An Embarrassment of Mangoes (12 page)

The whole ham would have been troublesome in any case on the packed sardine can of a minivan that is the second half of our trip back to Luperón two days later. A packed
guagua
, as the public minivans are called here, makes a crowded bus in Grenada look positively spacious. This one is so jammed that its conductor kid hangs outside the open door as the
guagua
rips along, with just his feet inside, his body dancing in the air to the salsa blasting from the van’s speakers and his hands beating out the rhythm on the roof. There is no room for a spare chorizo in this picture, let alone a whole ham. At one stop, an ancient, not terribly clean, and mostly toothless lady climbs onto the
guagua
with a live chicken tucked under her arm. She somehow squeezes in next to Steve and settles the chicken on her lap. It rides contentedly back to Luperón with its head and beak on Steve’s thigh, while the woman rides contentedly with her arm around his shoulders. I ride with visions of chicken mites and body lice dancing in my head.

I
always meet skippers kicking themselves all the way down island because they didn’t make room to buy in the Dominican Republic,” says our gospel cruising guide for this part of the world (the same one whose author sings the praises of night passages, and the perils of green stakes). Presidente aside—there’s
still
too much Old Milwaukee in the bilge—we make no such mistake. We squirrel away twenty pounds of vacuum-packed Santo Domingo coffee and a full case of MasMas bars—locally made chocolate bars stuffed with raisins and nuts. The only other time I’ve bought a case of chocolate bars was at Halloween, and then I had no intention of eating them myself; but Steve has convinced me that in the absence of a swinging ham, these will be the second-most perfect snack during future night passages. We content ourselves with only a half-dozen jars of tiny green olives—packed in brine with giant caper berries, themselves the size of olives—and as addictive as peanuts with drinks. (We would have bought a case of those too—if only the jars didn’t leak.) And several large globes of wax-covered Gouda-like cheese are tucked into the very bottom of the fridge.

The local cheesemaker plies his craft on the outskirts of Luperón, near the cockfighting ring, selling what he makes from an open-fronted wooden building identifiable from the road by its hanging scale. Behind the selling area, the floor is wet with whey. Wearing rubber boots and a garbage bag as an apron, a man paddles curds in a big plastic bucket, while balls of nascent cheese bob in other buckets nearby. From a distance, a long wooden table at the far end looks like it’s piled with monster ripe tomatoes, but on closer inspection, the tomatoes turn out to be cheese—coated in red wax but not yet labeled. They’ll keep for months, we’ve been told. While the cheesemaker weighs a couple for us, I ask him about the long, white rectangular blocks resting on the counter. He cuts off a piece for us to try: a salty, fresh, unaged farmer’s cheese still oozing whey. “
Queso de freir
,” he says. Frying cheese. What a splendid idea: a cheese specifically designed to be made more gloriously, fat-oozingly delicious by frying it. Of course we buy some of it, too—though not nearly enough to suit Steve. “It’s a fresh cheese,” I argue. “It won’t keep like the wax-coated ones.”

It doesn’t have to: We polish off most of what we buy that night. Sliced and fried in a little oil and butter, the cheese stays firm and develops a golden crust. But when you cut into it, the interior is molten, delicious smeared on bread. “Or,” Steve adds, “with a delicate slice or two of serrano ham.” No whole ham swings on
Receta
, but there’s no way Steve was leaving Luperón without a few fridge-friendly packages of the stuff.

I
t’s now almost the end of May and time for us to get a move on. Hurricane season officially starts on June 1, though everyone we talk to scoffs at the idea of a hurricane in the Caribbean in June, or even July. “The months of June, July and October only produce about one hurricane every three years for the whole western Atlantic,” one of our books tells us, and that includes the Gulf of Mexico as well as the Caribbean Sea. Still, our boat insurance sets July 1 as the deadline for being outside “the box”—the area through which hurricanes are statistically most likely to track. In the box after that, and
Receta
isn’t covered by insurance if she’s damaged by a hurricane or other “named storm.” And if the insurance company thinks there are
any
odds of a hurricane in July, that’s good enough for me.

