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Thursday, December 8, 2011

Village Economics

As the world economy seems on the verge of crumbling, I think of the statement by Jesus that “The meek shall inherit the earth.” This is usually taken as a bit of hyperbole, as just the observations that kingdoms may rise and fall, but the poor shall abide through all the power changes – or that the greedy will go to hell, but the poor will be worthy of entering heaven.

However I am starting to wonder that Jesus might have meant this in a directly literal sense – that the meek, the poor, shall literally inherit the earth.

For those whose lives are all about money and the power over it, a worldwide economic meltdown will be a disaster. As North America and Europe and Japan become increasingly ruined by pollution, radiation, and crime on every level from the street corner to the government, those who live by money will be rendered increasingly vulnerable. The Nehiyawok (Cree) people put it well: “When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover that you cannot eat money.”

People in the highly industrialized lands of the world, the rich countries, are generally at a far remove from the basic necessities of life. The food they eat goes from farm to shipper to wholesaler to packager to another shipper to distributor to retailer. The farms on which they rely are disappearing at an alarming rate. The water they drink comes through conduits often from sources hundreds of miles away. The homes they live in were built with materials trucked in from a great distance – and, if they lose these homes, there is nothing nearby from which they can construct a new home, nor do they know how to do so, except by paying a company to put it up.

But here in Panamá it’s different.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

"They Are Just Stupid, Lazy Animals"

Panamanians have mostly learned about life in the United States from watching its films and television shows. Hollywood movies and situation comedies are a major staple on Panamian television – in fact, other than the local news programs, a few telenovelas (soap operas), and the occasional nature show, there’s precious little produced in Latin America.

As a result, a lot of Panamanians believe, rightly or wrongly, that most United States citizens are incredibly wealthy, have one meaningless sexual affair after another, and shoot each other simply all the time. I also find it unpleasantly amusing to see how much swearing and cursing and sexually charged language there is in Hollywood’s offerings – I don’t think I have ever heard a local person utter even the mildest of epithets; only gringos.

This barrage of imagery, it seems to me, makes it hard for many folks here to accept that I’m not terribly different from them: they are so sure that people with my color eyes and skin are incredibly rich. I have to work hard to assure them that I have barely enough money to get by, that my life in the States was reasonably ordinary, and that I wish for no drama here, but just to live peacefully.

Sadly, a lot of expatriates living here do very little to dispel the image promoted on television. The financial assets held by many of these

people would be a pretty ordinary amount north of México. But here the U.S. dollar goes so much farther that these gringos think their money somehow justifies their turning into greedy monsters. They hire local people as workers, treating them like dirt, to put up gaudily ugly McMansions. They scream at these workers, usually in English because they can’t be bothered to learn Spanish, treating them like dirt, and spewing racist epithets like you wouldn't believe.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Hospitals and Healers

Where I lived in the United States and France, most people were unwell most of the time. They weren’t necessarily outright sick terribly often, but they never really felt the way people should feel; they were constantly tired (even when they got up in the morning), and burdened with indigestion, backaches, migraines, and breathing difficulties. They were often trying to work at their jobs while wishing they could just stay in bed, but, when they could rest, they found themselves unable to sleep. They would see the doctor, who would prescribe something, but they never really got better.

Here in las Tierras Altas (the Highlands) of Panamá there seems to

be a far lower incidence of low-grade illnesses such as colds and flus and chronic fatigue and allergies. I think a big reason for this is the relatively clean environment: the air here has very little if any industrial/vehicular pollution in it, the water is pure and full of healthy minerals, and the locally grown produce is healthy and nutritious. Also, people (except for the rich gringos and their big SUVs) get a lot more exercise here. Except for those rich gringos, most people don’t own cars; they walk to the grocery store, they walk to the bus stop, they walk to visit friends. The bus stop for me is a walk of several minutes, up a long incline, and I walk it quickly on purpose to increase the exercise potential.

But the most important health-inducing factor here is, without question, the lack of stress. The local people – Panamanians (Latinos) and Ngobe Bugle (Native Americans) alike – are a very easygoing, laid-back people. It frustrates a lot of gringos that they’ll say, “I’ll come by to do your landscaping tomorrow,” and then not show up for two or three days, but that’s the way they are: they will get to everything, but they feel no anxiety to rush through things; instead, they do it when the time comes.

If anxiety and stress are what you want, I recommend the big seacoast cities – the city of Panamá, Davíd, Colón – where you’ll find plenty of tension and pollution

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Spirits are Walking Abroad

This morning the silence is not empty but full. There are presences out there, around my little house; I can sense them. I look through the windows and see the cold mist breathing in and among the trees like ghosts. I step outside, wanting to take photographs of it, but my poor little camera is not up to the task, since it has no settings that can be adjusted. But it would be hard to record an image of these wandering spirits with even a good camera; perhaps it is their wish not to be photographed, and their nature to prevent it. Back inside I return.

And then unexpectedly, with the appearance of the sun over the great

Mount Barú, there is light everywhere, chasing the last vestiges of these mist-ghosts back into their shadowy lairs. Dawn arrives in splendor, with intense azure above the lower horizon, deepening over the mountains, and, high up in the firmament, a few thin cirrus glowing in saffron and pink, caught in the rays of the Sun yet below the horizon, for here on the earth below, all is still dark, still dark.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Real People

By now I’ve gotten pretty used to the reality that nothing can be taken for granted.

