Buscando
By Eric Beeman
There are lucky dogs, and unlucky dogs.
Lucky ones collared and cared for, living high on a hill with a
view of across the strait of the Palaminos and Culebra islands–sunrises,
moonrises, and eastern clouds, each day tracking above their watchful eyes.
They find sweet comfort in the sunshine and Leeward breezes. The pack consists
of three small white Havanese, a black-brown half-shepherd half-hound, and two
midsized yellow mixes. The five animals work in unison, greeting guests,
barking at every car that ascends the winding driveway to the top where the
hotelito sits. Life lived in a guest house. Trusting the daily neck scratches
from a rotation of visitors, eating left over dinners from a home-style meal
pot that the man (he is the cook, cleaner, bartender, and guest attendant)
prepares.
These dogs are not pampered, but they are welcome to stay, or
go. Home and free at once, from dawn till dusk, when the coqui
begin their cacophonous song.
Down on shores beyond the city of Fajardo a canine pack of satos
forage in the dry-season barely-damp mangrove. Little yellow pups stalking
lizards like a prized meal, off put by the scent of a mongoose, yelping loudly
at the larger dogs that steal their catch. Females live a short life lived
perpetually pregnant, and shooed away by a team of the grounds keepers
collecting dried-broom tree branches within the boundary of the Parque Nacional
Balneario, or on the beach of The Waldorf el Conquistador, or the small lawns,
tiny walled-in claims of land that parse up suburban villas.
Wherever they scavenge unwelcome. Unlucky.
* * *
For me, a simple walk from Playa Colora to the parking lot
became a Mishap in the Mangrove. I didn't remember any turns on the way in. But
on the way out, there appeared many. One wrong, mostly unconscious choice had
left me lost in the decaying stench of a jungle. The labyrinth laughed at me,
birds, and small animals made strange caw-caw-lings and human-ish
shrieks and whorls. The splashes of sun dappled an ever-narrowing trail
descending toward the swamp bottom, where I imagined a half man half iguana
centaur awaited my wayward arrival.
But the trail turned up, and sunny again, where I encountered an
assembled group of also-lost people. A Puerto Rican man, who spoke plenty of
English because he grew up in New York, and his adult daughter who didn't,
because she grew up here. They were joined by a floundering couple of quiet
married folk from Long Island. All of us together looking for the way back to
park entrance.
The daughter was dressed for a drink by the pool, not a hike in
the mangrove. She wore a tiny white bikini, walked in flip flops and had a
large canvas beach bag slung over her shoulder. She carried a smile and island
attitude, going with the flow under no particular concern, such as I had, that
we'd sucked into the mud, brackish with volcanic silt and ever-composting
foliage. Her father shouted loudly for our attention, as if to say, I am
watching you, as we jogged ahead to beat the edge a clearing looking for a sign
of civilization. Not that it mattered to me. Girls in white bikinis don't need
protection from me. The dead end path led to an RV park, seemingly deserted,
surrounded by a ten-foot fence, and a sign, NO ENTRADA.
But we were getting closer.
The Long Island couple had long ago given up on knowing where
they were. Giving full faith toward the taut and tanned well-fed belly of the
man that was guiding us. The tourists tapped their empty water bottles against
their thighs in gentle but nervous syncopation.
For the first time in my life, I slowed my pace and stuck with a
group. The father and I powered up our cell phones, and used the GPS map to
guide our way back to the dimensionless curve of blue that represented the cove
and the beach we were seeking. As we walked, a dot on my phone pinpointed
our travails, ever so slowly making progress, like a hedgehog plodding his way
home with a daydream in his head.
* * *
Cats are the only mammals known not to forgive. If you step on a
house cat's tail it will remember, and carry the grudge forth until the
transgression doesn't matter to it anymore. No one can win absolution with
petting, a treat, or a toy. Their behavior is their own prerogative.
