At the appointed hour, Captain Joe Mancino walked the dozen steps from his bar stool at Tickles Dockside Pub to the ferry at D dock, ushering aboard workmen, schoolchildren, grocery-toting moms, and me. Within minutes, St. Thomas’s clamoring harbor of leviathan cruise ships receded, and we had entered the sanctuary of Water Island, the smallest of the four main US Virgin Islands. The afternoon sea twinkled like diamonds. Palm trees waved from shore. Soon friends were lifting each others’ provisions into waiting golf carts, and I was offered a ride up the steep hillside to Virgin Islands Campground.
A homeland treasure
Far from cruise ships and hotels, tourists and their buzz, a mile-wide respite lets visitors feel like locals
“Water Island is like small-town America was 50 years ago,’’ said Mancino. “Everyone helps each other here.’’
Although four miles from St. Thomas, little Water Island (2 miles long by a mile at its widest) truly is a world apart. Its community of 160 consists mainly of stateside expats all busily engaged in the tropical adventure of a lifetime. Mancino moved here three years ago from Long Island and started the ferry business. Heath Nowak arrived from Louisiana just a month ago with his family to start a new job. A long cast of characters has preceded them: Pirates once drew water from the ponds for which the island was named. Freed slaves established cotton plantations here and worked them with slaves of their own. In 1944 the US military started but never finished Fort Segarra on the island’s highest point. And a 1950s developer, Walter Phillips, began what was to be the Water Isle Hotel & Beach Club, a grand four-star resort.
The hotel is gone now, and there are no nightclubs, supermarkets, or souvenir stores. A few thin roads wind past exhilarating views. Discreet, often gorgeous homes cling to the rocky, cactus-coated slopes. Deborah and Paul Quade, who balance their campground guests with their film-industry careers, offer four shake-shingled cottages next to their house overlooking Limestone Bay. They call it a campground, but trust me, it has to be cushy if I stayed there. Here in a two-room aerie (with a bed, not a sleeping bag), my roller-coaster life reduced itself to the simplest equation: walking, reading, soaking in the Quades’ solar-heated hot tub, and swimming many times a day.
Charles Pemberton, a resident contractor who was born on St. Kitts, had a word for this small orbit: “You stay close.’’ Close to home.
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