Say you'll be going to the paradise of the British Virgin Islands. Now, picture the place you would want to be leaving behind. It would be urban. It would be cold: late winter in a pallid, diligent, long-suffering northeast city. It would be my backyard, in other words, in Hartford, Connecticut, and you would be me, walking my dog across the tundra in dismal gray weather, Calvinist New England weather. I'm humming a vaguely recollected tune, Sailing away from here, I'm going to an island.... This afternoon I will be in Tortola. It might as well be Shangri-la.

Shangri-la is not a place but a concept. For the Calvinist in winter, it means indolence. ("We're going to do some serious nothing this week," says the woman next to me on the flight down.) It means indulgence, a welcoming cup of rum punch at the airport. Above all, Shangri-la means color. The ferry I take to Tortola is painted a garish teal, but that color is soon outdone by the hundred shades of sapphire and turquoise we're plowing through, so that halfway to Soper's Hole, the boat has ceased to seem outlandish and has become merely a wan attempt at realism. There's so much blue all around, it's like the old saw about the Eskimos and snow: You need 50 words for it. Mist blue, chalky blue, zinc raku blue, Magritte surrealist seagull blue, shimmery eat-your-heart-out black-satin blue.... Forget Calvin; you're on Caribbean color now.

License plates in the B.V.I. proclaim "Nature's Little Secrets," touting the charms of this archipelago flung out along the Sir Francis Drake Channel, east of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The B.V.I. are small - 40 islands with a net landmass the size of Nantucket and a population of just over 18,000 – and their secluded anchorages, pristine beaches, and cozy charm make them a prime cruising destination for sailors. But you don't have to be a yachtie to do an island-hopping thing in the B.V.I. I make my way around on ferries – squat, unromantic boats with names like Bomba's Charger. Ferries there are cheap, and they showcase local life: The boat to Virgin Gorda is fitted out with old jet airplane seats; and on the morning ride from Gun Creek to The Bitter End Yacht Club I find myself surrounded by women in pink maid's outfits reading romance novels or crocheting.

You're not exactly cruising when you ride a ferry, not exactly island-hopping. More like island-crawling, or island-clunking. Island-clunking in the British Virgin Islands: a good way to discover the islands' character... and their characters.

It Isn't Cricket

What is British, really, about the British Virgin Islands? Settled late and abandoned early, the territory was never much of a colony. After emancipation in 1834, the islands' plantation economy fell apart, and the Brits decamped, turning 5,000 slaves into landowners. Today, Road Town law firms advertise barristers and solicitors, and holidays include such occasions as Whit Monday. But the shift from pound sterling to greenbacks was made long ago, and at the race-track at Sea Cow Bay, horses run counterclockwise, American-style. British Virgin Islanders – "Belongers," in the quaint local description – are far more likely to have relatives in New York than in Yorkshire.

As for Road Town, the capital (and only) city of the B.V.I., it's pure Caribbean: crowded and dusty and loud with music, a town where goats graze the cemetery and guys steer lime-colored Mustangs emblazoned with Da Ting Start! through hordes of school kids in shorts and bobby socks.

Still, I'm eager, in my first few days, to find something British; and that's how I end up with a group of 12-year-olds in a school yard in Road Town, holding a cricket paddle in my hand. I mean mallet. Or bat.

"Mister Cooper is interested in our favorite sport," announces Denise Hewlett, a native Antiguan who, with her husband, Paul, coaches youth cricket in the B.V.I. "Say good afternoon to him, please."

"GOOD AFTAHNOON, MISTAH COOPAH!"

Dressed in a polo shirt and sweatpants – a B.V.I. cricket mom – Denise sets up the wickets and gets the kids positioned in the field. The bowler, the batsman, the wicket keeper: Cricket is bizarro-world baseball, disorienting for Americans. A run is a run; but instead of striking out, you're "bowled," and an "innings" can last for days.

Denise explains the rules, and soon I'm as lost as I was last night at my hotel bar, where an English guy tried to do the same.

"We kept the rules vague," he said finally, "so that our colonial subjects would never beat us!"

