by David Yeadon
I find myself walking on tiptoe even in the soft sand, so as not to bruise that special silence before dusk, before the noises in the bushes and the cool evening breezes that make the palm fronds go clacker-clacker-clacker.
And after all this today, more surprises tomorrow.
I’ve hardly begun.
Because I’ve slept during the day I feel like walking at night under a creamy half-moon and a canopy festooned with star patterns. The beach is a silver strip, edged by a sparkling sea that hardly moves at all: In the quietness of this night I meet myself again and rediscover so many things I’d forgotten.
Finally sleep eases in, so I spread out the groundsheet, bunch up the backpack as a pillow, and drift off with a final thought for the day: I hope all this never ends; I hope I never arrive.
On the third day—I think it’s the third day anyway—there’s a storm, a real humdinger. Out in the west, among the silhouetted islands, the sky is clear and bright. But in the other direction it’s as black as a mine shaft. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sky as black anywhere. The wind, a few minutes ago nothing more than a pleasant trade breeze, bashes into the palms like a prizefighter going for a knockout in the first round. The surf itself turns black, showing its true colors, discarding the simpering turquoises and royal blues, throwing off its limpid lappings on the shore, and gathering muscle by the minute. The gentle chitter of pebbles in the undertow is replaced by an ominous grinding and pounding as coral boulders, deeper down, begin to move against one another. The sea seethes up the pink beach, now turning blood red as the first egg-sized splatters of rain hit, sending up sprays of fine silica. It races far higher up the sand than before, pauses as if in frustration that it has failed to reach the tree line, and then tears back down the slope of the beach to consolidate itself in even higher, blacker waves that rise up like ancient battered walls to surge forward once again.
This is the ocean I love and admire. This is when you feel its strength and majesty—when you know it can destroy boats, men, houses, even whole communities, in the power of its latent spirit. You become too beguiled and entranced by its apparent docility in the Caribbean; you forget how oceans can shape and meld whole continents; you ignore its primeval force and nature.
But not now!
I find a hollow away from the gesticulating palms and flying fronds, up close to the sturdy thick scrub. And I watch as the rain thrashes the grasses, breaking them and pounding them into the soft earth. I don’t think I’d like to be a palm tree in this storm. They’ve learned the benefits of flexibility—they sway and bend and throw their fronds high like the outstretched gesticulating arms of Arab women at a wake—but each storm saps their strength, weakens their roots, stretches their fibrous trunks to the breaking point, and leaves them more vulnerable to the next onslaught. I’ve seen dozens of them on my walk, dead and discarded like driftwood, half buried in sand, their broken roots still screaming at the air—eternal reminders of battles fought and lost in the seething, scathing tumult of hurricanes.
I am lost in the power of the storm. Soaked, shivering (the wind is actually cold), and shocked by the suddenness of it all, I give myself up to its roar and its rage.
On and on, blacker and blacker, louder and louder. Maybe this really is a hurricane. With my radio out of action I’ve heard no warnings. My one hope is that Sam is comfortable and safe at home and not out on the ocean in this maelstrom. The growling and grinding from the surf is almost animal-like now. A fierce, teeth-tingling sound. Waves hit the shore like mortar shells, exploding in fury and froth, scattering rocks and shells and detritus up the beach and sucking the sand back into the depths with snakelike hisses.
I’m safe—or at least I think I am. I’m not a palm waiting for the final root-snapping blast. I have the luxury of sheltering in my sandy hollow and watching the spectacle like a young thumb-sucking boy at a circus. And I love it. I almost feel to be part of the storm’s spirit; I’m in the roll and heave of the black waves; I’m in the shrieking wind and the exploding rain-eggs. I’m out of myself and wrapped in the magic and mystery of it all….
What seems like hours later, the calm comes almost as suddenly as the storm. The wind dies. Waves toss in confusion like a restless army without generals and then subside, losing their dour color and adopting, chameleonlike, streaks of their previous blue and turquoise hues.
