Holy Water

Holy Water

By Bucky McMahon

Before it was an issue, it was an island. For fifty years, with cannons, Hellfire missiles, and napalm, the U. S. Navy has bombed the daylights out of Vieques, P. R., whose best-kept secret remains a bay that glows in the dark.

Under the whirling vortex of the Milky Way, billions and billions of tiny enzyme bombs blew up against our ship. We blasted back with a volley of photon torpedoes--shoom! shoom!--that wriggled away at hyperwarp speed. Or so it looked from the deck of the electric boat silently carrying us out into Bioluminescent Bay. No doubt it was the conflict between the locals and the U. S. Navy here on Vieques that made me see explosions in the luminous suds of the boat's wake, and torpedoes in the spooked fish that shot away in eerie blue-green streaks.

The vicissitudes of the daily news aside, though, as the western sky faded to lilac and the stars crept out, there seemed no more peaceful place on the planet than this remote estuary on the south coast of Vieques--eight miles of dark sea due east of Puerto Rico. Guide Sharon Grasso, an expat from Connecticut with degrees in biology and secondary education, steered us out to the bottleneck mouth of the bay, where the mangroves reached their croquet-hoop roots toward the opposite bank. By a sliver of moonlight you could see the sea out there, faintly foaming on the reef. Just a tongue of tide slips in through the turtle-grass shallows, so whatever seaborne flotsam washes in can exit only via the food chain. Ever since the dinosaurs were in diapers, "Bee-oh Bay" (as locals pronounce it) has been inhaling Pyrodinium bahamenses, a species of bioluminescent plankton, exhaling well-fed young fish, and glowing green in the dark whenever anything in its waters stirs.

It's the last of its kind in the Caribbean, Captain Grasso explained, and with its density of nearly a million "pyros" per gallon, the 160-acre bay is also the most potently illuminated in the world.

Naturally, then, we ecotourists, mostly from the U. S. and Europe, wanted to know just how secure this place was. From us, we meant. Or worse: them. Not the Viequenses, exactly, but their delayed dance with history.

An hour ago at sunset, after a mile-wide day on the beaches, about two dozen of us met at the poolside bar of La Casa Del Francés, an old sugar-plantation mansion converted to funky hotel, and then crammed into Island Adventures' white-painted school bus. Bioluminescent Bay Natural Reserve is just minutes from La Casa by paved highway. For twenty minutes more we lurched into craters and teetered over ridges, brush scrabbling at the bus windows, on the reserve's dangerous-at-any-speed dirt road, arriving finally at a little sandy cove among the mangroves. The crummy road, worse in the rainy season, is the bay's frontline defense against being loved to death, our driver told us by way of apology for any whiplash.

The bay's other big brother, ironically, has been the environmentally disastrous U. S. military, which has pounded the daylights out of the east end of Vieques with cannons and Hellfire missiles and napalm bombs since the early years of World War II. But then, Vieques is a sizable island, twenty-two miles long. The periodic bombing was like heat lightning in the distance, with faint thunder that always made her Chihuahua tremble, Grasso told us, but was otherwise hardly perceptible from the civilian zone. There had been room for live-fire exercises at Camp Garcia on one end, a humongous ammo dump at the NAF station on the other, and range for cattle on the scrubby hills in between. Space, too, for the herds of semiwild paso fino horses that have been rolling their eyes at mankind here ever since the conquistadors abandoned them. And long, empty stretches of powder-sand beaches with military-drab names like Red, Green, and Blue. And time and space for Bio Bay to fructify and flame.

So long as the nine thousand Viequenses made do with the middle third of their island, and fishermen agreed not to fish when the Navy wanted to borrow their Mar Caribe, inertia prevailed. You could ramble down the hill from La Casa Del Francés, parting a colloquy of pale horses chewing up the grounds, and stroll the waterfront promenade of Esperanza. There'd be saddle horses tethered outside the few bistros, old men talking politics on the benches, formal in their white button-up shirts. Vieques possessed the quaint, forgotten feeling of Key West in the fifties, visitors would say, the old-style Caribbean paradise, which is the kind where nobody makes much money, where you could wonder with Wallace Stevens, "Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know," about the ghostly demarcations of order, where things begin and things end.

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BUT FOR THE U. S. MILITARY, the beginning of the end was clear enough: April of last year, when a Marine Corps jet dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs that killed a civilian guard and injured four others. Then decades of frustration boiled over into anger and demands for "Fuera Marina!"--"Navy out!" Protesters, encouraged by the Puerto Rican Independence Party, camped on the bombing range, where they'd recently faced down the mighty carrier USS George Washington, which, with its formidable battle group of a dozen ships, was scheduled to open fire on Vieques again sometime in early March. Turning its ships toward the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Florida, the Navy gave the lie to prior claims that Vieques was irreplaceable, essential to military preparedness. Now it looks as if the days of distant thunder are over for Vieques, and change is rumbling in the wings, with rumors of an Italian megaresort coming to the south coast and a sports complex already under construction, with a lighted baseball stadium planned, hard against the reserve.

