One year later, the scars are largely invisible. Felled trees and sodden furnishings have been picked up and hauled away to unseen landfills. The odor of diesel and wet cardboard that pervaded San Juan for weeks after the storm has dissipated, replaced now by the salt scent of the Atlantic and the perfume of auto exhaust. There are still blue tarps on one roof in ten, but when you fly into Puerto Rico and see them from five thousand feet, they look pretty until you understand what they represent.
It's only when you look at the island through the lens of memory that the gashes and pockmarks left by Hurricane Maria become apparent. People who were born and raised here see them clearly. There are businesses that closed and never reopened. Schools that stand vacant. Once-beautiful parks and woodlands that bear the marks of torture. And above all, there’s a collective case of post-traumatic stress disorder that began when so much of what was living and familiar blew away or died where it stood.
But along with the scars came clarity. For many Puerto Ricans, the storm brought a renewed sense of purpose. Being confronted with so much destruction helped them decide what they wanted to build. It helped them rediscover old dreams. It brought clarity.
Miguel Rivera: Committing to Neighborhood Youth
They’re not his children, but they’re his kids. And Miguel worries about his kids. They’re teens, 14 and 15 years old. For months after Hurricane Maria, they had nothing to do. Schools were closed. Younger kids found ways to play amid the hurricane rubble, but the teens were just hanging out in the streets.
“And you know, when kids like that don’t have anything to do, they start getting into trouble,” he says.
So several months after the storm waters receded, Miguel decided to do something about that.
Miguel Rivera was raised in Cayey, a town of 48,000 situated in the Central Mountain Range that runs the length of Puerto Rico like an east/west spine. Sugar, tobacco, poultry, and Coca-Cola keep the town in business and make it a little more prosperous than many other cities in central Puerto Rico. But there are places in Cayey where families live in houses with dirt floors.
He grew up with baseball, a game that is so much a part of his being that he remembers playing the game at age four. He kept playing throughout primary and secondary school. Roberto Alomar, the Toronto Blue Jays’ legendary Puerto Rican second baseman, was his hero.
Miguel’s team got to the Puerto Rico championship while he was in high school. He played third base and right field then.
“I used to have a strong arm, and those are the positions where you need that because you’re farthest from first. And playing right field is awkward because most batters are righties, but I was able to figure out how to position myself to be where the ball was going.”
When he was 12, he went to his first major league game. It was Tampa at home versus the Yankees. It was the first of seven MLB games he’s seen in person: three in Tampa, three in St. Louis, and one in DC. He remembers them all, play by play.
After he graduated from high school in 2007, he went to Polytechnic University for computer engineering but left after a year and a half to join the army. He was stationed in Georgia for five years and served as an IT specialist. On his off days, he coached baseball teams for local kids. When he got out of the army, he moved to Indiana for a time before returning to Puerto Rico around Christmas, 2016.
As soon as he got back to his birthplace, he began playing and coaching baseball again, this time for a Class A amateur league team. His team did well, advancing to States where it won in the first round before being eliminated. He had to drive an hour each way to make practices and games. In Puerto Rico, that’s a long, long drive.
In September 2017, he made it through Hurricane Irma without much difficulty.
“Irma was no big deal,” he remembers. “It was like a lot of other hurricanes we’ve been through before here.”
But less than two weeks after Irma, he began hearing about the big one, about Maria.
“I first heard about it from my mother. She was freaking out. She called me and told me to go buy this and that and to do all kinds of things to get prepared. She was watching the weather forecast and crying hysterically.”
He gave a wry chuckle and went on: “That’s why I stayed at my grandparents’ house during the storm.” But in a more serious vein he added, “My parents could take care of themselves. But my grandparents are in their mid-seventies and needed me.”
As the storm approached, Miguel helped his grandfather bring things that the family stored outside their one-story house inside. Things that were too big and heavy to move they tied down.
“But we didn’t do the windows,” he says with some regret. “There just wasn’t time.”
The night before the storm hit, he and his grandparents and his great uncle sat in their living room playing bingo for pennies. It was raining. Later, he talked fantasy baseball with friends on his cell phone. It was the last time he gave much thought to baseball for almost six months.
At five or six the next morning, the storm picked up.
