The Rescue at Dead Dog Beach (2 page)

A few months later—less than a year after losing my dad—my grandpa died. He was the last remaining male adult in my life. After that, I withdrew completely. I mostly spoke to my dog; only when necessary did I speak to my mum, my nan, or my brothers. Soon Tanya was about the only friend I confided in. We slept together every night, my arm around her warm torso, its rising and falling soothing me to sleep.

I confided all my pain, loneliness, and hardest times to Tanya, and she listened patiently—and understood. When the local bully came near, Tanya would raise a lip and growl, and he knew not to touch me. In time, Tanya even drew me out of my shell. She was a very loving dog and seemed to recognize people with good hearts. When we ran around the neighborhood together, dodging in and out of the Russian oaks, she lured good-hearted people back into my life, and soon I was starting to socialize again.

One afternoon I was in the backyard playing with Tanya and a neighbor's dog named Doobie. The two dogs ran full speed side by side and playfully nipped at each other's necks. Suddenly Doobie broke formation, bolting through the partially open gate and across the street. Tanya made as if to follow her companion but stopped in her tracks and looked back at me when I called for her to stop. In my peripheral vision, I caught sight of an exhaust-spewing old pickup truck racing down the street. I heard the din of its rusty muffler. The pursuit instinct and the thrill of the chase won out over obedience. Tanya and the truck were destinies about to collide. Doobie ran free and clear while Tanya was not so lucky. A bleary-eyed driver stepped out of the vehicle smelling of whiskey and cigarettes.

Please. Please. Please. Don't let her die. It's my fault. I did this to her. My thoughts were running into and over one another, tumbling in a bloody confusion of guilt and shame.

Sitting in the bed of the truck, I held her head in my lap, trying to soothe her but barely being able to stomach the agonizing sounds of her whimpering in pain. It was too much to bear. Not a boy but not yet a man, I cried as the truck that put us in this position delivered us to the vet.

I held her close as the vet pushed the needle into her vein. I begged Tanya not to leave me. Not now. I felt her chest gently rise and fall for the last time as she took her final breath.

“Stay as long as you need to, son.”

Tanya was gone, and I was alone again. Saying good-bye felt like an eternity. Dogs have to die. Boys have to grieve. Life is not easy. When I summoned enough strength to stand, I wiped the snot and tears off my face, walked out of the office, and started running.

When I couldn't run anymore, I collapsed in the grass and cried until my heart rate and breathing slowed. The moment drifted away, replaced by a numb sadness and the inevitable return of my own powerlessness to change destiny.

After losing my best friend, the symbolic replacement for my father's love, I struggled again.

At fifteen, I felt so much despair that I tried to kill myself. From that point forward, I remained guarded and distant emotionally. I faked happiness so as not to be asked questions or draw attention to myself.

Then I got my act together, and, at age seventeen, I graduated from high school and volunteered to travel to Southeast Asia to work with orphaned children for three years. It was the change of environment and perspective I desperately needed. Seeing innocent children struggle from day to day just to survive made it impossible to keep feeling sorry for myself.

As a result of my attempts to outrun pain, I became an escape artist. I escaped into art, like painting and sculpture, and into extreme sports, like rock and ice climbing, mountaineering, paragliding, kite surfing. These were the things I felt gave me control over death. The art felt eternal, like I was leaving a piece of myself behind for others, and the sports took me as close to the edge as humanly possible without going over. They became a way of life, a way for me to live completely in the moment, temporarily forgetting everything that would otherwise weigh constantly on my mind.

The sports I do are inherently dangerous, and thus viewed by many as selfish. However, no matter how great the risk, the rewards are greater. The better I became at sports, the more risks I took. And so it's always been hard on anyone who loves me to accept this part of my life. It cost me many relationships before I met my wife, Pam. The women I'd dated had tried to change me, to stop me from risking my life for something so seemingly frivolous. But I lived for the feeling of complete freedom, and I had accepted long ago that I'd likely die in pursuit of it. Because even in these pursuits, somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I really didn't have any power over death. But when I stood on the fine line separating life and death, I could choose to control my fear.

