Yesterday I rented a car, rolled down the windows, put on some Cuban music, followed by Ana Belen, followed by Dave Matthews, and left Viejo San Juan, headed towards the mountains of Rio Grande, where I had a date to visit with friends. I chose the long route, taking one of my favorite drives in Puerto Rico, which starts on a short bridge just past the airport and leads alongside the Atlantic through a couple of smallish towns. As I entered into Pinones, cars braked and pulled to the shoulder, squeezing into makeshift spaces so they could stop to enjoy the frituras, the arroz de jueyes, and roasted pig on a spit, the pieces hacked off with a machete. Lechon is a Puerto Rican favorite any time of the year, but no time is this more true than the holiday season, when no respectable Puerto Rican household goes without the rich meat and crackly, crispy skin of the fattened pig. As I waited for the traffic to ease up, I glanced at the roiling waves on my left, thinking about how I've learned here that the sea has seasons, and how each of those looks and acts, just as I learned the cardinal directions in New York by paying attention to the grid system of streets and avenues.

Just past the food kiosks cooking with their wood-fed fires I pulled off the blacktop and onto the sandy road that's been cut through palms solely by years of use. It's a one-way road in most places, and it's not always straight. You have to learn to drive confidently but with caution, deciding when to stand your ground and assert your right of way and when it's best to yield. The drive is phenomenally beautiful to me, but it's also pocked by patches of ugliness... the dense cover of the sea grapes that separates the main road from this road make it possible--especially at night--for people to dump their trash--ovens, refrigerators, couches, baby cribs, escombros from houses in the midst of renovation-- sometimes put into shallow holes and most of the time not. I veered off the oceanside path and back onto the road, entering into the canopy of trees whose branches bend to meet each other, their leaves filtering the sun into a sublime light, the shade creating a noticeable difference in temperature. Drivers zoom on the straightaway that opens up between two dangerous curves, but they shouldn't I think; they miss that light, that sudden shift from sweat to goosebumps, the way the mist hangs onto the tops of the mountains of the rainforest just as you're reaching their foothills. They miss learning how to yield to slower machines--cows, horses, the occasional cyclist or pedestrian without other means of transportation--that have their own speed and rhythm, which are usually less negotiable than that of the car.

Right of way is a tough concept here... maybe everywhere. Tonight, I watched a taxi driver graze the thigh of a waitress with his fender as he reached to switch the station with one hand and negotiate his cell phone and the wheel with the other. As she pummeled her fist into the hood of his van and began a tirade about how he should be more careful, he just laughed, got back in his taxi and pulled up to his position in the fare line. Earlier today, a persistently unfriendly neighbor who never thought it might be easier to befriend me--or at least have one conversation over the course of 2.5 years--than to berate me seemed not to think that she had failed to yield when she opened the door of my apartment, uninvited and unannounced, to have one last spar before I leave.

Ceda el paso... give way, yield. It's not easy, that I know for a fact, but we miss a lot when we always insist that we have the right of way.