No matter whether a Panamanian service provider says “Tomorrow” or “A week from next Tuesday”, it invariably translates into “When I have nothing I’d rather be doing, and need the money.”

Nothing works dependably, human or otherwise. The electricity and the internet go out at least once a day, sometimes for just moments, and sometimes for hours.

The public water system is also doomed to frequent failure. Mountain

water – it is clear and delicious – flows by gravity down plastic PVC pipes. The system is such a hodgepodge that even Rube Goldberg would shudder. The pipes are sometimes buried, and sometimes simply laid across the surface of the land. There are unexplainable L joints zigging the pipes into unnecessary detours, incomprehensible junctures, dead-ends, and my favorite – frequent breaks that send geysers of water spurting into the air, and which remain unrepaired for weeks on end.


When the water system fails, most residents, even the gringos, rely on barrels they’ve had under their roof runoff downspouts to collect rainwater. Curious, I asked what they if the water system fails in the Dry Season, and the rainbarrels are empty. “Oh,” I was told, “we just go down to the river with a couple buckets.”

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Monday, September 26, 2011

The Frontier Land

What does it mean when we say this is a frontier land?

A friend suggested to me that the term carries an unpleasant implication of prejudice against the Native people who live here, who once were the only human residents. But I think it’s an appropriate way to speak of this land.

The seacoast cities, and some of the more gringified inland communities, are certainly laden with all the unpleasant trappings of Western civilization. But even there you see Ngobe Bugle people dressed in their traditional raiment – about the only concession they make is to wear shoes in the cities, because of the invaders’ penchant for letting broken glass and dirty needles accumulate in the streets. These Ngobe Bugle pass through like the wind, like ghosts and spirits. They do not tap their feet to the loud Latin music blaring from loudspeakers on the public buses and in the shops.

They say not a word. Their faces, carved from the same stone that their ancestors immortalized, show no expression. The Panamanians and the gringos pay them absolutely no attention unless they stand directly in front of them and take some of the invaders’ money out of their pouches to buy something.

But I look at them; I am again and again struck by the similarity of what I am seeing to photographs of the American West in the 1880s or so. I see a proud people learning to turn invisible before they are made to disappear by the advancing flood of, ahem, civilization. I love especially to watch

the Ngobe Bugle women passing through the Panamanian world in their colorful dresses; they are eternally unhurried and unruffled, simply visitors from another world, not participating in this one; they are more like wild animals in their utter separateness. Sometimes I surprise them when I greet them in their language – their expressions do not change, but you can see in their eyes the thought, “What, you see me? You, a foreigner, can speak words in our language?”

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Where the Wind Blows

I learned the other day that my little house back in the Catskill Mountain region of upstate New York was destroyed in a hurricane. Apparently the combination of wind and water pulled down a tree, which crashed through the roof into what had been my bedroom. If I had been in it at the time, I might well have been killed. At minimum, I would now be homeless and destitute. But, instead, I am alive and well and very happy in las Tierras Altas (Highlands) of Panamá.

One friend walked through it, talking to me on the telephone and describing the damage. I learned that thieves had come in, in my absence, and stolen pretty much everything – furniture, dishes and silverware, and precious family heirlooms like my great-grandmother’s handmade coverlet from the 1880s. Later, a neighbor came by and, with my permission, took what little was left to give to the poor. Since a lot of people, including families I knew, had lost everything in the hurricane, I was glad to do what little I could in this way.

What are things? Just things! All my life I have preached and taught that we must not allow ourselves to become possessed by our possessions. As one medicine man taught me, “Walk lightly upon this Earth.” For many years that little house with my few belongings was all I had. So it’s gone. In any case, I have had no plans to return to it; I couldn’t afford a return even if I wanted to. All I have lost is the option of going back, which I have never intended to exercise. In any case, I have had no plans to return to it; I couldn’t afford a return even if I wanted to. So, whether it exists or not is all the same to me. So, let the mortgage people, the insurance people, the tax collectors, and the lawyers fight over the bones. For, whether it exists or not, I have

what’s most precious: my memories. And look how Creator has looked out for me: Rather than losing everything, I’m safe here in another country.

Another country? I’m in another world!

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Taking Life as it Comes

Coming home in the darkness the other night was a wonderful experience for

me that most people in the Northern Hemisphere will never experience. If and when residents of the “developed” countries must go somewhere in pitch dark, without the incandescent lighting they completely expect and rely on, they are confused and frightened.

Here in Paso Ancho, even when there’s electricity, there are long stretches of the calles that after the sun has set are unlit by any artificial light – neither streetlamps nor houses with electricity are nearby, for these parts of town are mostly inhabited by Ngobe Bugle people. But, when the electricity goes out, as often happens, then the entire town is completely black. The only exceptions are the houses off in the gringo part of town; there the big gringo generators are fired up, generating an alien effulgence that seems to be from another world; you have to be careful not to look their way or you lose your night vision.

These nights, as I find my way home after having dinner and a pleasant evening with friends, are for me a fine adventure indeed. I don’t have a flashlight as I negotiate the calles (what pass for streets in this village, basically dirt paths), and I don’t need one. I let the darkness teach me: it is a Grandfather, a wise master who reminds me to slow down and become acutely aware of my surroundings through the senses, other than sight, yet available to me. This wisdom I am learning to invoke as well during the day.

