February 2011PUERTO RICO
Mary and I had wanted to go to Puerto Rico for years but there were always something more pressing or more interesting. Either we had a specific goal or a request from my mother-in-law to see something else or some other place caught our attention, but the stars never aligned. What made us finally decide to go to PR were two items: one of my best friends at work was from the island, and Tony Bourdain had one of his shows that made the food look really good.
I already had some contact with the culture of Puerto Rico during my residency. In Massachusetts, one of the many ethnic groups I had to deal with was from PR. I learned to deliver babies in rudimentary Spanish, I found that puertoriqueños are very expressive in showing pain. The contrast between Hmong women and women from Puerto Rico was remarkable. You couldn’t tell if a Hmong woman was contracting without looking at the monitor, whereas a puertoriqueña was yelling “Ay yi yi!”, her mother was yelling “Ay yi yi!”, and at least five sisters were having sympathy contractions.
Part of the larger picture of living in Massachusetts was the incredible niceness/rudeness of the natives; you never had to guess how people felt. Another thing that Mary noted was the panoply of ethnic groups that continued from generation to generation. One was Portuguese, or Italian, or Polish, or Irish. The melting pot did not exist. It was a stew. Mary would get her hair cut in a beauty shop inhabited by Italians, about the same time “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” was part of our pop culture. They would gossip loudly and Mary got to be the outsider who became the insider. I mean, someone had to listen to the same old stories afresh. Once in a while I would get my hair cut there, and I became notable because I was that nice librarian’s husband, the “dahktah”!
My impression of Puerto Ricans was not a good one. I saw them as mostly on welfare, suckling at the teat of mother Massachusetts. A doctor from Puerto Rico whom I worked with told me that I was not getting an accurate picture. According to her, if one had a job or was a productive member of society, there was no reason to leave the island. I was seeing the parts of their society that floated around the edges, ones that had enough ambition to move to the US proper but not enough to contribute.
One common thread in our lives here in North Dakota is our desire to shorten winter, some how, some way. Usually this takes the form of a trip somewhere tropical. We were torn between the familiar in Mexico or something new, with the overall grand scheme of finding a place to spend our dotage. It has to be cheap, it has to be warm, and it has to be interesting. Living with a foreign language isn’t daunting to either one of us, as we both seem rather facile with Romance languages. PR has the advantage of being America, well, sort of. They use dollars, English speakers should be ubiquitous, and American infrastructure should be everywhere. Modern highways, bathroom facilities, even NPR should be there. It should be easy to get to, as flying from the States should be cheap and direct.
I think it was David Bowie who once sang for the movie, “The Falcon And The Snowman”, “This is not America. Oh, no!” He could have been singing about Puerto Rico. They have the distinct status of being neither fish nor fowl. They spent 400 years as a territory of Spain, the jewel in the Spanish crown. It is halfway between the ports of Cadiz and those of the gold and silver producing regions of Central and South America. From the vantage point of the port of San Juan, one nation could control the shipping lanes of half the Atlantic. The choke point between Key West and Havana was a place of danger for the galleons from the likes of Drake and Blackbeard, but once past these it was smooth sailing, thanks to San Juan.
One hundred thirteen years ago, Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst joined forces to drive the Spanish from their last colonies in the Terra Nova, Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as from the Philippines. The soul of Puerto Ricans remained distinctly Spanish. It came nearly to a boil in the early 1950’s when two separatists gunned their way into Blair House in Washington, DC, which housed Harry Truman while the White House was being gutted and rebuilt. Two secret servicemen were killed, and two Puerto Ricans spent the rest of their days in jail. Twenty-five years later (I saw this one myself), Gerald Ford made one of the bigger presidential gaffes by offering statehood to the island during his last speech. I was dumbstruck. Stupidest thing I ever heard. The puertoriqeños apparently agreed; there was no groundswell for statehood. As recently as the early 21st century the island held a referendum where there were three choices. First, independence. Second, statehood. Third, status quo. Status quo won by a large margin. You get the stability of membership of the club without paying the dues. Understandable.
We flew into San Juan via Chicago. I had arranged for an apartment in Old San Juan, a place of narrow streets and public squares. I knew something about the city already because it was featured in a Spanish language telecourse offered in the early ‘90’s called “Destinos”. I would watch this on public television. The third phase of the 52 lessons/episodios was in Old San Juan. I wanted to walk the same streets, meet the upper crust of Puerto Rican society that didn’t come to Massachusetts, and practice my Spanish. We landed on a rainy night, and I was hit smack in the face with sticky, yeasty, soupy air, sharp contrast to the arctic air of Fargo. We caught a cab past the resorts on what seemed to be a somewhat substandard freeway, and were dropped off in front of our apartment to await the landlady to come with the keys. We sat in an open air bar across the narrow street, sucking on a Medalla Light, (the local beer) listening to reggaeton music over a cheap stereo with a baseball game between Puerto Rico and Venezuela on an old TV.
