Usually, when I put something into my Artifacts series, it’s a piece that didn’t fit into one of my long form essays, but this one is more of an actual artifact, albeit a recent one.
In early 2020, just as the first stories about COVID-19 were hitting the national news, I took a trip to Panama. I rented a little car and drove nearly every paved road in the country, and a few unpaved ones, some of it with a friend from college, but mostly solo.
Yesterday I found my daily journal from the trip. It was mainly field notes and observations that only I would find interesting, but I have selected a few excerpts to share. Just in case it’s not apparent from these selections, I had a great time.
From Day 6:
I had good orange juice and a so-so burger at the hotel restaurant. The other guests were all garbage.
On Day 7, I checked out Boquete:
Boquete is a nice town, but it’s full of backpackers, retirees, and other white people.
So I didn’t stick around. Instead I drove over the Continental Divide, left my car in Almirante, and took a water taxi to Bocas Del Toro, where I only stayed overnight. I had this to say on Day 8:
On the water taxi ride I saw some brown boobies, which are birds.
Also …
I don’t like the kind of tourists that go to Bocas Town. There isn’t only one type — I just don’t like any of them. The old people are probably the worst, though. When we got off the boat in Almirante, one old man decided he needed to tell one of the kids working on the dock how to do his job, that he needed to help the passengers off the boat before he started unloading luggage. What pisses me off the most is that he thought he was doing a good thing. Seriously, fuck that guy. I hope he dies soon.
Then I ended up back in Boquete.
I was planning to go to David or thereabouts, but I took a wrong turn and didn’t realize it until I was already much closer to Boquete, and since I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I was tired and sore from sitting in the car and from hitting a few too many massive potholes that the car only came out the other side of because it bounced so goddamn hard when it hit the bottom … Boquete it was.
On Day 9, I discussed the luxury of a hot bath.
… I’ve been roughing it for years and I don’t have indoor plumbing. I shower at the gym or take an ice bath outside. Yeah, I’m super hardcore, and also some high school kids saw my wiener.
Sometimes that school bus pulls up at the exact wrong moment.
Later, I recounted a conversation I had that morning with the owner of the hotel.
David, Panama is growing quickly. I can see how that sentence could be confusing; he didn’t call me David, and I’m not calling you David, even if your name happens to be David. David, which is the name of a large city in Panama, is growing.
I’m not sure who “you” was, but I guess I always write as if someone else will read it, even if it’s my private journal. Day 9 was the best day of the trip; it will find its way into at least one of my longer pieces, so I won’t say more about it here.
On Day 10 I got to do some real driving.
The road up the hill was pretty steep and winding, and it just kept going up, higher and higher, and all along the way there were Ngäbe people, and kids especially — hundreds of them. I went to Hato Chamí and kept going. I went to Cerro Flores, then back down and off another side road to Peña Blanca and Llano Tugrí.
After awhile I was on a new road that isn’t even on the map yet, and I just kept driving up these impossibly steep hills and around these ridiculously tight, blind corners, dodging kids and cows and whatever else turned up.
After awhile I was pretty sure I was headed back down again; first I started seeing more vegetation, then dump trucks and taxis, and finally I arrived back at the Panamericana in Tole.
Later that day, I became a bit frustrated with the local commuters.
The road was very bad, and people were driving like absolute imbeciles trying to avoid the potholes. Most of them were in trucks, driving them like they were in cars, and I was in a little car, driving it like a truck. I must have passed at least forty of them over a fifty kilometer stretch, and some of them didn’t like it one bit, but they could only chase after me for about thirty or forty meters before they had to start swerving around the potholes again, as I just skipped across the tops of them. I don’t like to call a giant group of people stupid, but … they were acting like their axles were held on with rubber bands. You hit a bump once in awhile. Calm down.
Then I had a hard time finding my hotel.
Eventually I came to the right driveway and got off the bumpy road, onto a worse one. This was a very poorly maintained dirt road that I really shouldn’t have the rental car on. In fact if I damage it here, my credit card’s insurance won’t cover it. I’ll have to stage an accident somewhere else.
Thankfully, that wasn’t necessary.
The only other people here have a two year old, and she chose 9-10 pm to run around screaming, while her parents, who had been giving me suspicious looks ever since I arrived, did next to nothing to stop her. I was tired from driving all day and needed the sleep, and was also annoyed that this guy thought I was into his weird-looking wife or something.
At dinner the kid wanted to come over to my table and they wouldn’t let her within twenty feet of me, like I was some kind of monster. I don’t give a shit about socializing with their child — ok by me either way, but give me a fucking break.
