I’ve made progress. I’ve constructed a small Quonset hut over the pump for the main cistern, a task left over from the last trip. Not elegant, perhaps, but for the last couple of years the pump and electric motor have been exposed to the elements, which can’t have been good. Now they’re snug and protected, more or less.
Before:
After:
That, you’ll note, wasn’t on the to-do list I gave last time. There are many such things, and every one of them is going to take ten times longer than I estimate when I start it. Death, taxes, and ten times longer. You can count on it.
Remember the air conditioner I was working on? I got the frame installed around it. That took ten times longer, too. It doesn’t look good yet, so no picture.
Remember the pool deck I showed last time, in late-night mood lighting? Here it is, in daylight, close up. You begin to see the problem. They all have to be fastened from beneath. I estimate it will take… well, never mind.
Foliage in Puerto Rico is glorious. Here, to brighten the mood, are some trinitaria and flamboyán behind the house.
I’ve been here at Casarboles (Treehouse) in Ponce, Puerto Rico, a week and a half now, and it’s amazing how little I feel I have accomplished, despite feeling that I’ve done nothing but work. How can that be? All those trips to Home Depot, all that hardware purchased and wrestled around, all those damp, pressure-treated two-by-fours carried home in the little Kia rental car to be laid out in the sun to dry. Surely that counts for something.
Exhibit 1: Here’s the picturesque pool deck, which I’ve featured in photos in past years.
What you can’t see in the picture is that the whole thing needs to be replaced. Not the steel supports that Allysen’s dad built—they’re still solid—but all the decking, and all the railing. Since we can’t get anyone in our time frame to work on it, I’m afraid it’s my job. Hence all the two-by-fours. (Yes, I know I could order them and have them delivered, but I need to hand-select them to weed out all the warped, knotty, and split ones. Because they’re going to be decking and railing.) By the way, have you checked the price of lumber lately?! Anyway, that, I thought, would be my first big job. Except…
Exhibit 2: Jayce—in a laudable fit of cleaning and inspecting while she was here—discovered that the AC to the master bedroom was full of mold and ready for the junk heap. Well, no problem, I said, we’ll just replace it. Except that it wasn’t installed in a window. I had to chisel it, literally, out of a wall.
And then repair and build a new framework in the wall to hold the new, smaller unit.
And then trim it all off so it looks good. Days later, I’m finished with the first two parts, just starting on the trim. To be followed by paint. Soon, I hope, we’ll be able to move into the room. If it sounds like I know what I’m doing or am particularly good at any of this, well, remember that I’m a fiction writer. One step up from a grifter.
Amidst this, my brain has been hard at work trying to figure out how to rebuild the pool pump cover, which was badly designed and has warped and fallen apart. And the once-solid gate to the “back forty,” which now solidly thunks on your feet when you try to lift it aside from where it’s propped because it fell off its hinges last year. Or how to set up a gauge and alarm on our water cisterns, which are just big, dumb black plastic tanks.
Yes, the city water went off for about two days, due to electrical problems involving the no-doubt ancient pumps pushing water up the hill. Our cisterns kept us supplied, but only barely, owing to the fact that the way one discovers that the water is off is when your cisterns run dry. In this case, it was Frances next door who ran out first and alerted us. Usually, it’s the reverse. Well, at least we had the pool to shower in. But the water’s back on now, and the tanks are full. (For now!)
During all of this, Allysen has continued to work her regular job during the day, remotely just as she did from home. She does her part on the house around the edges of that work, on the domestic side of things.
Much of what we’re doing would be necessary anyway, but are really necessary if we’re to keep renting the place.
Let’s close with a nice picture. Here’s Jayce and Allysen on the outdoor terrace of the Vistas restaurant.
See that little (giant) cross up on the top of the hill? Our house is a smidge to the right of it. The best view of the ocean and the coast comes just as you are driving down the hill past La Cruceta (the cross).
As I said last time, I dropped Jayce off at the San Juan airport today, to fly home. (She is, in fact, already home with the dogs!) Time was, we used to fly straight into Ponce from Boston, via NYC or Orlando. But those flights stopped with the pandemic, so now we have to come in through San Juan, a two-hour drive over the mountains. (Just as well, as it turns out, since there were no rental cars to be had in Ponce.)
