Think of this. One day, the garbage trucks stop coming to pick up trash. The city dump is permanently closed and walled off. But you still buy groceries, eat, and shop on Amazon. What happens when garbage bags stack up outside your door?

That is my problem today. Two bags are up on deck, their drawstrings tied. But there is no garbage pickup on the islands of Guna Yala.

Instead, on our maps of the archipelago are green icons for the burn sites. One every few islands. The sites are there by consensus, and because someone added the spot to the map. No government was involved.

We take our dinghy to the island, collect the fallen palm fronds and driftwood, pile them high, and light it. We throw the trash into the flame, then watch it burn and melt. The fire must be hot enough to incinerate everything, leaving only ash.

I like campfires. It was my favorite activity in childhood, and later, when breaking away from my concrete office to camp. But burning trash is a burden. I cringe watching the smoke pollute the sky. But it is not floating in the sea.

This problem of disposal throttled our consumption. We catch our own fish. We buy fruits and veggies by handfuls from the boats that arrive from the mainland.

But trash bags still fill. The provisions leave empty cans and wrappers. Our resupplies from PriceMart (Panamanian Costco) arrive overpackaged in layers of cellophane. Parts shipments come in two cardboard boxes.

We consolidate orders and think them through. Or, we choose not to buy. We generate only one small bag of garbage every two weeks. Astounding, in comparison to a full trash bin I rolled to the street side weekly in my previous city life. Astounding, I thought I needed that much.

The islands are clean of the local trash. Mostly. Once in a while, we see a bag that someone left against a tree without burning. They sailed away, so it is no longer their problem. It is only one bag, right?

Yet, the islands are full of trash. When we walk beaches on the ocean sides of the outer islands, the highest tide mark is littered with plastic bottles, a collection of single shoes from old pairs, and empty jugs of bleach. The surviving instructions on the jugs are in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese. From where did they come?

In the mid-1800s, Matthew Fontaine Maury, an American naval officer and oceanographer, convinced ship captains all around the world to drop bottles into the sea, with a message inside to anyone who finds one, to mail back the location and date of when they have found the bottle. His enormous experiment mapped how ocean currents moved around the world. The charts tell the story of the trash I see when walking around my remote island.

Today, we could simplify Maury’s experiment by walking on the beach with a grocery store scanner. Scan a plastic jug of bleach, or an empty pint of 15W-40 engine oil. In a data center somewhere is a record of where the items were sold.

Now back to our trash. I’ll admit to a weakness: we like beer. It is in light and crushable aluminum cans, but unburnable. Two beers a day fill a bagful in four weeks. When the bag is full, we set sail towards the mainland, where a local - J - lives in a small shack on an island the size of a football field. He collects cans and takes them for recycling on the mainland. He is paid for the cans by weight.

There are other enterprising locals who charge two dollars for a bag of cans. Later you may see the bag in the mangroves of the next island. No bueno. But J does not make you pay. He has to turn the cans in to make the money.

We sail to his island group. Our trip is not only to drop off the recycling. A family restaurant caters to tourists there who arrive in pangas for a day on the San Blas islands. We crave their chicken after weeks of seafood.

In the morning, I secure a bag of beer cans under the straps of my paddleboard. And another bag of tin cans. I aim at the palms on the other side of the reef, half-mile downwind. I hope J is home to take my cans, so I don’t have to push my inflatable recycling barge back into the wind without dropping its cargo. J is there. I am happy he will make a little cash.

Subscribe now

If you liked this story, please Like and Restack. It help a lot with reaching new readers. Thank you!

Leave a comment

Share

We meet the indigenous men soon after we drop anchor at Banedup. It is a small uninhabited island in the Holandase system of outer reefs in Guna Yala, North of Panama. The men are young - almost boys, short, skinny, fit, and dark-skinned. Twenty and eighteen, I learned later. Will the dog bite, they ask us when Bèlá Flek runs by their cayuco. Or, that’s the question I answer. Their voices are soft, the Spanish is accented and hard for me to follow. The words run together. The endings fade to a mumble.

Two high bundles of thin sticks are piled in the front and midship of the canoe. The bundles weigh the boat down to within an inch of swamping. They seem unconcerned. The man at the front lifts a plastic three-liter jug.

Do you have any water?

The day is hot. They swung machetes all day to gather wood. I wave them to follow my paddleboard to our sailboat.

I fill the two jugs from a filtered faucet. What is the wood for? I ask them.

For cooking. They paddle off.

I wonder if they gathered more than the boat can carry. But they cover the mile to their island without trouble.

The next afternoon, I hear commotion outside. The dog dashes upstairs, and I follow him up to the cockpit. The youth are back. They have a pile of coconuts stacked at the front, and a box of fruit. Regalos - gifts, they say, and pass me a few avocados and four handfuls of limes. I see two empty water jugs and ask if they want a refill. They nod. They are Y and S.

The next day, they stop with gifts of fish: Pargo Rojos, a local variant of small snappers, and Urals, a small version of jacks. We trade water for fish. I ask about a home-made spear in the cayuco. What reefs do they fish?

You want to go fishing? Y asks. I nod. We make plans to meet on their island at seven am. I refill their water, and they paddle home.

Later that day, I mention the gifts to another sailor.

The locals stop by and ask for water, he says. But we don’t have much during the dry season, not enough to share, so they stop coming after a while.

The islands do not have natural sources of fresh water, except for the rain. In the dry season, the sky can stay blue for weeks without a drop falling. There is plenty of water on the mainland ten miles away, but it is costly to bring out by boat. Many sailors buy it from local botteros. Locals can’t afford it, so they conserve it, hope for rain, and occasionally forego it for days, drinking coconut water from the plentiful palms.

We have a desalinator on board, a watermaker, as it is commonly called. We make 150 liters of fresh and clean water each hour when the sun is charging our batteries. We refill our tanks every three days. The water is easy for us, and it makes the trade with the boys feel lopsided in our favor.

But we both barter in what is abundant. To us, it is water; to them, it is resources of the land and sea. They gather boxes of fruit and catch fish at the cost of their time. It is a fair trade.

At seven o’clock the next morning, I pull up the dinghy to the ocean side of the island. I walk the beach looking for the boys. A few cane shacks with thatched roofs are built every hundred meters. They are in pairs, doors facing each other, the windows turned to the ocean.

I see Y and S ahead. They grab the spears, and we motor my dinghy behind a set of islands where the reefs steeply drop twelve meters to the sand. Fish, lobster, calamari. They are both shivering after two hours of diving. I am a bit cold as well.

When I drop them off on the island, they promise to come back with coconut water for drinking. Y’s grandma yells to the boys, don’t forget to ask for water, so I can cook your food.

Subscribe now

If you liked this story, please Like and Restack. It help a lot with reaching new readers. Thank you!

Leave a comment

Share

Short dispatches from our travels in less than 800 words.

Rio Azucar - Sugar River - is an indigenous Kuna village. It sits on an island, disconnected from the mainland by a small strait. We see a collection of thatched roofs from our solitary anchorage, and a sparse field of lights at night. The island is tiny, a few football fields in area, yet the map shows a bakery, a store, a school, and a small medical center.

We pull up to a small concrete dock. A Kuna woman, with a notebook in her hand, walks around as if expecting boats. It is only us. She says nothing as we tie up our dinghy. I nod at her, and her eyes dart to her notebook. She writes something, glances at me, then dashes to a shack.

A wiry man waves and walks over. I am Monolo, he says. What are you looking for? It is not a challenge but a welcome. He wears long pants, flip-flops, and a polo shirt with black and white stripes. He is just over five feet, which is a common height for Kuna elders. The younger generation trends taller. His hair is long. I notice some grey.

We are here for veggies and bread. He waves us to follow him on a path between tiny homes. This is the Main Street, as it were.

The place is remarkably clean. In the villages on the mainland, we grew accustomed to ditches with plastic bottles, torn paper plates, and pieces of used clothing. Just enough to leave a polluted memory. Here, the dirt path is raked, grass trimmed, nothing is stacked outside the homes.

Only children are playing, and their mothers on stools.

The homes are made of cane stocks, stacked vertically, tightly packed, and cross-hatched with palm leaves. The roofs are thatched or tin. Two windows per wall are cut in the cane. The windows are covered with a piece of fabric attached at the top. The fabric sways with the wind.

The homes surround a square. Two poles with Kuna flags mark the entrance to a pavilion. It is also made of cane with a thatched roof, but is large enough to cover a tennis court.

Congreso, Monolo points to it. Each Monday and Wednesday, the village gathers here, and we make decisions.

Which decision?

All decisions. About life in the village today and tomorrow.

How do you make them?

We talk, and we vote.

Everyone?

Everyone - women and men - equal rights, one vote each.

What was the last decision you made?

Where to send kids to high school. When we have money, we send some to Panama City. When we don’t, we send them closer to home. Two kids are going to Panama City now.

At the small store, we buy zucchini, tomatoes, Balboa beer. A woman who checks us out has only one eye, but no patch. A younger woman with bright teeth packs our groceries. She is Monolo’s daughter. The other is his wife.

We walk to the bakery and buy fifteen rolls, one dollar and seventy-five cents for all. I pull a roll from a bag, shake off an errant ant, and bite into it. Sweet coconut bread.

This is the clinic, Monolo points to a two-story stone structure. Always a doctor here from Panama for the villages. They come on rotation. The building has glass windows, a set of modern doors, and a waiting bench outside. When Obama was president, Monolo says, America helped us build it. Obama - yeah! Monolo brings two thumbs up.

And Trump?

Loco, peligroso, enojado - crazy, dangerous, angry. Obama - good person, the first thing he says in English.

We walk by the school, a single-story stone building with a painted brick fence. It is larger than I expected. The school is only through the eighth grade, Monolo says, then the kids go away. Do they come back? Most do, a few don’t. Loud city life is not for everyone, quiet life is not for everyone, too. But they come back. This is a good life. He waves around.

We are back at the pier. The woman with the notebook smiles at us. She says something to Monolo in the Kuna language. He says yes in Spanish, and she dashes to the guard shack. We buy avocados from Monolo’s brother, who just docked in a panga. Then he loads our bag with limes. Regalo, regalo - gift, he says. We run into such gifts here. It is a bizarre reversal of tipping.

As we pull away from the pier, Monolo yells, “We have a veggie boat. Kaidel is the man. He will find you.”

“Blue boat?” I holler.

Monolo nods. Si, Si. I raise my thumbs in the air.

If you like this logbook post, please consider Restacking - it helps us to reach new readers.

