This is the knowledge that comes with aging.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing about my summer vacation in Puerto Rico. But before I get into the music which is what this blog is about, I’m going to give you a little context information. I’m going to tell you about the street I grew up on.

My grandparents lived in the mountains but in the 1940s my grandmother developed some respiratory problems. The doctor recommended they move close to the ocean. The ocean breeze will take care of it, he said. What a doctor. So my grandparents bought a little house on Calle (street) Gertrudis in Barrio Machuchal in the town of Santurce, Puerto Rico. Santurce was everything the doctor ordered and more.

Santurce used to be a big swamp. It was where the newly freed slaves lived after Puerto Rico abolished slavery in 1873. Today if you go towards the east from Santurce, you’ll reach Piñones. Piñones retained its swampland character the longest, and if you go to PIñones you can get an idea of what most of Santurce must have been like around the time my grandparents moved to Calle Gertrudis. The ocean goes right up to a narrow stretch of sandy beach dunes and from there the land goes down hill into a landscape spotted with mangroves, lagoons and palm trees. The area includes the natural reserve of the Bosque Estatal de Piñones. The tourist industry and land developers have been inching closer and closer over the years, and recently they’ve come head to head with the highly organized local citizens who recently won an important victory and gained ownership of some large tracts of land in Piñones. In Piñones you can still hear Bomba and Plena very close to the way it was played over 100 years ago. Here’s a youtube video of some bomba players in Piñones. It’s a conversation between the lead drummer and the dancer.

Anyway, when my grandparents moved to Santurce there were only a few houses on the street. The neighborhood was a distant suburb of the capital of San Juan, just a few miles to the west. But as the areas surrounding San Juan developed, so did little Barrio Machuchal; the streets were paved, more houses were built, and in a fever of Americanism, the name of the neighborhood was changed to Ocean Park.

But as pretty as they might have thought the new name was, the neighborhood still sat on dried out swamplands. Which meant that every time it rained more than a few drops the whole neighborhood would flood, and in Puerto Rico it rains a lot. When my parents divorced, my mom came to live above my grandparents’ house, and thus began my upbringing on Calle Gertrudis. As a child, for me, it was great to play submarine-bicycle by riding through the streets with the flood waters up to my shoulders. But the grown ups only saw how their house foundations were tilting, or how their furniture got ruined every time the water came in the door.

To offset the flooding, sometime in the 1960s, someone, probably the government, built La Bomba. La Bomba was a giant pump located more or less in the center of Ocean Park and about a block inland from the beach. La Bomba was encased in cement so all you saw was a huge cement block on the corner of Santa Ana and Cacique streets. But underneath the cement, La Bomba was hard at work. La Bomba’s job was to collect all the water from the sewers, all the rain water that came in through the street drains along with all the water returning from toilets, sinks and bathtubs throughout the neighborhood. I never understood why it didn’t just collect the water from the street drains which were the ones causing the flooding, but then again I am no sewage engineer. Anyway, once the pump had collected enough sewer water it would push it all out through a huge pipeline about three or four feet in diameter. The pipeline ran under Santa Ana street towards the beach and would only surface right at the shoreline like a giant periscope peeking towards the horizon from under the sands.

This was the only visible part of the mechanism and the one that gave La Bomba its second meaning, because though bomba means pump in Spanish it also means bomb. And about every 45 minutes on a regular day, more often if it had been raining, La Bomba would vomit a shit, water and sewage bomb out of its mouth, right over the breaking waves of the shore.

Lucky for us Calle Gertrudis was just downwind from La Bomba, so the ocean current almost always carried the shinny shit stain right by the beach at the end of our street. It really was a sight to see. We would swim in the ocean until we saw the shit start to pour out of the pipe, then we’d get out of the water, and play in the sand while keeping an eye on the shinny stain as it traveled from La Bomba westward towards San Juan. Once the shinny shit stain had passed, we gladly jumped back in the water.

