Panama

On Christmas Day 2008, about three minutes before two stern-faced policemen approached to inform me that I would be robbed if I didn’t leave the park for a safer part of town, I took this picture of a man reading about Lance Armstrong.  As the man held up his paper (“Miracle” is the headline), and as a man on an adjacent bench made sure I knew Lance had only one testicle, I appreciated how even in a place like Panama City, Panama, people are interested in Armstrong’s phenomenal story.

This week, as Armstrong and others are zigzagging their way through the Tour de France, I suspect the guys I met in December are keeping tabs on their miracle rider.  There was a time, however, when instead of Panama reading about France everyone in France would have been reading about Panama.  And the subject, instead of bicycling, would have been about an undertaking much more expensive, deadly, and even grand—the construction of the Panama Canal.

Armstrong’s coverage tends to be positive thanks to the sheer feat of his victories.  In the late 1800s, however, coverage of the canal's construction, which was a French undertaking, was positive because the construction company had bought off all the French papers. “No less than 2,575 different French newspapers and periodicals had shared in the company’s beneficence,” writes David McCullough in The Path Between the Seas.  “Some little fly-by-night publications had even been founded for the sole purpose of getting in on the take.  In addition to such giants as Le Temps and Le Petit Journal (which received the largest sums), the full list included such publications as Wines and Alcohols Bulletin, Bee-keeper’s Journal and the Choral Societies Echo.”

France would spend more than ten years sweating and dying on the canal, during which time the French public—many of whom had invested their life savings in canal stocks—was left completely uninformed about the tremendous setbacks plaguing the endeavor.  When construction finally had to be abandoned in 1889 (the U.S. would pick it up again several years later) and after an estimated 20,000 workers had lost their lives, French newspapers, embarrassed and no longer in dubious partnership with the canal company, continued to print many a bold headline as newspapers tend to do.  “Miracle,” however, surely wouldn't have been one.

So here's to the independence of the press.  And, I suppose, to not being robbed in public parks, to retired men sitting on park benches, and to a 21st-century news culture which allows a Panamanian to enthusiastically expound on the testicular status of an American bound for France.

Today I finished reading David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914.  I first laid eyes on the book on December 23, 2008, while anchored in Gatun Lake on the Panama Canal.  I was aboard the Matarua, a Canadian yacht whose skipper had offered me free passage through the Canal in exchange for helping to handle ropes in the Canal’s three sets of locks.  We had left the Atlantic port of Colón late that afternoon and passed through the first set of locks that evening.  After a night's sleep, we would resume our passage at dawn, reaching the Pacific about 2:00 p.m. 

I was excited to find that the Canadian couple had a copy of The Path Between the Seas in their library.  I had wanted to read the book while visiting Panama, and had almost ordered it before coming.  But I decided against it on account of the extra weight it would’ve added to my pack.  Now, however, as it was set on the table as Joyce, the skipper’s wife, fixed us gin and tonics after dinner, I had the chance to glance through it.  The next day I would borrow it again for the above photo, taken as we passed through the Miraflores Locks.  The photograph was meant to illustrate the symbiotic relationship between a book and place in travel, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

I’ll be sharing a few excerpts from the book in the year ahead.  For now, since it’s nearing my bedtime, I’ll just pluck a quick tidbit from near the end of the book:

Construction of the canal would consume more than 61,000,000 pounds of dynamite, a greater amount of explosive energy than had been expended in all [of the United States'] wars until that time.  A single dynamite ship arriving at Colón carried as much as 1,000,000 pounds—20,000 fifty-pound boxes of dynamite in one shipload—all of which had to be unloaded by hand, put aboard special trains, and moved to large concrete magazines built at various points back from the congested areas.

My thanks to David McCullough for putting together such a readable history, and especially to Peter and Joyce for inviting me onto their yacht.  The Matarua was among the last of 14,702 vessels to transit the Canal in 2008.

I saw this horse on two different visits to Isla Bastimentos, in Panama’s Bocas del Toro archipelago.  Drawn to the salty taste of the surf, it would wade into the water and then mostly stand still, letting the occasional wave slap its face.  After maybe half an hour it would then return to the beach and slip silently back into the jungle.

It was a captivating scene: the clear and vibrantly colored water, the jungle-green backdrop, the horse maintaining such solid focus on its salty bath.  Its life didn’t seem that bad.  Certainly it was less stressful than many of its ancestors would have known, given that for much of human history horses have been instruments of war.  Since before 3000 BC they've been ridden in battle, and a training manual for chariot horses was in existence as early as 1350 BC.  It wasn’t until after the time of Christ, however, that the paired stirrup came onto the scene, revolutionizing yet again the tactics of war.  The English travel writer Colin Thubron, in his book Shadow of the Silk Road, explains its spread and significance:

The heavy stirrup was a Chinese brainchild as early as the fourth century AD, it seems, and as it travelled westward, stabilising its rider in battle, it made possible the heavily armoured and expensively mounted knight.  To this simple invention some have attributed the onset of the whole feudal age in Europe; and seven centuries later the same era came to an end as its castles were pounded into submission by the Chinese invention of gunpowder.  The birth and death of Europe’s Middle Ages, you might fancy, came along the Silk Road from the east.

Yes, this beach-loving Panamanian horse had it pretty good, as did the rest of us on the island.  We had put our shirts and stirrups aside, and the history of war felt rather remote.

