The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found (8 page)

I realize that I am only one fifth of
a family that has adopted María. It is because of this that I stole
her away with me to Bocas Del Toro. Travel is life on
speed.

I dragged María onto a boat taking
partiers across to the next island for the full moon party. We were
early – the moon hadn’t yet risen. Low tide stretched the beach out
more than 50 meters so we walked to a normally submerged sandpit in
water only a few inches deep. We lay together in the wet sand
looking up at the stars. Except for heavy bass thumping from a bar
far in the distance, everything was silent.

While waiting for falling
stars, something dark flashed in my peripheral vision. Then we
notice dark things flying over us. At first I thought they were
bats. Bats often come out in Panama at night and flash by so
quickly that your eyes never quite catch them. But these were not
bats- they were fish. And they were jumping over us from the small
pools on either side of us that the tide had left. We just laid
there together counting flying fish. I drifted, trying to remember
the theme song to
Family Ties
but getting the
Cheers
song instead. I don’t even
remember that time of my life. Suddenly, like magic, it became
brighter. The full moon was rising.

We didn’t speak. She reached up with
her hand and she held it until the moon rose over the
water.

“
How many times have you
seen the full moon rise?” Maria whispered to me.

“
I don’t know.”

“
Right now there are people
working jobs they hate. When they die, even if they are old, they
will realize that they have not spent enough time watching the moon
rise like this.”

Sometimes I thought Maria
was immature and I lamented our age difference. But when she says
things like this I think she is wise and all other conversations
inane. I mean I can’t even remember the theme song for
Family Ties
. How many
actual important moments in my childhood, moments so important they
shaped who I am, that I will only remember a few more times in my
life. How many more times will I lie on the ocean floor and see the
full moon rise?

I knew this was one of those travel
moments… life moments… a moment that tourists miss because their
itineraries are filled with sightseeing.

Tourists often brag about where they
have been. Travelers don’t know where the hell they are going. I
brought María here to Bocas to find out what we were to each other.
We were travelers.

The Red Jacket

Editor’s Notes from
Patrick McGreer

I have spent so many hours poring over
their blogs, diaries and personal letters to arrange what you are
now reading that I no longer remember my first impressions of them.
Except María, of course. Women as beautiful as her are not
forgotten easily.

The Lost and Found is a
hike-in lodge seven miles east of Fortuna Lake – now a reservoir to
a huge dam. It requires a fifteen minute walk up from the David to
Bocas highway. Like a lot of my guests are out of breath from the
walk and María was no exception. I smiled and joked that she should
have taken the elevator. She didn’t smile back. At first glance she
was so cute I immediately assumed she was innocuous and would be
amused by my joke. But she remained vacant and when she held my
gaze I felt a kind of chill I cannot explain. “
Tengo alas
,” she said. I have wings.
“I just need to learn to use them.”

They arrived at the top.
Gabriel, our handyman and part-time night safari guide, was helping
Dr. Mike with his luggage. I am sure I shook everyone’s hands and
answered their questions:
Why don’t you
guys build a zip-line for people’s bags? Did you carry everything
up yourselves? Why did you come to Panama?
The introduction speech I give is always new for the guests,
but for me it is a routine that has become one big blur. It was
this monotony that convinced my business partner Andrew and myself
that we needed to take a break. So we decided to lease out the
hostel for a year.

We didn’t build a zip line because,
well, we need money, and that will come after the new private
cabins, the sauna, new shower change rooms, a bigger cage for
Rocky, our pet kinkajou, and composting toilets. I didn’t carry
everything up by hand, but yes, I paid people to carry everything
up by hand. Gabriel made a buck per hundred pound bag of cement he
carried up for our builder. I carried one and vomited on arrival,
so I gave Gabriel a job after we fired our builder.

How I decided to come to
Panama is a much more involved question with several answers,
depending on who asks. The financial answer is the short one. While
most of our peers were getting married, buying real estate and
unknowingly heading into the subprime mortgage crisis, Andrew and I
taught ESL. Although we are both Canadian, we met in Korea and
bonded over basketball and websites for people who don’t want to go
home, like
the Escape Artist
and
International
Living
.

Andrew saved his money with the goal
of buying a little plot of land in Costa Rica. The idea was to
teach a little and then build a beach shack, teach a little more
and build something more. I was looking at offshore stock brokers,
and Panama, with all its banks, came up frequently. Somehow, we met
in the middle. I decided land was a better investment, and I sold
Andrew on teaming up and investing ahead of the curve in Panama.
Land values were set to rise with the increasing arrival of
retiring Americans who like that Panama uses the US dollar, is
cheap and is close to home. We made a loose plan to meet up in
Panama, not really believing the other would actually show
up.

In fact, I myself didn’t know if I
would turn up or not until a couple of months after I left Korea.
What helped me make up my mind had been following me for years
until it sat neatly in a chest of drawers near the beer fridge at
The Lost and Found. It was a red rain jacket that my girlfriend
gave to me when we said goodbye at the Ataturk International
Airport in Istanbul. I left the girl that might have been ‘the one’
for the security of a high paying job in Korea and the freedom
money could give. I promised to return one day with the jacket.
What I really wanted to do was return to her once I had banked
money. But she met another teacher like me, and although they broke
up for a time when he was faced with my very same dilemma, they
reunited again. They now have a lovely family. I have the red
jacket.

