Bermuda: Rainwater and Fish Chowder
Nobody tells you the first thing about Bermuda, so I will: there is no water here. No rivers, no wells worth mentioning. Every house has a white roof, and the roofs are not white for looks — the steps in them catch the rain and run it into a tank under the house. Your shower, your coffee, the ice in your drink: last month’s rain. You learn to be polite to the weather in a whole new way.
The second thing: nearly everything you eat arrived on a ship. Milk, lettuce, cereal — flown or floated in, and priced like it. A sandwich here is an accounting event. I have started reading menus the way I read proposals, looking for what the island itself provides, because that is where the good food is hiding.
Fish chowder, first of all — dark, peppery, made with rockfish and finished with sherry pepper sauce and a splash of black rum. It is the national answer to everything. Then the fish itself: wahoo, tuna, rockfish, caught close and cooked simply, because it does not need help. Spiny lobster when it is in season. And the drinks are rum with a flag planted in them — the Dark ‘n Stormy, the Rum Swizzle — Gosling’s being a local institution of the kind EMC aspires to be in data centers.
I am here to build a consulting business, and the island is teaching me its first lesson, the same one the chowder teaches: work with what the place gives you. Bermuda runs on collected rain and imported everything else, and it runs fine — as long as you respect the tank and watch the sky.