On either side of the road are deep ditches, and often there are dangerous

deep ragged ruts right down the middle of it, erosion from the runoff from the heavy downpours of Rainy Season. There are, besides, large rocks here and there that can upset the unwary. And I never know if another section of the road has been washed away since the last time I came this way. So, if I’m not extremely careful, I could break an ankle or leg, or even fall and hit my head. And nobody would know about me until sometime the following day. So I must carefully use my senses of touch and hearing and what information sight does afford me.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Tortillas of Love


Now I realize what a severely limited diet people are forced to eat in North America and Europe. Thanks to the megafarms and food marketers, the only grain is wheat, and it is so common that many people develop allergies to it. Much more grain is grown to fatten beef cattle to be flipped over into fast-food hamburgers. Fruits rarely go beyond apples, oranges, bananas, and grapes, maybe the occasional peach or apricot. And the staple vegetables are just corn, carrot, and potato. Salads – when North Americans even eat them – comprise mostly varieties of lettuce and tomato out of which all food value has been genetically engineered. Corn syrup, indigestible fats, and unpronounceable chemicals are inside all that pretty packaging. They are grown in polluting fertilizers and weed- and insect-killers that will also kill human beings. They are picked before they are ripe because of the vast distances they must travel to your supermarket, stuffed with artificial preservatives and flavor enhancers, wrapped in tons of plastic that winds up in landfills, trundled in dank trucks over thousands of miles, consuming fuel and producing roadway pollution.

Here in Panamá the variety of fruits and vegetables is astounding. I have been discovering an endless number of new flavors and textures, and half the time I don’t even know the name for what I’m enjoying. Only hours before I pick up some interesting tuber or gourd or fruit at the grocery it was still basking under sun and rain, in rich fields no more than a few miles away.

I’m crazy, for instance, about otoë. It is a tuber with a shaggy

dark-brown skin. Once I wash and peel it, I have its lovely lavender flesh, which can be eaten raw, or baked, boiled, or fried. When you first bite into it, especially raw, it has a “snap” to it slightly reminiscent of ginger, but as you continue to chew it provides a wonderful velvety flavor. It is flabbergastingly good cooked soft in a stew. Then there is yuca – not to be confused with its friend related only homonymically, yucca. Yuca, again, is wonderful raw or cooked, with a yellow flesh that tastes like well-buttered potato. Both of these, I’m told, are rich in vitamins and minerals.

Chayote is plentiful; one can buy it at the grocery, but I find it for free growing wild here and there. Think of it as shaped like a large knobbly green pear, but with a flesh reminiscent of zucchini. And also ullama, which I discovered when it fell off a farmer’s truck; superficially resembling a melon in size and shape, its flesh is like that of a hearty squash. Onion is grown plentifully here, spreading its redolent aroma through the countryside from each household's little field.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Artifacts: Art and Facts

In North America and in Panamá, and probably everywhere else in this hemisphere, students are taught in school only about history after the arrival of the Europeans – a clear ethnocentrism in which the subliminal message is not just that pre-Columbian Native American history is not worth mentioning, but that Native Americans are themselves not equal to those Europeans.

This double standard, I think, is especially devastating for Native

American students throughout the Americas. Here in Paso Ancho, where I live, the student body at the local primary school is eighty-five percent Ngobe Bugle. Yet the staff, which is entirely composed of Panamanians (people of Latino culture and claimed Latino descent), teaches only Spanish and not Ngobe Bugle, teaches history only since the “arrival” (i.e., bloody religious and political conquest) of the Conquistadores, teaches only Panamanian dance and music. These Native American children are educated into Panamanians in Ngobe Bugle bodies, never hearing a word about their culture or heritage, like it doesn’t exist. And I believe even the fifteen percent who are Panamanian students suffer too, from never being exposed to the joy of learning about this great civilization that once flourished here, and is still struggling to survive.

The signs are everywhere of the great Native American presence. I


went to what is called an Archæological Institute, situated on a working farm, and was stunned by the beautiful works of ancient art dug up right there. An institute it isn’t – my companions and I were given a tour by the farmer’s son

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

In Diós

Sometimes I feel like if you lifted North America up, all the loose parts would fall down through Mexico and get stuck at the narrow point that suddenly bends from west to east – Panama. This land is the crossroads of the world, the juncture of North and South America, the meeting-point of the Pacific and the Atlantic, a place where you find all races, all terrains, and every climate from northern temperate to tropical.

Here in Panama one sees a lot of young backpackers traveling on their parents’ credit cards – tall, lanky guys in baggy khaki pants, adorned with blond halos of long hair and not-yet-full beards, their arms around short attractive young ladies without bras, out to see the world from the road. By and large these are a pleasant sort to chat with. They seem to have some respect for the local cultures, are unafraid of a stiff hike in the back country, and more likely than not speak a reasonably serviceable high-school Spanish. With their height they seem to float above the general population as they stride on long legs through the shopping districts and up the mountainsides.

Tourists older than they generally stay close to coastal resorts or mountain-country spa hotels where they feel safe from the rather frightening local population. But many middle-aged foreigners are are here to put their vast sums of money into mega-mansions that would have cost them a lot more back home, or else to escape bad debts or legal trouble. Still, some of the gringos I meet are quite nice people. In a visit to Boquete I chatted in German with a visiting Swiss couple, Bruno and Renate, in French with a delightful young man from Haiti, and finally in French and Spanish with a quite interesting man who had lived for many years in Montréal.

