System Two

Zen and the art of Hyundai rental maintenance

2009-07-28T18:09:00.001-07:00

I can view the power of my position, and my eyes can see more than anyone in any place. I’ll play the game, and never ever lose.

Gentle Giant, “Playing the Game”

He stumbled into faith and thought, “God, this is all there is?”

Regina Spektor, “Blue Lips”

When you’re road-tripping west on 22 with Gentle Giant blasting out the open window, or standing atop the world’s biggest single-dish radiotelescopio, or having pinchos on the shores of Rincón, or weaving through the central Cordillera on la Ruta Panorámica, or navigating Guánica’s cactus-covered dry forest, or touring a 15th century Taíno sports complex, or sharing limitless conversation with a friend while leaning on the railing outside a lighthouse as the sun sets on the Caribbean horizon, believe me – you feel like you’ll never, ever lose.

All of it, in the span of two days.

Puerto Rico is about the same size as Connecticut, but way out of proportion. One evening you’re looking out on the aurora lights:

…and the next thing you know you’re on your way through the foothills of the Rockies:

Mojave in the morning:

…Appalachia in the afternoon:

It all started Saturday, 7 a.m., Punta Santiago in the dust. Destination: the Arecibo Observatory. Among karst upon karst:

…we eventually found ourselves victim to the staggering ease of getting lost in the Puerto Rican backcountry. Google Maps, invincible? So we thought, aimlessly scaling the slopes of a cliff-side town, Arecibo, Minas Tirith, metropolis of the tropics.

Two cans of Chef Boyardee later, we were rejuvenated, straight-shooting, on a two lane road, the widest I’d felt I’d ever seen, wide enough, 46 years ago, to fit endless truckloads of perforated aluminum panels, 40,000 in all, in the service of an enormous structure, straight out of Endor:

Later we arrived in Rincón, which means “corner” and appropriately lies at the very northwest of PR, but was actually just named after some guy named Rincón. Lots of reggaeton, a passable beach, and an absurd abundance of pizza shops.

A drive to Guánica, a night’s rest at Burger King, and we were wandering the trails of the dry coastal forest, in the land of the cactus:

…some adorned with gumdrops:

…others gracing el Guayacán Centenario, a 1000-year old tree:

From there, with colorful Yauco behind us:

…it was a northward jaunt through the rural home of the jíbaro, the authentic (…simple, humble, noble… nationalist, nativist) Puerto Rican. As you go up and up and up, the homes become more and more isolated – all the better to hog the panorama:

And all the more fulfilling when you finally hit civilization, even if it was effectively wiped out 500 years ago, now a museum and botanical garden, El Parque Ceremonial Indígena de Caguana.

At this point, numb from travel, 500 years was unfathomable, cultural exotica incomprehensible, one big blur, adventure on overdrive.

I’m glad I’m getting this all down, because there’s just so much of it – a single chunk in my memory, a single, incredibly long day, Burger King just one stop among the rest.

Amid the onslaught of novelty, each experience replacing the one before it, the essence of Puerto Rico, my subjective image of it, is no longer tied to a particular time and place. Instead, it’s the collective conscious, the interdependent act of experiencing itself – that which acknowledges, as Alex did, at the lighthouse on Rincón, that “you know, life is pretty good” – which defines Puerto Rico for me.

Out there, cruising on the autopista, it was me, Alex, and Regina Spektor, talking about cognitive science, about our lives, and about life. If central PA and central PR are any indication, I could go on a million road trips, have a trillion best conversations ever, and listen to those first few tracks from Far a quadrillion times. It doesn’t matter where; Puerto Rico is just as good as Connecticut, or Pennsylvania, or anywhere else.

...without food, water, or toilet

2009-07-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

There’s something odd about writing a travel blog after you’ve comfortably settled into a place for an entire two weeks.

At this point I have a pretty set weekday autopilot: wake up at 6:05 (or 6:15 … or 6:25), catch the boat at 7, work on Cayo until 2:30, come home, and then chill out until bedtime at 10.

Of course, when work consists of strolling around an uninhabited island recording monkeys’ reactions to puppet shows about morality that you perform for them (ask me about it), life is never actually boring.

On the boat:

Big Cay looking down on Small Cay:

And there are plenty of hot tropical attractions here, including natural swimming pools on the outskirts of the rainforest:

…and, in San Juan, statues (this one of San Juan himself):

…Congress:

…and weird spiky things:

Nonetheless, these are just punctuations in my Puerto Rican experience, and traveling requires a critical mass and someone with a car. To defend against the wrath of the hedonic treadmill that makes everyday life in PR just like anywhere else, you need novelty that’s sustainable.