A few cruisers, like Carl and Kathleen, have decided they love Luperón so much they will trust its reputation as a hurricane hole and spend all of hurricane season here. But most of the cruisers who ventured beyond Chicken Harbor have already left. Only a couple of stragglers—like us—are still here. We need to start hustling south.

The top edge of the hurricane box is at 35° north, between Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout, North Carolina; the bottom edge is at 12°40', in the Tobago Cays, part of the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Luperón is squarely in the middle of the box, 865 nautical miles from statistical safety by the island-hopping route: east from the Dominican Republic to the south coast of Puerto Rico; east along the south coast of Puerto Rico to the U.S. Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands; east through the Virgin Islands to St. Martin, at the top of the Leeward Island chain; east and southeast through the Leewards and the Windwards till we’re finally beyond the box. East, into the prevailing trade winds; east right down the middle of the Thorny Path.

The first thorn is the Mona Passage, the 60-mile gap between the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic and the western edge of Puerto Rico, and our gospel guidebook is full of optimistic advice. “Unpredictable currents everywhere,” it warns. “Rough shoals.” “Steep seas.” The ocean bottom here is to blame: It drops from a comparatively shallow 150 feet to the second-deepest hole in the world, the 16,000-foot-deep Puerto Rican Trench. As massive volumes of water tumble across the uneven bottom in an underwater waterfall, the surface churns, setting up wild and conflicting currents. Even in benign weather, crossing this stretch from west to east is like booking passage inside a washing machine.

Add to that the long lines of thunderstorms that religiously roll off the coast of Puerto Rico each evening, when the heat that has risen off the land meets the cooler offshore air. “The fiercest I’ve seen in my life,” says the guidebook’s ever-reassuring author. “Sometimes they . . . charge like bulls.” A crossing of the Mona is not to be taken lightly. The guidebook spends seven pages discussing strategy and timing. Obviously, it would be foolhardy to leave on anything less than a perfect forecast.

Once again, I start checking in daily with Herb, waiting for him to give our passage his blessing. Working on acquiring martyr points, I even send Steve to a potluck on shore one night—with the big dish of tortilla lasagna I’ve made (cruiser’s trick: stale tortillas make a fine substitute for lasagna noodles)—and stay behind, hunched by the radio, hoping to hear the good news. Wait, Herb says.

The next night I cheat: I check in at the start of the Herb Show, go off to shore with Steve for a happy hour beer, and am back onboard the boat just before the time Herb has been calling me the last few days. But there’s no pulling a fast one on Herb. “I tried to call you earlier,” he says, “but you didn’t respond.” It’s as if he can see what I’ve been up to; I feel like a teenager caught sneaking in after curfew from a date. But I get my punishment: The wind is still too strong for us to leave. As the days tick by, I get more and more antsy: We have a
lot
of miles to cover in a steadily decreasing amount of time.

“Let’s get our
despacho
so at least we’ll be ready to go,” Steve says. In order to leave the Dominican Republic, we need a
despacho
, a clearance paper, which we get from the
comandante
, the Luperón port commander. The
comandante
and his translator came onboard
Receta
to check us into the country, but we must go to his headquarters, the
comandancia
, to check out.

Cruising tales, we’ve discovered, always become exaggerated in the telling and retelling, and things are never quite so bad (or so good) as others make them sound. The trip to the
comandancia
is the exception: It’s actually far
worse
than the stories that preceded it, which were already heavily sprinkled with words like “awful” and “disgusting.”

The dirt path that leads to the
comandancia
starts behind the
lavandería
and leads across a stream and up a hill on the other side. It’s not until we pass the laundry-strewn bushes that we get our first look at the bridge. I try to weasel out: Surely my services as a translator won’t be required when we know the
comandante
has his own? “Nice try,” says Steve. “In fact, you go first—you’ve got a better sense of balance than me.”

The bridge doesn’t have very many planks between its two stringers, leaving open gaps and excellent views of the stream underneath. But this is only the start of its deficiencies: Some of its limited number of “planks” are just rough branches, and it has no handrails. Oh, yeah, and the “stream” it’s crossing is actually a smelly conduit for raw sewage. This ribbon of sludge, which runs through Luperón and down to the harbor, is the reason we don’t swim in the anchorage. Falling off this so-called bridge into this so-called stream would be truly horrifying. Besides, I’m carrying our most important documents, our passports and boat registration, in my backpack. I get down on all fours and start to crab my way across.