Gringos who settle here, however, often cannot be bothered to learn to speak Spanish.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Woo-Woo Religion and Silent Spirituality

In the center of nearby Volcán there is what appears to be a Roman Catholic

church – but when you look closely, you see that behind the façade is only an empty cement floor. The interior of the church was destroyed a few years ago by a tornado – a rare phenomenon in this land.

For me, this outside without an inside depicts the nature of Roman Catholicism here. It is supposedly the dominant religious expression of Panama, but it is basically a front, with little of substance behind it. Parishioners may attend church on the major holidays, such as Easter and Christmas; they will turn out for the big parades down the main streets on certain saints’ days, and they may seek the services of the local priest for baptisms, weddings, and funerals. But otherwise, they have little real involvement with this denomination. For the Ngobe Bugle people in particular it is at best a veneer – a reflection only on the surface of the waters, and their ancient traditions continue to persist beneath this seemingness put on, no doubt, just to satisfy these invaders of their ancient land now, for a time, their vaunted overlords.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

The Eye of the Beholder

People are very self-conscious of their appearance in the so-called developed countries. Men and women cannot walk by a mirror, it seems, without at least checking their faces and hair – or just to admire themselves. They consider with great care photographs of themselves before deciding which one they will allow others to see. Many choose to alter their natural appearance with props or even surgery, or employ subterfuges to cover up those qualities they consider to be less than fully appealing.

In Panamá, this self-consciousness is increasingly less apparent the farther down one is on the social scale. Gringo women here, as in the Northern Hemisphere, wouldn’t even think of going out into public without being perfectly dressed, coiffed, and made up. Panamanian women (that is those who claim Spanish ancestry) are far less concerned about these matters, though they generally choose outfits that they think make them look more attractive; they at least put on at least lipstick and often pluck their eyebrows. The Ngobe Bugle women, while their bodies are always washed and their hair carefully combed, while they invariably wear immaculately clean traditional dresses, never wear makeup nor in any way do they try to “improve” their appearance – and yet I have never seen a people with women (and men) so frequently beautiful as they.

This lack of self-consciousness is never so obvious as when these Native Americans see a photograph of themselves. They do show surprise, pleasure, and even pride when I present them with pictures of their children. But they are typically nonplussed or even merely uninterested in their own images. I am sure that in part it is because they rarely encounter themselves as an object – their homes don’t include mirrors, and when they wash their clothes in a stream they show about as much interest in their reflection as a cat.

The faces they see are the faces of nature: the ever-changing faces of the mountains that benignly look down on them, the faces of fields and forests in the

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

A Testament of Testicles

Up in the pre-dawn darkness, fumbling into clothes, joining friends outside. Within moments we are walking through a cold and silent Paso Ancho – groping our way, actually, since the night renders these dirt roads invisible – to the home of our friend Inéz. There, sweet lady that she is, we are treated to delicious cups of coffee; it is ubiquitous here, and far more superb than even the most “gourmet” brands available in the United States or France, since clearly travel and time quickly degrade the quality of the beans. As we sip the aromatic beverage, the sun outside Inéz’s windows gradually weaves his beams into the atmosphere from behind Barú. We see a field of yellow flowers, something like Keats’s daffodils, on the other side of which is the local Roman Catholic church. Soon we will be on our way to the top of the Florentina.

I was up this mountain once before to see the farm high on the Florentina run by Inéz’s estranged husband.

On the way, however, we took the wrong trail at one fork and wound up in territory new to us both. During the climb we encountered two very friendly Ngobe Bugle men, in heavy rain, hacking up a fallen tree with only their machetes. As we reached the top, all around us were wild steep slopes, nothing horizontal, and the constant, intense sound of the rain.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Signs and Portents

Signs appeared yesterday in Paso Ancho advertising a property for sale. The property in question has been inhabited for years by a family with whom I am friends. The first sign I noticed was affixed in front of their vegetable garden, which is where they grow the food they need to survive. The parents are hardworking and deeply devoted to their children. The children are charming: whenever I walk by their home,

they start shouting my name with glee and circle around me so we can laugh and play together; as a volunteer I have also taught them in the local primary school, and know them to be excellent students.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Kindle, Late, by Candlelight

I know this must strain the credulity of my younger readers, but I vividly recall a time when there was no internet, when telephones stayed in one place, when television consisted of one, maybe two snowy channels, when even electricity was not always a given out in the countryside. I remember a time when grownups kept in touch by way of things called letters, which were written in ink on paper, without spellcheck programs. I remember when children played outside the house, without any electronic equipment whatsoever, in an environment known as “reality”.

But today in North America or Europe these services are considered as essential as food, air, and water. One grows accustomed to their availability anywhere and everywhere. In the days of my youth, if we saw people walking alone down the street, laughing and shouting and carrying on a conversation, we would assume they were crazy. Today, we conclude that they are talking to a friend by way of an earpiece. Sometimes I’m not so sure they’re not crazy too.

Back in, ahem, civilization I would smile to see people tapping away on laptop computers while frying their bodies at the beach, or chatting with friends on their cells even as they climbed some mountain – presumably to “get away from it all”. Most amusing of all was hearing someone in the supermarket on the phone to the folks back home: “Do we need eggs? Well, what about milk?” Who needs a memory when we have electronics?

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Abuelo Enrique the Brujo

The public school system here is, sad to say, far below the standards set in North America, Europe, and the Far East. Yet, with a minuscule budget and many dedicated teachers, it does its best.

