
A Wilderness Unfolding by Carolyn Megan
1
On Fridays, the government workers detonate the ordnance they dig up during the week. The sound rumbles like thunder across the island. Out on the old Navy site, the brambles and vines overtake the fences, curling over the barbed wire and drawing it back to soil. Trees full of coconuts, mangroves along the shoreline: the Navy seized the best sites on the island of Vieques in 1941 originally as a safe haven for the British in WW II but it was never used for this reason. Later the Navy established quarters on the west and east side – one to store ammunition, the other to run practice drills. They fired ordnance at a test ship anchored in the harbor, did mock landings, cut down coconut trees and tied them together to secure the beach. When the Navy evacuated in 2003, they left behind two struggling nature preserves and a landscape littered with ordnance, heavy metals, napalm, Agent Orange, and depleted uranium leaching into the soil and into the Viequenses themselves.
2
Carla, the caretaker for the rental house, meets Michael and me at the supermercado and drives us up to the house, as there are no street signs to guide us. We wind our way over ragged roads, around holes and entire gullies that necessitate our coming to a complete stop before inching the car forward.
Skinny hard dogs run out and bark as we pass. Mixed breeds: a boxer’s square head, a retriever’s feathery tail, a basset’s small legs. The air smells rich and fertile, luminous flowers burst from vines that strangle trees, the whir of insects vibrate; we move past small rebar shacks and up the hill towards the walled-in modern homes built by moneyed foreigners. I maneuver the car over to the road’s precipice to let a group of tourists on horseback past. Carla’s car disappears out of sight.
In the early evening, voices rise and fall, dogs bark, insects hit the screen, a roach skitters across the floor, the church band practices for Sunday – each song a mamba or salsa. And beyond that, the ocean, which we can’t actually hear up in the hills but whose sound I imagine. We draw the iron gates over the windows and doors as Carla has shown us.
A car minus its muffler moves up and down the streets. The neighbor quiets his dog, “Señor, señor, cállate, cállate.” Distant shouts, the high walls surrounding the house, the insects incessant whine, the pull chain from the ceiling fan suspended over the bed: for a moment, I am at my new home in Portland, Maine where at night we hear the shatter of beer bottles against the curb and drunken arguments spilling out from the bar down the street. In Portland we shut the chain link fence at the end of our driveway and hope that we won’t find discarded beer cans or needles on our steps in the morning.
At dawn, roosters crow, a diesel engine coughs, I hear a voice in the distance, Radio Hispana in the background – the beginning of Latino beat, the bananaquit’s call in the trees, the soft wind flapping the window shade.
I check for roaches before stepping into my shoes and go down to the kitchen while Michael still sleeps. When I turn on the faucet, the cistern pump on top of the house clicks.
“The Navy laid the water pipe from Puerto Rico over to the island. They did some good,” Carla told us when showing us the house. “When tourist season is high, around Easter, the store runs out of food, the two stations run out of gas and the water spits out. Sometimes, I think it’s someone down in the village turning the water off just to get people off island more quickly.” Aren’t we part of the tourists to whom she refers?
I set the key into the padlock and let the chain fall, the weight heavy in my hand. I reach out to the iron grate and drag the gate to the side. Outside a swarm of beetles devour the sticky sap running down one of the trees, an indigo hummingbird startles in the bougainvillea.
3
On April 19, 1999, David Sanes Rodriguez stands outside the observation post where he works as a civilian security guard for the Navy. He is a Viequense native, a gregarious man, known for his laughter and loud voice. Who knows what draws him outside at that moment? Maybe he hears the planes in the distance and thrills to the sound. Maybe he is surprised to hear planes so close by when the target sight is over a mile away. Maybe he simply wants to be out in the air that in April smells of early green and earth. Maybe he understands that already chemicals seep into the ground, a different kind of wildness unfolding.
Clouds form and hang low as sunset approaches. Weather is coming in hard and it’s difficult to see in the mist. Does Rodriguez see the plane overhead? Does he hear the plane release two 500lb loads only fifty feet away on either side of him?
Birds quiet with the predator nearby. Bombs shriek a descending note as they fall. And after the explosion when the debris has settled and the air is only the sound of singe and burn and tear and shatter, there is a moment of silence before the first cry of one of the survivors. Does Rodriguez see where the shrapnel severs his femoral artery or does he simply fall, his blood pooling on the dry dirt? Does nature absorb Rodriguez’s blood as it has been absorbing all the Navy’s aggressions – mutating toxins into three clawed crabs and milky-eyed fish with two eyes on one side of their head?
The twenty-five year old pilot engaged in target practice claims that the observation tower’s red and white coloring somehow isn’t visible in the jungle’s green. Does he feel invincible soaring over the jungle, flying low and pressing the button that leaves in his trail only explosion and rising smoke? Does he circle back? Does he know Rogriguez?
And what of the thirty-five year old dispatcher in ground control who gives permission for the pilot to release the load?
What can we know in the end: David is dead, two people injured, the ground dispatcher transfers off island, the pilot – name withheld – disappears like the chemicals themselves, underground and unaccountable.