The bridge is alive, a wizard’s balance beam. The branches roll, the planks shift. Most of them have been merely laid across the stringers, not nailed down—and if I don’t put my weight in exactly the right place, they pop up on one side like a teeter-totter. I have to test each one for its balance point before I commit. Steve, meanwhile, is taking careful note of which branches move when I do, and has no intention of starting his crawl until I reach solid ground. Coward.

But neither of us falls in, and after brushing the dirt off our hands and knees, we follow the track the rest of the way up the hill to the modest cinder-block building with the national flag flying out front. After the bridge, getting the
despacho
is a comparative snap. A junior official types it—in triplicate—on a manual typewriter that was probably new in the year of my birth. Every time he bangs the carriage return to start another line, the carriage flies right out of the aged machine and has to be reinstalled before the paperwork can continue. It’s a cartoon come to life, and Steve is biting his lip so hard I’m afraid it will bleed. But at least the
comandante
, who only arrived here a couple of weeks before we did, is doing things completely by the book. There’s no attempt to extract a little something extra from us for unofficial pockets, as there was with the previous
comandante
, we’ve been told, before he was hauled off to jail.

That night, over happy hour Presidentes, we warn another
despacho
-seeking cruiser about the bridge. Someone who’s been in Luperón much longer than we have chimes in. “The bridge is new. And it’s a
big
improvement over the old system.” Apparently, the old system involved pulling yourself across the stream hand over hand along a slimy rope while standing in a leaky rowboat with a few inches of sewage water in the bottom. “People used to wear plastic bags on their hands and feet when they went for their
despacho
.” I don’t think he’s exaggerating one bit.

A
n unfortunate little fact: The word “nausea” comes via Latin from the Greek
nausia
, which comes from
naus
, which means ship.

A few hours earlier, we had ghosted out of Escondido Bay, with the barest breath of wind in the sails, in the company of two other straggler sailboats. We had left Luperón together the previous day, after finally getting Herb’s go-ahead, and had reached this lovely fjordlike bay after an easy overnight sail east along the north coast—so calm we motored partway. But we only stayed long enough to get a few hours’ sleep, pour fuel from the jerry cans on deck into our tank, and make a fresh Thermos of coffee before getting underway again, heading for the Mona Passage.

Despite the very light wind, we keep the engine off, to make it easier to hear Herb. “Be sure to ask him specifically about thunderstorms,” Steve says. “I see some dark clouds ahead.” Herb, looking at his computer screens 1,800 miles away, says he sees no “organized convection activity,” the forecast euphemism for “big-time pissing and blowing, accompanied by shitloads of lightning and thunder.”

“Organized” is the operative word. The storm cells created along this coast as the land cools at night are localized—not part of the overall weather picture. And soon all hell is breaking loose around us as we motorsail southeast close to the coastline. “You’re going to be passing through a big squall,” Ken on the boat ahead radios back. “Get ready for it.” We scramble to put on full rain gear—pants, jackets, boots, caps, and hoods—and then Steve takes down the sails while I steer. Soon blinding forks of lightning are sizzling down from the night sky and stabbing the surface of the sea around us. I count the seconds between the flashes and the thunder—far too few, given that
Receta
’s mast is the tallest object for miles around. Rain beating on my face, I wrestle with the wheel, attempting to stay on course while the wind howls and the boat plunges up and down in the suddenly steep waves.

The flashes and thunder become simultaneous. Steve has gone below to consult the radar, where the squall shows up as a dense splotch of black dots, and plot a new course that will, I desperately hope, take us out from under it. But in the meantime, I am alone on deck—and, despite the compass, I momentarily lose my bearings and am unsure which direction is toward shore and danger. For the first time this trip, I am honestly frightened. The glorious serenity of my first night sails—even of last night’s sail—vanishes. I know with absolute certainty that I was right to dread night passages.