It’s possible they just knew more about the pandemic than I did, but it’s more likely they were freaks.
The place had some privacy issues, which I discussed on Day 11:
I don’t want to hear my neighbors talking ten feet away while I’m sitting on the toilet, and I’d rather they not hear me pooping. When I was coming back up to my room last night I noticed that the curtain on my bathroom window was transparent when the light was on.
So I either shower in the daytime or with the lights off, I guess, or measure my waist height compared with the windowsill, and calculate the angle of the tallest female guest’s eye line to the windowsill from the nearest point in the hallway.
Or they could just get a better curtain and thicker doors and I wouldn’t have to think about any of it.
I got out of there and back on the road.
I left the hotel, and that road … I had forgotten in the short time I was there just how bad the road was, and how long … I went south to the end of the highway first, then doubled back, and when I passed the driveway for the hotel again, I thought to myself, if I had forgotten something in the room, would I go back and get it? Fuck no. The road is that bad.
There was much less traffic on the way back than there had been coming down, and that made a big difference, even though it was still a real piece of shit drive.
Finally, I got onto a better road, only to get stuck behind a parade.
… I don’t know what they were celebrating but it appeared to have something to do with Jesus and/or balloons.
At least I found someplace to stop for lunch, at one of Panama’s ubiquitous chicken shacks, where …
… I had chicken, French fries, and sadness. But it was under $5 so it’s fine.
Later that night, in Chitré, I went to a restaurant and encountered someone who rubbed me the wrong way. I’d forgotten about him until today.
My food wasn’t great, but the patacones were good. The Canadian guy giving his adult son relationship advice — not good.
It made me think of how they call Panama the Great American Interchange, where you have species from North and South America expanding their ranges, moving past each other through this narrow corridor; this guy was stuffing food into his mouth at about the same speed the bullshit was coming out of it.
I always like getting a read on dirtbags like him, and it’s so easy. Listen to them talk for thirty seconds and you know all there is to know about them, more than they even know about themselves.
He’s in his 60s but wants people to think 50s, so he dyes his hair, but to wear that Cuban shirt you have to be over sixty or under thirty, or just Latino, and you, sir, are very Canadian. The shirt also isn’t vintage, it’s retro, and those are two very different things.
He likes to pretend to be rich, but he makes about $60-70k a year and vacations in places like Panama because it’s cheap and he gets to feel like a big man here. Still, he doesn’t have the balls to go someplace even cheaper.
He works in sales and considers himself to be slick and persuasive, but in reality a website can sell his product better than he can; he knows he’s becoming irrelevant and has no idea what to do about it.
He’s single; he’s been married before, but he’s so insecure he can’t just have a relationship, he has to dominate, or cheat, or both. He needs the fuel for his ego.
He was never much of a father to his son, and that’s part of the reason his son has bleached, spiked hair as an adult. He’s trying to make up for that now, because his son is probably the last chance he has at someone looking up to him or thinking anything of him at all.
He tries to be authoritative, but he doesn’t know anything, especially about relationships, so he just talks and talks and never really says anything.
At the same time, he wants to be his son’s buddy, because he has no friends and he longs to be liked, so he keeps calling him “dude,” and saying gross shit that no son should ever hear from his father, about “smelling like pussy” and “fucking the shit out of” some poor, poor woman.
The truth is he’s never fucked the shit out of anyone in his life. When he does get the chance to have sex, it’s all about him, and it’s over very quickly.
He likes to talk about his son’s sex life because he gets a vicarious ego boost out of the deal. He also likes [sex workers], but he doesn’t want anyone to know, because it makes him look like he can’t get laid without paying for it.
A young woman recently told him he had old man smell. She didn’t mean it as an insult, but it’s been bothering him ever since.
They take a selfie and he flips off the camera, trying to look spontaneous. It doesn’t come out well so they take another one, and he spontaneously flips off the camera again, but this time he’s less confident and the middle finger is less pronounced, more timid, and sad.
He keeps looking over at me. He wants to be sure I can hear him. I’ve spoken only Spanish since I came in, so he doesn’t know if I can understand him or not.
I look straight through him. He doesn’t like it. In the time it takes him to get out his wallet and figure out what to tip, I get my bill, leave my money, and bounce.
On Day 15, it was time to go back home, and on the second leg of my flight, the reality of 2020 set in, aggressively, when a man …
… coughed directly onto the back of my head while there’s a goddamn pandemic brewing, so I’m probably going to die.
I got COVID pretty quickly after that, but I’m alive.
Happy travels.