We also get stories, sometimes featuring food. In the parish of St. Andrew, I interrupt a man washing his truck who, before he'll tell us where we are, plies us with a cooling drink made from tamarind seeds, complete with tamarind-seed legend. (A man is wrongly accused of stealing and is sentenced to hang. As a testament to his innocence, he swears that the seeds of the tamarind tree, from which he'll shortly swing, will always bear his likeness. And it's true: The seeds do have a little man-on-the-moon face.)

Since the eighteenth century, Barbados has been one of the most densely populated places on earth—today there are an average 1,644 people for every one of its 166 square miles, making it the world's seventh most crowded country. Although people are spread out and it doesn't seem so packed, density here is nearly twice what it is in India or Japan. And all along the road in Barbados, there is something to buy: home-bottled restorative coconut water, milk direct from the gourd, grilled pork rib, roast corn, dunkanoos or conkies (pumpkin-coconut cakes steamed in banana leaves), and, for a favorite teacher back home, a cunning hummingbird carved from a coconut husk.

The government of Barbados is the main employer, but this roadside economy is an important development—new, according to Irvin Belgrave of the ministry of tourism, since the adoption in 1991 of an IMF-style austerity program in which thousands of public jobs were cut. Belgrave, though himself a Seventh-Day Adventist, is the resident organist at his local Anglican church, not for love of God or music but to supplement his earnings from the ministry.

This widespread and necessary diversification is in evidence across the island, and in my own unscientific study, I would say that the hands-down (or hairs-up) winner among cottage industries on Barbados is the wonderful and, to use the local word, spanksious world of hair and beauty. You are sure to be pestered on beaches to have your hair braided. (I won't let my daughters do it, not since I saw a picture in a British newspaper of a little girl left bald after her hair follicles were ravaged by holiday beach braiding.) If you tire of the humidity-frizzed look, you might do better popping into the home of one of the hundreds of Bajan women who make ends meet with style—hairstyle.

No less striking as we drive along the road, we pass a place of worship every hundred yards or so. From the austere to the clap-happy and humble, there's a pit stop for everyone: Pentecostal (and once a Pentecoastal); Catholic; Adventist; Jehovah's Witness; and, notably, Anglican—the excessively large and solidly built churches that would look grand in their more natural setting, at the center of a sizable English town. Barbados doesn't seem to support the spooky fringe, like Haiti's voodoo or Jamaica's Revival Zionists and Kingston Pocomaniacs. But in addition to the known brands, you'll see any number of at-home prayer parlors and a Miracle Center, open now on the road between Holetown and Speightstown. Some really enterprising Bajans offer a twofer, such as Hallelujah Hair or Worship and Avon.