We clucked and fidgeted around the newly-renovated space, though in truth there wasn’t much we could accomplish. Although a few pieces of furniture for the space had arrived, most of it was piled up in Jane’s garage and there was no point in taking it out of storage yet.
We pushed into place the few pieces of furniture already on-site. Michael re-edged the paint around a window casing and I mopped the floors, mainly because I wanted to see what they’d look like without their coat of dust. There were finishing touches to be added but, for the most part, everything we could do was done. The next time we came down we’d be able to set everything up and get the lower floor ready for guests.
We were almost there.
Twenty-One
Beach Daze
Since there wasn’t much more we could accomplish at the house until our next visit, we made an executive decision to spend some time at the beach. The next morning, feeling a bit guilty for shirking chores that (for the moment, at least) didn’t even exist, we set off along the ridge of hills that lay like a spine along the east/west axis of the island. We drove past newly-constructed (and in many cases still unfinished) houses sandwiched between dwellings that looked like they’d been there for decades.
The island was definitely in transition mode.
The lane we were traveling along eventually spilled out onto the main road connecting Isabel and Esperanza. We turned right and headed towards Camp Garcia, the old Navy base that serves as home to many of the best beaches on the island.
On the left we noticed a huge concrete structure that we’d heard about (and driven past many times) but had never really focused on—a vast, unfinished shell of a sports complex. Conceived twenty years earlier as a world-class athletic center for training and sporting events, it was abandoned halfway through when its funding dried up.
Beyond this melancholy monument, the road meandered south past abandoned cars and crumbling houses, and a charming-looking nursery, one that we would later visit and learn to love. Then we reached the sprawling, untidy gates of Camp Garcia, its entrance flanked by a food truck selling empanadas and, surprisingly, spaghetti.
The broad gravel road leading into the camp was rutted and bumpy, giving our already-clanky Vitara a brisk workout. I noticed with amusement that I could glimpse the road through a good-sized hole in the floor.
Exactly what was the daily rate for this jalopy anyway?
But I didn’t really care. The sun was shining, a light, fragrant breeze tickled the trees, and we were about to explore some of the most unspoiled beaches in the Caribbean.
Today’s destination was Secret Beach, also known locally as Pata Prieta.
Yes, we’d been there many times before, but it was so beautiful we couldn’t resist visiting again.
It needs to be seen to be appreciated.
Reached along a twisting lane punctuated by seemingly-bottomless potholes and a hair-raising final descent along a narrow swathe of sharply contoured rocks, the beach is as romantic as it is secluded—a lazy half-circle of white sand embracing a shallow cove of aquamarine sea.
The water is warm and serene and utterly transparent.
Secret Beach (Pata Prieta)
We call it The Big Bathtub: sheer heaven for soaking away your cares.
The prize spot, in our opinion, is at the far end of the crescent, where the beach swoops to a graceful finale in a tumble of slate-gray boulders cascading down into the water. Fringed by an ancient gnarled tree, it’s a natural refuge—no beach umbrella required.
Today we were lucky. The beach was totally empty. Within five minutes we had claimed our coveted spot and were munching our bakery sandwiches, sipping our sodas, and gazing in wonder across the still blue water.
Paradise decidedly found.
☼ ☼ ☼
The next morning we headed to Blue Beach, which we’d also visited on several occasions.
Renowned for its beauty, this beach was reportedly even lovelier before the U.S. Navy decided to play war games up and down its length in the 1950s. One sunny afternoon the 65th Infantry, determined to defeat its faux foe at any cost, had ruthlessly hacked down the thick grove of coconut trees fringing the beach and laced the stumps with barbed wire to prevent the “enemy” from landing.
Although the maneuver was (duh) predictably effective, the beach has never looked the same. These antics might have been excusable had there been a real war; but as a mere exercise, the destruction of so many beautiful trees is much harder to forgive.
Even so Blue Beach isn’t exactly what one might term an eyesore. Its long strip of sand unfurls like a white carpet between a thick crop of dark green seagrapes to the north and the sparkling sea to the south. At its far end the beach curves outward towards a flat pebbly point that provides an ideal spot for lounging and general navel-gazing.
Blue Beach (Playa La Chiva)
The dazzling view is punctuated by a small, densely-vegetated island—La Chiva, or the goat—which lies in the center of the bay a couple of hundred feet from shore.
For the faint of heart or pale of skin, Blue Beach provides a number of concrete and timber pavilions that seem to be more popular with locals than visitors. We generally avoid them unless rain seems imminent, in which case they provide a deliciously cozy haven.
Generally we just drive along the main road until we come to an empty turn-off, then swing in, unpack our stuff and wander out to the first perfect-looking patch of sand (never closer than fifty feet from the nearest occupant, of course).
This particular day we were in luck—our favorite parking spot was empty. We pulled into the shallow driveway and maneuvered the car around to face outward, taking care not to get stuck in the deep sand on either side, while at the same time positioning the car in an alpha-auto stance that more or less screamed, “You have every right to join us, but we were here first.”