Two weeks in, I’ve found two forms.

First, the people here are great. Most of them are older than I am, a good mix of undergrads, grad students, and post-docs, from all over the place – including Germany, England, Canada, South Africa, Chicago, Dartmouth, Duke, and … Harvard. Whether in CT, PA, or PR, there’s nothing better than kicking back and enjoying good company, especially with new demographics. Even the Harvard people are cool (tolerable)!

Second, routine never comes easy if you’re up for a run down the beach.

Yesterday I decided to go barefoot to Palmas del Mar, a collection of resort villages about 6 miles down coast of Humacao. Having discovered on Wikipedia that there’s a casino in town, I packed fifty-five dollars and a pair of socks.

At high tide, the beach is kind of like New Haven – by now I’ve run it plenty of times, and sans novelty and running partner, you have the noise to keep you company.

You head down the sand, through the woods past the old army base, the mangos, and the reserve, and then a few more miles beside the surf before the beach ends again, at the Rio Humacao. I had run about this far once before, but this time, the river overran its bounds. One of the oddest things I’ve ever seen – the beach literally ended, tapering at a 3-foot cliff atop a murky floodplain. I felt like I was at the edge of a flat world – or on the Oregon Trail, but with no oxen to show for.

Amid quicksand and fear, I resolved that Las Palmas was too good to pass up, and forded.

Past an idyllic grassy lookout:

…a lonely, rusted tank:

…and an abandoned house covered in psychedelic graffiti:

…I arrived on coffee-colored, garbage-less sand, a local paradise for Puerto Rico’s well-to-do:

…fit with water-slides:

…signature golf courses:

…sea turtles:

…and albino dogs:

The bouncer at the casino was a nice guy, but unfortunately you can’t get in with socks alone. When he told me I should go back to my room and get some shoes, I politely nodded, keeping my cover – even on the beach, or on the road, let alone the lobby of the Sheraton resort, I felt like some illegal (and sweaty) rogue from Punta Santiago, the chronic trespasser from Gulliver’s Travels, in a mystical land, with English road signs, clean shaves, starchy Hawaiian shirts, and (no joke) $2.50 soda cans.

The next thing I knew, it was 7:00 p.m., and little time to make it back before early sunset. After a short sprint down the beach, I cut inland across the golf course, hoping to make it to some main road and high-tail it back to Punta. Forty-five minutes later, I was lost on a random fairway in the pitch black, threatening Jurassic Park -esque predatory birds screeching above, and eventually made it back to the clubhouse, out the driveway, and into a (confusingly) gated community. A man and his two daughters were just getting in their car when I asked them how to get back to the resort, where Kelly could pick me up, and not only did they get me a glass of water, they drove me the several miles there, and we had a pleasant conversation about Yale and Michael Jackson!

A fortituous, unexpected end to a bizarre day. This guy would've fit in quite nicely:

The enchanted isle

2009-07-09T21:46:00.001-07:00

Today we had to drop off Cora at the airport, so, in lieu of the usual monkey business, we traipsed around Old San Juan.

Puerto Rico’s tourism industry really plays up the old part of the city, and rightly so – it's like a colonial Spanish village, set off from the concrete and traffic of the city, a promontory looking infinitely into the Atlantic.

The most unique element of Old San Juan is that it’s protected by a 3-mile-long stone wall – one of a kind in the Americas. The sentries are gone, but the Spanish missionary flavor is still there:

Fortresses guard the city at various points along the wall. For a handy five bucks, you can tour San Cristobal and San Felipe del Morro, which comprise a complicated arrangement of roofs, passageways, and courtyards – kind of like Ezra Stiles College at Yale, but I never knew off-white walls and off-90 angles could look so good!

Here’s the main deck of San Cristobal, whose internal walls have been renewed to mirror how they looked 250 years ago:

A view from within:

A chamber to spy for enemy ships:

Across the bay to the mainland (Old San Juan is actually an island):

El Morro is equally dominant:

…assertive:

…capacious:

…and picturesque:

Step aside, Harkness Tower and SSS. Yale University never had to shoot cannons at Dutch galleons.

After surveying the rest of Old San Juan, it becomes pretty understandable why so many people like it.

