Our Friend, Author, and Veteran Traveler Mike Felix is writing his story of discovery of an indigenous music form in the Caribbean country of Belize.  The Story will be coming in in sections as they get written.  Here are sections one and two (illustrated by the Weekly Musician Editorial Staff..).  Enjoy!

How A Gringo Found Garifuna music and Punta Rock -  Part One

Back in the dim recesses of  the early eighties I was running a  little  company dealing  land development paper  out of a cubbyhole basement office in an empty suburb about a stone's throw from one of those northeast twin cities freeway exits. I could never exactly figure that location. They said it was cheap and convenient to getting around the Cities, but the company never was that strong at the bottom line, and later I concluded occasionally that the location might have been also propitious for a quick getaway if things went bad.  The company wasn't much; two  hyperactively motivated  bosses,  a few men,  and a bunch of attractive women. In that company the line between the law and the rules for sex discrimination had become blurred. One of my two bosses put it to me this way. "If the skills are equal,  hire the one that looks good." Sometimes the skills weren't equal, but they  hired the good lookers anyway.  

            My allocation of the staff was a beauty contestant secretary with a look in her eye which seemed to indicate that she was management and I was the person to be managed, a job, by the by, that she quickly concluded wasn't much of a challenge . As for the beauty contest part, her mother must have told her she was beautiful when she was very young and she had taken it to heart. She entered a lot of contests, I don't know that she ever won. She saw me, I learned quickly,  as  a step (and a small one at that) on some ladder that only she could discern. (She later became a highly paid corporate secretary to a bunch of lawyers.)                     

  Once on a Monday morning I was drinking coffee and conducting a review of possible land development markets by reading the  book review and travel sections of the Sunday paper  when my eye was caught by an article about this place, an island in a country I'd only vaguely heard of.  The country was called Belize and the last line of the article said ... if you can't do anything else you could always go Bonefishing.....

A Bonefish

....Bonefishing...... I'd always wanted to do that. Reading that line again I could feel the magnetic lines of the earth change. My secretary wasn't great at the mundane, but she seemed amazingly skilled at making reservations for airplane flights to sunny vacation spots.  In no time at all I was on an airplane to a place I'd never been, clutching my bundle of fly rods. Eventually the aircraft landed in strange Belize City. Sun! Eighty five degrees! I'd wondered where they'd gone.

            I did eventually make it to the Island that day. (with several adventures too banal for this narrative)  They weren't many Americans there then. I felt like Alice down a Caribbean rabbit hole. I did find a guide and caught some Bonefish and, as importantly, l quickly fell into the slowed-down flow of the little island  with it's Belizeans and Brit's and Americans and a few barefoot German remittance men trying to blend with the population and largely succeeding until they opened their mouths.

            One day after fishing I was hungry. In true island fashion, at that moment, all the restaurants were closed. My guide, no doubt feeling guilty from the huge fee he had extracted for fishing, generously said they had a pot of Cerviche, the ubiquitous Caribbean fish salad and I could have some of that. Cerviche, you may know, is comprised of  pieces of whatever Conch and fish you've got plus tomatoes,  peppers,  whatever else you've got..... and herbs. The whole mess is marinated in lime juice for a couple of hours until the lime juice cooks the fish, or failing that, at least renders any germs dead of an overdose of vitamin C.

            "It might be a little early to eat it," said he.

            Right.....About those herbs.  A few hours later my stomach was sending me messages flavored with the taste of Cilantro. I found that I didn't  like Cilantro. To this day I don't like Cilantro. I was told later that ... normally... the limes  render this herb less ..... pervasive.  I lay down and listened to the surf and  some sort of afro sounding  music coming from next door.

            What do the French say? "Always there is a woman."  I had met  one, a huge woman, not fat but huge, over six feet. She was  a nurse who had come to Belize city on one of those inexpensive "Alternative Life Experience Tours" from California. Their mode of conveyance was an large old Greyhound type bus that someone had acquired  and converted somewhat for long distance travel. Someone had painted it gaily with some excess lime green house paint. There were fifteen or twenty on the bus. There were various sleeping arrangements. Two gay guys slept in one of the overhead racks  altered for that purpose.  Just outside of Belize city the two gay guys got into a screaming fight. It was decided to send everyone to the islands to cool off. Thus had I met her.

            I traded her an extra pair of good sunglasses for some stomach medicine. She massaged my back, she said such touching was therapy. I was open to suggestion. We listened to her tape of the music. She rubbed. Later I felt better.

            "Where is that music from," I asked.

            "From Dangriga," she said. "I bought it from a Belizian. It's good isn't it? Some Garifunas make it."

            "What's Dangriga? What's a Garifuna?"

            "I don't know. Somewhere here in Belize," she said. "South I think."

            "South? Any bonefish down there?"

            "I don't know.... I suppose," she said vaguely. She brightened. "There is another town down there with the best beaches."  She rubbed my back a little. "You could come with us on the bus. We're going over to Guatemala......"

             I could walk from one end of this island to the other in fifteen minutes. It was beginning to feel confining, bonefish or no.

            "I think I'll go down there and find this Dangriga," said I.      

continued in next column:

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