“Maybe we’ll just stop by the hardware store to find out,” Michael said, in such a firm tone that Jane finally clammed up and began talking about something else.
The windows retailed for $625.
I called Humberto myself and said he could replace all of them if his $800 price tag included installation.
He agreed.
Jane was furious.
But on our next visit to the island, as we stood with her in the side yard admiring Humberto’s craftsmanship, she remarked, “You know, this guy is absolutely great. He just replaced all the windows in one of my rentals up the road. And his prices are so reasonable!”
Thirty-Seven
The Whether Channel
One of the first things we noticed when we started thinking about buying a house in Vieques is that most of the island’s residences are built almost entirely of concrete—including, not incidentally, the one we bought.
Concrete structures have their pluses and minuses. While it’s true that concrete walls make the simple task of hanging a picture an hour-long ordeal, they also cut down considerably on termite damage (unless you get concrete-loving termites, but we’ve already covered that particular horror). More important, concrete walls help keep your house from falling down during a hurricane. That’s a big plus.
Most people unfamiliar with Vieques assume that the best houses are on the beach. But because the majority of the island’s loveliest beaches are located on land requisitioned in the 1950s by the U.S. Navy, those same beaches are on protected land today.
Consequently there are very few beach houses. Sure, there are a handful of beachfront properties on the island—our friend Jonah has one in Bravos de Boston, and the view from his living room is stunning.
But the beaches these houses face are relatively meager by Vieques standards. And then of course there’s always the possibility that a huge wave will crash into your parlor and completely destroy everything you’ve worked like a dog to accomplish over the past ten years. That’s one of the reasons why we bought a house in the hills.
Admittedly, I’ve never been a person who obsesses about weather. Michael, on the other hand, watches the Weather Channel on a daily basis. To him, Doppler radar has the same appeal as a video game to a fourteen-year-old boy. He simply can’t get enough of it.
To be honest, I barely gave a thought to hurricanes when we bought the house. I’m a worrier, to be sure, but my worrying is highly focused and somewhat stylized. I worry about leaving home clad in brown shoes and a black belt, not about Acts of God. I’m so busy obsessing about those unsightly dings in the side of my car I sometimes forget to change the oil.
You get the picture.
Of all the things I fretted about in the weeks leading up to our purchase of the house in Vieques, hurricanes didn’t even make the list. But they came into much sharper focus the first time I surfed past the Weather Channel and happened to notice a pinwheel-shaped mass hovering almost directly over Puerto Rico.
“Oh my God, is that what a hurricane looks like?” I wailed to Michael, who (naturally) was also watching in the next room and was so traumatized by what was unfolding on the TV screen he could barely speak.
“Is our house in danger?” I asked, joining him.
“Uh, maybe.”
He was clearly spooked, and soon I was too. We sat side by side for at least two hours while the Weather Channel spooled through its staggeringly boring cycle of weather updates.
By midnight the hurricane had veered north, leaving lots of fallen branches and downed power lines in its wake but no serious damage.
I called Jane the next morning.
“We need hurricane shutters.”
“True.”
“Who do we call about getting them?”
“Me.”
“Can you hurry?”
She laughed.
“I can always try.”
In the meantime, we decided to do a little research.
We learned a lot. For starters, zillions of people around the world are foolish enough to buy houses on or near beaches. When these otherwise perfectly rational people come to their senses they realize they’ve invested their life savings in a property with the lifespan of a fruit fly and spend the rest of their days trying to protect it.
We also learned a few things about hurricane shutters themselves. One of the highest-end models consists of a series of U-shaped panels which slide along tracks mounted above and below the windows and doors and interlock for maximum protection.
Jane highly recommended this style, despite their high cost. Lots of her other owners had sprung for them, she told us, and were satisfied.
“Satisfied with what?” Michael asked when I repeated this little tidbit to him. “Have they been through a hurricane?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“As far as I know Puerto Rico hasn’t been hit by a hurricane in years, so how could anyone who’s bought shutters in the past two or three years possibly know if they’re effective in a storm or not?”
He had me there.
“Maybe they just like the way they look,” I hazarded.
“That’s a great reason to spend four thousand bucks.”
I called Jane back. She was her usual emphatic self. “They’re the best. Also, they’re the easiest to install.”
I was skeptical.
“Where would you store them?”
“In your lock-up on the bottom floor.”
“But then your guys will have to schlep them up two flights of stairs in a storm. Aren’t there forty or fifty pieces? Doesn’t sound easy to me.”
“Child’s play,” she responded, swatting away my objections like a pesky fly. “And they work!”
“How do you know?” I couldn’t resist asking.
She sighed.
“Because we’ve tested them.”
“In a hurricane?”
She paused for a moment.
“In a near-hurricane,” she said. “And they did great. And if it had been a real hurricane they would’ve done even better.”
“What’s a near-hurricane like?” I asked.
