Blog Posts

Dawn & Penn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 17

12/4/2016

Hard at work

Late August 2016 – More Excuses

I’m sitting here, working on this story. Occasionally I look up, see the beautiful deck on which I’m working, look past the deck to the gorgeously landscaped yard, then the beach beyond it, then the turquoise Caribbean Sea. I think to myself “Somewhere, up in heaven, Hemmingway is looking down on me, and he’s JEALOUS!”

Now for the excuses. I have not kept up with the postings on my blog this month because I have been sick all month.

If you’re a long-time reader, you know I have Meniere’s Disease. Meniere’s is a malfunction of the inner ear. I won’t go into all the details, I’ll just say that it affects my balance, makes me dizzy and nauseous, gives me massive headaches and I have a constant humming in my head.

It’s not pleasant to deal with.

Since this is such a rare disease, there has not been a lot of study on it. As of now, it is incurable and they don’t have anything to moderate the symptoms. The doc just told me to go into a dark room and lay down for a couple of hours. Don’t read, don’t watch TV, don’t do anything that stimulates either the visual or aural senses.

I’ve been dealing with this for the past fifteen years or so. Sometimes it’s a problem, most of the time I hardly notice it. It decided to hit me hard in Panama. For three weeks I was helpless as a kitten. I couldn’t stand up straight long enough to go into town, so I couldn’t check my email or post on my blog.

The pain was neigh on to unbearable. I would lay down for a couple of hours and get some relief. Then I’d get up and try to go about my day, then it would come back with a wallop.
I was almost totally disabled for three weeks. You can bet Dawn was having a good time too. I don’t know why I get so grumpy just because it feels like the top of my head is going to blow off.

I told you that Meniere’s is incurable. Well, I might have found the cure. I will patent this and offer it to medical science. It’s just that the cure may be worse than the disease.

Highway to heaven

You remember all the fun we’ve made of Zika Virus? I’m truly sorry if our light hearted attempt to deal with the possibility of this disease made anyone who has had to deal with it uncomfortable.

Last Friday, I was feeling well enough to go into town. I needed to get to the bank, do some business on the Internet and restock our grocery supplies. In the morning my Miniere’s wasn’t too bad, so I took off.

For some reason, the mosquitoes were out in force in Bocas. I sustained several new bites. One of them had a hard, red circle around the bite. I suspect that was the bad one.

When we were getting ready to go to bed that night, Dawn asked, “What is that rash all over your back?”
I didn’t know I had a rash on my back. I looked in the mirror and, sure enough, my back was covered in red welts. It didn’t hurt so I just went to bed.
The next morning, my entire body from my neck to my knees was covered in the rash. It didn’t itch too badly so I went on with my day.
By late morning I began to feel ill. The room started spinning. This was a different dizziness than the Miniere’s brings. I was burning up, then freezing. I actually got out a sweat shirt to keep warm for a couple of hours.

We had done a lot of reading about Zika before we came down to Panama. The consensus was that it wasn’t a problem for healthy adults. It was like a mild case of the flu.
Bull Pucky!
It’s been years since I’ve had the flu, but this wasn’t a mild case. I was heavy duty sick. I had a fever, chills, nausea, dizziness, diarrhea, the whole nine yards. Friends said that it was probably Zika and that it would pass in two or three days.
When, after day three, I was still sick as hell, I drove into town to see the doctor. She wasn’t there. Even though I was at the clinic during business hours, they were closed.

I drove in again the next day. Still no doctor. This time, there was a sign in the window saying they would be closed from the 18th to the 23rd. I went home.
I was still sick and not getting any better. This thing had lasted a week now. On the 23rd, I decided to go back into town to see the doctor. This time Dawn drove me because I didn’t feel well enough to drive.

We arrived at the clinic only to find it closed. Somewhere in my feverish mind, I did the math. If they were closed from the 18th to the 23rd, that probably meant that they would be closed on the 23rd. I needed to come back tomorrow.
Finally, on my forth try, I saw the doctor. She looked at me and said I had some form of the Zika virus family. Could be Zika, could be Malaria, could be Dengue or a couple of other choices. She said I should go home, eat chicken soup and lay down. If it didn’t get better in a couple of days, I should go to the hospital emergency room and have blood tested so they knew what strain of virus I had. Then they could treat it.

I wanted a pill that would fix me and I wanted it right away. That’s not the way the medical system works in Panama.
We headed home and I went back to bed. In a couple of days, I started feeling better. I recovered a little at a time. I’d feel better and get up and do stuff, then I’d feel ill again and have to go back to bed. After about three days of this, I pronounced myself back on my feet.

So that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. I wasted almost the entire month of August being sick with one thing or another. It ain’t fair, McGee.

1 Comment

Dawn & Penn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 16

11/27/2016

0 Comments

Mid-August 2016

A green garter snake on our steps

Time is a weird paradox. At once it is flying by all too quickly and at the same time, it is frozen.

One hour blends into the next, one day into another. We looked at a calendar the other day (We needed to know what day of the week it was. I forget why.) and discovered that we were in mid-August.

How did that happen? We just got here, but we’ve been here a life time.

We are at the end of the rainy season. By mid-August, the storms go away, the sky returns to its normal cerulean blue and the Caribbean its normal clear turquoise.

After days at a time with fierce tropical storms marching over us, the weather lightened. The wind died down, making it uncomfortably hot, and we again spent a lot of time swimming.

As I write this, the rain is coming down so hard I can’t hear the surf crashing on the beach. I don’t know how heavy the waves are because I can’t see the beach, some hundred feet away. Lightning and thunder are almost simultaneous, meaning that they are right on top of us. The dogs are curled at my feet (because Dawn has gone into town) seeking comfort.

After several days of nice weather, the tropical storms are back with a vengeance. This is by far the hardest it’s rained since we’ve been here. Remember the scene in Romancing the Stone where Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner are in the drenching storm and end up sliding down the hill? That’s nothing compared to what we have today.

The floors in the house are all flooded with water. It’s coming down so hard and fast that the roof can’t channel it off and it works its way into the house.

But I’m not here to talk about the weather. What could be more boring? Today we’re going on an Indiana Penn adventure. (Queue up the Indiana Jones theme song here.)

In the first scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, we hear Indy say, “I hate snakes.” Well, he better not come here

I’ve told you about the little (and not so little) garter snakes we find in the yard and Peanut’s predilection for hunting snakes. Joyce told us that she wants the dogs in at night. She doesn’t want to expose them to night predators.

A baby boa in the back yard

Today, we meet a couple of those predators.

The day before yesterday, Dawn shook me awake with “Penn, there’s a snake in the bedroom.”

I piled out of bed, put on my slippers and dragged myself to survey the situation. Dawn is no fonder of snakes than she is of spiders.

Big deal. A little garter snake made its way into the house. Peanut could take care of that for us.

“Where is it,” I slurred, not quite yet awake.

“Right there!” Dawn screeched. She must have thought I lost my mind being so lackadaisical about this emergency. She always complains that I have no sense of urgency.

I turned to see where she was pointing. Holy Shit! A monster snake was in the hallway happily munching down on the cat food.

The snake was about six feet long. (By the time I see you and tell you this story in person, it will be a twenty-five foot long anaconda.) What kind of snake was it?

Was it poisonous?

It saw me and didn’t coil up like it was ready to strike. Maybe it was a nice snake.

I tiptoed delicately around the snake to get some weaponry with which to remove it. Dawn refused to walk down the hallway, so she went outside, down the stairs and up the stairs into the main house.

Cesar's terciopelo

I thought about all the Wild Kingdoms that I watched as a child. Marlon Perkins always had a long forked stick with which to trap the snake. Then he picked it up at the back of the head to keep it from biting him.

Okay, where can I find a long stick with a Y-shaped end? How about a broom? The bristles on the broom should be stiff enough to keep the snake from getting away.

Am I nuts? I want the snake to get away, out of the house. It might not be a good idea to scare the snake and have it hide in the mattress or climb into the rafters.

I formulated my plan of attack. I’d sneak up on the snake from behind. It was about halfway into the hallway and the other half in the bathroom. I’d pin it down with the broom, grab it behind the head and toss it back into the yard. No sense harming the creature.

By now you should know how my plans usually work out. I don’t know why I do these things. They seem perfectly logical at the time, but in hind sight, I think I must be insane.

Time for action. I pinned the snake down with the broom, about six inches back from its head. It didn’t like that very much.

