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 Felipe. 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 room 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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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!”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The first sign of trouble appeared three hours into the trip. We descended the serpentine of the well-paved Highway 10 from the cold heights of the mountain pass into the thick humidity of the jungle. The road leveled and cut through small settlements, each a few homes along the road, a fonda with food and a few seats for locals and tourists, a church or two. Ngäbe kids walked to school on the narrow shoulder, and adults with machetes headed to work in another direction. A few turns past one of the settlements, cars and trucks halted in line.

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Road Inspection, I thought. The police, or ATTT - Autoridad del Tránsito y Transporte Terrestre, as the traffic cops are known in Panama, would park on the side of the road and check documents. Everyone stops, some are waved through, others are inspected closely. The tourists are rarely hassled. The locals are a bit more.

We stopped at two checkpoints that morning and passed through without trouble. The police look for human traffickers and drugs, someone told us, but, no worries, they said, you don’t fit the profile.

For five minutes, we did not move. Then for ten. A driver exited the vehicle behind us and walked to the semi-truck ahead. The truck driver climbed down from his cab, and the two men talked, pointed ahead, shrugged, raised their hands in confusion. I joined them. They spoke Spanish in a local dialect, too fast for me to follow. I listened without understanding, smiled when they did, and nodded when they nodded.

Ahead was a barricade. Tree trunks blocked the road, big boulders piled in between. Women in indigenous dress sat on chairs facing the traffic. A few men loitered between the logs, kids ran from the signs set up on the pavement, and a tienda just past the corner. The sign said Law 429 in large font, and more in a font too small to read from the distance of our small group.

What is happening, I asked a man who spoke slower than the other. I understand Spanish, I told him, but not as fast as you speak to each other. Protests, he said. They happen every few years. The government does something to take more money away from the people, and people block traffic on the streets to change politicians’ minds. The last outbreak lasted for weeks in 2022; no way to say how long this one will go on. Yes, they will let us through, but maybe not today. Yes, today, the trucks driver said, around two pm - someone told him they would open the barricade then. He shrugged, but there will be another block five kilometers up the road, and then more. That is how they do it. So don’t plan to get where you are going for a day or two.

I felt excitement at the prospect of witnessing people in another country practicing democracy. I also felt a tinge of worry. My mind replayed the old TV footage of protesters throwing rocks, canisters of tear gas flying the other way, riot police with shields, blood streaking down people faces. But the TV footage was from another part of the world. Panama is more peaceful, I calmed myself.

In two hours, the sun rose over the mountains and baked the cars. We drove off the road into the shade of the tree and parked along with other travelers hiding in the shade. The line of vehicles had grown behind us at first, but no new cars arrived for over an hour.

They blocked the road behind us, too, a Panamanian driver told me in English. No way to go back. Organized, I said. Yes, the banana workers’ union - very organized, too much power. Not too much, I said, if the government can take something away from them. Not enough power to stop the government, no, he shakes his head.

A bus pulled up to the other side of the barricade and disgorged backpackers, a well-dressed group of Panamanian women, and a few families. The group walked around the barricade and trudged the two hundred meters under the shade of our tree. The bus turned around and drove away.

Where are you going, I asked a woman from the group. Back to Panama City. We took a ferry from Bocas Town to Chiriqui Grande, and now we’re hopping buses back to David. Hopping buses? Yes, buses drive from barricade to barricade and people hop between them, slowly moving south. You can leave your car here, hop the buses to Chiriqui Grande, then take the boat home if Bocas is where you are going, she says. It is a rental. I pointed at the truck, we must take it back to Changuinola. No, you won’t make it that far, she said.

How could the buses be organized this fast? The protests only started this morning, I wondered. The protests happen every few years, she said, the system is already in place. They are practiced. It is inconvenient, takes seven hours to get to David instead of the usual four, but I don’t mind. She nods at the people by the barricade, they make the least money in Panama and work the most, so I don’t mind the inconvenience to support their cause.Her speech brightened my mood. The few hours in the heat, without action, without news or expectation had drained the excitement I felt, dulled the worry, and replaced it with annoyance at the inconvenience of compromised plans. I loved the trip around Panama, but now I wanted the comfort of our home and familiar routines. Yet, she reminded me of the stakes, of people fighting for their rights. I did not know enough about the local politics then to take sides, but I had to choose the right to protest on principle. Fine, I tuned down my irritation.

The bus arrived from the David side, and the women, families, and backpackers loaded up and drove off. We sat in the sun for another few hours, walked to the tienda for drinks and a candy bar. The protesters watched us enter and their following eyes settled me with pang of fear. Maybe we were the outsiders, like the politicians, the objects of their anger? Were we even safe? I looked closer and saw no malice in their faces but a mild curiosity. They are used to Europeans and North Americans passing through. I decided that we were fine.

At three in the afternoon, the loitering drivers at the front of the line ran to their cars. We got in and started our pickup. The protesters dragged a log from the roadway to open a small opening. The cars passed one at a time. We sped up on the other side to follow those in front. I felt elated. Then in five kilometers, we were at the next barricade. Stopped. In the same line of cars. Dammmmmmit!

I live in Changuinola, the truck driver tells me. We are talking by his cab. I have three children and a wife, but I’m on the road a lot, driving to Panama City or San Jose, Costa Rica. No, protests are not good for me. How am I supposed to feed my family if I cannot work? No, not good. I understand, he says, we have friends who are teachers and they are protesting too. They have to stand up for themselves. But there must be another way. I have to feed my family.

The darkness fell on the next barricade. The logs and branches lay across the road inside the settlement. People walked the sidewalks. Adults strode serious and determined, kids ran festive, carrying messages amongst themselves. A European man paced along his parked car. Each minute, his steps grew angrier and his face contorted with rage. We are tourists and have nothing to do with your politics, he screamed at the women and men at the barricade. Let us through. His anger wound the general tension. Let us the fuck through, he screamed at a man’s face.

We retreated behind our car. I did not want any part of his rage. I wanted cover from the backlash charged emotions snapping and whipping against us in violence. I understood what the European man felt, but I faulted him for the disrespect of showing it.

Let us the fuck through, the man screamed. The Panamanian stood calm, not amused, but neither intimidated. ‘No puedo,’ he said. I can’t. Then he walked away.

The European man charged across and began to clear the road, pulling the branches away. The Panamanians replaced them behind him. He screamed at them, rushed to his car, revved the engine hurled it against the barricade. He stopped just in time, before he ruined his rental.

You need to calm down, another European tells him. You will get your ass kicked and get us all in trouble. It is their country and you are a guest.

At the next barricade, it was already night, and we slept in the pickup until the rumble of the truck woke us. We drove again. We slept more at the next road closure, then we learnt in the morning that this one will remain closed. It will not open today. It will not open tomorrow. Not this week.

But we are lucky, we were close to the ferry now. We found a secured parking lot and for three dollars a day parked the rental behind razor wire and a heavy gate. Then we walked to the ferry. We will return the car when we can. And no, I will not pay for the extra days of a rental.

During the first week of protests, the tourist flows thinned in Bocas Town, leaving empty streets and empty hostels. People canceled their plans in the face of uncertainty. In the second week, the construction project to repave the Main Street ground to a halt. The barricades blocked the asphalt trucks on the way from Santiago, Panama. The produce shelves went bare on the third week, and our favorite local vendor temporarily shuttered. Gasoline became hard to come by in week four. In the second month, restaurant menus came with entrees crossed out in black marker. Not much got through to the island to replenish the inventories. Except beer. There was always enough beer, somehow.

The empty store shelves were a call from my past, from the time when the Soviet Union, rotted from inside, collapsed, and for four years after, the economy sputtered on a single cylinder barely running on the bad fuel of apathy and despair. The same empty shelves and lines at gas stations. I shuddered inside at the reminder.

In two months, the tensions rose, pressurizing the province. There was no violence still, but the piles of fist-sized rocks grew along the barricade, perfect for hurling. Mercifully, the rocks stayed put.

Then, Chiquita Fruit Company dropped a bombshell. It shuttered its operations in Bocas Del Toro after the loss of the crops on the abandoned plantations, and moved to its Costa Rican base. Six thousand banana workers were now without jobs. They protested against the government law that raided their Social Security into which they paid from their jobs, and now they had no jobs at all. Another twenty thousand people connected to banana production also went without income.

In the end, the politicians, the banana and the teachers’ unions shuttled to talks. Why so long to meet? Optics, they said. Neither side wanted to look weak. Optics at the cost of poverty. Then a compromise and a forced dismantling of the barricades, a return to alleged normalcy. The store shelves refilled, the road construction finished, and the gasoline became abundant again.

The protests slowly become a memory, for some a curious marker on the timeline of existence, for others an existential wound not eager to heal with time.

The protesters did not accomplish all that they wanted, but they moved the needle away from a disaster. The teachers clawed back some of what they lost. The banana workers did too. They lost a year of income, but Chiquita is coming back next year with a better plan for the workers. Take some wins, they say. Yet to many here, they feel Pyrrhic.

Were the protests worth the disruption to the whole province? Everyone has an opinion, none are the same; the thoughtful ones acknowledge both sides.

I was heartened to witness the exercise of democracy without notable violence from the police or protesters, although a few instances took place. The protestors were people who broke from apathy and stood up for something they believed in, at a great personal cost. And whether you agree or disagree with their positions, I hope you respect their right to do so. I have a certainty that some real or proverbial barricade of the past, made your life, whoever you are, better than it could have been. Democracy does not always look like a ballot, sometimes it looks like a barricade.

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The finca - a plot of land - is on San Cristobal, one of the nine large, inhabited islands comprising the Bocas Del Toro archipelago. There are hundreds more, but the small islands, if inhabited at all, may only have a native cabin or an expat house. Each of the larger islands has a couple of native villages of Ngäbe-Buglé (pronounced Nobi-Booglé) people, and hamlets of expats sprinkled throughout. San Cristobal, named after the island, is the largest village on the islands, with about a thousand people, a school, and volleyball, baseball, and futbol teams.