“I was in a tornado when I was in basic training in Missouri,” he remembers. “It was awful. But Maria was worse. It was like a lot of tornadoes all at once. I never thought I’d have to yell inside the house just so people sitting next to me could hear me. The glass windows in the exterior doors blew in and then wind, water, and even rocks started blowing inside the house. We tried moving some heavy furniture in front of the doors, but it didn’t do much good. Water was coming in through the windows. We were all yelling just to hear each other. My grandparents were in shock. They couldn’t move; they couldn’t do anything. The water just poured in til it was ankle-deep. This lasted all day.”
They made it through the night, barely sleeping in a house with eight inches of water. The next morning, when the winds finally died down, Miguel went outside. There were trees down everywhere. Electric cables lay on the ground. The house was covered with mud. And there was water everywhere.
The weeks afterward were hard. There was no gasoline to be had, so Miguel took to bicycling through the mountains, 20 minutes each way between his grandparents and his parents. His grandparents weren’t strong enough to bring bottles of water and other supplies back to the house on foot, so the task fell to him. He’d withdrawn some cash from his bank account before the storm hit, but it was quickly used up. Supermarkets which normally sold 24 bottles of water for $4 were now charging $10 for it. There were no working ATMs or credit card systems in the Cayey area.
In desperation, he and some friends scrounged enough gasoline to drive to San Juan, about 33 miles to the north. It was a difficult trip. The roads were blocked by fallen trees and they had to make many detours. But some of the ATMs in San Juan were working and getting money was essential.
By the end of October, Miguel’s grandparents’ house was still in darkness. Nevertheless, things were stable enough for him to feel comfortable about leaving on a long-planned trip to Los Angeles. It was good to get away, though he still worried about his family. The distance and the contrast between drowned, darkened Puerto Rico and the sunny glitz of Los Angeles got him thinking about his life. For most of it, baseball had been an important avocation. An extracurricular. But it was what he loved. And he saw how it could serve the needs of the young people of Cayey—both the middle-class teens and the kids in the dirt-floored houses who, after Maria, were living in mud.
“I’ve always seen sports, not just baseball but all sports, as something important to everyone at some point. It’s important to do something physical. And I’ve always done things with kids and teenagers.
I saw baseball as the way to help them."
He returned to Puerto Rico with a new purpose. But getting back to baseball was not easy. The fields around Cayey were unusable. The once-smooth grassy surfaces were pockmarked with mounds of dirt and deep divots. The fences were down. But he was determined to make it work.
He founded a new organization called Cayey Baseball.
“It needs a better name,” he says with a laugh, “but I wasn’t worried about a name when I started it.” He found funding from several organizations, including ConsumersAdvocate.org. The money was used to buy mitts, batts, and uniforms. None of it went to Miguel.
“This is my job now. I don’t get paid for it, but that’s not the point. I am focused on developing the program and developing the kids.”
Luis Lamboy: Seeing Through the Smoke and Mirrors
When Luis Lamboy was a kid, he had a paper route he did with his father. One day, he saw a Jeep Wrangler Sahara parked in front of one of their customers’ houses. It was bristling with decals, cool tires, lights, and a tan canvas top.
He turned to his father and said, “I’m going to have one of those someday.”
But he had to wait years before that happened. In the meantime, he went through primary and secondary school, did a year of college at the University of Puerto Rico on a baseball scholarship, began working in the restaurant industry, transitioned to the tourism business, and then began his current job as a trusted driver, house sitter, and general assistant to people who’d moved to Puerto Rico from the States.
Not until November of 2011 was he able to make good on the childhood promise he’d made to himself. He bought a grey Wrangler Unlimited then, one he plans to keep forever.
“If I were ever to imagine a car to have in my driveway for the rest of my life, that would be it. You can get in your jeep and you’re on a mission. You can go anywhere you want and get the job done.”
Unlike a lot of people on Puerto Rico, where Jeep culture thrives in various organizations, Luis prefers to keep his interest a solitary passion.
“I was in a Jeep event once,” he admits, “but I was working Saturdays and Sundays at the time, so I couldn’t follow up with them. And I hated being in line behind 50 other Jeeps, because the guy at the front gets to tell you when to go and when to stop. I’d rather just go straight for dirt and have a good time and come back home. They say never go Jeeping alone, and that’s good advice—but I do I sometimes.”
When Hurricane Irma hit, Luis’s Jeep was parked next to his apartment in Santurce, a residential neighborhood of San Juan. He was living there with his girlfriend and his dog Mago in a fourth-floor unit. They had stocked up on a lot of provisions before the storm hit but didn’t really need them.