It turned and twisted its head to attack whatever was holding it down. In the adrenaline rush of the moment, I decided to grab it a little further back, where its sharp fangs couldn’t reach me.

I grabbed the snake about an inch behind its head with my left hand. (I was holding the broom with my right. Who knew snakes were so flexible? It immediately turned and bit me. I was a little worried. I didn’t think it had time to inject any venom into my hand because I moved so fast (Dawn, about that sense of urgency?) transferring it to my right hand. Not a real good idea.

As I got a hold of the snake with my right hand, it turned and bit me three more times.

While all of this was happening, I was racing for the door. By the time I’d gotten the fourth bite, I gave the snake a strong toss into the back yard. The snake hit the ground and quickly slithered into the bushes.

My heart was threatening to burst out of my chest. I slunk down on the bed, looked at my bloody hand and had time to think.

Was the snake poisonous? I was soooooo stupid not to have considered that before my ill-advised adventure. Now, in the wake of the tragedy, I was worried.

The snake was about six feet long, smooth and black all over. It had a wicked looking head with a white mouth. Its scales felt like an expensive handbag. I was amazed at how strong the snake was as he curled around my arm.

Continuing my bout of stupidity, I ran to the main house to get the book about snakes. I’ve had enough first aid training to get an MD license. I thought back on how to treat snake bites. Put a tourniquet on the limb to restrict blood flow and elevate it. Cut a channel between the fang marks with a razor or sharp knife. Suck the poison and spit it out. Seek medical attention as soon as possible, but most of all KEEP CALM. A racing heart moves the toxin to the heart faster.

I think that by now, you have an idea how remote we are. If I had to go to the emergency room, I’d have to drive forty-five minutes into town. The emergency doctor would look at me and call for a med-evac. The chopper would fly from Panama City, about an hour’s flight then take me to the hospital in David, another hour. It the three or four hours all of this would take, I’d be dead

The snake book was no help. I don’t know if it has all the snakes in the world, but there are hundreds of pictures of them. I couldn’t find the snake I had just battled in the book.

Cesar had shown us a baby boa a couple of weeks ago and Peanut had eaten one. This snake looked a lot like the juveniles.

I guessed it wasn’t poisonous. I cleaned my wounds with alcohol and went about my business.

For the next hour or so, I constantly watched my hands. The holes didn’t burn. They weren’t turning black. I thought I’d be okay.

We drove over to Jim and Frances’s house to borrow their Internet connection. Jim looked at the wound and said “I’m glad you’re still with us, dude. If it was poisonous, you’d know by now.”

He meant I would be dead.

Was that a long story? We ain’t done yet.

Cesar's latest trophy

Yesterday, I was laying in bed deciding whether or not I wanted to get up when Dawn came charging into the room.

“Get up right now. Cesar has something he wants to show you.”

I struggled to my feet, pulled on a pair of shorts and headed to the main house.

“VICTOR!” Cesar yelled. (In Spanish speaking countries I go by Victor because no one can pronounce Penn.) “Mato una vivra.”

He stood with a long, wide snake handing from his machete.

“It is very dangerous. It bites you and you are dead.”

“Where did you find it,” I asked.

“In the yard, by the drive way. I was chop, chop the road (this means he was cutting the brush with his machete) when cuebra (snake) jumped up at me.” He gestured with his hands showing that the snake had leapt straight up so that its head was at his eye level. He pantomimed his fight.

“I stagger back a couple of steps.” (You have to understand that I’m translating his Spanish. He doesn’t talk in this polished manner.) “He is in the air, looking at me. This is very dangerous snake. I take two steps back and go swish with my machete.” He pantomimes swinging the machete. “And take off his head.”

We found this bad boy in the snake book. This was no harmless boa. It was the most dangerous snake in Central America, a terciopelo. These snakes are extremely poisonous. If you don’t receive medical treatment immediately, you die. Our book says that the terciopelo is responsible for ninety percent of all serious snake bites in Central and South America.

He laid the dead snake on the ground and we examined it more closely. It was much thicker around than my boa from the day before and maybe a little longer. It was kind of strange. The body was thick right up to the tail, then a thin tail exited the snake and left a kind of uneven back side. It was dark brown with white markings that made X on its back and a white underbelly.

He told us the story about how his daughter was bitten by one of these snakes and air-lifted to the hospital in David (remember, that’s pronounced Dah-veed). She was in the hospital for two weeks before she was released.

Poor Cesar’s heart was going super-sonic. He was breathing hard and shaking. I couldn’t tell if he was suffering the after affects of the adrenaline rush or going into shock.

I decided that he’d had enough for one day. I told him to take the rest of the day off to recover from his ordeal and Dawn drove him home.

So, what happened to the snake?

I'm guessing that he went into the pot for Cesar's dinner. They don't waste anything around here.

Now we turn on the lights and check it for snakes before entering the room.

0 Comments

Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 15

11/18/2016

1 Comment

Mid-July 2016

I’ve mentioned the insects several times in my musings. Today, I tell you about the wasps that ate Chicago.

Dawn is absolutely in love with Bocas. She keeps trying to find ways to convince me to move here permanently.

I could live here but for a few things. First of all is the sense of isolation. Without cell phone service and Internet, I feel like I’m living in the Nineteenth Century. I don’t know what’s going on with my family or who the Republicans nominated for president. (I know who the Dem’s will nominate, but keep hoping the GOP will come to their senses.)

Next is the lack of social interaction. We’ve met most of the neighbors on our side of the island (all 8 couples) and like them, but there is not a lot of social activity out here. We went into town yesterday and hung out at the Toro Loco bar. We’d been told it was where the local ex-pats hang out.

We got to meet a couple of good characters for future books, but it still takes us forty-five minutes to drive into town and Dawn has to drive home after I’ve had two Margaritas.

Then there are the insects. They drive me crazy. For the first month we were here, I was a mass of red dots from all of the insect bites. I itched constantly and often had blood running down my legs where I inadvertently scratched an insect bite.

When we sit in the living room at night and watch TV, hordes of insects of various sizes and shapes gather in the corner where the light is. It’s busier than O’Hare International.
Then there is the bathroom. When I go to bed at night, I have to fight a holding-action against all the insects to brush my teeth.

I finally decided to take action. Enough complaining, I was going to do something about it.
Joyce buys a bug spray called “Dos Tigres” (Two Tigers) by the truck load. It is a very efficient bug killer. It probably has every chemical banned by the FDA in it, but it gets the job done, sometimes too effectively.

Our private lagoon

I planned my attack with great care. I would commence my offensive an hour before bed-time. I’d spray down the sink area and the bathroom before we headed to bed so that by the time we were ready, there would be no more insects.

I sprayed the shower area and to my satisfaction, mosquitoes and moths fell to the floor. I sprayed the area around the toilet with similar results. Unfortunately, a gecko got caught in the cross-fire and became collateral damage.

Then I sprayed the area around the sink. Job done, I returned to the main house with a smirk on my face. What a surprise this would be for Dawn, to be able to get ready for bed bug free.

About twenty minutes later, I went over to the bed room to see the results of my attack.
Holy Crap! Dozens of huge, black wasps were swarming over the sink and in the shower. What had I done?

I quickly shut the door, not wanting to become a pin cushion for the angry wasps.

I told Dawn what I had done and she said, “Didn’t you know that there are two huge wasps nests hanging from the eves just on the other side of the wall from the bathroom?”

No! Duh! I had seen two shapes hanging from the eves one night when I was out on the deck, but had assumed they were bats. TWO wasp nests?
I had to take action. I grabbed another can of bug spray from the main house (remember: Joyce buys them by the truck load) and planned another sneak attack.

I crept up to the bedroom door. It drags on the concrete when you open it, so I carefully lifted and pulled at the same time. I got in without a sound. I sprayed the swarms of wasps and beat a hasty retreat.

Half an hour later, I returned to the battle scene to see the results. Piles of the nasty creatures lay on the floor. Maybe a dozen or so of the wasps were still flying and I had to hunt each one down and spray it with my accurate can of spray while taking care not to get stung.

After another thirty minutes I returned. I was triumphant. All the wasps were dead, as was every other living thing in a fifty foot radius. All that was left was cleaning up the crime scene.

I swept up my defeated foes. They made a pile about a foot and a half in diameter and maybe four inches deep. I didn’t bother to count them, but there must have been a hundred or two.
Feeling victorious, I went to bed, about an hour late, in triumph.

