I'm still drifting through Central American memories, looking at my life 10 short years ago...
The present has rippled and the past intervened. It's leaking through the walls of this cold northern room, and all those feelings are coming back with it.
This is from Chapter 4 of Vagabond Dreams. It's about traveling alone, and that first time you set out on the road.
My recent visit to Panama City has left me drifting 10 years in the past...
I'd like to share with you a reading of something I wrote at that time. It was my first real trip. I was alone and disoriented, in a place where I didn't speak the language. I didn't really know why I was there or what I should do. I only knew I had to go.
Those of you who have followed such impulses know how deeply that first trip will change you. After traveling the length of Central America, nothing ever looked the same again. I could never go back to the life I'd left behind.
I wrote this passage during lonely nights in a windowless room. It describes my first glimpse of the city, and of the disorientation I felt.
This is from Chapter 4 of Vagabond Dreams. It's the first time I've shared an actual passage from the book that isn't an "outtake" or a "deleted scene." I hope you enjoy it.
On the flight back, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, the feeling changed. I crossed some sort of invisible divide where I re-entered the life of the States: the life of work, obligation, responsibility and long hours. I dropped back into that weight as though it had never been lifted. It almost felt natural. But it's not.
I realized at that moment that Central America is a separate dimension. An alternate reality that one steps into, just as one steps into Macondo.
Down there I felt carefree. Like nothing matters. Rules don't matter because everything is chaos. You can do what you want, but at the same time you're responsible for looking out for yourself. Life slows down and Time loses its hold.
Ten years ago, sitting in a hammock in a dusty back yard staring at the moon, the night before I was to fly back home, I wrote:
At the end of my road I discovered that I could feel at ease anywhere. Every place belonged to me, because I no longer belonged to any place. Central America had become a state of mind, a mental construct, a place of no fixed geographical borders. It was something I carried with me.
But the challenge doesn't end with the conclusion of the journey. In many ways the most difficult task is just beginning. A journey is a liminal place, existing somewhere between the normal and the completely otherworldly. And so at the end of my journey I had to return, to confront society and my past lives with the light I'd fought so hard to win.
I would be shaken by questions, resentment, and the incomprehension of good people who couldn't grasp my new insights through the filters of the world I'd left behind. I would struggle with a nagging inconsistency between the wisdom I brought forth from The Road and the way things functioned in the day-to-day. My challenge would be to reconcile that; to carve out a new path for myself; to remain true to my vision, and to not forget.
I had to remember that the light is extinguishable, just because it is light. That it must be tended and cherished. And that it can only be lit from the source.
I'd forgotten that feeling ten years later. But I found it again once more.
As a writer and a constant reader of books, I've begun to feel increasingly disconnected from other people. I think it comes from spending too much time alone in a room. There's a glass barrier between myself and the rest of the world. I'm seeing it all at one remove, through the TV screen of my eyes, from several feet back in my head. Maybe it's a consequence of traveling alone, when the glances of strangers don't rest on you for very long.
I sit on the sea wall of Casco Viejo, up above the Plaza de Francia, and I have to keep reminding myself where I am: just above South America, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, lost ten years in my past.
I walk through the streets, revisiting places I'd been, trying to recapture how I felt then: alone, disoriented, unable to speak the language, lost and without purpose at the start of a journey that would change me in ways I had yet to comprehend. But it's no good. I can't connect.
I sit in a restaurant and eat alone, writing these words as dew drops run down the side of a beer bottle. I'm inside my head and it's like these other people aren't even here. They're just a few feet away, but they're behind that screen. They can't reach me and I can't touch them. And in an hour or two they won't even remember that our lives intersected.
But this doesn't bother me. I'm happy to sit here mute among strangers. Writing. thinking. Reflecting on the past.
I only regret that the city has changed so much, and I've changed along with it. It feels like I no longer belong in this world. I can't find that person I set free in Central America ten years before. The person I wrote about in Vagabond Dreams. Did I change so much when I crossed that gap to Punta Paitilla and the West? It was supposed to make everything easier.
I resigned myself to a different vision. And then, just as I'm about to leave this cantina, the 70's funk stops and a song by Maná comes on the stereo. It's a different Maná mix, but it's one of those songs I bought on a cheap dubbed tape in Bluefields, Nicaragua. I listened to it the rest of the way through Central America ten years ago, and it's plaintive, hopelessly romantic songs became wrapped up in the feeling of that journey.