Subscribe now

Share

We walk by a small group of sailors around the fire. We say hello and smile at them, but do not stop on the way to our dinghy.

“Hey,” a man calls after we pass, then rushes after me. He is a tad older than me, fit, with a white beard, well-trimmed beard, and only a lightly tanned face under the soft-brimmed hat. “Do you spear fish?” He asks. His accent is Germanic but faint.

His question stumps me. It is without preamble or context.

He extends his hand. “I am Yakob.”

I shake the hand and suppress my instinctive suspicion.

“Are you our neighbor on the boat with the Namibian flag?” I ask.

“You know the flag?”

“I looked it up.”

“My wife and I are from Namibia. She hates it when I go spearfishing alone. So I always look for company.”

“I do,” I answer his first question, “but don’t have a speargun with me, only a pole spear.”

“I have an extra you could use.”

“Would love to go,” I say.

“I will drop by around nine tomorrow morning to make a plan. The cut in the reef I like works best in high tide,” he says.

He comes at two the next afternoon.

“You want to go at three?” He asks. “Sorry, I didn’t feel great this morning and had to take it slow.”

“Three is great.”

I pull out my blue camo diving pants and the hooded top with a rubber pad centered on the chest. It is for resting the butt of the speargun when reloading the bungees. I check my mask, snorkel, and the long free-diving fins. I load my weight belt with five kilos and slide on the diving knife. The mask defogger goes into the weight bag.

Yakob picks me up on time. His dinghy is small, but there is room for my gear and my feet atop the anchor chain. He tells me about the cut we will explore and our plan for the dive.

“The speargun you will use does not have a reel and a float,” he hands me the gun. “Don’t shoot anything so big that you can’t hold onto.”

We put defogger on our masks and dive overboard. The water is clear. I can see past sixty feet into the cut. The current is less than a quarter knot. It is pushing me past the enormous coral fans just below, but I counter the current with the easy stroke of my fins.

Subscribe now

These reefs form a submerged wall, five kilometers wide. They are unseen from a distance but insinuated by a stretch of dangerous waves breaking against the coral walls on the ocean side.

On the navigation charts, they are depicted as jagged green patches. The zigzag edges are meant to convey the uncertainty of the boundaries and the extreme danger to boats. The danger that kills ships.

On the bay side, the reefs subdue the swell and turn the ocean to placid calmness. The water assumes a range of azure shades that tell a story of topography and life below the surface. The deep blue patches are the deeper holes. The greenish dark sections are the seagrass fields. The beautiful light azure is the sand. You have seen it on postcards.

It is the bands of underwater sand that we fish.

We swim a quarter kilometer against the current up the side channel. Cold flows brush against my face. It is the water lifted from the deep by a recent upwelling. The depth by the reef is only ten meters, but a kilometer deep a short distance from here. Spooky dark, and cold.

These corals are an escarpment of life. Fish. Bright coral heads. A sea turtle is dashing away. A nurse shark ten meters below is lying on the bottom in wait. Another nurse shark glides through a cut and follows me twenty feet behind, then closer, then closer still.

A nurse shark will not harm me, even at seven feet long, but the slow pursuit by a vestigial predator is unnerving. I am prey, and my mind fills with fear. I slow down and poke the tip of my spear in the direction of the shark’s nose. I don’t intend to poke it, I am too far, but my slowing down makes the predator weave and leave.

I look up and see Yakob watching me. I sense he is smiling, but I can’t tell past his snorkel. He turns and swims around the top of the reef towards the cut where we are going to fish.

I stop kicking and let my body relax. We are drifting on the current now. It is time to slow the heart down and breathe deeply to oxygenate the blood. It is a simple task of doing nothing, but the mind does not go along. It worries about the dive time, the weights, spotting the fish, my aim. I tell myself to relax, but instead tighten my chest and breathe in shallow spurts that ruin the rhythm.

After a break from diving, my mind forgets what my body knows, and I know better than to fight it. I need two dives for the old instinct to return and soothe the beating heart to a slower rhythm.

I inhale and glide towards the bottom. The adrenaline rushes my movements, and I burn through the air in seconds. I float back up.

I am slower on the second dive. I creep along the bottom and peek around the coral head into a narrow gulch. Nothing there but two blue tangs. They are a gorgeous, shimmering-blue fish, always darting, nipping at algae on the rocks. Big fish in profile, but thin like a plate from the front. They are not for catching. They carry a high risk of ciguatera toxin, which is the misery I do not want. I watch them go left, right, then vanish.

On my third dive, I am at the bottom holding onto a rock. My heart is beating slower. Oxygen consumption drops. I can function for longer in the depth. It is an old instinct we mammals borrowed from the earlier branches of the evolutionary tree to give us a fighting chance against the hostility of water. Or, maybe it goes older still, to the time of amphibians, when holding a breath was just a thing to do.

I push off the bottom and slowly kick up to a depth where the buoyancy returns, and my expanding lungs and wetsuit pull me up to the surface. I love the transition from sinking to floating. It is otherworldly, that trade between states of heavy and light. Like a mood, but the one I can control.

I breathe through a snorkel on the surface, with my face down. Yakob is at the edge of the sand below me, creeping around a coral head, then he swings the speargun at something I don’t see. The shaft flies. I follow the streak and see the shaft bury itself into the sand. Then a grouper twists and darts away. A miss.

I am next on the prowl. A shadow is moving my way, silver and narrow with a serrated tail. Spanish mackerel. I still myself behind a rock, knees on the sand, both hands on the speargun. Now, I am part of the coral, and little fish swarm me and bump into my mask.

I have been at the bottom for two minutes and begin to feel the tightening in my chest. The growing spasms of the body warn me that the level of carbon dioxide is reaching a dangerous threshold. Without practice, this feeling turns into panic and sends us scrambling for the surface. It is the compulsion to breathe. But it always comes early. The body still has another minute of reserves.

Free divers learn to handle it, wait through it, until the spasms recede. They will come again and soon, but the break buys me time to wait out the mackerel.

It is coming my way.

I am still.

I watch the silver predator through the swarm of small fish in front of my mask. The mackerel’s serrated tail slices the water, pushing it towards me.

But then it turns. Still four meters away. The distance is within the range of the roller gun, but I hesitate too long. I am too slow to follow it with the shaft, but too fast for it to notice. So it darts across the trench, and I take my finger off the trigger. I am not good enough to match its speed.

We dive for another hour. But an encounter with a pelagic is the highlight, so we soon give up and kick our way to the dinghy.

“Beautiful,” I say for the first time in an hour and a half.

“Did you see the yellowtail snapper?” Yakob stores the fins and the mask at the back.

“No. Saw the grouper you went after.”

“I was too close to him when trying to set up. He spooked,” he shrugs.

“I am just utterly out of practice,” I say.

We slowly motor back in the lee of the loud reef. He tells me how he finds his fishing spots, and I take note. Then he raises his free hand.

“There are people who live on the sea,” He points at me and himself. “And there are those who visit. You know, the charters. There are spots they go to fish and to have their fun. They have a right. But, we have a right to keep a few secrets.”

He swears me to secrecy. I nod.

I ask about his journey from Namibia, and he tells me a brief and simple story. He left, but Namibia is still home. He is going back there in two months. But only to visit, never to stay.

I recall the suspicion with which I met his first approach. Nothing about him but me. I am distrustful. A personal defect most times, except when it saves it. I am glad I put it aside yesterday.

Alex and I leave the island chain the next morning. Yakob is not on the boat. He and his wife are walking their dogs on the beach. It feels odd to depart without leaving a thank you. I’ll keep an eye out for the Namibian flag.

If you like the story, please Like and Restack, it is the best way to help us reach new readers. Thank you!

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

The length of my world is fluid. The first time I measured it on my run, the pent up energy of the previous sea passage and my rested body extended the running strides. My world was five hundred ninety steps long. Two days ago, I was exhausted, and the tide was high. It pushed me into the lapping water on the east end of the island. The shorter stride, longer world - seven hundred and two steps. But yesterday, it was what I told you.

Today, I turned to the right after hauling the dinghy onshore. The counterclockwise direction for the next three laps on the narrow patch of sand around the palms. Then I turn around to run clockwise. The beach is slanted, sharply cambered to the sea. I can see it and feel it in my ankles and knees. So I follow the clock hand then reverse to maintain the equal strain on each side of my body. Twenty nine laps planned today. A nice prime number.

I won’t make it. I know it by lap four. It is just too hot.

Subscribe now

No one is on the island, but my dog running along, picking up and carrying a succession of coconuts in his maw. And my wife lifting a twelve pound weight in a palm shade. The dog is compelled to follow me by past breeders selecting for hunting genes, but my wife makes her own choices. Oh, I know it. I would love it if she ran with me too. But she cares not.

You may think it is boring. Lap after lap of the same beach, of the same logs to jump over, and the same soft patches of sand that mire my stride. A treadmill. But you are wrong. Each lap is a deviation of direction and an experiment in physics of placing a foot on another log each time, and timing the waves. I run through the water at its shallowest, when only ankles are submerged, and the foot can escape the suction of the wave.

Boredom is not repetition, but a lack of attention.

There are new things ignored for days. I notice them once everything else becomes familiar. I have observed a shack with a pink panga across the cut on the neighboring island. Only a suggestion of locals in the clothes drying on the line, but never a sighting. They are ghosts to me. I have not seen them embodied.

Today, I notice a grill across the cut, right next to the shack. It is old. Or maybe it is new. In the tropics a brand new car turns to a pile of rust by the evening. But the grill is disused, or I would see the smoke drifting away from it sometimes in the last seven days. I have not. The ghosts don’t eat.

Maybe I insist on the ghosts because I resist the emptiness. Emptiness asks to be filled. What if no one is there any longer? I choose not to accept the thought. The shack can’t outlive the people who built it. It can’t become just wood returning to the jungle. They are gone for the weekend, I decide. They have not left for good to escape the smallness of their world.

I trip on a log. It was not there yesterday. Then I see that it was. There is that intersection of branches looking like two hands commanding me to halt. It is the same log but in a new place after the strong winds and waves of last night. The log is the same actor playing a new role in a new set. Nothing is new. Nothing is the same. This can never be boring.

But those are things, the outer world. Inside your head, there is another world. Give it an uninterrupted chance, cut off the tyranny of daily tasks, and your own mind becomes an interesting friend. It happens when I am running. On lap eleven. Or mile six. Or not today, but tomorrow. I don’t know when it happens to you. But likely when all else is boring.

Twenty four laps is all I make. I crash into the water and float. Hot.