“Windy. Very windy.”
I gave up. “Okay,” I said, “let’s do it.”
She called me back the next day. The shutters were on back order for at least six weeks. What a surprise.
“Why did we wait until hurricane season to order hurricane shutters?” I wailed to Michael that evening.
“The same reason we waited until last winter’s blizzard to buy gloves. We’re idiots.”
Though not particularly comforting, this shut me up.
☼ ☼ ☼
Over the next few weeks we logged many hours watching the Weather Channel. We became intimately familiar with the speech patterns, verbal tics and wardrobes of the anchors and reporters.
“Isn’t Rob wearing a new jacket?” Michael asked one evening.
“Are you kidding? That old thing?”
Looking back, that moment should have given us pause, but by then we were in too deep. In effect, we had gone over to The Dark Side.
“And what about Shelley’s hair? Does that woman even own a brush?”
We pondered her unkempt hair in scornful silence. Then something on the screen behind her caught Michael’s eye.
“Hey look, there’s a tiny storm brewing off the coast of Africa.”
“Is it headed west?” I asked, a tiny note of excitement cresting in my voice.
“Looks like it might.”
“I’ll pop some corn.”
Michael settled in for the duration.
“While you’re at it, could you make me a drink?”
☼ ☼ ☼
As fun as it was to sit around watching the Weather Channel all day, we were relieved when the hurricane season ended that year.
Which, coincidentally, was almost exactly when our new storm panels arrived.
Our next order of business was getting the metal tracks installed for the shutters
to slot into.
But for some reason this relatively small task seemed almost insurmountable.
Every time we broached the topic with Jane she seemed to come up with a new excuse for not doing it: “The screws don’t fit.” “You have guests in the house.” “Pablo has a cold.”
Why was she stalling? We never really knew.
Our working theory, however, was that she loved big tasks but hated small ones. Ask her to oversee, at short notice, the reconstruction of one whole floor of our house? No problem. Hang a towel rack in the upstairs bathroom? Zzzz.
We quit mentioning the tracks. The beginning of the next hurricane season was, after all, nine months away.
But the next time we were down for a visit Michael took the tracks out of storage and laid them underneath each window and door they belonged to. “Are we going to install them ourselves?” I asked.
“I hope not,” was Michael’s cryptic answer.
Later that day Jane stopped by. She had her usual list of things that needed to be discussed and so did we, but nobody mentioned the tracks. And every time we walked past them she managed to look the other way.
“I don’t get it,” I remarked after she’d left.
“Give it a day or two,” Michael advised.
And guess what?
When we returned home from the beach the next afternoon the tracks had magically been installed.
Occasionally, for old time’s sake, I’ll surf past the Weather Channel and pause for a short, nostalgic moment, remembering those long autumnal afternoons on Michael’s sofa.
Shelley’s hair is still a rat’s nest.
But I’m happy to report that Rob finally bought himself a new jacket.
Thirty-Eight
Dancing with Lizards
When we first bought our house in Vieques, the lot just below ours was vacant. But about a year after our closing, bulldozers moved in to level the land. Construction on a new property began soon afterward.
We were beside ourselves. Our neighborhood was so incredibly settled, it simply hadn’t occurred to us that someone would build a new house near ours.
And on such a small lot.
Jane asked around and learned that the builder was Hal Johnson, a successful contractor from New England who had moved to Vieques with his wife twenty years earlier for a change of pace. He was building the house for his sister and her husband, who lived in Easton, Maryland, just across the Bay Bridge from D.C.
Jane pointed out that we were “neighbors times two” with these folks, but somehow this fun factoid didn’t make us feel any better.
As we watched the house take shape, we rotated through all the various stages of grief, although we lingered with particular relish on the anger and denial phases, with a protracted wallow in the depression category for good measure.
“What if it’s horrible?” I wailed.
“What if it’s huge?” Michael wanted to know.
“How can it be huge on such a small lot?”
“Can you say McMansion?” he retorted. “Think Chevy Chase with palm trees.”
Every time we went down for a visit they seemed to have added another level. It was Buckingham Palace on steroids! Our ocean view was history! We drank heavily, all the while telling ourselves it could be worse, though we couldn’t imagine how.
And then about eight months after construction began, the house was suddenly finished (which, by the way, was definitive proof that the owner was a blood relation of the contractor—otherwise, it would’ve taken years).
And it wasn’t so bad after all. In fact, we kind of liked it. Built in a classic West Indies style, the house was two stories tall (okay, so the Buckingham Palace reference was a little over the top).
The whole living space—great room, two bedrooms and a bath—was on the upper story, with a broad wooden veranda opening out of the great room to take advantage of the fantastic ocean views. The lower level, which obviously existed solely to elevate and support the upper floor, consisted of little more than a laundry room and carport.
They painted the house butter yellow and put a bluish-green tin roof on top. We liked the sound of rain hitting the roof.