I kept Dawn in the main house during my offensive. I figured that if she saw the wasps, she would never go into the bedroom again.

The dogs guard the beach

That wasn’t the end of our wasp troubles though. Dawn found another large, very busy nest on the other side of the house. She asked me a couple of times to get rid of them.

Having dealt with wasp nest every summer in Seattle, I know how to handle them. I wait until dark, then put up a ladder, climb it and spray down the nest until it is soddened, then get the hell out of there.

I learned the hard way that you spray the nest after dark for two reasons. First of all, the wasps will all be home. You won’t miss any. Secondly, they’ll all be asleep. They won’t have time to wake up, get angry and come after you before they’re dead.

Of course, this is predicated on putting up the ladder in the daylight. I conveniently forget to put up the ladder during the day, that way I don’t have to attack the wasps at night.

Dawn has the patience of an angel. She puts up with my excuses time after time, until finally she takes matters into her own hands.

We had asked Cesar to spray a couple of ant hills next to the house. We’ve tried to fight off the ants with cans of Dos Tigres, but it’s a losing battle. We decided if we were going to make any progress, we would have to take the fight to them.

Cesar is a professional. He doesn’t kid around with cans of spray. He goes nuclear on them. He has a sprayer into which he pours deadly chemicals, then pumps it up and drowns his victims.

Dawn saw this and had a bright idea. “Let’s ask Cesar to spray the wasp’s nest.”

“No,” says I, “it’s still day light. The wasps will come out angry as hornets and sting everything in sight.”

You know the old saying, “If Mama’s not happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

I talked with Cesar and he said he’d handle it. I offered to get the ladder and he laughed.

“I’ve been doing this a long time. We don’t need a ladder,” he said in Spanish.

He walked up the steps and I closed all the doors and windows so the angered wasps wouldn’t get in the house.

“You can come in here if they come after you,” I said.

He laughed again. Stupid gringos.

I snuck my cowardly head out of the door to see what he was doing.

From the deck, he pumped up his sprayer and let fly. He easily hit the wasp’s nest, ten feet above him.

He sprayed it down good, then stepped back to admire his handiwork. Not a wasp survived. They dropped like flies.

I don’t know what was in the spray, and I don’t want to know. I just know I’ll never use it around food, pets or children.

Now we can live in peace, knowing that no wasps would ever dare invade our premises again.

1 Comment

Dawn & Penn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 14

11/13/2016

1 Comment

Still Early July 2016

Now come the cute dog stories.

Joyce has two dogs, they are the light of her life. Peanut is a dirty white mongrel that weighs in at about forty pounds. She is extremely fast and has a nose and ears that pick up threats faster than NORAD.

Little Bit is a smaller, slimmer jungle dog. I mean he is a street dog. There is a species of wild dogs here called jungle dogs. The jungle dogs are heavier built than the street dogs and have shorter legs.

What I’m trying to say is that these dogs don’t have all the instincts bred out of them. Little Bit is a herder and Peanut is a hunter.

Joyce’s cat, Polly is an inside cat. When they first got her, they were living in a motor home traveling the country. The cat was not allowed outside because they thought she’d never find her way home.

When Wes and Joyce were building their plantation here, Polly lived with Dawn in Florida. Now Polly lives in the master bedroom complex. She is not allowed outside. To prevent her escape, Joyce has covered the deck railing with a plastic chicken wire.

One day, Little Bit got trapped in the master bedroom while we went to town. When we got home, Dawn found him with this head struck trough the chicken wire, but his body stuck on the deck. He wasn’t happy.

I tell you this to explain how the hole got into the chicken wire. Naturally, Polly discovered the hole, her ticket to freedom.

We were sitting on the deck of an evening when we spotted the cat in our front yard.

“We have to get Polly back in the house!” Dawn screamed.

At about the same time, the dogs spotted Polly. They took off down the steps after her, Dawn and I in hot pursuit.

“Get the dogs before they hurt her,” I yelled to Dawn.

I just don’t know dogs.

While Peanut watched Polly and barked, Little Bit’s herding instinct kicked in. He started barking at Polly and snipping at her. I was sure we were going to lose Joyce’s cat.

I ran down the steps and tried to corral Little Bit, but he was too fast for me. He chased Polly towards the bedroom.

Dawn started laughing. “He’s herding her.”

Sure enough, Little Bit drove Polly back up the steps to the deck on the master bedroom. Polly flew through the hole in the chicken wire to safety.

Job done.

Peanut spots a snake on our side steps.

Peanut is a hunter and protector. She spends hours making rounds of the deck, keeping undesirable creatures from attacking us. Often she barks, then she and Little Bit take off in hot pursuit of something.

We were going to hang laundry beneath the house and Peanut was in a frenzy of barking. I didn’t know it at the time, but now we recognize that bark. It’s her hunting bark.

A baby boa constrictor, about two feet long, was sunning itself on the pavement and Peanut was lunging at it and barking. The boa was coiled, baring its teeth, ready to strike.

It looked like a standoff to me so I decided to end the fight. I took a stick, hooked into the snake's coils and tossed it out into the yard.

I was amazed at Peanut’s speed. Before the snake hit the ground, she was there waiting for it. The snake had no chance to coil and protect itself. Peanut bit the snake just behind its head and started flipping it around in her mouth.
She let go of the snake, but it was badly wounded. She grabbed another spot and flailed the snake around again.

The battle was over. Peanut ate her treasure and returned to the house with a shit-eating grin on her face.

A few days later, we heard her hunting bark again. She was on the stairs between the house and the bedroom. There, at the base of the stairs was an emerald green snake about three feet long.

She barked and the snaked coiled. The standoff went on for some time. This time, I didn’t interfere. Eventually, the snake managed to extricate itself from the fight and disappear.

A couple of days ago, Dawn and I made a trip out back to pick limes. The ground was soggy from all the rain. Peanut was walking with us.

Suddenly, she lunged and pulled an emerald green snake from the grass. She flailed with it and tossed it in the air. The snake was in bad shape and couldn’t escape.

This one she left dead in the grass.

We can’t forget her protector instinct. She guards us from monkeys, birds and the like. She was lying in her bed in the living room when she sat up and started barking. She and Little Bit took off down to the beach. We decided to see what she was barking at, it might be more poachers.

When we got to the beach we found Peanut barking at a ship out in the channel. She barked and barked and the ship changed its course and headed out to sea.

Mission accomplished.

Twice a day airplanes fly over the house on their way to the airport. Of course, Peanut responds instantly, barking and heading down to the beach. So far she has been one hundred percent successful. We haven’t had a single airplane land on our beach.

Dawn and Little Bit relax on the deck

Peanut was the first dog in the house. While the house was under construction, one of the workers came to work one morning with a five-gallon plastic bucket which he presented to Joyce. In the bucket was a little white puppy.

The puppy was in bad shape. The worker told Joyce that it needed to go to the vet. Joyce agreed, took it to town and showed it to the vet. The vet worked on the puppy for a while, gave it shots, and sent it home for Joyce to nurse back to health.

Joyce did a good job. Soon she had a healthy, loving puppy she named Peanut.

When the dog was healthy again, the worker wanted to take her home. Joyce refused.

“You let her get sick, then you brought her to me for help. I saved the dog. Now she’s mine.”

So Peanut and Joyce lived happily ever after.

How Little Bit joined the family is another story. Wes and Joyce were sitting on the deck, watching the ocean and reading when a little dog showed up on their steps. The wisdom on the islands is to drive off any stray dogs. If you let them stay, feed or give them water, they will think they belong there and you’ll never get rid of them.

Wes got up, grabbed the hose and drove the little dog off. As soon as Wes was settled in, the dog was back. After several attempts, Wes finally drove the dog off.

The next day, the dog was back. “We’ve got to get rid of that little shit,” Joyce said, thus he was named. For several days, they drove Little Shit off and each day he returned.

Wes decided to get rid of him once and for all. He enticed Little Shit to get in the truck with him, then drove up to Juanie’s café and dropped him off. He surely wouldn’t be able to find his way back.

By the time Wes was back, Little Shit was waiting for him.

The next day, Wes decided to take the nuclear option. They were going fishing and Enrique met them with his boat. Wes took the dog with them back down to Juanie’s.

They prepared for their fishing adventure then boarded the boat and shoved off. Little Shit plunged into the water and followed them.

“Don’t worry about him,” Wes said. “He’ll get tired and swim back to shore.”

He didn’t.

Finally, Joyce threw in the towel. They picked up the dog and went on their way.