We go back to Monona, our sailboat home, and we work. Zoom meetings, code, optimization algorithms for data too big to comprehend. Lunch. Discussions with the team half a world away. Just work. You know. Unless, you transcended the need to make your monthly check.

But then it is over, and the closed laptop lid collapses the world back to the tiny space of six hundred and seventy four steps. It is enough.

We float at the beach, a canned Mojito in hand. I point to the shack across the cut. It is solitary and miles away from the mainland. I ask, “Alex, if you had to live in this shack for the rest of your life and only eat what is in the sea, but it is plentiful…”. She nods, she knows the game… “And you could have people visiting you, once a month for three days. Would you want them to bring the exquisite food or books? It could only be either for the rest of your life.”

She shakes her head. “No.” She hates the questions. She thinks, “Maybe food.” She laughs. “I will write my own books.”

At first, I am surprised. Alex loves to read. Yet, I also know the slow decay of joy when every meal becomes the same. So maybe food, and write my own books?

I wonder about it all evening. Confined to an isolated patch of land, could I sustain my inner world on my own? If I am the only reflection of experience? I come to realize I can’t. I think of volleyball Wilson, conjured by Tom Hanks, his anthropomorphized face bouncing back ideas at a new angle. Wilson tries but he is a poor substitute for books, and no substitute for people. Antagonists challenge us, sympathizers support us, but both advance what we notice and know.

Two weeks of quiet life, or even a year, will deepen what I know with time to chisel expansive concepts from the raw material of past experience. But my capacity for attention will die in solitude. I will stop noticing. Even when running. So, the same reef fish for food. But the books, in the end.

Share

Leave a comment

I would have dismissed it if only one boat with a swastika flag passed us by. But two? What are we sailing toward?

The flag is the two thin red stripes at the top and bottom. A thick yellow stripe is in the middle. The thin lines of the black swastika are in the yellow center. The swastika shape is unmistakable, yet it is inverted as if seen in the mirror.

I grew up in the Soviet Union. My childhood was filled with the mythology of fighting the Nazi’s. It was a devastating and real fight for most families, as everyone lost someone in that war.

Twenty million dead.

I felt the anguish and hardship of it through my grandparents’ stories. The swastika is a symbol that triggers instinctive dread.

In truth, we expected the flags. And fortunately, they are not what they could mean elsewhere.

We are sailing into the Guna Yala archipelago, more commonly known as San Blas in English. Alex had read the regulations, as she does, before we landed on the islands. Although a part of Panama, the islands are administered by the local indigenous tribes, Guna Yala. Panama designates “comarcas” where indigenous locals have a degree of control over rules, access, and income. One of the rules in Guna Yala is that every yacht, or a small sailboat, must fly the flag of the region.

I love that rule. They are called courtesy flags, and each yacht must hoist a small flag of each new country it enters upon clearing customs. At least, while the yacht is within the borders. We have a bag of them. Hoisting a flag for a people who have lived on these islands since before the Roman Empire feels like a small act of justice.

But a swastika?

I understand that the symbol found its origins in mythologies preceding Western civilization. Archeologists found it on pieces of pottery 10,000 years old. In India, it was a symbol of luck and a cosmic order. In Buddhist and Jain traditions, it signaled the eternal cycle of life. In Guna mythology, and other Native American cultures, it meant the four corners of the world, the symbol of the octopus, and the cosmic structure in balance.

It was on the Guna flag before the Nazis adopted it as their symbol of murder. I just can’t shake the instinctive reluctance to fly a flag with it.

But in the nineties, the Guna dropped the swastika from the flag in favor of a new design. Green, yellow, and green. The interlocked arms of solidarity. The stars of the seven Panamanian tribes. It is beautiful.

Yet, the bad news is that they had to change it. The pressure from the world pushed them to abandon the symbol connected to their history, because a bunch of assholes elsewhere made it evil.

Or, should I abandon my Eurocentric lens? Respect the local history and local choices without judging them against my hurt sensibilities? Maybe.

The next time we see a local panga selling goods, I will ask for the original flag. If they have it, I may hoist it to honor their history and to spit in the face of the Nazis. Deny them the the ownership of something ancient.

Leave a comment

Share

We are one of the few anchored sailboats in the bay. Silent cayucos - indigenous dugout canoes - are the only other craft in a loose pack at the edge of the clear blue hole. A fisherman in each pulls on the line hand-over-hand, tosses the fish on the floor at his feet, then throws the hook in the water again. Portobelo is tranquil. Quiet.

Yet, this silence is new, a century old. Portobelo, Panama had a noisy history of changing fortunes, pirate victories, and pillaging empires. I see a reminder of old upheavals in thirty cannons trained on our boat from the ruined walls of three forts on shore and in the hills. Even from the distance, disused for centuries, their dark muzzles in the embrasures send a chill through me.

For a week now, every morning, I sit with my coffee at the bow of the boat, studying the gray coral walls of the forts. I look at the old guns looking at me. Why are they here? I don’t know this history, so I read.

It began with a promise. There is gold to the West, Columbus pitched the Spanish Empire. The Spanish found it after a century of voyages. Ships laden with stolen Peruvian treasure offloaded their loot on the Pacific side of Panama onto land caravans. The mules, people, and chains hauled it across the narrow spine of the mountainous isthmus to Portobelo, in the Caribbean. This protected bay became the base where the traders bought and loaded the treasure onto massive armadas for transport to Spain, to the descendants of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.

Where there was gold, there were pirates. Hence the guns.

The dog jumps into the dinghy and posts himself at the front. He hangs over the inflatable tube, his paws are over the edge, and his long face leads us to shore, like the bowsprit figurehead of the old ships, but alive. His ears are flapping in the wind.

The beach sand is jet black. It is the pulverized volcanic rock washed up here from inland streams. The dog jumps onto black sand, bounds over the coral rocks, and disappears into restored remains of the San Felipe fort. He knows the way, we walked through it each day of the past week.

San Filipe is the lower bastion facing the water. Twenty cannons line the wall and point at our cruising fleet. A tower on each end of the battery extends over the now-dry moat. The narrow musket windows cover the circumference and every angle of attack.

I walk into the tower. The space is claustrophobic. I imagine the pirate ships pushing through the cannon fire and disgorging the brigands onto land, who then rush the hill, muskets and swords at the ready. A soldier in each tower faces the rush in panic or in battle-hardened resolve, but undoubtedly fear. How could one not feel entrapped in here? How could one stay cool, knowing they are fighting for their life, but mostly, for other people’s treasure. Soldiers then and now fighting for wealth that will never be theirs.

I feel the cold ghosts of dead troops. I rush outside.

These forts are the third iteration following two hundred years of improvements. The Spanish built the first structures in the 1590s aimed at the disorganized buccaneers. The defenses were steadily improved after successive attacks over the next hundred forty years. They deterred the pirates, but proved no match for the British, who sacked Portobelo in 1739 during the Jenkins War. It was a big win for the British; Portobelo is still a name of places and roads in England after the victory.

But the British did not stay, and the Spanish learned their lesson. They built the three surviving forts in a feat of impressive military engineering…

We leave the lower fort and climb to San Fernando. It is the second bastion directly up the hill, thirty meters higher. We clamber up the steep sides along a deep trench. It is reinforced with precisely-cut coral stone from local reefs. The coral was easy to form when fresh. It hardened as it dried but retained its absorbent quality, which was perfect to swallow the cannon balls without splintering into pieces.

The walls are still intact, oblique to the sun, but the steps have crumbled into pebbles. The coral could fight the cannon balls, but not the time under the direct tropical sun.

The trench is deep. I can hardly see from inside. The shorter men of previous centuries would be protected from musket fire and cannonballs flying from the sea. But it is a dubious comfort. The only retreat this place offers is an impenetrable jungle.

Up on the hill, the view is stunning. The clear waters of the bay, green hills, the whitecaps further in the ocean. Beautiful and useful. The elevation made for a longer cannon range and extended watch distance. From here, we can see the anchored container ships on the horizon, tens of miles away, awaiting their turn through the Panama Canal.

A watchman of the past saw the white square sails tacking into the wind or rounding the cape under the friendly Spanish flag, or the skull and bones banderas of the pirates, or, the most feared, the Union Jack. Each spotting broke the boredom of the garrison life and caused commotion in the ranks, and a rush of preparations for a fight. Even the Spanish flag could be a deception. No chances.

The upper fort is a smaller version of the lower. There is a stone bread oven, an enclosed latrine, a gunpowder drying room, and roofless living quarters. The rooms are mostly roofless, except two with the arched roofs in the lower fort.

What was it like living here back in those times, I ask Alex. She is sitting on the cannon looking at the fort below. Boredom year-round, except on trading days, then terror when someone unwelcome came to steal the gold, she says. No adventure? No, she says, drills, maintenance, and tropical disease. She is right, I know. I saw her read the history notes.

The dog explores every corner of the fort. He acts as if it is all new every time we climb up here. It is a dog’s gift. But soon he slows from the heat and trots up the path toward the jungle to wait for us in the shade of a palm. Come on, you bums.

We climb over roots and leaf-cutter ant highways. It is another quarter mile through the jungle and fifty meters up the hill. The jungle recedes, and the last structure emerges at the very top. It is a square, ten meters per side. The walls are tall and studded with narrow embrasures. Are these living quarters, or the place for the last stand?

Another bread oven is inside, a water well, and coral walls. These were once smooth but are now eroded by the sun and wind. The stones look like grainy petrified wood. Pretty, really.

We exit and sit next to the wall on the hill facing the town. Portobelo is on the other side of the bay. From this distance, it is a happy-looking Caribbean village with colorful roofs and a chaotic street design. A postcard.

But down on the streets, it is a different picture. The walls are flaked, and the roofs are rusty. None of the gold that transited this town for two centuries has stuck. It slipped through the streets into the distant pockets of kings, queens, and merchants, as it happens with empires. But the people, on whose backs the treasure travelled, were left with none of it, but a memory of injustice. Now the bay is quiet again.

If you enjoyed this please Like and Restack. It helps us reach new readers.

Leave a comment

Share

Alex was unsure about this adventure. We are not mountaineers. The biggest hill we climbed last year was a set of eighty steps to our friends’ home on the islands of Bocas Del Toro. But Villarrica is tall. The Chilean stratovolcano erupts from the plains around the eponymous lake and steeply climbs to 2,860 meters (~7500 feet). The still active, at times smoking, volcano is covered in snow. It does not look well-disposed to interlopers.

