No Entiendo Nada
The Long, Stupid Journey to Puerto Rico
January 24, 2018
It was nine degrees the day we left Boston. The temperature in San Juan when we arrived was in the eighties, thus insinuating an illusion that winter could end and summer could begin all in the same day. It can’t. It hasn’t. It won’t.
My girlfriend Adrienne and I had been homeless since early October, but not “homeless” in the conventionally interpreted sense of the word. We’ve had places to stay and beds to sleep in, but never the same place or same bed for longer than a couple weeks at a time.
My personal belongings are scattered throughout the country. My beloved bicycle is dismantled and stashed in a box in the basement of Adrienne’s parents’ Massachusetts home, mere inches too big to be shipped by mail. My pricy desktop computer is bubble-wrapped and likely on a boat or a plane passing over the Bermuda Triangle at this very moment. (Update: it finally arrived, but the screen has a crack in it.) Most of the rest is in shipping crates, and I’ve been told these crates are currently sitting in the Port of Miami, perhaps awaiting some part-time crate inspector’s personal endorsement after she returns from an employer-mandated seasonal leave of absence. Or more reassuringly, I like to imagine that our couch and our bookcase and other furniture are lounging on South Beach right now, soaking up the sun and gulping margaritas as they while away the time together.
It wasn’t supposed to be quite this complicated. Adrienne was offered a job here back in July, and we were initially preparing to move to Puerto Rico in August. But opaque bureaucratic obstructions unclear to us halted the process, throwing the entire endeavor into question and officially putting our lives on hold. Finally, Adrienne’s start date was simply pushed back to September. Then October.
As we initiated the arduous, cumbersome mechanisms of relocation in somewhat short order, we held our breath when a beastly hurricane named Irma skimmed the northeastern coast of our prospective new home. It did some damage to be sure, but to us it felt like a dodged bullet—it could have been much worse. Little did we know, there was a second deadly bullet in the chamber.
Maria landed exactly one week before our move. I spent almost the entire night and most of the next day refreshing my Twitter feed, scanning for some hint of how bad, how hard, how harmful, and what next. The only useful piece of information I received for the next couple of days came from the top Puerto Rican emergency response official, delivered compactly in four precise words: “The island is destroyed.” My heart sunk into my lower intestines, and my mind swished and swirled in a bitter cocktail of uncomfortable thoughts: as far as we know, we’re moving to a destroyed island; were it not for the myriad bureaucratic obstacles, we would have been there a month ago; over three million people live there already, and their lives just became much, much more complicated than ours.
It wasn’t until the Monday after, literally as movers were taking away our belongings, when we finally got word from Adrienne’s employers: stay where you are. This time, the obstruction wasn’t opaque.
We remained in Utah for a couple more weeks. At the beginning of October, Adrienne was sent to work remotely in Boston. She flew out while I, now unemployed and momentarily unburdened of The Big Move, decided to drive across the country. I took my time, meandering through history museums and historical sites—my itinerary would only excite history nerds of very specific and scattershot interests, such as baseball, racial oppression, women’s suffrage, pizza, and huge-ass waterfalls.
From late October until late December, we stayed in various places around Boston, trying to strike a balance between saving money and avoiding excessive mooching off of friends and family. Our living situation was made tenuous by the fact that we didn’t know when we’d be re-invited to Puerto Rico—or more accurately, when it would once again be logistically plausible (and frankly, safe) for us to relocate our lives there. Thus we couldn’t quite commit to an apartment; instead, with a 14-pound cat in tow (pictured above, under the influence of his airplane drugs), we lived out of suitcases for the final few months of 2017.
December 30 became our new scheduled date of arrival in San Juan. As the day approached, a lot of people asked me how I felt about finally moving to Puerto Rico. Excited? Nervous? Relieved? “Suspicious,” is how I responded. I had spent the latter half of a year preparing for something that seemed difficult but worthwhile at the outset, then terrifying, then unlikely and almost imaginary, but somehow always still within the realm of the possible. Following the unsteady stream of news coming out of the island, there was no way to set accurate expectations. Some personal accounts from Puerto Rico (mostly around San Juan) indicated that life had pretty much gone back to normal. Other accounts differed extremely: no power, no running water, and a continued threat of death to the most frail, elderly, and medically dependent. Death counts as a result of the hurricane have been dramatically underrepresented by government officials. The struggle to provide electricity and clean water seems improbably difficult, but the whole effort also seems deliberately obstructed by the very people and organizations in charge of providing those services.
Since early October, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans have relocated to the mainland (over 300,000 in Florida alone), and for a population of 3.4 million that’s an enormous bloodletting in a relatively brief timespan. The irony of moving to an island when hoards of its lifelong residents are leaving is not lost on me. In fact you might understand why it makes me feel suspicious. Suspicious that moving to Puerto Rico now, of all times, is the wrong time. Suspicious that I even belong in a place that just so recently and vividly survived a collective trauma, and that I should be warmly (or even lukewarmly) received as a person from the nation-at-large which has neglected this place’s immediate and long-term needs. For Adrienne, it might be a little more straightforward: she was hired to do a job here, and she intends to honor that commitment. But for me, a tag-along who admittedly had every intention of sitting on the beach, writing long-winded essays, and watching baseball games ad infinitum, I am suspicious of myself and my own motives—as well-intentioned as I and they might be.
And yet, come the morning of December 30, Adrienne’s parents drove us to Boston Logan, where it was nine degrees Fahrenheit outside—a bitter sendoff. We got our bags checked, walked through security, and stepped onto the plane. Even while we were in the air and as I was watching Logan Lucky on the small headrest screen in front of me, I wondered if the plane might crash in the ocean, or if Kim Jong Un would show up in a fighter jet alongside our plane and blow us out of the sky, or if a giant sea monster would crawl up onto the tarmac at San Juan’s airport and spread its tentacles across all the runways, or if Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Vishnu, Oprah, and Mohammed would appear instantaneously in the middle aisle to announce that everyone on the plane had been chosen for a secret mission to save humanity from fidget spinners, which are actually evil space aliens that have invaded Earth from the planet Fidgetopia with the intention of stealing all the world’s best dark chocolate. Anything seemed equally plausible to our plane landing in San Juan.
As we made our final approach, one of the flight attendants riled the passengers into a chant of “Puerto Rico Se Levanta,” a rallying cry evoked frequently in Puerto Rico since Maria. As the people around me chanted and clapped their hands, I almost started to cry. No one knew how long Adrienne and I had waited to make Puerto Rico our new home. But in understanding and appreciating how hard Puerto Ricans were fighting to keep their old home, I still had a very long journey ahead.
The temperature when we landed in San Juan was above 80 degrees. My winter coat took up all the extra space in my backpack, so I had no choice but to continue wearing the hoodie I threw on earlier in the dim, cold light of Massachusetts. Everything outside the terminal looked green and humid. It was like summer began and winter finally ended, all in the space of one day. But it didn’t. It hadn’t. It won’t.