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Brian Talma steps out of the ocean looking like a Pixar version of a superhero beach bum. He wears zebra-striped board shorts adorned with hibiscus flowers. A curly mix of sun-bleached hair pauses atop his head before cascading down to his powerful, windsurfer shoulders. A puka-shell necklace encircles his throat. His skin is mocha-colored but with an orange-golden glow. His face pairs the broad nose of Africa with the insanely bright blue eyes of Sweden, or a husky. Or a Swedish husky.

Talma's mouth opens in a wide smile, igniting fluorescent teeth. "Action," he greets, with an inflection that confirms that whatever planet he hails from, that planet has a Caribbean. Truth is, Talma comes from Barbados, not far from where we now stand, DeAction Beach. Don't expect to find that on any maps, though. It's Talma's designation, not a geographer's.Talma can call it anything he wants. After all, as one who carried Barbados' flag in the Olympics (windsurfing, Seoul 1988), he has arguably put the country before more eyeballs than anyone else (at least until Rihanna became the pop tart du jour). Competing on the Professional Windsurfers Association tour for 15 years and notching at least one victory in 14 of them, Talma appeared on lots of magazine covers. He'd visit German or Spanish tour stops and wow the Europeans with his seaworthiness, his distinctive West Indian visage and his Satchmo-like knack for teasing music out of Bajan conch shells. Talma, who's now 43, was the youngest recipient of the Barbados Service Star, an honor bestowed on those whose contribution to the island nation is deemed of special significance. The Barbadian government happily leases him an acre or two of prime beachfront (actually called Silver Sands) for his surf/windsurf/kitesurf/paddle-surf operation, a purveyor of both lessons and equipment called DeAction Sports.

"We all live for action, right?" Talma says, beaming. "Once you experience life, you gotta go to the next level. Action!" The waterman attaches this word to almost every sentence, like a Canadian's reflexive "eh." Action.We ascend a wooden staircase to the upper floor of his bright-yellow surf shack, above a storage room with dozens of different boards for all manner of wave-riding. He grabs a Powerade in a chemically enhanced, laser-bright blue that approximates the color of his eyes, and launches into a boosterish spiel on the virtues of his beloved home turf. 

We listen, and by "we" I mean my two Barbados personalities. By now, I/we have been on the island for five days. I've learned that Barbados is somewhat contradictory. It blends the New World's anything-goes sensibilities with proper British decorum. It comes at you with the macho force of a 15-foot wave or the gentle caress of the Sandpiper Hotel's seersucker bathrobe. And if you arrive alone, as I did, it helps to cultivate multiple personalities. Talma has heretofore been speaking to my water-sporting, beach-loving persona; let's call him Sandy. Sandy hangs enviously on every one of Talma's words as he reminisces about his Bajan adolescence: "I went to school in the middle of sugar-cane fields. I'd skip class, relax in the cane fields … peel and suck cane." This note intrigues my other Barbados persona, the one conducting zealous tastings of Mount Gay, Cockspur, Old Brigand and other distillery products. Let's call him Rummy.It's well after noon, and Rummy realizes Bajans and visitors all over the island are already celebrating happy hour. Sandy wants to stay and take in the crashing waves, but the Rummy part of me says let's go listen to something more civilized instead. Like ice clinking against a tumbler.

A fine place to bear witness to the glories of sugar is Speightstown, a colonial shipping center that has mellowed into a West Coast hamlet known for its bars and for Arlington House. This 1700s coral-stone edifice is still standing strong, in part because the coral was adhered by local molasses. Arlington House was home to the Skinner merchant family for 200 years. The Skinners owned a jetty in the days when Speightstown did so much transatlan-tic commerce with British seaports - shipping sugar in barrels, mostly – it was dubbed "Little Bristol."

These days, a museum inhabits Arlington House, restored in 2000 with modern displays and interactive exhibits. The floor on level two bears an oversized Barbados map. Visitors are struck by the dozens of forts established by the British - all within signaling distance of each other – to prepare for possible invasions by those other damned Caribbean colonialists, the French, Spanish and Dutch. They never invaded, after all. But, y'arrr, pirates did. Action.

Rummy enjoys the museum's film presentations, including a dramatization of 18th-century sugar-plantation life, where owners and slaves certainly disagree on the labor situation, but together appreciate the trade winds and the beauty of cane juice. Rummy appreciates that, too. His first job out of college: pouring drinks at an upscale tavern, where he came to recognize Mount Gay and tonic with lemon as a world-class cocktail. Longtime connoisseurs know from the label that Mount Gay has been "Perfected by Tradition" since 1703 and that Barbados is shaped something like a pork chop. The wide end is at the southern bottom, tapering drastically on the east side to a narrower tip up north. Speightstown sits on a northerly stretch of the long, straight west coast of the pork chop, as do countless rum shops. Some estimates put the number of Bajan rum shops at 1,500. While the census takers seem to have gotten sidetracked before agreeing on an exact count, it's safe to assume there are eight or nine purveyors of fermented sugar distillates for each of Barbados's 166 square miles.

My first Bajan rum shop is called John Moore Bar. It features a roadside room with bottles and coolers and mixers; out back, on the edge of the sea, stands an open-air edifice where five graying locals talk politics and women while playing dominoes. Listening to them fire their Caribbean patois around, I understand only fragments of the fractured, melodic words.

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