Besides the blue-stained cobblestone streets:

…there’s a grotto fitted with roosts made just for pigeons:

…of which there are many:

It’s kind of like stepping into the Rotor at Lake Compounce amusement park, a small circular chamber inside which you spin around and then the floor drops out and you keep spinning – you just kind of have to trust that the ride isn’t out to kill you.

There’s a cultural institute and a nice handful of art galleries, including a small one with some aggressive graphic art:

…a tree that was just too cool to leave in the rainforest:

…and the second oldest cathedral in the Western Hemisphere:

I’ve realized that if you really want to get a feel for a place, you have to check out the local church. The Cathedral of San Juan, just like its location, is somewhere in between the awe-inspiring Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter & Paul in Philly and the quaint and friendly St. George of rural Mifflinburg, PA. Unfortunately mass was not in session on Thursday at 4 p.m., but usually you can figure out the local religious psychology by checking out the church bulletin, in this case El Visitante, the Periódico Católico de Puerto Rico. Best 50 cents since yesterday’s GOYA beans!

As far as identities go, Old San Juan is a juggling act. Some parts, like the church, speak autonomously for a historic culture that is, in some ways, visibly safe behind its century-standing walls. Other things unabashedly announce the village’s dignified tourist appeal – classy hotels, restaurants with Spanish names but English subheadings, piña coladas for $7.70 (compare to $2.00 in Punta Santiago), and, in one bookstore, a translated copy of Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought (in Spanish, it’s actually Las Palabras del Mundo) for $45.95!

Still other elements are a mixture of the first two, and I think it’s this third set that best represents Old San Juan – that is, the remastered buildings, the well kept cobblestones, and the castle roofs now covered with sod. Old San Juan has managed to maintain its flavor without becoming a blatant consumerist commodity. Once a sought-after strategic naval outpost, it still can’t help but grab attention – but instead of meddling with or masking its personality, it makes the most of it.

Listen up, Times Square!

The zoo story

2009-07-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

One routine day after another.

That is, if you’re native to Punta – or Cayo – Santiago.

Mind you, Punta Santiago is a village on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, home to a sprawling local playa, a sincere personality, and unbeatable tropical zest. Cayo Santiago is a small island about a half mile off Punta, home to over 900 free ranging rhesus macaques…

Monday began with a spectacular what-was-supposed-to-be-7.5-mile run down Route 3, which takes you northeast along the beach and then inland into the heart of la Isla del Encanto.

There was a quintessentially Spanish pinkish red railing in Naguabo:

…some adorable stray cats:

…and, without fail, fiery Latin American politics:

What a run. At one point, I encircled a sweeping pasture so green and lush, I would have thought I was on a rainy Irish countryside were it not for the equatorial cloud forest looming ahead.

After what ended up being an eleven miler thrice the intensity of the Philly Marathon, I arrived home and rigged up some brunch:

Impressive, I know.

Brunch can be a pretty mundane exercise. The thing is, though, when you’re in a place like PR, routine doesn’t come easily. Obviously there are plenty of adventures to be taken and wonders to be discovered – that goes without saying. But, perhaps more importantly, when you’re somewhere different, and living there for a big chunk of time – that is, long enough that it’s natural to go to the store and make your own brunch instead of outsourcing it to five-star one-week honeymoon professional San Juan chefs – you get to experience yourself in an entirely new context. Imagine a three variable function: person times action times location. Multiplying, instead of adding, you get me doing brunch in Punta Santiago – something that’s never happened before in the history of the world.

I think that’s pretty cool.

But nothing to match these last two days.

The whole reason I’m down here, and not toiling in Sterling Memorial Library, is because researchers brought macaques from India to Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico in 1938, and, 71 years later, I get to carry on the tradition of observing their behavior and inferring what’s going on in their heads.

My area of work is called “comparative cognition,” whose goal, at least primarily, is to uncover the evolutionary origins of human traits. I’ve had the privilege of working the past 12 months in Yale’s capuchin monkey lab, and this spring I decided I’d try my hand at the Cayo field site.

Each type of monkey research has its own intrigue. A little time in CapLab, as it’s called, will teach you that tufted capuchins have distinct personalities, largely dependent on rank; that their favorite food is fluff tacos (marshmallow fluff rolled in fruit rollup); that the alpha male is first in queue for women and food; and that, if they don’t have a token to trade you for food, they’ll give you a pile of shit instead!

