As primates, we all share standard features: the love of open spaces, the warmth of the sun on our skin, and freedom. We wandered wild planes and climbed steep mountains, searching for shelter or the wonder of discovering. No experience replaces the wonder of viewing an unknown place for the first time. Nature is the great canvas on which the gods painted their masterpieces.
We were like stray dogs. “Perros Realengos,” they say in our country. The type that roams the streets, free, unleashed. In our case, because it was the summer, we were free from school, and our main occupation was to fill our days with fun while escaping the summer heat.
We were kids of the Caribbean—sandals-wearers, dressed in faded shorts and wife-beaters, with ashy skin roasted by the sun, happy and innocent. Like stray, scrappy dogs, we happily played outdoors while trying to figure out how to best spend our summer. We had no bicycles, swim clubs, summer camps, video games, or modern gadgets. All we had was our friendship and time, lots of it.
It was our summer school break in July, and we did not have more choices but to sit by the shade of our building, bored like kids in Sunday bible class. My friend Bobby, who was one year older than I and had a more developed canine spirit than your humble servant Arthur, abruptly came up with an idea. He was always full of ideas, most of them bad ones. This time, he claimed he knew where a distant relative showed him while visiting his mother. It was far from our street, in another part of the city. As usual, I came up with a skeptical comment common in adolescents and a trademark in my family. “You’re lying,” I promptly accused him. “No, I am not…trust me”. He proudly asserted himself. He said I should trust him this time because the place was unbelievable.
We were a rather odd mix, resembling the Abbot and Costello type. He was tall and wiry. I was a bit chunky and shorter than him. We couldn’t be more different temperamentally. He was extroverted and friendly, with an easy smile and a playful character. I was more introverted, reflective, prone to frown-face, uptight, and angry. I was the oldest child of my parents. He was the youngest child of his. But we had a strange bond. We had an animalistic understanding of each other. I guess, in a way, we complemented each other’s loneliness. His father was not in his life, and his mother was too poor to care for him. Mine were too busy to concern themselves with me. We also had an unspoken agreement: I did not criticize him and vice versa. We were kind to one another and protective of each other. We were like stray, scrappy dogs; those circumstances made us brothers.
We lived in an asphalt-laden, cinder-block concrete cage in the oriental part of Santo Domingo. Global warming and greenhouse gas emissions still had not captured the public interest during our upbringing. But we did not need to know about a warming planet. We already knew. From an early age, we learned to respect the hours between 12 noon and 2 pm. In the Caribbean, as the morning grows older, the sun seems to lower and hit you with more intensity. Your skin warms up, and the reflection of the sunlight on the pavement confronts you aggressively. You seek refuge under any nearby shade you can find. Thus, the interring time between 12 noon and 2 pm became sacred. It was lunchtime, “siesta” time, and the streets would clear up, and the traffic slowed almost to a halt.
Families typically gathered for lunch at noon and afterward listened to a few Cuban radio shows from the fifties as a welcome distraction. It was like dessert to your meal. Later, once TV became ubiquitous, most households would tune in to the midday show, “El Show del Mediodia,” a variety show with comedy and music.
As I said, we sat bored because it was hot and no other kids were around to play baseball. The pavement was scorching, and catching balls was boring for just the two of us. He insisted that this place he was talking about would blow my mind. “Okay, let’s see it,” I finally begrudgingly agreed.
The next day, we started our adventure. We headed to a place several miles away from our neighborhood, on the city’s outskirts. It was a good 45 minutes to an hour’s walk. Even as the trek was way out of my comfort zone, I could not pass on the adventure. It was a desolate, rural land by the riverbanks.
It was still morning hours, and it was not yet too hot. We walked in the northeast, away from our housing project, through neighborhoods of single-home dwellings. No baseball caps, no bottle of water, snacks, or current standard trekking comforts. We crossed over one of the main avenues of the oriental part, the “San Vicente de Paul.” More single homes and poorer neighborhoods were in our way. One may better describe them as tin-roofed shacks. A couple of more miles ahead, we started abandoning all civilization. The landscape became all rural land. We follow a long dirt road bordered by barbed wire fences. To the left, vegetation, trees, and some sparsely pasturing cows. Some rolling hills, but for the most part, flat lands.
Further into the land, away from the city, the vegetation turned to marshes, which had very dark soil, given its proximity to the river. To the right, there was more bare land, presumably farms or government-owned fields. We had more walking to do, but we were pretty close.
To approach our destination, we needed to walk on a small, single-person path that was not trafficked by cars, animals, or many people. We walked on rolling hills covered by sometimes soft and muddy soil, not dusty, and intermingled with rocks and grass. A strong smell of vegetation and wild nature, seasoned by the heat, filled the air. The image of flying insects, heat, and vegetation pleased me the same way later in my life when I saw paintings of nature scenes in museums.
As we got closer, there was a slight irregularity on the ground. We walked down a small rocky path and descended to a flat, vast field facing the river. As we were very near, ahead, in the not-too-far distance, we caught a glimpse of the river and the swampy land around. The vegetation was thin, tall brushes emerging from a dense, dark brown, muddy soil. The breeze blowing from the Ozama River in our direction would often bring the smell of sulfur emanating from the swampy, stagnant, dark, muddy water near its shores. To the right was a small mount hill surrounded by trees, bushes, and vegetation.
