Ash Entombs Once-Vibrant Montserrat

Dunes of fine gray ash drift on the deserted streets, clinging to collapsed roofs and shuttered doors and windows. When a misstep breaks the surface, the ash sinks like hot quicksand.

The air smells scorched. Virtually the only sound is the creaking of the shingle-style signs of a dry-goods store and a tavern. A skinny brown dog bays, too frightened to be coaxed onto a nearby boat and safety.

This is all that is left of Plymouth, until two years ago a popular Caribbean port of call known to Montserrat residents as “the town,” the only real town on this once-verdant, 39-square-mile British colony.

Since the Soufriere Hills volcano rumbled back to life in July 1995, it has attacked the town below relentlessly, periodically hurling boulders the size of major appliances and spitting 700-degree ash daily. And the perimeter of destruction keeps growing, pushing people farther into the island’s rural north.

Two years of fleeing northward have finally gotten the better of Cynthia Peters. Over the weekend, she boarded the ferry at the north end of the island with the first group to evacuate Montserrat under a British government program.

“This one [has had] us hanging on too long,” the tall, angular mother of two said as she waited for the ferry. Wearing a flowered dress with a lace collar, she looked as if she was off for a day trip to neighboring Antigua rather than beginning a long journey to Britain.

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If the evacuees go to Britain, they will get free housing, schooling and medical care. If they stay in the English-speaking Caribbean, they will receive about $4,000 per adult and $2,000 per child to be distributed over six months.

Only a few dozen people were evacuated over the weekend. Still, the British government is prepared for the number to grow to 200 a day by early this week and has rented a catamaran to transport evacuees off the island.

Nearly two-thirds of Montserrat’s 11,000 people have already left on their own, but the official evacuation--although voluntary--has a daunting significance because it calls into question the long-term viability of a colony whose population is now huddled on the northern point of this pear-shaped island.

The evacuation highlights the conclusion of many like Peters: Their Montserrat is already gone.

“I miss Montserrat as I know it,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “You can’t go back to where your home is supposed to be, because the volcano took it over. . . . I’m from a village that was totally devastated. My mother’s home burned down.”

The volcano also “took over” the Great Alp Falls, the bamboo forest and the island’s few 17th century monuments, such as St. Anthony’s Church and the old Galway sugar plantation. The medical school--which generated about one-third of the island’s economy--was devastated in the first eruption and moved to another island.

Visitors’ passports are still stamped with green shamrocks here, a reminder that Montserrat calls itself the “Emerald Isle of the Caribbean” because of historical ties to Ireland. But the island that evacuees like Peters are leaving is strikingly different from the one where they lived most of their lives.

It’s not just that the ash that covers the south is creeping northward. Nor is it that new words like “pyroclastic flow”--the scientific term for the rivers of ash that now stream from the volcano to the ocean on three sides of the island--are being added to the vocabularies of everyone from third-graders to grandfathers.

The volcano has taken away Montserrat’s tranquillity: killing 25 people, leaving islanders homeless and fearing for their safety, and, most recently, provoking a political crisis that forced out the chief minister, the island’s top local elected official.

The north is full of cars and people from elsewhere--like Monterey, Calif., on a summer weekend, except that the weekend never ends.

The island’s “safe zone” is a mocking reminder of what has been lost: a heliport with Quonset huts instead of the now-shuttered modern airport; a shallow jetty instead of Plymouth’s lost port; a converted school surrounded by tents substituting for the sparkling new hospital whose inauguration was being planned when Plymouth was evacuated.

Worse, Montserrat residents--accustomed to spacious houses with mountain views--have been crowded into tents and classrooms with two or three other families, some for the past two years.

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The move north has left no room for the multitude of subcultures that once managed to fit easily onto the island.

The first to stop coming were the stars like Elton John and members of the Police, who created the island’s major excitement each time they spent time recording at Air Studios in Salem, on Montserrat’s west side, north of Plymouth. The studio is now in the danger zone.

Then came the cancellations from vacationers, who were the island’s lifeblood, filling the guest houses like the one outside Plymouth that Peters and her husband used to run. The cruise ships whose occupants once flooded Plymouth’s stores and restaurants each day took the island off their itineraries.

Then the retirees left: Americans who had built lavish villas around the golf course in Old Towne, outside Salem, and Canadians with bungalows at Spanish Pine, near the airport. All those buildings are now in the danger zone.

Last week, Caribbean insurance companies canceled all Montserrat policies. International banks have cut staffs on the island.

Those who had clung most stubbornly to the hope that Montserrat was not lost were people like Peters. They were the ones who gave Montserrat its distinctive character. They speak the local English dialect, many attended the Moravian and Methodist churches scattered across the island, and they produced the only celebrity who has stayed, Arrow, a businessman and singer-songwriter.

“I still think Montserrat can be viable,” Arrow said, sitting in the back room of his three-room discount store in Salem filled with suitcases that he has stocked for people determined to leave.

His original store, in the four-story Castle Building here in Plymouth, is barely a concrete shell. The windows have long been blown out, and the roof has collapsed.

“After the first evacuation, people thought we would be back in Plymouth in a month,” he recalled.

He also left a hillside house, featured three years ago in Caribbean World magazine, on Fox’s Bay, overlooking Plymouth. The house still stands, but it is covered in ash.

Now that the volcano’s reach has spread to Salem, Arrow is planning a third store, even farther north. He has cut back his tour schedule in order to stay closer to home.

Arrow said he plans to keep offering low-price shoes, shirts and records to those who have been devastated by the evacuations.

“We have to keep some hope alive,” he said.