Our landlady gathered us and showed us in. She had lived stateside for long stretches, giving her a Hispanic accent with a Long Island lilt. We were on the ground floor of a colonial row house turned into apartments. We had a living room with a worn out sectional couch, a television without cable hookup so got no channels at all, a kitchen with all the necessities, down the hall to the bedroom there was a dirty courtyard common to all the apartments that was about eight by twelve, and a back bedroom with the only air conditioning and no windows to speak of. Over the kitchen was a dusty loft with a bed but was so hot and stuffy that it would be essentially unusable. In short, it was perfectly fine and a good base of operations. Except for the roaches. I tried not to point this out to Mary knowing she would freak.
From this point, I don’t think giving a chronological blow-by-blow will suit my purposes. Maybe it would be better to give impressions and stories, like the lay of the land. Old San Juan is a distinct entity from the rest of the city. It is on a rocky, hilly peninsula that looks back onto the city proper, with its financial center, colleges and barrios on the south side of the bay, at least a mile away. As the land arcs around looking on the map like someone flexing their left biceps, you hit the resorts as you reach the isthmus, then to a governmental center and lastly to the colonial houses and restaurants. On the south shore of the peninsula is where the cruise ships dock and disgorge their cargo to wander within a few blocks for several hours.
The cemetery lies at the base of the walls of El Morro, the citadel that guarded the most important port in all the New World. Its bastions resisted the hated English with the exception of one six-week period in the eighteenth century. It was conquered by a small group of Englishmen but was abandoned because of a dysentery epidemic. The way to the gates of the fortress is a very long sidewalk crossing a field with grass as short as a putting green. It is usually quite sunny and windy, making an ideal spot for kite flying. The fort itself is like any other fort of its era, lots of stone and turrets and built on several levels. But the remarkable thing is its location. Across the mouth of the bay it protects is an island with a much smaller fortress but from which any ship would be swiss-cheesed straight away. I had the clear vision of just how strategic El Morro was. All shipping from the Caribbean either had to pass to the north or south of the island, and the shorter path was to the north. From this vantage point, you could control the entire operation.
As you walk south from the fort, the land slopes away along tree-shadowed streets. The well-to-do predominate, and as you get to the southern side of the peninsula, a mere seven or eight blocks, you gather more and more restaurants and chichi clothing stores aimed at the cruise ship denizens. On the whole, bargains are not to be had. There was a Coach store, a Crocs store, a few souvenir shops. Restaurants usually had a local theme, though there was a sushi restaurant and a brewpub that we tried. There were small squares with a few trees every couple of blocks, and bars that seemed to be more oriented to the local market, with salsa and reggaeton music, Medalla Light beer, and DonQ rum.
I can’t say that I was taken either with the character of the city or the food. One of our first meals was at the supposed birthplace of the piña colada, The Barrachina. I believe the name is a diminutive of the Spanish word for drunkard, “barracho”. Anyway, the drink had an creamy quality and so smooth that it more resembled a milkshake with a kick. The rest of the meal was fairly forgettable, though. Another spot that we ate at was a brewpub on the harbor, the aptly named Old Harbor Brewery. The beer was serviceable, the food unmemorable. Most of our days were spent walking up and down the hill, down to eat, up to rest.
On the third day, we caught a cab to the airport to pick up our car and head to the other side of the island. The freeway that crosses the island seemed narrower than the norm and certainly more crowded. Very poor looking apartment buildings loom over the road in some sections, and tropical flowering trees are scattered about the less urbanized environment. As you cross the central cordillera, the mountains become very tightly arranged, a sort of tropical West Virginia minus the Toyota pickups but with the satellite dishes. Garbage is strewn in the rest areas and along the side of the road, not enough to feel unsanitary but it is obvious that they aren’t as taken with order as we are.
Lunch that day was at a roadside lunch truck, eating with a few cops, a man in a tie and white shirt, a few working men, and a small family. We ate at picnic tables. I was surprised that the proprietor was a young man who spoke zero English. I had a cut of pork chop that must have come from an alien pig, as the meat was in all the wrong places. It was tough but edible, and the atmosphere was certainly pleasant, sitting under a large tree, the clicketyclack of Spanish spoken very quickly. There was a mobile tire store right behind, something you see fairly frequently. A beaten up old panel van filled with tires, a tire changing device under a tent behind and someone wrestling with a bias ply.
