Two Maps, Three People, a GPS, and a Tour Guide

I'm once again back at my desk in my living room in Florida, but for the purposes of the blog we're up to last Monday morning; we needed to be at the airport by 1:00 on Tuesday and I was determined to pack in lots more of Trinidad in our remaining 36 hours or so. The weather looked great from my window at the Pax, so off we went once again down the hill, through Curepe, onto the Churchill Roosevelt Highway, over to the Uriah Butler Highway and south 10K to Chaguanas (I really felt I was starting to get this driving business sorted; boy was I wrong...)

We stopped in at Radika's Pottery one more time to pick up a handful of clay for later mineralogical analysis; after the long buildup to Divali everything was really quiet and as you can see the hallway full of deyas is no more. I never did get a consistent estimate of how many there actually were - somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 and I know that's quite a range but I did hear both figures from folks at Radika's. I wouldn't doubt that at some point before we arrived a week ago that there were 100,000 deyas in that hallway.

Then it was back up the highway for an absolutely wonderful lunchtime treat - a visit with my old friend, great painter, and University of the West Indies art professor Ken Crichlow and he totally surprised me by inviting as well two of his colleagues - Lesley-Ann Noel, the Coordinator of the Visual Arts Program, and fellow teacher Larry Richardson who once upon a long time ago took me on my first epic drive around Trinidad to meet the potters in Chaguanas and Rio Claro. We had an absolutely fascinating conversation about art and clay and education and business and I really hope I can come back some time to check out the new ceramics curriculum they are working on for the program. SO much potential here.

Ken Crichlow, Lesley-Ann Noel, and Larry Richardson

In 2005 I put together an exhibition of Ken and Shastri's work for FGCU titled Trinidad: Two Views and it has been wonderful to visit both their studios to see the current work. Ken is just coming off of a major exhibition last spring, a gorgeous series of paintings he titled Rapture: optimism and transformation and we couldn't actually see any of those because they all sold but thankfully there is a digital catalog. We did get to see his newest work in process - great big swirling canvases saturated with the color, mark and movement that is so distinctive in his work. Such an incredible treat. I'll hope to see Ken again in December; he'll be coming to Miami for the wild ride that is Art Basel Miami Beach (quite possibly the biggest contemporary art show in the world)

We left Ken's around 3:15; reluctantly, but we were on a mission and were headed for one of Trinidad's great attractions - the daily sunset influx of thousands of red ibises to their sleeping site on an island in the heart of the Caroni Swamp. From where we were it was only about five miles or so but rush hour gets a really early start in Trinidad and despite the best efforts of Ken's directions, two maps, the three of us, instructions from the GPS, and multiple phone calls to the tour company we got completely turned around more than once and finally arrived around 4:20 for a 4:00 boat trip. I was a totally frazzled, cursing, sweating mess and convinced I had ruined the day for everyone but the lovely gentlemen with Nanan's Bird Sanctuary Tours just popped us into an empty boat and took us out through the canals to meet the tour in process, pointing out cool stuff in the mangroves along the way like sleeping boa constrictors. Happily, being a bit late does not, in fact, ruin your day here and once we had clambered into the other boat we set off for the open waters deep inside the Caroni Swamp.

The Scarlet Ibis is the national bird of Trinidad and something like 15,000 of them live here in the swamp, going out during the day to feed on the shrimps, crabs, and other crustaceans that provide the carotene that produces the bright red plumage, and returning to very specific sites in the evening for communal nighttime roosting. As you sit in the tour boats they stream overhead in loose V shapes accompanied by low flying herds of white egrets and when they all zoom in to land in their chosen clump of mangroves its like a ticker tape parade, red and white confetti speckling the trees until the egrets find their way inside leaving only red dots against the green foliage. We were really lucky - the tide was high this evening so the flocks came in early and we could see the birds quite clearly.

Moat of my time in the Caribbean I've lived local - completely separated from my life in Florida - and for this trip it was just grand to travel with my buddies Jan and Ellen. They've been a huge help, great fun, and absolutely necessary to the maintenance of my sanity while driving Trinidadian roads. Thank you thank you thank you - and where we going next ?!?!

Tuesday morning we got packed up and checked out and headed down to Longdenville, just outside of Chaguanas, for a mindboggling factory tour of the Abel Clay products facility, maker of structural earthenware blocks in Trinidad since 1936. I had been hearing about this place for years, and figured that if I wanted to understand ceramic production here I'd best go and was delighted to be able to make an appointment with Jason Mohammed, the very engaging and accommodating manager/director of the facility.

I don't know about you, but I totally love to find out how things are made and in this case we are talking about the production of 240,000 structural clay blocks per DAY. Mr. Mohammed gave us the grand tour starting with the original kilns and then moving along the entire production process from the gargantuan clay mining area to the many stages of clay preparation in the factory buildings and on into extrusion and drying of the blocks and firing in continuous twenty-four hour cycles in enormous computer-controlled gas-fired tunnel kilns. Utterly fascinating.

One of the original 1936 round downdraft kilns

One little corner of the giant clay mine adjacent to the factory complex

Dry storage for the cured clay

Moving clay through the many stages of processing in the factory

Blocks emerging from the giant extruders

Blocks drying on the right, the 24 hour tunnel kiln on the left

Finished blocks

Loaded truck leaving the factory

With just a couple of hours left we managed to fit in a visit to one of Trinidad's great Hindu spiritual centers in and around Waterloo and Carapichaima - the Temple In The Sea, and the 85ft tall Hanuman murti.

The temple was being prepared for one of the many community prayer sessions that take place in this quiet space first built out into the sea in the late 1940's by Indian-born indentured laborer Siewdass Sadhu after he was fined by his employer (the Tate and Lyle sugar company) for building a temple on company land. They tore that one down, so he created a space for his temple by painstakingly constructing a narrow 500 foot peninsula into the shallow Gulf of Paria.

And here we found the final resting place of the deyas we have come to know so well. After their brief time lighting the way, they are consigned to the natural world and at this site become an ongoing part of the foundations of the temple.

Last stop was the fabulous 85 foot tall Hanuman murti on the grounds of a huge pink stone temple and yoga center complex; it was pouring down rain at this point but that did not diminish the impact of this giant Hindu figure, said to be the tallest outside of India. Hanuman is the deity symbolizing physical strength, perseverance, and devotion, and of the unlimited power within  each of us.

Despite a few entertaining moments at the airport in Trinidad I'm home again now after several months of on-again-off-again travel, with a mountain of new information to work from and beautiful pots and images to inspire me. I've been looking at this new pitcher from Radika's - I particularly like pouring forms and have rather a lot of them from all over the world; unlike mugs or cups or plates these pots are about offering and sharing and I really like the references to family, community, and ritual embedded in pouring vessels. This pitcher is definitely not an art object altho its likely it will serve a decorative purpose now rather than a functional one; it was wheelthrown incredibly rapidly as one of several hundred pots made that day by that thrower and the rocks and sand in the clay push their way through the firemarked surface. It's not fancy, its not 'pretty' (which is a word we heard a lot in Trinidad in regards to preference in material culture) but for me the fascination comes from an essential integrity, a clear and simple human gesture that resonates through the complex history of people in the Caribbean.

Now its time to settle into a routine of writing, gardening, and making pots, and figuring out how to create a structure within this sabbatical year that is just as productive as my accustomed teaching schedule. The cat will help, I'm sure.