“Irma was not exactly a disaster for us,” he said.
They lost power for about ten days. When the lights came on again, he was already hearing about a second storm, a bigger, badder one, that was approaching Puerto Rico.
“We didn’t quite believe it. You know, a second hurricane in two weeks? What are the odds?” And in any event, he felt ready for Maria.
But it was, as he says, “a hellacious storm. I’ve never been in a rocking boat on bad seas before, but it felt like we were on the ocean, what with all the wind and rain.”
One of the windows in his apartment blew open and closed, open and closed as the winds picked up. He tried securing it with a rope, but with no luck. Still, he stayed fairly dry during the storm up in his fourth-floor apartment.
After twelve hours of relentless wind and rain, the storm let up at about 11:00 in the morning. Luis went outside to inspect the damage.
“The damage was impressive. Big trees that you thought would be there forever were on the ground. There was debris everywhere. Power lines were laying in the street.”
He wasn’t scared--after all, he drives a Jeep. But he did feel overwhelmed. There was no way for him to contact his parents by phone or internet, so he got into his Wrangler and headed south.
My Jeep is Hurricane Rated!"
“As I was making the trip, I began to wonder what was going on. The trees beside the road looked like they’d been burned—they were just trunks without leaves.”
It was during that trip that he began to realize that the Puerto Rico he knew was never going to be the same again.
“With all the leaves gone from the trees, you could really tell where the poor people lived. You could see their houses, how they lived, and what their needs were.”
He also saw how people helped each other.
“On the way back from my parents’ house, I saw whole families working in the highway, moving trees and branches off to the side and opening the road. Civilians with chainsaws, machetes, and axes were the ones who cleared the highway. I don’t care who tells you different. Everybody was pitching in. It was quite a scene.”
Luis’s employers continued to pay him after the storm, even though it was difficult to get much done. But because credit card processors were offline, Luis needed cash. Most of the ATMs weren’t working, but there was one place where they were dispensing money as usual: the casino in the Marriott Hotel.
“One week after the hurricane, I went there and saw a roomful of people playing slot machines.”
His experience as a driver landed him a ride-or-die gig with CNN to take Anderson Cooper and Boris Sanchez to different parts of the island so they could report on the devastation. Seeing the hidden poor of Puerto Rico as he drove them around, watching people gamble in a casino while much of the island was devastated, and noticing which neighborhoods and businesses had their power restored first made Luis think differently about Puerto Rico.
“I realized that a lot of things here were just smoke and mirrors. But once all that fell to the ground, you could see the reality behind it.”
Still, he doesn’t seem embittered.
“Maria brought out the best and the worst in people and I saw both. I was discouraged by some people, but surprised by others.”
Luis helped out in the relief effort after the storm. He was in demand because of his Jeep.
"I could basically go anywhere. I was able to do food runs for relief groups and was never afraid of what the trail would bring because my Jeep is so capable -- and I know what its capabilities are."
Luis didn’t have his power restored until December 4, some 75 days after Maria. But nothing seemed remotely normal to him until January.
“We had a strange Christmas,” he remembers. “My Christmas present to my mother was a generator.”
As the conversation returns to Jeeps again, his face relaxes.
“I’m going to be one of those old dudes who shows up at a park in his Jeep every morning at 11:00 without a care in the world,” he says. “It’s going to be this Jeep, the one that’s out in my driveway now. I already know that’s my life out there.”
Gaby Rivera: From Law Student to Graphic Designer
The last movie Gabriela Rivera saw before the hurricane hit was Baby Driver. She loved the character arc of Baby, the getaway car driver with a pure heart and a killer music collection. Here was someone who was pressured into a career he didn’t believe in. After experiencing many deaths and being permanently injured, he realizes that life is too short to devote it to other people’s expectations. This lesson was to prefigure her own career arc in ways she never expected.
She’d grown up with the movies, a passion handed down from her father. At three, she developed her first full-on movie obsession, watching and re-watching a well-worn VHS tape of Aladdin. Of course at that age she wanted to be Jasmine, so her mother put together an Aladdin birthday party for her and costumed her in harem pants. Aladdin posters, shirts, notebooks, stickers, and lunchboxes followed. She continued to love watching the movie as she got older, but at some point, she shifted from wanting to be Jasmine to wanting to be the Genie. Transformation was attractive to her.
“The Genie could be anything—even a bee or a goat,” she recalls, the sense of wonder still obvious in her voice some two decades later.