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You will have to pay them for a day of work, Chad says. Of course. They can cut a path through the jungle thickness in a day, which would take me a week on my own. It is an easy decision. Christian and Munique will start in the morning. They are local workers and cousins, from San Cristobal village on the other side of the hills, less than two miles away. I will join them at one in the afternoon, once my real job lets me out.

After my morning online meetings, Alex and I ride our dinghy across the two miles of the bay between the islands from Isla Colon to San Cristobal. October is a calm month in Panama with lower winds and flat seas. Our trip is fast, across the surface that is rarely smooth. We tie up the boat at a friend’s dock and meander the paths to find Christian and Munique. I only have a vague idea where they may be. I listen for the hacking machetes, but the hill is too vast and the jungle swallows all noise, besides the birds in the neighboring trees and the distant howls of the monkeys.

We find them at the top, in the clearing. They are in the shade of a tree, drinking water from a one-gallon plastic bottle. It is hot in the sun, humid, scorching without a breeze. We walk to meet them. I am in the lead, pushing the thigh-high grass apart with my machete, one step at a time. In the clearings between the thick jungle, in the tall grass, is where Fer-de-Lances like to coil, the local killer snakes. Walking slowly is a prudent precaution.

How is it going, I ask. They nod, and Christian wonders if I have a file to sharpen his machete. Not with me, but looks like you are done. He says that they can keep cutting to the other side of the hill. But, I say, you have done enough.

He speaks a slower Spanish and is easy to understand. Maybe it is his way, or maybe he is used to working with the semi-proficient gringos. Alex and I, I say, will walk and measure the distance to the dock along the path you have cut, but will be back in thirty minutes. He nods.

The indigenous people lived on the island before the first European contact in the 1500s. How long exactly is unknown, but the archeological and linguistic evidence suggests they settled the archipelago 800-1000 years ago, using the islands seasonally for fishing, gathering, and small farming. The arrival of banana companies shook their lives over a hundred years ago, then the arrival of tourists and expats delivered another perturbation. Today, the villages are an incongruous amalgam of traditional ways, cellphones, dug-out canoes - cayocos, and Yamaha-powered fiberglass boats - pangas. The old and the new: traditional dresses and Rolling Stones t-shirts, machetes and chainsaws, oral Ngäbe traditions and Starlink satellites.

Christian and Munique are back in the same spot when we return after walking a mile and climbing the steep slopes of the hill. We rest under the tree, all of us turned towards the breathtaking view. Across the expanse of the water are Solarte and Bastimentos. The two hilly islands compress the bay into a mile-wide channel and push it against the smaller Carenero island. Sparse red roofs of homes, shrunken by distance, dot the coastline. A denser settlement of Old Bank is a splash of color against the green. Through the channel is the Caribbean Sea and a wide expanse of warm water extending directly north. On the other side of it are the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, and Cuba, where we sailed from a few months ago. Eight hundred miles away, or eight days at sea.

I show Christian the survey map on my phone. Can we see these plots as well, I ask him. He is the older of the two, twenty-four, and does all the talking. Munique is not yet twenty. He is quiet. Christian nods and points in the direction slightly off from where I would have gone, then leads us. We cross a fence, and the grass turns short. Why? It is pasture, Christian explains. The cows keep the grass short. He points to large cow pies, taller and denser piles distinct from the flat pancake pies of the American cows. Whose cows? Nobody knows, Christian says, jungle cows. Used to be somebody’s, but the person is gone.

We see the herd across a ravine. Ten or fifteen heads of cattle: heifers, juveniles, and the bull. Christian picks up a large stick and cuts it with his machete to the size he wants, and carries it with him. We cross the shallow ravine, then Christian turns to walk along the top of the hill, parallel to the herd. The bull is nonplussed. He takes the point at the head of the herd and slowly intercepts our path, makes noises. I don’t like his tone. Neither does Christian. He points the stick at the bull and shoos him away. The bull stops the advance and walks parallel to us. The herd follows. Are we fine, Christian? He nods.

The other plots are beautiful, too. Alex prefers the first of the two with its expansive views and the breeze. The breeze is key for a house out here. There is no infrastructure of any kind on San Cristobal; each house must be off-grid. But it is easy to do here: the solar panels are cheap and the lithium batteries are affordable. Each house has a rainwater catchment system that fills up the tanks after a few hours of frequent tropical rains. But it helps to avoid air-conditioning. The air-conditioning is a power hog and destroys the hard-earned acclimatization to the tropical heat and humidity. The open windows with a breeze are enough. Most homes here do not have glass windows, just screens to keep chitras away.

We walk down the hill to check the distance to the mangroves below. A half-mile, I guess, but better be sure. Christian, do you have kids, I ask. Yes, one. It is enough, too many kids as it is, and kids take much time and are becoming expensive. Do most villagers still have many children, I ask. Some, but fewer now. People still have them young, but not as many as ten years ago, he says. Did you build your own house, I ask. Yes, with my brothers and cousins and my parents. We cut the wood from our jungle and shaped it into planks with a chainsaw. I have seen the Ngäbe Indians cut the trees into two-by-six planks with chainsaws, right in the jungle where they have felled them. The precision and straightness of the planks would blow your mind.

We used nespero and almendra trees before, Christian says, but now we can’t cut them without a permit, so we use other wood. Nespero is a beautiful local tree with woven trunks as if braided from smooth ropes. Almendras are the giants of the jungle, with extremely hard wood. It is prized for that - the wood is too hard for the termites.

Christian, are people leaving the village? We are slugging through a creek, and the mud holds our boots then releases them with a sucking sound. He can’t hear me through the steps. Are people leaving the village, I ask again. Yes, but they are not going far, just to the next island. They work construction jobs on Isla Colón. They are building hostels and Inns for the tourists, and homes for the expats. The villagers there build their own homes. Christian, have you traveled to other parts of Panama? He nods.

Two horses trot out of the shade and follow us. The mare is small, the stallion is larger but still small, yet aggressive. He charges us, changes direction after Christian shakes his stick, then circles back to the mare. Are these jungle horses, as well, I joke. Christian nods. Yes, there was a gringo, some Austrian or German, who did horse riding tours in the island jungle, but he left recently after he grew too old. The horses are still here.

At first, I feel sad, but then I see the horses’ healthy coats and fit frames, and I look at the vast pasture they made their own, where they gallop or trot as they please, without obligations to an owner, and I realize the old age of the gringo and his return home was his greatest gift to these two. Only two horses, I ask Christian. No, there are more.

We walk a quarter mile through the pasture, then stop at the cow corral. It is old, disused, but still standing, built of the local hardwood. We lean on the planks to rest and look over the water. Beautiful. Peaceful. Free of the hurry, of naked ambition and greed.

Christian, will you also leave someday? No, it is a good life. Tranquillo. I like my people.

I look at him and feel something uncertain. At first, I feel sad that his entire life will be on this one island. But then I realize I feel a tinge of jealousy. It took me thirty adult years to understand I was chasing the wrong thing, then to come to this stunning place to find peace. Yet, he is only twenty-four, and he is already here. No, not here as in this place, but a state of mind, where peaceful life with the people he likes is the most worthy ambition.

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Turns out, my creativity functions for only a few hours a day, at best. So, as with time or physical effort, I must choose where to direct it and decide what creative projects I must relegate to the future. That is, of course, inconvenient. Seldom can I focus on a single thing and execute it from beginning to end. Life is juggling, shuffling among many projects, shifting the mind between competing tasks and pressing deadlines on the same day.

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The win is the appearance of productivity. The loss is the shallowing of ideas. A glut of things in the head limits the potential quality to 95% of the possible. That is enough for most things. But the book demands more. The excellence is in the remaining five, and brilliance is in the tiny fraction of that.

While finishing writing and editing the final chapters, I had to stop writing essays. I didn’t like the decision. Essays are rewarding. They formalize loose ideas percolating in the mind into a coherent framework. I love sending them into the world. There is an instant adrenaline jolt of completing a work, and then the satisfaction of knowing that someone may appreciate it. They may agree or disagree, but they will think about the same observations in their own way. That is the writer’s bond with the reader.

But alas, life demands tough choices, even if it means giving up connection with the readers for a time.

Now, the good news: the initial drafts of the book are finished, and copies have gone out to beta readers. After their feedback, it will go to agents and then to publishers. In the meantime, I just have to wait, worry, and prepare for the next step.

It also means I can return to writing. Of course, I never stopped, but my writing became invisible, buried in the pages of a long-term project. So, I am excited to return to the past cadence or short-form written essays, in addition to the video episodes we’ve been producing.

Now I’m faced with a difficult choice. The political landscape in my old home, the United States, is fraught with the danger of disassembling from a democracy into an authoritarian chaos. Some days, the world seems to be burning. The compulsion to add to the chorus of voices advocating against the growing mayhem is strong.

Fortunately, the brilliant minds are already speaking, with deep comprehension of politics, and intellectual capacity to translate complexity with clarity. They are making an impact. Thus, we want to contribute elsewhere.

Blue Planet and Travel Banter will stay focused on travel stories—slow travel, in particular, and adventure travel occasionally—with the idea of reminding everyone, including ourselves, that life is not only about politics. It’s about connecting with the world, and taking little bits of knowledge and experience from people willing to share them—then passing them on to others who might incorporate the knowledge into their own lives in ways that improve them.

I believe in nuance, in the idea that subtle changes in perspective can bring monumental shifts in understanding. Dig into details of familiar things, talk to someone from another culture, and you may see what you discounted as no longer worthy of attention in a slightly different shade. That new nuance adds to the gamut of your understanding and pries open the mind. Lets you live a richer life.

So, Blue Planet and Travel Banter will remain about perspectives. Sharing the world through the eyes of other cultures, through the lens of video stories, and through the pages of essays. Thank you for following.

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But I like Panama City. The locals don’t add the City, it is just Panamá. Panamá is compact, clean, with a beautiful skyline called the Dubai of Central America. It is kind to pedestrians with its sidewalks. The public buses and metro can take you anywhere. The stunning two-mile park between the Pacific Ocean and the skyscrapers offers a break from concrete.