On a tiny island swarming with rhesus macaques, comparative cognition is a whole different animal. Unsolicited sex, masturbation, and territorialism are frequent happenings bordering on afterthoughts. Eyewear a mandate, headwear a must – lest you find yourself sprinkled with Herpes-B-flavored urine from above. Here, it’s the monkeys who reign supreme:

…and the humans who have to sit in a cage (for lunch, at least):

Monkeys versus Texans: it’s a tossup.

After running some trials this morning, I spent a few free afternoon hours exploring the perimeter of Big Cay (connected to its smaller companion by an isthmus). Operation: discover some new animals.

A macho crab:

The snail version of “Starry Night”:

And a punkish urchin:

All in the confines of the Atlantic spray:

This place makes you feel like a kid – a trillion inexpressible insights, a sensory kaleidoscope, a whole new world to internalize.

If Edward Albee is the basis for everything, is this The Zoo Story or The American Dream?

The ecstacy of gold

2009-07-05T18:48:00.000-07:00

I thought yesterday was the day of my life.

Midmorning today, I decided to go for a run, this time staking out a route on gmap-pedometer – haphazardly, though, as many of the roads here in Punta don’t have names, and some don’t even show up on Google Maps.

Upon leaving, it soon became more convenient just to run along the beach again. Not entirely preferable, as depending on the segment of the course the sand can get pretty dense, but obviously quite beautiful.

Once I hit the end of the beach, I began to lose my motivation to stick with a consistent pace, and eventually decided to slow down and explore some of the trails in the woods.

The initial route will take you to a rather developed abandoned army base:

If you go a bit further, you hit the main road that parallels la playa, but that’s means you’ve gone too far, and missed out on a handful of incredibly peaceful lagoons:

And then, this other trail, which wanders for a bit, before, right out of Exodus, the reddest swamp you’ve ever seen:

No artifact of photography.

Now here’s the thing. I had heard vague legends of a “mango forest” somewhere in the area. Such an exotic thought, you can’t really even conceptualize it until you see it.

And then, I did.

It wasn’t a forest in the sense of mango trees on all sides, though it may have become one if I had gone further down the trail. But seriously, plodding through the woods, coming upon a red swamp, vague legends of mango forests in mind, this, my friends, was all you could ever ask for.

There was only one tree, with a few low-hanging fruits and a number of groundlings scattered below. But just imagine walking down a concrete path, and then suddenly realizing you were on a yellow-brick road.

The remarkable unveiling of a timeless wonder, the immediate feeling of accomplishment, the sheer joy at the sight of the fruits of your laborious trudge through the (veritable) desert, is matched only by Tuco’s arrival at the site of imminent treasure in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Unlike Tuco, I got to keep it all.

The pre-postmodern world

2009-07-05T06:21:00.000-07:00

I never stop during a run.

In New Haven, at least.

But this is not New Haven.

Nor is it Oxford (CT). Nor Cleveland. Nor Philadelphia. Nor Mifflinburg.

This place is quite different. A place where, when I’m out in the sun for an hour and a half sans sunscreen, I burn like Brian Kilmeade in the face of Jesse Ventura.

Okay, that’s everywhere.

To be more precise, here, I can read a book by Steven Pinker, and really like it.

Eh, that’s also happened a few other times (The Language Instinct…How the Mind Works…?).

But you know, I really do like this one more than the others. Only about halfway through, and, yes, Pinker could use some tips from the postmodernists he (mostly) summarily minces, but The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is on a fast track to the title.

At this point it’s hard for me to divine what effect it’ll have on me, but there are strong signs that I may end up being less of a postmodernist than the past semester-plus has made me think I might be.

I realized I was a postmodernist, or some form of it, after: reading some Marx; taking Anth 413, Language, Culture, and Ideology (yeah, even more po-mo than it sounds); thinking more about small-r republicanism; talking to my older sister and Dara Lind; realizing that social psychologists often treat political ideology as if it were a statue made of granite, and then handle it with butterfingers; and reading Neo-liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology, by Susan McKinnon.

Not only does Pinker demonstrate convincingly that we are born with more complex minds than blank slatists on the po-mo New Left (and Christian far right) claim; he also intellectually discredits them by showing how ridiculous and ideologically charged their arguments against sociobiology and evolutionary psychology can be. Sometimes, the evidence speaks for itself, as when Margaret Mead, renowned intellectual, called Paul Ekman’s work on universal emotional facial expressions “outrageous,” “appalling,” and “a disgrace.” Come on, Margaret Mead, you can do better than that.

