One's crawling with tourists, the other's willfully, wonderfully sleepy. Welcome to the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis. Jennifer Finney Boylan reports on the big, big plans of the Americas' smallest country

There were a lot of sights I was expecting to see at the 3,200-foot summit of Nevis Peak, but an Italian priest wasn't one of them. I had climbed there with my guide, hoping for a panoramic view of this quiet Caribbean island and its sibling, St. Kitts, but when we arrived, I found the peak engulfed in drifting mist. About the only thing I could see clearly was the novitiate priest and the three guys with whom he'd made the ascent—a Canadian and two Nevisians.

As I took off my pack and lay down on the soft moss, I listened to the men discussing the rapid development of St. Kitts and what this might portend for peaceful, slumbering Nevis. "Maybe you should say a prayer for the island, Father," said one of the men with a laugh. The priest shrugged. "The island needs no prayers," he said. "God will speak through nature."

Below us, on the shoulders of this dormant volcano, were wild orchids, ferns the size of houses, and birds of paradise being tended by hummingbirds. During the ascent, I'd run headlong into a troop of green vervet monkeys, who'd stared at me hard, wondering what I wanted. Then they'd scattered into the rain forest.

Up on the summit, the mist broke, and for a fleeting moment we could see the southern end of St. Kitts, now being converted into a series of vast resorts.

"What do you see when you look at St. Kitts from here?" I asked my guide, a young Nevisian named Sheldon Clark. "I don't know," he replied thoughtfully. "Our future, maybe."

I had journeyed to the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis, the smallest country in the Americas, to determine how the two differ, not only from each other but from other islands in the Caribbean. During my visit, I frequently heard the islands referred to as "sisters," or occasionally as "spouses." One Kittitian—whose nickname, Bouncer, was typical of many I would encounter, including Muffin, Puddin', and Seamoss—told me: "The Nevisians and the Kittitians, we have a long marriage. Sometimes we fight, but it's all right. We know who our family is."

The strength of their union is being tested, however. With development ramping up on St. Kitts's southern peninsula—there are no such plans for Nevis—the islanders of this single, unified nation are right to wonder, as they gaze at each other across the strait that separates them, whether they have one future or two.

St. Kitts—originally St. Christopher—was named in 1493 by Christopher Columbus, after his patron saint. (He visited Nevis on his second voyage, naming it Nuestra Señora de las Nieves—"Our Lady of the Snows"; in time, Nieves became Nevis.) The English arrived 130 years later, and came to refer to St. Kitts as the "Mother Colony," since it served as the staging ground for their domination of other islands in the region.

For the next several centuries, the English and the French traded St. Kitts back and forth. The names of some sites (Bloody Point on the Old Road, for instance) are a reminder of the island's fraught colonial history. Much of the fighting was over sugar, a commodity so precious that for the better part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was literally worth its weight in gold.