The Rum Shop at the End of the Universe
The Rum Shop at the End of the Universe
Moonshine in Carriacou
Years ago, Caribbean rum darkened my heart and blazed across my tongue and made me see bright stars. It incited me to attempt a half-assed mutiny on a British windjammer and follow the path of reckless men committed to dangerous burdens. One of those men was a drunken stevedore who was flirting with sailboats in Antigua. He told me that the best rum in the Caribbean was moonshine on Carriacou, one of the southernmost islands in the Grenadine archipelago. The moonshine was called Jack Iron and he said I would never understand rum until I let Jack Iron ruin my understanding of every other rum. I was envisioning a world where rum drinkers terrifically prospered before losing their identities in the darkness, and I desperately wanted to be a part of it.
Finally this midsummer there I was, part of that world, sitting in a rum shack called The Valley in a village called Windward listening to two men—Dave and John—talk about the tropical dogma while they drank Jack Iron. On the walls there were murals of naked women fellating the sun and John poured me a shot from an unlabeled jug in which West Indian bay leaves soaked in rum. The rum tasted abandoned and volcanic; it took the words from my mouth and was like licking the equator. The drunken stevedore was right: Carriacou moonshine was rum a conformist world would never understand.
After finishing a flask of Jack Iron, the three of us set out into the habitual flow of the Carriacou night, dashing around a circuit of Windward rum shacks with ever-intensifying insobriety. I shared shots of moonshine with boatbuilders at an alfresco rum shack on the edge of the sea, waiting for the moon to rise. I felt the power of strong rum flowing as Dave explained the origins of Jack Iron. The rum was distilled in secrecy a few islands south in Trinidad before the casks were put on small ships under darkness so rumrunners could dart across the sea. When the rumrunners reached the waters around Carriacou, the casks were dropped overboard into the waves to float with the current until local traffickers retrieved them. “The point is,” Dave said, “Carriacou is the rum shop at the end of the universe.”
There were three or four or six intensely prominent stars in the Carriacou heavens. John said one was Venus or Jupiter or some other planet. In the lunar glow Dave explained how in 1987 he would lay in bed during the middle of the night listening to the rumrunners drop their casks in the sea. I thought of how American rumrunners had carried casks of rum across the sea from Havana in 1927. And I thought of how the proud rum drinkers along the Carriacou coast had survived for decades by building rum shacks to sell the contraband that washed up on their shores. Then I asked if Dave could still hear the rumrunners at night. He began to smile knowingly, triumphantly, the way a man eavesdropping on beautiful crimes would smile; the way I would’ve smiled if I heard moonshine being dropped into the dark swells on the horizon.
Nobody said much as we began the short ride to my cottage with the windows rolled down, letting in the smell of a spirited island night. Dave turned sharply out of a side road and sped up a buzzing hill, going fast above the broken skyline of verdant peaks. My perception of the world was being shaped by a day of drunken glory. It was sometime around midnight when I stepped into my cottage and decided to satisfy my hubris by drinking Jack Iron until I slept. But before I started drinking I walked down to shoreline and floated into the sea, letting the current pull me toward the south side of the world, drifting in the fugitive wake of the modern rumrunners.