Tag: panama

The Uncanny

(note: I began this post in Panama nearly two years before re-discovering it and completing it in France)

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Have you ever experienced the uncanny? That sudden intense feeling of detachment and dread when an occurrence doesn’t quite fit our rational ideas of what counts as possible or real? During these moments, one is thrust back to early childhood, when the world was imbued with magic and each object and event was a profound and inexplicable mystery.

I’ve had this type of experience many times. Here is the most recent.

My wife and I live in Panama. Panama had a merciless lock-down when COVID started. For nearly 6 months we were stuck in our tiny apartment in a high-rise on the coast in Panama City. I was allowed outside only for an hour a week based on the last digit of my ID card. We could not walk in hallways or stairwells in our apartment building. The city was cordoned off and split into neighborhoods with checkpoints everywhere. If you did not have a salvaconducto saying you were headed to work in an essential capacity for the functioning of society, the police could arrest you and fines were up to $1000.

So, for 6 months we taught from and lived in our tiny place on the 54th floor above the sea. I spent hours on the balcony photographing random things because aside from reading and doing Tai Chi and fooling around and cooking, there was not much else to do.

Casco Viejo, the Amador Causeway, and the Canal from our 54th floor lockdown

When we finally escaped Panama City we did not have a salvaconducto. At the edge of Panama Province there was a police checkpoint where they were sending cars back into the City if the driver could not produce one. We lucked out because a pickup-truck with a bed full of workers pulled up at the other side along with a huge bus and the cops from our side of the checkpoint rushed over to the other side of the highway. I drove through without getting stopped.

Freedom! We drove 6 hours to Cambutal, which is super-remote and undedeveloped. It’s mostly farmland with a jungle down to the beach where a couple hotels and a few small housing developments and restaurants have sprung up. It’s on the Pacific side close to the border with Costa Rica. The beaches in Panama were all closed at the time because of COVID, but in Cambutal there are no police, so we could go to the beach and ride horses and go hiking with no problem.

We stayed in a small compound of cabins built by a young Dane over a couple years. I woke early in the morning one day, perhaps around 5:15, and decided to walk the 400 meters to the beach. My hope was to see sea turtles nesting, or perhaps even more luckily to witness a hatching. I’d seen several baby turtle trails in the sand the day before.

When I got to the beach there were no turtles. The sun was just emerging above the costal hills down to the left. The waves were a dark verdigris and pelicans were skimming the foamy crests looking for food. A young man–the local surf spotter–emerged from his wooden teepee on the beach and started texting the local surfing groups to let them know the conditions.

A few stray dogs I’d already befriended ran over and I played chase and fetch with them for a few minutes, then I decided to walk back to the cabin to see if the wife was awake.

As I walked along the road I felt a strong sensation of alert. My entire spine and in particular the back of my neck started tingling to the point almost of vibration. A mist had arisen from the trees and fields and was moving across the road. The birds which had been cacophonous moments before at dawn were suddenly silent.

Then, a regular and heavy clopping echoed along the road. At first I couldn’t place its origins, as the sound echoed from a hill to my left. Turning in the mist I looked behind me and the vapors parted. In the center of the road to my rear was a white horse, its head lowered menacingly, its eyes fixed intently on me. Its jaw was working as though at an invisible bit. It was one hundred or so meters away. When I turned to look it immediately picked up its pace.

I worked at a horse farm as a very young kid, aged 11 and 12. I know the behavior of horses, and feel fairly comfortable around them. This one wasn’t right. I am not one to panic around animals, even aggressive ones, but as soon as this mysterious apparition picked up its pace I bolted and ran full-tilt. The compound was just ahead and I figured I might have enough time to get inside and evade this creature which would be much faster than I.

I got through the gate at the compound as my pursuer reached me. Our cabin was immediately inside the entrance on the left, seated behind a tall hedge. I got to the hedge entry and behind it just as the horse reared and neighed. Its hooves crashed down through some yellow flowers bordering the hedge and not a meter behind me.