When they returned from their trip, they asked Enrique to take the dog. Enrique lives on the other side of the island. He took the dog home by boat so that it had no idea how to get back to Wes and Joyce’s house.

Or so they thought.

By four pm, the dog was back. Joyce gave up. “I guess we’re going to have to keep him.”
Somehow or other she convinced Wes to go along.

“We’re going to have to give him a new name. We can’t go around calling him ‘Little Shit.’”
Thus, his name morphed into “Little Bit.”

I’ve already told you about Peanut’s taste for baby turtles. She also likes to dig sand crabs out of their holes. Little Bit also indulges in this activity, but I’ve never seen him catch a crab. Peanut is way better.

She smelled a crab under the sand. She stared digging a hole to go after it. When the hole was about two feet deep, she popped up with a good sized crab in her mouth.

I decided to save the crab and took off after Peanut. This was a futile gesture. A two legger can’t catch a four legger on a good day, and this is without reckoning Peanut’s spectacular speed and my gimpy knees.

However, my chase did cause Peanut to drop the crab and before she could pick it up again, it disappeared into the water.

Dawn takes the dogs on two or three walks a day. Lately she has discovered the lazy woman’s way to get the dogs their exercise.

Miss Polly, Queen of the Jungle

Joyce told us that we had to lock the dogs in the house when we drove into town because they would follow us. She said we could take the dogs as far as the gate on our private road, but not let them past it.

There are all sorts of dogs wandering around in the jungle. I suspect that a great many of them are feral. Joyce doesn’t want her dogs hurt or killed by them.

You also know that we don’t have any cell phone service at the house. If we want to make a call, we have to walk or drive up the hill, past the gate to Rosemary’s or all the way to the public road to find reception.

I was driving into town but Dawn was staying home. We expected that the dogs would want to stay with her.

WRONG-O!

The dogs followed the truck. I drove the quarter mile to the private road and they kept up with me step for step. I should mention that on these roads, you’re never going to go faster than twenty kilometers per hour.

I tried to leave the dogs in my dust. Fat chance. Peanut ran alongside me and Little Bit was not far behind. I got to the road and thought I’d exhaust them before we got to the gate. Nope. They kept with me all the way. Finally, I had to turn around and lead them home.

(I wrote about the tropical storms earlier, right now it’s coming down so hard I can hardly think.)

So, Dawn’s method of getting the dogs their exercise? She drives up to the top of the hill a couple of times a day to use the cell phone. We let the dogs run with her. When she gets to the gate, she stops and lets the dogs into the truck. She drives up the hill and makes her calls then lets the dogs out again when she goes through the gate. Then they have to run after the truck on the way home.

When they get home, the dogs are breathing hard, but have big smiles on their faces and are wagging their tails a hundred miles an hour. They take long drinks of water and collapse on their beds for a little nap.

I could (and will) tell you a lot of other dog stories, but this is a long post for today. We’ll take it up again tomorrow.

1 Comment

Dawn & Penn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 13

11/5/2016

2 Comments

More Late June 2016

Rainy season here in Panama is from May to July. The natives call the rainy season invierno, or winter in Spanish. According to the calendar, it is late spring and early summer, but for islanders, it is winter.

We had a particularly dry spring. Joyce said they had three weeks of totally dry weather before we arrived. (Why is it that they always have the best weather, see the most whales, etc before we arrive?) When Wes and Joyce left us, the cisterns were about half full.

We didn’t think much of it, but I checked them from time to time and the water was running low. I talked it over with Dawn and we went to DefCon 2. We were careful with the water, but weren’t on strict rationing.

The toilets here seem to have a mind of their own. When you flush them, sometimes they continue to run until you jiggle the handle. Other times, I have waited in the bathroom until they stopped running, then an hour later, discovered that they were running even though no one else had used the bathroom.

Then we had the big drain. One afternoon, Dawn walked into the bathroom and the faucet in the sink was running full force. She immediately turned it off and started looking for the perpetrator.

It seems that Heidi had used the bathroom last. I suspect that she saw a cucaracha or spider and panicked, leaving the bathroom with the faucet running.

In any case, we were nearly out of water.

This continued for days. After Heidi left, we had to resort to bottled water for drinking and washing. The truck was broken so we couldn’t go into town to buy water, so we had to ask neighbors to pick some up for us when they went into town.

In the meantime, it didn’t rain. Our situation was getting worse and worse.

We were in mid-June and had only had one big rainstorm and it came before our water crisis. We waited hopefully for the rain to start.

How stupid can you get? When it started, it didn’t stop.

Peanut discovers a tasty mid-day snack

Nearly every day a tropical rainstorm moves over us. Most of the time, they hit at night, but sometimes during the day.

It is awe inspiring to watch the storm. The winds arrive first. If it has been a hot day, they are very welcome. We hear thunder in the distance and see sheet lightning. Then it hits with the impact of a battering ram. The rain comes down so hard it disorients you. Our visibility almost disappears. The horizon and other islands that we can easily see during the day are gone. All you can see are the sheets of rain.

We have furniture on the deck. Every night we bring in the cushions so they don’t get wet. When the storm hits, we run to bring in the cushions and any laundry Dawn has hanging. They will be soaked in minutes.

Most of the time we have the louvered doors open, making the interior of the house open to the deck. It gives the cook a wonderful view of the ocean as he/she works.

The deck is maybe twenty feet wide with the roof overhanging that by about eighteen inches. The wind is so heavy that it blows the rain into the house. We have to scramble to close the doors to keep our inside space dry.

That doesn’t work too well. There are several leaks in the roof. Great puddles of water accumulate on the floor. We put towels down over some of them, but it’s a losing battle. More water comes in that we can sop up.

In the bathroom in the master bedroom, the floor is a lake. The causeway between the house and the master bedroom is covered with water. Just walking between the two spaces is a dangerous task.

We have a corrugated iron (steel?) roof on the house. The rain pounds down on it so loudly that it completely covers the sound of the surf crashing ashore. One night I was watching TV when a storm hit. It was so loud that I couldn’t hear the TV, so I turned it off.

The dogs are not found of storms. They are afraid of thunder and lightning. If the pantry door is open, Peanut hides there. Little Bit likes to curl up at my feet or in Dawn’s lap. If those options are not available, he joins Peanut in the pantry.

This morning I stood on the deck outside the bedroom and watched the power of the storm in the back yard. Yesterday, I noticed that the lakes and puddles in the back yard were gone. They had finally been absorbed into the soil. But the soil is so saturated that within a few minutes, they were back.

The rain came down in sheets. The wind blew so hard that the blanket Dawn had drying on the clothes line outside the bedroom was flapping around like an unsheeted jib in a gale. I went out to take it down and it tried to get away from me.
I felt like I was fighting our jib down in a blow off the coast of Baja.

The rainy season is supposed to end by late July. Since it started so late, it’s just our luck that it will continue until we leave in late September.

Our jungle island

Early July 2016

I want to start out with a tribute to our neighbors. Living off the grid is like the Old West. I’m sure that’s why these people are here. They grew tired of our regulated life in the States. They wanted to take care of themselves, not have the government decide what was best for them.
Some of the pioneers here want to tame the island, mold it in the direction that they would like to see at home. Others just want to be left alone. They don’t want any taming. They want to live in peace and make their own decisions. So what if they don’t want to wear clothes on a hot day or swim in the nude. No one cares.

This comes with a price. Freedom is never free. It means when your hot water heater breaks down or your roof leaks, you can’t just pick up the phone and call a repairman. There are no electricians or plumbers or roofers on the island. If you really do need their help, you have to fly them in from the mainland and pay for their room and board while they’re doing your repair.
Everyone here is handy. They fix their plumbing and roofs and repair their decks. Living here is not just sitting in your lounge chair watching the sun go down and the tide roll in. These houses take active maintenance to keep them habitable in this hostile climate. If you’re looking for a five-star resort, look elsewhere.

Wait a minute, did I just say hostile climate? You thought we were living in paradise with long empty beaches, palm trees and warm weather every day of the year.
Yeah. The humidity is one hundred percent. Any metal parts will be eaten alive by rust or corrosion unless you care for them. Everything is damp all the time. When you crawl into bed at night, the sheets are slightly moist.

The sun is unforgiving. It will destroy your wood unless you keep it protected. The rain is relentless. It pounds down with the force of a sledge hammer. It will destroy any electronics that get in the way and find ways through the roof into your house.

