Among the Stars, Below the Earth
Like many travelers, when Martin Dugard thought of Puerto Rico, he thought only of rum, a world-famous fort, and maybe West Side Story. A trip to the Arecibo Observatory and the Rio Camuy Caverns changed everything. Illustrations by Oksana Badrak.
The trolley rattled to a stop. It was a Disneyland-style tram with open-air passenger cars, but I couldn’t have been farther from the Magic Kingdom. There was jungle all around me — real jungle, green and moist, blotting out the sun, the heavy air smelling of decay and rebirth. And just a few feet away from the trolley, the earth was split, a great crack showing in the face of a limestone cliff. This prehistoric maw was illicit, chilling, and strangely inviting. I had heard a rumor that the cave’s interior was vast and vaulted like a European cathedral. Bats clung to the roof, and a secret underground river threaded beneath the limestone floors, revealing its chocolate-colored waters just long enough for them to whisper an invitation to an even greater subterranean adventure before disappearing, once again, into the bowels of the earth.
The juxtaposition was surreal: A throng of tourists stepped off a tram in the middle of dense jungle with all the nonchalance of shoppers entering a mall, while just yards away was the very real danger of the world’s third-largest cave network, a place where the reckless had ventured and never returned.
Africa? The Amazon? The Alps? No. I was in, of all places, Puerto Rico. I had come to peer beneath the core of the earth and then far into deep space (and maybe, when all was said and done, to drink a little of the local rum). So, beckoned by a tour guide who reminded us that one wrong step could mean plunging hundreds of feet into an abyss from which there was no rescue, I stepped through that great crack in the earth and left the dank jungle air behind.
I like to run on golf courses in the morning. The best time is just before dawn, when the air is calm and dew still coats the empty fairways. As a courtesy — and an acknowledgment that while golf courses are some of the best and most enjoyable places on earth to run, they are still golf courses — I don’t leave footprints in sand traps or run across greens and tee boxes, and I do, above all, avoid contact with any individual related to the game of golf. This goes double at any course with resort in its title. Strictly speaking, it is apparently illegal to run on a golf course, as any number of marshals, groundskeepers, and actual golfers have informed me. Yet some of my best workouts are on those morning runs. I also have seen and experienced some rather surreal occurrences at that time of day.
But we’ll get back to that later.
Where I’m going with all this, in a very roundabout way, is Puerto Rico.
Situated in the Greater Antilles, it’s the fourth-largest island in the Caribbean, after Cuba, Hispaniola, and Jamaica. First settled by an Archaic culture known as the Ortoiroid over 4,000 years ago, Puerto Rico became known to Europeans when Christopher Columbus discovered it on his second voyage. Legend has it that the crew of Columbus’s fourth voyage, traumatized by that journey’s brutal nature, were so terrified of sailing home to Spain that they stayed in Puerto Rico (which means “rich port”), thus becoming the island’s first serious colonists. In time, the port at San Juan became a cornerstone of Spain’s Caribbean empire. Vast citadels were built to keep away intruders. And while the Dutch, English, and French all made attempts to conquer the island over the centuries, it wasn’t until the United States’ successful invasion during the Spanish-American War that Spain’s long-held bastion fell. Even now, Puerto Rico is a U.S. commonwealth; its citizens carry American passports, vote in national elections, and use the American dollar as their currency.
Puerto Rico’s fringe areas are its least-known attributes. Tourists, in particular, have long viewed bustling San Juan as symbolic of all things Puerto Rican. Travelers throng to its colonial section, with its shops and restaurants and world-famous El Castillo de San Felipe del Morro, the fort that kept enemies at bay for almost four centuries. It is a city famous for its rum and nightlife, making it a perfect stopover for the cruise-ship legions meandering through the Caribbean.
But there is far more to Puerto Rico, a quiet and adventurous side hidden deep within its interior. There are canyons, mountains, white-water rivers, and places like the Caribbean National Forest. Also known as El Yunque, this dense jungle rain forest is riven by waterfalls tumbling off black-granite cliff faces. It is a place where parrots flit in the canopy and where the air is thick with the oxygenated scent of rampant vegetation.
If the island’s charms could be peeled away by layers — first raucous San Juan and the hundreds of miles of pristine beaches and then the rain forest of the rugged interior — you would find a third layer that comprises a pair of secret gems that the island reveals to very few. Ironically, those jewels transcend the island itself, one reaching out into deep space and the other down into the bowels of the earth.
It was the pair of treasures — the Arecibo Observatory, so vast that space-shuttle astronauts can see it from outer space, and the Rio Camuy Caverns, the third-largest caving network in the world — that lured me to Puerto Rico. Not that I am a caver or an astronomist, but something about these places forced me into a paradigm shift. When I think of Puerto Rico, I think of rum and the fort. And maybe of West Side Story. The cave and the observatory had a certain virtue, for lack of a better word. Their timelessness and what they had to say about the earth and mankind challenged my impressions of Puerto Rico. For this adventure, I flew to San Juan, took an ocean-view room at the Embassy Suites Dorado del Mar Beach and Golf Resort, and then drove west at the crack of dawn, bound first for the Rio Camuy Caverns.