The beach is a mess. A battlefield of broken things marking the line of fiercest attack. Way up the sand a couple of palms have fallen. I can see the threadlike runners off the main roots waving like flags of surrender in the dying wind. The scrub behind the palms is still intact, a few discarded leaves and twigs, but otherwise undefeated.
There are coconuts everywhere, blown from the palm tops by the storm. I pick up a couple, smash their shells with a rock, and drink down the sweet liquid inside.
I’m drying out fast. The sun is hot again and the stickiness of air increases as the rain evaporates. The sand is harder now, compacted by the storm, and I begin my walk again on a firm surface. The beach seems to slope more steeply than before, its softer top surface stolen by the surf, revealing a coarser grain. Still pink, though.
There are shells and bits of shells everywhere, but they’re all empty. Are they merely the discarded garbage of the seabed or have the terrified occupants—conchs, hermit crabs, sea snails—fled to the deeps, abandoning their perfectly formed castles to the fickleness of the surf hordes?
Ridiculous thoughts. The occupants and their castles are complete entities. One can’t exist without the other. I’ve become a hurricane-harassed brain. Can’t think straight. But the thought persists. Why are they empty? And so many of them. Wonderful whorls of calcium, so finely etched and colored. Architects and engineers would benefit from studying their microstructure—Corbusian elegances of form-following-function; Miesian essays of detail and exactness of fit; Robert Graves’s blendings of colors and subtle wit, and a Gaudi-like robustness and flair for sheer arrogance and idiosyncracy of design. A universe of forms at my feet. A mathematician’s total knowledge all in one curled snail shell. Perfect three-dimensional geometry. All here.
I thank the storm for its gifts. And then I thank this little island. So compact, so rich, so whole. I am learning something here.
Back at home, Anne has a lovely poster on the wall in her studio. A photograph by Elliot Porter of lonely surf-pounded rocks on some island in Maine. But the words on the poster irritated me:
I am not lonely
I am merely alone
We have a marriage that has endured and strengthened over twenty-five years and at first I couldn’t understand the idea of her feeling alone. Alone from me, our cats, our lakeside home, and all the myriad details of our lives. But shimmers of comprehension were shining through, polished by the storm.
I think back to my sudden surge of loneliness a couple of days ago, that great gloom that fell over me for a few hours. And then I realize that I’d come through it with the help of that deer with the calm eyes. We couldn’t talk, we couldn’t communicate in the traditional sense, but the deer had restored the wonder—the knowledge—that I have always known somewhere deep down.
I come back to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book A Gift from the Sea once again:
How wonderful are islands! The past and the future are cut off; only the present remains. Existence in the present gives island living an extra vividness and purity. One lives like a child or a saint in the immediacy of the here and now. Every day, every act, is an island, washed by time and space, and has an island’s completion. People too become like islands in such an atmosphere, self-contained, whole and serene; respecting other people’s solitude, not intruding on their shores, standing back in reverence before the miracle of each other individual.
We have to be alone to touch our inner selves. For if we cannot touch ourselves, how can we ever truly touch anyone else?
I pick up the shell again and stroke it. A thing so whole, so complete. A product of its own worl
d, its own complex net of dependencies and threats and terrors and truths. And yet, by its very nature—alone. In my hand. And something to take home with me.
John Donne got it right and wrong. “No man is an island” makes sense in a hundred measurable ways. But ultimately we are all islands and if we don’t face up to that truth and rejoice in the possibilities of solitude, we miss out on one of the gifts of life.
This island has revived my island. This little lost world has given new life to my own personal world. Fears, loneliness, hurricanes, noises in the night—I can accept them all now. And love too. Love is larger now; deeper in—deeper out.
In another day or so, after many more miles of sand and scrub, I’ll be meeting Sam again. I’m looking forward to that. I remember the knowing way in which he caressed and held the frigate bird and stretched its wings to show me their size and their beauty. Sam, I’m sure, knows and loves this island, but he also knows and loves his own island, within. There is something complete about the man. A completeness I’m learning to find within myself, thanks to a deer, a storm, and a shell.
