Wheels of Life

Later that afternoon, in the village of Rosalie, we got to the base of a hill that John described as "two or three miles long." It actually rolled upward for 5.4 miles, and when Pete arrived at the crest, lugging, as always, 40 pounds of camera gear, he was cramped up again, and he could speak only one word with conviction: "Taxi!"

John and I pressed on, up switchbacks through the villages of Gaulette and Salybia, and as evening fell John surged ahead. I was alone, and at two different turns in the road men began running up hill, after me, the instant they caught sight of my white skin and my shiny bike. "Money," one man implored.

I was now on the Carib Indian reservation, where the unemployment rate is about 70 percent, and I had no game plan for such appeals. I just pedaled hard, dodging anyone who might beseech me for cash, until I reached our hotel.

AT THE CARIB TERRITORY GUEST HOUSE, I was hit with a strange, serendipitous surprise: The place would play host, that evening, to a series of four boxing matches. A ring had been set up on the patio outside the kitchen. There were ropes knotted to the patio's concrete columns, and around the columns, there were foam pads. The floor of the ring was terra cotta underlain by concrete.

The matches would pit the Dominican National Team, a middling player in the boxing stronghold that is the Caribbean, against an underdog -- the Kalinago boxing club, whose members all hailed from the Carib res-ervation, bearing a long history of oppression.

The tan-skinned, almond-eyed Caribs are the Indians Columbus encountered when he first reached the Caribbean in 1492. Once scattered throughout the archipelago, they now possess a single land reserve, where many live in simple one- or two-room huts.

The Kalinago boxing team does not train in a gym. Instead, the boxers steel themselves by lifting rocks pried out of the earth. They spar on concrete, usually without benefit of face masks or gum shields. And on the night I was with them, they had to wait for the national team, which was inexplicably an hour late. They stood by the roadside in tank tops, lithe and lean and mean as snakes.

I waited nearby and talked to the Kalinago coach, Augustine Frederick, who is 32 and the sole Carib on the Dominican team. Frederick is a tiny man, a featherweight, and he is stoic and quietly earnest. He said: "They gave me their word. They will come." He said: "This is the first time my fighters have ever competed, and the national team, they feel like they will walk all over us. But you watch: We have been training a full year for these fights. We have a surprise for them."

The national team arrived, finally, and the fighting began: a lurid blur beneath the hot white flood lights. The Caribs fought barefoot, and the first bout was an ungainly thing, with the boxers elbowing and shoving and tangling their arms. But the true drama happened outside the ring. There were 60-odd spectators -- nearly all Caribs, and among them a guy who'd chased after me -- and everyone was delirious as the proprietor of the guesthouse, Charles Williams, did the play-by-play over a staticky microphone. "Oh yes!" he yelled, his words rolling into a jazz scat. "Oh yes! Something's happening here! Something's happening here!"

Williams, 56, is the chief of the Caribs and a controversial firebrand. Last year, he divided his tribal council when he noisily decried "Dead Man's Chest," whose directors hired hundreds of Caribs to play scantily clad cannibals. He noted that there's no archeological evidence proving that his ancestors were cannibals, and he lambasted every Carib who took $95 a day for film extra work. "Shame on us," he said in a press release excerpted by many U.S. newspapers, "that for a few dollars we are betraying our flesh and blood."

As emcee, Williams did not hide his loyalties. He rejoiced when the first fight went, on decision, to the Caribs and then again when the next Carib fighter victoriously split the lip of his opponent. All night he kept crowing: "Go Carib boy! Go Carib boy!" Spare and agile himself, he kept dancing into the crowd and handing the mike to his friends, and they echoed his banter -- albeit, with less poetic aplomb. "Very good," one man intoned, "very good, well done."

The referee called the third fight a draw, and then the fourth fight began -- a stocky Carib bruiser, Julien Valmond, against a much taller, rail-thin boy with jet-black skin, a kid so delicate-looking that I winced as he stepped into the ring. Within 30 seconds, Valmond had the kid on the ropes. At the back of the patio, he was efficiently pummeling the boy's face. The boy crumpled to the concrete. He stayed down for the count. And then the crowd flew into a frenzy, released, it seemed, from 500 years of hard luck. People leapt high into the air, their arms stretched above them in victory. They toppled white plastic deck chairs and danced. They chanted -- " Julien! Julien! Julien ! " Frederick, the coach, stood nearby, calmly beaming as he said, "I knew they would do their best," and Williams spouted a stream of unintelligible euphoria into the mike. Listening, I remembered what one old woman had told me as we set off on our journey: "You will have a fine time," she said without elaborating. "This is an open country."

