A helper works with Patty (right) in the family fields.

Imagine Media LLC

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Beyond the Bean

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Tiffany calls from about 10 feet behind me. She’s a local who has been on these trails before. Her first outburst of concern fuels the visions I’ve been harboring between heaving breaths for the past hour, of being the first flabby white woman to drop dead in the lush, hidden heart of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains.

I stop short on the narrow ledge, my ankles scratched like a cat’s post from the dense bushes. My shirt is soaked through. My Timberland boots wobble. The three stunning, steep miles we’ve hiked feel like ten.

“Boys, is this the right way?” I echo, shouting ahead to 14-year-old Leroy and his 8-year-old friend, Kevin. They seem to know these rocky strips of dirt as well as their forefathers who created them by slogging hours upon hours, up into the clouds and back down again, to the coffee-bean farms where there was picking work to be had. Sweet, shy, little Kevin is leading our way. He probably weighs 50 pounds on a day when he gets a full meal. He doesn’t talk much, not even as the thick scrub tears through his bare feet. I’m not sure why I expect him to call back an answer before pressing on.

Leroy, on the other hand, has taken a bit of a shine to me during my past few days living at the coffee farm he and Tiffany call home, perhaps because I gave him his first lesson in world geography. Though I hadn’t had the heart to tell the smiling teenager the reality of his place in the third world, I did become the first person to show him where his home, Jamaica, was positioned on a map. How ironic, I think as I stand in the woods without a clue to my whereabouts. He doubles back along the trail and takes my hand. “It’s the right way,” he assures me with a smile.

And so we hike forward, the four of us, trying to get back to the dirt road with no name that serves as the Lime Tree Village’s only lifeline to civilization, by way of the city called Kingston, far below in the valley. The other end of the road is our destination: its terminus 3,400 feet above sea level at the Lime Tree Farm. That’s where Leroy and Tiffany live, where my cozy two-room villa with refreshing shower awaits amid the coffee bushes that scale the mountainside like rows of European olive trees. Outside the window of my guest villa, like the other two at the farm, is a lush green sightline straight across the peaks of the Blue Mountain range, which turns deep amber at sunset. The panoramic view gives this place a serenity I’m having a tough time remembering now that I’m feeling a little lost in its belly.

The farm, at a mere ten acres, is small by comparison in the whole of the Blue Mountains, but it is the biggest in Lime Tree Village. It is also the only working coffee farm that offers tourists a comfortable, safe and downright enchanting spot to lay their heads during a week spent hiking through the majestic mountaintops and getting to know the locals who produce Jablum, one of the most expensive gourmet coffees on Earth.

 

                                                   ***

 

Charlie Burbury discovered the spot at the top of the mountain in 1989, when he was a disaffected 25-year-old house builder back home in England. His family had been coming to Jamaica for several generations—ever since his grandfather was appointed Governor of the island, serving until British rule ended in 1958. “I came out with a friend,” Charlie recalls. “We slept on the ground under a tree. I didn’t know anything about coffee. I didn’t know anything about Jamaica. I didn’t know anything about anything.”

Now, at age 40, he’s made a life of subsistence at the farm with his charming wife, Suzie, who survived a difficult childhood in a Kingston ghetto; their 2-year-old son, Alex; and Suzie’s teenage boy (and my hiking companion), Leroy. They live in a boxy structure that Charlie built by hand, complete with one window and a DVD player on which Alex watches endless showings of Finding Nemo. They have the only washing machine in the village and two of its only vehicles, a Suzuki and a Land Rover that can handle the rough road’s terrain at about 10 miles per hour on dry afternoons.

Two years ago, Charlie’s childhood friend, Rodger Bolton, helped him build three “rustic Caribbean”-style guest villas with plush queen-size beds, en suite bathrooms, working outlets (no small feat), and rods for hanging clothes, along with an open-air kitchen/restaurant that’s literally on the peak of the mountaintop where the clouds blow right into a person instead of passing overhead. Charlie and Rodger became financial partners, along with Charlie’s Uncle Oliver, in creating a tourism branch of the coffee farm’s operations. Rodger agreed to spend winters entertaining guests at the farm, and summers continuing his job as a charter yacht captain in the Mediterranean. Tiffany (my other hiking buddy) is Rodger’s girlfriend; she works for Charlie, picking coffee beans with the other locals he employs.