We walk on the path through this park. Only one other tourist couple is out in the heat. The rest are vendors setting up carts for the evening, and the soldiers. In black and dark grey camo uniforms, they are posted every three hundred meters, always in pairs, relaxed under the shade of palm trees or pedestrian overpasses. They casually observe and talk to each other. Some walk along the path. Only pistols for weapons, but tucked in their holsters. The soldiers are young. Mostly men, but women too. I can always see a pair, but soon I don’t notice them. They become a part of the landscape.

The other one million people are in the air-conditioned towers working for phantom dreams or watching the clock.

Since Uruk, the first known city in Mesopotamia, four thousand years ago, or maybe since Catalhoyuk, almost a city from three thousand years earlier, the cities walked in an uneasy balance. They gave us writing, science, laws, and bureaucracy. They advanced culture and the arts. They shepherded the civil society and the rules of governance. They made possible the theater, classical music, punk rock, and art exhibits.

Cities vacuumed talent from villages and suburbs and collided it in the laboratories of coffee shops, bars, and debaucherous parties. They gave us auteur films, Hamilton, and the canvas of Campbell’s Tomato Soup that defined an era.

Yet, they took away our connection to nature and built classes of unequals, with the poor affording the rich the luxury of monuments built in stone and of empires built in the ledgers of banking books. Achievement and exploitation, hand in hand.

Panamá is an old city but a new city too. In 1519, Pedro Arias Davila founded it as a beachhead for Spanish expansion, the conquering of Peru, and the movement of gold from the Pacific to Spain. In 1671, Captain Morgan destroyed it. In 1673, the city rebirthed eight kilometers away. The core of its resurrection - Casco Antigua or Casco Viejo - is still here, trapping tourists with its charm, restaurants, clubs, and shops selling Panama hats and trinkets.

We cross the stream of one-way traffic and enter that old part of the city. The streets are narrow, the sidewalks narrower. They feel narrower still when Toyota Land Cruisers rumble past on the cobblestone paths. I keep our dog on a short leash, to keep him off the road and away from the tires.

We weave through people and around corners. We are hot, hungry, and thirsty, a little short with each other. We want to duck into one of the many restaurants tucked into the old buildings but the signs “No Se Permiten Mascotas” slam in our dog’s face. No pooch, you can’t come in. The restaurants have no patios - the streets are too narrow for that. But two blocks ahead, I see umbrellas and hear music.

I pull the dog along and Alex scrambles behind me. Corona’s, please. We sit at the outdoor bar in the fray of visiting Columbians. A dozen of them drink the flagship “Panamá” beer and sing along with the songs they are blasting from a speaker. Columbians and Costa Ricans replaced the Westerners this week. It is Semana Santa, the Holy Week of the Easter, and people have the long weekend to travel in droves.

Two centuries ago, in 1821, Panama joined Columbia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The countries merged after a bloodless revolution of liberation from Spain. For a century, the four stayed together, then Panama seceded with the help of the US in 1901. The US had designs for the narrow isthmus, a plan to finish what the French once started then aborted, to connect the Pacific and the Atlantic.

The canal propelled the Panamá onto the worldwide stage. It grew through decades of the US administration, through the resistance against American presence, through Noriega and the invasion to oust him, and then through the transition of the canal to the Panamanians in 1999.

The city shot up to the sky after that, growing taller with the needles of architecturally marvelous skyscrapers, growing wealthier with the explosion of banks, growing interesting with people plying the freed creative spirit.

We don’t stay long in Casco Viejo. It is a tourist trap - architecturally beautiful, clean, foreign, both in spirit and in time. But a tourist trap nevertheless, which lost its authenticity to commercial imperative, and to the pressure of restauranteurs and shop owners vying for attention with their calls. And the soldiers.

The soldiers are more numerous here. They cover corners and direct traffic at the intersections without stop signs. They try to blend in against the buildings. But their presence is felt in their numbers. It is a paradox. Panama abolished the standing army by decree. But you would not know it. The black and grey camo against the historic buildings are in dissonance with that attempt at peaceful history.

We walk back along the same path. Yet, it is now a different place. The sun set two hours ago. The heat relented and the entire city, it seems, poured onto the path. It is five meters wide, and thousands of people rollerblade, walk, and run in both directions. The flow is overwhelming, improbably organized, and absent of collisions. It is exhilarating to move with it and against it. Like a river it flows around vendors and policemen, through the squares, and among enclosed courts.

On those fenced-in courts, hundreds more people are playing futsal, volleyball, tennis, pickleball. Groups watch them on the benches next to the fence. A few queue up to substitute.

We stop and watch the game of futsal. It is like indoor soccer, but with a slightly heavier ball that retards the bouncing and stays close to the floor. The game is serious and skilled. Most people play in shoes, a few barefoot. The barefoot group impresses with their footwork. They shed their shoes in search of better ball control, not from poverty. This is a wealthy city and everyone who is playing can afford a selection of shoes.

We stop to watch volleyball. Then, we stop by an open court filled with exercise machines full of people working out in this glorious open gym. We peak into the windows of a boxing training center, a modern and bright building, with a stunning rink.

The rows of seats surround the makeshift stage by the entrance to an ice cream shop. Each sits a person swaying to the music of the seven-piece band and the song of the guitarist. There are no tickets, no marquee. Only people playing music for their family and friends. We stop to listen. These are the joys of a city, the decentralized flashes of culture that bring me back.

This band is progress. And the people rollerblading on the street. And the games in the fenced-in courts. Not the banking, taller buildings, nor expensive cars, but the bits of our civilization that carve out a window for expression, afford people a chance to ply their creative dreams.

Maybe I could live in a city like this, where humanity is part of the design. For a moment, I am excited by the possibility. But then we wait to cross the street. We wait. We wait, then dash in panic through the opening in traffic. No. I can’t set roots in the city. Mine would be agrarian roots if I wanted roots at all. But for now, I will stay a tumbleweed, or rather, since a sailboat is our home, a mat of sargassum floating through cultures on the current of fate and snatching bits of wisdom on the way. I am better away from the cities, but I have much to explore because they exist.

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The ranger waves his hand and points to his left. He is on shore, a hundred feet away. He is calm but adamant with his direction. I steer our dingy to starboard and understand his urgency. A shallow flat is to port, and much of the same is to starboard, but a narrow channel, deep enough for our dinghy, leads to what is left of the dock. The ranger throws the thumbs up once we are aligned with the channel. When our dinghy hits the sand, he takes my bow line and whips it around a wooden stake driven into the sand. The stake is a piece of ocean flotsam polished by the waves.

“Hola!” we say.

“Que tal,” he says and waits for us to exit.

He is shirtless, tan, in shorts, and barefoot. His hair is thick and white. He is in his sixties, trim, and without an ounce of fat on his body. He carries a hint of a smile. I don’t think the smile is for us. Instead, it is always on his face, a mark of tranquility and inner peace. I don’t know that, of course, but that is how I read it.

We met him earlier in the morning when he and his comrade paddled a wooden dinghy to our boat to ask for sugar and coffee beans. The provision boat did not make it to the island from the mainland because of high winds, they explained, so they are out of coffee until the end of this week. We shared some of our stash, and they invited us to visit them. The monkeys should come out to eat on the beach later, they said.

The ranger ties our boat and waves us to follow him inside the station. The station is a wooden shack: three small rooms without doors. The only door is to the outside kitchen with a well-used wood-fired grill. The front room is empty but for five chairs. Four are facing each other, and another is facing the wall. The back room has two simple, utilitarian beds. The walls are empty. No adornments, no photos, no books, no shelves.

The two men sit down in the chairs and offer us the other two. They are both shirtless.

“How is life here?” I ask.

“Boring but tranquil.”

“Do you have many tasks?”

“No, just feeding the monkeys and reporting illegal fishing.”

“Much of that going on?”

“Illegal fishing? No, not at all,” The younger man answers the questions. The older man who met us glances out the window and glances at us. Sometimes, he nods.

“Do you like it here?”

“Tranquil,” the older man nods, “But boring. Not much to do. But yes, content.”

The two men are here for a month at a time. When two other men replace them, they go home to the nearby Isla de Juventus and to their town, Nueva Gerona. The cell service reaches here with the help of a tall repeater antenna mounted on a high post so they can talk to families. A month here, a month at home. Yes, of course, they have to work in Gerona too, they say, doing other jobs in their off month. The salary is too low - twelve thousand pesos a month is all they volunteer. I shake my head, that is enough for six drinks in Havana.

We leave the men and walk a sandy trail. Iguana tracks run along the pass and cross it - a straight, deep line in the sand from a tail and sets of even prints of four paws. Only a few monkey prints here and there. Monkeys are shy creatures. They prefer the trees. Iguanas scurry away, too, but we see them in numbers.

Only one set of human footprints in the sand. It is from one of the Rangers. The tourist boats stopped coming here much. It happened last year. Foreigners are nervous about the reported food shortages and power blackouts in Cuba, so they stay away. The foreigners brought the money, and without their money, the place fell into further disrepair. A vicious cycle. Unbreakable without a government investment or private capital. But neither is forthcoming.

We walk onto the beach. It is miles long, empty of people, but full of plastic trash blown here by the prevailing winds. A yellow bottle of vinegar is half buried in the sand. An empty jug of bleach is among the weeds. A plastic shoe, another shoe, many more shoes, but never from the same pair. The rangers clean the beach at times, but it is a Sisyphean task. The cleanup lasts until the next week of strong winds when the detritus of distant human lives, much richer than those here, drifts on the waves and settles among the drying seaweed. The seaweed camouflages much of it. At a distance, the white sand and palms combine into a photo of the island of dreams. A hundred years ago, before the plastics, the photo would have been true.

We walk the beach for two miles. An easy walk. The beach curves in a crescent and disappears around the point. We make it there and see another bay beyond. It is just as beautiful, the waters calm and azure and the white breakers are a mile off to sea, crashing onto reefs. Stunning. Just don’t look too closely at the plastic trash.

