He wanted to talk about marijuana. It was that familiar introduction to test me, to see if he could not only be our guide, but our supplier.
"It's good, you know, to smoke a little after a long day of work. I like it very much," he said in a grinning patois. He said he bought his marijuana at the top of Mount Gimie, where a solitary man grew his stock, and never left the mountain.
"He is totally self-sufficient. He is a hermit. He must be a hermit, because the police want to kill him. Some people go up there, but they never find him because he knows you are coming. And if you are not serious, if you are not hard, he does not come to you. But you go up there in camouflage, you go at night without a light, he will find you. He will point his shot gun at you and make a deal with you."
Philippe sells marijuana for extra income. It's easy income for somebody who was born with that enviable position of being able to sweet-talk foreigners. I hadn't quite made the connection that day. But while fishing fruit flies out of rum and ice, we started down that long road of breezy before-dinner conversation that you can't avoid in a place filled with hanging fruit and abandoned sugarcane fields.
How did Philippe's plant, for example, whose origin extends to Ancient China, become the most widely distributed plant in the world? How did it come to permeate Antillean culture?
"Those people out there wearing the Bob Marley clothes, those are not rastas," Philippe said, "it is a fake style. Being a rasta is a very hard life. There are very few left in St. Lucia. I only know one. They are vegetarian, but these people you see out on the streets with their bloodshot eyes, they are addicted to crack," Philippe said, referring to the recent Caribbean trend from casual marijuana use to hard drugs.
How does a plant - a plant like marijuana - evolve to become so desired by Earth's most successful biological mechanism for seed dispersal? Is our domestication of such a species an incidence of our domestication ability as a civilization; or does the plant in some way evolve into domestication for its own dispersal and success as a species?
Fishing village of Soufriere
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