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Photo by: James Schnepf

When it comes to seaside reading material, legal disclaimers have never really caught on, but this one came with an unexpected twist. "We cannot accept responsibility," began the note in the guest-services folder at Nisbet Plantation Beach Club, "for injury caused by falling nuts and fronds. - The Management." Nice: With upwards of 600 coconut palms standing tall and heavy-laden on the resort's spacious grounds on the north shore of the coconut-shaped island of Nevis, why not lay it on the line? Then the legalese slipped into poetry:    So remember Ike Newton's    Report that the fruit on    A branch during tempest or lull    When tumbling free    Can inflict misery    On a careless pedestrian's skull.They don't teach this sort of thing in American law schools, but maybe they should.Other places could learn a lot from the way things happen on Nevis (pronounced NEE-viss). Whether by design or happy accident, much of the less-appealing static of modern life has yet to reach its golden shores. There are no fast-food franchises within its 36 square miles (or 36 round miles, you could say, with the 3,232-foot-high dormant volcano Nevis Peak as the centerpiece, tall enough to condense rain out of passing trade winds and keep the island well-watered and green). Nor are there big-box stores or noticeably homicidal drivers, or even a single traffic light. "Old World charm," summarizes Erin Hurd, a California native who until recently managed Nisbet Plantation with her husband, Glen. "They haven't been negatively impacted by mass tourism."That's partly because Nevis requires a bit more effort to reach than some islands: Visitors arrive aboard connecting flights from San Juan, St. Martin or Antigua or a ferry from its sister island, St. Kitts. But the place is hardly a backwater. In its 18th-century colonial heyday, it flourished as one of the British Empire's wealthiest sugar-cane outposts. As the empire waned, Nevis' fortunes shifted, and the post-sugar lean times lasted well into the 20th century; during the Great Depression, for instance, hardscrabble living standards here fueled an uprising known as the Sugar Riot of 1936. In recent years, though, the island has enjoyed a prosperous revival fueled by tourism and offshore banking - a sort of Golden Age. Remnants of its past glory have been repurposed into inviting hideouts for travelers, including four plantation inns with a weathered authenticity. Nevis' literacy rate is among the world's highest, and emigrating to find work is no longer a local rite of passage. The place is elegant but not stuffy, welcoming but not overrun; cruise ships don't dock here, and the Four Seasons, by far the largest resort, has just under 200 rooms."The whole country," one visitor wrote, "has an air of gentle permanence and dilapidated sophistication." The U.S. Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer owns a villa here, as do other under-the-radar types. By my reckoning, humans are outnumbered by goats, sheep and green vervet monkeys - a feral population descended from pets the British brought from Africa in the 1700s. As a rule, tourists adore the monkeys and residents despise them, mostly because of their notorious habit of taking one bite from each piece of fruit on backyard trees and discarding the rest. "They are devils," a taxi driver told my wife and me. "Absolute devils." A day or two later, I overheard a British villa owner relating that his massage therapist had noticed his right upper back was unusually knotted. "That's from throwing rocks at the bloody monkeys," he'd explained. On Nevis, this constitutes a public-health crisis.With year-round human residents numbering 10,000 or so, the island is a lot like a small town, and like any small town it has its share of free spirits. During our stay we met Jim Johnson, a South Carolina transplant who leads guided hikes on Nevis' thickly wooded slopes - "the largest intact primitive rainforest left in the Leeward Islands," he told us. Johnson teaches an elective course at the island's medical school called "Poisonous Plants, Murderous Medicines and Fatal Foods." While hiking, he spouts rapid-fire outbursts from the Old Testament, Shakespeare and Nevis history, sometimes in the same breath. He showed us a tall hat he had formed out of a plant called leather leaf; it looked like something Peter Pan might wear if he became pope. Later the same day I met Quentin Henderson, an Englishman "with strong Scottish connections" who arrived 20 years ago to help establish a beekeeping industry. Henderson, known locally as the "Bee Man," dons a kilt for special