W
hat do you think about moving to Puerto Rico for a few years?” Pam asked me one evening in the spring of 2005. Pam worked at a biotech firm that specializes in developing and manufacturing drugs used to treat cancer, diabetes, and other serious diseases. In her own way, she too was working to beat death. Perhaps that's why she put up with me.

Her bosses in the quality compliance division, where she worked as a liaison between the company and regulatory agencies like the FDA, had asked her to take a short-term assignment at their Juncos site in Puerto Rico, which was home to a state-of-the-art facility for biotechnology manufacturing.

Never one to turn down an adventure, my answer was immediate: “When do we leave?”

We'd moved a couple of years earlier to the historic Hill and Harbor community, originally populated by fishing captains, in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, in hopes of putting down roots. We bought an old house that I put a lot of time into restoring, but all too often Pam was away on business trips, and, frankly the sleepy New England lifestyle was killing me. And despite our best efforts at nesting, Pam and I both suffer from an incurable wanderlust. It was one of the things that attracted us to each other in the first place.

In addition, I still hadn't recovered from the loss of our German shepherd, Achates, a few months earlier. He had been my faithful companion for over ten years, and I missed him terribly. At the end of his life, he had been a noble old man in great pain. Sometimes I wondered if we had delayed the decision too long and selfishly kept him alive. He was like a child to us, and Pam and I had always hoped that, when it was his time to go, he'd just go in his sleep. It didn't happen that way.

Putting a dog down is the darkest day of pet ownership, a decision that doesn't come easy and one that you can never feel proud of, or forget. When we returned home that evening from the vet's office, I told Pam that I would never have another dog. But lately, when she was traveling, I'd been lonely. I had no companion other than a bothersome neighbor who kept asking me to repair things in his home for free.

So this opportunity was a stroke of luck for both of us. It didn't hurt that Puerto Rico happened to be an extreme athlete's paradise. The prospect of moving made me feel more alive than I had in years. I couldn't pack up my art supplies and sports gear fast enough, but it took a few months to iron out the logistics, including finishing the restoration of the house so we could sell it.

In the meantime, we took a reconnaissance trip to the island in April. Pam's company assured us we could back out if we didn't like what we found. I had never been to Puerto Rico before and knew little about the island, but upon arriving in San Juan I was surprised to see the pervasive poverty. While there are plenty of beautiful tourist attractions in the old city—blue cobblestone streets and imposing fortifications dating back to the sixteenth century when the island was a Spanish possession—modern San Juan was a vast sprawl of high-rises amid low-slung cinder-block buildings topped by corrugated metal roofs, all of it enshrouded by dense jungle.

After exploring the city, we drove southeast from San Juan toward the area where we'd be living. The trip was hair-raising, but not just because the local custom for highway driving seemed to have been inspired more by NASCAR than the comparatively polite rules of the road I grew up with. What really affected us was seeing emaciated dogs wandering the roads, and gaunt horses tied to the freeway guardrails. The animals barely reacted to the cars and trucks whizzing by at seventy miles an hour, less than five feet from them. Every so often we'd see a dog lying prone and lifeless by the side of the road. On one stretch, I saw a horse lying halfway across the slow lane of the freeway. Its legs were akimbo and its head was jammed up against the railing. Rigor mortis had set in. Pam didn't notice, so I chose not to point it out to her.

Finally we crested a hill and caught a glimpse of the Caribbean Sea, twinkling blue out to the horizon. This was more like the paradise we'd both envisioned when Pam got the offer to come here.

Our destination was Humacao on the southeastern coast. It was just a little over an hour's drive from San Juan, but it felt worlds away from the capital. The southern half of the island was a lot more remote and less developed than the northern half. The villages were smaller, which I appreciated, having grown up in a small mountain town in British Columbia, and the jungle felt more imposing, as if the buildings and roads could barely keep it at bay.

