It was my first real job after I graduated from college; and due to a fortunate confluence of circumstances, I had precisely the mix of qualifications to get hired on the spot. My employer, the Federal Government, was conducting an educational/public relations program in Puerto Rico, and they needed someone with a degree in science, fluency in Spanish, and some teaching experience. My assignment was to travel to every high school on that Caribbean island and conduct an entertaining and informative presentation on nuclear energy to the assembled student body, followed by more detailed and educational laboratories for the science classes. I was provided with excellent instruction in public speaking and the subject matter, a minivan full of state-of-the-art educational materials and visual aids, and almost complete freedom to conduct my program in any way I saw fit. After a couple of months of intensive training (and many other adventures!) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, my van and I were shipped off to the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, just in time for the beginning of the academic year.

In spite of its relatively small size, Puerto Rico's overcrowded and treacherous mountain roads, not to mention some of the world's most insane drivers, made travel by automobile slow, exhausting and dangerous. I quickly resolved to divide the island into sections and schedule my visits to those schools in each one. This strategy involved spending a few months in each of the major cities, San Juan, Arecibo, Mayaguez, and Ponce, and dispatching the institutions within easy commuting range of each town where I would set up my home base in a big city hotel with all the amenities and conveniences. After my initial shakedown in the San Juan area, getting the hang of the job and what was expected of me, I moved to Arecibo on the northwest coast to service those schools in that corner of the island.

The plan, of course, fell apart immediately. Most people think of Arecibo as a remote and rural district where the famous Arecibo Radio Observatory is nestled in a range of beautiful jungle-covered mountains. Actually, the observatory is about an hour's drive south of the town, which is a crowded and busy little metropolis hugging a strip of flat land along the coast. The hotel was in the town square with no place where I could securely park my van full of equipment. The staff took one look at the expensive-looking gear inside and the US Government license plates and refused to accept responsibility for its safety. They suggested I find lodgings outside of town. It was starting to get dark, so I decided to try for a place I had spotted on the way in, about a half-hour's drive west on the coast road. It was night before I found the tiny hand-lettered sign by the side of the highway "Pan American Motel", and turned down the gravel road leading in the direction of the beckoning arrow. The gravel quickly turned to a poorly-maintained sand causeway, but there was no turning back. In fact, there was no turning around! There was just enough room for one vehicle, and the surrounding mangrove swamp brooded with menacing trees and imagined horrors. Equally menacing, but very real, giant land crabs scurried about the narrow little causeway in my lights and crunched under the wheels of the van. If it had not been for the fact that I had no choice but to go on, I would have immediately turned around and taken my chances back in Arecibo. I prayed that I not get stuck, and resolved that if I did, I would spend the night in the van rather than face the beasts on foot and unarmed.

It seemed like miles, but it was only a few hundred yards through the mangroves until the causeway brought me to a wide and sandy beach. My truck lights stabbed into the darkness, straight out to sea, catching the whitecaps of the crashing surf. Ahead, between me and the water were the ruins of a fairly large reinforced concrete structure, probably the Motel, now undercut by the waves of some recent hurricane. Only one room, the furthest from the water and detached from the main building, remained undamaged. The rest of the Motel was uninhabitable. For a moment, I simply tried to work up the courage to turn the van around and brave the terrors of de mongrove, mon again. But I soon realized there was a small, but operational streetlight on the remaining structure, so someone had taken the trouble to keep this remote piece of beach supplied with electricity. The dirt road turned back to gravel again, turned left parallel to the shore, so I followed it. About a quarter mile up ahead I saw another streetlight, and another building of similar architectural design to the shoreside ruin, this one relatively intact. As I drove into the general vicinity of this new settlement, two men came out to greet me; I was thinking if maybe I hadn't been safer with the crabs.

My greeters turned out to be, from their accents, two little jíbaritos, good old Puerto Rican country boys. I liked the rural folk of the island almost as much as I distrusted and feared the urbanized NewYorkified denizens of the larger cities; so I began to relax a bit. These fellows were Motel staff and they seemed amazed that I was alone and was interested in renting by the week. But I soon explained my situation, my needs and my reception in town; they said they could fix me right up. I could also see that they both drove huge finned V-8s and I reasoned that if they could get in and out in those things, I would have no trouble negotiating the causeway in my van. The boys explained that the Pan American already had some semi-permanent residents, a family from the Capital that were staying there while their apartment in town was being redecorated. I could have the room next to theirs. Security for my van was no problem. They were on duty all night.

My room turned out to be almost a third-world cliché, half the size of the smallest USA motel room, faded blue paint peeling off in sheets, one bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling, and a table fan. It contained a single bed, a small table and chair, a sink and open shower. It did have hot and cold running water, a mirror and clean sheets on the bed. There was no air conditioning, but you could sleep with the front door open and catch the northeast trades than blew across the tropics. The sound of the surf crashing into the reef 50 yards offshore provided the entertainment. Everything a real man needs to survive indefinitely. My neighbors were up catching the breeze, an attractive young couple from San Juan with a small infant. They seemed delighted to have company.

At first I was a bit miffed that I had been offered one of the two rooms built, almost as an afterthought, on the roof of the building. Access to beach level was through a set of stairs. In the daylight, though, I got an opportunity to study the building's architecture and determined how it's form was beautifully adapted to its function. The Pan American was about a dozen rooms built in a straight line parallel to the beach on a sand dune. On the beach side there was a porch and a door allowing you to sit and watch the sea a stone's throw away; or to stroll right into the water. Facing inland, the parking lot undercut the room so that the room was at ground level, but actually on the second floor. The ground floor was a garage with a swinging door. A car could come into the parking lot, turn around and back into the open garage. The occupants could then close the door and rise up to the second floor room at beach level via an interior stairwell. A catwalk allowed the attendants to discreetly settle the bill and deliver drinks and snacks through small openings in the wall equipped with trap doors.