A cat kept in the home will love you, keep you, and share the
space. But make it known who owns the spot of sunshine on the floor in front of
the window.
Feral kittens aren't so standoffish. They can't afford to be.
Once they set paws beyond their nursing habit, they and gather in the
marketplace, begging for scraps under the cafe tables on the sidewalks across
from the Mercado Santurce. Taking time to pounce and bat at each other's noses
or tails between devouring the falling crumbs, or licking food from
deliberately dipped fingers of the diners above them.
Cute kittens will convince you with their clean faces. The older
ones? Look out. Battle tested and street certified. There is a fight to
be had and a territory to watch over. Seeking shelter in the corner room of a
graffiti-covered building. Ghoulish ghosts and blue-faced devils spray painted
on the walls above their heads.
Safety is relative.
* * *
To conserve paper and the trouble of packing and keeping it dry,
I downloaded all of the directions I thought I would need, saved them as PDFs,
in the order in which I hoped to use them, inside a desktop folder on my
MacBook's screen. For reasons unknown, during the ascent toward the hotelito,
the computer wouldn't turn on. I attempted every reboot strategy I could:
pushing the power button repeatedly, opening and closing the computer lid
repeatedly, pressing Command Option Escape ad nauseum.
Nada.
Maybe it needed rest, perhaps the humidity crossed its switches.
I don't know. But I did know I needed to get to the hotel before dark, or I
would never find it. So I drove my rent-a-car into the foothills of Naranjo
directionless and unfettered by knowing where I was.
Afternoon rains soaked the air and windshield. Soft water like a
showerhead set on spray. Red-earth mud showed through the plowed green terraces
that opened up the sky in spaces between the mountains. The curves of the road
grew tighter, raising the altitude with every rolling turn. My rented Kia, so
accustomed to the groomed tarmac of the autopista where the odometer had
tallied the previous 276 miles, seemed to revel in the challenge, its engine
raced with joy as it revved atop over a mishegas of stone, dirt, and cinder
that pieced the pavement patches together.
Through the wonder of a dyslexic memory, instead of taking of
taking a right, and a right (which the downloaded maps would have shown me) I
took a left, a left, and a left. Farther and farther I wound on the
winnowing roads. Back home, these paths would be undeserving of any official
designation. But here they were blazed with black-and-white signs and numbers
indicating their designation as a state (colony) route: 965, 985, 971, 976.
Combinations of nine-hundreds conflated my mind.
I was lost.
Finally the Kia crawled through a tilted antique green metal
gate, indicating an entry into some kind of private property. But it was
not a hotel. It was a steep descent of gravel that I feared would either take
me to the other side of the island or the middle of the rain forest. I
executed a judicious twelve-point turn and headed back (I hoped) the way I
came.
The sun was gleaming now, and a rainbow projected over the
sloping landscape, lush, wet, and green. Then, a few miles from where I
reversed direction, I came upon a mini-van which crossed the entire width of
the road, and I had to stop.
The van's front wheel had sunk nearly afoot off the edge into
the red mud. Three young Japanese-American students were shooting I-Phone
movies of their predicament, while their driver pushed the gas. The misdirected
tire spun and spun, spewing the thick farm grass with a spray of red dots.
I was grateful (for not being the one stuck) and simultaneously
bereft that (without a doubt) I could not drive around them without enduring
the same fate. Nor could I help them, wearing flip-flops, and temporarily
possessing a car half the size of theirs. None of this could prove useful in
pushing them out of the muck.
Every two minutes another vehicle arrived, mostly Toyota pickup
trucks driven by farmers and landowners. The men brandished patience, smiles,
and a few good yucks, interspersed with Spanish swears thrown in our direction.
Variations of ¡so pendejo! and ¡que chavienda! Spoken in jest
with expectation that the audience would understand how they had annoyed them,
also acknowledging that it wasn't really their fault; the road was narrow, the
ground was wet. They didn't know where they were going.
