At Rincón They’re Walkin’ the Nose

It’s one of those rock lyrics I’d heard a hundred times and never understood, straight out of 1962, when a great song was one that sounded just right blasting out from the monophonic tube-powered radio speaker mounted in the center of the dashboard of your father’s mid-fifties Oldsmobile. It was Surfin’ Safari, the title song from The Beach Boys’ debut album. The chorus was easy to sing along to, but some of the verses were incomprehensible. This one, for instance:

At Huntington and Malibu
They’re shooting the pier
At Rincón they’re walkin’ the nose
We’re going on safari to the islands this year
So if you’re coming get ready to go

I’m from Toledo, Ohio. I’ve also lived in Boston, southwest China, and Tunisia. “Shooting the pier” and “walkin’ the nose” meant nothing to me. And I’d never heard of Rincón.

Then I moved to Puerto Rico and began hearing about a town on the west coast of the island where the surfing was awesome and the vibe was chill. I started noticing cars sporting this sticker:

So on Saturday, Lori Seubert and I made the two and a half hour drive there from San Juan to check it out. We wound up here:

It only took a few minutes for us to conclude that we’d come to the right place.

We began the day at Club Nautico, a breezy bar open to the the elements on two sides. They were doing a fair business at noon on a Saturday. The barmaids were friendly, the beer was cold, and surfboards hung from the rafters. It looked like the kind of place you could waste your days dissolving into cocktails, tall tales, and paradipsomania.

Properly lubricated, we headed for Maria’s Beach and stayed near there the rest of the day. We parked by a row of tourist shops, a café, and an oyster and clam bar.

We hiked the road up to the century-old Punta Higüeras lighthouse, a handsome landmark surrounded by a lovely public park.

Lori, of course, made friends with the native fauna right away while I admired the scenery from the high ground.

One of the stranger structures of Rincón was a blue building that, 55 years ago, housed an experimental nuclear reactor. Construction of the Boiling Nuclear Superheater (BONUS) Reactor Facility was begun in 1960. The plant operated between 1964 and 1968 and then was decommissioned due to “technical problems.” The building was decontaminated bit by bit over the next four decades and was turned over to the Puerto Rican government, which attempted to repurpose it as a museum. It’s unclear whether it still functions in that capacity. It certainly didn’t look like a going concern on the Saturday we were there. There was a fence around the property and a lone car in the lot, presumably belonging to the security officer patrolling there. The reactor dome made a bizarre backdrop to the beach scene.

It seemed reckless to build an experimental nuclear reactor just a couple hundred meters from the beach, especially in a community where tsunami evacuation signs are posted on every road. The reactor is just a few hundred meters from the beach. Fukushima, anyone? I couldn’t help but think that the authorities who sited it there probably figured “hey, let’s put it in an out-of-the-way corner of Puerto Rico–if it blows up, who cares?” In another weird twist, the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

Later in the afternoon, we returned to where I had parked the 4Runner. We stopped into the T-shirt shop and met Michael, tall, tan, muscular, and handsome with sun-bleached brown hair to his shoulders.

His father had been one of the American hippies who came to Rincón to chase a dream and a wave and the next good high. There he met a woman who had a place there and they never left. And they apparently passed on the hippie aesthetic to their son.

After chatting with him and buying a couple shirts, we went down to the beach to watch the sunset.

Lori and I weren’t the only couple enjoying the sunset. Down the beach from us a bride and groom were being photographed while their wedding party hung out and watched. Another couple watched the sun go down from their surfboards and then paddled in together.

When there was no more of the sunset to be seen, we headed to the café we’d passed by earlier, ate pub grub, and listened to a three-man band doing covers of old Santana tunes. At one point, Lori shot pix of me while I was perusing a tourist info table and plotting our next Rincón visit.

Oh yeah . . . my surfing friend Shannon tells me that “walking the nose” is about the same as ten toes on the nose, a/k/a hanging ten. It means to surf while standing at the very front of your board. It can only be done on a longboard by the most highly proficient surfers.