All was well.
And when we finally met the owners we liked them a lot. But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.
☼ ☼ ☼
In case you haven’t already guessed, there are lots of absentee homeowners on Vieques.
These folks come from all over, but most seem to hail from the East Coast of the U.S., with a particularly large cohort from the greater Boston, New York and D.C. areas. And no, we’re not all friends. But through the years we’ve gotten to know quite a few of them almost by accident.
Some of them we’ve met simply by going about our business in the coffee bar, at the hardware store, or at dinner. Others were introduced to us by mutual friends. And, believe it or not, we’ve met quite a few in D.C.
The first of these, of course, was Michael’s gym acquaintance who had introduced us to Daniel, the property manager who’d ditched us when we confronted him about painting our house the wrong color.
The gym guy was friendly enough when we ran into him but his partner decidedly wasn’t, and soon we found ourselves ducking behind columns when our paths crossed at the San Juan airport.
Then there was the woman I met through work.
A colleague and I were paying a site visit to a fellow non-profit organization in D.C. when the subject of Puerto Rico came up.
“Don’t you have a house down there?” my co-worker prompted.
Yep.
“Where’s your house?” asked one of our hosts.
“On Vieques.”
“Oh my God, one of our co-workers has a house there too,” she gasped, picking up the phone and dialing an extension. “Diane, could you swing by the small conference room? I have someone you need to meet.”
A puzzled-looking woman with curly blonde hair poked her head around the door thirty seconds later.
“Yes?” she said, her eyes scanning our small group.
“Diane, meet Patrick. He has a house on Vieques.”
I stood up and shook her hand. She looked stunned, to say the least.
“Pretty soon,” she remarked wryly, “it’ll be unusual to meet someone in D.C. who doesn’t own a house in Vieques.”
A few months later I heard about a fellow homeowner from the man who cuts my hair. Getting a trim one day, I mentioned that we’d bought a place in Vieques.
“I’ve heard of that place,” he said.
The island had gotten lots of coverage in the wake of the Navy’s departure so this didn’t strike me as particularly strange.
“Did you see the article in the Times?” I asked.
He caught my eye in the mirror.
“I’m not much of a newspaper reader,” he laughed. “No, someone mentioned it to me. One of my customers.”
He thought for a moment.
“Actually, he said he and his partner had bought a house down there.”
By now I probably shouldn’t have been shocked, but I was.
“On Vieques?”
“A little island off the coast of Puerto Rico, right?”
“That’s it.”
“I think they’re going to open a restaurant on the island…something like that.”
“Good God.”
I tried to imagine what it would be like to buy a house and open a restaurant in Vieques at the same time. Living hell.
Others simply called us up and introduced themselves. This included the Butlers, our neighbors up the hill. Through Jane, we knew the basics about this youngish couple from Philadelphia.
He was a hedge fund manager, she was a physician. They had four teenage children. On more than one occasion they had very kindly referred guests to us when they had a party too big for their house.
The second or third time this happened, I got Ellen Butler’s email address from Jane and sent her a thank you note. A few weeks later she call
ed.
“Jane took us down to see your beautiful house,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
I couldn’t help laughing.
“Not a bit. She brought us up to see your house several months ago. I assume all her owners have seen each others’ houses.”
She laughed too.
“Anyway, come use our pool anytime the house is empty.”
This was very gracious too—so gracious that I decided not to tell her we’d already enjoyed a dip or two.
☼ ☼ ☼
Speaking of fellow homeowners.
Allow me to introduce you to Jonah, a graphic designer from New Hope, Pennsylvania who called us one day out of the blue after noticing a feature on our house’s web page he wanted to replicate on his own.
He and his partner had bought a house in Vieques two years before us but had broken up soon afterwards.
Anxious not to lose his investment (and his potential retirement haven), Jonah had rustled up enough cash to buy out his ex-partner’s share of the mortgage and was now feeling relieved to have weathered the storm. But he was also feeling very much adrift in its wake.
There was something very appealing about Jonah—a worldliness intermingled with an almost boyish vulnerability—that compelled me, towards the end of our phone conversation, to invite him to join us for dinner in Esperanza the next night.
All well and good.
Except that he was late. Very late. Michael was hungry and distinctly not amused.
“Maybe he got lost,” I suggested.
“On Vieques?” Michael shot back.
I ordered another drink.
Ten minutes later the bartender called me to the phone. It was Jonah.
“Oh my God,” he said. “I’m completely lost. I’ve driven around this island at least five times. Where the hell is Esperanza?”
“On the Caribbean side,” I said as neutrally as possible. “Basically just head south from anywhere and you’ll get here.”
“Or not,” he said gloomily. “Plus, I almost hit a cow. She had the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen. I’d never have forgiven myself.”
Eventually I handed the phone back to the bartender, who gave Jonah such clear directions he would have had to be comatose not to find his way to Esperanza.
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 23