Dearly beloved, we are all gathered here today to witness the sad passing of our beloved matriarch, the late, Great, Salt Pond. She has nourished and cherished us along the banks of her salty waters for as long as there have been people living on this silted shore. She was born out of the union of shifting sands and crashing waves together with her sister the Lagoon, for whom also no one cares. She has witnessed this island’s first people arrive by canoe and she has seen them slaughtered by a foreign sword. She has seen her briny treasure picked by the weary and dispossessed people shipped here to toil under a cracking whip. She offered generously by letting the hurricane rains flow from the hills into her nourishing bosom. We couldn’t drown in their cruel waters because of her glorious basin.
Since 1858 she has let us harvest her precious bounty, adding wealth and fortune to Van Romondt’s and Perrinon’s name. Passing ships from Napoleon’s fleet have loaded her salt to preserve their meat. Drunken sailors have slept in her breeze and the Queen herself enjoyed her lavish salt.
She protected our beaches from black mud washed by November rain, and because of her our golden beaches were able to gather their deserved fame. When she blew her famous salt, the people rejoiced at their coming fortune. When the sun rose over our cool green hills, shafts of sunlight would color her brilliant features. Her shades of pink and crimson dyes would bask in dawn’s warm light, and stoic men would weep her salty tears at seeing colors as brilliant as hers. Shrimp would flutter in her salty waves and herons would scream at the day’s delight. Children fished and old men walked in her gentle waters and she added music to the name of her friendly home: Soualiga, land of salt.
Friends, Family, and Colleagues, delve into your memory; the demise of this most precious of our own identities started in 1966 with the scarring of old Fort Willem Hill. He bled under the scathing shudder of a backhoe as his face was ripped and scarred for soil used to fill her up. Now Fort Hill mourns his sister’s death, his scarred face sadly looking over Great Bay’s mourning sea.
On that fateful day the beautiful and rich pond lost her luster. She was misused and abused; made to pay for her beauty like the many pond dippers working her rippling shore. It was ripped from her, what was hers, what she so generously offered. Her cancer spread as we spread on her cowering banks to accommodate humanity’s encroaching scream. Waste, oil, and garbage were thrown at her as she wept and pleaded, but greed covered our ringing ears. Smoked, smelly, and hurt, she begged, but the boom of industry and modernity’s sinful delights made us forget who and where we were.
Her shrimp, birds, and fish crawled, flew, and swam away but we stayed to finish our destructing jobs. Her briny breath smelled of sewage and her brilliant bright hues turned a murky brown. When she blew her once valuable salt, people scattered for fear of disease.
As she lay dying, people offered help but were turned back—not economically viable. She could have been made beautiful with promenades and parks, with shade and peacefulness. Instead, we showed our carelessness and filth now lay encroached on her crying banks. One day we all will wonder at the stinking water in our front parlors. And the mountain streams will laugh at our grievous mistake while we shovel sewage sludge.
Before she died, she cried in pain and begged us to use her as an example. The Lagoon is dying of the same festering cancer so the pond pleaded for her sister’s plight. The Lagoon is being filled and killed, polluted and misused. That once pristine body, the most beautiful in the Eastern Caribbean, is being felled by greedy hands. Sewage is pumped by smiling parasites and crystal waters are turning black by drifting Feces. Sandy mountains mysteriously arise and shrink her coughing ripples. Her other sisters have already been killed or wait in line for their pending rape. As we, these island children, have lost our bleeding hearts.
Ladies and gentlemen, as you now drive along the Pond’s namesake road and ponder that corpse of water, remember that once beautiful body, that result of the creative force that unites all of humanity. She has succumbed because we simply are destructive. Remember our matriarch who has left us. Remember her when our children bat away buzzing flies and wrinkle their noses at the acrid smoke, please tell them, make them remember, that there lived a beautiful body once, before she withered and died by our neglecting hands.