All of which, for the gentle lights of Bio Bay, looms like a mixed blessing. Earlier in the day, on the beach at Sun Bay, I'd read in an old issue of The Vieques Times a letter to the editor from Nelson Caraballo Garcia. He wondered, "Why don't the U. S. Government just pay $1 million tax free to every resident on Vieques so we could move and start a new life somewhere else, where everyone could buy a house, and no one would be poor again?" And there was a suggestively brief bit about the mayor of Vieques, Manuela Santiago Collazo, who, in lobbying Washington for the return of all Navy lands to the people of Vieques, has filed suit against "an entire community of Viequenses who live on former Navy land rescued since the sixties," a legal move the Times calls "perplexingly illogical." In turn, the mayor is being sued for "highly irregular" real estate deals.

For her part, Sharon Grasso has steered clear of the political fray. "I think I'd be spreading myself too thin," she told me. "I'm staying focused on the bay. I just hope that if the land is developed there's a good plan, or it'll be a disaster."

THAT NIGHT WHEN WE tied up to a buoy in the middle of Bio Bay, the only sign of change I saw was a few streetlights on the hills to the north, not yet so much competition that the planktonic glow was diminished. Otherwise, everything was exactly as it had been on my first visit five years ago. The constellation Orion still dominated the southern sky, the old hunter holding up his animal-skin shield ("Uh, yeah, I think I see it"), forever poised to clash with his bullet-headed foe Taurus. Then those of us who wished slipped quietly into the water.

We had been hushed and reserved before, as if in somebody else's church. Now there were giggles. Goshes. Wows. As we bobbed in the amniotic warmth in our lifejackets, our feet churned bonfires below us, and scintillating trails traced our fingers' paths. Lovers drew close together, grinning and shooting darts of delight into each other's eyes. A toddler on board the boat stared into a bucket of Bee-oh Bay water with gape-mouthed awe as one of the crew stirred it with a stick. For those of us in the bay up to our nostrils, it was like reclining on a supremely soft black satin sofa and, with catlike languor, ripping the luminous stuffing out of it. You couldn't help but claw at the water as if it were the very cloud of unknowing itself and revelation lay on the other side. It was irresistible magic: However you moved, you made light; whatever you touched turned to glow. Though half the group waited on the boat for us to get our fill, we didn't want to go, not just yet.

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Stalling, I backstroked a little ways from the general merriment. I had on a black wet suit, so my arms, as they rose and fell, coated with pyrodiniums, appeared to be limned by dots of stars that one by one dripped off into the water, as if I were a constellation myself, one that had fallen from the sky and couldn't get up. Floating insensibly like William Hurt in Altered States, I closed my eyes for a moment and entered the hallucinatory territory of memory, recalling my first trip here with my wife as newlyweds, how swimming in the bay seemed the paragon of the kind of thing we hoped to do together: instructive and interesting, strange and sensual, in that order, as the night progressed under the serene scrutiny of the stars. As I swam back to the boat, I found myself impressed as much by the happiness of the group, the generally enhanced geniality communicated by word and gesture, as by the bay itself, whose gentle beauty has the same power as a catastrophe to bring people closer.

After more than fifteen hundred tours, it's that fervency of first impressions that keeps the experience fresh for Sharon Grasso. Plus, she simply loves the bay, she confided, and has started a nonprofit advocacy group to help protect it as Vieques comes into its own, free of the bombs. As for the Pyrodinium bahamenses, tiny cellulose-walled geodesic domes with chemiluminescent lanterns inside, they are just trying to protect themselves when they flash their lights. It's a last-ditch defense, biologists theorize, evolved by a creature, blind itself, to dazzle sighted foes so large as to be invisible.

At Bio Bay, the brightness of day disguises the baptism of fire that comes at night. Every movement, however slight, throws off light.

Beach: Zubin Shroff

The rusting hulk of an old Navy target. Last year's accidental deaths helped galvanize the "Fuera Marina!" ("Navy out!") movement, and soon, relics like this will be all that's left of the island's military period.

VIEQUES DIGEST

Island-hop from San Juan International or Isla Grande Airport via Vieques Air Link (787-741-3266) or Isla Nena Air Service (787-741-1577) for $55 one-way. The ferry from Fajardo on Puerto Rico's east coast is scenic, slow, and competitively priced at $4 round-trip.

Island Adventures offers 90-minute tours of Bio Bay ($20; 787-741-0720); book in advance in the high season, since boat space is limited. Tour headquarters, with educational displays, are located in back of La Casa Del Francés hotel. This turn-of-the-century plantation house is on Puerto Rico's Register of Historic Places, which may explain the venerable sheets and absorption-challenged towels. Joking aside (and with owner/comedian Irving Greenblatt presiding, jokes are included with the prix fixe dinner), the funky, informal Casa has character to spare, but it's not for the fussy ($177 a night, includes breakfast and dinner; 787-741-3751). Far more elegantly furnished, with a similarly grand Caribbean view, Inn on the Blue Horizon boasts a gourmet restaurant, Cafe Blu, and the "Cigar Tree": "your own area to bring your cigar, have a glass of port, and maybe a nice dessert" ($190 a night; 787-741-3318).