“We’re lost, Daddy, aren’t we?” Maddy pulled on the hem of Scott’s damp t-shirt, daring him to lie into her big brown eyes. She rested her small hand on his forearm.
“Of course not,” Scott said.
“Yeah, we are,” his older kid, Ash, said, elbowing Maddy to push past her on the overgrown rain-forest path.
“Daddy!”
Lynne dragged the pack off Scott’s shoulders, dropped it to the ground. “There’s no need to shove, Ash. And, of course, we’re not lost. You can’t get lost in the El Yunque. There are marked trails everywhere.” She handed Scott the park map. “You want to look again? I mean, just to be sure this is the right way.”
“I know where we’re going.”
Ash edged back down. “That doesn’t make sense, Mom.”
“What? That you can’t get lost? You can’t.”
“The El Yunque. El means the.”
Scott didn’t like the way Ash was looking down on Lynne, literally; Ash had shot up almost a half foot in the past year. He surveyed his fourteen-year-old son’s long awkward frame, the overly baggy shorts, the faded slogan t-shirt, until his eyes lit on the bottle of water in Ash’s hand. He wrested the bottle away, popped off the cap, and gulped down half the contents. He still had a good two inches on the kid, and probably thirty pounds.
Ash didn’t say anything, only stepped back.
About a mile earlier, the drizzle had stopped, and the strong Puerto Rican sun was now streaking through the elephant-sized palm fronds sheltering the path, like rays of molten lava. The angry red patch of acne on Ash’s forehead shone in the heat. This was their first trip as a family, beyond visits to Scott’s in-laws’ house on the Jersey shore, in three years. The last time they took a real vacation, Ash had been hardly chest high, just a little boy.
Scott sighed and handed Ash the water. “I’m glad you’re paying attention in Spanish class.”
Lynne wiped her neck underneath her short brown hair. “See, if we go that way,” she said, pointing in a different direction than the one where Scott was leading them, “we’ll continue to head towards the peak. If we go that way, we head for the Mt. Britton Tower.”
“How about that way?” Maddy asked, indicating a break in the flora just ahead of them.
“I don’t think that’s a path, Maddy. I think that’s just a viewpoint.”
“Like of the ocean? Can we go see, Daddy?”
Scott pushed a fan of ferns to one side and leaned against a boulder. With the edge of his t-shirt sleeve, he dried his brow. A mass of coleus brushed his ankles, their deep purple edged by green, much darker and larger than the coleus he’d endlessly mowed around at the tennis club when he was a kid. He’d been like Maddy once, ten years old, believing there was something exciting around every corner. He could still remember having had that feeling, although he certainly didn’t feel it now. It had been years since he’d felt it.
“There will be a good view from the top,” Lynne said. “I’m sure we’ll be able to see the sea.”
“You could wait here,” Maddy said. “I’d run.”
How quick Maddy was to find enthusiasm for stuff. “You mean, like, the four of us?” she had said, jumping up to see when he’d come home with the vacation brochures three weeks ago. “We’ll get on a plane? And there’ll be sun? And we can go swimming?”
“All the above,” Scott had said, spreading the brochures out on the dining room table.
Lynne had set her calculator down on her clients’ tax returns and fingered through the travel agency’s material. She’d looked up at him, her eyes thoughtful. “Are you sure this is okay, Scott? And that you should leave the shop?”
“It’s just five days,” he’d said, controlling the urge to sweep the whole mess of brochures off the table. Did she have to remind him how slow business had become? How desperate he was for every customer? “Jocelyn can run things.”
“Really? Because—” she’d begun.
“Oh, Christ, Lynne. Can’t we just take a trip and enjoy ourselves?”
Of course, leaving right then had made no sense to Lynne. She freelanced as an accountant; there couldn’t be a worse time of year for her to take five days off than in the late winter or spring. Moreover, she did the books for the store and knew how slow peddling tennis paraphernalia has been for him since the pandemic.
He’d stared her down until she’d tapped one of the brochures with a finger and said, “Well, then great! I’ll get myself a new bathing suit. It’s the Caribbean, right? I’ll order a two piece!”
