Yo Soy Destino

I’m tired. The chemicals running through my body wipe me out sometimes, I guess. So, nothing new today except that I discovered this fragment on my laptop while cleaning off my laptop as I “get my affairs in order.” I laughed, I cried. To explain, this was a section from a travel piece, that I might not now ever get to complete, on my first trip to Puerto Rico. Let me just say that if you waste your travel dollars headin’ off to Sandals, you’re a moron, since you can’t get any sense whatsoever what life is like outside of friggin’ Manalapan. And, as a human, you owe it to the rest of us to at least be aware. So, here’s the word snack for ya:

As we descend beneath the clouds and into the turbulence of La Tormenta, I reflect on how it didn’t seem to matter that Nature and Fate conspired to detour me and my leggy traveling companion from the Enchanted Isle. And now, as the turbulent, star speckled night pushes down on the wings of our Airbus, it occurs to me that we haven’t yet landed, that we aren’t in our car, that we aren’t yet safe, cold and sound in our bed beneath termite-digested eaves. So, anything might yet happen. Frankly, I’m tired of the creative forces of disaster whether of man or Mother Gaia. It’s time to wind this puppy down.

The whole thing seemed to start round about Columbus’ rather amazing second voyage and it’s been slipping downhill, or rather, down the outside sloped wall of El Morro, for five hundred and seventeen years. A long and gentle slide into potential oblivion, just like the descent being taken by this aircraft. Not enough to be terrifying but just edging on vague nausea.

This trip seemed destined not to be. First, arrangements were pushed forward three weeks at the last second, literally. Then, there was the issue of finding the right flights. My traveling companion insisted on matching seats, meaning the flights had to be trashed and re-booked. Then, the car got a flat. The flight made it halfway to San Juan when it was turned back on account of volcanic ash. Volcanic ash. Volcanic ash that I thought had been a misprint the night before when checking the weather. As it turned out the active volcano on the nearby island of Montserrat had belched forth fire and brimstone and clouds of this were floating over the island. The pilot explained that the floating pumice would, much like a giant bar of Lava Soap, scrub the insides of the delicate but brawny jet engine into oblivion. There’s that word again.

We arrived back at Kennedy. There were some Puerto Ricans on the flight who were none too happy with this gaff from the Underworld. They expressed their displeasure by getting off the plane. Unfortunately for them, this voided their tickets.

That’s all, folks. This was a very auspicious trip, ringed by a volcanic explosion at the outset and capped with a massive explosion of the stuff that makes petro-dollars, namely, petroleum at the largest petroleum refinery there. Must mean something, no?