Ms. Vie

St John is a little green speck of an island, covering a mere twenty square miles, floating in the Caribbean Sea. More than half of it is national park, and therefore completely undeveloped. There are no traffic lights, no billboards, and no fast food chains. There is no fast anything. You can only get there by boat. If you arrive on St. John as the average traveler does, by ferry via St. Thomas, You get dumped off with the rest of the cattle in Cruz Bay. If you were to then drive almost clear across the island, you would see Ms. Vie’s on your left. Ms. Vie’s snack shack is just that. It’s a shack, made of plywood, hand-painted the exact same yellow as the banana keets that buzz all around it. Ms. Vie is someone whose age is impossible to guess. She has the wise, twinkling eyes and the slow, mindful speech of a hundred year old woman, but not a wrinkle on her face. There aren’t a lot things on her menu; conch fritters, garlic fried chicken, johnny cakes, and a coconut tart (and of course, glorious, icy cold beer). All of it is delicious. And if you look around the property, the menu makes sense. There are plump, clucking chickens pecking away at the bulbous roots of coconut heavy palm trees that sit right across the street from the turquoise ocean that is crawling with sweet conch. It’s all right there. Ms. Vie takes the few, simple things that are available to her, and makes them remarkable, I’m sure, just like her mother’s mother did. She seems to be contented, and to love what she does. You can taste the love and the history in the food. She is breathing proof that people don’t need much to be happy. The West Indian people, as a whole, exemplify that ideal. People live more simply, so the small stuff matters more. Things that you never gave much thought to before, like a perfectly fried piece of chicken, or a tart made from a coconut that was plucked from the tree you are eating it under, make you genuinely happy.