A vision had come to his eyes of a younger Lynne, darting back and forth on the court in a tiny tennis skirt that flounced up and down over her strong smooth thighs that rose when she stooped to pick up a tennis ball. Back before they had kids, Lynne and he used to hit a ball a couple of times a week. She’d never offered him any serious competition, but he’d admired the surprising saltiness of her on-court language.
He couldn’t remember the last time he saw her in tennis whites now, much less a bikini.
“Christ, Mom. Spare us the gory details.” Ash had said. “You sure we can afford a vacation, Dad? You told me we couldn’t afford to get me a new computer.”
“Don’t say ‘Christ’ to your mother. I didn’t say we couldn’t afford a new computer. I said we didn’t have the money to throw away on it. That’s not the same thing. You don’t need a new computer. But we need to get away.”
He hadn’t said what he was really thinking, which was that he needed to get away. He hadn’t explained how he’d been walking down the street to his car, asking himself how he was going to get through one more day of this life, when he’d noticed the travel agency and decided then and there to book a trip. He hadn’t shared that he would have been ready to book it for himself alone if he could have.
Lynne was a good person, an agreeable partner, and she seemed happy with their life. But Lynne wasn’t the one who used to stand on the winner’s podium after a tournament and feel as though on top of Mount Olympus. It wasn’t the loss of his game that crushed him. It was the disappearance of the person who used to play that game. These days, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw the sloping of his shoulders, the slackness of his belly. All that muscle splitting away from the bone, atrophying. It wasn’t the shop failing. It was the thought that he’d come to a place where he could accept such a failure.
He didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want. The person he was becoming! Something had to change, even if it meant breaking up his family.
He reached into his backpack, rummaged for his cap. Next thing, he’d end up with a sunburned scalp like some aging golfer. Yes, even his hair was thinning. “Your mom is right about the view, Maddy. Shall we continue climbing?”
“You ready, kids?” Lynne said. “Wait, Scott, let me stuff the water back in your pack.”
Scott bent backwards slightly, feeling the straps on his back pull at his neck. When the jostling was done, he straightened. “Okay.”
“Yeah, but which way?” Ash said.
“Just follow.” He took off, pushing the larger ferns from his face. There were two paths to choose from, both signposted but neither marked with a destination he recognized. Why not just write “Summit”? Or “Top”? Or the equivalent in Spanish, with altitude noted? The top was where everyone wanted to go.
He forged ahead, aware of the six sneakered feet plodding behind him. He picked up his pace, ignoring his son’s complaints and his daughter’s panting. The air was full of the chirping birds, a persistent intermittent whistling, and the rippling of water. When he’d booked this day trip away from San Juan, he’d expected a rainforest like in the movies: animals screeching, birds clacking, the thunderous sound of waterfalls. There were waterfalls in El Yunque, but they were further down the mountain, too distant to be heard at this elevation and relatively modest, and Lynne had read aloud from a pamphlet at the visitor’s center that the park’s famous tiny tree frogs, the coquis, didn’t sing at this hour in the morning.
The path dipped, and a ribbon of water appeared beneath the chaos of vegetation. He kept alongside it. Hadn’t he learned, decades ago in Boy Scouts, when in doubt to follow the water? He’d been an exemplary scout, best of the bunch, until it had gotten in the way of his tennis training. He slid on a bit of mud and struggled to regain his balance. He could feel his son’s breath right behind him. At any moment, Ash would push past. They didn’t seem to be climbing anymore. Indeed, for the last quarter mile, they had been heading slightly downhill.
“Look, Scott,” Lynne said from behind him. “Stop a minute.”
He sighed and turned.
“Okay. I have no idea where we are. Happy? I admit it.” He plopped down on an uprooted tree, suspended above the ground by the natural twists and turns of plants around it.
The three of them plopped down beside him, and he thought: Why do they have to do that? Can’t I even plop down by myself?