This year’s car has a stereo unit that picks up your smartphone as soon as you plug it in to charge, and shows your phone’s GPS display on a larger screen. This would be great, except for the occasional lag in update of the display. Said lag (and poor road signage) has resulted in some missed turns and frustrating detours. Today, after dropping off Jayce, I headed to Costco, not too far from the airport. I sort of spiraled in, like a vulture looking for its next meal to give up the ghost. Eventually, this and that aligned, and I made it.
After stocking up with various consumables needed for the house, I paid and headed for the pizza area. I had never eaten Costco pizza, despite my brother-in-law Andrew’s long-standing testimony to its excellence, and I thought: The time has come. So I bought a slice. I liked it! I ordered a whole pizza to bring home and hit the road.
Now, ordinarily, the route from San Juan to Ponce is pretty much a straight shot over the mountains on the reasonably well-maintained highway, PR52. Due to ongoing construction, Google Maps told me I’d save 20 minutes by taking an alternate route: Route 1, winding through the mountains. Have you ever seen the Snake River from an airliner while flying across the U.S.? Wind and curl and curl and wind and loop. Serpentine to the power of 10. That’s PR1 through the mountains, except much narrower, with tight turns, back and forth. Fractal, like the Norwegian coast. Throw in a driver in a Corvette who seems desperately to want to pass the car ahead, and who treats the single yellow lane marker like the centerline of a runway. And the little beer joints on the righthand side of the road, from which cars randomly back out into traffic. It’s fun! I pass some private driveways that look like the first hill of Cedar Point’s Millennium Force*. I’m getting a taste of the mountains. Despite all this, the detour ends up cutting my projected drive time by half an hour. That must have been some backup on 52!
Arriving home, I put the pizza box on the kitchen counter and went to find Allysen. I came back a few minutes later to find one of the neighborhood stray cats up on the counter, pizza box open, scarfing the cheese off the top of the pizza. He got almost half of it before I chased him away. Testimonial to Costco pizza?
Now what do we do (humanely) about the influx of stray cats on the hill??
Today I dropped Jayce off at the San Juan airport to fly back home to Boston after 17 days (corrected, with apologies!) of sweat and toil in the Puerto Rican sun. Okay, I exaggerate. She wasn’t actually out in the sun most of the time. But she did work hard!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you’re new to the Ponce Chronicles, Ponce is the second-largest city in Puerto Rico, where my wife Allysen’s parents built a home back in the 1970s. Sadly, her parents are no longer with us, so the home now belongs to Allysen and her brother. It’s a beautiful place, and popular among weekend vacation renters. It’s also a place that requires constant, intensive upkeep—which we’re not here most of the time to provide. So, usually, once a year, we come down to work on needed repairs. Sometimes much needed repairs, such as after Hurricane Maria and last year’s earthquakes. And this time, the pandemic. Not that Covid attacked the house. But it kept us away for longer than usual, allowing things to slide. (Unfortunately, we have been unable to find a caretaker who can both see to the needs of guests and perform the necessary level of ongoing maintenance. We really need a couple of people. If you know anyone in Ponce…)
Allysen and daughter Jayce came down 17 days ago to get started, while I stayed home with the dogs. Earlier this week, I came down to relieve Jayce and—with a few days’ overlap—send her back to take care of the dogs.
So much work needed! My first day I was officially resting in honor of Father’s Day, so all I did was fix the dryer vent and refrigerator freezer-compartment drawers, which someone had removed for God-knows-what reason. After that, I fell apart in the heat and was essentially useless for a day, until I got back into the swing of things and renewed my old friendship with Ponce Home Depot. I shudder to think how much money we pump into the Ponce economy via Home Depot!