Well, the joke's on them, because cricket is huge in the West Indies, and as Denise tells me with pride, "We play it better than they do."

At last I step up to bat. The wicket corresponds to the plate in baseball, but there's no strike zone, and to protect the wicket you have to try to bat every pitch - oops, every bowl - even one down in the dirt.

"Keep your elbows out!" Denise calls over.

The swing feels awkward and cramped. It feels like I'm gardening. Can't I just haul off and aim for the fences like Mark McGwire? Denise gives me a forebearing look. I guess that wouldn't be cricket, I joke.

"Precisely," she says.

Then again, cricket B.V.I.-style isn't exactly cricket, either. I don't know what I was expecting, probably some posh, white-ducks, high-tea affair. The reality is far more colorful. Like the match a few days later over on Virgin Gorda, on a sun-scorched and uneven grass field dotted with cow pies, watched by a rowdy crowd scarfing up meat patties and drinking rum. An announcer does a nonstop comic play-by-play, razzing the players. Two outfielders chase a f ly ball, one a lanky teenager wearing shorts and sneakers, but no socks. The announcer starts calling the kid No Socks.

"No Socks, you are dangerous! No Socks, were you sent by the government of Grenada to kill Maurice Bishop?"

Rattled, the kid loses his focus – and slips in a cow pie. The crowd shrieks and hoots.

"No Socks, look out! Pretty soon we got to call you No Trousers!"

Killing Pain

There used to be 15 run distilleries on Tortola. Now it's down to one (Callwood's, at Cane Garden Bay). But if production is down, consumption remains high. The B.V.I. entry in the annals of tropical drinks is the Painkiller – a concoction of rum, coconut milk, orange juice, and pineapple juice, sprinkled with ground nutmeg. Friday night at Pusser's Pub in Road Town means two-for-one Painkillers, and the three guys next to me at the bar are ordering in multiples.

"It's his birthday," one says to the bartender.

"That's right," says the other. "I was born at four in the morning. Cesarean. That's why I'm always crawling out the window instead of the door."

What is all this pain being killed in bars in the tropics?

"There's a myth," one innkeeper tells me, "that most people who settle here are running away from something." Debts, the draft, bad marriages... eccentricity and exile go hand in hand, creating local legends. Like Bob, the 80-year-old who owns Smuggler's Cove Beach Hotel – a ruined shack strewn with old rum casks, torn beach chairs, and the rusted-out Lincoln Continental convertible Queen Elizabeth rode in during an island visit in the 1970s. A postcard from 20 years ago shows the place in tip-top shape, with well-maintained guest houses. What happened? Rumor says that Bob came from a wealthy family in the Midwest, that in World War II he was Roosevelt's telegrapher, that he had millions but lost it all.

People tell spectacular hard-luck tales. Weather is cruel. The inn owner who lost a roof to Hurricane Hugo put up another, then lost that to Marilyn. One yacht I see, wrecked on a reef off Necker Island, has a bashed-in keel right below its name: Live Long and Prosper. Ouch. When Fate twists the plot and laughs maliciously, then you need the Painkiller.

Island fatalism lies in an awareness that sometimes the dream doesn't happen; try as you may, "da ting go bust." Yet in sorrow the music and laughter take root. My favorite club musician in the B.V.I., Reuben Chinnery, grew up in the 1950s on Jost Van Dyke, herding goats and listening to country music on a Cincinnati radio station whose signal came through only at dawn. Chinnery has a dour demeanor, but once he starts to play his 12-string guitar, everything changes.

One night I catch him at The Pub in Road Town, busy winning the audience over with his quirky repertoire, a rowdy blues adaptation of "Proud Mary" ("Sailin', sailin', sailin' in the B.V.I.") followed by a funny, pokey version of "Get Me to the Church on Time." Afterward I buy him a drink – cranberry juice – and we talk. The man is gloomy: Processed food is killing us. Drum machines are corrupting musicians. Technology has some sinister surprises in store. The world is too sophisticated by half.

But what about his version of "Get Me to the Church on Time"? I ask. He grins. Years ago, he tells me, he got hold of the Broadway recording of My Fair Lady and memorized every word.

