Life on St. Croix

I just rediscovered this. It is from an email I sent out shortly after moving to the island and was staying in the little guest house at Rust Op Twist. I thought I'd share for those who didn't receive it (or for those didn't bother reading it):

I'm loving life on the beautiful Caribbean island of St. Croix and kicking myself for not moving here years ago. While the turquoise waters and beautiful rainforest significantly outweigh the downside to island life, there are some drawbacks.

At some point in the island's history, someone decided to exterminate the island's rodent population by bringing in mongooses. (Yes, the plural form of "mongoose" is "mongooses," not "mongeese" or "mongoose." I'm a big enough nerd that I looked it up.) Unfortunately, whoever decided on this "solution" failed to consider that the mongoose is diurnal while rats are nocturnal. Ironically, the mongooses eradicated the snake population which was actually dining on the rodents. On the plus side, there are no snakes on the island.

The other night, I awoke to a strange noise coming from my window air conditioning unit. This was especially odd, as I've never turned it on. When I finally struggled completely awake, I found my two cats sitting as close as possible to the window, fixated on the unit and the strange scratching that it emitted. Visions of the glowing, red-eyed rat from The Secret of NIMH danced across my brain, and I reacted by leaping from the bed and screaming at the top of my lungs.

When I say "screaming at the top of my lungs," I don't mean the cartoon variety "eek, eek a mouse." This was a full-fledged, topless-bimbo-in-a-B-movie-facing-the-hatchet-man scream. Impressively, I managed to arm myself with a broom and an electric fly-swatter without having to take a breath. I beat on the air conditioner and surrounding window slats with the broom – not once letting up on the ear-piercing bellows.

Nothing I did caused the scratching sound to slow. (I paid close attention when I had to pause to suck in air.) Over the next half-hour, it became obvious that the "creature" was determinedly climbing up the unit. It finally reached the top of the air conditioner, and to my horror, found enough space between the unit and the boards around it to slide several legs through the gap.

The legs that slipped through the fissure weren't the fuzzy appendages of rat, but angled, spider-like legs that were encased in some form of armor. Every horror movie I have ever seen (and some that I haven't) flashed through my head. Though hoarse from my screaming, I began to emit sounds that sounded similar to an air raid siren.

I watched in frozen terror as the many legs began to pull themselves along, until they found a space wide enough to raise the entire body up. I cannot describe the strange rhythm my heart pounded as the creature leveled itself and I found myself staring at . . . a crab. This was not a cute hermit crab that you chased on a beach as a child. This was a feed-a-table-of-six dinner crab.

While the sounds I made had no impact on the crustacean, it woggled its eye stalks toward me and found my broom-and-fly-swatter-armed battle stance terrifying. It slid backwards, falling back down the unit it had just climbed.

I leapt forward, taking advantage of the reprieve to stuff a towel from the dirty clothes hamper in the newly discovered gap as I heard the determined crab begin its slow crawl back up the air conditioner. Having turned on every light in the house (and outside), I crawled back into bed and listened for two hours as the crab sought entrance to my home. I finally heard it fall off the air conditioning unit and clatter down the side of the house.

Crab-invasion forces aside, life in paradise is highly rewarding.