Mustn’t Grumble!

The generator rumbles, day and night, across the street from the Department of Education – even yesterday on that most sacred of American days – Thanksgiving. I recognise how lucky I am to have the luxury of electricity, and I recognise how truly fortunate I am not to have to deal with a roofless house and all that entails – a life blown or washed away.

And so I “mustn’t grumble”.

That is arguably one of the most British of British understatements. Our world may be caving in but really there’s nothing about which to complain. A quick search brought up Chas and Dave, Eric Idle in The Life of Brian, and Terry Wogan’s autobiography. I can’t help feeling it’s a phrase that’s been around a lot longer than either Chas, Dave, Eric or Terry.

But those are the words which aptly describe many on St Croix. They have been devastated by a category five hurricane, Mad Maria, skimming the south shore two months ago and the majority of people when asked how they fared, respond with variations of “mustn’t grumble”. Dig a little deeper and you will find some living under a blue tarpaulin – signifying FEMA have stepped in and provided covering against the capricious elements. Or windows were sucked out, or blown in, in a terrifying eddy of angry winds – either from the hurricane itself or a tornado it spawned. Or “dat big ole tree, it jus’ felled down” – enquire further and you are liable to find it landed across a home, or the track leading to a home, or maybe it came to rest on a car.

But hey, Jemima or Cyril or Sarah, well they had it worse, so mustn’t grumble.

I bumped into a professor I know – we were both looking for anti-mould remedies or batteries or any of the myriad items shelved in The ‘ome De, that well known d-i-y store where employees where orange pinnies and which also took a battering, and whilst the roof might have been repaired the signage has not – anyway, she, the professor, proudly told me when I enquired about the state of the University of the Virgin Islands, that they were up and running two weeks after the storm. She added it might have been a bit chaotic – but mustn’t grumble.

A number of schools have been deemed unsafe and so the Complex, one of the high schools on the island, has juggled its timetable to accommodate not one but two other schools – an elementary and a junior high. The high schoolers are released from academic bondage at midday and the younger students stream in for the afternoon session. It must have been an educational nightmare to reorganize three schools into one, but mustn’t grumble, others have it worse.

Not only was hurricane debris strewn across roads – huge old mahogany trees rudely uprooted, galvanized tin flung from roofs, siding cartwheeling across fields and through gardens – but electricity poles tumbled too. Power lines whipped around in the wind before subsiding into tangled coils or snaked across buildings and roads, making the latter impassable for fear of a jolt. Some poles were felled to splinter in jagged abandon against a branch, or landed in a trampoline parody on a strand of cable still hanging. Adding insult to injury a sink hole appeared on the road linking Christiansted along the north shore to the East End of the island. The road on the south side was impassable in most places because of the aforementioned power lines.

A combination of no power for over two months – some lost it when that bitch Hurricane Irma sped north of St Croix the week before Maria hit – no water because, as you know, power is needed to pump water unless you have a handy ass or ox nearby to walk around and around in circles to draw it up from a well, no means of transport in some cases because a car has been damaged or because there is nowhere safe to go and, immediately after the storm, a curfew only lifted for four hours each day, not to mention a hospital badly damaged with many medi-vaced to the mainland, and I think most would agree there is a hell of a lot to grumble about.

But Crucians, and imports, are hardy folk. They focus on what can be done. They praise and celebrate the arrival of linemen (I’m sure some of them are from Wichita) who are valiantly assisting local crews with power restoration. They have elevated Tim Duncan, a local boy, and latterly of San Antonio Spurs fame (basketball for those not from the US) to near sainthood for his immeasurable help in raising funds, and then having the grace to actually come home numerous times to help distribute water, care packages, batteries and so on, rather than tossing a kitchen roll as our president was filmed doing.

There are stories of local generosity too. A local veterinarian, Kasey Canton, shipped and distributed generators from the mainland. A brother and sister duo, the Ridgeways, have raised money in a GoFundMe campaign  and dispensed needed supplies through their new organization VI-R3 (Relief, Recover, Rebuild), and there are countless other tales of magnanimous deeds.

And so as I grind my teeth at the incessant rumble of the generator I remind myself, and reflect that whilst the phrase may be British those on St Croix have earned the right to use it, I really mustn’t grumble and in the immortal words of Eric Idle, ‘always look on the bright side of life’!