I’ll get to the repairs in another installment. Last night we took Jayce out to celebrate her time here, and we drove along the southern coast, ending at a restaurant that had been recommended to us, name of Lordemar, in the town of Patilla. The view was spectacular! We watched the Strawberry Moon/Supermoon rise from the ocean. The restaurant was… interesting. Could have been really charming, if they’d upped the service and ambiance just a little. Menu-wise, they were 86 on my first two choices, so I settled on filet mignon, though I’m not a big steak eater. It was quite tasty! It was served with lovely silver cutlery! Huh. I’m kidding, of course. It was served with really bendy plastic utensils that were nearly incapable of cutting meat. The rest of the meal was sort of like that. The tostones were excellent. The wine was swill. The beer was Medalla, which is basically the local Bud Light.
But the view! The sea and the moon and the pelicans and the little black birds that chased each other territorially across the lawn! Priceless.
Sorry, I guess we didn’t get a picture of the little birds. But you can picture it in your mind’s eye, right?
Another shudder-thumper, a 6.0 quake, struck on the morning of our last day in Puerto Rico. It shook the house alarmingly, as we were engaged in a frantic race to finish final repair projects, clean up, get everything put away, and get on the road for a two-hour drive to San Juan for our flight back to Boston. It was scary, but everything seemed okay where we were, and we got right back to work. We didn’t get any action photos, but picture me up on the house roof here, securing the acrylic skylight in the wooden structure to the right, where it was booming every time the wind got under it.
Our last two days had been spent in the traditional way: working to frayed nerves to get painting projects done (Allysen and Jayce), feverishly finishing various small repairs (me), and with mutters of resignation transfering to the list for next year the things we didn’t get done this year. Most of that final push was done without power in most of the house, because of a blown transformer that knocked out our part of town. Our little generator-that-could was reserved for the fridge and microwave and phone chargers. Fixing things by flashlight! That’s the ticket! Do, or do not. There is no try. Hope it all looks good in daylight.
From the various quakes, we suffered some minor (we hope) cracks in extremities of the house. But after that final one in the morning, Frances next door reported seeing a building collapse downtown, from her terrace vantage point. Many damaged older structures will probably have to be knocked down. I don’t know how many people lost their homes, but thousands were sleeping out of doors, for fear of quakes in the night bringing their houses down on them. Still another hit that evening, but we were already winging our way northward at 530 mph, and heard about it later.
Throughout this ordeal, our personal suffering was largely limited to sleepless nights and repeatedly having the bejesus scared out of us as our concrete and cinder-block house (built by Allysen’s dad to exacting standards) shook and shuddered and swayed around us. But for others nearby, the costs were physical and dire. Folks still getting back on their feet from Hurricane Maria got slammed once more by nature. Unlike hurricanes, earthquakes are not a part of the normal life of Puerto Rico. It is a cruel irony that the area hardest hit by Maria was also at the center of the quake activity. This beautiful island needs help. It’s part of the United States, and it deserves to be treated that way.
Coming home from a trip, especially a work trip, is always a great relief to me. But never have I been so eager to get home as from this one. I woke up this morning, earlier than I wanted, and couldn’t get back to sleep even in the comfort of my own bed. With every quiver of our three-story wood-frame house, I thought, It’s just the wind, just the wind. Is it an earthquake? No, no, it’s just the wind.
Time for an animal report! Never mind the iguana. He’s an interloper and was chased off. No, I mean dogs. We’d gotten a complaint from one paying weekend guest about dogs running loose on the property. Really? we thought. Sometimes Toby from next door would come over. But he’s just one dog, and he’s sweet but shy. We were mystified.
Well, a couple of nights ago I was sitting at my laptop enjoying the view, when I saw a brown dog run down the steps and veer off down a side path. At first I thought it was Toby, but he didn’t respond when I called, and I didn’t get a good look. Then a second dog followed: a brief glance at me, and then down the path after the first. And then a third… and then a fourth. I got up and followed. These were no doubt strays, though they looked healthy and well fed. They showed no interest in me; they were busy making their rounds, posse on patrol, nothing happening here, folks, go back to what you were doing.
They moved with expeditious speed, doing a circuit of the house, and then past the pool and up the hill and gone. Gone where? Was there an opening in the fence?