I smiled because I knew The Road was sending me a reminder of what I used to be, and of what I still am. And it brought the past back to me again in these same streets.
Then....
...and now
Panama City, 10 years later.
The plaza in the colonial district still looks the same. The tidal flats are still muddy, and they still smell of the sea. Punta Paitilla still juts out across the bay, a glimmering jewel of finance, luxury, and life lived on another plane. The big ships are still there, floating at random anchorages, waiting to transit the Canal. A couple of them even look familiar. But so much has changed.
New buildings have gone up in the banking district, and there's a condo boom down the shore at Punta del Este. The Hotel Central no longer squats in it's own filth. It's been completely gutted and work crews are busy turning it into a casino. A Brazilian company has built a causeway on land reclaimed from the sea, so you no longer have to drive down the Avenida Central to get to Casco Viejo -- through the "dangerous" area, the place where I stayed last time. The entire colonial district is under construction, and I see scaffolding on every street as centuries-old buildings get a facelift. I wonder if the poor have been pushed out, as I predicted ten years before?
I've changed too, ten years later. Last time I stayed in a hotel surrounded by prostitutes just off the Avenida Central. I paid fifteen dollars for a room, which was too much, but I was just getting started and I didn't know any better. I went everywhere on foot and by bus. It was my first real trip. That pivotal journey that changes your world so that nothing ever looks the same again. I wrote about it all in Vagabond Dreams.
Now I'm staying in a five star hotel in the banking district. A place where a butler comes to press my suit, and where my mini bar is restocked with ice each night. I'm here on business, and I no longer have endless time to wander these streets, or to sit and read on a bench by the sea. It feels like I've crossed that gulf I wrote about in this exact spot so many years before -- that gap to Paitilla and the west -- and I no longer belong here.
Was that the price I paid?
Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Belize...
Belize City was a bit like Bluefields on the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua: a seedy place with an aura of decay. But it didn't feel like Central America. The musical lilt of Caribbean English had already displaced the Spanish I'd grown used to, and that Latin timelessness was missing, as were the Spanish colonial buildings and the social hunting ground of the plazas. Belize had a different sort of timelessness: a lazy island grace of rusting corrugated roofs and gap-toothed smiles.
Water taxi engines fired, and we motored out of the dirty estuary and into the sea. Piles of luggage filled the centre of the open boat. Passengers squeezed onto benches that lined both sides. Only three were locals. There were no backpackers; the country wasn't quite cheap enough for them. I was deep behind the lines of White Leg territory.
Three Brits sat in the bow. Their close-cropped hair and angry red sunburns gave them away -- that and the fact that they were thoroughly trashed at 8am. Belize still hosts a small British military contingent. Prior to independence in 1981 it was British Honduras; a centuries-old thorn in the side of the Spanish Main, founded by pirates and logwood cutters. The territory is still shown as a province on Guatemalan maps.
The Belize I saw was little more than a carbon copy of every other overexploited Caribbean vacationland. And it marked the end of my road -- but only for this journey. I knew by then that the terminus of each trip was a fallow period, when the lessons learned broke free and rose to the surface. I needed to think through those lessons of my Central American road before they got buried beneath the day to day routines of home. And so I stopped in Belize not to observe or to experience or to sightsee, but to buy time.
The water was transparent blue, and the tropical sun warmed my face and legs, inducing a comfortable torpor. I breathed deeply of the fresh salt air as we bounced through light chop that peppered my clothing with gentle spray, and I slept.
An hour later I was among coral islands. I jumped out at the wooden pier of Caye Caulker. The next stop was a larger island with roads and cars, geared to wealthy package tourists. I wanted to be able to walk everywhere.
A few sandy roads threaded the little village, but cars had been prohibited. Electric golf carts hummed as they rolled past at pedestrian speed. Wooden stilt-houses were painted yellow and blue. There must have been a time when they were vibrant and cheerful, but they'd since become blistered and cracked. The faded buildings resembled the people in a way: they'd let themselves go in the listless tropical heat. Island girls in calico shuffled down sandy streets with a lazy swirling gait. Rasta wannabes with matted dreds and knit caps loafed by the pier drinking beer and selling weed. The white legs of tourists flashed like ice shards in the sun, with souvenir t-shirts proudly displaying their past travels and origins.
