While you and I would have a bit more noise to contend with than the narrator in picking up these sounds, thankfully there are quiet moments when we do. Quiet island moments when we hear what we otherwise would not. Imagine yourself on a wharf at the lagoon in French Harbour at dawn. What is that sound? Imagine wild pigeons cooing in the mangroves, their gentle calls carrying over the dark water.
Since you have taken the trouble to be at the wharf on the lagoon at dawn, listen some more. Hear that sound? That little racket compared to the pigeons? Those are the ching-chings, roosting in mangroves as well, fussing as they begin to take on the day. Then, in the pause between the ching-chings’ racket and the pigeons’ cooing, a sudden, violent splashing erupts in the middle of the lagoon—the sound of a school of mullet escaping a barracuda.
Before taking the pathway to the lagoon, walk along French Harbour Road up the point. In the quiet, you will hear little rippling waves silently and smoothly brushing the white sand just feet from the edge of the seaside road. You may not see them, but there will be small periwinkles clinging to rocks that are half in, half out of the water and green with thin moss. Shiny sharks, each only inches long and with oversized heads and mouths, lie motionless with their stomachs on the sand. They lie hidden between the moss-covered blades of turtle grass in the shallows.
The island abounded with wild hogs, pigeons, parrots and other wild birds.
As a child growing up in French Harbour in the 1970s, quiet could also be found in the middle of the day when the sun was high in the sky. While standing in the mangroves along the canal, you felt your feet gripping the mangrove roots as you steadied yourself, watching a man from the Hill clean a fresh catch of conchs. He had returned from the lagoon and the green and blue waters beyond and had tied his dory in the shade of the mangroves. There, he finished his work before paddling to his home only minutes away.
First, he uses the back end of a carpenter’s hammer to poke a hole at the top of a conch shell. Then, using a butter knife, he expertly pushes the conch from the shell. As he dresses the conch meat with a butcher’s knife, the man carefully checks each slippery, de-shelled conch. You are not certain why he is looking so closely at and poking the de-shelled conchs. Then it comes to you — he is looking for conch pearls. Having had no luck finding pearls, the man completes his work. He then throws the conch waste into the middle of the canal — five heaping mounds in his large, cupped hands. You watch the light-colored conch waste slowly descend in the dark canal water. Your stare intensifies. You know what will soon come.
Tarpon suddenly descend to eat the trash in frenzy. The canal water boils from their sudden turns beneath the surface. Water splashes as tarpon jump above the surface. A few large dog teeth snap, joining in the melee. The smaller and more timid fish eat the trash that settles on the muddy canal bottom.
Those are some of the sounds one hears on a quiet day in Roatan. I look forward to the next time I am in the Bay Islands. For one night, surely, I’ll go to sleep early just to be in French Harbour before dawn.
