 St.
John: Thirty Years Ago
Anne Marie Porter
By Crystal Bray
Sept 12 - Oct 16, '07 issue
Anne Marie Porter is one of the reasons St. John is known
widely as Love City. Over the past ten years, she has become the go-to
girl for performing wedding ceremonies on-island, and it is due in large
part to her efforts that St. John has blossomed into a major wedding destination.
For those who have attended ceremonies she’s performed, it’s
easy to see why she’s so sought-after.With the perfect blend of
sincerity, solemnity, humor, and reverence, she helps usher couples into
the horizon of their new lives together. Clearly, she loves her chosen
vocation (which she would refer to as her “blessing”). I recently
attended the wedding of a lovely local couple way out on East End that
Anne Marie officiated. Adorned in her signature white butterfly stole,
she spoke to my friends as though they were her old friends, spreading
her arms wide to symbolically envelope the new union, a smile on her face,
her mellifluous voice alternating between addressing those gathered in
witness, and lowering to a more intimate volume to share words with the
couple alone.
 When
it comes to Anne Marie and St. John, the island that she has called home
since 1979, it’s difficult to imagine one without the other. She
seems perfectly suited to St. John, as if one cannot tell whether the
island shaped the woman or the other way around. After speaking with Anne
Marie on this topic, it seems clear that each have found a perfect fit
in one another.
As we arranged ourselves on a picnic table at the pavilion at Trunk Bay,
deserted as the late afternoon shadows called beachgoers on to other adventures,
we fell into a conversation about the importance of learning to focus
on the present, of, what Ram Dass termed, being here now. St. John seems
to be a good place in which to live this way. There are a lot of pretty
zen folks here. After all, aren’t we “all here ‘cuz
we’re not all there?” St. John is one of the few remaining
Western havens for dharma bums. Although I doubt Anne Marie would refer
to herself by such Kerouakian standards, she is most certainly zen. Serene
and open, she embodies this landscape of clear blue water, lush green
hills, white sand.
The 1970’s found Anne Marie in Connecticut, where
she had relocated from her birthplace of Raleigh, North Carolina after
graduating from college. She managed her own business there, a wellness
center for women, where she taught workshops such as “Nourishing
Ourselves: From Food to Relationships,” and “Creating the
Reality That You Want,” (a workshop she’s since led for the
Omega Institute on St. John). In November of 1979, she decided to accept
an interesting offer to travel. “I was sailing with some friends
who were delivering a yacht from Connecticut to Martinique,” she
explained, inhaling deeply from a vial of lavender essential oil before
passing it across to for me to enjoy as well. Opening her eyes and smiling
widely, she continued “but I never made it past St. John.”
After two solid weeks at sea, the boat made its first stop in St. Thomas
to reprovision. Intended as an overnight stop before the journey on down-island,
it was the first time Anne Marie had seen the island, as well as the first
time she’d glimpsed land in two weeks. She decided to stretch her
sea legs and go exploring to seek out what the new place had to offer.
“We were planning on leaving first thing the next morning, so I
found a cabbie and asked him what he thought I should do with my time
there. He said ‘Go to St. John.’ So he dropped me off at the
Red Hook ferry.”
Soon, Anne Marie stepped off the ferry and onto the St.
John dock, at the time “just a little cement ramp with a tiny wooden
customs shack up on stilts. The park in Cruz Bay was just a grassy knoll.”
Many people would have taken a tour, appreciated the place for an afternoon,
and continued on with their laid plans. Anne Marie did not.
“It was divine, perhaps, or destiny,” she mused, thinking
back, “It wasn’t a conscious destination but it felt like
home as soon as I stepped off the boat. I think it’s a blessing
to be able to ever find St. John and the spirit that’s here. And
that’s exactly what happened to me. It wasn’t that I was traveling
to St. John, I was just traveling, sailing with friends on a yacht delivery
to Martinique.”
Though she may not have been looking for a home, Anne Marie found one
on that day in November. She instructed the cabbie to “take me to
the least expensive place to stay,” and he dropped her off at Maho
Bay Campground. She rented a tent for a week, and returned to St. Thomas
to bid bon voyage to her friends.
“And then, obviously, I had to go back and tell my friends that
I wouldn’t be going with them. So, they took off and I came back
here,” she says, matter-of-factly. A little stunned, my first response
is to ask her if she was scared. “No,” came her instantaneous
reply, “I’d also moved to Connecticut, where I didn’t
know a soul, so I’d had a sense of...I don’t know...adventure.
No fear leaving North Carolina, no fear leaving Connecticut, no fear staying
on St. John.” And just like that, she changed her entire life and
adopted a little speck on the edge of the Caribbean sea as her home.
Well now, as the writer, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, skipping
the best part as it were. What happened after she said goodbye to her
only contacts and made her way back to Maho to spend her first week was
the thing that happens in any romantic story worth its proverbial salt:
she met someone. “During that week, I fell in love,” Anne
Marie says, beaming. “He was a lovely young man who was working
and living at Maho Bay. He had come for a week vacation as well and had
connected with his heart to the place. So, it was falling in love with
him that made me stay for a month at Maho Camps, rather than a week, and
was my reason for moving here. I moved here fulltime in 1980.”
 Who
knows if she would’ve stayed had she not fallen hard? Perhaps she
would have. But it’s just so fitting a beginning, considering what
Anne Marie has become to St. John, that she came here with an open heart
and found love the first week.
After her first month was up, she returned to Connecticut to collect her
things and tie up loose ends to begin her life on-island. Her Romeo did
his part from St. John to ensure she was, as they say, “gone to
come back.”
