La Vida Después (Life After)
I. La Temporada (Hurricane Season)
September 19, 2065. It’s that sweet time of the year that the residents of La Parguera, Puerto Rico look forward to: La Temporada. Some light sarcasm never hurt anyone.
These days, intense hurricanes are nothing extraordinary. Not for lack of strength in both wind and rain (they’re definitely extraordinary in that regard) but instead because these once one in fifty or one in a hundred storms are now nothing more unusual than a drought in California, a snowless winter in Michigan, or a flooded beach in Florida. These days, any tropical storm that forms during La Temporada has as good a chance of becoming a major hurricane as someone sweating on a hot day. Here in La Parguera, locals don’t even bat an eye to them anymore. Probably because they are the only ones crazy enough to stay there.
As with many communities, there is a sense of tradition in La Parguera when it comes time to prepare for a major hurricane. La Parguera’s tradition involves four steps. Step one, get your shit together. Step two, enjoy a night with friends before the storm’s landfall. Might as well have some fun before tough times. Step three, make sure to say goodbye to everybody (because you never know). And step four, lock yourself away in your shelter, pray, and ride it out.
Enrique “Kike” Ortiz, once known more commonly as Dr. Ortiz, is finishing up on step one of La Parguera’s tradition. Kike spends most of his days out on his retro fishing boat, an old 21-foot long Pursuit central console. She's an old boat from the mid-2020s with a couple of outboard engines that Kike managed to retrofit to use solar power instead of the typical gasoline. Whenever the weather allows, he goes out in search of what little fish remains in the waters of southern Puerto Rico with the goal of adding to the stockpile of food he builds up during La Temporada. In recent years, he’s also learned how to grow oysters within his shelter as a backup, in case any of these slow-moving yet intense storms stick around for too long. Today, much like everyone else, Kike is preparing for the eighth hurricane of La Temporada and second to track near Puerto Rico, Hurricane Marco, by taking one last run at a few fish. His target today, a Mahi.
During his youth, Mahi were as common in these waters as rats in a New York City sewer. However, the water has turned so warm that most of these fish have moved north like birds in the summer. But these birds weren’t coming back anytime soon. The few that remain are dwarfs. This fish that once would glide under the surface of the clear blue water now seeks shelter in the darker depths, where pockets of relatively cooler water exist. Cooler in the sense that 84 degrees Fahrenheit is considered a comfortable water temperature. Kike knows how to find the spots where the bottom drops off rapidly, thus allowing the water from even deeper to come up and cool the scorching surface water. Still, there is the matter of the fish’s present rarity, so even if he knows the spots, hooking an actual fish is still a game of chance. Like trying your luck with scratch tickets. Sure, you might win a few bucks every now and then, but how often do you find the jackpot?
Kike settles in on his third spot of the day in what will most likely be his last chance. The wind remains calm, but the first tail of clouds from Marco is already visible on the horizon. The waves mirror the wind as they one foot in height and barely rocked the boat. It was so calm that even people prone to seasickness would stand a chance today. Above Kike lies a clear blue sky, the last he will probably see until after Marco passes.
Kike sits on the yellowed driver’s seat of his old center console. Suddenly, Kike hears the reel of his pole start to scream from a running line. Luck is on his side today. A fish at this spot locks in on his makeshift lure all the way down in the cool depths. Baitfish has become hard to come by so Kike makes his own makeshift lures for fishing. These fish are not known for putting up a battle, especially with their reduced size, so it only takes Kike a minute to reel it in. The fish is a three-foot Mahi with a pale green and gold color, very different from the bright colors it used to don when Kike caught them in his teenage days. Back then, this kind of fishing was more of a pleasant weekend activity than an act of survival. On the plus side, now he wouldn’t have to listen to his dad’s Bon Jovi Greatest Hits album on repeat for five hours. With his fish in tow and Marco as the backdrop to an otherwise searing hot, yet oddly beautiful day, he heads back into La Parguera. There, he’ll soon get together with the other locals and step two of the preparation tradition. La Noche Antes, as it is called by the locals, is a mild celebratory night held before the landfall of a hurricane to help calm everyone’s nerves.
Kike finishes tying up his small boat on its trailer and hauls it back to his shelter. Kike’s shelter is a true representation of the life he held before returning to Puerto Rico. As a climate engineer, Kike once used his intellect to try and solve climate change. Now, he uses his intellect to survive. The shelter is a small, yet versatile old electrical substation that was once used by Puerto Rico’s electrical company. It was abandoned after the electrical company scaled-down power production on the island due to the island’s mass diaspora over the last century. Kike commandeered the old station when he returned to Puerto Rico a few years ago. He noticed its strategic position on a hill adjacent to La Parguera. The side of the hill it was on made the shelter favorable for both sun exposure, needed to power the solar panels on the roof, and for protection against hurricanes. While it clearly had shown wear and tear from lack of use, Kike has restored it to a suitable living space. Over the years since his return, Kike had amassed a decent set of commodities in the shelter. He has solar panels on the roof, energy-storing batteries, a desalination plant along with a rainwater collection system, energy-efficient lighting, and a plumbing system needed for his small oyster farm. Most of these materials he had procured from an abandoned FEMA warehouse that had been left behind after FEMA’s last ever recovery effort operation some years ago. It wouldn’t have been the first time FEMA abandoned resources in Puerto Rico.
Kike drives into the shelter with his boat in tow. He grabs his freshly caught fish and sets it on a cutting board. Carefully, he extracts as much meat as can be taken out from the Mahi. He disposes of the remains outside for the seagulls to finish off and stores the newly packaged meat in his freezer. He walks over to his rechargeable batteries to assure himself that his solar panels have collected enough energy to last for the next two to three days. Once verifying they had, he goes up to the roof to shut the protective steel door over the solar panels. The steel door would make sure the solar panels aren’t permanently damaged from the hurricane. This was his final task of the day before preparing for step two of the tradition.