After a second poor sleep in a row, I decided to stick close to the house for the early part of the day and just walk. I decided to do some individual studies of some of my favourite roadside plants - of which there are many. With 12 hours of intense sunshine daily and usually a few major rainstorms each day, the plants are always growing. I figure this will be a quiet day.
I work my way up a road, making a few sketches and starting to feel more awake. Around my 3rd or 4th plant, I’m on the road outside a very well-manicured laneway. There are people around; I can hear someone doing stuff towards the house.
Eventually, a young man - a local - walks down the laneway, asking if I’m alright.
“I saw you standing nearby, and now I see you at the laneway, and I figure you might need help.”
“Oh no… I'm good; I’m staying nearby. I am just doing these sketches of various plants along the road. I show him.
“Oh - that’s Red Ginger,” he says, looking at my iPad, which depicts a 5-6 foot tall plant with 6” red-magenta flowers all over. It runs about 30-40 feet along the road across from the lane I’m standing in.
“Ginger? Like, the spice?” I couldn’t draw a ginger plant from memory, but I thought they were quite small.
“Yes, but it’s not the same plant - we just call it this.”
I show him a few others.
“That's Agave,” - pointing to a cactus plant, and “Croton,” another one with mid-sized leaves and lots of yellow veins.
“You seem to know a lot about plants. Are you a gardener?”
“I am; I work for this couple up here,” motioning at the house.
I ended up in an hour-long conversation with this fellow, Tony. He is very pleased to find out I’m from Canada; he gets excited and says, “I have a baby in Canada… I haven’t seen yet…” - the mother is going to school there but returns to Barbados often. He hasn’t been able to visit, but he tells me, “Every day I live another life in Canada” - through his phone and pictures.
He asks me what was the deal with all the fires this summer? His partner, being in Toronto, had smokey skies. “Is it just people setting them or… how is this happening?”
I try to explain it as best I can. “It’s partly climate change; the snow in the north is melting earlier. We have a long period of no rain in the summer. Where I live, I often won’t see any rain for 2 months in the summer. My lawn is yellow, no matter what.
“I think it’s also partly due to logging practices - we just plant the same tree for huge areas, and this makes them more vulnerable to fires.
“Some of the fires were started by people - being stupid - having a campfire without being careful when it’s super dry, sparks fly… something starts. Other times, it’s lightning.
“It’s part of the normal process. Indigenous people used to try to control fires as part of forest regrowth. But now, we don’t really incorporate that.
“There’s a huge amount of territory up north; it’s just hard to fathom how much open space there is and how few people there are.
“It would be like all of Barbados burning… a thousand times over… I don’t even know the scale of it…”
Next, he says, “There are two things I want to do when I go to Canada. I want to go to the CN Tower. And I want to go to Ribfest.”
I laugh at this.
“The CN Tower is easy. It’s always there. If your partner is in Scarborough, it’s not that far away.”
“Ribfest - I think this is like a rotating festival. It goes from place to place; it might be in a city for a few weeks, usually in the summer. In the winter, they probably are down in the Southern United States.”
I suggest he also go to a Blue Jays game when he is there.
“Yes! I know the Blue Jays now. I bought 2 snapback hats even!”
“That’s good. I see tourists wearing Yankees hats, but I’ve noticed quite a few Bajans wearing Blue Jays gear, which I find interesting.”
“This is because so many of us have a connection to Toronto. There are Bajans in America, too - we call them the Bajan-Yankees.”
I tell him that almost every single Bajan I’ve spoken to - and it’s hundreds at this point - has a connection in Canada or has lived there.
“Bajans know more about Canada than Americans do.”
“Every Canadian I’ve ever met has been so nice… so polite… but what I can’t understand… I can’t understand why they say sorry!”
“Oh man, I know - it’s like a bad habit… we do have a reputation for being nice. That might be partially the ones who travel.” We get sidetracked into another conversation before I can explain that there are truly some insane, lunatic, vile Canadians - just like anywhere else - but perhaps not as much as America.
“I’ve spent so much time learning about gardening here. I’d have to learn it all over again if I worked as a gardener in Canada.
“You have plants that grow - and then learn to live through the winter - and then grow again?”
I can certainly understand how foreign this seems to him.
“Yeah - the plants here never stop growing, eh. It’s insane.”
I try to explain how plants shed leaves and go dormant through the winter. I think if he can handle plants in Barbados, he could handle them in Canada.
He really wants to hear more about Toronto.
“I think it’s the most diverse city in the world now. More than New York. You’ve got a lot of people from the Caribbean - Jamaicans. Koreans, Chinatown, a big Arabic population, Little Italy… I think every country on the planet is represented. The density and action would be similar to Bridgetown, but it just goes on for miles, and there are all sorts of people.
“When one of these neighbourhoods has a team in the World Cup - Little Portugal, for example - it shuts down. Bars are packed, and streets get filled with people when the team wins. It’s insane.”
We talk about how hard it is to make it as a professional sports player - he tried for a while as a teenager and travelled around the Caribbean playing soccer but never made it far enough. I mention how the NBA is so difficult to make; there are only 400 people in the league.
“Some tall white Canadian just signed in the NBA, right?”
“Tall white… I… can’t think of who this is… there’s only like 30 Canadians…” (and the only white one has been in the league for a while.)
He flips up a picture on his phone. The red sequin suit jacket is instantly recognizable.
“That’s Gradey Dick. He was drafted by the Raptors… but he’s American.”
“Ah, that makes sense - he’s on Canada’s team then.”
I really like Tony. I tell him all about my hops plant. As I’m doing so, I’m also wondering about Hops in Barbados. There’s clearly a local beer brewed here (love to the Banks) - but… Hops is certainly a perennial plant in Canada. Can it just grow year-round here, or do they import it?
Tony needs to do a bit more work to wrap up his week, and I’d like to get a few more sketches in so we part ways. I leave him with a card and tell him to be in touch when he makes it to Canada.
I manage a couple more sketches on the way up the road and back down. It wasn’t the Friday I had planned, but all in all, it was a pleasant day.