We had become so practiced at unloading the car that it took us barely three minutes to grab the cooler, chairs, umbrella and backpacks that constitute the essentials of our Vieques beach experience. Five minutes later Michael had identified our campsite du jour (located by some unfathomable Zen process of divination), and within ten minutes we were lathered up with sunblock and fully prepared to do absolutely nothing for several hours.
When I say absolutely nothing, that’s only half the story.
I do nothing. Michael does a lot. What he considers leisure, I consider a workout.
He stands around on the beach a lot, looking out to sea; he goes for long, strenuous walks; he endlessly arranges and rearranges his towel, ensuring that no particle of sand has had the gall to land upon it. He goes for swims; he reapplies his sunblock exhaustively; he repeats. And at some point during this marathon he summons up the energy to unfurl a couple of large black garbage bags he’s brought with him and collects litter on the beach.
Frankly, I’m exhausted just telling you about it.
In the meantime, I’ve barely moved a muscle. Literally.
Here’s my drill.
We arrive. I kick off my flip flops and unfold my beach chair while Michael sets up the umbrella.
If I’ve remembered to wear a swimsuit I take off my shorts.
I position my chair under the umbrella. If we’ve taken the time to stop for sandwiches at the glacially-slow but very good sandwich shop in Isabel, I lovingly devour my Cubano (thin-sliced ham on bread so toasty-crisp you’d swear it was spray-starched). If we didn’t bring sandwiches I munch on a bag of chips and a few pieces of luncheon meat (turkey or ham) we bought at the colmado on the way down.
After lunch, I stand up—reluctantly, it must be admitted—to re-apply sunblock to Michael’s back. Then I sit down again and rummage around in my backpack for my book.
The ensuing hours are about as close as I ever get to heaven (with a few exceptions that don’t constitute suitable copy for a PG audience).
In my opinion, the luxury of not thinking is vastly underrated, particularly if you’re a chronic over-thi
nker like me. Sitting on the beach in Vieques with a good book (or Kindle) affords me the extreme pleasure of turning off my brain, at least the self-defeating, always-worrying lobe, to a degree that I never achieve anywhere else, under any circumstances.
I can’t tell you how much I love slipping between the covers of my book for a completely oblivious couple of hours, only to look up and discover that the sun has catapulted itself appreciably westward, the tide has rolled out, and Michael has turned a slightly darker shade of chestnut.
Now that’s a day at the beach.
Twenty-Two
Double Exposure
Exposure is a big deal on Vieques.
No, not that kind.
“You guys are on the Atlantic side?” people occasionally ask when we describe the location of our house. They seem all too ready to draw the distinction between an Atlantic view and a Caribbean one, the implication being that those of the Caribbean persuasion are vastly preferable.
“We can see the Big Island and Culebra from our balcony,” I respond a tad defensively.
“How nice,” the south-favorers reply, their voices trailing off, a pitying smile trembling across their lips.
The really dumb part of this scenario? For a couple of years I bought it. I honestly believed that a Caribbean view was superior to ours, simply because so many people said so.
There had been signs that I didn’t really believe this, but I ignored them.
Item One: when our air conditioner broke down that first summer and Jane put us up for a couple of nights in one of her properties in Destino, Michael and I stood by the pool at sunset one evening and marveled at the view across the wetlands down to the glistening Caribbean.
“Amazing, huh?” he said.
“Stunning,” I replied. “Although,” and here I struggled to give words to the stray thought nibbling at the corner of my brain, “it’s kind of like looking at an infinity pool. The effect is amazing but there’s not a lot to see.”
Item Two: when we wake up in the morning in our condo in D.C. the first thing we do is open the bedroom curtains and raise the living room blind. And yet, although the view from our apartment is breathtaking—one of the largest cathedrals in the world stands foursquare in front of our building—we rarely pause more than a few seconds to drink it in.
In Vieques, on the other hand, the minute our eyes pop open in the morning we fling open the bedroom door and rush through the great room onto the balcony to drink in the view…which includes:
•the mountainous big island looming majestically to the northwest
•a delicious little white sandbar at eleven o-clock, crowned by a toy-like beacon
•Culebra itself, also mountainous but more gently so, to the northeast
Panorama from the balcony
Directly below us, groves of verdant trees dot the landscape and houses, big and small, tumble down our hill towards the ocean.
I haven’t even mentioned the ferries—both passenger and cargo—carving white troughs through the water back and forth to Fajardo several times a day. Some afternoons we sit mesmerized on our balcony, watching these boats’ slow steady progress for a half-hour at a time across our field of vision.
And at night, when the island is shimmering with darkness and the sea and sky have melded into a solid mauve field, we watch cruise ships crawl across the horizon from St. Thomas to San Juan, bright smudges of illumination seemingly suspended in mid-air.
And yet, despite this abundance of northern-exposure beauty, occasionally when we’re idling our motor at the top of the ridge to drink in the Caribbean view, I can’t help saying, “You have to admit, the view from this side is pretty fantastic.”
To which Michael will reply, “I agree,” followed by a long silence. “So would you switch?”
I hesitate, gazing at the flat, tranquil sea.
