Sunburn is, scientifically speaking, direct DNA damage, or, damage to living tissue, namely that of skin, that results from excessive exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun. The typical symptoms of sunburn—dizziness, fatigue, and of course, the reddish, pink chic skin of terrifying itchiness and scalding pain—are irritating but hardly life-threatening, survivable but immensely souring.

San Juan, Puerto Rico is a place of dense humidity, a Caribbean shroud of white-hot smog dangling in the bright atmosphere like a fuzzy, imperceptible shower curtain, complete with intense sunlight, white stone buildings, and thin, shabby, erect palm trees of faded green and brown that provide little shadow.

When you emerge from airport in San Juan, luggage and family members in tow, it would be inaccurate to say the heat hits you in the face; that would imply some unexpected quality to the proceedings. No—the heat lingers, coating the Puerto Rican surroundings with a tinted yellow haze, and a wavelength, smelling of lead and deep, scorched earth, signals its arrival not by touch, but by sound, a hum resembling the flapping wings of a hummingbird.

Even in the luggage dock, where thousands of bags of luggage adorned in Christmas-colored ribbons floated by on conveyor belts, a strange silence played, at mezzo-forte dynamics, above all the chatter, all the crying babies, all the summaries of plans for the ensuing week. The heat, in a subtle, undeniable fashion, worked its way into the ambiance, transmitting a faint, yet entirely comprehended warning of what lie in store in the San Juan sky. So the heat, if anything, was not surprising.

This was the place of the 2009 Ricci family vacation.

For our first full day on the island, we went to the beach and had the physical components of sand redefined. Strong winds plus feathery sand, sand of little dull pebbles, pebbles of ultimate precision and haunting minimization, flying through the wind-swept beaches and violently caressing the smooth, burning skin of an American tourist. During our time on the beach, which included ill-fated sand castles resembling demented plateaus and multiple investigations into the murky, foul-tasting seawater of the pale-blue Atlantic, it seemed, strangely, that I was avoiding sunburn. Though my bronze phenotype of Greek and Italian skin had never, in relation to the Chicago, Illinois sun of my home, burned beyond faint piggy bank pink, I took precaution, delicately dabbing my skin in SPF 30 suntan lotion. It seemed to be working.

The day sloshed on, the kind of heavy, piercing, squinting summer’s day in which massive waves of heat, sunlight, and humidity seem to make time stop. Days where a minute can go on for hours, mere seconds pile on like a car accident on Michigan Avenue, and you sit, idle and wondering, where the time went as every hour peels away into an ever-expanding can of trash.

When I grew tired of the foul tasting salt water and sand, I attempted to lie back and enjoy the sun, irritated I had forgotten my current read, Don DeLillo’s Libra, in the hotel room. Then, my father suggested the one seemingly essential task to any Caribbean beach voyage. Parasailing.

It really is stunning in its simplicity, parasailing. You sit in a sturdy harness of thick, brightly colored nylon (mine a tropical red), an enormous parachute is thrust behind you, the moderately-sized boat rockets forward, and the powerful winds of the Atlantic lift you into the air with all the gentleness and gentility of a cellophane bag floating in a rough Midwestern breeze. And the effect is astounding. Total weightlessness, drifting with the sensitivity of a crepuscule, gleefully suppressed by gusts of wind. Absolute release. Independence, with a hint of welfare, from the forces of nature.

All told, I was out on that boat for an hour and a half, sitting on the boat’s mildly chaffing rubber seats while the people who accompanied me on the trip, two cousins, my sister, and an uncle, experienced their own parasailing. Though the actual act of parasailing was supposed to take all but 10 minutes, the two men helping us, nice men in their 20s with closely trimmed beards, darkly-tanned skin, and broad laughs resembling Robin Williams in “Mork & Mindy,” took extensive time between voyages, changing the parachutes and venturing further out from the coast for stronger winds. I sat in the sun the entire time.

During the trip, my brother got sea sick and almost vomited.

We returned to the hotel shortly after, sand leaking from every possible crevice in our rickety, burned bodies. Burned—the thought first occurred to me as the abrasive water of the hotel shower thrashed against my beat-red skin, tiny little pelts of hydrogenised pain digging into my skin. Like nails of a jealous mistress. My forearms, shoulders, and chest resembled malnourished tomatoes, while my thighs, milky white on one half and half red from where the swimsuit had stopped its coverage, had all the contrast of. The SPF 30 suntan lotion I used earlier had an 80-minute cycle. I applied the lotion an hour before parasailing. I was on the boat for an hour and a half. 90 above 20, a minus sign to the left of the building, a jagged horizontal line supporting the structure. 90 minus 20. 70 minutes of naked skin in a brutal Puerto Rican sun.

SPF, or, Sun Protection Factor, is the protection rating for a particular sunscreen. SPF 15, for instance, allows Ted Potato to bake in the sun 15 times longer than regularly believed until the harmful UVB waves of the sun begin to harm his skin. UVA rays, which are different wavelengths in the light spectrum from the more damaging UVB waves, are not measured in sunscreen protection gauges. Some scientific findings suggest that the 15 SPF level is in actuality the most effective level of sun protection, and that SPF 30s and even 45s provide additional chemicals and costs without added protection.