Back at the ranger station, the men ask us to join them for another fifteen-minute chat. They crave a company. We chat about the monkeys. They have been brought here three hundred years ago from Vietnam. We talk about fishing. They give me a small bait fish for the plentiful barracuda. We talk about politics. My Spanish is not equipped for that but we muddle through, connecting on the universals of discontent with politicians. Then we chat about life - those bits about people and families that make a human happy.

The next day, as I watch the island recede behind the horizon, I think of the corporate cubicle warriors from the States, my former colleagues. How many would trade their places with these men? Trade the money, the hustle, the weekend commitments for the tranquility and simplicity of life? Tempting. I suspect many think they would. I remember the conversations. But then again, this dreamy ease of life is like a picture of a stunning beach. Exactly what one wants. Yet, when you look closer, there is a bottle of vinegar hiding in the sand, a faded jar of bleach, and a worn-out shoe. The trash of life, impossible to leave behind. The sand looks whiter, yes. The life seems calmer, yes. But when we land somewhere, anywhere, to make it right, we still must do much cleaning.

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I slipped into the next stage of hypothermia. The shivering stopped and I no longer felt cold. How could it be? An hour ago, we baked under the relentless mountain sun on the Altay plateau. Now, I struggled to say a sentence. The cold rain and the rushing wind leached away my warmth, confused my thinking and ability to reason

Author in the Altay Mountains in 1996.

My two comrades looked no better. James, the Canadian, was not shivering either. He sat with a stoned smile, gazed through me at the majestic glaciers - tall, beautiful, deadly. They descended from the Tavan Bogd Uul, the mountain that touched three countries at once, Russia to the North, Mongolia to the East, and China to the West.

Pavel looked sleepy. He was a researcher from Altay University in Barnaul, the capital of this south-western Siberian region. The city was a few hundred roadless miles away. Safe, unreachable, and never to be seen again. Not by us. Not by me. The wind drained my warmth and my future. And I was not even twenty.

The previous year, I studied in the United States. The amazing year was a lucky draw for a Russian kid in 1996. I returned to Barnaul for the summer. My English was good then, and that was how I ended up in the middle of nowhere, or maybe in the middle of everywhere, where three countries converged on a peak.

My dad’s friends were university researchers and every year, they drove military trucks into the vastness of the Altay mountains to do their research with a group of students. Twenty or forty people would pile into the back of the ZILs and into a dilapidated bus, then trek over “bezdorozhye” - the roadless high steppes - to the border of Altay. That particular summer, a Canadian planned to join them. He spoke no Russian, and the Russians spoke no English. So they talked to me.

“Egor, we need an English interpreter, unpaid but fed, to go with us to Tavan Bogd Uul,” Dmitry, the boss, told me. My father urged me to see him. Dmitry sat in a peeling wooden chair in a dilapidated station that hosted their equipment and their weekend parties.

“To where?” I said.

“Tavan Bogd Uul,” Dmitry walked to the map and landed his finger in the middle of the map, away from anything familiar.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“I am going.”

“Don’t you have any questions?”

“How many days?”

“Three weeks.”

“Yes”

Next week, I met James. The Canadian flew in from Alberta and moved into a hotel downtown for a week before our departure to the mountains. The hotel sat at the edge of a large Soviet square surrounded by classical government buildings, a fountain in the center, and the ubiquitous statue of Lenin in front. Everything in the dispiriting spirit of Le Corbusier.

I walked with James around the city and explained things: why people were crushing into buses instead of waiting for the next - no one had an idea when the next would come, maybe in ten minutes or two hours. I explained the workings of long queues - they looked like a mob, but everyone knew who they followed. I told him about the babushkas selling five-gallon buckets of strawberries - pensioners, pensions not enough to live on, so they were doing what they could to make it. I took him to an early Russian restaurant, and we both laughed at an attempt. He was a curious man and accepted knowledge with glee, his happiness the most foreign of qualities.

On the way back, he always stopped by a large Geiger counter display outside his hotel. He took a photo with his Leica of the number tallying the daily exposure to radiation. It was a vestige of the time when a nuclear fallout was the number one fear.

“Are people still afraid of that,” he asked.

“The nuclear war? No, they are afraid of the empty store shelves and missing out on butter when the store runs out before their turn in the queue.”

On the surface, he was what I imagined him to be: a typical Canadian with an amiable personality, pasty skin, and a soft midsection. But he was in South-Western Siberia seeking discomfort and adventure in the mountains where a few people had gone. He intrigued me. I grew up in this chaos, while he had willingly chosen it, if only for a time. To each his own, I thought. I appreciated his company, although sometimes felt ill at ease with his constant optimism. He was my window to the Western world. I sampled it the previous year and craved to return to it.

At the end of the week, we mounted ZIL military trucks and an old bus. About thirty of us split between the three. People on the bus had the seats, and we in the trucks lay on sleeping bags and provisions. We drove twelve hours to the end of the paved Choysky Tract deep in the Altay Mountains, then followed gravel roads deeper still. We came to a steep ridge, where the gravel withered into a dirt and climbed into the clouds.

We disembarked and walked ahead of the vehicles. They crept behind us up the craggy slope. We marched out of the cloud, and each of us stopped in awe upon reaching the crest. The high-altitude plateau extended past the horizon, framed by the glaciated peaks on each side. Vast expanse, barren of people and roads. Only the green of grasses, the gray of rocks, and the bluish patches of ancient lichen blended in the distance and ran against the white of the snow.

We still had two days to drive. Endless bouncing, endless singing, endless arguing, endless laughter, endless translation of questions from Russian to English and back. It was exhausting, but I relished my role. I was a conduit of information from the recently forbidden West.

We arrived to the end of the plateau and build a camp of four tents. Two for sleeping, one as a lab, and the fourth as a mess hall. Then, people went to work.

A team collected samples of flora. Another sampled the rate of photosynthesis at various altitudes on the slopes. Geologists collected rocks. Drivers chased wild horses - oversized ponies, more like it - to keep from boredom.

I followed James, who followed the botanists. He collected tiny flowers, purple or white, to take back to the camp and study them through a magnifying glass, then press them between sheets of paper. In the evenings, people gathered around the fire with two guitars and thirty voices.

My translation duties began to grind on me. I could not join the easy fun around the fire; always caught between questions, a medium, and never a person. James noticed my growing resentment and understood.

Tomorrow, he said, we should rest from the Russians. Maybe explore the approaches to Tavan Bogd Uul? See if we can hike around it? Imagine, he said, we could walk through three countries by hiking around one peak! Hike it? It would be mountaineering, I told him. He shrugged. But I liked the idea.

After breakfast the next day, we left for the mountain. Pavel insisted on tagging along. He spoke broken English and addressed James directly, so I did not mind.

We hiked through the tundra. We walked on the grass around the granite patches, away from the thin layer of lichen on the rocks. Up here, the lichen took centuries to cover rock, and a careless step wiped out decades of growth.

We reached the glacier in two hours. James looked at the ice and the terraced pitch. He shook his head.

“No, I am too fat. You climb it. I’ll be right here.”

He plopped on the ground and leaned against the rock. He pulled a notepad from his back pocket, rummaged for a pen. “Go, go.”

Pavel and I went on. Easy climb at first, then steeper, the mountain forcing us to drive our ice axes into the snow and soft ice, to take cautious steps. By eleven thousand feet, the ice hardened and bounced our axes away from the ancient surface with a thunk. We slowed. I looked behind at a distance we covered, also a distance we could fall.

Pavel missed a strike and slipped. He slid past me and continued for another ten yards. He dug the spike of his axe into the snow and arrested his glide. He looked at me, eyes wide with fear.

“We should keep going, shouldn’t we?” He asked.

“I think so,” I said in a shaking voice.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Right?”

Pavel climbed back to me. He sat down. Swallowed. Drove the edge of his axe into the icy slope and held on to it with both hands. His legs twitched. He looked down and swallowed again.

“Yeah, we keep climbing. Right?”

“We should.”

We sat without looking at each other. The valley ran away from us to a distant range jutting above the horizon. We came from there, a two-day drive away. I wanted to be on the other side, on the road or in a village where glaciers were not welcome.

“Is he waving?” Pavel pointed to a dot below. It moved in a Brownian motion, up and down and randomly sideways.

“Right?”

“A problem? I think there is a problem.”

“Go down to see what’s up?”

We glissaded, a controlled slide to a stop with the axe. Lift the axe to releases, glide down over ice pressing the axe into it to slow the descent. Stop to rest. Repeat. Butts wet from the ice, hands shaking from effort and fear. Exhilarated. Two thousand feet of risky fun.

We stepped of off the glacier onto the rocky plateau. Without the ice underneath, the air felt hot. That’s how it was up here. Cold ice and hot rocks, freezing nights and hot days, if the wind did not blow. Scorching at noon.

James lay on the ground. We rushed to him.

“James,” I yelled.

He snored. I shook him awake.

“Why were you waving?” Pavel asked.

“Waving? I was not.”

“We saw you waving,” I said.

He shook his head, “Did you make it to the top?”

“We thought you needed help. We came back.”

“I was sleeping.”

We ate lunch in direct sunlight. There was no cover for miles around, and the sun burned my skin through the shirt. My head sweated underneath the long sleeve that I tied around it to keep away the punishing rays. I looked back at the glacier and marveled at the contrast between the cold ice and the hot rock just meters away. A very Russian scene, cold and hot in proximity, the richness of spirit and poverty of life under the same house roof, the beauty of creativity, and the ugliness of oppression under one nation.

“Yikes,” James said. Pavel and I looked behind us. A dark cloud crept over Tavan Bogd Uul. Ugly with anger and impatience to drop the heavy rain, lightning, and thunder. A storm like this passed two days ago when everyone was still at camp. A fury. Loud, angry fury throwing lighting bolts into rocks, burning divots in granite, and filling them with hissing water. Ready to burn anyone in the open.

We tossed sandwiches into our backpacks.

Pavel led our dash, half walking, half running. I followed. James huffed behind me. But we had no chance. The towering colossus rushed upon us.

Pavel pointed to three rocks, each four feet tall and leaning on each other. It was an imperfect shelter but the only cover above ground. We swerved and crashed behind them. We breathed heavily from the effort, from the heat and anticipation of a beating.