But we are fit enough, I say. We routinely hike ten miles on the weekends in the heat. The slopes will be tough on the thighs. Yes. But we have the aerobic engine to push on. We will make it. Alex concedes, and we sign up for the ascent.

Soon, the other eight people are here. We inspect our backpacks: crampons, ice axe, snow pants and jackets, a plastic sled for the ride down, gloves, helmets, sunglasses, gas masks for the caldera. We put on the climbing boots, stiff and heavy, then load into the van.

Subscribe now

At the base of the volcano, the guides break us into groups. Each issues instructions to their small team. We’ll go slowly and steadily, our guide tells us. We’ll take a few breaks to rest, take our packs off, drink, and have a snack. The crampons are for the snow, but don’t worry about it now, he says. After the instructions, we head up.

The pace is high. The first kilometers are on the gentler slopes. It is a steady uphill on a rugged trail through the thinning trees. After half an hour, we stop to shed layers, too warm from the effort. The cold air is a respite. In another half an hour, we begin the climb.

It is steep. The trail switchbacks among rocky outcroppings. The surface is mostly firm, but sections are the soft aggregate of volcanic pebbles that capture the sinking boots and send us a step downslope for every few steps up. I look back. We climbed above the plains and the trees, and can already see the vistas for tens of kilometers into the distance. Seems like good progress. I lift my head up to see how much further I have to go. The top is as far away as when we started.

Villarrica is one of the 65 active volcanoes in Chile. Other accounts claim there are 62, others over 90. The total number of mostly extinct volcanoes in Chile is about 2000. The number of active volcanoes depends on the definition of an active volcano. Some counts include the mountains with recent eruptions, which are still seismically active today. Others, relax the definition to include the volcanoes that erupted within the time of human history, and still have a chance to blow in the future.

Villarrica is from the former group of sixty volcanoes actively monitored today. It is one of the most active volcanoes in Chile. The last eruption occurred in 2015. The spewing lava fountains and ash columns force the evacuation of Pucón and other neighboring villages.

In the years since, the volcano has been quiet. It puffs smoke at times, hence our gas masks, and other times the lava bubbles to the top and pools in the caldera, visible from the rim of the mountain at night as a soft glowing lake of molten rock. The lava lake is almost always there, but it fluctuates: rises with the buildup of gases, then recedes a hundred meters below the mark near the rim in the calmer periods of weeks or months.

An hour and a half into the climb, the pace is relentless. I look at Alex and see her despair. She shakes her head. I don’t think I will make it, she says. Her quads are already dead. I nod. Mine too. No worries, I say, you may catch a second wind after the breakfast stop. She shakes her head with doubt.

But I have been there when I ran mountain ultra races. In each, the trouble came a third into a race. The mind responded to the rebelling muscles and commanded a full stop. You won’t make it, it would say. I’d think about two-thirds of the race still ahead, assess my body, and see no way how I could run another hundred kilometers. But at the next aid station with chicken soup, Gatorade, and smiling people, something would flip, I’d run on feeling well. After the finish line, I’d think with surprise how I could put one foot in front of the other in that miserable stretch one hundred kilometers ago.

This is one of those moments for both of us. There is no way we can make it. But it is the wrong time to stop. So we climb on. One foot in front of the other, sliding back every fifth step.

Alex is in front of me. She rounds the corner on a narrow ledge, then the fifty-kilometer-an-hour wind pushes her sideways, and she teeters on the path. I grab her backpack. But she is fine. I am just nervous. The wind is relentless. Angry.

It is Puelche, our guide tells us. This wind blows from Argentina. It crosses the Andes and descends the steep Cordillera, compressing and warming in obeisance to physics. It is a warm wind. Pleasant when you stop. Brutal when you push against it.

The Puelche will stop above 2400 meters near the top, the guide tells us. The wind detaches from the steep cone of the volcano to rush towards the Pacific on its rampage. I hope so, I say. The wind is loud and terrifying when I am walking on a ledge.

We take another break in a gulch between two outcroppings. The view is stunning, but we hardly glimpse. The people with us add a layer of pants. We put on the helmets. Then we are off again.

Another break. This one is beyond the last black diamond chairlift. Closer to the high snow. I look at Alex. A tear is running down her cheek. I don’t think I can make the summit, she says, sorry. I touch her shoulder.

The guide sees it too. He asks how she feels. Alex is honest. He nods. This is the point where people make a decision to stop and where he expects the group to thin. He asks me if I plan to push on, but I say I am staying here. He says I should come with him. But I shake my head. This is our trip. Alex’s and mine. What is another summit without your person?

A filled checkmark, empty of meaning.

We work together with other guides, our guide says, so you can go with her. He points to a young woman. Her face is tanned, happy, with indigenous features. It will be you and a couple of others, he says. Then he leaves with the fragment of our first group.

“I am sorry you won’t reach the summit,” I tell the new guide.

She smiles, “No need for me to go up there. I am Andréa. It is about you and you and you.” The statement is simple. Honest. I believe she means exactly what she says.

“There is a great view around that ridge on the way to the summit,” she points up where the volcano disappears past the steep slope. “We can slowly climb to see it. At our own pace, when we are ready. She polls our small group, and we all nod. But we rest first.

We sit. We chat. We hoist the backpacks, adjust the balaclavas, and start to trudge up the serpentine slope. Step after short step. It is easier without the pressure of reaching the summit. I look at Alex on a switchback, and she smiles for the first time since the bottom.

The view opens to 270 degrees on the ridge. We see the small, map-like imprint of Pucón on the landscape below. The view beyond stretches for a hundred kilometers. The steep mountains that surrounded the city yesterday are only small hills from our vantage point on the stratovolcano. We laugh, then sit for some time to take in the new perspective.

Andréa walks over, with a booklet of birds, and tells us which ones live on this volcano. Her eyes widen, and she points to a bird from a page hopping on the rocks next to us. It is a rare kind. It is small and white, with a yellow line from the beak to the wing. Andrea is surprised to see it. I am surprised such a small bird can sit on the rock in the howling wind.

We pick up our packs and climb again. A concrete structure is to our right. It is robust, with an arched dome and open front, like a tube half-buried into the mountain. The opening is facing Pucón and away from the caldera above. A shelter. During the eruption, Andréa says, the lava accelerates on the snow, collects the rocks, then rushes down the slope towards Pucón at 60 kilometers per hour. It flows around the shelter.

I see the evidence of the flow, but I can’t make sense of why someone would be up here during the time of eruption. Scientists? Researchers? A few lunatic mountaineers? Or maybe something was lost in translation, and I simply misunderstood?

We are climbing to a ledge one hundred meters above. I see one of our companions ahead without a backpack. The backpack is on Andréa’s back, slung on top of her own. It does not slow her down.

The wind stops in line with the snow, just below the ledge. We climb over and sit on the rocks. It is as high as we go, Andréa says, we will descend from here.

I look up at the summit. It is right there, another few hundred meters. A group is traversing across the snow on their final stretch to the summit. I expect a flood of regret, but it does not come. Equanimity settles instead. When did it happen, when the youthful urge to achieve ceded to the contentment with the journey? Ten years ago, or five. It marked a time when more things became joyful.

Alex pulls empanadas out of my backpack. We bought too many, and they are enormous. We offer them to Andréa and others. They share one. We have one each. Real food is inconvenient on hikes and climbs, but it lifts spirits beyond what a protein bar can do.

Andréa points out volcanoes in front of us. Lonquimay, where we were a week ago. Llaima and Osorno. Calbuco is a bit behind us, at the edge of Puerto Montt. Each is a white colossus rising above the mountains and among the lakes. Their size plays tricks with distance. The symmetrical snow cones are just in front of us, but hours of driving away from each other.

Two people slide on the snow from the summit towards us. They arrest the slide with crampons at the edge of the snow, and repack their flat sleds and crampons into backpacks, then head down. They are a couple who climb as a hobby. They zoomed past us on the ascent. Now they are in a hurry to get down. We pick up our gear and follow.

We take a different route down through the lapilli field. Lapilli or scoria is loose volcanic rock fragments, pea- to walnut-sized. Andrea shows the technique, then I follow. I gently push away from the slope and let the gravity guide my hop. The foot lands, buries in soft lapilli, then slides down a bit more. Then another step in a rhythm of moon hops, long and slow. It is fun! We move five times the speed of our climb. Or faster.

At the bottom, my thighs are burning. Knees wine from the pressure of repeated, albeit soft landings. But I am exhilarated. Alex is smiling too. We walk the last two kilometers through the woods on lighter feet. We did not complete the climb but we did what we set up to accomplish. Something difficult that we have never tried together.

If you enjoyed the story, please Like and Restack. It helps us reach new readers. Thank you.

Share

Leave a comment

We leave for the Cochamó Valley at seven in the morning. “They may not let us in,” I tell Alex, “but the drive along may be worth it.” I show her photos and the map. She sips coffee, thinks, then nods. I know she is thinking this trip should have been planned weeks ago.

Cochamó Valley is the Yosemite of Northern Patagonia. Green, steep mountains transition to granite domes forming a narrow valley. But there are no crowds, no tour buses, just metered foot traffic and horse convoys.

The entry into the valley is eighty-seven kilometers from us. It would be an hour drive on a regular highway, but we must take a ferry across a barranca, then a curvy gravel road around the fjord. Maps forecast a two and a half hour trip. We must be on the trail by nine-thirty to get the permit for the backcountry. It will be tight.

The ferry terminal is only seventeen minutes away. When we arrive, the ship is there, and the cars and trucks are driving up the lowered ramp. The dock master waves the pickup in front of us to board, then raises his hand to stop us. We must wait for the next ship, forty-five minutes away.

I want to scream and pound the steering wheel in frustration, but keep it inside. That pickup passed us on the road a minute ago. I laughed at the pointlessness of his move. “He passed one car to be behind four more cars ahead. What a moron!” I said to Alex. Now he is on a ferry, and I am waiting for the next.

This almost certainly kills our plans. Yet, we choose to try. I exhale my tension. The drive itself is worth it, I tell myself. The surrounding mountains are unlike any I have seen.

On the next ferry, we eat empanadas and drink coffee. Alex takes photos of the barranca unfolding around the peninsula. Of the sun, climbing over the snow of volcanoes behind the front range of the fjord. Of the other ferries, carrying fifty cars the other way. 

I fight my tension. The drive itself will be worth it.

