Restless Me - Alternative Travel

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Autumn 2005

Restless Me Base Camp for the Global Traveler

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Refuge Among the Exes (cont.)

Culebra has a bumpy face. It juts from see-through water the color of Aqua Velva — the aftershave my father kept on the red Formica counter in his bathroom. It’s seven miles of wedding-cake-white sand, thick mangrove, cactus and scrubby, green hills. The island, part of a mini-archipelago that includes 22 even smaller uninhabited cays, sits smack dab between the Puerto Rican mainland and St. Thomas.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 605 acres of technicolor reef ring the island. The reef is touted as some of the healthiest in the Caribbean due to a dearth of local development and fresh water. Pollution and run-off cloud ocean water and damage coral reef, but Culebra’s climate is dry. It has no streams or rivers and gets only 25 to 30 inches of rain a year, so whatever nasties are created don’t find a natural path to the sea.

The island is the antithesis of commercial brand culture: there are no movie theaters, chain hotels, big-name resorts, or fast food joints. There isn’t even a traffic light. The business district in Dewey consists of a few restaurants and small shops. It takes about 30 minutes to walk it end-to-end.

Derelict houses — leftover relics from past hurricanes — litter the waterfront. Most homes are modest concrete or wood structures. These are the ones the full-time residents (all 2,000 of them) live in. The more advantaged build on the hills to get the best views, breezes and the protection from nasty weather. There are a few multi-million-dollar places, too. One, above isolated Zoni beach, has its own pond with a bridge and mini, motorized sailboat.

For entertainment, there’s the local private school’s annual theatre productions or the public elementary school’s salsa band, which begins its practice early each morning. All that percussion can be a shock at 8 a.m. So I learned to fortify first with a cup of café con leche from the deli. Then I’d hustle down to the pandaneria, near the concrete practice building, for a second cup and a quesito, a flaky cheese-filled breakfast pastry. In most of Puerto Rico, a large coffee is a measly 8 ounces, not nearly enough to get my synapses firing correctly. Finally, adequately caffeinated and satiated, I would stand in the bright morning sun, my back to the harbor, face the rectangle structure that had been squished onto a triangle formed by two crossed roads, and listen to the young salseros. As my head and shoulders juked in tempo, I was amazed at the complexity of the rhythms and beats they produced with precise velocity. There was no clunky, plodding “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” or “Jingle Bells”. This was nothing like the jar of squawks, squeaks and baaks my son’s school band emits. This was music.

My days on Culebra took on the same pattern: Start with music — well, coffee then music. Make love to my husband. Pack lunch. Snorkel. Walk around town. Read on the deck. Walk around town. Cook or go to dinner. Walk around town. Try to get decent reception on the single English-speaking television channel. Read. Go to bed. That pretty much summed it up. I can only attribute the two panic attacks I suffered, the first of my life, to the fact that I had never been so relaxed. It was like my body was going through stress withdrawal. How weird is that?

– – –

The day we snorkeled Punta Soldado, it was just my husband and I. Joseph stayed behind to relax and have unregulated Game Boy time. That beach is long and hot — a mass grave of bleached, broken coral coughed up from past storms. The winds blew out of the southeast that day. There, in the lee, the cove was calm and translucent and perfect.

The reef at Soldado is a quick, easy swim in either direction from the beach. We opted first for the darker area to the left where the reef starts as a low, stretched lip of vibrant fall colors, thick with sponges, corals and animal life. Further out, in deeper water near a wall of rock and reef, three purple squid, shimmying backwards, surprised us. Their large, black eyes were so bright they looked playful, almost mischievous, as if they had a secret and were on the verge of telling it.

After lunch — salami sandwiches, chips, Snickers bars and Cokes, which we ate in the shade of an Acacia — we made small sculptures out of coral chards and posed them on the ancient volcanic boulders that marched into the water. We returned to the beach a few days later and found our gallery intact. A sunbather was lounging among our handiwork on a red towel; the white pieces surrounded him like tiny sentries.

We weren’t supposed to have gone to Soldado, at least not in the vehicle we rented from Jerry of Jerry’s Jeeps. Rent from Jerry and he’ll commit you to the more civilized paths — of which the road to Soldado is not. It is, like many others on the island, a steep, narrow, dangerous dodge of axel-busting potholes and ravinelets. But, since even the main streets weren’t paved, we figured Jerry’s contract would be difficult to enforce.

Jerry doesn’t actually rent Jeeps. He rents Suzukis and Isuzus. We got a Samurai. His enterprise, directly across from the airport, is a jumble of overflowing worktables and ramshackle pre-fab sheds. Besides the rentals, he keeps six junkers that can be cannibalized for spares. Which are which is anybody’s guess. A plastic table and four chairs are near the street, under a large white tent.

Jerry wasn’t there when our realtor, Jim, dropped us off. Jim is another ex, a former New York cop. He and Jerry have a racket of sorts going. Rent real estate through Jim and he’ll steer you to his friend for transportation. He’ll even make the reservation for you. I didn’t think anything about the arrangement at first. It bothered me even less after Jim met us at the airport with fresh-picked key limes and a homemade, orange bundt cake.

When we caught up with Jerry the next day, our first priority was to trade cars — our original had a lame backseat and calcified gears. Jerry and his dog Wiggles, a purebred Chow, rounded up a less vintage model and we sat down under the tent to go over paperwork. Wiggles laid her head on my feet.

Paperwork? What Jerry really wants is to orchestrate your stay. He hand draws and color-codes a map telling you where to go, what to do and when to do it. This includes when and where to buy groceries; where to get the most reliable information about snorkeling conditions; where to get Ben and Jerry’s ice cream; where to go for sandwiches before heading to the beach; where to get a snack at the beach; where to buy liquor; which restaurant has the best outside dinning; where to go for pizza and which Chinese restaurant cures constipation.

The finished product, with its layers of blue, red, green and black lines, squiggles, arrows and notations, is a treasure — so busy it’s not navigable, but a prized souvenir all the same. We wondered later if we might have gotten a better deal on our rental elsewhere. “I don’t care,” my husband said. “I’d rather have the map.”

We sat under the tent for nearly an hour, not because there’s that much to do, but because Jerry loves a captive audience. One surefire way to prolong the confinement is to ask how he came into the possession of a show-quality dog. As Jerry tells it, vacationing big islanders sometimes tire of their pets and leave them at the Culebra dump. Eventually, sanitation workers shoot any left-behinds that stay too long. Gunshot blasts scare survivors downhill to the airport where the manager, “a real son-of-a-bitch,” according to Jerry, puts out poison traps for the riches-to-rags stories because he doesn’t like that they beg for food and attention from tourists.

Jerry couldn’t stand the killing, so he launched a one-man rescue operation. By the time we met him, he’d found homes for about 56 of the abandoned dogs, including Wiggles, who was now and will remain a fixture at Jerry’s Jeeps. “I don’t know if Jerry saved Wiggles or if Wiggles saved Jerry,” Jim said.

As part of his mission, Jerry learned to neuter unaltered animals. He acquired the skill working as an apprentice to a veterinarian who was a part-time resident. These days, a vet from the big island comes over a few times a month — as a way to justify the purchase of a large powerboat says Jerry — so professional care is available on a semi-regular basis. Jerry pinch-cuts in between to keep the stray population in check. “My medical training hasn’t been much,” he admits, “but I’ve never had a complaint.” NEXT

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