It is also a paradise for every species of insect known to man. I like the monkeys and sloths and turtles. I despise the insects. They are everywhere. When I brush my teeth at night, I am assaulted from every direction. Dawn hates the spiders. I dislike the spider webs.
The spiders here are very smart. Because the average human here is about five foot six, they spin their webs just above that level. We go walking in the forest and Dawn walks under the webs. I get them right in the face.

Bocas Town is like something out of the Fifties. You go into the hardware store and ask for a part. The person behind the counter disappears into the maze of shelves behind the counter and finds it for you. No self-service here.

There are no chain grocery stores. They all seem to be owned by Chinese families. The entire family works in the store. When you ask for help finding something, they take you to it. The big key here is that you can find someone to help you. Nine year old boys stock the shelves, teenage daughters man the till.

Our Jungle super highway

This is where I have to say something about our neighbors cooking. Courtney and Rosemary own the only marina on the island. They have an open air cantina on the point, looking out at the sea and back to the cove where the boats are moored.

They serve food in the cantina. Every day they serve breakfast, lunch and dinner. On Friday nights they have live music and BBQ ribs and chicken. We’ve gone over on Fridays several times.

Whenever we go to Rosemary’s house, she’s cooking something. Sometimes it’s pizza dough for the Friday night spectacular, sometimes its hemp bread or coconut cream pie. One time she was working on an amazing chocolate desert.

She’s like a drug pusher. When we drop by, she gives us a little taste to get us hooked. Then we have to go to the marina on Friday night to buy a whole portion. With the chocolate dessert, we had to buy two. We shared one after dinner and took the other one home for a late night snack the next evening.

I have to tell you about Frances cooking. I already mentioned their BBQ, but I should tell you about the side dishes Frances made. She is a Loos-iana girl. She made a couple of Cajun dishes. I don’t remember (and probably couldn’t pronounce their names) but I remember their flavor. It was wonderful.

I think all of our neighbors are heroes. You could take the plot from an old western, change it to a tropical story and film it right here. We have neighbors that I have identified as the sheriff, the self-sufficient farmer, the good hearted farmers wife, the saloon girl with a heart of gold and the rigid storekeeper.

The best part of it all is that when one person has a problem, everybody comes to their aid. They may have petty feuds, but those are put aside until the problem is solved.

Thank you to all the residents of the north side of the island.

2 Comments

Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 12

10/24/2016

1 Comment

A sloth in our yard

Late June 2016

Time seems not to exist. Days melt into weeks and I lose track of when we are. I usually don’t know what day of the week it is or what day of the month it is. Therefore, I’ve stopped using exact dates for headings.

I’m going to write about a bunch of miscellaneous stuff today. It may or may not tie it, but it’s what’s happenin’.

Let’s start with the sloths. We were driving over to Rosemary and Courtney’s. As we came up the hill towards the gate, there was a bundle of fur laying in the road. It didn’t move as we approached.

Dawn was driving, so she stopped the truck and I jumped out. I thought the poor thing had been hit by a truck and was suffering. I wanted to help.

As I got close to the victim I recognized it as a sloth. These are kinda cute mammals that weight about thirty or forty pounds with long legs and claws. They usually live in the trees, but do come down for water or to cross roads. They are incredibly slow animals. I don’t understand how their species has lasted this long. I expect that the jaguars would have no trouble catching them.

Our sloth was obviously not hurt. It just lay there and stared at me. I realized that sloths take their own sweet time crossing the road, so I got back in the truck and we
drove around it.

When we told Courtney about it, he says that they’ll let you pick them up. He was driving down the road and found a sloth right in the middle of the road. Courtney was in a hurry, so he got out and picked it up under its arms. The sloth spread out its arms like it was flying.

This was a momma sloth with a baby on her back. The baby spread its arms out and pretended to fly too.

We have seen sloths in the trees in our yards. They don’t seem to move much, just hang onto the tree and eat a few leaves.

Jim and Frances rent out their house as an AirB&B. They had guests coming and Dawn volunteered to help them clean the place.

After a long day cleaning, she dragged herself into the truck and started up the driveway. When the house was well out of sight, she came upon a sloth in the drive. Remember, Jim’s driveway is really just a path between the trees. There is no shoulder, no way to go around the sloth.

Dawn took it out of gear and waited for the sloth to cross. She sat for fifteen minutes watching the creature slowly make its way across. Then it was thirty minutes. She was tired and hot and wanted to get home. Finally, the sloth made it to the other side and she could drive on.

All of this brings us to the question: Why did the sloth cross the road?

Answer: He had an hour to kill.

Monkey business

Since I’m writing about small mammals, I might as well throw in monkeys too.

I have seen two species of monkeys here, the howler monkey and the capuchin. I have heard some of the long time residents call the capuchin monkeys white face monkeys but my Panama wild life book says they’re capuchins.

The capuchins are smaller and very agile. They move through our trees in troops of twenty or thirty. They don’t make a lot of noise, but we have a row of trees just on the edge of the beach that they use as a highway to move from one side of the property to the other. These are cute little guys. You want to grab one and cuddle it and keep it for a pet. As a matter of fact, this species is often captured and brought to the U.S. for pets.

You don’t want to get near when they are traveling though. They defecate in their hands and fling their feces at you.

As I said, the monkeys use our trees for their super-highway. We sit in our chairs on the deck, sipping a Margarita and watch the circus go past.

The howler monkeys are another story. A little larger than the capuchins and with dark faces, they are LOUD. There’s a reason they’re named HOWLER monkeys. These guys sit in the trees around the house and absolutely blast us.

I don’t know of any other animal that is louder (except maybe rock musicians, or possibly an elephant trumpeting). Their cry is something between the roar of a lion and a 747 taking off. Sometimes they make a sound that sounds like a dog whining. Sometimes they open up and howl. When this goes on for hours, it can be quite annoying.

The other morning, I awoke to the howl of monkeys. I lay there and listened to them, but didn’t bother to get up. Dawn says that there were about forty or fifty of them transiting our yard. She sat and watched them for about a half hour before they were all gone. Enough about monkeys.

Let’s talk about the local fruit (and I don’t mean at the night clubs). Wes and Joyce have lime, mango and cacao trees planted in their yard. They also have pineapple (piña) bushes and watermelons.

The piñas they grow tend to be small, but very tasty. Likewise, the watermelons don’t get very big. I don’t know if this is because of the climate and soil or because of the animals eating them before they get large.

We pick limes from the tree at least once a week. Dawn has started making homemade Margarita mix and it’s yummy.

Speaking of yummy, Cesar brought us a ripe cacao the other day. He broke it open and showed us how to eat the insides and spit out the seeds. It was very sweet, something like a cross between the sweetness of a pineapple and the texture of paste. You pull a seed from the fruit and suck the sweet meat off if it, then discard the seed.

We didn’t put two and two together until this morning. I was working on this piece and forgot what the name of the fruit was. Cesar dropped by and I asked him. When he told me it was a cacao the light bulb went off over my head. The seeds are chocolate. You dry them, then roast them and grind them to make chocolate. Duh!

The monkey super-highway

1 Comment

Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 11

10/10/2016

1 Comment

Our private beach

Sometime after June 9th 2016 (I can no longer keep track of the day of the week)

It’s time to talk about our beach. I’ve already described the house and the park-like gardens. I’ve also said that the beach is about fifty feet from the base of our front steps.

We go down to the beach nearly every day. Dawn takes the dogs on walks once or twice a day and sometimes she even pries me away from my computer to join her.

We have four hundred and fifty feet of beach front on our lot. (The whole lot is thirteen acres) The beach itself is several miles long and totally private. To the west is a head land and point that blocks further passage on the beach. To the east another points marks the end of the beach. We often skinny dip here because there are no other people around

We have light tan colored sand. Not like the white sandy beaches I was used to from Hawaii or Mexico. The sand is fine and as you walk along the beach, you sink in about ankle deep. Near the water, where it is wet, you sink in even further.

I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect it’s because the coral here is the same light tan color.

I know that in Hawaii, the white sand is because the fish eat the coral and pass the sand. The coral there is white.

The jungle comes right down to the beach. Palms of all kinds, teak, sea grape and mahogany trees line the coastline with about twenty or thirty feet of beach between them and the ocean. There is a little drift wood, but nothing like we’re used to in the Pacific Northwest.