Funny, isn’t it? Perhaps all the answers are all around us. We merely have to pause, see, and understand.
It is evening again; the sun scatters strands of golden tinsel across the bay. And wisps of silver cloud, pluming—just for me.
Thank you, little lost world of Barbuda.
5. PANAMA—THE DARIEN
Lost in the Golden Time
“Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
Keats
The idea of the Pan American Highway has always intrigued me. Tim Cahill’s record-breaking auto road odyssey with Gary Sowerby from its southern endpoint in Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego to the last few feet of bumpy track by the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska (Road Fever—A High Speed Travelogue, Random House, 1990) only increased my fascination at this route, over fifteen thousand miles long, passing through such a kaleidoscopic wealth of scenic and cultural variations from latitude 50° S to latitude 70° N.
Conceived by the Pan American Highway Congress in 1925 and boasting a spectacular array of engineering and logistical feats, this amazing road has one glitch, a place where it surrenders its magnificent continuity and admits defeat against enormous topographical obstacles. That place is the Darien Gap in Panama, where Central and South America meet in a narrow and pernicious jungle, mountain, and swamp-clogged peninsula less than 100 miles wide and 150 miles long.
One traveler described it back in the sixties as “packed with incredibly dense vegetation, threaded with rivers and streams, and thought to harbor head-hunting Indians as well as poisonous snakes…the Darien Gap has long frustrated every attempt to travel the full length of the Pan American Highway.”
On most world maps you can barely make out the region at all. You wonder what all the fuss is about. But its impact on the highway is unmistakable. After crossing the tortured wilds of Patagonia, the notorious Atacama Desert of Chile, the western fringes of the Amazonian Basin, and a dozen other places once thought to be impassable, the road gives up at the port of Turbo in Colombia and travelers are obliged to spend tedious days arranging transit on a ship to Colón at the northern end of the Panama Canal. And all to avoid the terrors of this 150-mile-long “gap”!
Lurid reports have trickled back from world wanderers about this place. “A hellhole,” “the worst jungle in the world,” and even (to borrow Winston Churchill’s description of the Soviet Union) “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
In spite of its notorious reputation, little has been written about the Darien, and the place remains a tantalizing lost world—an ideal candidate for my explorations.
And so—off I went to Panama, hiking boots polished, backpack brimming, and expectations exhilarated by recent press tales of defeated expeditions and the strange habits of native tribes somewhere deep in the gloom and swampy morasses of this truly enigmatic region.
Panama City, following the graft and kleptocratic regime of Noriega, was not a place to dally in. Beyond the high-rise patina of urban sophistication on the edge of the shantytowns and around the vulture-encrusted rubble heaps, there was a mood of anarchy and creeping chaos—too many booze-or drug-crazy youths in clapped-out cars roaring around the city looking for something to distract them from the stupor of the streets. Many of the stores, looted and decimated by the locals during the U.S. “invasion,” were still boarded up. Banks, the lifeblood of Panama City, were open but seemed to sport more security guards than customers. Highways were littered strips, the haunt of packs of wild dogs by night and their human equivalents during the day.
I found little reason to linger and, after making my travel plans known to the disinterested authorities, I was relieved to be busbound heading east to the end of the road at the village of Yaviza. Finally I was off to the Darien to satisfy a decade of personal curiosity.