Every word? I say. So who's Zoltan Karpathy?

Chinnery grins wider, and executes a more-than-passable Rex Harrison: "Oooooozing charm from ever pore, he oiled his way around the floor!"

Soul Food

There are restaurants on Tortola where you can get pan-fried risotto cakes with wild mushroom ragout, asiago cheese, and truffle oil. But it's West Indian-style home cooking – plantains and breadfruit, pig tail and turtle meat – that carries the flavor of local dishes, local lives.

I fall in love with a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Road Town, the Roti Palace, run by an elderly, elfin Indian woman named Mrs. Leonard. Her menu consists entirely of rotis – puri roll-ups filled with curried chicken, beef, or fish. Mrs. Leonard makes me a conch roti, cooking it up with onion and garlic and lime juice, then sits down with a big bucket of garlic and peels it as I eat. She learned to make rotis in Trinidad, she tells me, which she fled as a young woman, escaping a bad arranged marriage. Her husband tracked her down and had her brought back. But she stuck to her guns and got a divorce - not an easy thing to do 40 years ago. She heard about Tortola: There were jobs, it was a place to go.

"So I came here, and then -" she shrugs – "I started my life over again." Eventually she married a Tortolan and has been running her restaurant since. Her husband, she says, doesn't like rotis.

"He doesn't have the taste for them, so I make other things."

Mrs. Leonard continues peeling her way patiently through the garlic. Her only wish, she tells me, is to see India once in her life. I'm struck by her situation: In this far reach of the Indian diaspora nothing binds her to her ancestral homeland ("a few words," she says, when I ask if she speaks Hindi) but a wistful longing to see the place - and those rotis she makes, speaking to her out of the deep collective memory of food.

Another night I eat at Mrs. Scatliffe's, who cooks up a daily special in her bright yellow house in Carrot Bay. You have to let her know you're coming, and when I stop by in the afternoon I find her in her garden, a wizened old woman in torn boots (big toe poking through), and a tattered sweater that comes down to her knees.

"You looking at Mrs. Scatliffe!" she cackles when I inquire. "Now, don't be surprised!" Using a long stick as gardening tool and cane, she points to where a coconut has just fallen, barely missing her head. "See how good God is to me?" she says. "I could be lying there dead!"

There's a religious undertone to life in the islands. It tinges conversations, the melodies people hum, the jokes they tell, the stories. Mrs. Scatliffe's words, filled with scripture and praise of Jesus, are irreverent and a little paranoid. When I return that night for a feast of pureed breadfruit soup and chicken with coconut, she tells me stories laced with equal parts laughter and dark references to enemies.

"I have had obstacles put in my way," she says. "But God still going to find a way for I to make a dollar!" The occasion combines the Caribbean mix of African fatalism and superstition with Christian end-days fervor. And some very good food.

Nature's Playground

In the long, sleepy pretourism era of the B.V.I., subsistence agriculture was the way of life, and one still encounters animals everywhere. The cock crowing at 3:53 A.M. outside my hotel window, setting off a rowdy call and response; the horses owned by a dreadlock-wearing fellow who takes them down to swim in Cane Garden Bay, where they emerge from the water to shake like dogs. Goats regularly stop traffic. So do cows. Paradise is a farm.

Of all the islands, Virgin Gorda frames most dramatically the B.V.I. contrast of farmland and fantasyland. Modern times here began in 1964, when Laurance Rockefeller built a resort on Little Dix Bay. ("We owe everything to Rockefeller," one hotel owner tells me. "Before him, there was nothing here. Just sheep and rocks.") Since the 1960s the population has tripled to 3,000, and it's still rising, with new luxury developments in places like Mango Bay and Nail Bay.

Virgin Gorda is a gorgeous island, nature's playground. At the southern end lies the gravity-defying geological marvel of The Baths, huge boulders wedged and piled on one another, creating caverns where voices echo eerily. At the opposite end of the island is the sheltered anchorage of North Sound. I'm not a sailor, but if there's any place to try to get a feel for sailing, here it is. And so I take a lesson in a little Rhodes 19, with an instructor named Christian, a 25-year-old Irishman. Sailing is simple; that's Christian's mantra.

