Don’t hate me, but I’m writing from St. John in the Virgin Islands and it’s a paradise. No, it’s beyond paradise.

You know something is extra, extra special when the rich people build their houses in a place and then call forth their power to turn the rest of the place into a national park. They do this often. Acadia National Park in Maine is another such example. So is Virgin Gorda Island in the Caribbean. The rich want their houses built and they want to enjoy the spectacular surroundings, but in order to keep it beautiful, they have to prevent other people from enjoying it too. So, they lobby Congress for national park status, and what do you know? There’s miles of expanse no one can build on. It’s a great trick, and while you might argue it serves the environment in a good way, I promise you they didn’t do it for you. They do it for themselves.

Part of the reason St. John is so beautiful is because a great percentage of it is untouched. But visiting here isn’t for the feint of heart. It’s basically a series of mountains that you must drive up and down in order to get anywhere. Sometimes you drive up a hill that looks like Niagara Falls without water. Add to this, driving is backwards here–meaning you drive on the wrong side of the road. So not only are you dealing with steep roads, hairpin turns, and cliffs with no guardrails, you are also driving in a way that is completely foreign to you.

If you have learned anything about me and my husband in this column, you know this kind of unfamiliar situation isn’t our strong point. When I’m not yelling at him to slow down, I’m covering my eyes with my hands. Sometimes I look out at a particularly beautiful vista and I say, “Oh, gosh, how beautiful, but don’t look.” The good news is we’re already into Day Three and we’re still alive. Tourists actually die here because they forget to keep left, and they probably die more times than any tourist agency on the island cares to admit.

Then there’s the matter of groceries. You know how expensive everything is these days, but imagine getting food 1,000 miles from Miami to a faraway island. I’m not kidding when I say picking up a few things at the grocery store here is $300. A bottle of Tylenol is $20. A can of peas is $3.49. A cocktail is $14.00, but that’s not too bad. Rum is plentiful here. You can drink rum punch but you can’t afford to eat.

The big houses built by the lucky are perched high up on mountains here because there’s nowhere else to build them. Electricity is 8 times more expensive here than it is at home, so imagine opening up your $800 electric bill every month. Our little cottage is across from a mountain with twenty or so mansions built into the side of it and most of the people in those houses keep their lights on all night because nobody cares about the bill. They’ve somehow earned the right not to care.

Beauty, and the ability to place yourself in it, costs a lot of money. The most beautiful places on earth are the domain of the rich. Their mega yachts drift by the sliver of sea we can see from our porch. We stare across to the big mountain, the houses all lit up, and sometimes we can hear people talking, their voices carrying across the valley, and they sound happy as they watch the sunset across the bay. They don’t have the worries most people do.

There’s not enough workers in St. John. If you can bartend or waitress, you’d get a job here quickly but then there’s the matter of how you’re going to live. Who can afford a can of peas on a waitresses income?

Part of me never wants to leave here–it’s just that beautiful. But there’s also something I don’t like about it. It seems to be missing a heart. It’s so exclusive that neighbors live far apart from one another, and they’re insulated in a way that keeps them from seeing the real world, which is by design.

But a lot of the people who have second homes here were instrumental in creating the world the rest of us live in today, and now–now they don’t like it. They don’t like the crowds back home, and the strip malls lining every road, and the fast food restaurants, and the regular folks who work at Walmart or serve coffee or deliver newspapers. They don’t like the world they had a hand in building so they escape from it to places like this.

They say the meek shall inherit the earth. It’s an interesting thought, here in the beauty of the Virgin Islands. Right now, the meek, the native islanders –are just trying to survive.