After a long surveillance and assessment of the scene by one of
the men, a plan was put in place. He spirited a thick-gauged fifty-foot hemp
rope from the bed of his truck. He crawled beneath the van like a crab on his
back and tied one end of the rope to something substantial in the
undercarriage. Then he angled the rope off of a cement utility pole at
the edge of the field, and back to the bumper of his own truck. With some
implicit hand signals directed at the driver of the van the extrication began.
The entire apparatus of rigged together van, pole, and truck shook, and the
telephone and electric wires trembled but held their tension. Rubber found
traction.
And the scene dispersed.
* * *
That night, I lay in bed at the hotelito. A thunderstorm
passed, the water drained from the tin roof into collection urns stationed at
the corners of the guesthouse beneath the wide eaves of the hipped roof. Moonlight
broke the clouds and drew path to where the ocean and horizon meet. The
rainforest awoke with a rousing cheep--cheep--hum. While I am certain these
were the sounds of frogs and insects, my sleepy mind drifted toward the
birdfeeder hanging from the potting shed in my backyard.
Finches, chickadees, catbirds, robins, cardinals, jays, and
blackbirds, they all visit the clear tube seed silo swinging from a hook.
Beaks dart into tiny holes to retrieve the meal. Yes it is March but
winter is retreating at a glacial pace. The snow melts slowly. A migratory
pile-up is happening in Rhode Island, cautiously waiting out the cold before
going any further north.
Seedeaters thrive, insectivores not so much. It is too cold, too
late, this year.
The pecking order is fierce, birds jockey for position along the
roofline of the shed and the peak of the garden fence.
Wait your turn and go hungry, or get you beak in there somehow.
One poor creature is always shut out. It addles along, thin and
under-fat, accepting it's place. On the ground gleaning tiny pieces of
nutrition from the husks of sunflower seeds, because it knows that's the best
shot it's got at life.
The cheerrping and chuurrbling of the temperate El
Yunque night eased into a rocking assonance. A humming planetary vibrato of
insects and tree frogs sang me to sleep.
* * *
"You can't get lost in Puerto Rico," said the woman on
the plane next to me, going home to visit her mother. "No matter where you
go, you are still on the island. It's not like here where you drive and drive
and are in three different states before you realize it."
If I wasn't lost, I was always searching. Buscando.
I parked the car in el centro de Ponce, fed quarters in a meter
and wandered the blocks wooden, stucco homes, iron balconies. An architectural
cross section of Key West, Florida and Sevilla, Spain unfolded around me.
Beneath blooming yellow and pink flowered trees strolling through a myriad of
shops. Stopping inside a resale shop of Catholic artifacts, religious ornamentation
sold from estates and deconsecrated churches. I considered buying
something and shipping it home, but alone it would have meant nothing, the
message required context.
As I approached a plaza, everyone I saw seemed to have a plastic
spoon and cup full of bright colored ice cream, the source of which I wanted to
find. Scooped from a vendor with a cart, with bells jangling from the
side as he moved forward. I pointed toward mango, found a place to sit,
and took in the scene.
It was Middle School recess, or early release Friday. One of
those things or maybe even a siesta, existing as a relic in this, the most
Spanish of American towns. Uniformed girls and boys wearing plaid skirts and
white blouses or khakis and monochrome polo shirts emblazoned with school logos
ambled about in small groups. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year-olds ambled
about. So many couples! Holding hands, kissing, whispering in each other's
ears, flirting on schoolyard swings or stone benches near fountains. Rehearsing
for love, reading from a five hundred year old script. Practicing romance as a
learned art.
No sign of gay love, anything bucking tradition, or at all like
me.
Through the iron and stone gates of a convent, a beautiful young
nun, in gleaming white habit, flitted between the archways, leaning forward as
she walked swiftly in and out of view, an apparition wavering in the hot sun.
She had something to do, some place to be, right that moment.
Don't we all? Don't I?
Alone, but present together with the people and the places
around me.
Searching.
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