Tuesday started ordinary enough. Our truck was in the garage . . . broken transmission fluid line. With only one car, at 8AM I drove Nikki into Boquete to the BCP Theater, where she volunteers as manager, to get things set up for the Tuesday Morning gringo meeting. She had meetings afterward and promised to give me a call around 3pm when she was ready to be picked up. It was raining and had been seemingly for weeks, although it was only a day or so . . . stead rain. Panama had tropical depressions on either side of the Isthmus producing heaving rain which looked, as our Aussie friend Diane said, like two big bosoms on radar. (They would eventually merge in the Caribbean to form hurricane Ida.) Since it was the first of our string of November holidays, and we had nobody working on the finca, I went home to work uninterrupted on my world cruise lecture on Kusadasi (Ephesus) and to start on Istanbul. Lecturing on a world cruise sounds romantic and exciting, but right now it is just sitting at the computer trying to coalesce thousands of years of history into a few dozen visually exciting Powerpoints with a few good laugh-lines thrown in to keep the audience having a good time as we slog through empire after empire.
About 3:15 PM I got a call from Nikki to pick her up at Dave and Erin Ross’s in Boquete. Usually it’s 10 minutes to get from our house to “downtown” Boquete. Traffic in Alto Boquete (“upper” Boquete as opposed to Bajo Boquete “lower” Boquete, which I usually laughingly refer to as “downtown” Boquete) as jammed up like the 101 in Ventura. Panamanians may be laid-back, particularly in the “frontera” or “interior”, but there were a lot of Panama City folks here for Tuesday which was the Get-Ready-for-The-First-Independence-Day-And-Five-Months-of-Kicking-Back-And-Working-A-Little-as-Possible holiday, otherwise known as GRFTFIDAFMOBAWALAP Day. (The Panamanian government loves alpha-bet-soup names for the several million or so government agencies. I can never figure out what the acronym stands for, much less what the agency does . . . but they all have nice logos.) So all the Panama city driver began honking horns and resorting to the Panama City cluster-fuck driving style when confronted with a traffic jam, i.e. cars headed the wrong way against traffic and going in every direction proceeding to make a bad situation worse.
I’ve lived now in Panama long enough to big up a few things . . . my Panamanian attorney from Panama City rides with me, covers his eyes and says, “Wow! You drive like a Chiricano!”, which I take as a great compliment, but then I learned my driving skills in New York City and on California freeways.
So, hearing approaching sirens and seeing flashing lights and knowing that the authorities were arriving and would soon make matters worse, I too pulled out into oncoming traffic on the two-lane road and managed to get to the turnoff for Volcancito. I figured there had been an accident on the grade where the two lane road snakes down into Bajo Boquete (“downtown”) and that I would sneak around up through Volcancito and then down the back way through El Salto into Boquete.
As I turned up the road to Volcancito some of our friends from Panama City were standing beside the road with their car and told me that Boquete had flooded and they were trying to get everyone out and not letting anyone back in. Apparently it had rained all day, much, much harder in Boquete than it had in Palmira, 10 minutes away. This happens in the Chiriqui mountains: it can be pouring one place, and sunny in another. So it took me 1 hour to wend my way through Volcancito and down through El Salto going through 6 mudslides on the way.
When I got to Dave and Erin Ross’s there were a few cars in the driveway, and I rang the bell and nothing happened. So I figured the power was out and walked in . . . and the entire floor was covered with water. I found Dave and Erin, Nikki, and some friends on the back porch, sipping wine. They had all returned from a BCP Theater meeting and found water cascading into their house from a failed roof. So you can see that even we gringo are adapting, adjusting to the cultural differences and coping with disaster without stressing unduly.
Knowing I had to navigate back to Palmira I drug my wife away from the wine, and we headed home. Boquete was a wet zoo, but most of the people had left and a few parade left-over schools and bands were boarding buses to head home. We found our friends from Panama at my brother’s former house in Boquete and they were showing us some of the damage from the river that had flooded there. Some folks next door came over and they were digging out. I managed to slip on the grass and go crashing down hitting my head and getting covered with mud. Meanwhile ambulances and emergency vehicles were streaming out of Valle Escondido where we used to live before moving to the finca. My friend, whose cousin in the mayor, said that his cousin had told him Valle Escondido was a disaster area and houses had collapsed. Since we have friends in Valle Escondido and still own a house there, obviously we were concerned. I wasn’t sure they would let us in, but the guards all know us and so we drove in to see this beautiful valley full of mud and debris. From the other side of the valley we could see that our house looked fine. I asked one of the Valle Escondido workers if our friends house was OK, and he just took his hands and mimicked it breaking in two. I asked if he had seen our friend and he said no . . . now, really concerned . . . we drove up the road past our property, which looked fine (and is) up to a sea of mud and a few city vehicles. Thankfully we saw Jackie standing in the middle of the mud in the street. The mountain above their home had collapsed and came crushing down tearing away the left side of the house. Jackie had escaped moments before the mountain came down with nothing but the shirt on his back. But he was alive! His partner was in the States, their houseboy was in Panama, and their renter had been on line in their bunker-like downstairs guest apartment through the entire thing, not really knowing there was a problem until he lost his Internet connection.
