No Entiendo Nada

San Juan for a Beginner

February 3, 2018

Our apartment’s windows face north and south. To the north is the Atlantic Ocean, albeit partially obstructed by a few high rises. The far-out breaking waves still entrance me, but nothing’s more exciting than the occasional cargo ship or cruise boat skimming along the horizon. At night, the cruises look like luminescent spaceships floating in empty darkness. One might imagine an unkempt Will Riker in a tacky Hawaiian shirt lounging at Ten Forward, nursing his fourth or seventh bucket-sized piña colada and wondering to himself if maybe this is what life is all about.

To the south is San Juan, the newest and most daunting object of my fascination. San Juan is a vibrant, breathing, beating 500-year-old city with roughly the same metro population as that of Cleveland or Tampa—by last count, at least. We live in Santurce, the most populous of San Juan’s 18 barrios.

There’s so much I already want to put down in words just about this small corner of Puerto Rico that’s my home now: the bizarrely active nightlife hotspot that is the Shell gas station on our street corner; the basketball games of vastly varying quality that take place nightly in an open-air gymnasium across the street; the street vendor who sells fried potatoes every day from 9:30am to 2:30pm and looks desperately bored the entire time; the history implicit even in the name “Santurce.” Of those and many other topics I will take more time to explore later. But first and foremost, I feel duty-bound to relay an impression of what it’s like to live on an island that was purportedly destroyed last fall.

I wanted to begin this by telling you that several months after a couple terrible hurricanes, San Juan is on its way to “normal” again. I wanted to say that an undaunted populace, supported by competent local governance and compassionate national leaders, have willed their lives back into order. This is the narrative that vibes with my pathologically ingrained worldview, one that’s buttressed by an innocent faith in mostly good people acting with mostly good intentions. Problems never seem too outsized with such a worldview—injustices, imbalances, and hardships are always on a steady, patient, obedient trajectory towards correction and normalization, and one only needs to wait long enough for nature to drive itself to goodness.

For a person like that, like me, to say things are or are not “normal” is dubious. I don’t know what normal was before, nor do I know what normal ought to be. My expectations are corrupted by personal experience—I’m a white Midwestern boy who daydreams about mountains while staring out windows—thus my sense of normal changes every day I’m somewhere new. This is the case in San Juan.

So I can tell you what I see here, as I intend to do for as long as I live here. But I want to be upfront about the precise tint and thickness of my particular set of goggles. In turn, you should keep that in mind when I say that San Juan—and for that matter, Puerto Rico—does not look normal to me.

One of the first things you notice about San Juan as you’re, say, driving from the airport, is that Maria has rendered most of the traffic lights inoperable, even at some of the busiest intersections. Large debris is very slowly being cleared out, but it’s not uncommon to find downed electrical poles, trees, and other miscellaneous rubble pushed to the side. Many buildings wear the scars of a hurricane, including a few that appear to be irreparably damaged.  One of my newest late night hobbies, aside from cramming Spanish lessons on Duolingo, is browsing my neighborhood on Google Street View just to get a sense of what’s changed. Storefront signage especially did not fare well.

But the physical destruction only serves as artifact and evidence to the inception of an ongoing human trauma. According to Puerto Rico’s public electric company, about 30 percent of the Commonwealth still doesn’t have electricity. That amounts to roughly one million people who have been without electricity for up to five months—the longest power outage in modern U.S. history by an abundant margin.

The stories I’ve heard from people I’ve met here reinforce the stories you’d find in most stateside reporting about Puerto Rico’s woes. Just about everyone had to wait weeks or even months before their lights came back on, and many others still don’t have power today.

One of the movers who delivered our furniture last week mentioned that despite living in San Juan—where electricity was fastest to be restored—he still doesn’t have power at home.

An Uber driver who lives just 40 minutes outside San Juan told us he had no electricity or running water, but he considered himself lucky because he had figured out how to tap a nearby spring for fresh water.

Embedded within every personal account I’ve heard is a pattern of psychological disruption that looks a lot like post-traumatic stress disorder. Everyone seems to suffer at varying degrees, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I live across the street from a school, and as I stare south out my kitchen window I often wonder how a child would process all of this. An illustrative story in the Washington Post this week put an affecting spotlight on kids’ struggles through the eyes of their teachers:

Trauma has also complicated school for many students, who grow fearful when it rains and have difficulty focusing. Teachers have addressed the storm head-on: Some are teaching the science behind hurricanes, and a high school in Rio Grande assigns students to work on a guide about recovering from a natural disaster, using their firsthand knowledge. Even for young students, the storm was something teachers could not ignore.

“When it rains, they get anxious the school will flood,” Vázquez said. “You have to calm them.”

I don’t intend to write these blog posts as a recurring enumeration of Puerto Rican tragedies. There’s way, way more than tragedy here. The truth is, I arrived in San Juan on December 30 and saw a city alive, a complex living organism with blood pumping and muscles moving. It’s a vibrant, breathing, beating human body, just like you or me or Cleveland or Tampa. But I want people to know that this body’s bones are missing. I know it sounds strange, but when you see a body, you don’t always think about the bones that are inside. That’s what keeps a body stable and secure: that rigid, sturdy structure that holds everything up. And when bones go missing, you notice that. It’s worth asking ourselves who took them, where they went, and how a bustling body gets them back.

San Juan is a normal place. Except for this: it is a body with no bones.