(Part 2 of writing that aligned with climate action 30 years ago.)
Mayor Cano’s cycling trail will follow a route beside mostly one-lane roads, paved and not, that recalls Rincón’s vicinity’s quirky heritage.
Barrio Barrero, where the trail will start, amounts to a few clapboard houses beneath corrugated tin roofs, gaily painted boats pulled onto the beach, rusting pick-ups under sheds, chickens cackling around sherbet-colored bougainvillea — all in a million-dollar setting of seagrape and banana trees that frame offshore Desecheo island.
In Corcega sits a hauntingly beautiful boarded-up train station, its weathered gray clapboard of perfect proportions, with ornamental brackets, jigsaw-cut transoms, louvered ventilators, and big hinges on high double doors and wood windows. Alongside grow shady African tulip and genep trees, and across the street a forest of mangoes and palms. Waves are calmer here, the scene subdued.
On the way to the Balneario de Rincón — the beach with public facilities — stands an old railway water tower said to be the last remaining on the island.
The Goat House, whales and Dominicans
Above Tres Palmas, where highest waves crest in winter and where surfers line up with three royal palms ashore, sits the Goat House. Goats wander the unfinished hilltop mansion, leaving traces of their presence. Immigration patrols keep watch for Dominicans trying to slip into the U.S. territory, who steer for Rincón lighthouse with its beachfront beacon visible from far across the Mona Passage.
Just north of the lighthouse is Domes Beach, named for the small nuclear facility abandoned before completion. A municipal park has opened here with a new museum of underwater treasures. Viewfinders for a quarter let visitors sight humpback and sperm whales that migrate offshore November through March. The way slices between dome and sea. No beach, just hurtling waves.
Here and there remnant ties of yesteryear’s railway show through the sand. You reach Pool’s Beach through an old brick tunnel under the narrow road that also crosses a creek.
Just north where the road turns up and curves into Aguada, the trail will end.
You don’t have to be a surfer to hang loose in Rincón. Everyone joins late afternoon touch football, volleyball, and the beach barbecues and bonfires that end active days.
Restaurants everywhere prepare local fresh food cheap, the ubiquitous arroz con habichuelas (rice and beans) blended with the savory and sweet root crops they call viandas; in an occasional piece of fresh snapper grilled with lemon while enjoying the local beers — “India” from Mayagŭez and the light one they call “Medalla”.
One of the best in the surfing area is El Nuevo Flamboyán with 4 tables on a cliffside porch above the sea. Order the 6 popping fresh jumbo shrimp that come with a big portion of arroz con habichuelas for under $10.
El Molino Quixote is good for chicken (though the seafood’s frozen) in a beautiful hammock-strung and flower-filled site by the sea on the south side of town. Also two affordable garden cabañas here.
Bahia in Joyuda, below Mayagŭez, was memorable with three sides open over the sea, and no trace of chic.
Horned Dorset Primavera, on the way south from Rincón, is maybe the best hotel on the island, but pricy. Closer to town are Villa Cofresí and Parador Villa Antonio (the latter with porch kitchens for all rooms), with attractive garden settings, in the $75-a-night range. Both are popular with weekending Sanjuaneros.
Dennis and Carol Ritch offer four more-than-minimal apartments at Pool’s Beach for around $500 a week, while Beside The Pointe offers more just down the road priced about the same.
Puerto Ricans live all the time for what might have been
I glimpsed this essential Puerto Rican ambivalence about political status in Radames Rivera, who talked with me for hours in plantain-accented English.
Radames had given up high living in San Juan to move to the hill town of Maricao because of a traditional Puerto Rican urge: the obligation to support a family endeavor. Brother Luis had fallen in love with a rundown coffee plantation. Luis knew he could make a small hotel of the estate house with family support.
“It was very hard to convince me,” says Radames. “I was a city man.”
Radames worked in the art library at the University of Puerto Rico before he began coming to the country every weekend. Now he has relocated his atelier to the family’s Parador Hacienda Juanita.
“Last night before I went to sleep,” Radames said, “I felt anguish. I want to stay here but I don’t want to stay here. I think the anguish will pass.”
In the mountains
Two fellows eased alongside, towing a horse behind.
“Amigo, what you training for?” one called out.
“Por la vida!” I called back.
Later, as I flew downhill past where they’d stopped, he called again.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
“Herberto,” I called back.
“H-e-r-b-e-r-t-o-o-o-o-o-o!” echoed behind me, my name on the Cordillera wind.
Climbing from the beautiful, preserved university town of San Germán up to Maricao, I stopped at a roadside bakery to fill my water bottles. In perfect English, Cabo Rojo native Nick Vasquez-Tell tells me when he lived in Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island, that he got his rye bread recipe from the girlfriend of ’30s racketeer Legs Diamond.
It’s the ride and the encounters, more than famous sites, you go cycling for. Phosphorescent Bay, the caves at Camuy, the Spanish colonial city of Ponce — I would save those for another time with a rental car. The bike is for wherever the backroads lead.
Climbs in Puerto Rico can angle so acutely they register “0” on the speedometer. Sometimes you get off the saddle altogether and push. Still, the rides held their own rewards. The minute you’re back on the bike the agony’s forgotten in a forest of bananas or a coffee grove.
Twice I engaged locals to drive my remaining two bags and laptop to my destination for the day. It was that or put my thumb out and wait for a pick-up truck. I figured better to pay ($20 a pop) and keep riding.
The fellow I engaged at Parador Casa Grande near Utuado told me about a road not fully on the map. The mystery road hugged Lake Caonillas, dammed on its namesake river in early morning stillness.
What vast regions of this country are barely populated! Valleys pour down hills. A cloudy morning sun bathes the lake between light and shadow.
Once, when I stopped, an old man approached. He had ridden bikes till bad knees got him. How were my knees? Was I having any problems on the road? Where did I stay overnight? At a little store higher up, Jose Antonio said I had to come back and look for a place to live here.
“Fellow on a bicycle,” he said, “would love this country.”
He gave me black coffee, sold me a couple of batteries, told me to say hello to Richie, his stepson, who works at a fruit market on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach.
Spellbound by movie marquees
I had reached Mayagüez on an evening when a city club was celebrating 100 years of popular music in Puerto Rico. Forty musicians sat on stage.
Official introductions droned on: the reading of proclamations, each introducer in turn introducing the next. They paraded their ceremony endlessly.
Four came on stage at once. Dignitaries from the audience were asked to stand. Another speaker was invited up. She motioned two more to join her. Each was photographed.
At last the musicians were introduced. Yet there followed not music but a discourse on music.
When the music at last began, trumpets poured sound ripe and round as June mangoes. Propeller-age rhythms rocked the auditorium. The sufferance of endless ceremony seemed bound up with life itself as now, ceremony indulged, older men and women rose up and danced. Young people joined in. The place came alive.
When the music stopped, the crowd continued to rouse the night. Rivers of excitement streamed out. I pedaled absorbed in the tapering flow until, passing beyond farthest reach, calm returned. I cycled a street beneath arches of colorful lights, the kind I remembered as a spellbound kid that, on movie marquees, went round and round.