"Gauge the wind, point your boat, set your sails, and go," he tells me. I try, but I keep falling into minor multitasking panics, when thinking about the sail makes me forget the tiller, or vice versa. Still, once or twice it all falls into place, and the boat becomes a perfect machine, mediating between wind and water. For a few minutes we're really sailing, taking the wind and magically turning it back on itself, and I can sense the whole of it, not just the parts.

"See?" says Christian. "Your sails are in, you're watching your telltales – you're in the groove!"

The next morning I catch a boat from The Bitter End for a day excursion to Anegada, a flat coral island – the name is Spanish for "drowned island" – shimmering like a mirage to the northeast. People come out to snorkel at Loblolly Bay, but the island lies off the B.V.I. sun-fun-money grid. It's desolate.

I hitch a ride around with a St. Vincentian named Andrew, a Seventh-Day Adventist who runs a tent crusade. Andrew's guitar is plastered with Yosemite Sam stickers, and he has an odd, poetic way of repeating everything, like in a villanelle. ("This island is a very nice place. Anegada is very nice. A very nice place.") We bump along the one road into the village, known only as The Settlement, little more than a scattering of shacks in a treeless field littered with chunks of coral. The place appears to have been hit by a huge wind that leveled three houses out of four. No wonder people are religious. The men of the island have to go looking for wives, Andrew says, and many don't succeed. The population is 200 - there are more Anegadians in New York City than on Anegada.

"It is very quiet," he says. "It is a very quiet place."

You have to be more than a little in love with loneliness in the farther reaches of the B.V.I. You have to live for the silence. In nature's playground, silence is the sound of a boatful of people holding their collective breath and staring at the immense flat boil of water where moments ago a whale suddenly surfaced. It's the sound of finding yourself all alone on a sandbar island so narrow that when you stretch out your arms, waves graze your fingertips – on both sides. It is the sound of your awe at the peak of Eustatia Island, with those 50 shades of blue spreading out all around.

I ask a longtime resident of the B.V.I. what it's like to live amid so much beauty, day in and day out.

"You get used to it," he says. "But you never get jaded about it. There are still times when you have to stop the car and look."

Pilgrimage

I ride to Jost Van Dyke on a tiny ferry, the When, with 6 school kids, a 90-year-old guy named Cool, and an American husband-and-wife missionary team. It's Friday; there's a weekend music festival on tap at the famed Foxy's Tamarind Bar. Brother Jay, Sister Caroline, and I sit perched on a gunwale, hemmed in by cases of beer and Myers's Rum.

Life on Jost isn't the easiest, Sister Caroline tells me cheerfully – no running water, no vehicle, a steep two-mile walk to their church.

"But the Lord told us to come here," Brother Jay adds. "We were on vacation. Down here on our boat, in 1996, right in Little Harbour on Jost. I was sitting on the dock at Sydney's Peace and Love Restaurant when suddenly I heard His voice."

With a mere 170 residents and thousands of visiting yachties, Jost seems an unlikely place for a religious crusade. In the 18th century there were Quakers here, but they didn't last; "their spiritual commitment had been weakened," one history delicately puts it, by "an over love of money."

Today the chief obstacle would seem to be an over love of party. Boats have provocative names like Try Me and Nauti Nymphet, the palm trees outside Club Paradise are painted purple, and the prim little Methodist church in Great Harbour sits closed, its red shutters shut tight as if it can't bear to look.

On Jost, the morning after and the night before blend together. At Ivan's Stress Free Bar and campground at 10:30 A.M., the scene is tinkling chimes on the breeze, Neil Young warbling away, and a few extremely stress-free people drinking vodkas-and-cranberry juice. From atop the bluff at Black Point, the stones being sloshed around in the surf below sound exactly like ice cubes in a big drink. Jost turns your imagination bibulous. Nature itself becomes a giant cocktail glass.