4
We drive to Playa Grande, one of the former Navy footholds. Horses walk in the center of town, graze on the hospital’s front lawns. When we rented the car, the agent suggested we get horse collision insurance. “They roam freely and can surprise you.”
At Playa Grande, the remains of the Navy presence are visible in the coiled barb wire, broken fences, crumbling structures. Vines and vegetation draw the vacant buildings back to the soil. It’s easy to imagine that nature has somehow healed itself, surging onward, but also too, to imagine the leaching moving underground invisibly. For toxicity’s subterfuge moves quietly: all appearances deceive.
We drive past the first parking lot and continue down a dirt road. No-See-Ums swarm and spill into the open car windows. We park and leave the car unlocked as the rental agent suggested. “They’ll break the windows to get at your items. Just bring what you need and watch the remote places. With the influx of tourists, everybody has discovered a way to make a living on the island.” Though it’s never clear who they are, we are wary and obey.
A hummingbird hovers near a collapsing barbed wire fence. Out on the beach, sea grape vines with large spade shaped leaves, climb trees, encircle limbs, pull trees to the ground. Along the shoreline, the leaves float back and forth in the current. We see the drop off, the flow of rip tide. Lush flowers with explosive pink and orange petals horrify with their beauty. Hundreds of ants crawl at its center.
Green vines move across the beach. A frigate bird flies nearby – its long ghastly reach of wings barely beating. I watch a line of pelicans flying above the water. Everything seems tenuous, the tip of the birds’ wings could hit the water, the tendrils of vines reach out for more – another tree, another surface. The water shimmers; the clouds tremble.
5
We are here as the result of the kindness of a friend who has loaned the house that her son owns on the island. He is an airline executive who bought the house for cheap just after the Navy evacuated. We seek a reprieve from our new neighborhood in Portland where in the first months, someone breaks down the dog door installed by the previous owner and attempts to enter. Upon returning from work, I walk into the kitchen and feel the shock of cold air and see the gaping opening in the door dented from the kick of a boot.
“You were lucky they weren’t able to fit through the door,” the reporting police officer tells me. “You should get rid of the dog door; it’s only an invitation for people to enter.”
Days later, we discover the padlock on the shed broken and our bikes stolen. Plants, decorations, grille; each day when we return from work, we survey the yard to see what is missing.
“Bayside is a neighborhood in transition,” the realtor told us when we looked at the house. We are never clear what we are transitioning from and towards. The street is a contradiction: homeless shelter, high-end steak house, mosque, food pantry, brunch place, dive bar.
These visible edges of wealth, poverty, class, race, religion, and culture drew me to live here. I understood all that the neighborhood held in balance and somehow this transparency made me feel safe. My desire was to shape and fit the word home into Bayside too.
I didn’t yet understand that a neighborhood has its own identities informed by its history and the tensions of the past.
I’m trying to understand how environmental toxicity becomes internalized in thoughts about one’s worth and what one deserves.
Maybe I don’t want to understand that once toxicity is internalized, those thoughts become the fulfillment of that place.
When there is talk about building another shelter at the bottom of the street, the neighbors rally together. “Enough,” we say. “It’s time for other Portland neighborhoods to house social service and low income initiatives.” When the city council issues the permit to build, a city councilor tells me, “What can you expect, it’s Bayside. This is what happens there.”
When we protest the bar’s liquor renewal license as the direct cause for some of the fighting and late night vandalizing on the street, the police officer at the hearing says, “It’s the neighborhood, not the bar.”
Will I ever understand that hoping to make changes in a neighborhood is an undoing of deeply held beliefs both external and internal about the neighborhood’s value and worth?
6
David Rodriguez’s death galvanizes four years of civil protest. Viequenses want their home back; citizens occupy the Navy’s test site where they are arrested. When they’re released, they return to the site again.
On Mother’s Day fishermen, with less and less fish to harvest, anchor in the harbor to stop the Navy war games. Ordnance has settled into the ocean floor and a load of uranium has disappeared; no one in the Navy administration can say where it went. But the natives will tell you that it rests somewhere in the island where it leaches into the soil. They will tell you that it’s seeded in the lung’s lining and the cancer that ravages a high percentage of the islanders. They will tell you that high exposure of mercury finds its way into utero and results in the increase of learning disabilities. The Navy denies all of these claims and evacuates the island, yet the EPA names the island a superfund site and orders the Navy to clean up the mess. The Navy has not kept record of the ordnance and begins a program of burning the jungle and detonating found ammunition. The same toxins explode into the air and float down to the soil.
7
Late in the day, when the air cools, the blinds and doors stand open in the houses we pass. Chickens run over the yard, televisions glow and reveal the sparsely furnished rooms. A mattress on the floor, boxes for tables and chairs. Small homes built of rebar and cement to withstand hurricane season – all of them in beautiful colors. Lilac, saffron, tangerine, mango, yellow, robin egg blue: bright colors along the hillside even in the most decrepit of homes.