The road to Cochamó is gravel. It is one-and-a-half twisty lanes, but switches to one lane on narrow bridges. I learned to drive on roads like this in Siberia. Still a kid sitting on a pillow, I learned to avoid branches and potholes. Then, when older, to catch the car’s drifts in the corners and feel the wheels regain traction on the hills, to left-foot brake through the curves. My dad sat in the next seat, nodding and giving instructions like a rally co-driver.

The road is empty. We zoom around the curves, throwing dust. This is the best morning, I smile. Alex points to a vista ahead and asks to stop. To stop? We hardly have enough time! But I pull over. She takes photos from the edge of the road. Steep mountains rise from the cold water on the opposite side. The fishing boats are laid up on the dirt sea bottom at low tide next to us. A small house at a distance. One boat is working around the aquaculture buoys. Its low rumble is the only soft noise in the steep barranca. A human noise, but it seems to belong.

Two hours later, we are at the park, and we are late. We drive past backpackers and a six-horse convoy into a small grass parking lot. A young couple is the attendants. They are eating lunch, but are not unhappy to see us. Yes, we are late, the woman confirms. We can still go to the park check-in just up the trail, to try for a pass, but the rangers have been strict. I must look like I am about to cry because her face softens, she takes my phone, and returns it with a map on the screen. “Go there. It is a beautiful waterfall.”

We get to it after an hour of climbing. A Chilean family is there watching the cascade. The elder grandfather and grandmother are in swimsuits and jump into the frigid water. They hoot and laugh. The mother and the kids watch and taunt them. 

We talk to them later. They are farmers from the other side of the range. They drive here, sometimes, for the beauty. Grandfather tells us stories. He is soft-spoken and hard to understand. But we try. The young boy’s eyes grow wide with excitement when he learns we are from the United States. To him, it is a land of dreams. He does not follow the news. He peppers us with questions and invites us to join the family for food. But we have volcanoes to see, and a long drive back. We thank them.

“Did you have a good day?” The grandmother asks.

“Wonderful,” we say. 

It is fine not to get what you want. The day will take its own shape and imprint something wonderful on your memory. If you let it.

Please Like and Restack. It makes a huge difference in helping us reach new readers. Thank you for your help!

Leave a comment

Share

The people on the streets are young. Valdivia, Chile, is a university town. Women are in shorts and sweaters. Men are in shorts and sweaters, too. Boots, tennis shoes, no flip-flops. They are walking in groups across the bridge, along Main Street, from the river waterfront to an outdoor concert playing behind Bar 55. The fans are against the stage and all the way back to the entrance of the park. It is too packed for us.

The air is cold, although it is summer. The town sits at the mouth of the Valdivia River and the Pacific Ocean. The ocean keeps the weather comfortable for the locals. But it is too cold for the two of us from the tropics. I zip up my down vest.

We almost skipped it. Valdivia was not on our minds when we thought of the trip to Chile. Nor was it on the main route: Santiago and wine in the North, the Volcanos and Northern Patagonia in the South. But Alex noticed that Valdivia is a microbrew town. Three waves of German immigrants influenced the beer culture here since the 1850s. The detour would add two hundred kilometers to our travels, but we are willing to drive for good IPAs.

We split from the crowd and turn to El Growler. The brewery’s public space is a courtyard. A food truck and a separate trailer for the beer taps are under the tent roof. The post-college crowd fills most of the tables. A few tourists are here too. The tourists fumble through the menus. The locals order what they know without looking. There is a noisy buzz, a rapid chatter of Chilean Spanish. I order a small pour of West Coast IPA. Alex gets a juicy hazy. We see no reason to leave.

The next morning, I know we tried more beer samples than we should have. We want an easy day and drive along the river to the coast, fifteen minutes away. The Valdivia River widens to a large bay and meanders between steep hills, then spills into the cold Pacific Ocean. The road hugs the coastline, the tight curves relax through hamlets. Homes line the hills. Moored fishing boats line the shore. They are reminiscent of the lobster boats we see in the northern hemisphere, but the fishing deck is up front.

I have driven through a similar scene on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Similar curves, hills, homes, and boats. Only the cars are different, and full public buses are part of the traffic. No buses were on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. People are expected to fend for themselves.

We park and descend towards the beach. The locals are in their bathing suits on the sand. I see swimmers in the bay. I am in pants, long-sleeve, and a down vest. It is cold. I convince Alex to climb over the boulders with me, around the bend in the coastline. The sea-otters gather there, on the rocks or on the mats of kelp just meters offshore. But the otters are not there, only rock and the cold Pacific.

Please Like and Restack. It makes a huge difference in helping us reach new readers. Thank you for your help!

Leave a comment

Share

Before we leave Malalchuello, Chile, in the morning, I make coffee, and we watch from our couch as the Volcán Lonquemay splits the flow of morning fog. The stratovolcano sat dormant since 1990. Quiet. Imposing. Foreboding. I try focus on its beauty, but can only see its dangers - an eruption launching pyroclastic flows towards our cabin. Obliterating our plans. I shake my head - maybe bad dreams last night that I already forgot.

.We drive. On the map, the road makes a long loop east and south, then west again to drop us back into the Central Valley some kilometers away. The road is twisty on the map, except for the straight two-kilometer section of an old one-way tunnel through the cordillera. The brush Argentinean border and a long mountain lake before traveling back inside Chile. Looks good. Why not?

The tunnel is narrow. We have to wait for the traffic from the other side to exit the opening in the mountain. Two local Chilean wildlife firefighters are passing a bucket for donations along the lines of cars. They are in full firefighting kit. Another local woman is selling bags of nuts and snacks.

The light turns green, and we enter the narrow arch. The road inside is a single, paved lane. A row of lights is at the top of the arch and is only bright enough to eliminate the curved roof of the ceiling and the wet spot where the water seeps through the concrete. The car lights illuminate the roads

.

I want to think about who built the tunnel, but instead, I think about Chilean earthquakes. I try to think of construction methods, but earthquakes refuse to leave my mind. This country moves. Plates grind along its spine. They raise the Andes and crush what sits above them. The 1960 Valdivia Earthquake was the strongest ever recorded on Earth at 9.5 magnitude. 2010 Maule at 8.8 magnitude, 2014 Iquique earthquake at 8.4. These earthquakes fell buildings and crushed tunnels like this. Caved the roofs onto cars.

I am looking over traffic for the end of this tube, but it goes on for another five minutes.

The pavement ends. The paved spur of R-181 splits East into Argentina. Our Spur, R-81, turns south to follow the valley, then climbs the high slopes. The surface is gravel and was graded this season at least once, but the loathsome washboard bumps are back on the climbs and sharp turns. We stop and wonder if we should continue. Our vehicle is a small SUV built for the city. It can handle this road, just not if it gets any worse

“The dust trails are from other cars. Yes?” I point Alex to the thin clouds rising from the slopes. The trails are across the valley, kilometers ahead. “Moving fast, so the road should be fine. Right?” I say. Alex shrugs. Then we watch a tiny white Suzuki emerge from the nearest cloud and pass us going the other way. Four people are crammed in the car. We drive on.

This valley is away from the easy reach of tourists. It is open, with a savannah feel of open ranges, clumps of trees, creeks, and shallow brown hills. There are homes throughout, but kilometers apart. The homes are simple ranches, with a pickup truck parked by most and barbed wire fences extending away from each home to mark the expansive boundaries of the ranches. Some are empty - only brown hills and clumps of trees. On others are cows and sheep.

The road stops climbing and hugs the long lake. The lake is from a postcard. Only a family or two are swimming and kayaking every few hundred meters. Calm water, sun, gentle breeze. No concession stands, no cabins. Steep mountains are on each side. One mountain has a trail that climbs to the top and crosses into Argentina. We stop to look at it, but the slope is too steep. A Chilean flag is atop the hill. I suppose an Argentinian is next to it on the other side of the slope.

It would be awesome to touch the border in the wilderness, but we do not have time to climb. We still have a long drive to the breweries of Valdivia.

If you liked this piece, please Like and Restack. It makes a huge difference in helping us reach new readers. Thank you for your help!

Leave a comment

Share

Valparaiso is chaos. People squeeze past each other on steep stairs. Cars brush mirrors on the narrow streets. Tires slip and scrape against the cobblestones, bump against the tight curbs. 

We are on the third loop around the same neighborhoods, climbing hills and looking for an opening among the tightly parked cars. But we find nothing after twenty minutes of driving. I duck into a side street where I don’t think we have yet gone. Then I recognize a wall painting of a detective mouse talking to a criminal dog, both human-sized, and intent on their conversation.

Maybe this street? I turn, then brake to stop. Many streets in the hills are one-way, but how can you know without clear signs and with the parked cars facing in both directions? But we are already committed, so we drive on and meander among the painted homes. I squeeze onto the curb to let a delivery van pass. It shoots past us down the cobblestones without slowing. My heart rate spikes.

“He still had his mirrors on,” I tell Alex with a forced smile. “The delivery driver. Probably knows how not to crash on these streets.”

We find a spot at the very top and park. The views are focused by three-story ancient buildings on each side of the street, but they open wider as the hill falls away. The container ships with familiar names of Maersk, Cosco, and Hapag-Lloyd are anchored throughout the bay. Tugs or fishing boats traverse the water, their wake contrails paint a road in the sea. The distant homes and high-rises across the bay climb their own hills.

Alex says she wants to walk down to the port. I say I want to find a hat. We agree we both want a gelato. We walk the streets along the shops and restaurants. I don’t see the hats I like. But we find an excellent gelato. The store is on the corner with two uneven stairs. The red awning spells Artisanal Gelato, the wooden door is open and propped with a brick. We try samples, then choose. For once, the clerk does not switch to English.

Valparaiso is too much, but it is perfect for inspiration. The city is built on the spirit of Bohemian creativity. It was the home of Pablo Neruda, he wrote his poems in these hills. The city left a mark on young Roberto Bolaño, before he wrote his books in Mexico and Spain. Manuel Rojas walked these streets. 

I think of them as solitary monuments of culture, but they lived in a community, were one with it, and would have blended with the modern locals, creative, and each a bit unique. The locals’ clothes are just ahead of current trends, or very far behind. Haircuts, shoes, and other subtle clues that hint at an artist. They are around us now.

I could not live here, but I want to be here. A day is enough, or maybe a month. Any longer, and the chaos of the place will disassemble the composure and mental order that I have tried to build. I’ve heard it happens in places like this. The mind lets go in a creative sprint, then sometimes never comes back. What if this is the price of creating something amazing? Would it be worth it then?