The tourist tram threw me, I have to confess. I had images of donning a grubby coverall, hard hat, and headlamp, and then wriggling through a pile of green guano to enter the cave. But entering the Cueva Clara de Empalme, which is the largest cavern in the Rio Camuy network, is as simple as stepping off the trolley and walking down the cement path. At first I was a little put off, thinking that following a set of handrails on a guided tour of a cave would be unadventurous. But it wasn’t. The instant we set foot inside, I was glad for the walkway, for the cave was a vast assemblage of stalactites, stalagmites, and sudden descents farther and farther into the earth. The air no longer bore the pungent whiff of jungle but was still and dusty. Sunlight filtered in through the cave’s entryway, giving the inside a ghostly feel. It was as if we had not descended into the earth but somehow had stepped onto another planet. The chatter among the tour group stopped as we gaped upward at the ceiling, hundreds of feet high. The only sound was that of rushing water, unseen but very close, beneath our feet.
What must it have been like, I wondered, for Russell Gurnee to explore this cave back in the 1960s? It was Gurnee who undertook the systematic mapping of the cave system and the thundering Rio Camuy. The entire cave network stretches for miles, formed by an endless continuum of galleries and passages. Most of it is off-limits to the public, and much is still uncharted, but the Cueva Clara de Empalme and the nearby Espiral sinkhole have ample magnificence. It boggled my mind to hear the tour guide talk about the composition of stalactites and stalagmites, none of which we were allowed to touch. Each foot of growth on those rocky spikes, some of which were dozens of feet tall, represented 1,000 years of water droplets slowly calcifying until they hardened into rock. Even more mind-boggling was the notion that the caves are 45 million years old.
It is amazing to run those numbers through the head and then try to imagine what that many years feels like. Civilizations have come and gone, seasons, storms — and yet the caves have remained largely the same.
Head spinning, I stepped out onto an overlook, where I could see the Rio Camuy very far below. It shot forward from one hole in the earth and then snaked along a narrow slot before entering the rock once more. How deep did it go? I wondered. How fast was that water raging? What would it be like to attempt that same journey in a white-water raft, bobbing and surging ever deeper into the cave before finally shooting back into the light?
Then, prompted by the guide, I continued making my way through the cave of wonders, taking pains to keep my hands on the sturdy metal rail and my feet on that wondrous concrete path.
To find the Rio Camuy Caverns, I took Highway 22 west from San Juan, and then headed south on Route 129, following the signs. That same road leads to the Arecibo Observatory. So it is that a small jungle highway with very few amenities connects the core of the earth and the conduit to deep space. The Arecibo Observatory must be seen to be believed, but imagine that an artificial lunar crater has been carved out of a jungle’s limestone peak. The depression of the crater houses the largest radio telescope on earth, capable of peering far beyond our galaxy and into the billions of others galaxies that are said to lie somewhere out in the great beyond.
I’m not much of a science geek, so I don’t have the talent to properly appreciate terms like light years and multiple aperture telescope, but I can comprehend the enormity of a concave structure 1,000 feet across, beaming signals into outer space. The radio telescope has been used to determine, for instance, the rotation rate of Mercury, the accurate location of spy satellites, the exact image of asteroids, and the existence of pulsar and extrasolar planets. And it’s also made a pair of fine cameo appearances inI and in the James Bond film GoldenEye.
So what does one do when visiting a radio telescope? Well, gape, for starters. Gape at the immensity of the structure. Gape at the knowledge that the signals beeping forth from the place where you are standing will soon be bouncing around the cosmos, and gape at how small this makes the earth suddenly seem. Visitors are not allowed inside the actual control booth, but from a viewing platform just outside, I looked down into the vast white surface that those space-shuttle astronauts observe and watched as a massive boom was extended out over it, housing the technical apparatus from which the signals are bounced into space. A sonorous ping reverberated throughout the facility, the very signal that would soon echo throughout the heavens. Sure, there’s a gift shop (rather, a Galaxy Shop) and a hands-on interpretive center where visitors can learn exactly how the telescope works, but like the Rio Camuy Caverns, sometimes the best moments at a place like the observatory come from taking time to ponder the height and breadth and depth of this space and time continuum that we inhabit. It is a place where one realizes that we often think on too small a scale and that anything really is possible.
Which brings me back to my running on the golf course. The morning after my visits to the caves and the observatory, my head still ringing with questions about the meaning of life, I was out running on the resort’s links. The layout took me along an oceanfront cliff before plunging through a row of condos and then out into a series of low hills lined with palm trees. I had the course to myself. It was quiet. I was lost in thought.
Then, literally, out of the blue, a golf ball fell to earth just two feet away from me.
I stopped and looked around. There were no golfers, and no passing bird had dropped the ball.
There was no explanation whatsoever for that golf ball thumping to earth by my feet. I like to think that one of those great pings being emitted over at Arecibo had seen a response, that someone out in the great beyond had chosen to drop a golf ball from the heavens.
I had come to Puerto Rico for a paradigm shift in how I viewed the place, to be stunned and amazed. And so, in several previously unlikely ways, I was.