Speaking of police, they are absolutely everywhere. Always in these new style Chrysler cruisers, ones that look almost like a caricature of a police car, the distinct black-and-white in sharp contrast to the dusty K cars that serves as standard issue to the rest of the population. They seem benign enough. Speed traps, parked in convenience store lots, hanging at the gas station, but always there. They don’t seem in any particular rush to perform their duties. I mean, traffic still speeds, people cut each other off, lanes are more advisory than anything else. But there they are, dressed in black in the desert heat of the south side of the island, bullet-proof vests under their sharply pressed shirts.
Along the highways of the southern coast of Puerto Rico, the roads are not truly American standards. The freeways can suddenly become four-lane city streets with little warning, and the city streets always seemed to have more traffic than they were designed to carry. There was also a sort of aggressive nonchalance about other cars, similar to the way people drive in Massachusetts. “I am in my car, and that’s where my responsibilities end.” If you want to look at something, slow down to 10 miles an hour despite the fact that there is no place to pass. If you are driving alongside another car at the same speed, the fact that there are ten cars wanting to get around is no concern of yours. Later in the trip, an ambulance, lights and siren wailing, overtook us. There was a clump of cars parallel driving ahead of us. I told Mary, “Look, nobody’s going to get out of the way.” Absolutely as predicted, the poor paramedic had to snake his way through traffic because nobody but nobody was going to yield but us.
We drove past the second city of Ponce towards our next place of residence, Guanica. We had a reservation for a vacation apartment several miles southeast of the town along the Caribbean coast. Because it is in the rain shadow of the central mountains, the landscape is much dryer than in the humid north. Out the back door of our house ran Bosque Estatal de Guanica, a tropical dry forest. The road ran narrow for eight miles along the side of a cliff, opening up into scrubland that always seemed to have a fire smoking within sight of the road. In places where the fires had already made their mark, the blackened earth held forth with the charred twigs of what had hoped to become a tall tree. We eventually pulled onto an even smaller road that leads into a community of houses overlooking a cove.
We took two days to sightsee in small trips. We took the initial afternoon to sip rum and beer and catch up on our reading, with little ambition to do much. We could see across a short channel to Gilligan’s Island (actually “Guilligan’s”, but why let a little “u” get in the way of a good story). They said that you could easily kayak there, but the ambition never compelled us to do that. That night, we drove down to the malecon of the town of Guanica. There was a single bar along what looked to have been at one time an active fishing port, but no sign of any working boats now. There was a couple at the bar and loud salsa music playing, and as the sun set over the water, we ordered our rum based drinks and I ordered what is the official food of the island, mofongo.
Mofongo can come in many forms, and only seems to need one or two characteristics to carry the moniker. First of all, it has a “crust” of cooked and manually flattened plantain. It is then put into a vessel of some sort that can be shaped like a potpie or a parfait or anything in between, and filled with something, almost anything. I usually ordered it with a mélange of seafood like conch, shrimp, clams, all in a gravy. The last thing that makes a mofongo a mofongo is garlic. What ever is in there must reek of the stinking rose. It’s not sweet, or savory, or spicy. Just garlicky.
The next day, we decided to check out Ponce. We read in the guidebook that there was a cute little market downtown and a nice town square, and so we went hoping to find a nice place to lunch. Traffic was ghastly, streets were narrow and parking was a problem as everyone was circling around but nobody was parking. For some reason, Mary and I were being cross with each other that day. I found a parking spot on the town square with the requisite cathedral, and we walked to find this lovely market. We walked past women’s clothing stores where the clientele wore stretch pants regardless of their physical conditioning. One place we passed had female butt mannequins out front that had pants that had butt falsies so that baby could have back. We found the downtown market, and it turned out to be a failed indoor space with about a quarter of the storefronts filled with uninteresting stuff. The only two things it had to offer were air conditioning and a clean john.
We walked back to the car crestfallen, and I found a store that had what I consider to be a required purchase, the cheesiest t-shirt I could find. It was black and had the gigantic visage of someone I was not familiar with, saying in Spanish, “Father Of Salsa”. Truly hideous. We then sat on a park bench to eat an ice cream cone when every panhandler in town walked up to us, palms outstretched. Firm but polite “gracias, no” was all they got. Lastly, a plump little lady got the same response when I found she just wanted to talk. I felt badly being so rude, but I just hate panhandling. We drove back to cool in the shade of our little house.