Of course there were signs on the beach that said swim at your own risk, water may be contaminated and other such warnings, but this was our beach, and you know we were going to swim in it. As kids, we would dare each other to hold our heads in front of La Bomba echoing into its pipe things like, tra la la la la, you cant spew on me…you chicken shit Bomba… come out if you dare, and other extremely clever things. Or we’d dare each other to see who would stay in the water the longest after the shit had come out or who would swim closest to the shit stain. But the truth is we were all chicken-shit ourselves, and all it took was one tiny turd looking thing to come floating by and everyone would be a Mark Spitz to the shore.

So you can imagine our beach was not the one they put on those tourist postcards. But La Bomba wasn’t the only thing that made our beach somewhat crappy. First of all, there really wasn’t all that much of a beach to begin with. The street did dead end right into the sand, but then there was, on a good day, only about ten maybe fifteen feet of sand before you hit the ocean. The ocean itself was dark, choppy and often colder than you would imagine a Caribbean island beach to be. It was a great beach for amateur surfers, for perverts who liked to jack off to the ocean breeze, for young couples looking for a place to make out, and it was great for us kids.

The beach was so narrow that the houses that faced the beach at the end of the street, had to go get a bunch of rocks to put in front of their house to keep the waves from eroding their foundations when the tide got too high. When the tide got high enough it would run down the street and past my grandparents house where us kids were busy watching our paper boats get carried away by the ocean. To me it was the coolest thing, but I think the grown ups only saw the possible Bomba turds floating down their street.

Once you get turds in your head it’s hard to get rid of them. For example, I was recently told that every time we drink a glass of tap water, we also drink a minuscule fraction of a microgram of e-coli. It’s unnoticeable by itself, but if you add all those little fractions together at the end of the year it turns out you drank about two tablespoons of shit. Guess who’s drinking filtered water now?

So you can imagine what the possibility of all these turds floating down the street must have done to the grown ups on our side of Ocean Park. And so began the fight against the Bomba. I was too young to understand the details of why they didn’t just stop the thing, but I imagine it had something to do with having to make a choice between the turds going into the ocean or going into your living room when the neighborhood flooded from the rain. Most of the 1970s were spent in this battle.

In 1984 I went to Texas to go to college, and when I returned for summer vacation the following year the Bomba had been deactivated. There was no more Bomba. The giant pipe still stood there at the edge of the water, but it no longer pumped out the sewage into the ocean. What a great feeling. Proper sewage had been installed, and the neighborhood didn’t flood, and the shit went elsewhere and not right on our beach.

Then the most amazing thing happened. Within a few years, the beach had magically grown. It might have been a coincidence, but it sure looked like the shit had been eroding the shoreline cause as soon as the Bomba stopped spewing the beach started to get wide and pretty. Eventually the beach grew to more than a hundred feet of sand between the end of the street and the water.

After the Bomba closed, the ocean also miraculously calmed down, and its waters became light blue and clear. The surfers were not happy, but our beach had become a postcard perfect beach. They took off the warning signs, and within a few years, we had one of the most popular beaches in the area.

Suddenly our little neighborhood became flooded on weekends not with literal turds coming out of the sewers but with the kind of turds that drove pimped up jeeps with super loud Blaupunkt stereos and parked wherever they felt like, in front of someone’s driveway, right on the sand, on the sidewalk. They’d bring coolers and leave beer cans and cigarette butts everywhere, pee on people’s yards, walk up and down the streets at all times of day or night looking for some kind of action. There was even a street girl who took to bathing with the water hose my grandparents kept on their front yard. And I mean in the nude, just like you would in your own shower, she’d bring a little soap and everything. Needless to say the hose was put away.

Ocean Park went from being a place where old people like my grandparents lived to being a place where old people like my grandparents were disrespected by a constant barrage of beach hipsters and bums. Of course the popularity and beauty of our beach bode well for property prices. The first sign of this was when the Gangsters moved to the street. Previously it seemed everyone that lived there had lived there since the 1940s or 50s. Now in the 1980s a wealthy family moved in and the first thing they did was build a 12 foot high concrete fence all around their house, no one knew them and no one ever saw them, they would drive their tinted windowed car through the gate and that’s all anyone ever saw of them. So of course we concluded they were gangsters.