The next two minutes were calm. The sky darkened. The heat shifted to cool. A breeze arrived from the ridge, carrying cold and a warning. Noise. The noise of a pounding rain or hail. Vicious, angry, without empathy.

It hit with force. The frigid gusts and the sheets of rain attacked our exposed skin. The force of the wind tore at my eyes. It blew the shirt off my head and launched it beyond the crest of the ridge. Pointless to chase it.

I wiped off the tears and turned away from the blast, then glanced at my companions. In their eyes, the excitement surrendered to fear. The same fear infiltrated my body.

I looked North in the direction of our camp. The horizontal sheets of rain erased all around us and confined us to a tiny space of mere feet where we could see nothing but the rock vanishing into the storm. The rain soaked our clothes, and the wind peeled away the moisture. It cooled our bodies with frighting speed and within minutes we were shivering from growing cold.

“Should we move?” Pavel asked, eyes wide with fear, arms shaking.

“No, wait it out behind these rocks,” James said.

“They aren’t doing much.”

“Will walk in circles in this rain,” James argued.

“Keep the wind at your back.”

“In the mountains, it circles.”

We stayed. Shivered. Listened for the thunder. But we heard none. A lucky break. My frantic thoughts raced through our options and what was to be. But slowly, they settled into a strange calm. And my body slowed its shaking, and the cold receded. My body ignored the rain and the wind and began to feel warm. Content. I heard my thoughts broadcast to me from a distance. ‘Advancing hypothermia, man!’ but the thoughts carried little meaning, like a passing billboard on a highway after hours of driving.

The deluge stopped, and I watched with disinterest the sheets of rain departing in the wind. The curtains opened on the mountains again, and James gawked in amazement as if seeing them for the first time. I watched him watch the mountains, and I listened to the distant broadcast of my thoughts, which did not seem my own. ‘Silly man James, excited about everything. Silly optimism. Watching the Geiger counter! Taking photos. Who cares? Only people who never worry about the basics of life, of food. Only people who don’t understand queueing for bread. These mountains will teach him. This country will teach him. The weight of its sad history will turn him into a cynic as it did all of us who had the misfortune to be born in this Soviet paradise. So what? He won’t make it out of here, and I will not have to translate. That’s nice. What a goof!’ The thought arrived in small packets of short phrases. They imprinted themselves in my mind without making sense then.

The wind followed the departing rain. The mountains sighed with the last puff and relieved us of torment.

We sat there. Stupefied. Defeated. Incapable of movement in our hypothermic sloth. Incapable of the only rational decision to move and awaken the muscles through a force of will and re-ignite the furnace of life. But the mountains took pity, partied the sky, and flooded the valley with sunlight. The sun’s warmth touched our bodies. At first, we ignored it as we ignored the cold, but it thawed the skin and the reluctant muscles, raised the temperature of our bodies. We began to shake. The shaking awakened our reason, and we understood the gift. The mountains let us keep up our future. Walk home, they said, you feeble men.

We shook from the sloth and ambled along the ridge in silence. Unsteadily, but then with surety as our shaking stopped. A kilometer, then another, then towards the tents, into the safety of our camp.

In the evening, we heard of others caught in the same distress. All of us made it back. All of us retold our stories with extreme brevity and with a fatalistic shrug. But not the Canadian James. He seemed happy to walk out of the predicament. I watched him eat his food, and I envied his hunger. Yes, hunger for food, and his hunger for life, for experience. I envied his zeal to be happy. His zeal to smile and his silly drive to make others laugh. Superfluous things, I thought. Was he a fake?

I ate my hot soup, chewed the tough pieces of chicken floating in the broth. It warmed me on the inside, mellowed my edge. Why am I set against him, I thought. I felt guilt, then affection. Could he be just a kind man?

“Why are you always happy,” I asked him with a restrained resentment in my voice.

“It’s a choice,” he said.

“That simple?”

“No, it takes the hardest of thinking.”

“Yeah? Just thinking?”

“No, you also need to live through the hardest of things.”

I looked at him and was about to scoff. What would a wealthy Canadian know about the hardest of things? But his smile turned hollow, and in his eyes, I saw a glimpse of a personal history that could fatally wound. Were the hardest things beyond the circumstances of daily struggle? I restrained my scoff. I inhaled to ask what had happened to him, but he pre-empted me with the widest, most sincere smile. “We all will have something to teach us.”

I do not know what happened to him before, nor do I know what happened to him since. We did not stay in touch. But in the following decades, I understood the truth of his words. Life is unsparing with its difficult gifts. When it hits, we make choices. The strongest choose a path to happiness.

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“Tell me again what happened?” She said as she pulled back.

“My friend, Alesha, was on another balcony next to me on the third floor. I leaned out to see him and asked if he was going outside to play. Then I fell over. Then I was spinning. I saw the second floor. Then I landed in flowers.”

“In flowers? What kind?”

“Tulips. They were yellow tulips. And they had flowers that were not open.”

“Ok. And how did you get the black eye?”

“I hit a tulip. But I don’t know because I was spinning really fast.”

“Well, I would like to talk to your mother to make sure you are all ok.”

She gave me a note to pass to my mother and send me home. I ambled on the dirt footpath across the unused soccer fields. They were still drying after the last of the Siberian snow melted in early May. My head hung low. What was I going to tell my mother? I could not spin a story. My mother knew it was Lenka.

Lenka was a neighbor girl of ten, a head taller than me, and the oldest in our band of four. We played tag, called each other names, ran on the streets, fought, then were best friends again. Lenka had shoulder length hair, cut in a straight line, and the bangs to match. She was skinny, with bony knees. She had a cutting tongue that none of us could challenge. And she had enormous feet. I never noticed the feet until two days before. They seemed normal until that afternoon. But there, sitting in the dirt and playing tic tac toe with loose sticks, I saw them.

“You have long, ugly feet,” I said.

“No, I don’t, you idiot.”

“Yes, you do. They are as long as your legs.”

Lenka rolled off her butt onto her knees in my direction and threw her fist at my head. Into my eye. I screamed. Jumped up. Tried to hit her. But she pushed me to the ground. With tears rolling, I ran for home.

Our parents met on a stairwell of the apartment building later. They collected the testimony from all present, looked at my eye, and sent us to our respective flats on the same floor. I could hear them through the door laughing. “Haha. He got his butt kicked by a girl. Haha.” Savages.

The next morning, I saw a proper black eye. It wrapped around and crept onto my nose. It hurt. I watched it in horror, wondering how to explain this abomination to my classmates and to Maria Ivanonvna. That is how the balcony story was born.

I gave the note to my mom. It was pointless to hide it. Maria Ivonavna always called after I went home with a note about one trouble or another. With my head low, I gave her the note. I stared at her feet in contriteness. I heard a hiss, or a croak, or a stifled cough, a sound indeterminant and terrifying. My life was over. Mother would tell Maria Ivanovna. The word would spread, and I will be forever known as the boy who was beaten up by a girl.

“Fourth floor,” she said.

I squeezed my eyes.

“Alesha lives on the fourth floor, and we live on the fifth,” she went on, “so what balcony did you fall from?”

I squeezed my eyes tighter, then felt a tap on my head. Two fingers — tap, tap. “Hello, what floor?”

“Third,” I squeezed out.

“Vova!” She hollered for my dad. I heard the balcony door open and close. The heavy footfalls of punishment headed my way.

He looked at the note. Tapped it with a finger. Lifted my chin up. Looked at my black eye. Looked at my mother. Then he broke out into outrageous laughter.

Mother tore the note from his hand, slapped his shoulder, and shoved him out of the room. “You big oaf! Keep it down!” She yelled after him. Then at me, “And you go do your homework. Already did it? Do it again. Three times!”

The next day, she walked me across the unused soccer fields on the way to school. I stopped to re-tie my shoes, then for the second time. She saw through my ruse when I tried again and scolded me, “Face the consequences!”

On the stone steps of the main school entrance stood Lenka, with her stupid bangs, stupid bony knees, and her stupid grin. She was smirking, but then she saw my mother’s look, a pure evil, and she slouched repentant.

Maria Ivanovna was in the homeroom. She stood up to greet my mother. The women chatted about their little dachas in the country and plans for planting the strawberries and carrots, how the new Italian shoes were due to arrive at a store in the city center, and how early in the morning they must join the queue for them. I wished they talked forever but waited for my turn with a bated breath.

“So, it was so scary what happened,” Maria Ivanovna finally said, “go over the balcony like that. The third floor!”

My mother turned to me. “Why are you lying?” She did not wait for an answer. “He exaggerates sometimes. He thinks it makes the story better.”

“Oh,” Maria Ivanovna nodded and glanced at me. “Exaggerates?”

“Yes, yes. He just talks a big game. Takes after his father. It is fun for these men to tell people a story with all the facts a little bigger.”

“Oh!”

“Yes, yes. We were at my cousin’s, a building over. They have two boisterous boys. So they get out of hand sometimes,” my mother shook her head, looking exasperated.

“Oh!” Maria Ivanovna was listening in rapt attention. I was listening, too.

“So, the boys get wild and shove this one right over the railing, off the second-floor balcony. Can you believe it?”

“Oh, goodness!”

“There was a mattress, you see. Down there. That’s why they did it as a joke. But he, of course, hits a branch, you see. And gets a black eye.”

“Oh, not a tulip?”

“A tulip?”

“He said he landed on a tulip.”

“A tulip? Why are you lying?” She turned to me. She turned to my teacher, “No, a branch.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t you say anything!” My mother commanded.

For years, I have not questioned this story. But twenty years later, an event with my own kid at school triggered the memory of my balcony escapade. I remembered it only in broad strokes. So when my mother visited me in Wisconsin, I asked her why she kept up the lie. “Can’t let the kid down, ever,” she said as she retold the story in detail. “But mostly, I thought it was just funny.”

And I always thought she was a serious person.

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I enjoyed writing this story, it was a great break from boat work in the morning hours a few days ago. If you enjoyed it, please hit Like and leave a comment.

