Panamá City: Between Skyscrapers and Sargassum.
Cities Build Civilization and Crush the Soul.
I did not expect to like it. Panama City is a city after all. Earlier in life, cities enamored me. The people, the noise, the creativity, and the activity brewed into intoxicating possibilities. Later, the cities crushed my soul.
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.
Exceptionally well written Egor, you took us there. Similarly, a couple days of exploring in a city and then I, too, need to wander on. ~J