A couple days later, we were driving through the Puerto Rican mountains of Arecibo to the Arecibo Observatory, a massive scientific haven that houses the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, an insanely sensitive gizmo (featured in the films Goldeneye and Contact, and an episode of the X-Files) capable of capturing, harnessing, and analyzing radio signals from thousands of kilometers deep within the universe. Operating with a 305-meter dish stretching across the rainforest and a massive, 900-ton receiver that suspends over the dish using wire as thick as smokestack lightning, the telescope detects radio waves of 100 millions years old, faint discharges of years long past that sat, suspended in time and space, waiting to be noticed.

The drive to the Observatory, though, was a practice in irony.

The roads in Puerto Rico, the system of trails and paths beyond the major expressway that cuts the island in half, is a system of extreme claustrophobia and frightening width, featuring two-lane roads barely wide enough for the one Suzuki rent-a-car my father was driving. While my father cautiously drove through the winding streets, avoiding potholes, branches, and stray dogs (while my sister’s anxiety of an ensuing car crash reached fever pitch levels), I sat in the car’s backseat throbbing with the pain of sunburn. Physical contact, especially involving the shoulders and triceps, was impossible. Dressing in the morning, even, took extreme boldness, the soft, lush cotton of my polo shirt and chino shorts feeling vaguely of barbed wire, scratchy, abrasive, instances of Brobdingnagian suffering that makes the eyes water. The polo, a vibrant blue, matched the pulp redness of my skin and white sand chino shorts with fortuitous jest. Like an American flag, redwhiteblue.

While the suffering commenced, though, I began gazing at the environments we were driving past, stunned but concerned with the surroundings. The vegetation of the forests, unruly and incapable of governance, brought dense shadows on the road, as trees stretching like green-tinted fingernails blocked out the sun. Ivy and other plants grew to the edge of the road, a spongy, mossy solace from the gravel path. And beyond every strip of road, every treacherous curve, the landscapes disappeared into deep gullies, drops of descent covered on every square inch by an immense tapestry of chlorophyll and photosynthesis.

Such danger, with perturbing swings in the road nearly taunting the driver with an accident, yet such beauty, a deep, dark, aggressive symphony of nature beyond the grasp of the environmental holocaust known as modernity.

The beauty of the forests, though, paralleled the poverty of the Puerto Rican people, collections of impoverished, unfortunate souls who live painfully unaware of the LCD, sugar-coated joys and prisms of pleasures we Americans swim through on a daily basis. It felt strange, sitting in a car, bumps and swerves abound, red skin and bluewhite clothes like the American flag—and admiring the dense beauty of a region wrought with such human suffering. Even the crumbling houses and arching shanties in which these people starved, their sunken eyes and silent faces gazing at our passing car, unkempt facial hair crusted with dirt and despair, rib cages starring like angular porticos, were beautiful in the way they were part of the land, the way the forest had taken over these people and their homes, the walls covered with vines, the foundations rotting from bulging roots of nearby trees, the malnourished family dog lying, panting, exhausted in knee-high grass, the wet residue on windows and inflatable swimming pools green from algae.

90 minus 20 equals 70.

Returning to the hotel—an Embassy Suites—with its fake waterfall, plastic plants, neatly assembled stone-tile flooring, felt like a charade, a grand allusion of mockery. We had just completed dispatches to a site of crippling reality and returned to a retreat of seclusion and distraction, an authentic world for a superficial one, a real place for a precession of simulacra. It burned.

Non-malignant skin tumors are caused, in large part, by excessive UV radiation, and sunburn, in relation to the squamous cell carcinoma brand of cancer, a cause of skin cancer. One of my uncles once worked with someone who experienced heat stroke as a result of excessive sunburn. The radiation singed her skin, causing water ruptures to bubble and explode across her body, a body of extreme dehydration.

I sat in the plane ride back home, my charred forearms bubbling with the slight anticipation of peeling. My shoulders, already gone, pealed the entire flight. Every stretch of the body, every arch of the back. Rip, rip, rip. Peel. Peel. Peal.

I spent the majority of my time reading, looking through the window, and occasionally watching the in-flight film, He’s Just Not That Into You, with no sound. Interesting experience, really, watching a film without the sound, guessing the plot, the action, the emotion—all through silent, pretty, well-fed faces.

About five hours passed until the captain notified us that the plane would begin its descent in roughly 20 minutes. I opened the window next to my seat and looked out. We were now flying over land, some clean suburb, most likely in Indiana, of lite green trees, front lawns neatly trimmed like golf courses, and speckled houses all bearing a resemblance to a perverse Rubik’s Cube. It felt strange, seeing America from a plane, seeing a place of such inherent unpredictability and economic despondence in such perfect, geometric order. A grid of perfection housing creatures of unpredictable chaos. 20 plus 70 equals 90.

As the plane neared its descent, I began searching the various roads for cars. When traveling, whether by car, bus, train—ascribing various narratives to other travelers has always been a hobby of mine. This one is picking his daughter up from soccer practice. This one is getting some milk from the grocery store. This one is driving to a job he hates. From the plane’s high altitude, I looked at each road, scrutinizing the pale grey stretches, but I didn’t see anything. No cars, no movement. Finally, though—inexplicably—I saw a car, a lonely wanderer, a blip on the radar, driving down a side street. I looked a little further on, and I saw a whole freeway, buzzing with cars, flowing with activity, surging with life. Immediacy.