occasions. He's also renowned for a hobby he's pursued for decades with great passion: collecting license plates. Not long ago he tailed a tractor for miles around the island because it was pulling a trailer with a Minnesota plate. He repeatedly raced ahead of the tractor and then followed it closely to get a better look. "Finally," Henderson told me, "the driver stopped and said, 'Bee Man, why do you keep passing me and waiting for me? Why do you keep doing that?'" In the end, persistence paid off, and the Bee Man struck a deal for his Minnesotan trophy.Nevis also resembles a small town in that it's not easy to keep a low profile there. In the early '90s, an American named David Johnson relocated to the island to work at the Four Seasons, and he habitually spent some of his downtime at Nisbet Plantation, a rival resort. One afternoon he was lazing in a rope hammock on Nisbet's beach when one of the staff members politely approached. Johnson's bank had somehow tracked him down and called Nisbet's front desk to deliver a message: His account was in danger of being overdrawn; would he care to stop by and make a deposit to avoid bouncing a check? In the week we spent on the island, we came to recognize this as a very Nevisian anecdote.You could do worse than to spend an entire vacation on Nevis without leaving Nisbet Plantation. The Caribbean's only shore-side plantation inn, the resort's 36 rooms occupy prim, pale-yellow cottages along a broad, palm-lined lawn that connects the property's 1778 great-house-turned-dining-room with its breezy beach. Here the young widow Fanny Nisbet met British naval-legend-in-the-making Horatio Nelson; they married under a kapok tree that still stands in the hills near Montpelier Plantation, another colonial-relic inn. Thirty-seven percent of Nisbet's guests are repeat customers (most hotels average in the single digits), and during our visit one guest had settled in for a five-week stay. Some members of the resort's warmly congenial staff have worked there for 30 years. Some visitors, Erin Hurd told us, hug employees and tear up when it comes time to leave.I can understand that - coconut bombs notwithstanding, the place is wonderful - but we headed out anyway. We never visit an island without dedicating at least one day to getting hopelessly lost. ("Exploring," we call it.) Compact and ringed by a smoothly paved road of recent vintage, Nevis is all but idiot-proof in this respect, so we set out on a Saturday mission, roaming clockwise toward the sparsely populated windward coast. Someone had tipped me off about a bar known as Domino College, the inspiration for a Jimmy Buffett song of the same name. We used that to overlay a vague sense of purpose on our wanderings, figuring we'd snag a snapshot of it for a Parrothead friend back home.We started by making a few unscheduled stops. At Newcastle Pottery, a rustic, open-air studio marked by a sign weathered to near-illegibility, we chatted with a woman named Almena who was forming a drum-sized clay pot, by hand, for cooking over coals. "I was trained to do it on the wheel," she said, "but I like working with my hands." At a rocky windward shore called Long Haul Bay, we picked through washed-up sea fans and barnacle-crusted ropes that had drifted from who knows where.What we didn't find was the one thing we were looking for, despite circling around the hillside village of Butlers, where the map pinpointed Domino College. If this storied site were in Florida, say, you might expect billboards miles in advance, giant inflatable parrots, a concession peddling Buffett T-shirts and CDs. The closest thing we found was an unmarked open-air bar where three men on the porch were indeed slapping dominoes on a table. Although a tour guide had told us that gambling is illegal on Nevis - with 80-some churches there, traditional morals hold sway - a pile of dollar coins on the table suggested that we had stumbled onto the scene of a crime. The island has also outlawed profanity, we'd been told, and though the men were jabbering at one another in excited patois, I think I picked out a few misdemeanors on that front, too. But there was no Domino College sign, just a hand-scrawled list of drink prices."Does this place have a name?" I asked the proprietress, an older woman who popped the caps off our midday bottles of Ting and wiped off the mouths of the bottles with a paper towel. "No name." She smiled. "I'm Millicent. 'Millie's bar,' people say."If, as I suspect, this was indeed the onetime site of Domino College, it was the most Nevisian tribute to that fact I could have imagined: an ongoing game of dominoes and a colossal shrug.>>> Click Here to Continue Reading