I shudder to think of its paucity in tiny rural villages far less proximate to urban centers than Paso Ancho. I have derived much joy from volunteering there – mostly, under the guise of helping the students with their English, I play guitar with them, leading them in standard American children’s songs such as “Old MacDonald” and “A Bicycle Built for Two”, the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic “Do: a Deer”, and can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head tunes like Raffi’s “Baby Beluga” and Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden”.

I’ve met relatively few local people whose school-learned English is better than rudimentary; those who are able to converse in the language have managed to do so either by their own initiative or in university. Most of the teachers make great effort to instruct in large, often unruly classes with little pedagogical equipment and virtually no books.

And to a considerable degree their work is undermined by the other well-established institution, the Roman Catholic Church. Either teachers unabashedly expound standard catechetical dogma as if it were fact (no de facto “separation of church and state here”) or, if their thinking is free of these maddening constraints, they don’t dare arouse the ire of officials, priests, and parents. One young lady – an intelligent person and clearly one who was a good student in school – insisted to me that evolution was falsehood and that fossils were put

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The Horns of Elfland

In The Circle of Life I noted how “The early European settlers thought the civilization they were building here [in North America] would be a New Jerusalem, but they only rebuilt the ‘fleshpots of Egypt’ they sought to escape on an even greater scale of greed and destruction.” My novel Rats Live on no Evil Star, written later, picked up this theme: “Every planet homo sapiens has found...,” one passage contends, “it has turned into another Earth – another tedious Earth just like the one they couldn’t wait to leave.”

But, previous to my departing forever from the United States, I wrote nowhere about this phenomenon so furiously as I did in The Wings of the Morning:

He sees this beautiful land fill up with immigrants, new residents from Ur who come and buy or just appropriate land, who build houses and schools and hospitals and shops. He sees this land levelled, garrisons built, and houses, always more houses going up. It looks more and more like Ur every day, the Ur he thought he had left forever.

No more do people trust each other, but instead trust the power of law. No more do they accept each other’s word, but bind everything with these written contracts that presuppose the potential of false representation.
The land now is holy no longer. The ceremonies are forgotten almost overnight, and the land and sky fill up with junk. Cycles of nature are ignored, humanity’s relationship with nature is forgotten. ...

They wear clothes from Ur. They work at jobs. They marry members of the other tribe, or people from Ur. They have children who know no songs, no stories, of their ancestors. The tribe has no ancestors any more. It is broken up, displaced, existent no more. The tribal network, the delicate spiderweb of relationships, is gone. Depression sinks down into his very bones, darkness envelops him like a cloud of bleak despair.

He is once again a tribe of one.

Nor is that all. He realizes ... he was the virus, the seed of doom: he brought the eventual destruction that brought down this tribal way. …

A flood has engulfed the world, sweeping through this valley within the circle of mountains, a flood of sameness, sweeping upon him and the tribe like an irresistible tide.

By whatever name – Egypt, Ur, Earth, or the United States – this flood of sameness is much the same, and the waves of this inundation, having rolled over most of the Northern Hemisphere, are now crashing down on what few lands remain relatively undrowned thereunder. The root of my anger is in how the culture (more of an anticulture) of greed has spread through the world like a virus. I grew up among the bitter fruits of the conquest of Native America; one must remember that I was born less than a century after slavery had been ended, legally at least, and only some sixty years after the “Indian Wars” (wars won far more often by deceit than force of arms) were concluded, and that the struggle for civil rights – still not truly and fully concluded in the United States – became fully engaged as recently as my teenage years. I grew up not in a place, but in suburbia, the same ubiquitous noplace suburbia that extends across North America, western Europe, eastern Australia, Korea, and Japan.

Sometimes I wonder why it is I am writing this description of my adventures in Panamá. I began it to help myself to keep the details of events fresh in my memory, and to share with friends. I came to Panamá in large measure to escape this anticulture of consumeristic sameness. But if in a published version I describe too well the beauty and wonder of this land and its people I could inadvertently

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

A Hobbit Hole in Costa Rica

My first three months in the country were coming to an end, and I had to renew my right to stay in the country.

On a regular tourist passport one can stay in Panamá for a maximum of ninety days. (Some say the limit is twice that – Panamanian law is rather fluid, and subject moreover to considerable interpretation by local officials; I prefer to err on the side of caution.) Unless a foreign national has secured one of the prized permanent visas, one must leave the country and then reënter Panamá after 72 hours.

I decided to go to the nearest border, which was at Río Sereño. I took the bus out of Volcán due west toward Costa Rica. This part of Panamá, new to me, I found ruggedly beautiful. But the best part of my travel was yet to come, and entirely by accident.



Río Sereño could just about have been a frontier town out of Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. Men wearing cowboy hats rode their horses among the buses and trucks in the main streets. Native American families sat together on benches watching the passers-by. A few streetside carts were set up to sell trinkets or snacks.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Bare Feet and Civilization

It is a lot like Hobbiton here, the delightful community in J. R. R. Tolkien’s fiction. The locals, many of them, especially the Native Americans, walk barefoot – and prefer it that way. Horses and donkeys, carts and wagons, are their preferred transportation system

(though when they need to they do take the bus into Volcán), and even in the larger cities one is not surprised to see someone in town on horseback to run errands. And they live in small, partly earth-sheltered homes that are small, clean, unpreprepossessing, yet comfortable. Flowers are everywhere: cultivated and wild, alongside roads, bushes and vines in yards, and in farmyards as well – coffee and onion and squash, to name three. The sense of growing things, some orderly in farms and others in a beautiful natural profusion, is palpable. The Earth is very much alive here.