We join groups of gawkers snapping photos of the walls. Painting of local history, of the people who made this place, of injustices. We sit on the bright, terraced steps - all tropical colors, one per step, climb the tight space between homes. We make our way down to the sea, where a tourist square is jammed between the gates of the working port. There is a street market under a hundred tents with people showing and selling. And people stealing. Pickpocketing is a big business on these streets. We have been warned to keep our hands in our pockets. I do.

The fishing boats crowding the pier are imposters. They once plied the trade but replaced their working decks for rows of chairs, and replaced their fishing captains for full-throated marketers fishing for people to sail on the tour of the harbor. The tourist trade earns more cash.

The day rushes past. It lurches from noon to six in a blink, at the speed of this city. And it is time to leave. We climb the streets on our way from the port, but away from the standard tourist route. The buildings are still the same, but with more flaking paint and cages over windows. The dogs stick to their side of the street and watch us wearily. The streets are emptier here, but the few locals still greet us with a smile… 

If you liked this piece, please Like and Restack. It makes a huge difference in helping us reach new readers. Thank you for your help!

Leave a comment

Share

I am glad he was wrong. Ecstatic. I told him so. “Ryan, you need to revisit Santiago - the food is exquisite. In twenty years, since you have been here, the city has re-invented itself.”

He told me at volleyball, a few days before we left Panama, how much he loved Santiago, just not the food. “Food is bad,” he said.

But something happened in the culinary world. Anthony Bourdain? The parade of celebrity chefs who spread the exquisite cuisine from the elites to the masses? Instagram influencers - a scourge playing good - elevating expectations and pushing cities to up their food game?

So Ryan, I am glad you were wrong. The Completos - the overstuffed Chilean hotdogs, the salmon, the tapas, the beer and wine at Barrio Italia, and Bella Vista are worth the trip.

I loved Santiago. We both did.

We leave the apartment in the early morning and walk the sleepy streets. One coffee shop is open, then another one, but all else is shuttered at 10 am, sleeping off the hangover of the night and resting before the evening’s gaiety. Tens of places on the immediate blocks. Hundreds in the two adjacent barrios. We saw swarms of frugal young and the rich in the night before. All in the social embrace of the city.

But they are gone now. Only the empty streets. Chairs chained or hidden. Workers spraying the green grass against the dry air of central Chile, spraying sidewalks to beat down the dust and detritus of careless revelers. Very few cars on this street. Quiet. Intimate.

The sidewalks are wide. They are built for couples holding hands and passing other couples walking the other way. From restaurant to restaurant, from a photo of food to a photo of drinks, to a photo of smiling faces. Later, but not now. Now it is only the workers washing the street.

I am a bit angry. I want a latte, but coffee shops are closed for another hour, until 11 am. We long passed the two that were open. All closed. What?

Coffee shops open early in the business district a few blocks. The suits need the coffee before the Bohemians. The suits don’t wander into the chaos of these barrios. Not until night, when the humans in them shed the suits and escape the LinkedIn universe of pretenses into the mismatched architecture of bohemian streets, unique and rebelling. Wall art, bursts of color on the concrete.

I want coffee, but I can’t go to Starbucks. It is too close to work. When I work, although without a suit, I am the business person, like the rest, choked by task lists. Going to Starbucks will pull me out of the spirit of the vacation. I will smile through the irritation instead. I hope that Alex won’t notice.

We are at the hill - Cerro de San Cristobal. The one with the Virgin Mary lifting her arms over Santiago and over the tourists. They are milling underneath, some kneeling at her base, others gawking and snapping photos.

“Don’t go there,” Alex says, “you will boil the holy water, you heathen.”

It is mostly a joke…

We ride the funicular. Walk the parapet. Listen to the clean female voice of the gospel singer. I can’t see her, but I know she is singing live. There is a priest at the entrance. He looks German, tall, and pasty. He could be a Chilean, of course. We try the Santiago Zoo on the same hill, but back out for the crowds.

There is an open coffee shop! One Latte, one black. My woman likes it strong. I have a Zoom meeting with a client. Fuck. Can’t escape. The connection was bad, at least, so I cut it short…

Share

The contrast is jarring. Three minutes ago on the rainforest side of the mountains the bus labored through clouds and mist. Over the crest, it is sun and blue sky. The peaks of the Cordillera Central de Panamá snared the clouds and pushed them back at the Caribbean, sparing the sky of the Pacific side of the country. The crossing felt like the beginning of our trip to Chile. Only five hours away from our home on Isla Colón, but a different energy in the hilly savannas, away from the dense jungle.

We began the day at Taxi 25 dock on our island of Isla Colón, then boarded the bus in Almirante. The flight would have been faster, only forty-five minutes over the reefs and blue waters of the sea, but four hundred dollars more. We opted for the ten hour ride.

We share the bus with indigenous locals and their children, but mostly European and American backpackers. The backpackers pass through in numbers in Bocas, in identical uniforms of hiking boots, tech Patagonia pants, and large Osprey backpacks under the rain covers. This is the closest we have been to them. The backpackers slide past us in town without much friction. They are younger than us and looking for an adventure in what is our normal life.

The bus is new and comfortable. The local children are quiet, no screaming or yelping I expected. Instead, they listen to their mothers. The bus driver is calm by Latin American standards. “No bags in the overhead compartment,” he commands everyone boarding. On the tight curves of the road and only modest braking from him, each bag from above would have found a target on the heads of people below. Instead my bag is underneath the seat and jabs my ankles each time it slides with the curves.

“Bus is ok,” people told us, “cold and too long. Fine to take once, just to see the sights.”

But I love it. I recline the seat and watch the mountains. How could the first people cut their ways through the density of this jungle? Today, with machetes, chainsaws, and bulldozers it is a daunting task. But then? Before the sharpened tools? The dense green wall, impenetrable, yet subdued and suborned to the will of indigenous. But only for a time. Even a season of neglect and the jungle takes back each un-lived house and unworked land.

Once we crossed the ridge, the jungle did not follow. It stayed on the wet Caribbean side. The slopes of the drier Pacific side reminded me of California’s golden hills or postcards of the Mediterranean. Patches of light woods, golden slopes, rare farm homes, and meandering cows. Panamanian cows with a hump at the base of their neck, like malformed camels.

The bus attendant walks the aisle, holding on in the swaying bus. We are stopping at a fonda on the side of the mountain for a bit of food and rest, he tells us. Twenty five minutes, then back on the road. It is enough time for empanadas from a stand, a few minutes to eat them at the outdoor tables with gorgeous views down the valley aiming at the Pacific. Two dollars a plate…

Subscribe now

“What are you working on?” I pointed to the cuts of plywood, stacked by the stairs. 

“Fixing the boat, just stuff,” he shrugged, “gotta get out of here some day.” He laughed and shook his head. 

“Where would you go?” 

“Don’t know, some place I’ve not been.” 

“Many of those out there?”

“Oh, yeah - big world,” he said. 

“Of all the places you have been, which left the most impression, Tom?” I asked. 

He did not take time to think, “Patagonia.”

His boat was Black Dog. Old, once formidable and seaworthy. It was beyond the repairs of a tinkerer. It needed a liftout at a boatyard and a few expert, vigorous hands to return to service. Or it needed two hands of one man and much, much time. 

I walked by Black Dog every morning. The wood of its freeboard was dry; it held its shape without visible cracks. But I could see soft spots when I looked closely. The paint was faded but not peeling. The main mast was taken down and laid along the deck. The rear mizzen mast was sawn off a few feet above the cockpit. The boat floated, but it planned to stay where it was.

“You said Patagonia last time, Tom.” I stopped and chatted with him at his resting bench.

He nodded. “We had a fly fishing camp there. With my brother. Nobody there, just trout and Patagonia. Patagonia is a character. Best time, really. A big change after the corporate world.”

“The corporate world did not agree with you?”

“Agreed with me long enough. Decades? Right? Too long ago.”

“Why did you leave? Patagonia, I mean.”

He shrugged and thought to answer, then let the answer go. “You should go there, Hank.” He smirked. He called me by the wrong name in joking retaliation for the first two weeks of my calling him John. “And the fish camp,” he added. “It is still there. Rustic and beautiful. Should see that.”

Around New Year’s, Tom was out of sight. Peter, my British sailor friend, dropped off his scuba gear for me to clean the bottom before we sailed out on a trip. “Tom died, have you heard? Went to the hospital in Davíd and stopped breathing. Nice guy.”

“No, I didn’t know. He planned on leaving, but on Black Dog.”

“Hope is good to hold on to. Nice guy.”

Tom was an acquaintance, too distant for a friend, short with words, bristling his light sarcasm as a shield against interlopers into his life. I told Alex that Tom had died, and she grew sad. She later said the news affected her deeper than she expected. Me too. Tom was in our community, now smaller.

In a few weeks, men are on Black Dog. They are feeding the anchor chains out of the lockers into a panga - the chains can be reused or resold. They are throwing lines out of the cockpit into a pile on a dock - some ropes will find a second life, most will be discarded. Two anchors are detached and stacked for a pick up by the next owner. Slowly, the boat becomes a shell, a memory. Then, maybe, a local dive shop will strip it clean, tow it to one of the coral restoration projects, and sink it. Black Dog will be an anchor to new life, for fish and corals, and for divers swimming through its cabins and imagining its history.

When life begins, we pursue knowledge. When we begin to work, we pursue possessions and experiences. When life ends, both are dispersed among the living, the possessions among family and landfills, the experiences as bits of memories among those the dead have touched.

Maybe I will dive Blackdog someday, too, but long after my trip to Patagonia. You must go there, Tom said. Insisted in a very quiet way. I thought to go before, but now I will indeed.

If you liked this piece, please Like and Restack. It makes a huge difference in helping us reach new readers. Thank you for your help!

Leave a comment

Share

Two very American questions perplexed me when I arrived in the United States in the mid-1990s.  They are the two questions Americans ask immediately, and usually in the same order. At first, they drew my ire, then they lost their meaning through repetition. But since I moved to a new Latin American culture, the irritation at the questions, or rather their follow-up, has returned with force.

Where are you from? What do you do?

A man in a bathroom line begins with the first. He asks me after a brief exchange of greetings. He just came out of the bathroom and is waiting for his kid. He yells through the door, “Don’t touch anything!” It is a fair warning. The bathroom needs a refresh after a busy dinner service. Most bathrooms in Bocas del Toro, Panama do. Especially in the high tourist season. There is no response from the stall.

The man is clearly American. It is the attitude, the look, the clothes - shorts, a t-shirt, and a hat. I know it, because I look much the same. “Where are you from?” He asks.

“We live here now, but I am from Wisconsin. I lived there for thirty years.” I say.

