bcholmes | Magic on the Cliffs (Reply)

In Kapayisyen (also called Okap, or Cap Haïtien), Sio and I decided to go for a hike north of the city. Our Lonely Planet guide said that there were the ruins of some forts up there, although it was unclear about how far a walk it might be. You hafta understand, on Friday, Siobhan and I went up the mountain to Petyonvil, and decided to walk back down the mountain to the guest house in Delmas. It was quite the walk, and our leg muscles aren't terribly happy with us.

So, bowlegged and limping slightly, we started walking up a hill north of Kapayisyen, toward some remains of some forts with no clear idea how far we might be traveling. It didn't take us long to pass the first ruins. We noticed some pretty old remnants of walls and we wondered: is this part of the first fort? Sure enough, a few metres farther, we turned a corner and there were several old rusty canons, squat and short-muzzled. They looked about the size of good-sized wine barrells.

"I don't think I'd want to live in the house directly across from where those cannons point," I said.

"They don't work. Look, they're filled with rock," Siobhan responded.

"Physically, yes," I acknowledged. "But psychically...?"

She wrinkled her brow at me.

Farther down the road, we found the ruins of the next fort. Mostly, all we could see were the walls of the fort. Through a gate, we could see more walls, and tall grass, and the remains of a structure built into the side of the cliff below us. Our books described it as inaccessible.

So, off we went to the third fort. We turned a bend, and started downhill, and could suddenly see a good part of the bay. An old, rusty metal boat had run aground in the bay, and sat there, lopsided. There was a beach that followed the cliff wall, around the edge of the bay. And at the farthest part of that cliff, where the cliff bends out of sight, there was a stone structure. A wall? With an opening? It was hard to see it.

So down the hill we walked. Down on to the beach. The beach was covered in rocks and garbage. We found the place where old saran wrap goes to die. And then the beach gave out and we were walking along a narrow ridge of rock between the cliff and the water. At one point, we met an old man.

He was sitting on a rock. Old, and thin, with a walking stick beside him. He had a white shirt and white pants, and a straw hat. If he had a piece of rope for a belt, he's look like an image out of so many Haitian paintings.

"Bonswa, mesye," we said. Good evening, Sir.

He looked up from his writing and cautioned us about the way forward. A big rock was in the way; someone had built stone stairs up and over the rock, but they'd broken. We thanked him for his warning and continued forward. Afterward, I found myself thinking about this man. A man with a cane, at what might be the "entrance", per se, of the trail to the fort. Hm.

We climbed over more rocks, more stairs, up and down, on a narrow ridge. From this vantage point, we could no longer even see the structure we thought we were headed toward. I looked at the sky.

"It's getting darker," I said. "I wonder if we should be heading back, soon."

"Let's at least get to that spot where the cliff turns. See if the fort is there."

"Okay," I said. "But if there's a tiger just around the bend, I'm so going to hold this against you."

We turned around the edge of the cliff, and just in front of us was a set of stone stairs leading upward. The third fort.

We walked up twenty feet or so, and there was a huge structure there. Old walls. Stairs between different levels. A platform by the water with about a dozen huge cannons, six feet long. There was no person charging admission, no tacky guys in 18th Century French uniforms mugging for photo ops. Just this amazing piece of history, largely unspoiled by tourism.

We wandered up to another level, and there were some recently-constructed wooded structures. Something in the back of my head said, "They do seremoni here." And I looked around and saw veves for Bossou and Ezili Freda. A make-shift poto mitan.

It was getting more and more overcast, and I was worried about climbing back over those rocks in the dark, so we wandered back. But it was such an amazing piece of history. And although there briefly saw one other group of blan checking out the same location, it wasn't like it was a tourist trap.

But we headed back. The old man with the cane was nowhere to be found on our return trip.