Shortly thereafter, the big fences started to come up everywhere. As children we could cut through all the back yards on the street, all the way to the beach, but now the houses were all blocked off from each other by huge walls, the porches were being closed off behind bars, and everyone started to live in fear of being robbed or of someone using your water hose to bathe.

The newly formed neighborhood association got together and decided to close off the neighborhood. But Puerto Rico has a pretty cool constitutional law that says that all beaches are public, and access to the beach can not be restricted anywhere. So the neighborhood association of Ocean Park closed most of the streets, except for one at each end of the neighborhood and put a gate on each end and a guard on each gate, but the guard couldn’t keep anyone out, all they could do was take the names and license plates of visitors. To this day, to get in all you have to say is whether you are a residente (resident) or a visitante (visitor), either way you get in. The two principal members of the reggeaton group Calle 13 call themselves Residente and Visitante in jest of a similar situation which happened in their neighborhood.

All this added protection did little to stop the beach party that the neighborhood had become. The grandparents now stayed caged in their houses while the crazies ran the streets. But soon the various grandparents who owned the houses began to die, and the children who inherited the houses instead of moving into them with their children, chose to live in other parts and divide the houses into several rooms that they could rent at a huge profit to young, single beach goers with dogs. Cause for some reason, everyone has a dog.

The result was that a house that previously needed one or two parking spots now needed four, five or more. Our street is a one lane street, very narrow, and now the front yards have been paved over to make room for the tenants’ cars. I was just there and it is a weird feeling. There is hardly a sidewalk anymore, the houses either have high cement fences that go right up to a sidewalk to narrow to walk on, or the sidewalk has become part of the parking area that used to be a front yard. The fence at the Gangster’s house is now actually one of the lowest and prettiest ones, and their house, by comparison, seems open and welcoming.

However, once you get to the beach, the houses and cars disappear behind you and the beach is as beautiful as it has ever been. My mother spent a good amount of time in the 1990s calling TV news crews to report on the huge amounts of garbage that the visitantes left on the beach, and eventually the government installed garbage cans throughout the beach, and people for the most part use them. And even La Bomba is now pretty. In a weird Planet of the Apes turn of events, the only part of the Bomba that is still visible is the very top of the shit spewing pipe as it sticks out about a foot above the sand far from the water, and some local person has carefully decorated this tip with a mosaic of colorful tiles.

Right before we arrived back on Calle Gertrudis, a few sea turtles had made nests on the beach and laid some eggs. Young biologists and other nature enthusiasts made camp around the nests to protect the eggs from being stolen (they are quite prized since the turtles are endangered). The naturalists were there in shifts around the clock for over two months, and got to know the people of the neighborhood. They also seem to have acted as a catalyst in establishing a feeling of community that had been somewhat lost. The locals would visit the eggs and their caretakers and talk, watch the eggs for a little so they could go for a swim or use the restroom, they would bring them food, water, music, etc. Finally, both residentes and visitantes were rewarded with a bunch of little sea turtles that made it safely back to the ocean.

When we were there, that feeling of community and accomplishment was still felt, and I hope it grows because it will be needed. There is a developer that has bought several houses right on the beach. The same developer has offered 2 million to the grandmother who lives on another house facing the beach one street over. Luckily the grandma said if she left her house it would have to be feet first.

What this developer wants to do is build some high rise beach front condos. However local law doesn’t permit buildings higher than four stories tall so the developer has left the houses in disuse, and is waiting to see if they change the laws or if he can find somebody that will take a bribe and give him the permit he needs. It’s happened before. It happened just recently in an incredibly central part of San Juan where a developer was not only given a permit that allows him to restrict access to the beach (which as I said is against constitutional law), but the developer also got permission to restrict access to El Fortín de San Geronimo, a small historical fortress built by the Spanish throughout the 17th and 18th century, and which apparently now belongs to the developers. So as you can see local law is not exactly etched in stone.