Tides this close to the equator are not much to talk about, maybe two or three feet. However, we are facing the open Caribbean Sea, so we get waves crashing ashore. Sometimes the sea is calm and you can easily walk out until you can’t touch bottom. Sometimes the sea is angry and you have to dive into the waves to get off the beach. The sound of the surf crashing on the shore is a constant. There is no silence in this jungle. At night, we watch a DVD on the TV and huddle close to hear the sound track over the roar of the breakers. Sometimes I think it’s going to drive me crazy, sometimes I don’t even notice it. The other day I was driving into town and just stopped on the road and turned off the engine in the middle of the jungle to hear some quiet.

Turtle tracks on the beach

Several species of turtles nest on our beach. First there are the leatherbacks, then the hawksbills, the green and loggerheads. The females take turns coming ashore to lay their eggs with the leatherbacks coming in first, then the green etc.

Dawn and Heidi discovered several turtle nests on the beach and Joyce carefully records their coming and going. The mama turtle leaves the sea under the full moon with the highest tides and climbs up the beach to lay her eggs in a nest above the high water mark then returns to the sea. The eggs are warmed by the sun and eventually hatch at the same time. A single turtle may lay as many as one hundred and sixty eggs. Several females will lay their eggs in close by locations so that when thousands of baby turtles hatch, some of them have a chance of making it to the sea.

Naturally, predators are waiting for the eggs to hatch. Some even eat the eggs. The worst of the bunch is a species called homo sapiens. We have poachers here. Even though the turtles are protected by law, there is no police presence to guard them. The honest people don’t eat them and the dishonest ones ignore the law.

These people have been eating turtles and their eggs since time began. Every year the turtles return to the beaches where they were born to lay their eggs. The cycle continued. Then modern man came along.

First it was the pirates, whalers and explorers. Turtles were great sources of protein and taste a lot like pork. The shells were prized for making jewelry.

Soon, a worse type of pirate hounded the turtles. The capitalists organized expeditions to hunt the creatures and finally, their factories and ships produced so much pollution that their feeding grounds became deserts.

Now the turtles hang on by their flippers. The natives here don’t seem to understand the concept of yesterday and tomorrow. They only live in today. Today, there are plentiful turtles on their beaches so they hunt them, not realizing that they are on the brink of extinction around the world.

One day, Heidi was out walking when two men came down our beach. One had a machete and the other a bundle of sticks.

“What are you doing here?” Heidi asked.

“Oh, we’re from the government. We’re surveying the turtles. We find the nests and mark them, then when the turtles hatch, we count them.”

Seemed harmless enough. Until we told Gundela about it.

“Poachers!” she screamed. “Those sons of bitches are marking the nests so they can come back and steal the eggs.”

Sure enough the next morning, the nests had been dug up and a few broken turtle eggs littered the beach.

Heidi and Dawn now went to Def-Con 2. Dawn built a scarecrow and asked me to tie a hangman’s noose for her. She hung the scarecrow above the turtle nests and lighted a tiki-torch.

Heidi was swimming when two guys were marking turtle nests. She confronted them and told them to leave. Remember, the average Panamanian man is about five foot six. Heidi came out of the water in her bikini looking like Ursala Andress in Doctor No. It was this Valkyrie who is a martial arts expert and two little brown men. They decided that discretion is the better part of valor and cleared out.

Turtle nest on our beach

Another day, Dawn was walking along the beach when two pangas showed up with two men apiece in them. She ran back to the house and got Wes’s BB gun. I gotta tell you, this BB gun is so realistic looking that if you pointed it at a cop, he’d shoot you.

It looks like a big, bad automatic pistol.

With her weapon in hand, she returned to the beach where the pangas were approaching the shore. She aimed the gun at them and they did a quick one-eighty. Then she stayed, stuck the gun in her waistband and played with the dogs until they lost interest and left.

All of this was before we learned that the poachers in the pangas carry guns. I guess they didn’t want to get into a gun fight over a bunch of eggs.

On Sunday, Jim and Frances invited us up to the tree house for a good ole Texas-style barbeque. We call it the tree house because the lower floor is a kitchen, dining area and lounge. It reminds me of a Key West bar. In the center of the big room is a large tree. Upon careful inspection, I could tell that the tree didn’t grow there. A group of Boy Scouts built the house as part of a tree house competition. They brought the tree in to lend style to the house, but we now call it the tree house. Looking up at the house from the beach, it truly looks like a modern tree house, overhanging the steep hill.

Jim and Frances rent out the house on AirBNB.

The driveway down to their house reminds me of a carnival ride. It is barely wide enough for one vehicle. The forest reaches out and grabs at you as you drive down. It is steep and is just ruts in the dirt. When it rains, the footing is so bad that you have to have 4-wheel drive to get down.

While we were lounging around, watching Frances cook, waiting for the other guests to arrive, Jim and Dawn took the dogs for a walk. They have a pack of four or five dogs, I can never tell because they’re constantly moving around and all look alike. Add our two dogs and you have my worst nightmare.

Peanut sniffs out a turtle nest

They had only been gone for a few minutes when Jim came huffing back up to the house.

“All hands on deck. I need help freeing a stranded turtle.”

I pulled on my sandals and headed down to the beach. Frances stopped to grab a camera.

The path to the beach was no better than their driveway. I clung to vines and small palm trees as I edged my way along small cliffs until I finally arrived at the scene of the crime.

Dawn was standing down in a cluster of green rocks with driftwood piled on them.

“Where’s the turtle?” I asked.

“Right there.” Dawn pointed.

I didn’t see no stinkin’ turtle. I stepped down into the rocks to get a closer look.

“Watch out!” she shouted. “You’re going to step on the turtle.”

Sure enough, if I looked carefully, I could see that one of the big rocks was indeed a hawksbill turtle. She was wedged between two rocks that were covered with driftwood to a height of about three feet. No way was she going to climb over that.
Not only that, she couldn’t turn around. Apparently turtles can’t back up, so she was stuck.

She was about three feet long and maybe two and a half feet across. When we lifted her, I guessed that she weighed about two hundred pounds.

Jim and Frances arrived. There wasn’t room for all of us to work around the turtle so Frances chronicled the event on her camera. You can see the video on my home page.

Jim took one side of the big beast, I took the other and Dawn lifted her tail end. We tried to lift her and she panicked. She tried to crawl forward and jammed my hand against a rock. It hurt. Come to think of it, it still does. It swelled up like a golf ball, a purple golf ball that is. But not until after we rescued her.

She had wedged herself so far forward under the driftwood that we couldn’t lift her. Jim and I pulled her back into the clear, then we lifted the squirming, fighting reptile up to the first rock. She wanted out of there. She tried to get over the driftwood, to no avail.

“Lift, NOW!” Jim yelled.

I got a handhold and between the two of us, we got her up on the driftwood. As soon as her center of gravity was over the log, she slipped from our hands, down the rocks and into the sea. We stood and watched to make sure she made it, but never saw her again. She must have swum out into her home under water.

We all felt very full of ourselves, saving this magnificent animal. No single person could have lifted and moved her. But as a team, we did it.

Peanut waits for turtles to come ashore

Yesterday, Dawn saved a baby turtle. She was walking on the beach with Peanut and Little Bit when Peanut smelled something under the sand. She started digging and before long, came out of the hole with a small turtle in her mouth. Peanut trotted over to Dawn and dropped the turtle.

Dawn had been told that you don’t pick up baby turtles. We later found out that the babies need to walk in the sand so they memorize their beach. The turtles always return to the beach where they were born. Dawn did as told, lifted the turtle and carried him into the water. She let him go and watched him swim away.

Afterwards, she looked in the hole Peanut had dug. At the bottom she found the shell with a hole in it where the turtle had hatched.

I mentioned earlier that when the baby turtles hatch, they make a mad dash for the sea to escape predators. Gulls, pelicans and other sea birds love to feast on baby turtles. Small mammals, snakes, etc. like to join the fiesta.

The egg laying season is in full swing. For the last couple of days, as we approach the full moon, we’re seeing all kinds of turtle tracks in the sand and nests on our beach.

Turtle tracks look like tractor tire tracks. There is the center area where the sand is flattened by the turtle’s shell. Then, outside of the shell track, are the tracks left by their flippers as they propel themselves forward. The track ends where they decide to build their nests, then there is another set of tracks where they make their way back to the sea.

The nests are depressions about four feet in diameter in the sand where the mama lays her eggs. Then she covers them and heads back to the open ocean, never to see her offspring again.