A check the next day confirmed that—surprise!—there indeed was a place where the iron bars had worked loose enough for dogs to slip through. The Ho Chi Dog Trail! And it passed through our property. It took me an hour or two to secure the opening. I haven’t seen any dogs come through since.
But the stray cat count is up to five now. And they’ve started serenading us at night with mournful yowls. I glanced down from the deck last night to make sure there wasn’t a critter in actual distress, and I discovered an orange sort-of-tiger cat sitting on a brick wall gazing around placidly. When he saw me looking at him, his expression clearly said, “Who you lookin’ at, buddy?” Miffed at my intrusion, he ran off.
I turned and did likewise, except for the running part.
Just a few hours after I posted my last report, minimizing the effects of the quakes, the real one hit—6.4 magnitude—at 4 a.m.! It was a bone-rattling, house-shaking event that sent us leaping out of bed and running out of the house in our skivvies. It felt and sounded like a freight train hitting a bad section of track, with us sitting on the floor of a boxcar. It was scary as hell, especially for us earthquake neophytes. It was followed by aftershocks, and we spent a sleepless night, waiting for the next one.
In the moment of the quake, the power went off throughout most of the city, with the exception of the airport and scattered locations. We later learned that power had gone off for most of the island. [As I typed those last sentences, we just got another little shudder. Will I get used to them?] We soon learned all about the tectonic plates sliding past each other not far offshore. If it was scary for us, it must have been terrifying for the folks living closer to the water. Very soon there was a traffic jam of cars coming up the hill in the night: families who’d fled the coast in fear of a tsunami. Many of them were camped out on the road just below us, the next day. Fortunately, the tsunami never came. Here’s a government map showing the epicenter, just offshore.
Ironically, this was the year we’d finally decided to buy a small generator for power outages, to keep essentials like the refrigerator going. I’d bought it in Boston just before we left and mailed it, via USPS, to ourselves in Ponce. It was here, but still in its box. I’d bought a jerry can, but hadn’t filled it. Our wonderful neighbors Frances and Che, who have a whole-house generator, had us in for breakfast; and then I set out looking for gas. I found a city eerily still. Some gas stations were open, but not much else. One Walgreens was letting people in one at a time as others left. I got my gas and a second can, and headed back up to try the new generator. Soon it was muttering away, keeping our food cold and our phones charged. The electrician had not yet installed a transfer switch for the house circuits, so we just plugged the fridge in directly to the generator, and one more extension to power phone and laptop chargers. What a relief! Fortunately, we only had to depend on it for about ten hours. Power came back on late the first evening after the quake. We were amazed; we’d expected a much longer wait. You go, utility crews!
In all, we came through it okay as far as damage is concerned, if you don’t count the fraying of our nerves. Every little aftershock since has had us glancing at each other anxiously. It was Jayce’s birthday, but we decided to put off our planned celebration a few days, especially since nothing in the city was open.
I was scheduled to return home the night after the quake, leaving Allysen and Jayce to do a few more days of work while I saw to things at home, but this turn of events had us pondering whether I should stay in case of further earth-shaking developments. The decision was taken out of our hands by the cancellation of JetBlue flights to and from the island that night. Hasty rescheduling ensued. Now we’re all leaving together on Saturday. Poor Captain Jack and McDuff will have to stay in the doggie hotel a few days longer!
In other news, I got the hot water flowing again (for a few hours, before the power went out). I was wrong about my amateur diagnosis of the wrong voltage. Apparently those heating elements just corrode away all the time. They sell them at Home Depot in blister packs like disposable car chargers.
And now, with the power back, the hot water is back, too. Hrahh! And I just now saw tonight’s first JetBlue flight land, on the other side of the city. Whatever was wrong, they got it fixed!
No time for a real report today, as I have to leave shortly to pick up Jayce at the Ponce airport. She’s landing at 2 a.m., this being one of the more merciful JetBlue arrival times.
Mainly, I wanted to reassure everyone about the earthquakes, which apparently are in the news everywhere. We are fine. We’ve felt a bunch of them now, including a cluster early this morning. But nothing damaging, so far. I understand that some folks west of here and right on the coast have not been so lucky. My heart goes out to them; first the hurricanes, and then this. But just to repeat: we’re fine.