We drove around, checking out different seaside communities. I was captivated by the beautiful Caribbean beaches as well as the majestic dormant volcanic mountains of the surrounding rainforest.

“I wonder if anyone has flown those,” I said to Pam.

She just smiled. I suppose I was a little predictable after ten years together. She knew I'd have my paraglider up there soon enough.

But my main goal was to find places where I could kite surf. Kite surfing combines the thrills of both paragliding and surfing: you stand on your board and use the power of the wind in your canopy to propel you across the water. It's a sport I'd recently taught myself, and I intended to make the most of my time here mastering it. The majority of kiting is done on the north and southwest coasts of Puerto Rico; I hadn't found anything on the Internet about kiting near where we would be living. And that was fine by me, because I love a challenge, especially when it comes to doing something no one else has done.

As we explored more of the countryside, I became more optimistic about living in Puerto Rico. Besides the many adventure opportunities, I'd get to refocus on my art as well. If this scenery didn't inspire me, nothing would.

When we returned to our home in Rhode Island a few days later, I joked to Pam, “The door to this place won't get the chance to hit me on the ass on the way out.”

As spring turned to summer turned to early fall, our move date was suddenly upon us. With packing help from my brother Barry, we escaped the predictability of Rhode Island for the unknown of Puerto Rico.

When the real estate agent provided by Pam's company brought us to the gated entrance of Palmas del Mar, the resort community in Humacao that would be our new home, I was stunned by the sheer size of the property. It was bigger than both Pam's and my hometowns combined. I didn't know then that it prided itself on being the largest planned community in the Caribbean, with banks and stores, two golf courses, a marina, a fancy private school, a casino, a country club, and twenty-four–hour security guards.

Although this was where most wealthy Puerto Ricans and expats lived in minimansions, we were able to secure a lease on a modest three-bedroom house that had enough room for visitors. There was also a small outbuilding shoehorned into the backyard that I could use as a studio. I felt more disappointed than privileged to be living the gated lifestyle, but I figured Pam's company knew best. Pam had heard from some of her coworkers on previous business trips to the island that house burglaries were common, and being in this community would keep us safer, or so we thought.

That first night in our new home, with most of our household belongings two months from joining us, it seemed like we had checked into a hotel rather than a new life.

“It feels like we're on vacation,” I said.

“I know,” said Pam. “Except I have to go to work on Monday.”

“Well, it's not Monday yet. You wanna go to the beach?”

Palmas del Mar had its own gorgeous white sand beach, so we borrowed a golf cart—the vehicle of choice there—and made our way to the ocean in the late afternoon to enjoy the end of the beautiful day, listen to the waves lap gently against the sandy shore, and watch the spectacular sunset.

Yeah, this is home
, I thought.

O
n Monday morning, while Pam readied herself for her first day in her new job, I loaded the car with my kite-surfing gear. Pam and I had agreed that I would take her to work in Juncos, a small city about thirty minutes away toward the center of the island, and pick her up in the evening. That way I'd have the vehicle to use during the day. I already had my sights set on a few beaches I had scoped out on Google Earth a few weeks earlier, and I was eager to check them out in person to see if they'd be good for kiting.

After dropping Pam off, I headed back east toward home, passing the exit for Palmas del Mar and continuing south into Yabucoa. I crossed a long bridge that traveled the width of the swampy valley before making a left toward Playa Lucia. From the satellite images I'd seen, the road would soon be obscured by jungle. Google didn't lie. A few moments after the turn, the road narrowed, and branches and leaves scraped along the sides of the truck. I was a little concerned about how I'd explain the new scratches back at the rental office when I turned the vehicle in. Luckily, I later learned that small scratches and dents were considered normal wear and tear here in Puerto Rico.

Eventually the jungle parted and I popped through the other side. The view before me was incredible: white sand, tall palm trees running the full length of the beach, and the aqua-colored sea beyond.