He screws up his face and looks at me with mock suspicion. I know what is coming next, and I breathe in to calm myself. I was already on edge because the waterfront restaurant is crowded, and I had to wait too long for a margarita. I look at his screwed-up face and smile.

“I hear an accent,” he says. “So where are you really from?”

Where am I really from? I think for a bit. 

“I was born in Russia,” I say, “I lived in the Czech Republic until I was 7, then in Kazakhstan until 10, then back in Russia until 16. In the States for the last thirty years.”

“So you are from Russia,” he states. Clear and certain. Nothing I say matters anymore.

I suppose my last thirty years in the States were just a blip, irrelevant as a definition of a place I think of as home, entirely erased by a place I was born and barely know. But that is how it is for Americans. I asked many, ‘Where are you from?’, and they’d say Ohio, or California, or Idaho. Then clarify they lived there only until one year old, or two, then spent the entire life in Washington. ‘So you are from Washington,’ I’d say. ’No, Ohio!’ 

Why are they not from the places that forged them as human beings?

It goes further still. Americans are descendants, most of them, of those who uprooted families and moved across oceans. Then they moved too, for a job or an adventure, never to be from somewhere else, just to live where they are not from. They tell me, ‘From Ohio, but I am German.’ German? Were you born in Germany? No, I am a fourth-generation American, but my family is German. Have you visited Germany? No, but I would like to. Or Italian. Or Irish.

Those are the answers expected of me. 

Once, I tried to argue. I had two margaritas, and the other guy may have had four. No, I am from Wisconsin, I insisted. A few times. Each time, his face only grew more purple with rage. No! Where are you really from? My friend Rafa sent the man back to his table. Rafa is from Texas, Mexico, or Florida. He has not yet told me, and I have not really asked.

But I like this man in a bathroom line. He is happy to be on the island. He is from a spot in California I used to enjoy. He runs a trucking company. He told me all that, unprompted. He is worried about his son touching everything in the overused bathroom. Salt of the earth. Why argue? Sure, I can be from wherever you want me to be. I say that to myself to de-escalate my own ire. I think, I don’t really care. Except, I do. Not about a place, but a choice to tell you what I think of as home, a place that made me, and where I belong. But my choice is pilfered by a narrow view shaped by culture and habit, then imposed on me.

“What do you do?” the man asks, then becomes distracted with commotion on the other side of the bathroom door. He listens for a moment, looks at me again.

This is the second question. It is inevitable, like the next breath. I want to say I run, I read, and I play sports with my friends. But I know what the question means. I am in software, I say instead. He nods and smiles. I sense that to him it is impolite not to ask. It is impolite for me to answer in my own way.

But why is this the question? Many of us shoehorned ourselves into a career in our youth without understanding much about life. Then, we spent the rest of the years finding a way to be what we actually want. Yet, what we want is seldom a question. Even among friends.

What inspires you? What makes your life interesting? What do you like to share with others? These questions are not for a casual conversation. Unwelcome. They are too close. Too personal. We are expected to front politeness in a bathroom line and smile. But never to push too close in a scripted casual exchange.

‘Hey, I just met people from Wisconsin, but really from Russia,’ the man says when he returns to his own table. ‘He is in software.’

These two are good questions. They offer a rope bridge to inch across to a possible friendship down the line of many interesting questions. They are not the problem. I am rallying, instead, against a version of these that force an answer that the other person may not want to give. I don’t want to give. You can ask me, ‘What do you do?’ and ‘Where are you from?’ I will answer. But when you ask me, “Where are you really from?’, I will answer too, but quietly think - “What a dick!”

If you liked this piece, please Like and Restack. It makes a huge difference in helping us reach new readers. Thank you for your help!

Leave a comment

Share

First Street hugs the island shore in a gentle curve. Restaurants and hotels jut into the channel with a view of the islands of Solarte, Carenero, and Bastimentos. The tables in the busy season are filled with Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Latinos from the city, or from South America. The fondas of the parallel street are busy too, especially at lunch, but only with the locals who gather to eat hot soup in the heat of the day.

Subscribe now

Why the locals don’t visit the first street is easy to explain. They can’t cross a block into a parallel economy where the prices and sanitized experience are out of their reach. Why the tourists rarely, if ever, visit the fondas on the second street is more perplexing. After all, the tourists I talk to crave authenticity, they insist. But then they revert to the familiar food they can order in English. They sip cocktails and look out onto the views, surrounded by their peers.

I understand. The first week of our stay in Panama, I brimmed with excitement to plunge into the local scene. The first day, we passed a fonda with the smell of grilled chicken, but without a menu, and a local cook chattering with someone in Spanish too fast for me to follow. We moved on and had a Texas sandwich from Tequila Republic instead.

The next day, we passed another fonda with the rich smell of fried plantains drifting in the smoke. We thought to sit down. But the distinct foreignness of indigenous faces ruffled our comfort. Their glances were friendly, welcoming even, but the sense of our own strangeness sharing the small patio shade pushed us on. We ate falafel at Bambuda instead, surrounded by European faces.

I thought about the ludicrous situation for the next three days. A fear of emotional discomfort clashing with a wish to experience life as a local. Silly, of course, but powerful. The same fear that keeps us from taking a step from comfortable to interesting, from rote to exciting, from familiar and into the less known, where the best experience is forged. It is hard to fight it, even with an understanding of its limiting chokehold.

I would have scoffed at my own hesitancy before the travels. Impossible! Of course, I will try new things! But then the idealized expectation of a place crashes against a dirty table. The Western fixation on food safety collides with the bare hands of the local cooks pulling the chicken off the bone. Then, it is easy to swing back to what we know and pay triple for the comforts of familiarity.

The good news is that such nonsense does not last. Most of us make a decision to choose adventure if the option stays in front of us. But it does not come easy. And the door may shut before we build the courage to walk through it.

Today, I like the local fondas! The food tastes great, and the service is honest. The prices are a fraction of those at the restaurants on First Street. In week’s time, we broke through the barrier of our own fear. After, we visited the fondas regularly. Once every other week or so. Why not more often?

Well, the food is only Panamanian. Tasty, but similar from place to place. And we Westerners have grown used to the privilege of choice and variety. Today, we have Panamanian, tomorrow it is Italian or Japanese. It is indulgent, indeed, but the reality I rarely question.

Three weeks ago, on Mother’s Day, a panga full of locals pulled up to Bambuda. Indigenous men and women climbed onto the dock, then sat down around a long table. Twelve of them. Maybe a family, or maybe friends. They ordered colorful drinks and martinis and food. They talked and passed appetizers to try.

We left before they did. On the walk home, I considered that the boundary between the parallel economies is more porous than I suspected. The money flows in both directions. Each time we eat at a local fonda, we contribute to the locals’ ticket to take a trip to the other side. Maybe someday, these parallel economies will no longer just slide past each other, but will mix in an equilibrium of relative prosperity.

If you liked what you read, please help us reach new readers - Like and Restack. Thank you!!

I nod. I don’t feel like dealing with it either. I ask, “What if they are the big ones today?” Alex thinks, shrugs, “Yeah, maybe.”

Esteban’s cayuco is next to our hull, but does not touch. He floats inches from the boat, pushes away with a gentle touch of his hand when his craft drifts into the gravity of ours. He smiles. Greets me. Sweeps his hand to show off the nine lobsters lined up for my view. Then he laughs. It is a good haul.

Subscribe now

The lobsters are between his feet, on the floor of the shallow cayuco. He arranges them in order of size. A large one at the end moves to crawl away from the lineup, but he pushes it back with the heel of his bare foot. Four are large, almost too large for our pot. The rest are regular or on the smaller side.

“Twenty-four dollars for all of them. For nine,” he says. “Normally thirty, but twenty-four for you, my friend,” he flashes his teeth. They are small and white, except for two on a side that betray his age with the signs of slow decay. I don’t know how old Esteban is. I guess older than forty but younger than seventy.

Life carves the lines on locals’ faces without fairness. Some are burned by the sun, which turns them old before half a century. Others are caressed by it, looking youthful into their sixties. Maybe it is not the sun, but a fortune they struck with a choice of a mate, toughness of their chosen profession, or the difficulty of their children. Or maybe it is just dumb luck of a genetic draw.

Many fishermen look older. The lines on their foreheads are deeper. The vertical line of worry carved by furrowed eyebrows is prominent. But, so are the happy laugh lines around the eyes. The competing features of these lines are imprinted on their faces by the changing luck of their trade.

Not many indigenous cayuco fishermen are left. Those who can afford a panga and a motor have shifted to ocean fishing for tuna. They sell to local restaurants and to people on the docks.

I still see the cayuco fishermen in the channels and bays between the islands. The line-fishermen float their cayucos close to mangroves or above the steep drop-offs. They do not use fishing poles. Only a handheld line that they feed into the water. They tug on it with a careful rhythm to fool the fish into believing that the dead bait is alive and worth pursuing. Or, they simply let the swell do the work. The waves lift the shallow canoe and tug the line, then release it in a trough.

Esteban is a different kind of fisherman. He is a diver. His snorkel and mask are behind him in the aft of the boat. They are on top of small fins more fitting for a child. He dives down to corral heads and through channels with rock formations where families of lobsters hide between feedings. Lobsters and crabs, he catches with his hands. Fish, he spears. He dives for hours each day, on his own breath, against the pressures of the depth.

“Alex,” I yell. “They are good ones.”

She pokes her head from the inside, “If you think so. We have cash.”

I find the empty ‘Do-It Center’ white bucket and pass it to Esteban. He loads the lobsters one by one. He is careful. The lobsters here do not have claws, but an angry defensive slap of the tail can hurt. He hands the bucket up to me. The lobsters are trying to climb up the slippery side.

“You have a cold beer, amigo?” Esteban asks. It is a hot day.

I nod. I pass the bucket to Alex down below, and she passes me a beer. Esteban, touches the cold can to his forehead, opens it and sips. His eyes widen. “Strong!” He is used to the light Panamá or Atlas beer. The IPA bites his tongue.

“How long does it take to paddle here?” I ask.

“Two or three hours, depending on the wind and waves.”

It seems far, but I know it is worth it for him. The local workers make between twenty and thirty dollars a day. He just made twenty-four dollars, and he still has fish to sell, plus a few crabs. His maintenance cost is paid for in his time. He has no fuel to buy. And some of the catch is food for his family.