“Not on your life.”
Twenty-Three
Crazy by Design
Back in D.C., with more than two months to go before we could return to Vieques to put the downstairs level in order, we asked ourselves what we could accomplish in the meantime.
We couldn’t easily buy more furniture without another kamikaze San Juan shopping spree, but we could order smaller decorative items and ship them down.
First up: rugs.
I’ve always liked seagrass rugs, which I associate with tropical interiors. So I began surfing the Internet for carpet vendors.
Our criteria were simple enough. We wanted rugs that were: (a) stylish; (b) reasonably priced; and (c) capable of being shipped to Puerto Rico.
Sounds easy, right?
Wrong.
We might as well have been trying to ship a Hummer to Micronesia.
After a couple of frustrating hours I stumbled on a website offering a whiff of promise—the rugs were attractive, the prices were within our range (though near the top), and the drop-down “shipping destination” list included Puerto Rico. I decided to call.
The man who answered the phone was a dead ringer, vocally, for Foghorn Leghorn, the windbag rooster from Looney Tunes cartoons.
“Where are you from?” I couldn’t help asking after a few moments of preliminary chat, half expecting him to inform me that he’d been born in the Warner Brothers animation department.
“Chahlston,” he replied. “In the great state of South Carolina.” A pause. “And how about you, sonny?”
I’m not making this up, he actually called me “sonny.”
“Washington, D.C.”
“Oh mah.”
I was surprised he didn’t say shut yo mouth.
Having obviously decided the less said the better about our nation’s capital (which had, after all, been a bastion of Yankeedom during the War of Northern Aggression), he launched into the business portion of our call.
“And Wawshington is whey-ah you all want yo roogs shipped?”
“Actually, no. I need them shipped to Puerto Rico.”
“Puerrrrto Rrrico,” he repeated, in a mock Spanish accent overlaid with a thick Southern drawl.
“That’s right,” I confirmed, fully prepared for him to gasp and tell me that such a maneuver was impawsible. “Is that a problem?”
But he barely missed a beat.
“They-ah ah no problems, my yoong friend,” he said, “just solutions.”
Oh brother.
“Actually our place is on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico,” I countered, determined to burst his Southern-fried bubble.
Surely that would give him pause. But not a bit of it. “If Federal Express goes they-ah, we can get you yo roogs.”
I’d heard this before, too. Americans’ faith in Federal Express is almost touching in its unshakability. It’s right up there with fad diets and tax cuts (or a combination of the two).
I’m sure FedEx is a perfectly dependable company in the forty-eight contiguous states. And for all I know, the residents of Alaska and Hawaii swear allegiance to the FedEx flag on a daily basis.
But we had learned the hard way that FedEx in Puerto Rico is a very hit-or-miss sort of enterprise, dependent on the whims of its lackadaisical local staff.
“FedEx isn’t all that reliable on Vieques,” I remarked.
This elicited a hearty belly laugh.
“I’m sure they can find yo little hacienda,” he gurgled merrily.
“I wouldn’t bet the farm on it,” I went on. “We don’t even have a street address.”
There followed a pause so pregnant it needed an obstetrician.
“Uh, how’s that?”
Got him. Or so I thought.
“That’s nothin’,” he drawled. “I grew up in a house that wadn’t even on a road—just plopped down in the middle of a big ole cotton field.”
“But,” I continued, a hint of desperation in my voice, “FedEx will NOT deliver without a street address.”
I could almost hear him sipping his mint julep.
“You all have a sayul phone, dontcha?” he respond
ed smoothly. “They’ll just call you once they get theyah and you can tell them how to get to yo place.”
“But there won’t be anyone at the house to sign for the rugs,” I tossed out wearily, making one last attempt to inject a note of reality into our increasingly bizarre dialogue.
“Not a problem, my yoong friend, I’ll just check the bawks that puhmits delivery without signature.”
By this point I was completely worn down. He could have told me FedEx delivers to Jupiter and I would have happily concurred.
☼ ☼ ☼
FedEx never called me.
And two weeks later I got a sheepish call from Foghorn.
“I’m afraid I have a big ole dollop a’ aig on my face.”
“Excuse me?” I said, suspecting that I was the victim of a prank call.
“You wuh entilely right about those Federal Exprayess people in Viakus. They tried to delivah yo roogs and eventually shipped them back to me. I have them right heyah as I speak.”
I couldn’t help feeling a tiny thrill of satisfaction. Still, he sounded so dejected I decided to throw him a bone.
“Well, at least you tried.”
“Thank you for that kind remahk, sonny, but you were right and I was wrahng. Now what can we do to fix this mayess?”
“I have no idea. Let me do some research and I’ll call you back.”
I got through to Jane and explained the situation.
“Silly twit,” she said of the rug man. “People never listen to the voice of experience.”
“Do you?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Not very often,” she answered honestly.
“So what do we do?”
“That’s easy. Give them my name and cell number. The local FedEx man works for me part-time.”
“I should have known.”
“And by the way, I warned you about seagrass rugs. They’ll mildew after six months.”
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 14