By this time the Valley was a sea of fog and it was quickly getting dark, so we really couldn’t see much. Jackie had rescued one of their two cats. He had a place to stay and we took the cat to the vet.
More later . . . suffice it to say that for two days I have been up to my ankles, and sometimes up to my thighs (and needing help getting pulled out) in a sea of mud and debris. It is pretty much all gone. You have to understand that Brad & Jackie had one of the truly showplace homes in Valle Escondido. Brad’s kitchen was the finest kitchen in Boquete with acres of cherry and granite, top-of-the line professional everything, Viking this and Viking that . . . we found the Viking built in refrigerators yesterday . . . identified them by the drawer containing the neatly wrapped cheese slices, in the pile of mud and debris where the bedroom used to be, squashed like an accordion. There are areas of the house that it will take us weeks to uncover.
I don’t like living in a disaster zone. When I was in seminary a tornado roared through Comstock Park and I came home to find that the path of the tornado was down our street. My folks home was spared, but many of our neighbor’s homes were totally obliterated. I can still hear the chain saws and remember the agony of helping people sort through piles of what had once been their homes, hoping to salvage some reminder of their lives before the disaster. It all came back the past two days.
We lived in Ventura County, California . . . what can I say. I remember a month when the city was ringed with fire all night and hundreds of fire crews from all over the West coast where running through town to fight fires, driving back from Santa Barbara and seeing the hills above our house in Ventura all ablaze . . .
The responses to folks at these times is interesting too . . . people come and say, “If there is anything I can do . . .” and then walk away. Hell! You see all this mud? You see that shovel? Pick it up and help! But they really don’t want to help, they just want to ease their own consciences by volunteering without doing what obviously needs done. Brad hosted a weekly dinner party for a local group . . . two days have gone by and I haven’t seen any of those folks showing up with shovels? What the f***? We are either in this thing called life together . . . or not. So for those of my local friends who are reading this . . . grab a shovel, put on your boots and help! Response to this kind of tragedy defines who and what we are as a community.
Some folks “get it” . . . we had three guys show up with shovels and wheel barrows . . . people Jackie didn’t even know. A couple of gals showed up yesterday a noon with lunch for all of us! Just saw a need and filled it. As Dr. Robert Schuller used to say, “Find a need and fill it: find a hurt and heal it.”
Unfortunately, even “paradise” can have natural disasters.
More later . . .
November is the patriotic month celebrating the birth of Panama. Red, white and blue banners are everywhere! [Kinda makes you wonder how they came up with red, white and blue, doesn't it. I mean why not blue and yellow, or red and green? Well red and green was already taken by the now-province of Chiriqui where I live which declared its own independence 50 ears before Panama.] Anyway it is a BIG celebration, and it all starts Monday in Boquete with a huge parade that goes on endlessly with nothing but students marching and “bands” . . . we use that term loosely. Bands in Panama consist of 50 kids with drums playing the same thing over and over, 20 girls playing the same repetitious song on bell lyres, and a few guys with bugles . . . but it is all done with enthusiasm, and I guess that is the point. The parade itself runs usually about 8 hours!! Of sameness!
Latest tiger . . . coffee. OK, we’ve been growing superb coffee now for a couple of years. My wife, Nikki, invests a lot of time, effort . . . and money . . . into growing an excellent product. We spend a lot of money on chicken shit, otherwise known as fertilizer . . . and it shows. Now comes time to harvest and sell our beautiful coffee cherries. Take it to a big beneficio, stand in line with everyone else, some of whom have nice coffee, some of whom haven’t spent a dime on fertilizer and just have shitty little cherries . . . and we all get the same price per lata. Boquete, Panama is known for specialty coffee . . . not just any coffee, but the stuff, if you can find it, that a coffee buff will gladly buy in the States for $14-16 a pound . . . and we, really small time growers [Forget all that Fair Trade stuff, it's for big consortiums of independent growers, not really the small, little guys you assume] . . . we the little growers, and our little grower neighbors are getting, if we’re lucky, about 35 cents of that $14-16 a pound.
The dreaded October rainy season has come upon us in earnest!
Then then need to be washed by hand to remove the sticky “honey” and then dried . . . hopefully in the sun. In the commercial beneficios they are put in big revolving drums like a huge clothes dryer for about eight hours. These are usually fired with dead wood or gas.