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I wrote this story last week. Although, it occurred two decades ago, it is most relevant today.

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We ignore much of what supports our lives. We photograph the arches of beautiful bridges but seldom notice the stout columns lifting them into the air. We enjoy the roof lines of cathedrals without heeding the beams on which they sit. We eat fruit from the trees without much thought of the people in the hot or cold fields that nurture them from saplings.

They are there. Men, women, and children in a large group, picnicking. The four blankets, laid out side by side, carpet the grass in a square. The adults sit on the circumference facing in and talking in rapid Spanish, sharing food on large common plates. The children run around, playing, although a few older kids sit with their parents, proud to be a part of the circle.

They are the migrant workers who come to Wisconsin to work at the nursery for the summer season. Busses bring them in late March and April, then take them south in October where more work awaits in a counter season somewhere in Alabama, or Mississippi, or Louisiana. They come with families. The men work the fields in the tree nursery, many women too. The kids go to the local school.

My job is half a mile from here. I work for a different company in an office away from the chill of May air. But I walk along the nursery on my lunch breaks to clear my head. I like the deliberate geometry of pruned rows, the order enforced by hundreds of hands with sheers and shovels, and an eye for incidental design. The tiny spruces and young apple trees in careful groups reorganize my mind and calm the boiling stress of deadlines. I can smell the fresh dirt here. I can smell life outside the spreadsheets.

I saw this group three Fridays in a row. Each time, I walked too far from them, on the other side of the railroad tracks. Today, my path along the saplings takes me right to them.

The banter stops when I approach, and one man rises with a smile. He waves to the kids to slow down. They stop and look at me curiously.

“We are having lunch, Señor,” the man says. He is young, in his twenties, with a thin beard covering his chin. He looks apologetic, congenial.

“Looks delicious,” I say. “These are your kids?”

“Miguel’s and Johnny’s,” he points at the two men in their early thirties. He points at the kids, “and nieces and nephews.”

His English is easy and almost unaccented, which may be why he speaks for the group. I wave hello to the kids.

“We will be back on the pruning in a few, Señor.”

I startle at his assumption. But then, I am a white man in clean clothes walking through their fields.

“I don’t work for the nursery,” I say.

He smiles broadly, “Oh, Señor is no boss!”

I shake my head, and he repeats it to his family, “Señor is no boss.” I am uncomfortable that I disrupted their lunch. I say I hope for the dry spring, wave at the kids, and move on.

The interaction is on my mind for the next week. Their assumption of who I was, and the man’s implicit apology is a brush with the order of things. The workers and the bosses divided by clean clothes and their citizenship. Divided by an accident of birth. The boses in a place of opportunity, the workers searching for a place where they can find it. Dumb luck.

Next Friday I fly to some metropolis to do business for my company. Then the same the following week. When I am back and walk the paths again, the families are on their blankets, sharing food, laughter, and life. They see me, and the young man with good English yells, “Señor no boss,” in greeting. I smile, and we chat. He is Jesse. They are from Texas, it turns out, but from Puerta Vallarta, on the Pacific Mexican Coast, before that. They like the work. It pays well, and the company is fair.

In a few weeks, it is hot, and as I walk by, the kids yell, “Señor no boss”. It became my nickname. Jesse stands up and hands me a plate. He points to a spot on the blanket. I eat the rice and veggies with chicken, and I ask questions. They ask questions of me. The eldest of the children is captivated by my work in software and the travel it demands. He wants to make video games, he says. He also wants to go to Europe to watch the English play soccer. Futbol, he says.

A white Ford F-150 truck slowly bounces along the rows of the trees. It stops and a man in boots, jeans and half unbuttoned shirt steps out. It is Dave, I have seen him around town. He grabs a box and gives it to the kids. Donuts. The kids each take one. Dave waves to me and to the group, then drives off.

“Foreman,” Jesse says, “a good man,” I ask what makes him good. And he shrugs, “It is very hot, but he always keeps his truck’s windows down. He sweats with us, and he knows the work. He knows our names. To him, we are people.”

“Other foremen like that?”

Jessy shrugs, “Maybe half.”

The men on the blankets look down, the women busy themselves with clearing the plates. Only kids still seem happy with their donuts.

For the next three weeks, I avoid the walk. Their welcome and their offer of food raised a self-consciousness that I cannot explain. I feel inadequate walking by with empty hands. I think of that strangeness, how their welcome is driving a confusing wedge. I share my reservations with a friend. She listens, thinks, then shakes her head. She says I am raising a false barrier and that those people are genuine in their welcome.

Next Friday, I walk by with a box of croissants and pastries. I see them and give them the box. The kids are happy with the treats, and we again share a meal. Next month, I travel, week in and week out, and then the weather turns cold. The families are gone.

They are not there next summer. I run into the foreman Dave at a gas station and ask him about the group. He purses his lips and says that sometimes they are sent to Mexico, but then sometimes they come back. I know he is talking about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, so I don’t ask. It is a fraught topic in some parts. But then I chance it, and ask him what he thinks.

“Everything grinds to a halt without these workers,” he says simply.

My software company has grown and we move our office to a city twenty miles away. It is away from the fields, away from the wholesome work on the land. The next summer, I forget my walks.

But another summer later, when I ride my bike from a pick up soccer game, I slow by another group of soccer fields to glance at the speed of men on the pitch. This is the local Latino League. It is a serious affair. I stop and watch; then I hear a yell, “Señor no-boss!”

Jesse runs over and bumps me on the shoulder, then drags me with him to the blankets where his family and a few others are setting up for the game. They are playing in an hour. Jesse drags me onto the field to warm up with them, and I serve balls and kick practice corners. They are too skillful for me to play with them in a game, and I don’t speak Spanish. So, I say my goodbyes before they start. As I leave, I ask where he has been. He had to go back to help his uncle and aunts for a season. Was it his choice? I ask. He shrugs and says that everything worked out for the better.

Next Sunday, I make plans to go apple picking at a local orchard with my girlfriend. I imagine the trees there were raised by the hands of my acquaintances. I imagine my trip as a way of silent thanks, though self-indulgent it maybe. But the Sunday morning is cool and rainy. I look outside and make coffee for two, then climb back into bed to read. I have a choice to stay dry, but if it rains tomorrow, the crews will still go out to the fields. All over the States - working, growing trees, picking vegetables, managing cattle. All to fill our shelves and our fridges. Even the fridges of those who shout that those workers do not belong here. The shouts of ignorance between the bites of their apples.

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Then I slow. I am a quarter mile past the hitchhiker. His appearance finally sinks in. Tan cowboy boots are midway to his knees, pulled up over his naked legs. The cut-off jean shorts descend midway to the knees from the other direction, in the fashion of the seventies, but too short by the standards of today. Their bottoms are fraying. A tan buckskin vest is on his naked torso. Two diagonal fringes meet in a v-pattern on the front of the vest. The leather frills are four inches long. No hat on his head, but one is hanging over his daypack.

I make a u-turn, drive past him, u-turn again, then stop. He is a slight man, with a few years on me. Tanned, darker than his buckskin. He climbs in.

“Telluride?” I ask.

“Where else?” he nods.

Only one road leads to Telluride. The same road lets you escape. When you end up there, it is with intention, never by accident nor on a drive-through to another place. The town is a captive of the Rockies, which clench their jaws around it and squeeze it into a gorgeous valley. These mountains are tall and steep. They forbid casual visits and mandate commitment. Well, it used to be so in the days of the miners, who came here to dig for gold and silver over a hundred years ago, and lesser metals like zinc and copper. Today, it is a resort for the moneyed folks. They fly in their jets.

“Why did you change your mind and pick me up?” he asks.

“Your costume. I am curious about the story.”

“Costume? That’s everyday wear, my friend,” he laughs, “Well, not in the winter.”

“Even more interesting, then.”

He gives me a curious look. But then he nods.

For a few miles we ride in silence. He is comfortable with it, more than I am. But I am holding firm. It is a skill I am building, to let the silences hang. The depth of conversations grows in the quiet spaces between empty banter. If only this conversation were to start.

“Why Telluride?” I ask.

“Bluegrass Fest. Have you been?”

“Oh, shit. Did not realize it was this weekend. Yeah, I have. Was planning to take the kid for a few quiet days of hanging out and mountain biking, but I don’t think it will be quiet with the fest.”

He looks at the empty seats behind him. “Where do you keep the kid?”

“I stuff him in the back. There is a bed in there — less arguing, more peace, and by the end of the day, we still like each other.”

He stares at me with concern, then bursts into laughter. His laughter is loud and theatrical, and I wonder if he mocks me. But his eyes are laughing and I buy into his sincerity.

“If I buy a vehicle,” he says, “I will go for length and a bed in the back. That could have kept a girlfriend or two around for longer. Live and learn. Live and learn.”

I almost say, ‘What’s with the outfit?’ but I don’t. It may come as an insult. Although, I want to know how the bottom of a Texas cowboy adjoins the middle of a hippie, and the top of a Native American, with a head of a surfer. I suspect he could be all of those things, for in America, such melding happens. Unlikely as it is, and even contrary to history, it occurs with regularity. It is a reflection of America itself, not in a way of obnoxious, in your face, contrasts, but in a quieter way, where unlikely things coexist at all scales.

His laughter shakes the restrains off the conversation, and we begin to trade questions and stories. Slowly, I shift to listening as he picks up steam and weaves a tale of his life. A summary, indeed, but fascinating and as contrasting as his costume. His story moves through the anti-war protests, The Dead concerts, pursuit of the “American Dream” of comfort and security and attachment to things — a prison of the mind, he calls it.

Then, onto finding his own freedom again, away from the dress pants and buttoned shirts of the office and into the “costume” he was wearing today. He air-quotes “costume” and winks at me at me as a reminder of my misstep.

As he talks, I notice my kid move into the seat from the bed. He looks through the window, glances at our companion at intervals, and he does not have a Game Boy in his hands. Just listening. Without a Game Boy.

“Going back to Telluride is a bit like going home,” the man says, “We built that ski resort in the seventies and a bit in the eighties.” He spins a tale of the early days, the few of them out there, skiing and making runs, working through the summer. “Just a few of us built it at first.”

