By Jaime Vergara
For Variety

WE thought we had mother nature’s balcony to ourselves. But there was a gentleman ahead of us, solitary but not forlorn, gazing with a clearly modulated oriental smile on his face while viewing the whole panorama stretching from San Antonio in the south toward Garapan and Puerto Rico to the north. We were under the open skies by San Pedro chapel up Kannat Tabla when midnight struck at 40 degrees longitude lines past the international dateline.
Unto midnight, the island air hosted an intermittent drizzle that blew in from the southwest and out to the northeast. It did not seem to bother the fire crackling faithful much but shortly before midnight, the display that my wife and I expected to occur equal to if not louder in intensity to that of last Lunar New Year’s celebrative fireworks in the Garapan area was evidently not going to materialize. There was hardly anyone on the streets and there was but one other car at American Memorial Park’s parking lot whose owners, like us, might have come to view an aerial show of nitro-glazed sparks. Residents of Fina Sisu, we were prepared to be loudly and brilliantly entertained by the sights and sounds of the famed Paseo de Marianas. It was to naught, or so, we thought.
Dejectedly, we headed back toward As Terlaje when we got the brilliant idea to head up Kannat Tabla to soak in the view of the drenched leeward side at midnight. We were not disappointed. Residences below Mt. Tapochau shot out rockets of the kind you see on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July. There was no singular site that dominated the lagoon side of the island as the hotels started releasing their pyrotechnics shortly before midnight and pretty soon, the whole scene was like a tableau of young Chamorro, Filipino, Korean and Japanese ballet dancers pirouetting to Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” and “March,” as well as the ubiquitous “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy,” in the “Nutcracker Suite.” Obviously, like Linus to Lucy watching the clouds, we saw more than what was objectively being presented by the paraffin-based ignitions hovering on the lower atmosphere of the island.
For an hour, the explosives got louder and the incendiary devices got brighter, and it did not matter that the air was drenched. In fact, the humidity in the atmosphere added glitter to the sparklers that were sent up to glorify the heavens across Obispo Camacho’s Chalan Kanoa just above the Sugar dock boat wharf. The ancient Chinese arrows claimed the skies even as close to 10,000 China-originating garment factory workers reportedly reside on island as part of the current island demographics, but remain aliens regardless of how long they have resided in the place, and no matter how cheated they feel to have invested so much to come to a sovereign territory of the much-heralded United States of America only to be deprived of the opportunity to call the place home. They join a cast of thousands, and in desperation, some have foolishly cast their lines to the open skies of the Pacific.
Back to earth on that sobering thought. This is a night of smoke and mirrors, of ancient fairies, Vox Dei, along the longed-for ferries to join and connect common aspirations of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, Vox Populi. But for this earthling, this is not a night of socio-political musing even as his fellow Democrats have begun whoring by the Rivers of Babylon even before their formal congressional ascendancy. It was a metaphysical moment, best consummated in silence. And in silence, my new day and Ano Nuevo began.