Before I go into an exposé on the making of the road to Shoal Bay, let me first take this opportunity to tell about the place Shoal Bay itself, and what it means to me. “Shoal Bay”: the beckoning pronunciation that marks a quaint little peasant homestead — the sound of a name that resonated in my tender ears ever since I was a toddler.
During my early years, I grew well accustomed to the sound of “Shoal Bay” as a regular household theme. I was nurtured in a family which thrived largely off fishing, the raising of livestock and agriculture, which Shoal Bay provided. Our lives revolved around that name. We lived in the small village of Little Dix, on a little hill near the southern outskirts of Shoal Bay. That elevation provided us with a good view of the northern horizon — the skyline beyond which Shoal Bay lies.
Shoal Bay was the honorable place of my father’s birth, in fact, back in the 1920s. It was the place where he, Haraldo, and his eight siblings, were raised under the strict hand of their hard working “Pappy”, the then popular Joe Harrigan. They grew up in a small but neat and comfortable twin-gable-roof cottage, surrounded by a green, well-kept spacious yard, a stone’s throw from the seaside. Later, Shoal Bay would be the place where my mother “Mammy” would journey to do her daily toil, gingerly trekking her way back home — through a narrow rocky footpath — with a bundle of potatoes and peas on her head for the family pot.
Via that same familiar treacherous footpath, Shoal Bay was the place where my Daddy would “go out” by “fore-day” morning, to tend the fish-pots for the reaping of a daily catch. And by midday, his loyal customers would be sitting patiently under the fig tree in our Little Dix front-yard, awaiting his prized return. T’was the place where we tethered our many sheep, goats and cattle; the place where my legendary grandfather’s fowls and turkeys roamed wild, cleverly avoiding the poachers’ killibans.
Shoal Bay provided a source of support in agriculture for many humble families back then. There, many of the neighboring villagers owned a “ground”, a plot of arable land on which they cultivated indigenous crops, whether it was in the sandy soil or in the red ferrous dirt. It was the place where one could find the island’s biggest, juiciest purple sea grapes, bull-head mangoes, and savory gooseberries. It was the place where we village boys would welcome the chance to go for an after-school evening getaway to “pick wood” for fueling our out-door fireplaces to cook our food and bake our staple daily “johnny cakes”. And during that getaway, some care-free fellows would cheat a chance to paddle and swim in the placid, welcoming waters. Yes, Shoal Bay sustained us.
Today, Shoal Bay is no longer an antiquated sleepy little peasant hideaway. It has been rather commercialized, inscribed in what I would refer to as the “Call of Fame”, for when you call the name Shoal Bay it rings a bell for the rich and famous who relish its turquoise waters, its balmy trade-wind breezes, and its beautiful stretch of powdery white, enticing beach sand. Call the name Shoal Bay today, and you invariably mean a tourist paradise.
But it would be interesting to note that it is only over a few recent years that Shoal Bay has rapidly evolved to attain that level of notoriety and fame. To give an insight of its sudden transformation, I wish to describe in this article how “the road to Shoal Bay” actually started, and how it developed into a route that leads the discriminating tourist to one of the world’s top-quality beaches. After all, it was in the July 2017 edition of Travel & Leisure magazine that Shoal Bay was acclaimed as a place to which visitors should head for excellent snorkeling. And this is just one of the many features which cause Anguilla to be regarded by Leisure & Travel as the best island in the Caribbean.
Now, for the “making of the road” story: As was mentioned earlier, the way to Shoal Bay was traditionally through a treacherous rocky foot-track, colloquially known as a “bush pa” (bush path). For most of the way, one had to navigate cautiously through hill and hollow, skipping from one embedded rock to another, many of which were sharp and jagged. Moreover, it became quite a precarious walking art, especially during rainy times, when some of the rocks became rather slippery and unstable. Besides, the narrow footpath lay between a thick overgrowth of hazardous bushes.
Coming to realize the need for a proper roadway into Shoal Bay, in the Summer of 1965 my father met with his cousin, Austin Rogers, father of the Hon. Evan McNeil Rogers, and told him that he plans to start cutting a road. Austin had long been residing in Shoal Bay with a relatively large family, and indeed he embraced what seemed to be a brilliant idea. Within a couple days after the making the proposal, both Haraldo and Austin, accompanied by another devoted cousin Renford Hawley, also a resident of Shoal Bay, all got together one early morning to work on cutting away bushes with machete and bill. By the way, the “bill” is not such a popular cutting implement these days. It was a broad, flat, black high-grade steel tool with a chubby handle and a sharp edge like the machete, but shaped almost like a C, carrying a hook at the end for tearing stringy vegetation. Back then it was quite popular, used especially by workers who cleared plots of land for planting crops.
Anyway, the ambitious trio, Haraldo with cousins Austin and Renford, started cutting bush from the entrance where the Shoal Bay roundabout now stands. Many curious passersby were delighted to see their efforts that morning, and pitched in to help. In no time, word spread around the Little Dix village and Shoal Bay proper that a road to Shoal Bay had been started. Much excitement filled the air. The villagers were enthused with the idea that Shoal Bay was getting a proper road. And this was not to be a “start-and-stop, abandon it” kind of effort. No, we were in for the long haul.
As a young child of about eight, I was proud that my dad was playing a major part in this significant undertaking. In speaking with him recently about it, he recalled: “After we started cutting the road, I urgently approached Wallace Rey, who was over the public works at the time, and I asked him to help us with some stones to fill the hollows. He said he would but, according to what I heard, those stones only came long after the road had reached a good way. See, in those days Anguilla was still under St. Kitts, and things were hard.” Well, obviously, St. Kitts did not care about a road to Shoal Bay, ‘cause Shoal Bay as backwater wasteland wasn’t that valuable to it.
After about a half mile of bush was cleared, unfortunately my dad had to leave the actual project to make good of an opportunity for employment in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Regretfully, he had to leave the project, but the project never left him. The Shoal Bay road was a prime concern of his, and he would always inquire of my mother, via air mail, as to how the efforts were progressing and how far the work had reached.
After a while, work on the road was adjusted down to one day per week. Now, it had become a Thursday afternoon jollification kind of venture. A goat would be butchered in the morning and by late afternoon a meal would be served to the road builders. From our Little Dix hill look-out, I could have viewed, in the north, smoke emanating from makeshift fire places, ascending in the air. As summer holidays ended and it was back-to-school, I would excitedly rush home especially on Thursday afternoons just to be part of the road-building action, alongside my older brother Joe, as long as my mother would allow me to go.
Yes, it was a Thursday routine. Dozens of folks from the neighborhoods would be laboring at the grueling tasks: cutting bush with machete and bill; filling holes with stones; digging out tree stumps with pick-axes; smashing the sharp, uneven rocks with sledge hammers; and painstakingly digging and shoveling dirt from dirt-holes, then heading that dirt and throwing it on the track for spreading. What made the labor easier, though, was that Austin owned a Massey Ferguson tractor with a wooden trailer and a Bedford truck that were often utilized for transporting the surface fill from the dirt holes.
*(to be continued next week)
