For all of the effort it took to make it to Anegada, the
payoff was big. This is an island with the strangest of cultures. The people
are isolated but friendly, glad for outside
visitors. The economy is based on two things… renting you a
scooter and selling you lobster. The lobsters are so big they refer to them as
Lobzillas. You select your victim from a pen that is floating at the purveyors
dockside and they cook it for you in a half barrel grill with some kind of
special and delicious Anegadian spice.
When you are done, you traverse the island until you find a private beach. This is not an
arduous task, because the island is one long sugar sanded circle and there is
very little humanity here. Everything is a private beach.
The only company you encounter on these gloriously
unscathed beaches is the occasional cow patty. Because on Anegada there seems
to be more cows than people, and they
like the beaches too. We heard about a
particular beach called “Cow Wreck Beach” and we embarked in a beat up rental jeep (driving left lane on scooters did not
appeal to our safety sensibilities) to tour the island and find this mythological
place. I anticipated the origin story…a boat full of cows having shipwrecked on
a beach and a few hearty survivors cowpaddling their way to shore, their
descendants becoming abundant and now populating this island en masse. Turns
out the theory was wrong. A shipwreck in
the early 20th century did indirectly involve cow but was not the seed of the cow infestation. In
fact, the profligate cowness of this island could not be explained by anyone we
talked to. Given the amazingly unsullied vista, the bizarre name may be the locals way of making this place uninviting to non-cows.
So we just enjoyed a cold one as we deliberated on how the Cow Wreck Beach Bar and Grille could survive, given that it is an impossible Bar to get to on an island that is impossible to get to, and given that it appeared that only we and the cows had frequented it in the recent past. Since Joe speaks fluent Cow, he mooed out the window to the bovine residents as we made our way home, thanking them for sharing their slice of paradise, stopping at a fisherman's lair to procure a lobzilla for another day.
Julianne December 9th, 2016
