Puerto Rico holds one of the planet’s last bright spots

“Do that again!” someone calls out, as if Bras might be able to manipulate the sky above.

I approach the edge of the deck to see swimmers kick their legs and flail their arms. They appear as iridescent butterflies shimmering in an inky sky. I clip a slender piece of foam around my waist and probe the darkness. The water is warmer than the air. It feels near body temperature, and, when I am fully submerged, I am surrounded by a cloud of liquid electricity. I am speaking to the water through movement, sign language, and it is responding with visual cues.

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Not far from where I’m treading in a tornado of light, a man is carrying on as if he’s on hallucinogens. “Look at the hairs on my arm! Look! The hairs on my arm!” He dips his arm into the bay and lifts it for everyone to see. His hair has become a catchment of flickering pulsars. “It’s so weird! Like I’m covered in stars!”

When Bras announces that it’s time to get out of the water, a collective groan rises. Back on shore, when people begin to make their way down the boat’s gangplanks, Bras shouts after them: “Don’t forget to tell people about the lights!” He isn’t talking about the soul-stirring bioluminescence; he’s referring to the street lamps and front porch bulbs in the neighborhood above the bay. He’s reminding us to take inventory of our far-off corners of the world, where light pollution is likely veiling our view of the night sky.

“More light,” Bras says, “isn’t always better.”

* * *

During my last day on Vieques, I decide to take a daylight tour of the mangroves. I’m part of a large crew, but we’re attentive as Carlos Cruz Morales, a 20-something with wavy black hair, gives a brief paddling lesson.

The group falls into loose formation as we travel toward a mass of mangroves. It’s unclear how we’re going to pass through the forest’s tight aerial root system. I am within a foot of the mangrove forest, and, still, I do not see a clearing large enough for a human body, much less a boat, to pass through.

Morales hops out of his kayak. The water barely reaches his chest. “Abracadabra, Rastaman! Open, sesame!” he shouts dramatically as he moves a few of the trees’ dreadlock-like, dangling prop roots to reveal a passage.

He pushes the first craft through. The tunnel seems to close itself behind the kayak. The mangroves might not be home to a plethora of spiders, as one fellow boater had feared, but they host a healthy population of tarantula-size arbor crabs, which scamper along the roots as I pull my paddle into my boat.

This mangrove forest is relatively young, with most trees standing at 25 to 30 feet. During Hurricane Hugo, it lost many of its mature trees, some of which were more than 60 feet tall. “After Hugo, the bay didn’t glow for six months,” says Morales’s colleague, Michelle McNerney. “The conditions just weren’t quite right.”

We’ve traveled half a mile into the mangrove when we reach another open section, a watery roundabout. Clumps of spongy silt float up around us. Morales jumps out and thrusts his hands into the water to produce a huge clump of earth, which he plops on top of his head as the group looks on, aghast. He begins to work it into his long hair. “What’s good for the dinoflagellates is good for your skin and nails!” He continues his mud bath, clearly delighted by the group’s collective recoil. Each time he pulls a handful of mud from the water, a sulphuric stench wafts over our flotilla.

Morales looks slightly alarmed when a military-looking cargo plane flies by overhead. “I haven’t seen an airplane like that in a long time,” he says. Morales grew up with the military presence. “I used to sleep every night to the sound of bombs. Boom! Boom! It thundered every day without rain.”

When the plane is gone, Morales dips back into the swampland. Still reminiscing, he explains that one of his favorite childhood haunts was a beach where purple and orange coral formed rainbow cliffs. To his chagrin, it was located in a former military zone. “Sometimes, when they were bombing, I wouldn’t go there,” he says. “Other times, they still said I couldn’t go there. I did, anyway. But then the protests began.”

People opposing Navy activities on the island — including well-known activists such as the Rev. Al Sharpton and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — were regularly arrested for acts of civil disobedience between 1999 and 2003. The movement was spurred when a local man was killed by an off-course bomb, an incident that incited international rage. “When things got bad, I couldn’t go to my beach at all,” Morales says. “I would have gone to jail if they’d found me there.”

Morales jumps in his boat to lead us back through the mangrove. As he paddles, he mentions that some of his friends are advocating a local movement to build a bridge to mainland Puerto Rico. “People always say, ‘I hope Vieques gets a Kmart’ or something like that, but I say take $2 and go to the mainland on the ferry. It’s all there.”

He negotiates the mangrove passageway gingerly, using his hands to propel himself root-by-root slowly, so that his boat doesn’t hit the oysters below. He says, “I know Vieques will change, but I want it to stay like this — quiet,” he says. “A bridge would make the island different. If we have more people, we need bigger roads. Bigger roads mean bigger neighborhoods and more cars. Nature will disappear.”

A year ago, Morales had a different outlook, he says, “I was like, ‘Nature, who cares about that?’ ” But when he heard Abe’s Snorkeling was hiring, he was quick to apply. Though he couldn’t yet speak English, he knew how to kayak because he had grown up around boats, he had learned to snorkel as a spearfisherman, and he was familiar with most parts of the island because it was his home. Even so, when Morales was hired, he didn’t see any fringe benefits to working outdoors.

Over time, his feelings began to change. He says: “Before, I didn’t understand that you don’t need money for the most beautiful things. A smile? Free! The beach? Free! Surf? Free! Free things for me are enough. That’s what people come here for, what they really need, the free things. My island isn’t developed, and that is a good thing.”

When we exit the forest, he says: “When I started working here, I didn’t know how these wonderful trees worked. Everything here is important.” He shakes his head, “All my life changed when I starting sharing my island. I’m no santo, how do you say, saint? But I’m a better person since I got to understand this place.”

We’re in full sunlight now, back in the open waters of the bay. The water becomes choppy as we round cliffs on our way to a small beach. I guide my kayak onto coral-littered sand, and a middle-age man, who’s on Vieques as part of a trip around the world with his wife, pulls up beside me and plants his paddle as a flagpole.

The man says, “It’s unbelievable this place is still here.” But it’s really what isn’t on Vieques that’s amazing. Even now, nearly a decade after the Navy stopped bombing the island, there are no chain stores. No fast-food restaurants. No golf courses. “It’s like the whole island is 50 years behind,” he says. He pauses, glances around the otherwise deserted beach, and reconsiders. “Or maybe it’s 50 years ahead.”

Leigh Ann Henion’s debut book, about wonder-inducing natural phenomena, is forthcoming from the Penguin Press. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.