“By the time I moved back, he rented us a little house in Coral
Bay, next to where Shipwreck Landing is now. He wanted to make sure I
would come back. I wasn’t going to live in a tent forever,”
she laughs. “And our landlord, the lovely Miss Anesta Sewer, who
was our teacher and friend, a great herbalist and a great woman, lived
right next door.”
Soon, she began working at Islandia Boutique, a store owned by Inga Hiilivirta,
and which Anne Marie describes as a “delicious, sweet little shop.”
She worked many different jobs over the years, from waitress at Mongoose
Restaurant to an original Luscious Licker (don’t worry, for those
who don’t know, it was Bonny Corbeil’s health food store).
But she found her calling around ten or twelve years ago when she was
asked to perform a friends’ commitment ceremony. She accepted the
honor and soon agreed to perform other ceremonies for her friends, weddings
and commitment ceremonies as well as child-naming ceremonies. Before long,
her talents were noticed by some higher-ups at Caneel Bay, and she began
performing services there as well. When I ask her if she feels she’s
found her calling, she replies, “I think my whole life got me ready
to do this work. And it’s a great blessing to be able to be with
such a wide variety of people from all over the world when their hearts
are wide open. I’m not affiliated with any religion, dogma, or political
party. I just create ceremonies based on the couple. I always ask them
if they’re affiliated with anything that they would like honored.
Whatever they are, I’m here to honor their commitment. It’s
not about me. I want to be a channel of blessing for them.”
Her talents have won her a lot of good publicity, which has fueled the
ascendance of St. John as a wedding destination. Anne Marie pulls a book
from her satchel and flips it open to show me a page with two facing pictures.
The first shows her marrying a smiling couple on the beach. The photo
next to it captures her with the same couple, still smiling, still on
the beach, a few years older and holding their first-born child who has
just been baptized. “And since then, I’ve baptized their second
child,” she says with a proud, happy laugh.
Anne Marie feels very lucky to be able to do what she loves. Through her
work, she acknowledges, manifests, and creates more love in a world that
needs as much as it can get. When I ask her what provides the same energy
for her, she responds with a cause close to her heart: animals. “The
thing that has been the most heart-nurturing for me is that more and more
people are concerned with protecting and respecting the animal population
on St. John. It’s been very inspirational and joyful to me in my
time here that people have become more aware of how really important it
is to love and respect animals. They’re our divine teachers in fur
suits. They give us unconditional love. That has helped me be able to
stay here.”
She hands me a bumper sticker bearing the words “BE KIND”
and in smaller type, “In memory of Louise and Buddy.” This
sticker is affixed to many vehicles around St. John and it is an homage
to Anne Marie’s beloved dogs who were killed by a neighbor. Rather
than being bitter, she has become proactive in her efforts to spread awareness
of animal cruelty, to educate younger generations against it, and to help
foster in others her deep love of all animals. “The message,”
she explains, “is to be kind to animals but also to be kind to each
other. Because it’s all connected. Fortunately, there are a lot
of people here who are committed to their spiritual growth.”
Anne Marie has weathered her share of storms here--real, emotional, and
spiritual--but she has never contemplated leaving. “This has always
been my heart’s home,” she says definitively, “and I
never said ‘I’m going to leave.’ And I never left. The
only time I’ve been away was to teach at the Living Food Institute
in Puerto Rico. But I still had my little hovel in Coral Bay that I rented
from Miss Anesta. I never moved away.” And, it’s clear that
she never will. “For me,” she explains, “it’s
always been the extraordinary physical beauty of the place and the goodness
of the people that was here and that is still here.”
It is very important for her to feel close to nature, and she currently
makes her home tucked up on Bordeaux Mountain, where she lives “in
a treehouse.” She claims it’s so open that the sugar birds
actually nest inside! “I live in a birdhouse!” she says, “I’m
up in the woods and it’s very remote. I’m right there in nature.”
Communing with the natural world around her, Anne Marie is comfortable
and content in her home. “I think that wherever you go, you will
learn your lessons. Wherever I chose to go during these last thirty years
of my life, I would have had to deal with relationships, finances, childhood
wounds, etcetera. I’m just dealing with mine in a place where it’s
always summer, in a place where it’s beautiful.”
We gaze up at the rustling trees as the afternoon light warms our skin
and the sound of the waves soothes our ears, and I understand exactly
what she means. St. John isn’t always perfect, but it’s terrifically
close; our physical location doesn’t change our past experiences
or heal our wounds, but if we chose the right place it can help change
our outlook and facilitate our growth. Look around, and tell me you don’t
feel lucky.
A quick glance at her cell phone tells her that it’s nearly time
to meet up with the couple she will be marrying on the beach that evening,
and she dashes off, parasol in hand, to greet them. I follow closely on
her heels and we introduce ourselves to Sean and Jessica, a beautiful
couple dressed with simple elegance for their quiet nuptials. Anne Marie
immediately makes them feel at ease, chatting with them about Trunk Bay,
asking them questions, and smiling at them as she leads them down the
beach and into their new life together. I am the sole witness to the intimate
ceremony and act as impromptu wedding photographer. I’ve never attended
a service Anne Marie has performed without getting teary, and this one
is no exception. You can always feel the sincerity in her words, and the
beauty of what the ceremony means is always immediate. As I look on, she
faces the couple toward the water. Their forms are lit by the sinking
sun as it paints the waves orange and pink. As she speaks, Anne Marie
raises her arms behind them. Lightly touching their backs, she connects
and envelops them as they gaze out over the endless water, looking out
on their future, full of love.
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