Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Annexed stories from the river
Curiously, here in Adjuntas all the neighborhoods have their stream pool.
One is the Blue Puddle, another one is The Box, another The Mango and this other one is The Dungeon.
Names are given to pools depending on how people
(and this dates from many years ago)
on how people visualize the pools.
The “Blue Puddle” was because people saw that it was always, like
well, since the waters were deep it looked bluish.
and that’s why they named it Blue Puddle, that one is from Yahueca.
The one in my neighborhood is The Dungeon.
“The Dungeon” is due to its shape, a wall of rock that surrounds the river’s pool in a semi-circle manner.
Who named it? Well, we don’t know, but someone thought about “The Dungeon”
because it was like a cage of rock and it only had one exit and it was where the water flowed out from the pool.
And each river, each of these rivers had their stories.
There’s a story where a maiden appears out of the water… where this and that appears, that sort of stories.
That’s part of it, that’s why I tell you that it passes from generation to generation
and it may be that in that space of time some of the elements of the story change.
Because remember, that it goes from my mouth to your mouth, from your mouth to somebody else’s…
It’s like the game of “pass the message”.
Yeah, like the game of ‘‘pass the message’’,
and there are people that add some element to make it more interesting or to scare us.
Because in our case it was to scare us… so that we wouldn’t go to the river
It has two whirlpools and they’re both very close to the rock wall.
Of us, there was no one that went near there, it was a terror because
apparently it was the most mysterious part of the pool (
That is, in that moment it had relevance because one is a child and so
practically, I believed everything that people told me.
But the older people said that the pool had a whirlpool and that it sucked people in.
That’s really deep; it’s black all the way down.
They tell me that there is, almost at the bottom of the deepest part, that there is like a whirlpool.
Yeah, there is a whirlpool.
That catches you and doesn’t let go.
In the summers, I've gone to the one next to the public housing apartments.
Up there is the river and there is another one after that.
They say people have died there because of the whirlpools.
You can see it and you can feel it.
When I’ve jumped there I feel like something pulls me, that’s why you need to swim up fast.
Because of the pressure, it sort of pulls you to the bottom and it’s really difficult to go up.
You feel like something pulls jerks down.
In the past, here in Adjuntas, a part of the river on the entrance of the town was canalized.
Then everybody went there to participated in Saint John’s night.
They used to canalize it in the summer and it expanded in such a way that everybody jumped in the water.
When it is Saint John’s night, each family brings food, like pork and everything.
They celebrate it in Blue Puddle and in the Written Rock too, if I’m not mistaken.
Around Christmas time people go to Blue Puddle, they roast pigs there, turkeys.
They cook right there, throw parties and do anything. It gets packed at night.
In the Blue Puddle they place extension cables connected to colored lights from my neighbor’s house,
the kind they use for the patron saints’ festivities, they also place the lights around the water.
They celebrate Saint John’s night.
Not in the traditional sense, they closed that part of town, take pictures and then they publish them in magazines.
To take the lids off, because it was a bridge that had wooden lids,
To take the lids off they had to bring a machine
because the water pressure was so much that it didn’t let them take them off.
They would come back with a machine and take them off and they would store them away.
When you come here in the summer the rivers are packed, because of the season,
but it is not like before that we went in any season to the river.
Not now, here the river season is now the summer.
It’s the boom for everybody to go up to the countryside and you go to The Mango and it’s full,
you go to The Box and it’s full, you go to the Blue Puddle and it’s full.
The people go in the summer, in the summer, yeah.
I always go, since I live right by, almost everyday,
but this summer I didn’t go much because I had a trip to the U.S.
Me neither, I didn’t go much to the rivers this summer
because about five days before the end of classes I left for the U.S.
I went three weeks and I came back late.
I was almost every day in the river.
This summer season it got really crowded and you can even go at night.
We couldn’t even get the cars through to go to our houses.
Where I was raised there was a type of well and we used to go to there, not only us the neighbors too,
and we had a specific hour when we would all go down there.
We spent time together and we brought back water home and stored it in the house to wash the dishes.
There was one specifically for drinking water.
We drank from the well, from what was known here as an “eye of water”, a spring.
That “eye of water” was apart so we went there with a pot,
we would collect water to fill our cans and we’d fill girl’s cans too.
After we filled everything, we would all go up the little trail to bring the water.
It was drinking water and to wash the dishes.
I also had the experience of going with my mom and my neighbors to the river to wash with stones
We would help her bring the clothes, since there were stones in the river.
They used a blue big soap bar; they would break it in two pieces.
The neighbors would go all together, each had their own stone already.
It was a river stone, that one is from our house, she would take the clothes and they would bring a wooden spatula.
They would beat the clothes with that wooden spatula to get the dirt off.
They would lather it up, beat it and then we would rinse it.
My grandmother would take the clothes and carry them to the rivers to clean them.
Near here, by the road to Utuado, there is a small tube that brings water from the river.
My mother used to fill gallons of water and bring them back here, since the water came very clean.
We would drink sometimes, but not much.
Each time that we went by, we would take a little.
Sometimes the tubes that don’t have drinking water come from farms.
In my house there is a river that runs through the back where we get the water.
In my house the water also comes from the river.
Back home my mom has a filter where, when there’s no running water,
she puts all the water that comes from the river and we use it to wash the dishes and shower.
For the filter from my house, my mother has to use chlorine capsules.
That cleans the water and you use it that way. Not me, I go get the water this way; I get water from the aqueduct.
Also, each neighborhood also has those kind of daring characters,
the ones that do what the others don’t dare and risk doing that sort of things.
They were feats. If someone jumped from a tree it was a feat, and he was also the boldest one of all.
From here to “El Nuevo Día” (local newspaper).