She was hardly in kindergarten when her father introduced her to Star Wars. She was so young she didn’t understand much of it at first. But her father was patient. He explained that while it looked like Star Wars was about things that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far away, it was really about things that were going on in our world. In Puerto Rico. And everywhere else on earth.
When she second trilogy came out, she was old enough to see them in the theaters. Her favorite of the three was Revenge of the Sith, the film where Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader. It was another love affair with a character who transfigures himself in response to terrible events. Soon she had Star Wars light sabers, keychains, action figures, and Lego sets.
By the time Hurricane Irma hit in early September, 2017, Gaby was living away from her parents for the first time in a one-room apartment in Rio Piedras. She’d gotten a bachelor’s degree from UPR in international business and accounting. Even though she loved drawing and dreamed of becoming an artist, her family and friends stressed to her the importance of entering one of the traditional professions.
“Everyone said be a doctor, lawyer, or accountant because you’ll never make a living as an artist."
She also discovered that she had a flair for coding and had enjoyed doing contract work in that field, but again the voices of authority in her life steered her in other directions. So she dutifully followed their advice and attended law school at night. But by day, she worked as a graphic designer at a tech startup in Vega Alta.
“When I heard that Irma was coming, I prepared everything in my apartment,” she remembers. “This was my first time living alone and I was determined to be responsible. I moved the furniture to the center of the room. I emptied my fridge, because I knew power would be off for a few days. And then I drove to my parents’ house. But Irma was like any other hurricane, like all the storms I grew up with here. It wasn’t that bad. Nothing happened, really. No big deal. I missed a few days of work is all.”
The news that a second, more powerful hurricane was approaching Puerto Rico felt unreal.
“I hadn’t even rearranged the furniture back in my apartment. I drove to my grandparents’ house on Tuesday night. While I was driving I was thinking this is kind of crazy, but I was calm. I figured that since Irma wasn’t such a big deal, Maria wouldn’t be a big problem and I’d be back in a few days.”
It was not to be. The night the hurricane hit was unlike anything Gaby had ever experienced.
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, the sound of the wind and things hitting the windows and our roof and gutters getting ripped away from the house. You could feel the storm through the exterior doors—they were shaking and rattling and humming. We have a sliding glass door that leads to the balcony, and when the wind changed, it would buckle and bend. We started bracing it, so the glass wouldn’t break. The windows were vibrating. We all went into an interior room on the second floor away from the windows. And then we lost all communications. It was—” she pauses for a moment “really scary.”
The next morning, Gaby’s family and her dazed neighbors were out on the street, sizing up the damage and trying in vain to get a cell phone signal. Her family’s house lost part of its roof, gutters, and a window. Other families weren’t so lucky.
Gaby’s mother ran a store that sold furniture and appliances and propane. The family reopened the store a week after the hurricane hit, but even the most basic transactions were difficult.
“We couldn’t process credit cards because the electricity and the internet were down. Cash was hard to get because the ATMs were either offline or had very long lines. My mother was not going to let people go without stoves or propane, so most transactions were done on store credit. We tried to get to the people’s houses to make deliveries, but it was really difficult because gasoline wasn’t available. The lines were huge, and you needed a permit to get gas without waiting in line. I was working with my mom and dad all that week.”
Once the airport reopened, Gaby and her brother flew to Orlando to go stay with their aunt. She thought it would be a short visit, but she didn’t return until November when electricity was restored. While they were there, they were interviewed by the Washington Post for an article about Puerto Ricans who left the island after Maria.
Looking back at Maria one year later, Gaby believes that the hurricane had a profound effect on her: a transformation, like the Genie, like Darth Vader, like Baby.
“One of the skills I acquired was to be more patient with everything, because you see the stress in people trying to get gasoline, food, and basic stuff and they can’t find it. I saw all these people going crazy without water and food. But I learned to be patient and wait."
I learned that I can’t wait for other people to help me, my family or my community—I have to do it myself. "
"And that’s what we did. We tried do to whatever we could to help others, whether they were family or just people we saw in the streets.”
“When you go through something like that, you’re reminded of something you already know but sometimes forget: it’s important to live your life like you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. It can all change. After Maria, I started making decisions about my personal and professional life and didn’t worry so much about what other people thought. And so I left law school to devote myself to web development. Because that’s what I like. That’s me. I’m not going to waste my life doing something I don’t like.”