Where in the World is Montserrat?

Right now, I'm reading page proofs for my book Goat Water Is Not What You Think: The Montserrat Island Life of Two Hoosiers and the Volcano That Ended It. The publication date will be sometime in the early spring of 2014! 

Several people have asked me where the island of Montserrat is located. Although it is relatively unknown as a vacation destination and sometimes is omitted altogether from maps of the Caribbean, Montserrat lies 27 miles southwest of Antigua, which is a well-known cruise ship stop-off. St. Kitts is about the same distance to the northwest. On a clear day, both can be seen from Montserrat.

All three of the above-mentioned islands are part of a long chain extending from Puerto Rico in the north and continuing south to the coast of Venezuela. A lot of these islands are ports of call for winter-weary North Americans.

Most Caribbean islands were formed by volcanic activity, either long since ended or at least quiet for now. A volcano on Montserrat, unfortunately, came to life in 1995 and over the intervening years has destroyed the southern two-thirds of the island. That substantial chunk of Montserrat remains a "no go zone."

Montserrat's volcano

How long will it remain so? Will it never be inhabited again? You can never say never, I suppose. This past summer, we visited Pompeii, which is in southern Italy near Naples and Sorrento. Over the years, people have moved back into the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius, which erupted and destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD. Its last eruption was in 1944, but another "Big One" is expected.     

An October-November Surprise

It is fall in southwest Florida, which means that a few trees, like the bald cypress and the frangipani, are losing their needles/leaves and will remain naked all winter. They are in the minority, however, and most gardens remain green, which is one reason snowbirds like to congregate here. It isn't only the warm breezes and the blue skies that attract them.

We have another deciduous plant that also loses its leaves, but follows that phase almost immediately with extravagant blooms, all the better to ward off our version of winter. These flowers, in various shades of pink, will stay on the trees almost until it's time to leaf out again. Called the silk floss tree, this fall stunner is a relative of the kapok.

Next spring, the silk floss tree will sport, along with its new leaves, avocado-size pods containing silky threads, but they are not as good as kapok for stuffing. The silk floss tree has a couple of other strange characteristics. The trunk is bulbous at the bottom and is covered with nasty-looking thorns.

A similar, but unrelated, tree on St. John in the Virgin Islands is called the "monkey no climb tree."