind’s eye. I follow the birds and their young near a saltpan-dam running perpendicular to the shore into the bay, two parallel lines of stone with the center submerged, that seem to disappear into the distance - a pathway to nowhere.

Fred and François are already ahead of me, engaged in a long discussion on computer mapping programs and GPS coordinates. On my previous visit to the island, I looked up my old classmate, François van der Hoeven and discovered our common affinity for mondi-walking - exploring the dense, thorny shrubbery of the Curacao countryside. After I returned to my home in Jerusalem, he and my brother, Fred Mendes Chumaceiro, continued to go out weekly, scouting the mondi for archeological remains, acting as pathfinders for the local archeological association.

The “binnenwater” – Dutch for “inside-water” - is a very distinctive feature of Curaçao’s limestone coastline, fanning out like a lobed fig leaf with a very narrow stem connecting it to the sea. These lagoons, or inland seas, with their shallow waters, often bordered by the dense foliage of mangroves, offer a welcome refuge to aquatic birds. On the white salt flats in Jan Thiel I photographed pelicans, herons, flocks of flamingos, when my brother and I hiked around that bay a few years ago, and the long, red legged “makamba” birds, referring to the Papiamentu epithet for the Dutch. The deeper binnenwater of Saint Anna Bay provides docking to large cargo ships and oil tankers and the island’s development owes much to this protected natural harbor, the Schottegat – literally the Sheltering Hole.

Millennia ago, the valleys of the inner bays were formed by rainwater flowing down the surrounding hills, carving a channel to drain into the sea. The direction of the flow is now reversed, with the sea entering the narrow passage to the sunken, empty valley, filling up this lacuna - from which the word lagoon derives.

As we walk in easterly direction, I photograph the muddy waters against the sun. There is a sense of dark luminescence, both foreboding and uplifting – as everything on this island seems to be one thing and its opposite. Likewise the inland sea is at the same time a sheltering bay to ships and birds, as well as a captured water that can be manipulated, dammed, drained, and that conveniently lends itself to the dumping of waste - sewage, asphalt, wrecked boats. If we turn its fig-leaf shape into land, making its negative space a positive one, the inland sea would be a peninsula, literally, almost-an-island, and so the inner bay is almost-a-lake, if not for that narrow connection to the sea. In other words, the inside-sea is both inside and outside – part of the land and part of the sea. Perhaps the reason I am so absorbed by the thought of encircling these inner bays, is that I too, a daughter of the island, having lived all my adult life away, am both and insider and outsider.

At the Hermanus saltpans Fred and François continue on a dirt road that hugs the shoreline, still involved in their discussion. Here I walk out on the half-submerged walls, with water on both sides of me, planning to rejoin them on a perpendicular dam, further out, that meets the shore in a bend of the bay. I am eager to find myself surrounded by the inland sea, to follow the walls into the far reaches of the bay, as if walking on water.

Since I started hiking seriously, around 1993, I have come to know there is nothing like long distance hiking to totally immerse myself into the landscape, in body and spirit. Hiking is immeasurably different from ‘seeing the sights’, going for a ride and stopping at picturesque places. Rather, it means to experience space over time, as a continuum, to flow with it as it changes, to move with its rhythms of open and closed, high and low, and the shifting light of the day.

At first, and for many years, I hiked without a camera – I had refrained from following the footsteps of all the other photographers in my family – my parents, grandfather and son - and in fact only started to photograph in the digital age. Back then, I would experience the hike in a visceral way, like a dance. It was a direct, total, experience of my body in space, as I squeeze through narrow gorges, or reach the top of hills and mountains, crawl into hidden caves, or run into theimmensity of the desert.

Today, if I do not have my camera with me, I feel as if I am missing out on a vital dimension of the hike, one that I can experience only through the lens. With the camera it has become another kind of hike, as I search for a different reading of the landscape, focusing on the interstices that do not have a name, contemplating the colors and textures, so that I no longer recognize what I see. Through the act of framing, I am able to enter into a magical world, that I would harldy notice otherwise in a nature that is an uninterruped and continuous whole. Indeed, hiking with the camera has becomes a hunt for hidden images, just like my brother and François scour the mondi for archeological remains.

As I walk on the saltpan walls, I am captivated by the living organisms that gently sway their tentacles in the muddy bottom of the bay. I get closer to these enigmatic creatures with my lens, wondering what they are – plant or animal. Later I learn they are jellyfish that turn themselves upside down, so that the algae, with which they live in symbiosis, can get the sunlight they need for photosynthesis. Cassiopeia is their name, after the mythological figure punished for boasting to the gods of her beauty. This is a knowledge I gained in retrospect that magnified numerous times my sense of wonder of looking under the surface.

