“Auxilio!” he cried. He had been tossed out of the kayak and into the sea. He couldn’t swim.

    “Auxilio!”

    The waves were unrelenting and slammed him against the reef. He tried to scramble back into the kayak, but the sea was unforgiving. He was sandwiched between the kayak and the reef.

    “Don’t panic! The vest will keep you afloat.” My voice quavered. Don’t panic. It was a command I directed at myself. Fear seized me.

    “Hold on!”

    I was on the island of Fajardo where my father’s father was born. I had arrived by ferry earlier that day and met a guy named David who offered to drive me to Esperanza, on the other end of the island. On the road there, I told him I wanted to rent a kayak and invited him along.

    “It sounds great, but I don’t know how to swim. “

    “Don’t worry. You get a life vest. But you won’t need it.” I had only been kayaking once, in a quiet bay in San Juan, but spoke with confidence.

    When we got to Esperanza. We rented a tandem kayak and paddled out to an islet that lay just opposite the beach. We left our sandals on the beach. “We won’t need them, “ I said.

    The water was a clear turquoise. We beached the kayak when we got to the islet. The coral was rough and bruised our feet. A sailboat had washed up long ago on the beach, probably torn from its moorings when some long-ago hurricane beat up the island.  We climbed aboard. “I want one of these,” I said.

    After a few minutes I asked him if he wanted to paddle around to the other side of the island. “Sure,” he said.

    We launched. As we paddled around to the windward side, a fiesty wind stirred up the waves. The sea swelled. When one of the waves broke over the bow and sent bucketsful of sea water into the kayak, I lost my cool. “Let’s turn back,” I suggested.

    We couldn’t turn the boat fast enough. The sea pushed us headlong into a wall of rock. We spilled out of the kayak and dragged it to the shore. We tried to carry the kayak to the opposite end of the islet, but the rock was jagged and cut into our bare feet. So, we tried to launch, but each time we made the attempt, a wave that had crossed the Atlantic, encouraged by gales and lifted by winds, ending its peregrinations in an impressive display of power, forced me back to the stacks. One of these waves dismounted David and would have swallowed him up save for the life vest. He scrambled to the nearest rock. The waves knocked the kayak this way and that. I couldn’t paddle past the breakers. The sea pulled me in. I used the oar to keep the kayak off the rocks. Stroke by stroke, I brought the kayak around to calmer waters. David met me on the opposite side of the islet and we paddled back to the beach.

    And so began my love of kayaking.

    I cycled Puerto Rico that summer, stopping in Bayamon, Mayaguez, and Las Marias to visit cousins and my uncle, Samuel. I hadn’t seen my uncle in decades. The man who greeted me looked nothing like the man my mother had pointed out in a family photograph that hung on the wall. The man in the photograph had a truculent aspect. The uncle who greeted me had a winsome appearance. The man in the photograph had the weathered, hardened face of an alcoholic. The uncle I met had a radiant face and a sturdy constitution. The man in the photograph lived in an apartment in Brooklyn. The man who greeted me lived an acre in the mountains with a stream running through it.

    Las Marias was what I expected Puerto Rico to feel like. My uncle lives in a wood cabin he and his brother-in-law had built. It’s simple and cozy. He planted banana trees, orange trees, plantains, lemon trees, and an apple tree. He had a vegetable and herb garden. Along the winding mountain road which leads to his house grow mango trees, coffee plants, and breadfruit trees. When the mangoes are ripe, they fall to the ground for him to collect and take home. A zebu half-breed grazes nearby. From the top of the mountain, I could make out the towns of Aguadilla and San Sebastian. The air was pure. He drew his water from a mountain spring. At night, the crickets chirp, the coqui whistle, and the insects sing their lullabies.

    My uncle is  a vegetarian and addicted to Ovaltine. He retrieved photo albums and dusted them off. “This is your great uncle’s wife’s cousin... and this is my wife’s brother-in-law. This is your grandfather.” He was a soldier in the US Army. A handsome man stared back at me. I was in the land of my forefathers.