Yesterday, Dawn was totally excited. We had a set of turtle tracks leading up to the path where we walk down to the sea. I couldn’t find any trace of a nest, so we decided that this must be a false nest.

The mama turtles sometimes come up onto the beach and leave their tracks to confuse predators. Then they go back into the water and come ashore again in another place to lay their eggs.

This morning we had a couple of sets of tracks right in front of the house. There is a nest in our path that leads down to the beach. Dawn can’t wait for the eggs to hatch and see the babies head for the sea.

Last night, since it was one day before the full moon, we took flash lights and walked down to the beach to watch for turtles coming ashore. We waited too long. We saw a couple of turtle tracks and new nests, but it was about an hour after high tide. I didn’t realize that turtles could read tide charts. Apparently they come ashore when the tide is at its highest so that they can plant their eggs high above the high-water mark.

I’m sure we’ll have more turtle adventures as the months pass by, but that’s it for now.

Turtles aren’t the only wild life here. Stay tuned, on my next blog I’ll tell you how to avoid having shit flung at you by a howler monkey.

1 Comment

Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 10

10/6/2016

1 Comment

Our beach house

Day Eighteen, Sunday June 9th 2016 (for about two weeks)

Heidi goes home today. She was paranoid about missing her plane, so we arrived in town at nine am for her noon flight.

We dropped by the airport so Heidi could check that her flight was on schedule and check her bags. Remember, this airport is like something out of Romancing the Stone. There are eight parking places and no security preventing you from entering the boarding gate part of the terminal. As a matter of fact, there is only the boarding gate part of the terminal, no fancy chain restaurants, bars or executive clubs.

The terminal is a one story building with a bad yellow paint job. Apparently in the last election, there was a ballot measure to collect funds to improve the airport. After the measure passed, the terminal was given a new coat of yellow paint.

A month or so later, a work crew came along and painted white primer over about twenty percent of the surface. Then all worked stopped. No one knows where the millions of dollars allocated to the improvements went.

Oh, well. That’s Panama.

When you enter the terminal, the room for deplaning passengers is right in front of you. To the right is a “ticket counter.” Next is the one boarding gate and further down the building is a waiting area with about fifty or so chairs. Not a problem, no plane with more than fifty passengers is ever going to land here.

Since we had three hours to kill before her departure, Miss Heidi wanted to go shopping for gifts to take home to her friends.

We drove about five blocks to an open lot with several open-air stands set up selling the local artisans’ wares. Heidi and Dawn plowed through the stalls and I got bored and stood by the truck. Heidi argued price with the vendors, even if the price was only one dollar, she had to get
a better bargain. Eventually she collected several choice items.

Dawn refused to buy anything there. The prices for the items, made in China, were higher than she’d pay for the same thing in San Diego. Cravat tourista.

After the excruciating shopping adventure was over, we found a place to have brunch, then headed back to the airport.

One more word about Panamanian security: you know how you run your bags through an X-ray machine before they’re loaded on a plane in the U.S.? It’s kinda the same here, except two nice young ladies open your bags and go through them looking for contraband.

I suppose this isn’t too big a thing, unless they pull out your frilly underwear and other assorted personal toys that you don’t want anyone seeing.

This is the part that takes the longest. Since our security guards go through each bag by hand, the line builds up. With an X-ray machine, the bag would go through in a few seconds. By hand, the search can take five minutes or more, depending on how interesting your baggage is or how big an ass you make out of yourself with the guards.

Finally we got Heidi checked in and left the airport. We stopped at the mini-super for a few grocery items, then headed home.

Bocas airport (just kidding)

FREEDOM!!! We were in our luxurious jungle hideout by ourselves. Nothing to do now but sit back, relax and enjoy our freedom, right?

When we got home, Dawn stopped in the basement to check the load of laundry she left washing. The utility sinks were full and water was overflowing onto the floor. Our plumbing was stopped up.

I traced the stoppage from the kitchen to the septic tank and determined that it was in the laundry room. It was so far down the line that we needed a plumber’s snake to get to it. Of course, we didn’t have any such tool.

Our neighbor, Gundela, stopped by to check on us and went through all of the same checks I’d just done and pronounced that our pipes were stopped up. Duh!

We stopped by the neighbors on the other side, Rosemary and Courtney. Courtney seemed like a very knowledgeable, get-things-done sort of guy. He didn’t have any bright ideas. I asked if there was a plumber on the island I could call.

After they stopped laughing they informed me that the nearest plumber is in David, on the mainland. It’s a four-hour drive from David to the ferry landing, then an hour ferry trip across to our little island. From the airport, it was another forty-five minute drive to our house. Either that or we could fly him out for the one hundred dollars airfare each way.

I called Wes. He said that they’d had that problem before, he thought it was caused by fat being washed down the drain, then congealing in the pipes. The solution was to pour boiling water down the drain, then use the plumber’s helper to force it down.

Okay, easy enough. Wait a minute! The hot water heater wouldn’t light.

We spent a day or two gathering useless suggestions from the neighbors, then went into town for something. When we got back, the sink was empty and the drain was running clean. We boiled a kettle of water and dumped it down the drain.

If flowed easily.

Now the hot water heater problem. Wes suggested that we get Jim, from the next house (about a mile away) to our east.

We drove over to talk to Jim and Frances. That isn’t as easy as it sounds. The driveway to Jim’s place is more like a burro trail. Bushes and trees bang against the truck. Pot holes could swallow your vehicle. When it rained, the mud was knee deep. We needed to put the truck into 4-wheel drive to get through.

Jim said gave me a few suggestions, then said if I couldn’t get it going again, to let him know and he’d take a look at it.

Jim is the island’s solar electricity and flash water heater expert.

If you haven’t heard of a flash water heater (and unless you live on a boat, you probably haven’t) it is a gas fired water heater with no holding tank. The water enters the tank cold and exits it hot. No fuss, no muss, no bother. It’s really a good idea, since you don’t have any large holding tank to rust out and explode in your basement or garage. Besides, it provides an endless stream of hot water. As long as you have water and gas (propane in our case) you have hot water.

Unless your igniter dies.

Our private beach

I tried all of Jim’s suggestions and nothing worked. I finally drove back over to his house to tell him we needed his help. You understand that I couldn’t just call him. There is no cell service on this side of the island.

We have two basic means of communication here. The coconut telegraph and a personal visit. There is a heavy iron gate to discourage tourist from driving down our road. People leave notes taped to the gate for others all the time.

Of course, everyone who goes through the gate stops to read the note, whether it’s meant for them or not, so everyone knows your business. I don’t know how the word travels so fast, but by the time you get home from posting the note, someone drops by to ask you about it. (Well, maybe it takes a little longer, but you get the point.)

The other method of communicating is face-to-face. You climb into your truck, drive to their house and have a conversation with them.

So to Jim’s house I went. He said he’d be by in the morning. That makes two days without hot water. I saw no point in trying to rush him; it wouldn’t have done any good. We’re on Panama time here.

The next day Jim and Frances dropped by. While Frances and Dawn gossiped, Jim tore the hot water heater apart. The problem was the igniter. It wouldn’t light the gas.

It’s a simple part to replace, if you can find one.

Jim left, saying he’d track down a new igniter for us.

A couple of days later, he dropped by to let us know he’d found a source. The new igniter cost two hundred and seventy-five dollars. The whole heater had only cost about three hundred dollars to begin with.

This was a decision for Wes. I drove over to Juanie’s to call him. No answer. They are driving around the United States in a motor home and are frequently out of cell phone range. I left him a text message.

Two or three days later, he got the message, contacted Jim and discussed the issue. In another couple of days, he let us know that he’d ordered a new water heater from David. It would arrive on Friday.

Toby is our fairy god mother. She runs a service in David that shops for you. You need a new water heater, call Toby. You want to order toilet paper or beef tenderloin, call Toby. She even sent her people to pay our parking ticket in Almirante, on the mainland.

Wes has an account with her. He sends her money, she keeps track of his balance and when it’s low, he sends her more.

When we needed auto parts, we called Toby. There wasn’t enough money in the account to cover it. After several discussions, we figured out how to handle it. We hid five hundred dollars in a magazine, then put it in an envelope. You are not allowed to ship cash on an airplane. We took the envelope to the airport and shipped it to David, where Toby picked it up. You wouldn’t do that in the States.

On Friday, I drove into town to meet the truck and bring the heater home. Then I drove over to Jim’s to let him know it was here.

“I should be able to stop by on Sunday,” he told me.

Sure enough, he showed up on Sunday and installed the new heater.