Esteban bales the water from the bottom of his porous canoe. Quick, practiced strokes with a one-gallon plastic vinegar jar, cut in half. He sips the beer one more time, sets it between his legs, and picks up the paddle. It is the traditional hand-made wooden paddle: long, narrow blade with a handle on top in the shape of water buffalo horns. He gently bows his head towards it as a thanks for my business. I wave and nod my head. Then, with strong, silent strokes, he disappears around the mangrove.

He makes no noise. He makes no waves. A quiet human living a quiet life. He takes just enough from the world to keep on living in tranquility. Mostly happy, I imagine, if the deep laugh lines tell a true story. In harmony with the sea. Yet, I suspect I am wrong.

The image is my projection of what I want to run away to from the stress of my Western job. I know, it is a foolish dream. I have it easy. I don’t bob on the swell, caught in an unpredictable torrential downpour in the midst of thunderstorms. I don’t fret that someone discovered my secret fishing spot and emptied it to feed the tourists. I have different worries, but I suspect they look trivial from inside his cayuco.

We did not want lobster today, but I am happy we bought it.

If you liked what you read, please help us reach new readers - Like and Restack. Thank you!!

Subscribe now

Share

“When are you planning on leaving?” Our friend asks over a beer. “We planned for early November,” we say, “but projects got in the way - so three to four weeks from now.”

Christmas is in a few days. We are indeed late. “You are not going anywhere,” he laughs kindly and dismisses the idea with a wave. It is a welcome to the club.

It is true for many. People pass through this place on their quest to see the world, then see something they like. They linger for another week, or another short project. They don’t decide to stay, only decide not to leave today. Soon, they plant roots in a community of friends. And why not? If a place resonates and captures you, what is the need to move on?

Subscribe now

We ask ourselves that often after a tough bout of travel. Tired of change, exhausted by sailing weather, and the bureaucracy of customs, we crave the routine of one place. For a bit, until the restlessness of familiarity creeps back in, or an urge to meet a new culture. But in this place, among the islands of Bocas, the urge to move is less acute.

It is an age-old story, beginning at the time of early human tribes. A tribe settles and grows. It forms hierarchies, and soon enough, a restless band of youth picks up their kin and travels to find another home, where the luck is their own to make, unrestricted by the settled order of a prior home. They build a village, survive or thrive, but soon enough, they spawn another party searching for their own luck.

Their move is an act of convenience, or necessity, or rebellion, but always of renewal. Their restlessness is not a flaw but a feature of humanity that seeks to expand the horizon of what it knows and what it can do. This impetus has grown in us through evolutionary imperative.

Yet, breaking the magnetism of a birthplace is a monumental effort. It is easier now, less permanent, with planes, trains, and automobiles to shuffle us back to see the family and friends. Still an effort to go and form new bonds, establish yourself in a network of people often wary of outsiders. Most people I came across never do it. They never leave. Some out of fear. Others, out of faux-wisdom that new places bring nothing new. They say that new places, like all people, are the same.

Others leave and return. In the time away, they gain the deeper wisdom that transformation is possible without leaving—but only with an attention to nuance impossible to gain without departure from the place you know. A paradox, but true.

Our home never urged us to leave. But we are a part of a narrow band of human nomads who want to see what else is there, at the expense of the predictable comfort of an established life. A need to shake assumptions and shed the boredom of agreeable thinking. Travelers we met here share a similar urge. Why had so many stayed?

“I came on a sabbatical eight years ago,” an American woman in a taxi tells us. She cradles a dog too big for her lap. The back seat of the Toyota Hilux is too small for three people and a pet. Her now husband is in the front seat, a local, speaking Guari-Guari with the driver. “This place just makes sense for me. Slower, with less pressure from the clock.”

“You think you will ever go back?” I ask.

“I go back to visit, but it only reminds me to return to the island.” She looks outside at the surf lapping the beach, next to the dirt road, bouncing our pickup on its potholes.

The story is especially common with sailors. Panama is at a unique crossroads for big decisions. From here, a sailor can pass through the Panama Canal into the Pacific and commit to a journey around the world, or at least to a month-long passage to French Polynesian islands. It is a gigantic choice.

The other option is to sail another loop of the Caribbean Sea along the Antilles and the islands north of South America. But the journey requires beating against the elements along the Thorny Passage, named well to reflect the sting of trade winds pushing against the sailors’ will.

It is easier to delay the decision and to stay put. Soon their boats grow oysters on the bottom, barnacles foul their propellers, and jam their rudders. Years pass, and these sailors finally admit that the anchorage or the marina is their end of the road. They shrug and acquiesce to their fate. “I guess I am stuck in paradise,” they could look around and say, but most of them don’t, because they surrendered their option to leave. And the place that does not offer a door out is only a prison with a view.

We are not staying. I feel this place could be a home. I love it. I am learning to treasure what it offers. And that is precisely why we will move on to Colombia, Guatemala, and Roatán. We need the challenge of the sea and a look into the new cultures, to feel the freshness of the familiar place upon return.

“Is it normal for the snow to be gone from the mountain so early in May?” I asked a friend a few years back when I visited him in the mountains. He looked out of the window and shrugged. “I have not noticed,” he said. He moved to the mountains exactly because they were there, then he forgot to see them.

We will sail away to remember what we found, and to notice it again upon return.

If you liked what you read, please help us reach new readers - Like and Restack. Thank you!!

Share

Leave a comment

The Bocas del Toro archipelago, in Panama, where we live, is an example. On the one hand, such a scenario preserves cultures. It can be beautiful. Diverse values and perspectives coalesce on an island to teach me the many ways to understand the same idea. On the other hand, it hides an uncomfortable truth of wealth disparity, opportunity, and uneven political and economic influence each group exerts, often disproportionate to its size.

Subscribe now

The Ngöbe-Bugle community are the original inhabitants of the islands. They were here to greet Columbus on his fourth voyage in 1512, and for centuries or millennia before. The indigenous locals live in tightly-knit communities throughout the islands. They rely on strong kin networks and are beginning to make inroads with the state that has long marginalized them.

Afro-Caribbean Bocatoreños arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The colorful buildings and roofs of the Old Bank on Bastimentos Island, across the narrow channel, mark the town where they live in our proximity.

Chinese Panamanians began arriving in the late 19th century as well. They established a diaspora anchored in retail, grocery, and hardware commerce. Most have integrated completely, speaking Spanish in business but Chinese at home, maintaining cultural links and heritage.

Latino Panamanians (mestizo) migrated to the islands later and more so in recent decades. Many have left the busy city, lured by the promise of the ‘tranquilo’ tropical life. They are the most closely aligned with Western culture, movies, and fashions.

The last group is the ex-patriates. Recall a map you may have seen in a coffee shop in a tourist hub somewhere - the world map onto which people place pins of their home locations. On such a map here, the plastic heads of the pins would cover the world. A few clusters from North America and Europe, a blob over South Africa, a solid coverage of the South American continent, then a sprinkle of pins everywhere else. In our volleyball games, you would have two people from the same country per side, at most.

So many groups on a small island, in a small town. The groups have to mix, right?

In daily lives, they do. In the work crews, in the aisles in the grocery stores, in a crowd watching fútbol. People from every group are doing similar things. Then comes the evening or the weekend, and everyone disperses to their own districts, churches, and their preferred beaches. The segregation is, of course, informal, following no law but cultural lines drawn by time, language, and heritage.

And, drawn by the economic opportunities gifted by past preferences, or taken away by past and current injustices. Not the overt Jim Crow segregation, but preferences dolled out by politicians in a patronage system of pay-to-play.

Clientelism is rampant in Latin America - support me, and your land document will pass the review. Or maybe you want a construction contract? The situation is improving, but is more overt and blatant than the shadow clientelism of the Western democracies.

The result is the same the world all over. The rich get richer. The less fortunate groups claw their way out of poverty at a slow pace of generational changes, if at all.

I see the embodiment of these strata around me. The local construction crews of indigenous people build from the architectural plans designed and approved by Latino mestizos, and often paid by Western expatriates, spending their Western incomes at Latin American prices.

I see it in the homes themselves. The indigenous settlements of simple single-wall construction, the one-room shacks on stilts in the swampy, buggy areas of Bocas. Modest homes of mestizos and Afro-Caribbeans throughout the town, and well-windowed homes of expatriates on, or with easy access to the beach.

Despite the disparity, I don’t see outward animosity. Afro-Caribbean boterros joke with the indigenous ones from the neighboring docks. People stand next to each other at the parades and celebrations. They buy each other’s food and dance to each other’s music. There is intermarriage, still uncommon, but present.

Yet, each group harbors prejudices against the other. One hears a story of shoddy work and waves the whole people off, “That’s just how lazy they are.” Another hears of a theft and shrugs with dismissal, “Malientes, they are all like that.” In each group, someone gripes about another.

Like everywhere else. Here, more direct. In my old home, in the States, it is dressed in a polite language of evasive but discernible contempt. You spot it once you know how to read between the lines. Sadly, you no longer need to - the prejudice is now in the open.

Here, the prejudice spans the spectrum of kitchen gripes to debilitating policies packaged into a photoshopped image of progress. Or a blatant denial of opportunity, when a fishing permit is yanked from a fisherman in an act of petty vengeance. And with that, yanking the schoolbooks from the fishermen’s kids.

Maybe it is an inevitable consequence of soft boundaries emplaced by cultural preservation? Such is the choice, some say, integration or division. Yet, another choice is respect and an even playing field.

The Western democracies have been aspiring to this ideal, but the record is dismal. In the democracies, we see the examples of diverse cultures co-existing without continuing violence. We also see the exploitation of cultural diversity by populist politicians, whipping up passion along the easily definable boundaries.

But erasing the cultural uniqueness and blending it into a grey uniform goo will not solve the prejudice. If not cultures, the populist will use geography. If not geography, they will use class. If not class, then the color of your football team’s jersey. They will zero in on how you are special and how others want to take it away from you.

Many will latch on, propelled by our millennia-long impetus to find a clique. The poison of the blind pull to belong by defining differences is the hardest to resist.

This afternoon, we are going to Coquitos and Bibi’s. Two beautiful places on the beach, owned by a successful Afro-Caribbean woman. I’ll ask my German bartender about his week. Sip a drink from the Colombian master of mojitos. Get a hug from a taller-than-usual local friend and a fist-bump from another. Then we will drink and watch people dance. People drink and mix, but at the end of each song, everyone drifts back to their own cliques.

We all co-exist in this bar with quiet acceptance and respect that people afford to another individual human. Yet, we are less charitable towards entire groups. Everyone belongs somewhere here tonight, but tomorrow, we separate again to build the future where not everyone will belong.

Share

Leave a comment