For over a century Viequenses toiled in the back-breaking industries of sugar and tobacco until the 1930s when sugar prices fell and the industry collapsed. Workers had little to show for their efforts and when the Navy arrived in the 1940s and offered to buy the plantations, landowners accepted. Those who had homes sold them for $150-$200 or in some cases were forcibly removed by the Navy in the course of one day. Natives left for Puerto Rico or the main land or stayed and collected welfare.
Today tourists are the new infiltrators, buying valuable land, developing eco hotels in pristine areas, erecting gated communities and driving the market. Citizens who want to reclaim land are unsure of what it is that they claim. Wherever we drive on the island, we pass the signs nailed to trees, spray painted on the sides of abandoned or crumbling homes: No des tu tierra al extrano por mas que te pague bien and El que su terruno vende, vende la patria con el.
“Don’t sell your land to the foreigner. When you sell the land you’re selling your homeland as well. “
8
What if the place you claim as home is toxic?
In 1827 when our home was built, the Bayside area of Portland was the site of the city’s industry. A tannery belched smoke into the sky and dumped dye into the marsh where tidal currents carried the toxin into the small river edging the neighborhood. The air carried the stench of Bayside’s slaughterhouse, and blood and feces seeped into the soil and water sources. Boats came into the harbor for goods and sailed out in a sea of pigmented red and yellow. At night, people were afraid to walk through the neighborhood for fear of being robbed or worse.
I wonder what airborne toxins may have settled into the dirt when our house was erected. When Michael inches through our basement’s crawl space to shut or open the windows, he stirs up a layer of dust that rises up through the gaps in our floorboards, leaving a layer of silt. He wears a protective facemask and breathes through a carbon filter. The crawl space smells of dirt and something else that I cannot identify. I reason that with the passage of almost two-hundred years since the house’s construction, there can’t be any danger lurking in the soil. But I am afraid of what the dirt holds and try to avoid going into the basement.
Each time Michael comes back up from the cellar, I drill him for the details: Does it seem okay? Do you see mold? Is the foundation secure? Did you see mice? Rats? Do you sense something wrong in the soil?
Michael pulls the goggles off his face, peels off the protective plastic suit he wears. He has seen a red salamander running along the far reaches of the crawl space. I think of red dye, blood and imagine a brown or olive green salamander carrying the distant tannery in its DNA. We go online and Michael identifies the eastern red-backed salamander. “See,” he says. “It’s supposed to be red.”
Is this how toxicity builds? Did anyone express concerns in the early 1800s when Bayside’s air became so fetid that people covered their faces as they walked down the street? Or did those who had the means simply move away and leave behind a toxic landscape to the working class and newly arrived immigrants?
9
We meet our group at dusk and climb into the tour guide’s van where other gringos wait. The radio blasts caribe music and makes the silence comfortable. In the front seat, the tour guides speak in a rapid dialect that I’m not able to understand. On dark roads, the van moves up and down over the roots of trees and through deep potholes filled with the afternoon’s showers. The van’s lights scan thick vines arcing over the road and the growth pressing in from all sides as we make our way to the biolumniscent bay – one of the businesses recently developed around the eco-tour industry.
“Welcome,” the tour guide says. “My name is Enrique. The bay is bordered by mangroves and this makes possible the abundance of B12 upon which dinoflagellates live. No mangrove, no bacteria, no dinoflagellates. So we must protect this bay. It is one of the unspoiled places on the island. One of the areas that we fight for.”
The guides unload kayaks from the trailer. Clouds move quickly overhead, revealing the first pinpricks of stars. “Look,” Enrique’s voice floats over the water. “When the dinoflagellates are disturbed, they light up.” Startled fish dart away followed by a stream of light.
The pull of the paddles calms; each stroke leaves a milky train in the water.
Out on the bay, we tie the boats together and lower ourselves into the warm water. Around me, other participants bob and laugh at the line of color left in their wake as they move their arms and legs.
I am afraid of the wildness here, of what it holds and of what might be held in my home in Portland. I am afraid that I don’t know when to fight to make change, not only in the landscape but also in my expectations of myself. I’m afraid not to know when to give up and when to continue fighting. And if indeed Michael and I decide to leave our Bayside home, I am afraid that I will join the ranks of people dismissing a neighborhood, landscape and people as if it is their fault, and that I will turn and look away. I am afraid that I won’t be able to afford to leave.
But here in the water, the basin’s wildness feels like an opening, a possibility. Untouched and clear. The mangroves haven’t been cut down and thus protect the basin. They create nutrients for a healthy bay and the organisms that thrive. Here, surrounded by the island’s hills, the mangroves offer a womb of protection. I move away from Michael and the other swimmers and float on my back, cup my hands and let the beads of phosphorescence – the whole cosmos of silvery bubbles – run down my arms.
Mangrove trees rustle at the water’s edge, Orion and Venus define the night sky. Up on the hillside, bare light bulbs illuminate the road.
Carolyn Megan teaches at Colby College and facilitates nonfiction and fiction workshops through the Maine Writing Workshop in Portland, Maine. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The New York Times, MS. Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Review and Crab Orchard Review.
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