Abierto Ya
My wife, Mary, and I just returned from two weeks in Puerto Rico, in a house that still has no electricity. We rented the house through Airbnb in November and the owner assured us there would be electricity by the end of January, but she called just after New Years and said there was still no power. She offered to help us find another place, but I had been completely seduced by the view in the Airbnb post. And we were going to Puerto Rico in part to celebrate my birthday, so Mary, bless her, went along with my decision to keep our reservation.
The house was in Rincón, a coastal town in the northwest corner of the island. Hurricane Maria had veered north as it left a bandoleer of destruction, and Rincón was spared a direct hit. But the counterclockwise winds churned up huge waves that gouged out miles of the beautiful beaches in the area, including the small one right in front of our house.
Rincón is a year-round destination for surfers. The first amateur international surf championship was held there in 1968, a statue of a surfer on a board has an honored spot in the middle of town, and route 413 going north out of Rincón is dotted with beaches, breakers, surf shops, and even a convenient lighthouse on a bluff from which to watch the surfing.
After a couple of days we had figured out how to live without electricity in the house. We charged phones in the idling car, we used the flashlights on our iPhones and got some help from little night lights. We went to either Burger King or the EC Bakery to charge our laptops and use the free wi-fi. If we were eating in we got food ready before the sun went down. We coped.
But we were constantly aware of the luxury we had compared to many of the people we talked to. Our two weeks without electricity was almost like camping. Their four months without electricity was both enormously frustrating and galling because it seemed so random. The oceanfront alleyway our house was on had twenty such dwellings, with four houses on the southern end having electricity and four on the north having the same, but with the rest in the middle without. People on the street made sure you knew that the electricity in the south stopped at the mayor’s house.
I have lived for decades among Puerto Ricans in New York’s East Harlem. I was not surprised by the gerry-rigging we were seeing in Rincón. It’s common in my neighborhood in New York to see ingenious work arounds to problems caused by government neglect, but seeing huge, live, sagging power lines running over roads can be unnerving.
Lack of power was the main problem when we were in Rincón. Without electricity households and businesses couldn’t do the work necessary to rebuild. We heard many stories of older people, parents, whose children brought them to the mainland in the aftermath of the storm, but who didn’t want to live away from their homes. Reluctantly the grown children brought their parents back and tried as best they could to make their houses habitable.
Unsurprising to us was the way in which the people we talked to were coping psychologically with Maria and the travesty of the relief effort. A weary anger mixed with what I think of as a healthy equanimity was the order of the day. I expected any mention of Trump to elicit bile but that didn’t happen. Instead, often, people smiled, said something about paper towels, and seemed like they didn’t want to ruin their day dwelling on some clown racist they couldn’t do anything about.
The owner of a souvenir shop told us that tourism on the island so far was down seventy-five percent. I don’t know if that is true but restaurants we had seen bustling on other trips to Rincón were only half full if that. A hotel we had stayed in right on the beach several times was a ghost town and the lovely beach in front of it was completely gone. A weekly downtown arts fair was mainly attended by locals. Only the surfers, it seemed, were in abundance. The storm had rearranged the coastline but, according to a long-time surfing teacher we met, the alteration actually improved the already ideal breaks.
Huge Puerto Rican flags with the hashtag #prselevanta, Puerto Rico rises, sewn into them dot the island, their free flapping a reminder of the savage winds of Maria, their words a message of hope. We did have the sense that when people spoke about Rincón getting back to normal they meant that a feeling of resiliency was taking root. Time and again people would tell us that they never want to live through such a ferocious storm, but the subtext was always that they had lived through Maria and that they were rising from the destruction.
Everywhere you go in Puerto Rico you see signs, some professionally done, some banners, some cardboard and crayon messages tacked to a door saying Abierto Ya, Open Now. Taken together these simple declarations become a stirring testament to recovery in the face of a natural and man-made disaster. The island has been battered by financial rape, by Irma just before Maria, and by Maria, but its people seem to know how to persevere, how to get past the bitterness, and how to continue the rich lives they have always led.
We had missed the organized relief efforts of the first couple of months after Maria and we didn’t see any way we could help with the lack of electricity. We were told often that we had already done the best thing we could do to help by going to the island, doing touristy things, and putting a little bit of money into the local economy. Maybe another thing we can do is to remind people on the mainland of two things — that Puerto Rico is a land of wonderful people and gorgeous natural beauty, and that it is Abierto Ya.