An hour passes, and we roll into Telluride. People are everywhere, pushing through the smell of weed, beer, and joy. I stop downtown, and he is ready to jump out the door.

“Regular folks don’t usually stop to pick me up. Maybe they are too afraid of my costume,” he laughs at the word, “It is usually someone who must save me with Jesus or hippies in an old VW bus. Cool. Thanks for stopping.”

He jumps out, takes off his buckskin vest, stuffs it into his rucksack, and, bare-chested, melts into the crowd.

“What a nut,” I say, “but a great story.”

“He is like Forrest Gump,” my kid says, “Is it all true?”

“Maybe some of it. I don’t buy it. He did not build this resort, I’d say.”

“How do you know when to believe people?” my kid asks.

“I don’t know. But some stories are just too incredible.”

I hope he does not push further. I don’t have answers to such questions. I am a jaded cynic, and I don’t want him to be. I want him to see more in people than my history allows. I want him to believe the stories they tell. But more so, I want all those stories to be true.

We find a parking spot, far from the chaos of the downtown, and meander through the streets. My son wants sushi for dinner, but it is too early, so I talk him into riding the gondola up the mountain. In the summer, the gondola takes mountain bikers to the top, and used to take hang glider and paraglider pilots two decades ago, when the lawyers were not too many. That is how I know this place, from the bird’s eye view, when I came here in my younger days to fly the ridge. I want to show him the majestic valley from the height of the steep peaks.

We get off the gondola at the top and head for the exit. There are photos and plaques on the temporary exhibit of Telluride’s history. And as we walk by them, I stop cold.

“No fucking way!” I say. I am too loud and draw disapproving glances. I point my son to a photograph. Young men stand around the old-fashioned two-person ski lift, happy and smiling.

“That’s him!” I point. Young but unmistakably him with the laughing eyes, honest and earnest.

“So it was true,” my son says.

“Looks that way,” I feel embarrassed. “Maybe when someone tells you an incredible story, it is a better default to believe them.” I don’t think he gets what I am trying to say. I go on, “You know, where I came from, I learned to see the worst in people. It is not right. I am unlearning that bad habit. Should give people a chance.”

“Crazy story,” he says.

“Yeah. For sure.”

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I am thinking about it now. A conversation at a bar prompts my thoughts. The bar is full. It is a rectangular affair that can seat sixty people. It is me and my dog at the edge, by the servers’ station. I come for chicken wings and calamari and to stare at the boats in the marina on the other side of the bar. The dog comes for the petting he garners and nibbles that people sneak him, thinking I can’t see.

Every seat is full for the happy hour. That’s how it works in Key West. The locals swarm for the half-priced drinks and food, and the tourists wander in by luck and grab a seat at the bar or a table in the long wings of the restaurant.

“Do you come here often?” a woman asks and laughs. She is to my right. White hair in a professional bob, a fashionable sweater with sleeves pulled up to her elbows, and jewelry on her wrists and fingers. The fingers are knotted from age. The forearms are thin and covered in sunspots burned-in over decades in the tropics. Her face is thin, the classic lines of a beauty, once and still, but now under a mesh of thin lines.

She is with a companion, who is her daughter. I overheard their chatter. The daughter is in her sixties, but it is a guess, and I could be aiming low. I compute where it may place her mother. She is in her eighties, at least. And, while middle-aged, I have lived only half her life.

The mother is giggling. She raises her glass of white wine. She has seen me before, she says. But that’s not true. It is my dog that people remember. They recognize the distinguished pooch and make an allowance for me. That’s fine. My dog gets me local discounts.

She asks me where I am from. How long am I here. She is excited about sailing. Declares me a local. Our banter is easy. I must lean towards her when she talks. Her voice is soft with the weakness of age. Yet, her speech is eloquent and clear, with the strength of an active intellect.

“How long did you live in Key West?” I ask in a break in her questions.

“At least forty-eight years. I came for the warmth and stayed for the ocean.” She is from Kansas City, where neither the cold nor the culture were a fit.

“What did you do here?”

She is about to speak, then she stops. She lifts her glass, looks at the ceiling, at the hundreds of nautical flags suspended from it, takes a sip of her wine. “It will come to me. I don’t always remember. But it will come to me.”

I am at a loss. I feel a rise of my existential fear, but it is only me. She smiles, drinks her wine, then points to the TV and the football game. “These athletes are amazing. They are so much faster now,” she says.

“You always watched football?”

“With my husband, he was a fan. He liked his team,” she sighs. The sigh is mournful, lonesome. “He liked the team; I liked the players,” she laughs now, then calls out the names of her favorites. They don’t mean anything to me.

“Kansas City Chiefs?” I ask.

“I am not sure…” she says. She stops and thinks, “I think it was a cleaning business. I started a cleaning business…” She flags the bartender, “Abby, two more,” and the glasses are full again, hers and her daughter’s. She sips her wine. “Yes, a cleaning business.” She turns to her daughter, but the daughter is chatting with a neighbor two seats away. The mother calls her name, then again, and asks how long she has had the cleaning business. The daughter half turns, “Two years. Then you…” the daughter’s attention is called away.

“Yes, I had another business… It will come to me.”

“Some people say Key West becomes too small after a while?” I say.

“Any place becomes too small when you stop looking for something new in it. People always have something new to say if you listen. And new places. They open and close. I go with my husband. We see what’s new and go there. Always something to do.”

I notice the mixing of tenses: the talk of the husband in the past, then the talk of him in the present. I discard such incongruities in the course of normal chats. Now, I wonder if the husband’s existence is a mutable fact. Has he passed away, or is he sitting at home watching a game? I want to ask but I don’t.

I fear inflicting a wound, and I frantically look for a question to bring our chat into the present, into what is around us, where there is no risk of a memory gap. I can’t find it, so I sit and I think. What would I want if I were in her seat and she in mine?

I cannot know the answer. I forget my keys. I cannot recall the precise verbs I need for my sentences. It happens more often with each birthday. But I do not yet know how it feels to discover a gap that defined a vital part of my life. Such as a job. But what if a job or a business are only placeholders to get us through the day and onto important things? Of course, we don’t treat them as such. We elevate them, allow them to displace much else. But maybe she knows better and can afford to forget.

If only so. What we remember or forget is likely an accident of physiology, a random decomposition of neural networks. We can’t choose to only forget trivialities or regrets.

“Where are you sailing next?” She asks.

“Guatemala or Panama. It depends on how plans develop over the next three months that we are in Key West.”

“Oh, how fun. I always wanted to go to Latin America. Maybe I have,” she laughs and shrugs her shoulders.

I soon get my check and say my goodbyes. Later, it is hard to fall asleep. I wonder if I have it wrong.

I believed life to be a collection of moments stacked in a sequence. Each moment is stamped into memory by the power of emotions and, less often, by the power of thoughts. And that’s all we have. As age chisels away our acuity, it shreds the core memories, shrinking what was our life. Shrinking who we are. But is it so?

She seems happy. She is talking to strangers. She is finding newness in her days. The vitality of her speech, her observations, her humor speak of a rich life. She remembers the bartender’s names, and they remember hers. Maybe one can forget the past but remember to live in the now. And, maybe, that will be enough?

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So when the hobby runs its course, I must find another. I did not believe I had a method for picking them, but, over four beers, a friend outlined the criteria I subconsciously followed. The hobby must be complex enough to entirely take over my thinking to the detriment of important things. It must be ruinous to my finances. And it must be obscure enough for no one else but me and a small cohort of adherence to care. The last quality is important as it offers excellent opportunities to educate and enlighten innocents at parties. It is a good way to broaden your circle of acquaintances from your circle of friends.

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By the early 2000s — that’s when this story takes place — I built a substantial list of past hobbies, which precipitated a crisis. Can I find something that fits the bill? Turns out, I did not have to look.

Around that time, at the beginning of the century, I moved to a small town of about twelve thousand people. It was a nice American suburb. Half, a bedroom community for people working in the capital but looking for affordable homes; half, locals who had never left; and a small part, seasonal migrants working at the tree nursery nearby. Nice town, with a functional main street, a few restaurants, a factory, and a festival celebrating Norwegian Syttende Mai — the independence day. And a bicycle store.

I saw it right away. Its name was the misspelled name of the town — Stoughton, but phonetically correct to highlight the oddities of the local accent — Stoton Cycle. It shared the signage with the coffee shop but had its own space for the slogan: “If it’s in stock, we’ve got it.”

The store was in the basement but had high windows to let in the light. Rows of bikes and accessories. Old posters of racers climbing the French Pyrenees and smoking cigarettes on their bikes. New posters of modern racers covered in the logos of their sponsors but healthy-looking in contrast.

The stereo played local talk radio. The station was left-leaning, but this particular show espoused an especially far-left ideology that I saw not working during my childhood in the communist Soviet Union.

The only man in the store was in a black apron, turning wrenches in the back. “Can I help you?”

“No, not really.”

“Huh.”

He went back to unscrewing the peddles. I stood in the middle and looked at bikes from a distance. The prices looked right, triple what I should spend. The helmets were expensive, too, as was the clothing kit.

“A lot of people race bikes around here?” I asked.

“Just ride them. A few.”

“But some race?”

“Some.”

“I think I would like that.”

“What?”

“Racing.”

“Why?

“Seems fun.”

“Aha. No, not a lot.” He shook his head.

“What? Not a lot of fun?”

“A lot of fun. Not a lot race.”

“That’s good.”

“Why?”

“Easier to win.”

He set down his wrench, turned around, and sized me up the way a boxer would before a bout. He was taller than me, with an Italian face, like the smoking men on the posters. His hands were covered in grease. He could give me a beating, I suppose. It would certainly ruin my light shirt. So, I opted for de-escalation.

“Who is the communist around here?”

He sized me up again, with a more obvious intention. I could sense his annoyance and confusion. But then he laughed, walked over to the radio, and turned it up.

“No,” he said, “I listen for the conspiracy theories, deep state and inside jobs, and all.”