The Lady of the Seasons, as some traditional nations call her, is very much present. The hills, mostly to the south of the village, are round like a woman’s breasts. Streams often join beneath hills, where they are nestled under trees and bushes, looking to me like the Lady’s beautiful genitalia. On the larger, steeper hills to the north one sees lines of coffee bushes sculptured onto steep flanks that are nearly cliff faces. The air is cheerful, and her breath, the breeze, is sweet and timeless.
However, to continue the analogy to Tolkien, Mordor encroaches – in the form of ultrawealthy gringos and their unnecessarily outsized mansions blotted into the middle of some otherwise transcendent vista, driving around in their big silver SUVs with tinted no-see-in windows.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Darkness and Wealth

Here I learn the fragility of life. My home is gone lost to me because of my poverty. My children are incredibly far away. Here I must survive by speaking a language in which I am not entirely comfortable, in a land where I am not yet quite at home. The country in which I was born is becoming impossible to live in - both because of the economy, which is devouring the middle class, and the new ultra-conservative rulers, who are making it just about illegal to be anything but rich and white.

I understood this sense of alienness and fragility well when I was in a small restaurant in Volcán that caters not to gringos but Panamanians. I was with a few friends, speaking in Spanish. I think at one point I said something in French, and a man seated alone at a table behind me came up babbling joyfully in Italian at me. He had mistakenly thought I had spoken in Italian, his own native tongue. As it happens, I do speak a little Italian, and he was overjoyed to hear the language on someone's lips other than his own. He embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks. He called me friend and brother, and went out into the night almost dancing with his joy.

But this land in which now I live is warm and welcoming in ways I have never experienced before.

One cannot imagine walking down the street in a typical American community, and walking up to the door of some stranger's house at suppertime, and being immediately ushered in and asked to partake of the evening meal. But here one can. One does not abuse this generosity of course, and one extends it as well. Yet here it happens.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

The Gringo Effect

There is a strange spot between Volcán and Paso Ancho where it seems like cars and trucks roll uphill.
Some people insist that it is an optical illusion created by the immediate surroundings, and others are quite as emphatic that it is magnetism from ore within the mountains pulling the vehicles along the incline. I do not know, myself, which it is, or if it is something else altogether. But it is an odd feeling, to say the least. A gringo friend of mine taking me somewhere demonstrated this spot, pulling to the side of the road, coming to a complete halt, and putting the car into neutral. The vehicle began to move - and the optical illusion, if that's what it is (as I think), is certainly quite convincing. I may just take a paperclip with me to that spot and see if the paperclip is drawn along.

But I'm not going to solve as easily a quiet controversy as to the effect of gringos (often called transplants, expatriates, and the like) on the village of Paso Ancho and a thousand just like it in Latin America and the world.

A respected friend of mine here, of European origin, points out persuasively that, when he first came here quite a few years ago, "There was nothing." By that he means there were no paved roads, no supermarket, no public water supply, not much electricity. The arrival of the gringoes, he insisted, meant two things: an inflow of capital, improving the collective wealth of Paso Ancho, and the opportunity to learn new, marketable skills.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Approaching Abuelo Barú

Most of my days are spent writing. One would think that living in France would be inspiring - to be in the land of Baudelaire, Gide, de Maupassant, Camus, Rimbaud, Saint-Exupéry, Yourçenar, and so on - but no, I wrote nothing of significance the whole time I was there; if I hadn't translated my novel Rats Live on no Evil Star into French, I would consider the time (as far as writing is concerned) virtually wasted. But in the first month alone after arriving in Panama I completed seven stories and four poems.

Every now and then as I work on my writings I hear a low-pitched meow from outside the door. I know who it is; it's my friend, the orange cat. He's not quite a year old, not fully grown. I don't know with what humans, if any, he lives, but he is always clean and friendly. He is kind enough to accept my humble offerings of meat and milk.

Then he will sit in my lap and clean his fur, emitting a loud deep purr, and sometimes wander around my casita just to see what's up. Then he disappears until the next time he condescends to call on me. I hope he appreciates the many cats who spent years training me to be a good servant.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

I like to say - adapting an old Americanism to the situation - that here in Panama I can really wake up and smell the coffee. The hills around here are dotted with coffee farms. My landlord, Wulf, has his own plot of coffee within just a few yards of my front door.

Every morning I brew myself my daily ambrosia made from beans grown in that plot.

There is no other way to put it than bluntly: the coffee here is so much better than any I ever had in North America or Europe. After hearing me remark about the coffee here, several locals have quietly let me know that the coffee they sell abroad is inferior, and that the best of the crop is reserved for here. I can believe it.

One morning I had the immense pleasure of helping to pick this season's crop of coffee beans. The small white flowers on these plants (somewhere between bush- and tree-size) exude a delicious aroma, and the beans themselves have a soft white pulp that is surprisingly sweet and delicious - and full of caffeine, so don't eat too many!

There was something satisfying about this simple, pleasant chore. After watching onion harvesters at work the previous day, and being tempted to join them for a while, this was a treat.

I wondered as I gathered the beans who it was who first said, "You know, Bill, I've got a great idea. Let's try gathering these beans, clean out the stems, wash them, skin them, let them ferment, then let them dry until they're black, roast them, grind them up, and finally put them in a strainer and pour hot water through them, and drink the results."

