Negril's Mystic Caves

Peter Ricketts kept following me down the beach. When he saw my girlfriend, he sometimes followed her too. So the next encounter I had with Peter was not necessarily cordial.

“And where is the lovely little lady heading today?”

The white hot sands of Negril are often cooled by the unofficial porters along the resort row. For each pace down the shore, next to the hollowed oil drums curdling plumes from jerk chicken, there is a waiting driver. Peter was part of this workforce, soliciting constantly, but never impolite.

“Ya girl told me it’s the fella’s birthday this morning.” His silhouette broke the plane of the horizon, stretching over my body. Roaring River, he explained, could provide the rejuvenating pleasures of Negril to commemorate my birth anniversary. “I can bring you just up the road to the mineral springs. You will love you-self.” We agreed to meet across the main street in two hours, after his morning jog and my breakfast.

As Jamaica sheds its cloudy dawn veil, beyond the canopies, the Blue Mountains stand regal. While images of paradise sometimes hint at its essence, only the prying needle of a fruit-fattened mosquito tells its aims. For the off-road experience that defines Negril -- hiking trails up the hills at Savanna-La-Mar -- only a trustworthy knowledgeable guide like Peter can lead the way. His talkative hospitality smoothed the ride along the coast. Our chat veered constantly then, with mangled tree trunks reminding visitors of past hurricane landfalls. When I mentioned my Jamaican heritage, he revealed his origins and handed me his passport. We shared the surname “Ricketts.” Although our kinship was vague, he was a brother spiriting me to caves to experience earthly rarity.

Luminous leaves reflect dew as you turn the bend at Roaring River. A group of guides perched near the cave entrance offer “flim” (in Jamaican patois) to load cameras. Slim, woolly-maned merchants negotiated tour fees with one family at a time, despite the flat rate painted on a wooden sign. The way to avoid paying twice is to have a driver schedule your tour beforehand. Our descent into the cavern distanced us from the morning light, and a Rasta shaman extolled the healing properties of the red clay walls and bat dung in melodic chants. I avoided the other Americans flashing photos, asking if we could enter the bathing pools first. Local residents were wading in their trunks, smearing the sulfuric mud on their bare skin. The shaman impelled us to dunk our heads in the ripples, and the water warmed every standing hair. But when the heat piqued, he led me from the wading cave into another lit room where a steel staircase peered over an infinite jade lagoon. The connected platform below was for diving.

“Once you go in, is like a new life come unto you.”

And though he did not report how deep or cold it was in the water, I knew I had one chance for tropical baptism. So I jumped.