Panama is some vast tropical tapestry I’ve only had a glimpse of. First, in a brief twenty-four hour stayover in Panama City, then a few days later, visiting the islands along its Pacific Coastline. You get some small idea of that natural and man-made diversity from the air as you land in the capital—jungles, estuaries, creamy beaches, tall buildings, tiny box buildings, industrial parks, houses cut into hillsides. I hope to go back before I read about it too many times in "Outside" or "trips" magazine, and waves of dotcommers invade its shores, and while it still has this alluring edge in my mind. "Alluring" meaning, the sense of precariousness and volatility you have about a Central American country portrayed for instance in the film "The Tailor of Panama" or Joan Didion’s novel, "A Book of Common Prayer". The sense of anything that might suddenly happen. Am I a thrill-seeker or a snob? Not really. But I do like to get clues about what the essence of a place is before it becomes shall we say…totally "globalized". Before you get to see the place on your TV screen as the so-called "raw" backdrop to some "reality-based" survival-adventure series.
Panama City itself is possibly at least a microcosm of the country’s enduring diversity. I see an amazing ethnic range in the hotels, stores, shops and parks—African, Latin, Asian, Caucasian. Somehow, it all works at least on the surface and they all recognize each other as Panamanian. Spanish is of course the lingua franca, but English is widely spoken in most commercial establishments. Aside from the taxi trip I take in the morning out to the Canal zone with a group of other passengers from my flight who are also hanging around my hotel, I manage one other quick taxi trip within the city to the Parque Natural Metropolitano, which my cab driver informs me is the only natural forests within the limits of a Central American capital. My cab driver clearly enjoys using his English with me, and we make a deal to have him pick me up in just over an hour for the return to my hotel. My cab driver is fascinated to hear I’ve just passed through Miami, a city he’s lived in himself and is eager to return to. In between his English to me, he fits in frequent pointed comments in Spanish to several young women walking ahead on the pavement on our side of the street, two youths who almost take off his side-mirror with their scooter, a slow-moving wagon he tries unsuccessfully to bypass on a too-short straight stretch, and the handling of his own car in general. He does it all with a smile.
Panama City in the early morning, from my hotel outdoor rooftop restaurant, is a dizzying mix of hills and flats all covered with soaring skyscrapers, shopping complexes, and apartment blocks. In between, trees, palms, vine and bougainvillea insist on their occasional space as well. Most of what I can see is the business district, a little bit of Manhattan with a slightly illicit air about all the offshore addresses that one of my fellow passengers assures me occupies many of these facades. I would like to go back some day to this city and be here in the evening, as the light melts on the hills and the diamonds of the night start to wink back conspiratorially at the lights from windows high and low all over Panama’s capital. For now, at the end of my day I can only view those city lights as they slip away beneath my plane window, then disappear altogether in the deepening night air.