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Gringo Weather

Everybody tells me that the weather here used to be reasonably predictable, but that it is no longer. And everybody - the gringos, the Panamanians, the Native Americans - offer the same reason: worldwide industrial pollution. I arrived here in the dry season, and it has been, for days at a time, extremely rainy. I've been told that last year's rainy season was the worst anyone can remember (hence the neighborhood meeting

about directing the rainwater runoff), and that the way this dry season has been suggests the coming rainy season will be even worse this year. Most days this dry season are lovely, however, yet somehow people have a sense - and I see the workers striving hard to bring in the harvest.

Predictability has long disappeared from the Northern Hemisphere. The ice cap is melting. Horrible snowstorms. Intense heat waves. Long weeks without rain or long weeks of nothing but. The locals here in Panama tell me that they, at least, enjoyed good weather and knew with confidence how the weather would be in a day, a week, a month, even a year. No longer, they say. The gringo civilization has destroyed that confidence. I have arrived here in time to witness the invasion of evil consequences from the pollution of the industrialized countries.

Of course, to some degree the Panamanians have contributed - trucks and automobiles here are badly tuned and emit a lot of poison, factory emissions are virtually unregulated, and many farmers use DDT and other equally horrible chemicals. But, then again, Panama, like so many third-world countries, has little choice in these matters because its economics are not strong enough to provide any choice - and that, once again, is the fault of industrialized countries. Moreover, the fact that the economy has changed, now necessitating trucks and cars, even if poorly maintained, is the effect of industrialization coming from abroad.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Through the River and Over the Woods

What one sees in the roads – the likely possibility that the locals deliberately leave them in minor disrepair to discourage the gringos – seems also true at the river. When I first arrived, I could find no simple way to traverse the Chiriquí Viejo other than dancing across on the stones like the locals do, and hope not to fall in. The bridge that had straddled the fording place, someone explained, had washed away in the last rainy season, and nobody had gotten around to putting up a new one.

This fording place is, however, a frequently used thoroughfare. I have grown accustomed to seeing local people dance across on wet stones surrounded by roiling white rapids, clearly familiar so with the crossing that they didn’t hesitate but seemed almost to fly over the waters. In my desire to visit the other side – which looked fascinatingly wild from the Paso Ancho side where I stood – I was building up my courage to try to emulate them, or perhaps adopt the coward’s route and take to the water with pants legs rolled up and my socks and shoes in hand.

But then one day I came down and found a new bridge had been built.

In its own way it rivals the engineering marvels of the world – the Golden Gate Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge, even. But it was not built for gringo traffic: it consists of three logs, one sagging in the middle, braced at either end by piles of unsecured rocks, and two lengths of barbed wire for handholds. It must have taken a lot of effort to drag the rocks and logs hither and angle the logs across the river. And now, as they did on the stones, the local folks now walk across this span as comfortably as if it were a promenade in the Bois de Boulogne.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Gringos, Ruts, and Native Americans

Many of the gringos are very nice people, and actually learn how to fit in reasonably well here, gaining the respect of the local people. All gringos (even me, getting by on a retirement pension so small that it was impossible to survive on it in North America or Europe) are by local standards well off, some of them rich even by gringo standards. But unfortunately there are some who live not only ostentatiously with their money, but nastily. These ones I rarely encounter directly; when I do, they look down their noses at me, even though I’m American, simply because I don’t have their kind of money and smug pushiness.

There has always been class consciousness here; there’s definitely a distinction between Latinos and Ngäbe Buglé. But relatively new is this strong emphasis on social stratification, in which certain groups perceive themselves as better than those they deem “below” them. So harsh is it that certain rich gringos think they are intrinsically better than not only all local people, but even the poor gringos like me.

There was a neighborhood meeting to discuss how best to direct the deluges of rainwater that pour down some of the village’s dirt streets during the rainy season,

flooding cellars and causing the dirt roads to erode badly.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Walking Zen

I decided from the start that I would walk daily. In a community such as this it is the ideal way to meet local people, as opposed to gringos. The expatriates seem to prefer electronic encounters, in chat groups online or by telephone, though they occasionally get together for “community meetings”, musical events, or hikes, at which English is the common language, though some of them are primarily French- or German-speaking.

Still, I have lived with Americans and Europeans all my life and, while many of them are very good people, this land is not part of that worldwide “America” – not yet anyway, not from lack of their trying to subsume and destroy this land too; that “America” is close, in those congested cities on the two seacoasts. This still is the local people’s land, and so I want to know them more, not necessarily the Americans. There are bars and restaurants up on the highway (one of only two paved roads), but none in the village proper, and not all that many local people have telephones, and fewer have internet access. (You can pay I think it’s twenty-five cents an hour for computer time at the little local grocery.) If you want to meet the local people, it must be on their terms and on their land – get out and walk.

By walking daily I am becoming acquainted with the people who have lived here for many generations, who know with their very being the spirit, the language, the music, of this land, and can help me to begin to learn it. Moreover, they will get to know me and, I hope, decide that I am a decent, respectful person as gringos go. If they see I am making every effort to speak in their language and to live in a way harmonious with their ways, and not insisting on keeping my North American customs, perhaps they will look out for me, putting the mantle of protection about me, even helping me if I am in trouble, or at minimum leave me alone. If hypothetically any of them is motivated to rob me, thinking I am another rich gringo needing as the Bible says to be “sent empty away”, such an individual will soon hear that I am polite and respectful and liked by many of his friends and neighbors, and I hope choose instead to leave me alone. Indeed, I have walked everywhere and not once felt the slightest fear; I believe I am far safer here than I ever was in the United States or France.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Paso Ancho, in the Mountains, that much nearer Heaven

La Ciudad de Panamá, a tangled nest of superhighways and skyscrapers, was beautiful in its ultra-modern ugliness. I stayed at a very pleasant older hotel recommended to me, the Veracruz; it was quiet and the staff was friendly; everything was wonderful except for the oppressive heat that hardly lessened during the night, making it hard to sleep.

