Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (4 page)

So, with Archer happily settled into a room at my parents’ house, Matt and I head for the airport. We’re thankfully financed by a travel magazine assignment, my first since Archer’s birth. My father holds my son in the crook of his arm, and Archer waves good-bye, repeating his favorite new word: “Go! Go! Go!”

The syllables rain down like a blessing.

February/March 2011

TWO DAYS LATER, MATT AND
I ARE STANDING IN A NARROW AL
LEYWAY IN
Isabel Segunda—on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico—when a stranger approaches to tell us that he’s channeling the power of the ocean. Crazy? Maybe. But we’re here on a similarly far-fetched quest—to swim in a celestial sea. I tell the man, who introduces himself as Charlie the Wavemaster, that the Milky Way will soon crackle and shimmer as it slips through my fingers. Bits of stardust will cling to my hair.

I hope Vieques’s Mosquito Bay, or Bio Bay, will be as grand as I’m imagining. Plankton-induced bioluminescence—which appears to mirror stars in the night sky—occurs spontaneously across the globe, but no site on earth hosts the phenomenon with more regularity than the southern coast of Vieques. In 2008, Guinness World Records named Bio Bay the brightest in the world.

Charlie, a gray-bearded man who is wearing a baseball cap and handkerchief headband, seems delighted by our plans. He says, “The Bio Bay, it’s all about vibrations. You slap the water and it lights up! It’s inspiring! The water holds so much awe!”

I smile. That’s exactly what I’m hoping to find here.

Charlie is holding a long metal pole. I gesture toward the rod. He says, as if he’s surprised that I have to ask, “Oh, this is my magic wand!”

A ferry from mainland Puerto Rico approaches in the distance. Charlie taps his wand on the ground near my feet. “I’m putting out vibrations right now. Feel it?” There is a dull resonation under my sand-encrusted flip-flops. Charlie says, “Vibrations affect everything and everybody all the time. All the way up to the divine!”

A yellow butterfly hovers above us. Charlie uses his free hand to point out its fluttering wings. He stops his vibration making and pulls the rod close to his chest, saying, “Hey, what do you get when you multiply two negatives?”

“A positive?”

“Yes!” Charlie says, pleased that I’m playing along. “Everything,” he says, “comes out a positive if you look at it the right way!”

Vieques, which is located roughly seven miles from the main island of Puerto Rico, is a place where it hasn’t always been easy for residents to see the bright side of things. In the early 1940s, thousands of residents were forced from their homes when the United States Navy expropriated roughly two-thirds of the twenty-two-mile-long, five-mile-wide island for artillery storage and military training. In the following decades, Vieques was the site of perpetual military training involving munitions that delivered doses of napalm, lead, depleted uranium, and a cocktail of other contaminants. In 2003, when the navy ceased bombing, nearly 18,000 acres of the island were designated as a national wildlife refuge. This move has kept residential activity concentrated in a narrow swath of land in the center of the island, preserving its status as one of the least developed in the Caribbean.

In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency added Vieques to its Superfund National Priorities List, officially making parts of the island hazardous-waste sites. This designation made Vieques a supremely unlikely tourist destination. But the navy’s toxic legacy has proven no match for the island’s more than fifty undeveloped beaches where—on a busy day—visitors might share a crescent of sand with one or two other intrepid souls. Tourism is on the rise, but the cadence of local life still dominates the streets here.

Matt and I begin the climb back into town. Charlie follows. Together, we walk through Isabel Segunda—the larger of the island’s two towns, with a population of roughly 2,000—in full view of its bustle. Cars blast the thump-de-thump of reggaeton. Neighbors chat through barred windows with people on the street. Young men in athletic clothing ride bareback on horses guided by rough, twisted rope. Roosters run wild through the scene, dodging hooves and tires.

Everyone passing, almost without exception, gives Charlie a hearty hello or thorny glance that reveals respect, bemusement, or disapproval of his one-man, wave-channeling work. Charlie, as it turns out, is somewhat of a local fixture. He’s a full-time Wavemaster. I can’t comment on the practicality of his work. All I know is that he’s putting out a good (there’s just no other way to say it) vibe.

We stroll a few blocks into town before Charlie bids us farewell. Just before he slips into the driver’s seat of a borrowed pickup truck he says, “There are so many mysterious ways and miracles in the world. There’s so much involved you could never understand it all.”