Then, winded, I watched through a gap in the hedge as the horse turned and returned to the road via the gate to continue on its way. Its muscular thighs trembled and shook and its mane was scraggly and covered in burrs as it swung its head around and grunted. I could hear its slow clopping long after it dissolved into the mist.

A bit more than a week later, my wife and I went on a horseback excursion to visit some old petroglyphs carved into ancient rocks. When our horses arrived I saw the one I was to use and thought: “oh, no!”

But it was a lovely day.

returning from our petroglyph excursion along the beach in Cambutal

Living in Another Language

In the USA there is an unfortunately large group of people who are absolutely intolerant of anyone who speaks other than English. These people often get exasperated and even violent when they hear others speaking Spanish on the street, or when a shop or restaurant is playing the TV or radio in another tongue. Spanish of course was spoken in large areas of what is now the USA LONG before English…

But any American who has had the experience of living abroad in a place where English is not the primary language understands immediately how difficult and how taxing it is to become comfortable in another tongue.

We lived in Panama for four years. I never got my Spanish up to snuff while living there. We worked for an international school and all teaching and learning was required to happen in English, we gravitated socially to staff and expats who spoke English, we were in lockdown for almost an entire year during covid–there are lots of excuses I can make. On top of these reasons, the Spanish in Panama is quite ‘gummy’ and difficult for an untrained ear. Words are lopped off casually and crammed together. The pace is rapid but the articulation is laconic. It’s beautiful to listen to but challenging to comprehend. Nevertheless, I was able to navigate my way through basic conversations by the end, to feel confident in restaurants and shops, and I even got through a hospital admittance process when I had to get a hernia operation, totally in Spanish. But my Spanish remained at the level of an early elementary student’s.

When we travelled to Colombia or Mexico, however, I could comprehend the Spanish much more easily. Every consonant and syllable was carefully articulated. Riding in a hired car from Medellin to Guatape I had a 3-hour conversation with the driver. I noted his name was Alain which was not a Spanish but a French name, and he told me his mother was a fan of the French actor Alain Delon and his mysterious green eyes. I told Alain how much more easily I understood his Spanish than the Panamanian Spanish and he said ‘they speak that soft Caribbean Spanish over there.’ Others we encountered said that Panama was full of hicks and was regarded as the equivalent of Texas in Colombia, with its own peculiar language.

When we left Panama we flew directly to France and spent a couple nights in Toulouse to adjust to the time difference. French felt easy and after struggling for four years in Spanish I was immediately much more confident in a language I’d studied extensively as a young man. When we arrived at the house we were buying the owner had set it up so we could stay in the gite apartments for a couple days before settlement. He gave me long, detailed tours of the house and instructions about the systems and how things worked. Then, we went through the notary process and the purchase. I was surprised at how quickly French returned after 2 decades of under-use. But it was EXHAUSTING. I wasn’t thinking in French, I was translating in my head. I became so tired and frustrated after a few days that I wanted simply to sleep for a week.

But we had clients in one apartment the very first day–no rest for the weary!

I still have great difficulty listening to French radio or watching movies. I read much better than I hear! Subtitles for films are necessary but the colloquialisms and slang phrases are beyond my ken. I work on trying to improve daily by revisiting old text books I used before ( French for Reading currently is helping a lot). I also subscribe to and read a couple journals and try to go beyond the “quick tour” of apartments with clients and to engage in a bit of conversation with them. And: novels. Balzac you are killing me!

There are many people here in town who are native English speakers, most of whom have lived in France for more than a decade. The majority of them speak almost no French at all. An Australian friend who moved here last year got a phone call when we were out to dinner and immediately thrust his phone at me because the speaker was French–it was a real estate agent calling about a property he’d seen. When I handled this fairly simple phone transaction our Aussie mates thought I was some kind of wizard.

Most French people, even out here in the rural Correze, are quite patient with those who can’t speak French. I wish folks back home could be like that: don’t judge someone for not speaking your language. Be empathetic and compassionate with them. It’s really difficult to pick up another tongue. Try it and you’ll see.