The first eighty or so miles were tolerable enough as I bounced along with a dozen Indian-featured passengers in a gaily painted minibus of a species known to older Panamanians as chivas or “nanny goats.” Salsa music blasted from a cracked speaker above the driver’s head. He only had the one tape, which he played over and over again, although it wouldn’t have made much difference if he’d had a whole library of salsa cassettes—that stuff all sounds the same to me. An endless frantic bongo-and-brass racket whose frenetic energy drove passengers into a deep stupor. Sweaty too. The music seems to exude heat and, even with all the windows open, I sat in moist misery wondering why so many of my “lost world” adventures seem to take place in such torrid climes. Next time, I vowed, I was going to stick to the cold places—maybe the Falkland Islands or Greenland or even Antarctica itself. This Yorkshire body, with genes generated in the cool Irish bog country of County Cork, does not adapt well to perpetual saunabath sorties. Maybe there’s a subconscious masochistic intent to my wanderings. Maybe there are deep-seated guilts in my psyche that need to be expunged by the torment and torpor of travel in such uncomfortable places. A hair-shirt harangue for an overly hedonistic life? Maybe even….
The road ended abruptly. Without any warning we bumped off the edge of the tar and onto a corrugated mud track, formed into peaks and troughs and ditches by trucks and getting worse by the minute. At first the driver didn’t appear to even acknowledge the sudden change and careened along even faster. He was an aggressive, arrogant fellow who called himself Zolo! (yes—he pronounced his name with the exclamation mark), blasting through mud sluices and skimming over the ruts in what looked like a frantic effort to lift the minibus off the ground and establish a kind of gravity-defeating hovercraft ride that would bring us to our destination in a state of suspended animation.
I had to give the man credit. A few times he almost made it, as we seemed to float weightlessly above the craters before crashing to earth with a jarring crunch and ominous creaking of springs and chassis. But at least we were on level ground. I’ve had enough bus-riding experiences in Central and South America to last most of this lifetime and they were invariably on narrow mountain roads undefined by anything so practical as guardrails. As a result you feel to be hanging by a few centimeters of bald rubber to the edge of precipe and canyons, cutting sharp corners with a precision guaranteed to come splat to splat with anything traveling in an equally foolhardy manner in the opposite direction.
Somewhere deep in my backpack I usually carry a tiny Saint Christopher pendant presented to me by my grandfather, who realized that he was largely to blame for releasing the wanderlust in me during my formative years (he was a National Geographic nut and made me one too). He felt a need, I suppose, to assuage his guilt by giving me this token of saintly protection. Usually I don’t wear the thing. I have a distin
ct aversion to men draped in chains and trinkets. But always—on Latin American mountain highways—I make an exception and slip it around my neck, under my shirt. I’ve read countless and very bloody accounts of busloads of peasants and adventurous backpackers being pulped in remote valleys after vain attempts at flying, off and over the edge of these notorious roads. But this time, as I said, we were on level ground and somehow Zolo’s attempts to become airborne seemed far less threatening.
Then he became a mere mad mortal again as we hit the first mud hole and sank below the wheels in a pool of thick gooey liquid that stank of festering vegetation and ripe sewage.
Zolo took the incident personally, cursing and raving at the track as the undercarriage of the bus steamed and the engine stalled and we sat for a few moments of silence in the sweltering heat.
Then he must have said—rather shouted—some magic word at the passengers, for one by one they began to leave their seats and their bundles and baskets (and a cage with three cocks in it) and shuffle down the aisle, out of the door, into the mud pool. They were like automatons. They didn’t even try to leap for the dry high ground at the edge of the track. They just stepped right in the goo as if paddling into the ocean. A few rolled up their dusty, stained trousers, but most didn’t even bother with that meager refinement.
The hell with it. I was damned if I was going to get out of the bus into that stinking morass.
Then Zolo directed his anger toward me, as I was the only passenger left sitting, holding tightly onto my backpack. And—surprise, surprise—I obeyed unquestioningly just like the others, shuffling down the aisle, trying to leapfrog the mud hole and failing miserably. I sank up to my knees in the stuff. The other passengers, who had been sitting mute for the first three hours of the journey, now decided it was time for a little light relief at my expense. Their laughter and giggles and ribald comments could have turned me into a raving nut case, like the driver, but after a second or two’s reflection I began to see the situation from their point of view and decided that we all looked pretty silly wallowing about in the goo, wondering what to do next. So I laughed along with them.