The next morning I took a small commuter plane to Davíd (dah-VEED). From the tiny porthole I looked down on wrinkled forested hills and sharp mountainsides, hardly able to focus on the newspaper I’d taken aboard to see what was happening in my new homeland. David, when I landed, was more like what previous experience had led me to expect in a Latin American city, the one we read about in Borges and Allende, with its shabby storefronts, doughty farmers’ markets, and old haciendas trying to shake off the sweat and dust.

My new landlord, a German named Wulf, plus his delightful Panamanian wife Olivia, picked me up at the airport. Wulf is a retired cop whose career was in the United States, so his English is superb if, like his wobbly Spanish, it has a German tang to it. Olivia, who comes from a very poor background, has excellent innate intelligence and judgement, plus a deliciously acerbic sense of humor.

Davíd and Panamá, being at sea level and only eight degrees north of the Equator, have the climate you would expect: one of considerable heat and humidity throughout the year, with thunderstorms thrown in during the Rainy Season. They also have a high population density with the inevitable crime, drugs, and traffic accidents. And they suffer from what I call the “Gringo Factor”: prices always seem to be higher where there are enough well-heeled gringos who still find those higher prices a bargain compared to back home.

But Paso Ancho (“Broad Pass” in Spanish) – in the western highlands near Costa Rica, under the watchful eye of Barú, the country’s tallest mountain – is in what is called a microclimate, an ecological niche. You might think you were in the Adirondack Mountains minus the winter – though once in a while it actually does snow a little bit on Barú’s upper slopes. In fact, the clean scent of pine and spruce in the air reminds me of “home”, of the northern New York community of Theresa where I spent much of my childhood. Here, as in that village not far from the Canadian border, evergreen trees easily outnumber deciduous; the difference is that here every now and then one is surprised to see a particularly hardy palm or banana tree managing to live at this altitude. The temperatures are uniformly springlike; it is rarely hot in the afternoon, and can get cool enough for a sweater or even a jacket in the evening. At night it can get into the low 40s Fahrenheit.

Travelling up to Paso Ancho is not merely a physical trip through space, up a highway into higher altitudes; it is also a voyage through time.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Escape from France, Escape from Stress, Escape from Snow

France! When an opportunity presented itself to move thither I seized it immediately. France, land of many of my most cherished artists and novelists, composers and filmmakers, poets and philosophers; surely it would be a land to inspire a writer! But I was reminded often of Mark Twain’s quip, what a pity it is that the wonderful culture of France, its language, literature, and cuisine are wasted on the French. Twain was pointing to a tendency toward boorishness and snobbery. I point rather to the loss of everything that is truly French in favor of Americanism.

In short, I found France had become – not the political entity “The United States of America”, and part of neither of the two continents by the name, but rather America – the occidental culture (or lack thereof) that has each person pulling what he or she can out of as many other people’s pockets as possible while trying to outyell those others in a quest for attention – the culture of multinational firms that have far more power in the world than presidents and kings – the anticulture that has blanketed much of the world in strip malls, superhighways and fast-food restaurants, and infected billions with the economics-based æsthetic of everpresent cacophony of garbage television, mind-rotting electronic foolishness, and talentless little singers who all sound, look, and behave alike: badly.

My home was an old country farmhouse, with exterior walls in exquisite disrepair, the stucco in places furred with ivy and elsewhere cracked away to expose the underlying brick or stone, and within an astonishing number of dark, cold, humid rooms in deeply stained and shellaced wood. The house, with attached barn, was set in the midst of pastures in which I enjoyed strolling and visiting with the horses, looking up at the vast snow-covered Pyrénée Mountains looming to the south. Often I went south into the mountain villages, and sometimes played my guitar at outdoor farmers’ markets. For a few euros I bought a used bicycle and rode around among the farms and forests to see the fields and forests and meet the neighbors. These were delightful, especially Marie-Christine, who often popped by with delicious tarts that somehow she’d made to spare, and old Monsieur Plonchon, a veteran of war whose stories were fascinating accounts of living history. And I was thrilled to join a group in Toulouse, headed by Bertran de la Farge, one of the most brilliant scholars on the Cathar movement and a delightful human being; the group was striving to recover and strengthen the region’s ancient Occitán culture. I developed some wonderful friendships, especially among the African Muslim commuity, including two transplanted African couples each with a brace of adorable and delightful little daughters.

Yet France as a whole, even in this relatively rural region far from the Paris megalopolis, was superhighways and gigantic malls selling overpriced trash. There were pockets and nodes of genuinely French culture, but they were being squeezed down to nothing. And the often disturbingly racist French frequently blamed those new resident African Muslims, who were determined to fit in and contribute to their new homeland, rather than the real culprit, the ultra-rich executives seeking to make another fortune at the expense of the plebians. What would the great French revolutionaries have said to see this débâcle?

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.