Here’s the current flight track of JetBlue, inbound. Okay, off to the airport!
Not again! Ik thought. No, wait—that’s the opening line of one of my books. That should be: “Not again!” I yelled, turning on the hot water for a tired-after-travel shower, and finding only cold water. Hadn’t we fixed the hot water last time, fixed it to last? Maybe not.
We are back in tropical Puerto Rico, to work on Allysen’s mom’s house. And despite my not-very-tough-guy screech at the cold shower, it is still quite beautiful here on the hill. We arrived in the middle of the night on New Year’s Day, and slept in. Most of our luggage wouldn’t arrive for another day and half, due to a last-minute flight change. And with just Allysen and me here, it was very quiet. Here’s a snapshot view.
And another, looking out over the city at twilight:
In the first two days, we have started making a list of all the things that need fixing and upgrading for renting to vacationers and weekend guests. (Why has no one complained about the lack of hot water? It is a mystery.) But never mind that. Here are some more interesting, er, points of interest:
Yesterday, we had two very small earthquakes, rock and sway! (In years of living in Puerto Rico, Allysen had never felt an earthquake.) Apparently there have been a lot of them around here lately, as a couple of tectonic plates nearby sidle past each other. To Californians, I’m sure it’s nothing. To us, it was rather disconcerting.
That sudden, deafening banging sound in the house was not a late firework, but the washing machine on spin cycle. (Call Sears repair. Sigh.)
There are still plenty of dogs on the hill, as they periodically erupt into loud group conversational howls. Fun.
Also, we have our traditional couple of stray cats wandering through the property. This year it’s two young tigers. I have decided to call one of them Burning Bright. Not sure about the other.
I periodically hear a train horn in the distance, which is odd, because there are no trains on the island. Must be from the shipping port, perhaps switchers moving cargo around.
We had local, artisanal pizza one night, and local craft beer the next night. Here’s Allysen learning to take a selfie with me, and Allysen taking a spousie, said spouse with a local IPA.
Oh—the hot water? I took some things apart, and discovered that our hot water heater (a really small 120 volt tank) had been professionally installed to a 220 volt line. Okay, things officially feel normal here now.
This was in some ways the most difficult trip of our annual series, partly because problems we thought we’d fixed last time came back to bite us again. Just about everything that could go wrong, did. Water, electric, plumbing, appliances, even unexpected repairs to the roof. The cistern pump that we spent so much time getting to run? It burned out and seized when the incoming power line kacked, giving us an impromptu brownout. The nice remote-operated driveway gate? The same.
Eventually we got most everything fixed, though some of it had to wait until after we’d returned home. Some of it ran right up to the wire on the last day—when, of course, we had to go to the airport at one in the morning to catch our flights home. Tempers frayed. Somehow we got through it.
Here’s the power company truck on station, putting in a new line to the house. They told Allysen they were one of only two truck crews providing emergency services to the whole city of Ponce. They did a great job. Allysen and our neighbor Frances cheer them on.
Did I mention the guards? Because the old hotel just up the street is finally slated for renovation, they hired a security crew to keep kids and carousers out of the property. Imagine our surprise to encounter armed security guards right outside our gate. They were all ex-cops or current cops, and generally a very genial group. They had nothing to do but chat with us and our workers, and take care of the stray dog that adopted them. Startling at first sight, they gradually came to seem a friendly presence.
Our friend Crystal joined us from California for the last few days, and wielded a mighty paint brush. (Crystal was once my housemate, and it was she who introduced me to Allysen, more than a few years ago.) We promised her one day of fun, and were glad we had, because it forced us to take a day of fun for ourselves. We drove across the island and walked around Old San Juan for an afternoon. It was lovely.
Here’s a whimsical sculpture chair that was surprisingly comfortable to sit in. We called it the catbird seat.
And here’s a stray kitten we named Stet, who was getting a little bolder, day by day. I hope she makes out okay. Another week or two, and we would have brought her home, for sure.