Lynne’s round face was flushed. For some reason, the freckles on her short nose stood out all the more for it. He could see damp rings around the armpits of her light blue t-shirt and her ample chest rising and falling. How sexy he’d found her small sturdy body, her disproportionately large breasts when they’d met in college. The hours they could spend in bed together. Somehow, they’d wandered further and further from that intersection in their life together until it was no longer visible.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “It’s really not that difficult to find one’s way around here. It should be fairly straightforward.”
There was a rustling along the path ahead of them, and two elementary-school age kids, all dimpled knees and pudgy elbows, emerged from the world of green leaves and fronds and undergrowth, followed by what had to be their grandfather, wearing long shorts and leather flip flops. His bowed legs were covered with tangles of graying hair, and more hair, most of it white, sprang from beneath his collar. The kids were laughing, slapping each other playfully. The grandfather stopped, letting the kids run ahead, and mopped his forehead with a kerchief. “Hola. ¡Que sendero extraordinario!”
Scott nodded in return, not sure what the old man was saying other than something joyful.
“He’s talking about the path, Dad,” Ash said, under his breath. “He’s saying he likes it.”
He nodded again at the old man, this time with more commitment. “Si, si,” he said. “Extraordinario. Pero….No es de aquí… Estamos...” he turned to Ash. “How do you say–”
“Desconocidos,” Ash muttered, before getting up and walking a little way away down the path.
The old man laughed. “We are all strangers here.” His hairy arm swept over the rainforest around them, the tree-laden mountains extending down like a stormy dark-green sea until they reached the actual coastline, a distant breadth of pale blue horizon, just barely visible. “This is God’s country.”
Scott caught a glimpse of Lynne’s face and although she was nodding pleasantly at the Puerto Rican grandfather, he understood she was struggling not to break out laughing. Not at the old man, but at him for struggling to speak Spanish when the old man then proved to be fluent in English. Further down the path, Ash was rolling his eyes.
He had just been trying to be polite, attempting the local language.
“Right,” he said to the old man. “Well, buenas dias.”
“Buenos dias,” the old man said, ambling after his grandchildren.
Maddy knit her brow. “Hey, Daddy, he spoke really good English.”
He ruffled her hair. “Of course, he did. He probably worked in the U.S. then returned to Puerto Rico when he retired.”
“I thought Puerto Rico was part of the U.S.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
He scratched the back of his neck, feeling the sweat under his fingers. “Well…” He wiped his hands on his shirt and searched in his bag for the water.
“Puerto Rico is a protectorate of the United States,” Lynne said. “But not one of the fifty states. That’s what Daddy means. Some people call it the fifty-first state, but they don’t have, for example, their own U.S. senators.”
“What’s a senator?” Maddy said.
“You know what a senator is,” Scott said.
“No, I don’t —”
“Oh, shut up,” Ash said. “You know exactly what it is. We studied all about the U.S. government in fifth grade, and I know you did to.”
“Oh! You mean, like, Congress?”
Ash started laughing. So then did Maddy. “I missed some stuff,” she squeezed out, and his kids laughed even harder. Ash lifted his hand and Maddy high-fived it.
“Way to go, Maddy-o,” Ash said.
“Okay, kids,” Lynne said. “I’m not sure it’s cause for a celebration. But, look,” and with this she turned to him, “if we’re going to reach the top, we better get started.”
She pulled out the map. “See, you’ve taken this trail.” She ran her finger along the sheet, in a direction parallel to the path that led to the summit. “But we need to go this way.” Now she retraced the line about halfway then sent them on another trail.
After Lynne had passed around a new water bottle, they started back down the path in the direction they’d come, with Scott now in the rear. Lynne pointed things out along the way, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. All he could see were the patterns of green all around and the three of them, his family, ahead of him: Ash, tall and reedy, inclined towards his mother as she spoke, Lynne, the hollow of her back stained with sweat but her profile animated, and Maddy, skipping to keep up.
They were walking faster now, and it wasn’t long before they reached the turn-off and headed along the trail shooting up in the opposite direction from where he’d been taking them. Ropes of beige plant matter flipped down from the branches. Palm branches larger than a man swung back and forth, stirred by his family’s passage. Long flat roots crisscrossed the path, and one by one they each hopped over it.