The red jacket stayed with me in
Korea. I led an uneventful life, teaching every over time hour and
dreaming about sitting in front of the 7-11 on Khao San Road in
Bangkok with a cold Singa beer. After nearly four years of
teaching, I gave away most of my belongings and brought my jacket
to Koh Lanta, in Thailand. On December 26th, 2004, I got up
unusually early to buy shaving cream. I noticed a big commotion
down by the beach, so I walked down and saw Thai kids running down
to the receding shoreline to throw flapping fish back into ocean.
Scuba divers shouted frantically, dropping their weight belts and
flippers and running in the opposite direction.

The Asian Tsunami of 2004 didn’t kill
so many on my island, but it did destroy my bungalow. The few
things I did salvage were stolen the next morning from a garbage
bag I had with me when I passed out on the side of a rock quarry,
drinking with a biker gang from Germany. But I had my passport and
my bank cards with the money I saved in Korea. And the red
jacket.

I made it to Khao San Road in Bangkok
and finally did what I had day dreamed about all those hours
teaching Korean kids… drinking Singa and doing nothing. There was
nothing on my ‘to do’ list. Freedom…. Just another word for nothing
left to lose. Now what?

I thought back a few days to a moment
on the side of the rock quarry on KohLanta. I was with about eighty
other tourists who fled from the waves. From where I was standing,
I saw no death or serious injury. So I was talking cheerfully with
other tourists, exchanging stories and emails for photos. But then
one lone tourist drove up to us on a mini-bike and shut his engine
off. He searched our faces and shouted, “Veronica! Veronica!” The
tourists looked at one another but no one named Veronica called
out. And he drove off.

Freedom, standard of living, security.
Choose two.

I had all the freedom in the world but
no one looking for me. No hockey trophies sitting under a bed
somewhere. A bank account, a few Myspace friends and the jacket. I
wanted to go somewhere for a change, someplace where the faces of
the people I met would not be all just one big blur after I said
goodbye. I didn’t want to choose a country just for the money. I
wanted a place of my own, a place to set up and call home. I wanted
more than just the jacket. The list of places where you can buy
land and own a business is a short one. But in Canada I am just
like all the rest – I’m Canadian. So I decided to build the Lost
and Found. The red jacket followed me to Panama.

The building of our eco-hostel was
impeded by the owners of La Fortuna Dam, the huge hydroelectric
plant ten kilometers up the road from our location. The dam is a
classic example of the behavior of a multinational corporation that
grossly exaggerates economic benefits to local communities and
bribes governments to allow megaprojects that suck capital from the
developing world. Built with foreign expertise and financed by
predatory loans, the dam does not contribute a penny to the local
economy.

The dam’s turbines are housed in
soccer field-sized chambers deep underground. Tunnels large enough
to park a chain of jetliners burrow through mountains of the
Fortuna Forest Reserve. The water generates electricity by tumbling
through the tunnels, and is later regurgitated and spat back up
when there is excess power in the grid. La Fortuna Dam generates
40% of Panama’s electricity, and its owners make multiple millions
of dollars selling power to Costa Rica. The watershed is protected
by law, a law the owners wrote themselves and presented to the
General Assembly for rubber-stamping. They created the vast Fortuna
Forest Reserve, prohibiting all those living within its boundaries
from ever titling their property and effectively squashing economic
development in the region. But they missed a little piece of land
that was titled before the reserve was created. We bought those
eleven hectares, eleven hectares of paradise, a garden of amazing
organic coffee planted among alluring orange and lemon
groves.

The company’s reasons for objecting to
our presence in the reserve remain a mystery to this day. They
wrote a threatening letter of objection to the Minister of the
Environment and an email to us demanding we leave. Our
environmental impact assessment was rejected even after local
officials had told us to build. We were shut down and fined. Our
life savings were in jeopardy.

Our fortunes began to turn
after a chance encounter, what I would call destiny if I were a
superstitious man. About a twenty minute walk from the lodge is the
little town of Valle de la Mina. Andrew was there getting some
local food at a small restaurant when a grandfatherly man dumped
out Andrew’s glass of water, filled it with a strange red liquid
and said, “
Dale pues
”. I never really got a handle on what that means. Could be,
‘
Okay then
,’ or
‘
Do it
.’

Andrew did it. It had bite. It tasted
tart and almost effervescent.

They finished the bottle
and the man pulled Andrew down to his farm to show him how his
organic fruit wine was made. His name was Félix González Córtez,
but the village knew him as Don Cune. As a small boy he loved to
eat an animal known in these parts as a
conejo pintado
. As a five year old,
he could never get whole word out of his mouth. All he could say
was something like ‘cune’ (koo nay). So when he asked for his
favorite food, he would say “
Quiero cune,
quiero cune
!” When his parents wanted to
get him home quick, they shouted
Cune
. It became his name.

“
Más
orgánico
,” he would say with a smile that
ran ear to ear, beaming underneath his signature weathered straw
hat, the brim upturned in the style of the Panamanian
peasant.

Turned out Cune had a passion for all
things organic. Why kill your customers? was his line of thinking.
But Cune had some problems of his own. His coffee yield was down
80% due to coffee rust, a crippling fungus brought on by increasing
rainfall. It was a temptation on a farm just to spray chemicals,
but Cune had worked more than ten years to obtain organic
certification and was just one year away. Because of the rules
governing the reserve, however, he was ineligible for any type of
loan to improve his farm because he had no deed to his home, no
collateral to offer. Although he had lived there for decades, he
was, in the words of the CEO of the hydroelectric company, “a
squatter that we tolerate.” Andrew had a cup of coffee -- world
class. Then he had some more wine -- wild blackberry, cashew fruit,
pineapple… a little sour, with bite reminiscent of Don Cune’s wit,
wry but merry.