As he drives away, I can hear his metal rod echoing in the truck bed like a tuning fork.

 • • • 

It doesn’t take long to realize that exploring Vieques requires a car. The island, which doesn’t have a single traffic light, is also devoid of taxis. We catch a
público
—part of Vieques’s limited public transit system—and head for Maritza’s Car Rental.

The island is stitched together by a series of unmarked, one-lane roads. Our minibus races by turquoise and hot-pink houses, past a church hosting a tent revival, along fences of slender branches and barbwire intertwined with hibiscus vines. Each time a car appears up ahead, we enter a contest of wills. Who’ll guide their tires off the blacktop first? Which driver is going to yield? Locals tend to favor small compact cars and work trucks. Visitors are immediately identifiable in the late-model Jeeps that have begun to proliferate.

After I fill out the paperwork necessary to secure a Jeep Cherokee—which turns out to be several years newer than the vehicle I drive back home, not exactly a positive on an island where driving is considered an adventure sport—I inquire about Vieques’s speed limit. I haven’t noticed any signs posted. The attendant looks shocked by my inquiry, as if she’s never been asked about these regulations. In fact, she looks like she’s never even considered them. She shrugs. “I don’t really know. Maybe 45?” I must look concerned about the looseness of this estimation because she adds, “Don’t worry. The horses will let you know how fast to go.”

Here, horses trump Hondas. The animals often appear wild, but the clip-clop of metal shoes and the brands burned into their coats reveal that they are at least semitame, domesticated. They sometimes chase cars alongside roads and, along with prehistoric-looking iguanas, can often be found leisurely sunning in the middle of streets.

The rental attendant says, “When people want to ride the horses they just go out and catch them.” She makes a lassoing motion and explains that, sometimes, if people cannot locate their own horse, they’ll wrangle whatever animal they can. In this situation, proper etiquette requires the borrower to set the animal loose in the middle of town. This way, the owners are sure to find out that their free-range friend has been released.

As I turn to go, she says, “I know it seems strange, but the horses here get sick if they’re penned in. We don’t know why, so we let them be free. It’s the only way they will be healthy. It’s what makes them happy.”

 • • • 

Matt and I stop in Isabel Segunda to gather supplies—grilled cheese sandwiches and guava pastries that fill our pristine Jeep with powdered sugar. As we drive out of town, signs of development completely disappear. Increasingly, there are more and more horses grazing on the grassy knolls. They are pleasingly plump, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone comes this far out of town to lasso.

We’re on our way to see a collection of bunkers that appear on our cartoonish tourist map as hobbit hovels. The abandoned military bunkers are covered in peeling paint. Despite their novelty, they’re not that exciting, so we take off in search of plantation ruins, which are marked only by a hand-painted sign. After spending thirty minutes or so exploring crumbling brick buildings on foot, we get back in the Jeep. I’m ready to go back to the hotel for a nap, and Matt knows not to get in the way of my slumber. Still, when he notices a small path near the ruins, he can’t resist. “I bet there’s more to see down here!” he says.

Branches brush against the sides of the vehicle. I thrust the tourist map out the window and lay it against the side of the car in an attempt to protect its paint job. There’s a prolonged screech from the driver’s side. Matt, ever cool, says, “I didn’t notice that thing.”

“You mean that
tree
?”

We both laugh. Maybe my hormones are finding balance. Perhaps there’s something else at play. All I know is that I feel more warmth toward him than I have in a long time. It’s now clear that the road isn’t a road, but we’ve gone too far to prevent damage and can’t turn around. The path is too narrow. “Let’s keep going; this has got to lead somewhere,” Matt says.

I don’t say anything. The situation is ripe for bickering, and we’ve avoided that thus far. This actually feels like some sort of breakthrough. I’ve been so focused on my son and myself, I haven’t given enough thought to the sort of stress our marriage has been under. I’d wanted to shout “no” when he turned down this road, but I’d refrained, trying hard to fight his observation that I’m now a naysayer to everything he wants to do. (Currently on the list: Get a puppy, a basketball goal for our gravel drive, a microbrewery.)

We could have just gone to the beach today. But we didn’t. Matt is a fellow wanderer. Curious without my incessant, sometimes debilitating sense of hesitation. I’m more than a little nervous about our upcoming rental charges, but this experience is reminding me that Matt’s willingness to take risks is one of the reasons I married him in the first place.

