Many summers ago I was lucky enough to be able to travel extensively in the Caribbean. I went island-hopping by myself and one of the places I visited was Montserrat, an island in the Lesser Antilles region of the Caribbean. Two striking features of the island nation that caught my eye were its black sand beaches and the sulfur springs in the central mountains. The former was an indication of the past of the island while the latter was a significant hint of the future to come.
The sand on the beach was black not because it was dirty or polluted by an oil spill but because it had been created by the erosion of volcanic rock deposited many years ago. It was a surreal experience to walk along a beach that looked dirty but was as clean as any beach can be. However, it wasn't the past that caught up with Montserrat but rather its future.
On July 18, 1995, with very little warning, the dormant volcano that formed the backbone of the island (and caused those afore-mentioned sulfur springs to form) erupted and destroyed a significant chunk of the island, including the capital city of Plymouth.
The country has still not recovered from that cataclysmic event but is a barely mentioned footnote in the history of human casualties in a natural disaster. My everlasting memory of Montserrat is of the mountains as the plane took off at the end of my visit.
Montserrat still exists today but it is not the one that lives on in my mind.
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