We are new to snow-birding. Truth be told, we’d always felt righteously superior to those who fled New Hampshire in winter. But then age and injury meant no more snowboarding and no snow meant no more cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, so why not?

We wanted to go where it was warm enough to swim and where the money we spent would benefit people in need. Puerto Rico, in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, earthquakes and a visit by a president who tossed paper towels to people who had lost their homes seemed like a good choice. How much it would cost would determine how long we would stay.

When I saw the price of the place on Airbnb, a two-bedroom ground-floor apartment almost on the water outside San Juan for $35 a night, I booked it for all of February. True, it was across a lagoon from San Juan’s international airport and in Loiza, one of the poorest townships on the island. It was also next to a bar on a street with no name and some of the nearby homes, in satellite views, wore blue tarps.

The apartment came with the right to use an old fish landing across the street. The house was noisy, the landlord, a retired English professor from Philadelphia, said. Puerto Rico was noisy, he warned. But how bad could it be?

The lagoon looked bigger on the map. The end of the runway was close enough that the planes that passed over the house with a thunderous roar were only several hundred feet overhead. We couldn’t quite make out the faces of the people in the window seats, but almost.

Our host, it turned out, was nearly deaf without his hearing aids. He didn’t mind the planes. My wife did. She hated their roar. So did my brother and my niece, who stayed with us for a few days.

The coast road in Loiza is lined with food kiosks, shacks really, where cooks grill kebabs and fry delicious, unhealthy food over fires fed with cut up shipping pallets. Puerto Rico imports 90% of its food from the mainland.

The township had banned big beach-eating hotels. Homes were dilapidated or empty but the beaches were beautiful and public. We lounged beneath palm trees, read, and swam daily in a beautiful cove. The temperature ranged from low 70s to high 80s.

“This would be a really cool place to stay,” my brother, a Seattle doctor, said of our lodgings, “if you were in your 20s.”

The roar of jets bothered me less than the rest of the cacophony that surrounded our retreat in the tropics. The bar next door was literally next door, its wall a few feet from our bed. “Puerto Ricans don’t talk, they yell,” a young woman explained. “It sounds like we’re fighting and arguing, but we’re not. That’s just how we are.”

One morning at seven we were awakened by two bar employees, men in their 60s who had known each other all their lives. They stood two feet apart in the street and yelled at each other, a discussion not an argument. From late morning, when a group of male retirees gathered to pass the day on the landing, to late in the evening when drink turned up the volume, people around us yelled.

The house behind ours was occupied by an old man in a flat-topped legionnaires hat who raised roosters for cockfights, which had been banned in January. The roosters crowed day and night and his yard stank.

Feral chickens, dogs and cats were everywhere. Just outside our bedroom window rose a papaya tree. At dusk it would fill with roosting hens that rained droppings onto the cars below. They were joined by a single rooster that crowed on and off through the night.

On our third night in paradise our host shot the rooster from his balcony. Unfortunately, the chicken-loving lady next door, whose small, chained-up dog yapped on and off day and night, was on her balcony. She called the police, who in loud voices with blue lights flashing, stood in the street and interrogated our host about the chicken murder. Both parties were ordered to go to a community dispute resolution court. Our host insisted that the police take the dead rooster as evidence.

A routine developed. At dusk, when the chickens gathered in the papaya tree, the host, myself or my wife, Linda, would take a garden hose and douse them until, with much squawking, they would fly off and find somewhere else to roost. “This is the real Puerto Rico,” our host said, “not the tourist version.”

The real Puerto Rico includes a love of really loud, really bad pop music with a repetitive, thumping bass designed to prevent all thought. The music blared from bars, cars, trucks and boats armed with banks of speakers, and from boom boxes on wheels. At one point, in our picture-postcard cove, three different, enormous boom boxes played three different songs simultaneously within yards of each other.

Driven from the beach we returned to our tropical retreat where at times when a jet rattled the house while the little ratty dog was yapping, the roosters were crowing, the loafers were yelling, the music was blasting and it was time, once again, to go out and hose down the chickens, we laughed, because we were in our 20s again.

Coming soon: Puerto Rico’s woes and why they like it loud.

(Ralph Jimenez serves on the Monitor’s editorial board and lives in Concord.)

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