So, ultimately, while I may still be just as much of a postmodernist both morally and politically (as are a lot of people who call themselves liberal in modern America), I’m now less inclined to side with po-mo’s descriptive claims about the mind as I’ve recently begun to do.

The Blank Slate has, thus, been quite transformative, and fun to read, and I recommend it.

Likewise for Puerto Rico.

Unbelievable.

After spending four hours wafting above the wonderful, almost edible, Atlantic clouds, I arrived in San Juan Friday night at about 8:30. It was thrilling, even exhilarating, to see the city in Christmas tree form after four hours at sea.

The first thing I realized after getting in the car (fellow researchers Kelly and Cora, and Kelly’s friend Jason, came to pick me up) was that the flora of the island is much different from that to which I’ve become accustomed in 19½ years of Pennsylvania and Connecticut. In itself, it isn’t overwhelmingly new to me. I mean, I’ve been to Florida and southern California, and I’ve seen palm trees and the like before. But knowing that I’d actually be living here for a substantial length of time made me feel like a stranger in a strange land. This is no vacation – it’s life, masquerading as one, with categorically different furniture.

As I mentioned, I really never do stop during runs, but, the next morning, I took not one, not four, but five breaks. Each was totally necessary, especially the second one. I had been running down the road that skirts the beach for a few miles, before it all ended, and if you want to continue traveling along the coast, you have to meander through and up a trail in the woods. And so I did. A few minutes later, I came upon a huge concrete slab (which I later discovered is the remnant of a former army base) and looked out onto the ocean – from maybe, at that point, over a hundred feet above. Folks, you’re just going to have to take my word on this one. The view (or la vista fantastica, as I related it to a few passersby on the way back) was jaw-dropping.

It was one of those moments when you stop running, stop thinking, and just feel. The exemplar of experience in the strictest, most arational sense of the term. Psychological System Two firing on all cylinders. The most recent in a string of such moments I’ve had this summer, including, but certainly not limited to, jumping in the Schuykill River, taking a cigar walk with Mike and Emily at 4:30 a.m., running through Central Park in the rain with my sister, listening to Revolver, witnessing a theophany atop “The Pulpit” on the Appalachian Trail in PA having trekked shoelessly for miles, looking out onto the Mifflinburg farmland, midnight cigar walking with Rek and Adam, and conversing with my mom, my sisters, and my aunts. This was all those, but you didn’t have to be me to appreciate it. Objectively spectacular.

That the otherwise very foreign Puerto Rico is not really a foreign country doesn’t take away from its intrigue, but adds to it. On the streets of Punta Santiago, where they accept shiny green Jackson 20s just like we do, you feel like you’re in America in, say, the 1800s. It’s a thought experiment, a novel about an enchanted isle, but real life just the same. Everything’s mostly pre-modern (or, at least, pre-postmodern), a good old, a strikingly clean old. It’s funny because, when I see trash piling up on Long Wharf in New Haven, I wonder why the hell the city won’t try (a hell of a lot) harder to make it the toast of the Connecticut shoreline it can be. Here, though, there’s a certain aesthetic to a trashed-up, rundown house, or a soda cup washed ashore in the seaweed. It’s an aesthetic similar to that of the dirt on a soccer pitch which, though definitionally dirty, is so natural, so pure, so clean, you could almost eat it.

Being an American in a semi-American place is also kind of interesting. I’m much whiter (now, redder) than virtually everyone I’ve seen on the island, so I’ve gone around assuming people think I’m not a native Puerto Rican. At the same time, this is never fully clear to whomever I may be speaking to, and so every conversation starts off with an awkward “habla inglés?” or “buenos días” or “perdón.” I really, really want to have to speak Spanish, but most of the time it becomes immediately obvious to the person that “mi español no es bueno,” and we end up just talking in English. The worst is when that happens and I feel it appropriate to end the conversation with “muchas gracias” or “hasta luego,” but the person, who himself is busy saying “you’re welcome” or “see you later,” gets thrown a bit off kilter. Though to me I’m making a deferent gesture to their language on behalf of my own, to them perhaps that deference is ever-so-slight condescension.

A postmodernist might say I’m in a catch-22 and that the dominated automatically wins (versus me, the American, the de facto dominant). In the real world, though, you have to speak English or Spanish, and power dynamics can’t have their cake and eat it.

Speaking of cake, yesterday nadie on the beach and streets of Punta visibly celebrated the Fourth of July.

As for me, why celebrate political independence when all I ever needed was miles and miles of Caribbean sand?