The entire structure was designed to accomodate secret lovers and illicit affairs! I learned later that this is what the term "Motel" means in Puerto Rico, and even though these establishments were quite common, they were always placed well out of sight and not advertised too blatantly. Business spread, presumably, by word of mouth. All day and all night the cars would come in, the passenger (always a lady, gentlemen always drive in Puerto Rico) with her face behind a magazine or newspaper. The cars would back into the garage, the assignation consummated, and then roar off into the mangroves. I could watch this soap opera for hours, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and eating spiced ham and American cheese on white sandwiches (the only food available) with the staff. Due to the one-way status of the causeway through the mangroves, this often meant somebody had to back up. No pasarán! The boys told me how during one of these encounters the occupant of one vehicle recognized a spouse in the other and a brawl broke out. The police had to be called to get traffic rolling again.

Fortunately, this wasn't the only entertainment. During my days off the lagoon betwen the beach and the nearby offshore reef was a snorkeler's paradise. The waves spent their force on the rocks leaving a quite and placid basin, most of it about 15 feet deep, littered with colorful corals and extravagantly colored fish. Marine life was everywhere, crawling about the rocks and sandy bottoms, and swimming alongside myself and the jaded friends from the city I could convince to brave the traffic and come visit me. Harmless but ferocious-looking barracuda patrolled the many openings in the reef, and the water was so clear that if you swam in the middle of the lagoon you could look about and see an area of about a half acre teeming with life. That alone was worth the trip.

Still, it was the late-night sessions with my uptown neighbors and the jíbaritos who worked there that I remember the most, it was my first opportunity to get to meet and socialize with the common folk, and I recall those evenings most fondly. One night, we watched a car turn in off the causeway, stop at the ruins, and the driver get out and walk to the little room under the streetlight the staff used to hold the overflow at the hotel. We saw the motorist run back to his car, get in, and race to where we were, where he jumped breathlessly out of his car. "Boy, am I glad you guys are here. I stopped my car back there and went to that room looking for directions. There is a very strange man on the bed there, he wouldn't answer me when I spoke to him, he just glowered at me, he was very frightening. I was afraid for myself and mi señora." The fellow was an older gentlemen, and as we learned later, he and his wife were tired and just wanted to utilize the motel's more conventional service of simple lodging. The boys knew that building should have been locked and unoccupied, and leaving me with the old couple, they jumped into the Pan American utility vehicle, an ancient Jeep, and roared off to investigate.

They came back a few minutes later, shaken. There had been no one at the other building, although the door was unlocked and the bed still made and unwrinkled. Nothing in the other building had been disturbed. It had been in sight continuously, and well illuminated by the streetlight, ever since the old man had run out of it in a panic. The boys in the Jeep had raced over there immediately, no one saw anyone come out, but there was no sign of anyone being there when they got there. After taking care of the old couple, they filled me in on the history of the little room. Supposedly, it was haunted by the spectre of one of the old staffers, who had been killed when the storm washed away the foundations of the old motel. One of the boys told me how another staffer had told him he had decided to take a nap in that room one day, gone in and turned off the lights, and just as he was falling asleep, someone, or some thing jumped into bed with him. He did not remember how he was able to escape...

With a start like this, it is not surprising that the rest of the night was devoted to ghost stories, all punctuated by glances at the little building under the streetlight.. The boys had a million of them, and I had some insight how close we were, in the last third of the twentieth century, to the age of folklore and magic and fear. I enjoy a good ghost story as well as the next man, but even with a willing suspension of disbelief I cannot bring up the feeling of fear that the unknown can generate in others. The horror of my deepest fears comes not from the supernatural or the dark forces we know so little about, if indeed they exist. I am reduced to despair and gibbering, shuddering panic when I think of the horrors of the plain, everyday world. How can we fear the terror from beyond the grave, or the demons of hell, when we have had to face the likes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot in our lifetimes. And it is not necessary to invoke foreign dictators or primitive savagery either, we have our motorcycle gangs, prison scenes, and organized criminals. It is the banality of evil, how it can appear anywhere, that puts the world of Lovecraft and Crowley to shame. The squirming thing in the mind of the common rapist is infinitely more evil than anything in even our most fantastic fiction or most primitive superstition.

The last ghost story I heard that night, before I went to bed, went something like this:

"I was just a kid, and we lived in the country. My older brother used to go into town several times a week where he was going to school, learning how to read. One night he was very late getting back, we were worried about him, and almost started to go out looking for him. Then we heard his horse ride up to the barn gate and stop.

"Normally there was a pause as he dismounted, and then a creaking as he swung open the gate. This night there was nothing. Finally we went out and saw him, still in the saddle, trembling and shivering and moaning gutterally, unable to speak. We had to help him down, carry him into the house and put him to bed. Still he could not speak, could not sleep, he was in shock, in great fear, helpless. It was terrible; we thought he had gone mad.

"He improved gradually over the next few days, and eventually he got back to where he could speak, but it was a few more days after that before he could bring himself to tell us what had happened to him. He had been riding back from class and was about halfway home when he heard someone run up behind the horse. Before he could turn and see who it was, the spectre jumped up on the horse behind him, and clasped his (its?) arms around him. They were icy cold. From that time on all he could recall was total and crippling panic, he remembered nothing but an endless nightmare, its details now forgotten. His pony knew the way and managed to get him home. From that day on, he never spoke of it again."

I felt a shiver myself, then, of true fear. I had heard that story before. Over a campfire in East Tennessee. The little mountain girl who was my lover there told it to me, almost identical in detail, as it was once told to her by one of her friends.