Ash held a branch back for Lynne to pass around; Maddy skirted under it. Scott waited for it to stop oscillating then grabbed hold of it. He sprinted to catch up with the others.
The path grew steep, and Lynne and Ash stopped their banter. There was just the continuous sound of falling droplets of water. The tiny San Pedritos with their sharp red beaks and bibs flitting. Maddy panting. He found he had to work to keep up, too. He wasn’t used to being in the back of the family. He wasn’t used to how fast, how efficiently they were moving ahead without him out in front.
They reached a clearing and stopped again to drink. Through a parting in the green tangle of forest, they could see a neighboring mountain, slightly lower than the one they were climbing and carpeted in a voluptuous green, so smooth and velvety he thought if he were able to reach his hand out and touch it the green would spring back under his fingers like moss. Tiny puffs of mist were caught in its crevasses. He took a quick sip of the water and passed the bottle back to Lynne.
“Do you think we’re almost there, Mom?” Ash said.
Lynne looked up the path. “I’d guess about twenty minutes.”
Scott nodded in agreement as though one of the kids had asked him, though no one had.
“Hey, isn’t this beautiful?” Lynne pointed to a snail, its pale peach shell perfectly round and translucent, inching up the trunk of a palm tree. His son and daughter leaned in to see it better. They were so focused on the mollusk that they were breathing in tandem. He could see their ribs rising and falling through their thin t-shirts.
He stared at the cropped brown hair of his wife and two children, all three almost touching, all three so connected, so close to each other but so separate from him, and thought: My God. I love them.
He took Ash in with his inflamed forehead, and Maddy with her sharp little chin, and Lynne, her mouth moving though he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He saw them as they might be without him, his wife and two kids becoming a trio. Or maybe how they already were, as pure and complete individuals.
He stepped closer and pushed himself into their circle. “In France,” he said, “people eat snails. With butter and garlic.”
“Yech,” Maddy said. Ash mimicked gagging.
With Lynne again in front, they continued climbing. Scott caught up to Maddy and offered her his hand. They walked hand in hand until the path again became narrow, and he let her go ahead of him. He was surprised at how lithe she was.
“Look at that,” Lynne said at one point, and they all stopped again to admire a bright orangey-red cone-like flower. Or could you even call something so pulpy a flower? “It’s from the same family as the pineapple,” Lynne said. “I read about it at the visitor center.”
“We should have downloaded an app,” Ash said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Your mom is doing a good job on her own.”
They took up their pace again. The sun beat down hotter, but a stirring of the trade winds from off the sea broke through the tangle of greens. Every few yards they were rewarded with the glimpse of a vista. Scott imagined what it would be like to come here often, like that happy grandfather probably did with his grandkids. Their progress to the top was fast, now that they were on the right path.
A strange thought came to him: maybe he hadn’t been leading Lynne and the kids along the path earlier. Maybe he’d been blocking their passage.
“We’re there!” Ash said, breaking into a jog.
Scott stepped from out of the brush onto the summit and was buffeted by winds, cooling the damp of his neck and legs. Lynne held her hair back from her eyes. He reached over and cleared a strand from her mouth.
“Wow!” she said.
The kids ran forward, scrambling onto a rocky outcrop, battered by the breezes. He and Lynne followed them, walking side-by-side now.
“You were right,” he said. “You can see forever.”
“Be careful, kids!” Lynne called, but her eyes were smiling, fixed on the horizon.
He lowered himself down on the edge of the outcrop, and Lynne settled down beside him. He removed his sneakers, and breeze brushed the heat from his sore feet.
“This is it,” he said, “Isn’t it.”
Lynne put a hand on his knee. He put his hand on top of hers.
The warm air swirled madly around them. The land below rippled with every sort of green — forest, jungle — racing up and down the primordial grooves and gathers of earth: mountains, spikes, peaks, valleys, dales. Beyond them, the smooth blue sea, perfectly evident.
Image: Puerto Rico (El Yunque)by R9 Studios FL, licensed under CC 2.0.
- We Are All Strangers Here - April 9, 2024