Foxy's Bar occupies the east end of Great Harbour, amid sea grape and palms. It's happy hour when I arrive, and Foxy is onstage in the open-air thatched-roof pavilion. People sit drinking at long tables in the sand, everyone in bathing suits, barefoot. Foxy's barefoot too, in rolled-up baggy pants, a ragged T-shirt, and a captain's hat. He's strumming his guitar and laughing, telling a joke about a woman's four favorite animals. ("A mink in the closet, a tiger in the bedroom, a Jaguar in the garage... and a jackass to pay for it all!") It's the kind of routine that has made his reputation as raconteur, barfly, homespun island sage, and all-around wonderful waterfront wacko.

Before he became a legend, Foxy worked as a fisherman; he crewed on boats and was a houseboy in St. Thomas. Then in 1968, for a Harvest Festival party, he opened up a little shack he called Mama's Booth, Foxy Callwood Bar.

"It was only supposed to be for one day!" he says. Thirty-odd years and several renovations later, the party's still cranking. Camouflaged to look ramshackle, Foxy's place is actually a humming business. He takes me through the professional kitchen, shows me a storage room piled high with cases of Foxy's Lager and Foxy's Fire Water Rum.

"Everything Foxy," he laughs.

He is the happiest man in the world, he insists. "Bill Gates, he could write a check, he could fill it in with a thousand zeros, I would not trade my profession for his."

But what is his profession? I accompany him as he strolls the bar, greeting people. He takes me aside to show me a model boat he carved from a kapok tree: He's going to install remote control, he tells me, and steer it around the harbor. Then he excuses himself. Peter Jennings has just walked in, with his son and a female friend. Foxy heads over.

I chat with a guy named Jim, who lists celebrity sightings at Foxy's over the years. Robert De Niro, Keith Richards, Tom Cruise. "In my next life," Jim says, "I want to come back as Foxy."

Foxy is very foxy indeed. He's every person's fantasy of life in paradise – unfallen Adam, the island man, limin' in his hammock, no cares, no worries. His work is no work, and he's very good at it.

I think of Brother Jay, building his spiritual beachhead on the other side of Jost, plotting his mission to the party cruisers. But Foxy's true believers are already on a pilgrimage – to the island temple of his bar, the liturgy of his innocent-bawdy stories and songs, his comic sermons of fallenness. Good luck, Brother Jay.

The Green Flash

During my stay in the islands I've been reading Don't Stop the Carnival, Herman Wouk's novel about a Manhattan press agent who in a midlife swoon buys a hotel in the Virgin Islands, then suffers one comic disaster after another - "misadventures," Wouk writes, "in the illusory paradise of a tropical island."

The novel describes an astronomical phenomenon in the Caribbean – some call it a myth – known as "the green flash," in which the last bit of the sun is said to glow vivid emerald as it slips below the horizon. In Wouk's novel the green flash plays something like the role of Fitzgerald's green light in The Great Gatsby, an elusive, romantic symbol of promise. Some people here treat the whole idea with mirth. ("Drink a few more of those," a bartender says to me, "and you'll be seeing purple spots if that's what you want!") Others almost mystically assume the flash depends on your own karma. I've been looking for it at sunset: on Virgin Gorda, gazing off toward the island of Fallen Jerusalem; from the top of Tortola, at Skyworld, where on a clear day you can see cruise ships leaving harbor in Puerto Rico. Looking in vain.

My last evening in the islands I spend with a couple who've lived on Tortola for 20 years, running a hotel and restaurant. We're sitting on their porch, and they're telling me what it was like to start out with no experience in the business: a trial by fire, just as in Wouk's novel. They did everything themselves – the cooking, the cleaning, everything.

What about the green flash? I ask. Have they seen it?

The sun has to set just right, the husband explains - over water, not land. He points to a notch between two islands. When the sun sets in the water there, then you have a chance to see the green flash.

A chance?

"Some people don't see it," he says. "Some people never see it."

His wife pours another drink, and the two continue telling me about their lives, talking with easy pleasure and laughter. They're in love with pink-orange-violet on the horizon. Colors again, so many colors. And the green flash?

"Actually, I have seen it," the man says, quietly. "We've both seen it."