Now I understood what she meant. Dominica is open-hearted: An unrehearsed humanity prevails. Restraint and tense hesitation and the walls between people all dissolve in the sweltering heat.

I wasn't used to life being so freewheeling, so loose-limbed. Generosity exists here in the United States certainly, and it can flash out at the most random moments -- when you're stuck by the side of the road with a flat tire, say, and some stranger comes along with a jack. But still so much of daily life feels corporatized, digitized: Minute to minute, we are awash in phrases such as, "May I be of further assistance to you?" and "Press one for more options." We are never too far from a Mini Mart whose sterile fluorescent lights burn all through the night.

It can be cold and alienating to live in such a landscape, and an uncertain person can find myriad reasons to retreat, to go inside his shell. And that is what I did often when the muscles in my body were knifed by pain. I functioned so that there was not much perceptibly wrong with me, and nominally, gingerly, I stayed in shape, taking walks, swimming laps in a pool. But I conceived of myself as broken. Quite often I refrained from the most basic activities -- climbing down a few flights of stairs, say -- in fear that I would spiral down into worse, more intractable muscle inflammation and pain. I held the pain around me like a case, a shield, and I cultivated a hurt contempt for the world as the pain fed on itself and worsened.

Now, ringside, I felt the chanting shake through me: "Julien! Julien! Julien!" Eventually, someone kicked on the stereo, so it blasted loud reggae, and then we all flowed outside and milled about on the grass, chatting, saying nothing of substance, as we lingered out there in the dark.

THE LAST DAY OF RIDING WAS EASY. We all made it, gliding, ultimately, down a winding eight-mile hill through groves of banana plants, and then over a rare stretch of flats, through the rain, into Roseau. We had drinks at a bar there, and then the next day Pete and I set off on one last adventure. We took a cab across the island to Paix Bouche, to take in a festival.

There are no hotels in Paix Bouche, and Pete showed up there with his bike disassembled, contained in a box. Awkwardly, he began traipsing around town with the huge, heavy box, begging for lodgings.

Within 20 minutes, he befriended the proprietor of the village store, Gerard Honoré, who secured us the run of the church hall. "We'll make sure you have whatever you need," Honoré said as he set a couple aging mattresses onto the floor for us. "If you need me" -- he gestured toward his small house -- "just knock on my window."

Soon darkness fell, and, on the blacktop up at the school, a reggae and soca band, the Nature Boyz, began playing on a raised wooden stage before a crowd of 300 or so, locals all.

The Nature Boyz starred Honoré's daughter Theona and her boyfriend, Bryson Williams, as singers. All of the band members wore indigo glow tubes for necklaces, and they danced with a synchronized, high-stepping syncopation that carried the fresh, juicy verve of the Jackson Five, circa 1974. In between songs, though, Williams was homey. He talked up the prizes the local school was offering that night, as part of a raffle. The grand prize was a farm animal, a goat. "Someone's gonna go home with a goat tonight," he said without irony. "Someone here is going to bring home a goat!"

I drank beer and danced -- tentatively at first, and then, in time, into the sweaty swirl of the crowd, my arms swinging wildly, until I was lost in the beat. Soon, I was paged.

"Where's the white man?" Williams said from the stage. "We want the white man to come up here and dance."

He meant me, and for a couple seconds, as the crowd went quiet, casting about in the dark for my pale skin, I felt a little unnerved. This kid was mocking my cramped, arrhythmic middle-aged shuffle -- I was certain of that. But there was a sweetness to his plea, too, a curiosity and a warmth, so I climbed the stairs up onto the stage, and for maybe 30 seconds, I danced -- all out, in front of the band, beneath the glare of the lights.

"Yes!" Williams sang out. "Do the white man dance!" He mimicked my wheeling, back-bent maniac skank and at once the crowd picked it up, too. The school yard was a sea of wide-whirling arms. " Do the white man dance! " everyone shouted, rolling into a chant. " Do the white man dance! "

The chant was still going when I stepped back out onto the blacktop, and a swarm of people surged toward me, clapping me on the back. A guy came along with a bottle of rum and, laughing, handed it to me. I took a hard slug.

After a while, I walked down the hill. The music faded until the night was silent, and for a minute or so I stood outside the church hall, looking up at the stars. Then I went inside and fell asleep.

Bill Donahue is a writer living in Portland, Ore. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 3 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.