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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.