The main strip was lined with open-air restaurants and bars. Trinket shops sold Guatemalan handicrafts at inflated prices. A profusion of dive shops offered packaged SCUBA and snorkel excursions to all the same places. After Corn Island, I couldn't help but feel disappointed.
I found a cheap room at Lucy's Guesthouse on a side street. It took some searching. Lucy was a wrinkled black lady with a ready smile and a low chuckling laugh, and I liked her immediately. Her guesthouse was quiet. The party places were further down the strip. She placed a deep wooden armchair on the veranda in front of my room, and a hammock swung limp in the sandy yard. I knew right away where I would spend my island evenings.
Places like Belize made me feel a little ridiculous. Locals pandered and deferred to white trash North Americans, the bottom of the suburb-dwelling TV generation back home. Down there they're wealthy. Bob and Martha, obese beyond belief, waddle around in tent-like Bermuda shorts; they argue and fight over twenty cents for a crummy whittled handicraft and think their bargaining quite shrewd. It's a microcosm of vapid Western pop culture, consumer cannibalism garnished with quaint dark-skinned locals and musical accents. But the locals all want what the tourists have.
Moments in those places shattered the aura of adventure that had permeated my travels at the far edges of the map. They reminded me of the bland homogenization that's infecting the globe. I couldn't buy in to the illusion of paradise those places tried to present, and I felt guilty to be a Westerner.
Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Bluefields, Nicaragua, on the Mosquito Coast, exactly 10 years ago...
I walked to the Enitel building to place a call before dinner. I hadn't sent a message home in weeks. I expected end-of-world explorer's reports, yellowed clippings of my obituary: Last seen on a jungle boat to the Mosquito Coast.
The line crackled and fizzed. My father's voice was an echo far away, like talking to someone at the wrong end of binoculars.
"I'm in this town called Bluefields, in Nicaragua," I shouted, enunciating carefully to make myself heard over the tired wires. "We were out on an island so I was kinda cut off."
"Are you getting enough to eat? Do you have enough money?"
Back home, Nicaragua still conjured images of extreme poverty and revolutionary violence.
I tried to sound tired and hungry. "Well, we drank fifty-cent beers on the beach all day and ate five dollar lobster for supper. Every night we drank a bottle of the world's best rum under the stars. Oh, and there was a shortage of rooms, so I had to sleep between these two European girls." I paused. "I'm getting by."
There was a long silence.
"You still there?"
I heard a grunt. "You lucky bastard."
"Yeah, well I knew this place would be okay when I saw they had ice."
"What do you mean?"
"Ice is civilization."
"What?"
"Never mind."
The line went dead.
Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Panama's Darien Gap...
Banana trees and low bushy plants lined the dirt path that led beyond the village's last tambo. Jungle pathways were never entirely clear, no matter how recently someone had used them. The forest reclaimed everything with a creeping growth that was almost visible. Keeping those vital roadways open meant that each person who passed must absent-mindedly cut back the encroaching growth. The constant ringing of these slashing blows became the music of our march.
Beyond the outskirts of the village we picked our way across a churned-up clear cut of decaying logs, tangled branches, and muddy hummocks, a place where the ochre and black topsoil of the jungle had been laid bare with simple tools. Green brush smouldered in small piles, releasing slow, reluctant wisps of acrid smoke that hung in the thick moist air. This was El Coco's larder.
A solitary man worked the far side of the clearing, painstakingly, by hand. The dull ching of his machete as it cut through thin branches and the heavy thunk as it bit into stumps echoed off the broad leafed plants that hemmed us in.
Beyond the clearing we were completely swallowed up by the green-tinted light of undersea. The machete's efforts were silenced as suddenly as though a heavy curtain had fallen. The forest deadened all sound, absorbing even the soft puffs of our breath.
At first the Embera tried to shepherd me around danger. They guarded me nervously, as one would a toddler taking first steps. But I soon caught them whispering about how silently I contorted around the foliage rather than crashing through the undergrowth and moving it around me.