This inland sea, trapped in a system of dams, is no longer the same sea as the Caribbean outside the bay, (tellingly called “laman afó”, the sea outside, in Papiamentu), but many organisms have developed adaptations to its high salinity and unique ecology, like flamingos, mangroves and the upside-down-jellyfish. Though not actively manipulated today, the structures still hold shallow waters and salt is deposited as the waters evaporate. But the salt I photographed on my previous walks around the saltpans of St. Marie, Cas Abou, and Jan Thiel, is no longer here – it has been dissolved by the heavy rains that flooded these low lying plains in the rainy period. I am disappointed, longing to get more shots of the intricate white forms, dripping like icing on a birthday cake and the whirls of sparkling crystals mixed with kernels of black sand and the minuscule crustaceans that color the flamingos pink.

Going through the old slides taken by my mother, I am touched to discover the ones that seek the abstract patterns of the salt, as if I am now echoing her pursuits, speaking the same language. Somehow the saltpans embody my photographic lineage more than any subject matter – starting with my mother’s father, Benjamin Gomes Cassseres, who captured the saltpans in impressive black and white photographs before the age of light meters; to my mother, Tita Mendes Chumaceiro; and my father, Frank Mendes Chumaceiro, who filmed laborers shoveling up the salt into wheelbarrows at Jan Thiel in the nineteen-fifties, when those saltpans were still being worked.





It is difficult to look at the saltpans without thinking of slavery. Even if they were still exploited after the emancipation, salt winning in the scorching heat of the sun surely depended on the hard labor of those who had limited choices of livelihood. History still weighs heavily in these regions, with three plantation houses around the St. Marie binnenwater – Hermanus, Jan Kock and Rif, each with its own grid of saltpans. To this day, the island’s slavery past still seems to arouse at once fascination, shame and awe. The writer Miriam Sluis, in Zoutrif, her book on Rif St. Marie, explores the impact of slavery on present day society, asking how this disgraceful history still affects the descendents of the slaves and their masters.

Just as I had hoped, my saltpan dam, though partially inundated at places, takes me safely back to the shore, and I continue with the others. When we approach the deeper parts of the bay, the water becomes a rich, dark green in the mid-morning light, reflecting the steep side of the Seru Largu across the bay above the entrance channel. I can already see that the rocks at the foot of the hill reach all the way down to the water, and ask myself how we will follow the shoreline there, but decide to cross that bridge when we get to it.

A little stone wall appears on our left, and we examine the lime burning oven which is in remarkable condition. Fred and François are surprised to note that it does not appear on the Werbata maps of 1908. It is something that Werbata, in his thorough mapping of the island, would not have overlooked - could it have been built after his team roamed the Curaçao countryside? As they study the structure, and ponder these questions, my lens is drawn to the pieces of bright, orange roof tiles tucked into the dark construction of damp stones, crying out to be noticed.

Along the rock wall there is a spring of fresh water – so improbable in this realm of salt. François tastes it to prove the point – and we enter a hidden world of upside-down-trees on the still waters that run shallow, bordered by a high, gray limestone cliff. Suddenly, I find myself entranced by the magical spell of this place, and with my camera I begin to see, creeping with my lens into every little turn and bend of this watery space. I single out a spot of light, a meeting of leaf and water, an interplay of green mangrove leaves in the foreground, a dark rock with a rose patch, like a wound, in the background, and its reflection in the ‘underground’ – on and under the water surface.



As we reach the coast, we emerge from the leafy canopy beneath a sky now ominous with dark clouds. The stony shore, at this bend of the coastline, is not a safe and gentle beach, but receives the brunt of the easterly winds as it swerves out towards Cape St. Marie. Sticking out about the waves are the corroded remains of a pier that was apparently dumped here from the port at Bullenbaai, evoking a ship that ran aground in a storm.

A rusted pipe lies across the narrow entrance to the inner bay, broad enough to balance on top, so that we need not wet our feet in the crossing. I photograph the white skeleton of a decaying moray eel, its teeth and vertebrae sharply delineated against a carpet of succulents with crisscrossing orange-red stems. Across the bay, in the far distance, is the green silhouette of the Christoffel, rising above the hilly landscape, clearly the highest peak on the island.

We try to follow the long entrance channel into the bay, but as I had already observed from afar, the rocks at the foot of Seru Largu come all the way down to the water, and we did not bring the proper shoes to venture on this wet route. And so we climb the steep and pointy rocks to where they form a plateau. On the way, I photograph milon di seru against the bright sun, the spikes of this round cactus a fiery orange – orange, again, now complementing the dimmed blues of the bay.

Once on top of the plateau, we try to make our way through the dense growth of the infrou cactus and thorny bushes. In Papiamentu they call this mondi será – a mondi that is closed to passage. In previous hikes with my brother, we never shied away from making our way through fields of cactus and the prickly wabi bush. The two of us have climbed the Christoffel off-trail from every possible angle, knocking down the offending infrou spines with our sturdy walking sticks. But now our time is limited, as we want to get around the entire inner bay efore the end of the day, and we have not even made it to the bend where the bay broadens after the entrance channel, and almost an hour has gone by.

