NEXT time you’re wending along the North Coast Road to get to that overrated beach at Maracas Bay, keep an eye out for a concrete-surfaced road on the left called Fond Pois Doux, which climbs into the mountain through an uninviting tunnel of overhanging trees.
Take the route (if you have some driving skills and didn’t buy your licence), and you will be rewarded with a view of a place unknown to many, with names you may never have heard; like the Paragrant Village and beach near the bays of Mal d’estomac and La Vache, with the islets of Saut-d’Eau and Les Bouquets watching offshore.

If you follow Fond Pois Doux’s route all the way to the end, it will take you through the slave-runaway, patois-speaking, blue devil-making, chive-planting, French creole parang villages of Paramin and Cameron, and eventually to Maraval or Diego Martin, whichever is your fancy.
While travelling through, you may come upon a man sitting at a roadside stall located on a ridgeline. There might be a bunch of coconuts, some vegetables, or a few heads of kush-kush on sale. Behind the stall is the man’s mountainside house of scavenged galvanised roofing sheets and logs near an outhouse that must surely be the highest latrine in the land. Two dogs laze at his feet. Man and dogs appear the same: Unhurried and unbothered. You must meet this man.

FIRST IMPRESSION
Your first impression might be that Peter Celestine is a hard man. Every one of his 62 years is marked on that weathered body. Paramin will do that to you, living all your years climbing these mountain roads to get from crop-land to Central Market in Port of Spain (And you’ve never really see a steep road until you see a Paramin road).
Peter Celestine could also be considered a poor man. He lives with those dogs, Bag and Ring, in a house he built for himself, lit by flambeaux, cooking by fireside. It is his third, and largest, “house”.
But you will come to realise that Celestine is one of the luckiest people to ever live on this often wretched, sometimes wondrous island. Celestine has known this for years. It’s probably why he speaks of his life’s journey, the joys of youth and the pain of growing old, with the same contented smile.
Celestine said that over the years, hundreds of people have stopped at his roadside spot, asking the same thing: Would he sell? Just name the price. And while land sold all around him to some of the richest people in Trinidad (their mansions are carved into the mountains at impossibly steep places), Celestine was good with his lot in life.
“I know I have the best view in the country,” said Celestine. No lie. From his perch, he looks south to a view of the Saddle Road, the Moka, the towers at One Woodbrook Place, the vessels travelling out of the port of Port of Spain in the Gulf of Paria.
To the north is the Caribbean Sea, and on clear days when the clouds are not sweeping across the ridge, Celestine can see Venezuela, Grenada and Tobago.
FARMER FROM BIRTH

Born to hill farmers in the lower area of Paramin in a crowded house of 12 siblings, he started planting on his own at age 14.
“I hardly went to school,” Celestine said. “I worked the land, doing all kinds of crops to this day. I planting for the future; fruit trees now. I have no children. I never married; never believed in it. I had a woman; she lived seven years with me, then she decided to go.”
And there was the incident when he had one too many drinks at a lowland bar, and fell asleep roadside on his walk back home one evening. Celestine said someone ran over him with their four-wheel-drive (almost everyone has one in these parts), the injury landing him in hospital.
The three weeks it took for him to recuperate at hospital, someone stole his most prized tracker dog, the mother of Bag and Ring, along with his gas tank. Confirmation: Nowhere is safe.

LOSING A LIMB

Which brings us to the matter of Celestine’s left leg.
Twelve years back, Celestine was deep in the Blanchisseuse woods doing some hunting, when he triggered a trap gun probably placed there by a ganja planter guarding his crop. It blew off his heel. The time it took for the other men to get Celestine to a hospital meant there was little chance of saving the limb. Gangrene had already set in.
“When the doctor came in and told me they had to cut… even with that bad foot, I wanted to climb off that bed and reach the ceiling. It was negligence. They waited too late,” Celestine recalled.
Losing a limb, it could break a man. Not this mountain man!
“It took two, three years for that to heal. I couldn’t get a (prosthetic) leg. So I gone ahead and made one: PVC and a strong piece of wood, some clamps and screws,” he said.
And Celestine was back to work, working the hillside, planting his crops; climbing those coconut trees so he could pick nuts to sell; fishing down at the bay to make extra money; doing whatever it took to make enough to live.
Eight years ago, he got a prosthetic leg fashioned with metal and a rubber boot, and is on a waiting list for a newer model. If he gets it, fine. If not, he will just make do with what he has. (Reprinted from the Trinidad Express)

By Richard Charan