By Leigh Ann Henion
I’m standing in a narrow alleyway when a stranger approaches to tell me that he can channel the power of the ocean. Crazy? Maybe. But I’m on the island of Vieques with a similarly far-fetched quest: to swim in a celestial sea. I tell the man, who introduces himself as Charlie the Wavemaster, that the Milky Way will soon crackle and shimmer as it slips through my fingers. Bits of stardust will cling to my hair.
Vieques’s Mosquito Bay, also called Bioluminescent Bay or Bio Bay, is one of the last ecosystems in the world where dinoflagellates — microscopic, single-celled organisms — create halos of light around whatever disturbs their nightly flotation. Marine bioluminescence, which appears to mirror stars in the night sky, occurs spontaneously around the globe, but no site on Earth hosts the phenomenon with more regularity than the southern coast of Vieques. Guinness World Records 2008 named Bio Bay the brightest in the world.
“The Bio Bay, it’s all about vibrations,” Charlie says. “You slap the water, and it lights up! It’s inspiring! The water holds so much awe!”
Charlie is wearing a baseball cap and handkerchief headband, and he’s holding a long metal pole, which I gesture toward. “Oh, this is my magic wand!” he says. Charlie taps it on the ground near my feet. “I’m putting out vibrations right now. Feel it?” There is a dull resonation under my sand-encrusted flip-flops.
When I turn to continue my exploration of the town of Isabel Segunda, Charlie follows. Cars blast the thump-de-thump of reggaeton. Neighbors chat through barred windows with people on the street. Young men in athletic clothing ride bareback on horses guided by rough, twisted rope. Roosters run wild through the scene, necks pumping back and forth as they dodge tires and hooves.
When I turn to continue my exploration of the town of Isabel Segunda, Charlie follows. Cars blast the thump-de-thump of reggaeton. Neighbors chat through barred windows with people on the street. Young men in athletic clothing ride bareback on horses guided by rough, twisted rope. Roosters run wild through the scene, necks pumping back and forth as they dodge tires and hooves.
Just before Charlie bids me farewell, slipping into the driver’s seat of a borrowed pickup, he says: “There are so many mysterious ways and miracles in the world. There’s so much involved, you could never understand it all.” As he drives away, I can hear his metal rod echoing in the truck bed like a tuning fork.
Vieques, which is about eight miles from the main island of Puerto Rico and has a total population of roughly 9,000, is a place where it hasn’t always been easy for residents to see the bright side of things. In the 1940s, thousands of people were forced from their homes when the U.S. Navy expropriated roughly two-thirds of the 21-mile-long, four-mile-wide island for artillery storage and military training. In the following decades, Vieques was the site of perpetual military training involving munitions that delivered doses of napalm, lead, depleted uranium and a cocktail of other contaminants. In 2003, when the Navy ceased bombing, nearly 18,000 acres were designated as a national wildlife refuge. This move has kept construction concentrated in a narrow swath of land in the center of the island, preserving its status as one of the least developed in the Caribbean.
In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency added Vieques to its list of Superfund National Priorities, officially designating parts of the island hazardous waste sites. This designation made Vieques a supremely unlikely travel destination, but the Navy’s toxic legacy has proved no match for 50 undeveloped beaches where — on a busy day — visitors might share a crescent of sand with one or two other intrepid souls.