“Yeah, reasonable,” I said, “maybe I’ll stay awhile and learn something.”

He sized me up again. “Do you have a bike?”

“No, why?”

“To race.”

“Yes, yes. No, I don’t.”

“So you need one?

“Does not look like you have any racing bicycles,” I say.

He waves his hand around the store.

I shake my head, “I want the one where you can see the carbon fiber, like on those bikes in the Tour de France.”

His face lit up. I could see he appreciated my enthusiasm for good equipment. He dropped a catalog in front of me, opened it up, and pointed to a thing of beauty. I saw the price and considered that his enthusiasm was about the commission.

We chatted about bikes, discussed my goals, discussed my budget, then leafed a few pages back to a more modest section. I looked at the bikes and the prices. We leafed a few more pages back, then a few more. Finally, we found a match between the prices and how much beautiful carbon fiber I could see — a sliver on a top tube. I began to haggle over the price. He closed the catalog, threw it atop the toolbox, turned up the radio, and went back to wrenching the peddle.

“Maybe I could talk to the owner?” I yelled over the noise. He pointed at himself. I nodded and gave him the thumbs up. “Ok, good on the price.”

He turned the radio down. “It will take a couple of weeks to get the bike.”

“Okay.”

Every few days, I stopped by the store, and he would remind me, “A couple of weeks.” A couple of weeks later, it was still “a couple of weeks — component supply crunch.” In two more weeks “strike in Italy — no derailleurs for the rear wheels.” Two weeks after that — “wheels are back-ordered.”

I would stop, and we’d chat about bicycling and life, the crazy things happening in the world, and the lunatics running some countries. With each visit, I noticed a lessened annoyance and a softening edge to his demeanor. And by the end of the second month of “supply chain disruptions,” I almost thought he was glad to see me. But then, I thought it was a kindness afforded a newcomer to his town who needed a friend.

When the bike finally made it into the shop in a large cardboard box, and I watched him put it together as we drank beer, I saw the care he took in assembly, a care you afford a friend. I looked at the time on the clock — he was working after hours. I felt thankful a person would grant me a favor of their company, and I now regretted calling him a communist.

For the next twenty years, the bike shop owner Phil and I, and many of our cycling friends, clocked tens of thousands of miles around the southern parts of Wisconsin. I stopped at his store each week. We sipped beers and talked about the going-ons in the sport. I’d tell him about bicycle crashes I’ve seen. He’d tell me about some fellow trying to buy a bike he did not know much about, and, without irony, I would make fun of a poor schmuck.

It turns out, you can pay someone to become a lifelong friend. But Phil paid back. Every couple of weeks, he’d join our backyard fires and always, always, brought quality beer. And good conspiracy stories that no one believed.

I raced. I never won any races but did well enough to advance through categories and race for cool teams. And my then-wife complained not once about that new hobby that stayed with me for two decades.

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I watch her march for the creek, the hiking boots still on, but the jeans rolled up to her knees. Tall, slender, with a weathered daypack that has seen much rain and sun. She is comfortable on the trail. Hair in a ponytail, a buttoned flannel shirt, and arms swinging in rhythm to her gait. She is about to step into the stream.

“This is the only stream you cross on the loop. The next eight miles are dry,” I blurt. I am surprised, it is not my way to get into people’s business. But I know this trail. No need to schlep in soggy boots along the cliffs of Andrew Mollera Pacific Coast.

She looks at me. Her eyes are angry, unhappy to be pulled from her thoughtful solitude. Sorrowful eyes? She sees me in my bare feet, tying boots together to throw them over my neck. Her gaze relents, and she nods with a touch of thanks.

I cross the creek. The water, chilled by the cold December nights, splashes to my knees, wets a sliver of my pants. On the other side, I clean the sand off my feet and put on socks and shoes. I throw a covert glance across the creek, then throw a few more to watch her wade. She sits on a rock as far as she can be from me.

At the next intersection, I stop and think. Everyone goes right. The guidebook commands you so, unless you seek the torture of successive climbs. I think of the woman by the creek. She wants no company. She wants to grind through her own thoughts. She is a tourist. She will go right, so I turn left.

The third climb ascends to a view of miles to the south and to the north — the Pacific Ocean and the cliffs that frame it along Highway 1. The rocky shore was built by the tectonic geology to showcase the power of the crushing waves. This is Big Sur, and I love this place. I caught the need to feel its spirit from the fevered, alcoholic dreams of Kerouac’s book. I come here to bury the disappointments of personal mistakes, and it works each time.

“Sorry,” I hear behind me, “I did not want to startle you.” It’s her.

“Over there,” I point half a mile offshore, “you will see the whale spouts. You just have to wait. They are riding the California Current south to their winter home.”

She nods, and I set off. Another climb and then a choice. To the left is a hike through the redwoods, through the majesty of the thousand-year-old giants. They make me feel small but the right size on the scale of important things. To the right is a shortcut along the beach through the carved arches of limestone cliffs.

“Sorry,” I hear her again.

“No worries.”

“Do you know this place?” She asks. I nod. “If I walk the Redwood Trail, will I have time to come back on the beach before the tide rolls in?”

I check the watch. “Yes, but walk fast. You have two hours.”

I turn onto the beach. She walks to the trees.

The beach is empty. It is often so in the colder months. The tourists still come but loiter within a mile of the entrance. They are afraid of spots that sever the phone service and their link to phantom safety. So it’s just me.

I walk along the boulders and dash through stone hallways, impassible at high tide. I time the waves, then sprint through the openings before the next deluge floods the path. It feels like being a kid again.

I climb a rock and sit with a book, leafing through pages but not reading. It is like nervous foot-tapping some people do to manage their anxiety. I leaf through books.

In an hour, or maybe more, I look along the beach. The tide is coming. The water is licking boulders that were safely dry on my walk. That woman needs to hurry before the tide floods the archways and makes her climb the cliffs.

I leave and meander to my car, then to Fernwood. It is a lodge and a cafe, but an unassuming bar at night. It welcomes all but is home to locals who live in Big Sur. I sip my beer. Then she walks in. Of course, only a couple of places open this late for a stretch of miles. She nods at me, and I gesture to an open seat.

We drink beers, and we talk. She is on a solo trip from Colorado through a few states, but mostly California. Big Sur is beautiful, she says, and she will stay a week. We chat about hiking plans. She interrogates me about the trails. Tells me what she likes, and I tell her where she could go.

“Why are you out here?” I chance.

“This trip is a way to be alone.”

“Sorry to intrude.”

“No. Away from people who know me. From those who give advice.”

I do not pry.

“What trail are you doing tomorrow?” She asks as I am paying my bill.

“A connector from Tan Bark. It follows the crest of the coastal mountains. Going for the views.”

“May I join?”

I am quiet for a moment in surprise. Then I tell her the mile marker where we will meet.

The trail is gorgeous and abandoned. The tourists, the children, and the arguing spouses are at the waterfalls below, an arm’s length from their cars. They keep the noise with them. Only wind and birds are here.

We talk in spurts for a few minutes, then walk for half an hour in silence. I learn she has lost someone. The next day, on the next trail, I learn she thinks he died a terrifying death. The day after, I understand the depth of her loss, a husband, a friend, a soulmate. We hike in the afternoons and have a beer in the evenings. I go to my campsite. She goes to her truck that she parks on different turnouts dotting the highway along this scenic route. It is a perfect routine for people who are seeking time alone but need a few minutes with another to stay atop their internal gloom.

“So what happened?” I feel comfortable asking now. We are at dinner in a restaurant atop Big Sur. The New Year is a day away, and the crowds are back in their city homes, readying to meet it. Only a few people are on the patio, watching the fog drift over the Pacific.

She tells me. He loved the mountains. They shared that. He also loved being in them alone. He took a day every other weekend and backcountry skied the back slopes of the fourteeners. She asked him not to go alone — backcountry reliably kills solo skiers. But he needed to commune with the Rockies to reset his inner peace. Then he did not return. Not that night, not the next day. The search parties found avalanches, but the rescue dogs could not sniff a life underneath, nor could they find the body. An accident, everyone said. A tragedy. But she thought — a choice, to risk his life and to risk leaving hers in shambles. She harbored anger. And she thought of his last minutes, immobile under the pressure of the snowpack with his own terror. Conflicting, guilty, devastating thoughts. So much forfeited, for him and her. Then, the funeral in absentia and the stream of misguided comforts: “He died doing what he loved.” What the fuck, she said.

I listen and feel a rising guilt. A stream of hobbies: skydiving, whitewater kayaking, mountain climbing, hang gliding, in service to my need to touch a deeper meaning or find a path to overcome fear. All noble in my mind until this night.

She shines a light on the ugly, selfish drive. All risks I took, thinking them my own. But they never were only mine. They were the risks I imposed on my ex-wife, my young son, my friends, and my employees. Doing what I loved and forgetting to live for those who love me, for those who need me.

The next day is our last. She will be driving south, and I will be driving north. We beat through a dense path I know. The brambles catch the skin and tear clothes. Keep following, it is worth it. She does.

The path spills onto rocks piled in a terrace around a breathing pool. The pool exhales a cloud of white mist each time a strong wave powers into the channel connecting it to the ocean and pressures the water upwards. The mist drifts at the cliffs, wets the rocks, then runs down in tiny rivulets back into the pool. It’s a spectacle I can watch for days. Three seals across agree.

“It is dispiriting. After almost a year, everything still feels empty. Nothing makes a difference,” she says without self-pity. An observation.

“The point is that you are making a difference.”

“I don’t feel it.”

“Sometimes you touch a person with a random word, a story, or a patient silence that lets them say their piece. You leave a little seed that grows into a new way of being. And you don’t even know. You have a story to share. You have the wisdom to give. And someday you may read of the difference you made in their life because you were there.”

I wonder if I should confess that I represent what she despises. But I don’t, because I feel I will not be that man for much longer. Thank you for the new path.

— This story occurred over 10 years ago. The encounter had a profound impact on my worldview. Sometimes, it is okay to open the door to an opportunity by doing something out of character, like blurting out unsolicited advice.