[ISL] Gregory Howard on moving from PEI to Bermuda

[rfmcdonald]

Gregory Howard's personal essay in The Globe and Mail describing how a move from PEI to Bermuda a decade ago changed his life caught my attention.

I take a ferry to work.

Wide-beamed Coralita sidles up to the dock with a shudder and a bump. I go up the stairs with some of the others crowding aboard and sit on a bench on the upper deck looking out over the water.

Coralita has carried me in rain and high winds, in scorching heat at noon and, on the last run of the day, home in darkness. Aboard her, we are men, women and children of every human shade. Schoolchildren in pinafores and shorts, garrulous pensioners and those of us on our way to work on this tiny, fish-hook-shaped archipelago in the North Atlantic called Bermuda.

On any given workday, Americans and Brits, Scandinavians and South Africans take their seats beside white and black Bermudians aboard Coralita.

Those of us “from away” are interlopers employed in insurance, financial or legal services who have no memory of the riots here less than 50 years ago, when black people fought to gain access to equal wages and job opportunities that were available only to whites.

I take my seat beside a young Chinese man holding a slim book, the characters cascading down the page. Some of us never speak and some never shut up. Snippets of conversation float to me: a cautionary tale about a wife who has left Bermuda because she’s had enough of doing nothing while he works. A lovely house on the water couldn’t keep her in this paradise without something to do.