We finally arrived. Bobby was all proud and happy to show me the place. It did not need an introduction. I was already sold. It was the second most beautiful scenery I had seen in my short years. It was the experience one supposed is felt by nomads when trekking the desert and finding an oasis. The best part was still in storage.
We went a few meters down the short rocky path, and as if one opened a door, there was this small, almost oval pond. It was like a twenty-nine by thirty-five feet swimming pool, towered by the trees that shaded it. At the bottom of the pond, I was amazed by the most transparent water I had ever seen. The water bubbled from springs underneath a large rock, which nature located as a supporting wall to all the trees on top of it. Soon after, that big rock became our diving board. The canopy of the trees on top of the rock provided a shield from the sun’s rays. Only a few rays found their way between the branches, hitting the surface of the spring water and shining after their encounter with the water, giving the place its pristine look. The sharp contrast between the pond and the not-too-distant rotten-egg-smelling swamp water made the pond even more divine. We were in the wild but in a landscape designed by the Gods.
We jumped into the water. Its depth was at most 5 feet, which was perfect mainly because my swimming skills still needed to be honed. The water was calm, refreshing, and inviting. The bottom was completely transparent, as seen from the top of the rock and the trees. It was a floor of pebbles, small stones, and tiny fish swimming carefree around it. The purity and freshness of that bubbling water, happily shining as it was touched by a few sunrays filtering from the trees above it, accompanied me for the rest of my life. The docile, fresh, bubbling water spoke of innocence and purity. We found paradise. The most unforgivable image was the water bubbling from the bottom of the pond.
We spent the remainder of the morning, ecstatic in our joy, learning to swim or jumping in the pond as I honed my swimming skills. It was the first of dozens of trips we took that summer to our pond, which we considered the most beautiful place in the universe.
At first, we decided to keep it to ourselves and not tell the rest of the kids about it. Perhaps, at a deep level, we suspected that it would no longer be special if it became common knowledge, especially because of the bad elements in our neighborhood. But our plan did not last long; this was too good of a find not to share with our friends. As a compromise, we invited only those kids we considered good friends. We were not selfish enough to keep it to ourselves. Almost toward the end of the summer, our initial suspicion proved prescient.
At one point, before the pond was common knowledge in the neighborhood, my friend and I were addicted to it. We started going twice daily: first thing in the morning until around 11 am, when we started getting hungry. Later, we would return around 1 pm.
As brave souls, we continued venturing on our daily long treks, enduring the intense sunlight. One day, out of fatigue, we decided to shorten the trip. My friend claimed that there was a shorter way, but not without risk. As we walked along the barbed-wired road, he pointed to the left of us at a vast field. It was evident that it was private land. Rumor had it that there was a bull in that field. We disregarded common sense and were stupider than braver. In my temerity, or by pure laziness, I convinced him to risk an encounter with the bull to shorten our trek. Luck protects stray scrappy dogs. We did not encounter the bull. Instead, we ran into a few pasturing cows and softer, muddy, rotten-egg-smelling terrain. A small price to pay for shaving ten to fifteen minutes to our trip. It was a straight line to the pond.
As everything is never meant to remain a secret forever, the news of our paradise fell on the ears of the older, delinquent-prone kids. By then, I was no longer interested in going there. My friend Bobby heard of a different place. It was larger, more like a creek than a pond. We went there. It was also far. It was an okay creek, but I did not care for it. I was still grieving. I got particularly enraged that the older kids never credited my friend for finding the pond.
The last news we heard from our pond was toward the end of the summer. We were ready to go back to school and other fun-filled activities. One of the bad kids, “Maney,” was reported to have climbed one of the trees towering over the pond and dived into it. He opened a large gash on his skull, requiring dozens of stitches. He soiled our pond. I knew it would not end well once they started going there. We did not talk about the pond for several years as we grew older.
Forty years later, as we have done every time we see each other, my friend and I recalled our shared past. In one of those memory-lane trips, we realized how crazy we were. We laughed at our Sisyphean spirit and how silly it was for us to walk almost an hour to our pond to cool off, only to return home, walking for another hour, drenched in sweat.
One of the last times we spoke about the pond was long after I left the island to become a gold prospector in the US. I asked Bobby about the pond. He described with great sadness how I would no longer recognize all that area. It was now filled with housing projects and other edifications. A concrete jungle buried the pond. Our pond, “la pozita,” only survived in our memories.
We always agreed on something: If we had the chance to take our daily, sometimes twice daily trek, we would do it all over again. If we were to do it all over again, we would never change our pond for any modern swimming pool or summer camps. Our poverty and childhood innocence, by necessity or ingenuity, allowed us a test of happiness in this life. More than forty years later, the memory of our pond still brings smiles to our faces. In our hearts, we’re still stray-scrappy dogs happily defying the summer heat.
P.R. Thompson.