It only took us two weeks to get the problem solved. That’s two weeks of boiling water to do the dishes and taking cold showers. Oh, well. It’s Panama.

1 Comment

Penn and Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 9

9/16/2016

1 Comment

Penn at Juanie's

Day Twelve, Wednesday June 3rd 2016

The morning dawned just like any other morning. Another lousy day in paradise.

Heidi has been here long enough to fall into a morning routine. She gets up early, makes coffee and reads. Then she gathers up the dogs and walks down to the lagoon where she takes a swim. She makes it back to the house for another cup of coffee, stretches out and reads until we get up.

I don’t know what has happened to me. I used to be an early riser, a morning person. The further I get from working, the later I get up every morning. It may have something to do with the fact that I’m up later at night than I used to be. When I was working, I went to bed at ten pm, no matter what. Now I stay up to eleven or twelve every night, wild child that I am.

Anyway, when we get up, the day begins.

Today, Heidi and I made a trip down to Juanie’s to use the Internet. Juanie’s is a beach restaurant about five miles down the road on Drago Beach. It’s the only place near us where we can get a Wi-Fi connection.

This is your prototypical beach shack restaurant/bar. I keep expecting to find Jimmy Buffet plucking out a tune in the back. The restaurant is what you would call open air. Wooden posts hold up a corrugated iron roof. The tables and chairs are in the sand. On one occasion, my chair’s legs sunk so deeply into the sand while I was sitting there that my chair collapsed and I found myself lying in the sand.

The kitchen is behind a waist-high concrete wall. There is a real floor in that section of the building. Large wooden shutters hinge up to let the air in, at night they close them down. A bathroom is also in the building.

Juanie, a native Panamanian Indian woman, is a gracious hostess. Her husband, Willie, is a tall, thin black man who does water taxi and fishing trips from their beach. He speaks pretty good English, but Juanie doesn’t speak a word.

The road to Juanie's

I should take a moment to speak about the racial groups in Panama. Of course, there are the natives. They were here before Columbus. They are short, brown people. Almost to a person, we’ve found them to be friendly. Cesar, our gardener, is an Indian. Spanish is his second language, he, like all of the natives here, speaks his native language first. He also manages to speak a little English. I have no problem communicating with him.

Then there are the Afro-Caribbeans. They are the descendants of slaves who were brought here from Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

Of course, there are the Europeans and North Americans. The Spanish colonized the area early in the Sixteenth Century. These are the progenies of those Spaniards, but there are also French (they made the first attempt to build a Panama Canal in the late part of the Nineteenth Century) as well as other assorted Caucasians. The North Americans are mainly from the U.S. and Canada and are late comers, but there is a large North American presence in the country.

Then there are the mestizos. These are the offspring of various mixes of the aforementioned groups.

So far, we have seen no signs of racial tension or prejudice. There are natives and blacks in important positions in the government and owning businesses. Everyone just seems to get along. I wish we could import this into the U.S.

Now back to Juanie’s café. When last we saw our heroes, Heidi and Penn went to the café to use the Internet.

We sat down and whipped out our electronic gear. The server came over, we ordered Margaritas, and went to work.

To my chagrin, the Wi-Fi was painfully slow. It took several minutes to load a web page. I turned on my email and the entire time we were there, it was busy downloading email messages.

Heidi managed to get a hold of her husband for a long conversation.

After my first Margarita, I changed to Arnold Palmers, I was driving home. Miss Heidi could drink me under the table any day of the week. As you know I’m a cheap drunk. Two drinks and I can’t get the car keys in the ignition. After four Margaritas, Heidi was still stone cold sober.

When we got back to the house, Dawn was busy baking me a birthday cake. It was her first attempt at baking in her mother’s house and things didn’t go smoothly. Of course, she couldn’t find the ingredients she needed. The oven was a challenge for her. She is afraid of gas and couldn’t get it lighted. I lit it for here when we got home.

After the cake was in the oven, Dawn and Heidi declared war on bugs. They started with the loft, but soon the battlefield had moved downstairs to the main room.

Dawn was SEAL Team 6 of bug warfare. With her bottle of bug spray in hand, she mercilessly hunted down the little buggers. Heidi, being afraid of the bugs, stayed downstairs and shouted up encouragement.

When the loft was so full of gas that no bug could possibly survive, Dawn came down stairs and she and Heidi attacked the kitchen. They pulled out drawers, emptied them and scrubbed them down, then cleaned out the cabinets.

The roaches ran up a white flag and made a strategic retreat, however, Heidi and Dawn had already decided that no quarter would be given. They slaughtered them ruthlessly.

When the massacre was over, Dawn put a layer of boric acid down in the cabinets to keep the roaches out. She is a veteran of the bug wars in Mexico. Living on the boat in Mexico is a constant battle against the cucarachas.

I believe that Heidi slept better after that. I was tired from just watching.

Miss Heidi in town

Day Thirteen to Seventeen, Thursday June 4th to June 8th 2016

Our days settled into routine for the next five days. Heidi got up early, went for her walk and swim. We got up, had coffee, Dawn took the dogs for another walk, we went swimming. Dawn puttered around cleaning here and there, organizing things so that she could work with them. Heidi and I read hundreds of pages.

Occasionally, we went into town. This was mostly for shopping purposes, but one evening we were there late and decided to have dinner before we returned.

I’ve been hearing about this restaurant called El Refugio (The Refuge) from several people. They all say it is the best place in town, so we decided to go there.

We got there during their posted hours, but they were closed. Oh well, we’ll go there on another night. (We’ve been in Panama a month and a half now, and have tried several times to go to El Refugio, but every time they were closed. How do they make a living?)

We cruised around town looking for a second choice. Heidi and Dawn wanted to eat at the restaurant at Hotel Bajia. I wasn’t enthused, but went along since they wanted to. The restaurant served Indian and Thai food, neither my favorites.

We sat down, ordered drinks, then dinner. About the time the food came, it started raining. I’m talking serious rain here, folks. We were sitting on the covered deck over the water, but had to move back because the wind was blowing rain onto our table.

I have only seen rain like this once in my life. We got caught in a tropical storm when we were in Costa Rica. Well, Costa Rica is only a couple of miles up the road and this was definitely a tropical storm.

Penn and Heidi at the Pub

The water poured down in buckets, no make that tank cars. We had to move again, leave the deck and go into the restaurant. Dawn wanted to run up to the store for something, so she left Heidi and I eating our meals.

Then the roof started leaking. A gutter on the roof of the adjoining building broke under the force of the torrent and poured the water into our restaurant. The floor flooded. The roof over the bar leaked and the bartenders rushed about moving anything that wasn’t nailed down.

Heidi discovered that the hotel lobby next door was dry, so we moved over there and waited for the rain to stop. Not in this lifetime.

The rain continued to pour down. By this time, it was dark. The streets began to flood. Water rose higher and higher, threatening our little dry spot.

It had been an hour and Dawn hadn’t returned yet. I was getting nervous and decided to go looking for her. I stepped onto the curb and was instantly soaked. I waded across the street in roaring water that was up to my calves. I made it across the current without falling. On the opposite curb, I was still standing in water, but it was only ankle deep. I worked my way up the block towards the store where Dawn went.

Shortly before I got to the store I found Dawn. She was encouraging a group of women and children who had gotten caught in the deluge, soaked to the skin.
“We need to move the truck,” she yelled.

I looked at the truck and immediately saw what she was talking about. The water was up to the axles. In a few minutes, the floorboards would be under water.
She left her little flock and climbed into the truck with me. We drove off through the river and found high ground on which to park. It was about a five block walk back to the hotel to reunite with Heidi.

When we got back to the hotel, everyone was watching a group of boys playing in the water. One of them had a surf board and another was towing him with his bicycle. The first boy was surfing the streets of Bocas Town.

We considered getting a hotel room and not risking the road back out to our house, but Dawn was adamant that we go. We left the dogs locked in the house and the thunder and lightning must be driving them crazy.

We voted and Dawn won by a 1 to 2 vote. We headed back to the house.

We had surprisingly little problem on the road, no trees down, no washouts. The house was more or less dry and the dogs were happy to see us.

We later learned that the street we were on used to be a dry river bed that channeled the water off the high ground to the sea. In their infinite wisdom, the city fathers decided to fill in the river bed and pave it over for a main street. Now, when it rains, the rain still takes its historic route to the sea, only now it is flowing down the busiest street in town.

1 Comment