 Charlie and Rodger had hoped to welcome their first visitors to the new guest villas last year, but Hurricane Ivan blew those plans away along with most of the village’s coffee beans. Having recovered structurally from the storm, if not yet emotionally or financially, Charlie and Rodger are excited about the upcoming season. The laid-back Englishmen hope tourists who stay for a week will enjoy what they have come to love about the place—spectacular views, family-style Jamaican meals, healthy exercise, a bit of education about how a coffee bean goes from farm to factory, and a chance to spend time with villagers who live a simple and friendly life far from the all-inclusive resorts. Charlie alone has spent more than 15 years here, evolving from a man called “Whitey” to a traveling disc jockey known as “Blue Shadow” to a respected farmer and member of the village family. The goodwill he has banked in Lime Tree Village and beyond extends to every tourist who becomes his guest.

“We have local knowledge,” he explains in a British accent slurred with a Bob Marley twang. “It’s so personal and small. (Our guests) get to see the proper Jamaican life, but they’re also staying with Rodger and me, and so we’ll know what they might like.”

Charlie, Rodger and the extended family who live at the farm are not quite sure what people will think of the experience they are offering; in fact, I was one of the first to enjoy the infrastructure they’ve built and the relationships they’ve nurtured.

They are very much like people standing in a clearing on a trail in the woods, wondering if they’re going the right way.  

 

                                                   ***

 

“The whole of the hills depends on the coffee,” Charlie says as he spins the Land Rover’s wheel, taking us higher and higher up the mountain toward his farm. The wide dirt swath is pocked with craters like an acne-afflicted cheek, stripped naked of asphalt and left nearly impassable in parts by the 1997 rampage of Hurricane Gilbert. My stomach is woozy as we climb around blind corners. The altitude, while offering fantastic views, inspires queasiness.

Luckily there is plenty of stopping along the way to roll down the windows, get some fresh air and chat with the dozens of villagers whom Charlie calls friends. They are like dandelions sprouting up all along twists and turns in the crumbling road, a podiatric rush hour along the lifeline that links Lime Tree Village with the local school and the Mavis Bank Central Factory. The factory is where coffee beans are sorted, roasted and packaged as Jablum, which sells for about $30 per pound U.S. With wages at about $7 a day and the bus ride from Lime Tree Village to the factory around $1.50, most of the workers choose to walk the four and a half miles each way. It takes a minimum of 45 minutes to go downhill in the mornings, and at least two hours to hike back up after a day’s work. The locals always say hello to Charlie because he sometimes has room to give them a ride.

The only other true employment option in the village is becoming a coffee-bean picker on the farms, which pays about the same but sometimes requires literally hanging onto bushes while standing on a 30- to 45-degree slope, in the hot sun, gently twisting the beans off the plants so as not to yank off the entire bud and ruin the next crop—the next season’s income. Women make up the majority of the work force here; the typical life story includes at least one teenage pregnancy, a young father who flees for the city below and never returns, and a life of working to feed and raise the children alone. Most of these women prefer the factory to fieldwork, since the former offers more social opportunities and the latter destroys their nails and hairdos. A few dream of going just once to meet new people and peek at life along Jamaica’s northern coast, where the beaches and resorts are. “It’s financially difficult,” as Charlie explains it. “It costs three days’ work.”

Villager after villager smiles and waves to us from the roadside as we continue our drive back toward the top. “Yah mon,” Charlie says again and again with a wave out his open window. We pick up a few people here, drop off a few there, and make sure to slow down and at least say hello to everyone. I feel like royalty in a motorcade, almost embarrassed for having a vehicle carry me instead of working my way up like everyone else we pass by.

We see the man who makes cement blocks by hand, who created the walls of the guest villa where I’ve been sleeping. There go a few of the factory workers who double as pickers at the farm, who work for Charlie during the frenzied harvest times. There’s person after person who has so little financially in the eyes of the globe, yet who combine to offer everything that keeps the village and the world-renowned coffee operation running.