François suggests we return and continue along the sea coast and then make our way back across the saddle between two hill tops, to the inner bay. I am glad to let him take the lead, rather than having to sit down with the maps and worry whether we will find a way out or not – and so I follow blindly, keeping my eyes through the lens.

As the three of us walk along the sea, the showers finally catch up with us and we take shelter behind a rock that blocks the northeasterly winds. I am only concerned about my camera getting wet, but the plastic bags I brought do the trick especially since the rains end in a short while, as they often do on this island.

We easily find the newly bulldozed road of the resort under construction that will soon transform this arid wilderness into the leisure grounds for the privileged from overseas, carrying globalization into the bay of St. Marie. As much as François has been actively opposing the uncontrolled development in wild nature and erasure of archeological sites, he is now glad to take advantage of those very problematic roads, so that we can gain time and continue our circumambulation of the bay.

The way up to the pass on the roughly bulldozed road, strewn with large blocks of recently uprooted and broken stone, is not too steep. At the descent, on the other side, the road is no longer stony, but overgrown with shrubs in delicate bloom that are swarming with bees. My hardy hiking companions have frightened me with tales of their close encounters with these insects that in recent years have become vicious and are purported to attack all who come too near their nests. Luckily we discover that their aggressiveness is greatly dispelled when they are focused on collecting nectar.

Even if we are still encircled by countless buzzing bees, I stop, suddenly, to capture the thin hilu di diabel, “devil’s threads,” that are almost strangling the dark green shrubs. The amazing thing is that they are not yellow here, but flaming orange. I wonder if orange is indeed a preference of nature in these dry regions, or is it is precisely this color that I notice among many others, as it stands out against the dull hues of the dry landscape?

When the bay finally appears in front of us, we have already been walking for more than four hours, and take a welcome lunch break by its shores. Here is the first sign from the old Rif plantation, a v-shaped wall along the shore, made of rough coral stones heaped on top of each other – what often is called a ‘slave wall’ on the island, but which François insists on calling by its more descriptive name in Dutch, stapelmuur, a piled-stone wall. The wall’s angled shape makes it an unmistakable landmark on the Werbata map.





After our rest, we continue into the old Rif plantation grounds, and Fred and François show me the indigo basins and a cylindrical grave they have found on previous scouting trips, some together with Miriam Sluis, whose mondi- explorations with her dog are an integral part of her book uncovering the history of Rif. We walk along the shore for a while, crossing the valley where indigo was cultivated as the path climbs toward an old slave house, its overgrown and crumbling walls, baring a construction of mud-covered woven sticks.

Finally, on top of the hill, we reach the Rif plantation house, which is in an advanced state of disintegration - its walls are cracked, eaten by saltpeter, and debris is scattered all over the floors. Its doors and windows have been stripped, as well as its formerly tiled roofs, leaving only a skeleton of wooden beams against the blue cloudless sky. This is a paradise for my camera – each frame an abstract painting - of walls with patches of mold and saltpeter, jagged cracks, peeling remnants of paint and shadows cast by the crosshatch of beams.

I capture the maze of rooms upon rooms, leading to some other dark spaces beyond, the sunken cement bathtub, the old kitchen with its bright red walls. Then I see the wooden steps leading up to the attic, strewn with shards of orange roof tiles. I cannot resist the urge to climb to the attic, to follow my childhood curiosity for secrets hidden under the beams, despite my fears that the rotten steps and floorboards will give in with my weight. In the trance of photography and memory, I forget all the threats.

François and my brother have already thoroughly explored the entire plantation, and ours is ostensibly not a scouting trip, yet they cannot resist searching for a graveyard on the grounds of the old plantation house that they had not yet managed to locate. They wonder if one of the three missing graves was actually found already, but mistakenly identified as the raised foundation of a little house. It is all a question of interpretation, of rereading the same materials. Again I find similarity with my photography, in my attempt to discover other ways of seeing.

The saltpans that I photographed here some four years earlier and to which I was eager to return, are now flooded over, and anyway we must hurry back as the day is drawing short. In the distance, in the dull green hills, I start to see the white painted landhuis of Jan Kock. Below, in the grey, muddy waters, is a white heron, which I capture in the same shot. This is where we started, we have walked around the entire inner bay – which is what I had asked my brother and François to do. It was not enough for me to walk along parts of the shores – I attributed great importance to going fully around – circumambulating the inner bays.





There is a sense of completeness, wholeness, in circumambulation, that reverberates deeper, in the spirit. A feeling of return - a homecoming. And so, in circumambulating the inner bay of Rif St. Marie, I realize I am echoing my yearly return to the island of my birth - rounding my own, personal circle, coming home. And, perhaps, on another level, it signifies the return to my photographic roots, connecting me to a long lineage of photographers.

***

all photos and texts - Copyright © 2009 by Rita Mendes-Flohr
more photos, with full screen slideshow and Curacao music on my website:

http://ritamendesflohr.phanfare.com/

On my photo exhibit at Landhuis Bloemhof, Curacao in October 2010:
http://myphotographiclineage.blogspot.com/