That evening we drove several miles west to what was advertised as a phosphorescent bay. We waited after dinner at a dock in La Parguera until it got dark. After we bought our tickets, the other passengers were collecting at it quickly became clear that they were all from New Jersey or Long Island, with the loudest voices, the harshest laughs, and the most grating accents imaginable. They were laughing and telling stories and so I tried to get a place in the back of the boat as far away as I could. As the time to depart arrived, and older local took control of the helm and a young man in a bathing suit hops on and we drive through the dark of the mangrove swamp, about a half mile out along the coast. In the pitch dark the young man jumps into the water and wherever he splashed, an ethereal blue-green glow would follow like the tail of a comet. I stuck my own hand in the water and could cause the little dinoflagellates to get all irritated and protested with photons. Very pleasant and by the end I had gotten to even like some my fellow passengers.
The next morning we went hiking for several sticky miles in the park behind our house. It supposedly is one of the rare examples of a tropical dry forest. We were beaten there by what appeared to be an Elderhostel that we had eaten dinner with the night before. After several sweaty but pleasant miles of rocky trails, we had enough and went back to cool off. Later that afternoon, we drove to the small city of San German, which was purported to be an historical treasure trove. Like other towns in Puerto Rico, the streets were impossibly narrow and traffic fearless. There were two churches, the new one and the old one. The new one was built in 1688. The old one was 1609. The old one is now a museum. We were the only visitors there, and a priest manned the desk at the entrance. As we approached, he asked me in Spanish if I wanted the senior discount. I could have popped him in the nose! Carded in reverse. I stuffily declined and paid the full price. It was only so-so worth it, but still with nothing else on offer there, we visited and returned to our house.The next day was our last full day on the island, and I intended to spend it lazing about. I had already enjoyed a few beers when the cleaning lady seemed anxious to talk to me. I couldn’t quite get to what she was worried about when at about 2 PM a young man who gave us the keys originally asked us when we were leaving, I said, ”Tomorrow.” He disappeared and returned shortly to say our place was rented that night to someone else and we had to pack and leave in a hurry. They had misinterpreted my dates on the reservation. I said we wanted the place for the “15th, 16th and 17th.” They took that as meaning I would leave that day. I meant we had it that night, too. We hurriedly packed up everything and drove off, having no idea where to spend that night. We looked up an inn we had considered and called and found that they indeed had a room that night and we were more than welcomed.
We once again drove through Ponce and then inland along secondary roads, into the heart of the cordillera. Now, I have lived in West Virginia where the roads cling to the sides of hollers and backyards don’t exist, and this made The Mountain State look like gently rolling hills. Around every corner on a 1.5 lane road came barreling a tractor-trailer with neither fear nor conscience. I don’t know if Mary closed her eyes or fainted or I could no longer hear her over the sound of my own gasps, but that was one long road. A silent prayer of thanks arose from the car as we reached our destination, Jayuya, and its only hotel I knew of, Hacienda Gripinas.
The hacienda was built in 1858 and lived most of its life as a coffee plantation. Puerto Rico has a reputation of growing some fine coffee beans in the mountains, and the location at the foot of the island’s highest mountain is stunning. It is at the end of a narrow road that is lined with small houses wedged between the hills and the street. Our room has an old bed and creaky floors and a small television set. The windows overlooked the leafy treetops surrounding the hotel, and there were no screens because apparently, no bugs. It was quite cool, even requiring a blanket at night. To leave the hotel you had to walk through the dining area, and there was a parlor with dark wood floors and fin de siècle furniture. The very broad porch looked down a good twenty feet to the grass below, and had rattan chairs and looked like you had just stepped out of a movie about the antebellum south.The next morning we drove to the northern coast and along the freeway to our hotel next to the airport in San Juan. It was notable only because Mary lost her Ipod somewhere, most likely at a fast food joint where we stopped to use the bathroom. We arrived at our hotel and I looked through the car five different times trying to find it, to her distress. I returned the rental car that afternoon and walked the three miles back to the hotel.
And so if you decide to go to Puerto Rico, there’s a lot there that’s familiar. It’s exotic and warm, and that there’s much more to it than San Juan. We didn’t see El Yunque, which is a rain forest that is about thirty miles east of San Juan, which is supposedly spectacular. The parts we did see, though, were pretty and certainly deserved a more thorough visit.
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