They hadn't expected it, but I was more at home in the jungle than I was in the village. I'd grown up in the woods, camping with my friend Rob Wilson in lean-tos we build with a hatchet and twine. Studying the forest's silence, blending in with the sights and smells that surrounded me, seeking understanding rather than domination. It was a way of looking at things, a way of moving that we held in common, and it brought us closer together.
Massive outsized trees with wide buttressed roots propped up the canopy, lending the forest the aura of an enormous outdoor cathedral. Vines, mosses and epiphytes hung down in tangled green confusion, living off the larger trees in a symbiotic Gordian knot, as the weak always do upon the strong. It would have been impossible to extract one component without damaging all the rest.
As the shock of that first glance wore off, I began to notice the details: the intricate veins on a leaf's broad canvas; a flower that lent a pastel flicker to the deep sea of green; twigs that looked like insects, and insects that mimicked twigs. Monkeys and squirrels leaped and swung through the mid-ranges, while smaller birds flitted from branch to branch. At our feet, highways of leafcutter ants crisscrossed the muddy path and vanished into the undergrowth, nearly invisible one way but signaling their presence with bobbing green-flags in the other.
Whenever the screech of a birdcall pierced the silence, Chung froze and turned his face to the source of the sound. He touched me on the shoulder and extended a slow arm, then whispered a name close to my ear. I squinted to pull the hazy outlines of a shape from a background of shades of green, but sometimes it was so far away that I couldn't even make out the faintest blotch.
In the jungle, everything was wet. The thin soil was forever leaching water that the trees squeezed from the moist air, or the rain deposited in frequent downpours. This runoff collected in hollows, carving miniature canyons that threaded their way to the Jacque and eventually to the ocean. The vegetation was thicker at the edges of streams; it arched over the water in a tightly woven canopy, and damp leaves leached to our flesh like wet paper when we passed.
We forded small rivers, knee-deep, 8 or 10 feet across. Sometimes we crossed slippery log bridges with arms outstretched, and other times we waded through limpid pools, their cool waters flooding my boots and wicking up the legs of my pants.
Once a trail met ours, and Ricardo pointed down it and named a hidden village several days away on foot. These were the trade routes of the jungle, connecting fragile habitations, allowing them to share the simple goods they grew and wove to make life easier, or just to pass the time.
It was a necessary network, but after walking for so long in silence, with only the dim light of the forest all around us, the thought of other humans felt sinister somehow. In nature I could be reasonably sure of what I was dealing with. I found the human world of opaque motives much more difficult to navigate.
During my time with them, I learned that the Embera of Panama's Darien Gap lived in harmony with their surroundings. They didn't try to be "close to Nature" - the idea would never have occurred to them. They were Nature, an inextricable segment of that community of life. It's misguided to revere them for this, or to demonize them. They're simply being what they are; acting in accordance with their essence. But we can and should learn from them.
The lesson is that there's more than one way to exist. The prominent delusion of our Western culture is that we have discovered the best way to live, and that we must therefore foist it on the rest of the world. The American Dream (for lack of a better term), consumerism, even the very notion of linear progress - we've exported these ideals through our infectious media, and they're spreading like a plague.
We must come to recognize that our worldview is not right for all places and all times; that there's room for diversity, for other ways of living and of seeing. Our monoculture is destroying places like the rainforests of South America, and fomenting resentment and unrest in places like the Middle East. We're making the world unliveable by trying to force everyone to live in a single way.
The Embera have developed a way of living that exists in harmony with their place, and we must recognize that other cultures have done the same. Rather than conquer them as we've always done, we should study their adaptations and their lessons, and we should learn to do the same for ourselves.
Borders signify change and a new beginning. They're a crossing over into unknown territory, evoking feelings of possibility that contain great hope as well as great fear. But borders are also a closing off. When we enter new terrain, we're closing off what came before both physically and philosophically. We can never go back. Nature allows no birth without a corresponding death.
Major life changes often slip by unnoticed. We never think to mourn the passing of our childhood until middle age. But I stopped one day in the middle of a dusty road at the edge of Nicaragua to look back at where I'd come from. I shed my skin, sloughed off what I'd been before, and emerged transformed and renewed. I put one foot forward, then another, and I stepped into a new future.
