Contributed by: Matt Landau
www.thepanamareport.com
A/C and comfy beds are fine for a while, but it’s like living
with your grandmother—cozy, safe, and hopelessly humdrum. Balboa
and I were looking for something a little different. We wanted
to find someplace new and beautiful and exciting—and we didn’t
want to travel too far. So we started off cruising along the
Pacific coast, where the mountains and the forests and the sea
are sexy.
The sign for El Parque Nacional Altos de Campana is deceptively
small, veiled by overgrown weeds and droopy palm trees. We
turned in without any expectations and the rap song on the radio
got me all pumped up. I often like to sing along to rap songs,
sometimes—if I’m feeling particularly creative—inventing new
verses and rhymes. Balboa was impressed when I improvised the
following verse to a Talib Kweli bit:
“Yeah I like to go out to beaches
Las Palmas, you know.
Cheaters envy if I wanna get grimey wit' it at Coronado
Las Sirenas down in Gorgona.
And when I get there, I just sit back and chill.”
“You liked that one didn’t you mister?” I asked him. He squealed
in a way I can only describe as pure ecstasy. Then, with his
little daggers of baby dog teeth, he nipped my elbow.
Soon the road became fairly steep and the views increasingly
vast. We passed an old van which had deteriorated on the side of
the road—beyond it some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve seen,
outside of print media and nude beaches. If I was a van, I
thought to myself, I would want to rot in a similar place.
Junkyards are for common folk.
At the park ranger station there was a man who was shaped like a
football. He showed Balboa and I through a few trails, pointing
out several toucans and a hedge of Viagra fern. From an
overlook, the boulder-studded mountains reminded me of Ireland
or Iceland. This crazy mist had settled and my Nikkon captured
it in that not-quite-as-good-as-actually-being-there way that
cameras do. We thought the park was delightful, but we were
hungry and appetite is very important to us.
At this dusty, loveable roadside café I worked my way through a
whole fried snapper which arrived with three neon green moon
wedges of lime, Balboa sticking to milk and a saltine. We were
having fun together, but we still hadn’t found anything
exceptional. Nothing special. Maybe there was no perfect little
spot, we thought to ourselves. Maybe our search is useless and
we should just go home and play Nintendo. “You think we should
continue?” I asked him—a question that elicited a quick barklet
before his canines sank sharply into my hip. “I’ll take that as
a yes.”
In Gorgona, down a small, rocky road and over a rickety old
bridge lay what appeared to be the perfect little beach: clear
water, salt and pepper sand, and only a few wild horses chewing
on a plant that resembled green barbed wire. I snatched my iPod
and searched recklessly for a book I thought I had thrown in the
back earlier, its nonexistence forcing me to grab a bad romance
novel from the back seat pocket—the kind with a puffy, almost
bulging front cover. Balboa absolutely loves the beach, and when
his paws hit the sand for the first time, he jumps and prances
around like it’s the best thing in the world to him. We wandered
down the beach in search of nothing and anything: coming across
a spare plastic doll limb and a few hollowed-out coconuts.
The waves were a little too strong and there were sand fleas
hurling themselves at my ankles. After a while, the sun was
showing the kind of fierce rays that make you squint even when
you’re looking away, and after a quick dip in the water our
attention span was up. “Onward and upwards,” we cried. “Onwards
and upwards.” People sometimes made fun of us for saying things
like that twice, but we like saying things twice and on our
trip, we were living by our rules, goddammit!
Somewhere near Coronado, we took this pebbly dirt road which, if
I hadn’t seen a car go down it before me, I would have
discounted as mud pit. There were piles of mangoes and oranges
littering the sides of the road; something that the Jersey boy
in me found funny and exotic. Towards the end of the road there
was a small parking area and a stone walkway—the kind that could
have led anywhere. Narnia, I thought, would be a cool
destination. At the end of the path, there was no Narnia, not
even a magic centaur. However, there might as well have been men
with trumpets and angels giggling, as the sand and ocean and
rustling palms of this secret beach were near flawless. The sort
of thing secret beach hunters dream about in their dreams.
There was no one on the beach except a smiley old woman wearing
a Yankees T-shirt and shucking coconuts. The woman’s name was
Nancy and she brought me a frosty beer and a huge hunk of juicy
watermelon from her little red food shack. Balboa chewed on the
rind while I tossed a couple ideas around in my head: Would
people worry about me if I was gone another night? Would anyone
mind if I just stayed at this perfect little haven forever? Was
that sand in my ear or a mischievous centipede?
We propped ourselves up against a heavy piece of drift wood and
basked in our pride. “We finally found it,” I whispered to
him—his response, slightly piercing my finger, my ring finger,
drawing the tiniest rivulet of blood out and down my forearm. As
the sun was sinking lazily in the sky, a flock of mosquitoes
descended upon us—rudely reminding us that it was time to go
home. We had found what we were looking for though—the perfect
little spot—and that made us happy. With smirks on our faces,
sand in our toes, and blood on our hands, Balboa and I slowly
made our way back home.
Articles reprinted with
permission from
www.ThePanamaReport.com
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