And there, coming up on our left, is Eva, who goes by the nickname “Duchess” and who welcomed me with a smile a few days ago. She sometimes earns money as a picker at the farm, but today she’s slogging her way back up to Lime Tree Village after a day of work at the factory.

I jump out of the Land Rover, tell Charlie I’ll see him later for dinner, and walk the last few miles up the road at Eva’s side. She is 28, the single mother of a 13-year-old daughter who wants to become a teacher. Eva doesn’t know if her daughter will make it into such a grand position, but she studies hard, so Eva sends her to a better school in Kingston that requires a 20-mile bus ride and tuition. That’s where all Eva’s earnings from the factory go; her flat, plastic-looking shoes are a stark contrast to my waterproof boots as we approach her house. One room appears to be fully built, but the second is bare cinderblocks without a roof or windows.

“What will you do tonight?” I ask as she hugs me goodbye.

“Well, my daughter will be home soon,” she says. “And I like to watch The Bold and the Beautiful.”

 

                                                   ***

Patty and June are the village’s most productive farmers, having acquired land as family members passed away over the years—seven acres here, eleven acres there, another two acres down a ways and on the other side of the road. June used to be a picker at the coffee farms, walking back and forth to work past Patty’s house, but now, after 26 years of marriage, they work together to grow peas, carrots, cucumbers, yams, lettuce, sweet peppers and just about everything else the land will sustain. They even have a coop where they raise chickens. One might say Patty and June are the most diversified couple doing business on the mountaintop.

The red shutters on their two-room, white-painted cinderblock house are just a few steps from Charlie’s farm, like a neon exit sign as I lumber to the road’s end and back toward my villa, which is built to the standards of comfortable tourism and is downright luxurious compared with every other home along the road. Patty flags me down with a wave before I pass his place—he knows I’m leaving tomorrow, bound for Miami on a jet airplane. He wants to share his last, two-cupful bottle of sorrel wine with me as a goodbye gift.

“It’s a nice idea,” Patty says of the notion Charlie and Rodger have of bringing tourists to live among the villagers here at the top of the long, winding road. He thinks a few beats before adding what he thinks visitors might want to hear: “It’s all good and peaceful and quiet. There is something that goes on here. The citizens police the area. A man come up here and try to make something wrong, and by the time he got down there, we got a road block. Cut off in the trap. There are so few vehicles, you see them and you know. You hear them.”

We drink a toast to our new friendship and promise to see each other again, and then I walk the last few steps back to Lime Tree Farm. Charlie’s wife, Suzie, has prepared a delicious dinner of stewed chicken, peas and rice, and fried plantains, just as hearty and locally inspired as the full breakfasts and midday snacks she makes for all farm guests.

My legs ache, but my feet feel fine—much better than after the first day’s hike, when I felt so lost and I kept slipping and sliding down the steeper trails. My new friends kept telling me to “walk like a Jamaican,” taking small steps and putting my weight onto the side of my feet instead of lurching heel-to-toe in a straight line forward. I’d thought it was silly advice at the time. I’d always been taught that one gets places by moving purposefully and with great strides—but here, the lesson doesn’t hold true. Moving slowly and sideways seems to be the prudent course, minding the path that has been cleared by many generations before.

Over dinner, I tell Charlie, Suzie, Rodger and the rest of the farm’s family that I can’t wait to come back. This place offers the best exercise I’ve had in years, spectacular views and morning cups of coffee that taste even better now that I have become friends with the gracious people who picked the beans off the bushes.

“They’re not really bushes,” Charlie corrects me gently. “They’re quite hardy trees. To get them to bear takes a long investment.”

He waits a minute before adding: “We’re lucky up here in the mountains because we have the coffee. If we didn’t have the coffee, we wouldn’t have anything.”  ♦

 

From left: Kevin, Rodger and Leroy atop a mountain trail.

At the top of a lone dirt road in  Jamaica’s blue mountains, a small, struggling village produces one of the world’s priciest gourmet coffees