In the mountains surrounding the Panamanian town of Boquete, there is a rather phenomenal coffee farm called Hacienda La Esperanza.  It is run by Jose Pretto, a Panamanian citizen of Italian descent seen in this photograph.

We met two hours into my walk down a curvy two-lane highway, where I was on the hunt for good pictures of the region’s coffee harvest, now in full swing.  Jose called out to me from a dirt road leading off of the highway, inviting me to wander through his fields and photograph his pickers at work.  I thought I would stay for ten minutes; I stayed instead for four hours.

To summarize: Jose, who once flew commercial jets, has thrown his life into an organic coffee farm, and his love for the land is contagious.  He showed me his chicken coups, scattered about at key points.  The chickens, which provide eggs, also spend their days pooping and scratching the soil under the coffee bushes, providing nourishment and aeration.  Orange trees also dot the farm, providing shade for the bushes and dropping delicious fruit to the ground (which workers and the occasional visitor can then pick up and eat).  A beautiful stream rushes through one side of the property, and Jose is in the process of relocating his workers (who live on the property) a few hundred yards away so that the water remains unpolluted.  The farm even has a couple mules, imported from the U.S., so that the workers don’t have to carry full sacks of coffee on their shoulders as they do on most other farms.  And this is but a very small glimpse of the place!

During my visit, Jose also received several unwanted visitors: officials and lawyers who are hoping to take much of the water from his stream.  The water is needed, they say, as more American retirees flood into Boquete and build homes and condos that demand the area’s natural resources.  Jose, who has invested thousands of dollars to fight this, minced no words as he spoke about the short-sighted stupidity of developers (who are passionate about money, not about a right relationship with the environment) and of society in general (which poisons its food with chemicals).  It seemed fitting that when we said goodbye, we were standing beside the billboard seen above, which Jose put up along the highway to share his message that, when we don’t consciously care for the land, we may very well destroy it.

I suspect Jose would find a kindred spirit in Wendell Berry, who writes a lot about the land and our relationship to it.  In an essay entitled "In Distrust of Movements", Berry says:

Well, all of us who live in the suffering rural landscapes of the United States know that most people are available to those landscapes only recreationally. We see them bicycling or boating or hiking or camping or hunting or fishing or driving along and looking around. They do not, in Mary Austin’s phrase, “summer and winter with the land”. They are unacquainted with the land’s human and natural economies...In fact, the comparative few who still practice that necessary husbandry and wifery often are inclined to apologize for doing so, having been carefully taught in our education system that those arts are degrading and unworthy of people’s talents. Educated minds, in the modern era, are unlikely to know anything about food and drink, clothing and shelter. In merely taking these things for granted, the modern educated mind reveals itself also to be as superstitious a mind as ever has existed in the world. What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food? 

In the Panamanian island chain of Bocas del Toro, theft is a problem on some beaches.  During the week of my visit, one couple described being approached by two young men who “asked” for their wallet.  They carried no weapon, but their demeanor was intimidating enough—and the travelers sufficiently isolated on their secluded stretch of sand—that they handed it over.  The couple did, however, ask if they could keep the non-cash items in the wallet, which the thieves amiably agreed to.

The theft happened on Wizard Beach, which is sometimes patrolled by police.   In this photo a policeman on the beach talks with an Israeli traveler, likely wishing to assure her that he’d keep a good eye on her belongings.  Later the officer would tell me that she was “very beautiful,” an observation with which I could not disagree.  He also answered my question about the ship that had been anchored offshore for two days: it was waiting to pick up a load of bananas.  (The province is home not only to pretty beaches but also the Chiriqui Land Company, which brings you Chiquita bananas.)

Bananas and beauty aside, one of the most provocative descriptions of theft I’ve ever read is in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.  Here an argument is made that thieves include more than the two opportunistic men on Wizard Beach:

“Good,” Baba said, but his eyes wondered.  “Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one.  And that is theft.  Every other sin is a variation of theft.  Do you understand that?”

“No, Baba jan,” I said, desperately wishing I did.  I didn’t want to disappoint him again.

…

“When you kill a man, you steal a life,” Baba said.  “You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father.  When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.  When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.  Do you see?”

The official currency of the Central American nation of Panama is the U.S. Dollar.  If you buy a house, a book, or a stalk of bananas, you use the dollar.  George Washington’s body may have been laid to rest in 1799 in Mount Vernon, but his image lives on in countless nooks and crannies of the world – including in Bocas del Toro, Panama, where this photo was taken.

One of the most powerful aspects of travel is that it introduces people from one socio-economic level to those of another—something that, unfortunately, doesn’t happen often enough back home.  Through these interactions people sometimes even become friends.  But what does deep friendship look like between people who inhabit starkly different socio-economic worlds?   Friendship can seem easy and uncomplicated on a surface level, but when a person with little access to money has to decide which of his children to put through elementary school (while all of yours will go to graduate school), has to watch his spouse suffer from an ailment that you would not because your insurance would cover the thousand-dollar medication, or can only imagine through your photographs and stories what a week-long holiday in another country would look like, what is friendship?  How does friendship navigate the economic chasm between two people?

Though this is just a playful photo, I thought it symbolic of how money can separate people, even people who wish to be friends and in many ways are.  And it reminded me of a quote I read many years ago in an obscure book entitled Missions and Money: Affluence as a Western Missionary Problem, by Jonathan Bonk:

It is humanly almost impossible for a wealthy family to share a deeply fraternal relationship with a family whose material and economic resources are a pathetic fraction of their own….