“Maybe I should turn the radio up?” he says.

“Okay.”

I clutch the car seat. Matt notices and tells me, “All we can really do is relax and hope for the best.”

There is absolutely nothing that can be done at this point sans machete. My stress isn’t doing us any good, and my paint-job-protecting map got caught on a briar. I don’t loosen my white-knuckled grip on my seat, but when Matt turns the radio up, I slowly bob my head to Caribbean tunes, and we push on.

 • • • 

Just before sunset, we meet up with Garry Lowe in the parking lot of a convenience store. Not long ago, Garry was a fly-fishing guide in Colorado. On a whim, he decided to return to Puerto Rico—his mother’s homeland and the site of good boyhood memories—to start his own enterprise, Vieques Adventure Company.

Garry, a lanky guy with a level of animation that rivals that of a caffeinated stand-up comedian, says, “I really shook up my life when I came down here. It was like Boggle!” He hops around, pretending like he’s got a hand full of dice, and then points to the ground, to indicate he’s just rolled a series of letters in his imaginary board game. He shouts, “L-I-F-E! This is my life! I won! I’m on the water 200 days a year, and work isn’t like work at all!”

Garry runs biking and fly-fishing tours on the island, but his real claim to Vieques fame lies in his innovative use of clear canoes. His polycarbonate boats give people who are unwilling to swim in the Bio Bay at night an idea of what it might be like to be immersed in its unique aquatic wonders. Tonight’s group gathers in a puddle of yellow created by the headlights of Garry’s passenger van. He suggests a last-minute run into a nearby market to use the facilities, saying, “The circus will begin soon! Curtain in seven minutes! Hurry!”

When the crowd—a mix of all ages—emerges from the store, Garry hangs his head as if in mourning. He’s spotted a teenage boy in too-tight swim trunks toting a new bottle of bug spray. “I asked you not to use any of that stuff!” Garry laments. He points to the store and says, “Go in and wash your arms. Scrub them!”

“Really?” the boy asks, bewildered by Garry’s sudden shift from fun-loving adventurer to schoolmarm.

“Yes!” Garry says. “I know you don’t want to kill anything on purpose!” He shakes his head. This is the sort of thing he fears most. “I’m not a tree-hugging kind of guy, but I do think that humans have a habit of wanting to save something after it’s already gone. Everything we put on our bodies has the potential to kill the dinoflagellates. Shampoo, deodorant, sunscreen. All of it.”

A substantial loss of the photosynthesizing plankton would disrupt the Bio Bay’s food chain and result in decreased oxygen levels. It would also snuff out conservationists’ hope that—through careful regulation and vigilant guiding—tourists can safely commune with earth’s remaining bioluminescent bays. There are about six left in the world, and Puerto Rico is home to three.

Garry’s watch beeps. Usually, island time means something like “hang loose, no worries,” and in daylight hours this is true on Vieques. But at night, the demand for tours, especially Garry’s, is too great to wait for stragglers. “We’re still missing one,” he says, dismayed, as the pink-armed, bug-spray-free teenager hops into the van. “I feel bad she’s going to miss this,” he says of the no-show before putting the vehicle in gear. “We’ll be there in four minutes and forty-eight seconds!”

When we reach the put-in site, Garry puts on a headlamp to show us around. His boats are all outfitted with red lights so that he can keep track of his crew, the color chosen for its benign nature. Any amount of white light has the potential to disrupt the plankton’s circadian rhythm, the biological clock that lets them know when it’s time to glow.

Once Garry has safely positioned everyone in canoes, he hops into his own opaque kayak. Almost immediately, the wake alongside our boats is illuminated. I feel as if I’m paddling through neon blue champagne bubbles. I put my hand in the water. When it’s immersed I can see my fingers, outlined in tiny, round orbs of light. When I raise my hand to the sky it is camouflaged by its own spontaneous twinkling.

Garry has located a buoy and invited the group to gather around him. He explains that the dinoflagellates are neither plant nor animal, but rather, as the Latin origins of the word “bioluminescence” indicate, they are living light. Garry says, “They use the same chemical as lightning bugs. They’re both trying to talk with light, just in different ways.”

A rope connecting our boats hits the water in a metered motion, setting off liquid sparks. The group is abuzz with questions. Someone asks, “Would the water still glow if I took some in a jar and put it on a shelf in my house?”