the feeling I came here for. I don’t know what freedom is, but I know what it’s not. It’s not the life we had back home. Years of my life spent waiting to turn right into the vast Omni parking lot, pulling my weight even when bored to tears, trying to be a decent person and coworker and not some boozer or flower-stomper. But no matter what I did, I kept being reminded, by my own countrymen, that I am an exploiter/polluter/oppressor. When, from what I could tell, the rewards of my privilege included awkward networking lunches with friends who’d lost their jobs during the recession, staycations, & the luxury of not getting shot by the cops during routine traffic stops. Had I actually enjoyed oppressing others, had I gotten off on my alleged exploitations, it would all have made a sick sort of sense. But I stopped feeling good. I stopped feeling that I had a potential to be good or noble.
No one out here makes me feel like that. The sea is an equalizer. Anyone can survive & anyone can die. We all suffer through the same weather, not just the sailors but all those who live in fragile housing by the sea. My family & I inhabit 44 feet of space. Other than peeing into the sea, we leave it untouched. We burn less gas than we ever would traveling in a car. At sea there are only minimal rules of coexistence. You stand on or you give way. You keep a lookout at all times. You carry the burden of your own life.
I suspect there will be a time, not long from now, when I will have to realize this isn’t real. I’ll go back to Omni. Back to the right-turn-only lane. I am overwhelmed, if briefly, with vertigo. At the thought of my blinker glowing in the rain. As if it’s the very definition of insanity.
In front of me, a father lifts the tarp he’s put over his children to protect them from the spray. The gesture hurts me. I miss the kids.
The guys driving the boat are modern Guna, as unsentimental as any New York City taxi driver. They blow past an old fisherman in his ulu at such close range he nearly capsizes. Their shirts flap arrogantly in the wind.
Red T-shirt. Yellow biplane. Dead peccary. The hills of the San Blas range rise and fall to port. I guess I nod off, my forehead wedged between my thighs.
I wake up surrounded by water. We’ve taken an offshore passage. Never one that a nervous merki would choose. We are surrounded by blue water in a tin can of a boat. So overfull that the gunnels look level with the water. None of us are wearing life vests. I turn around to see an island in our wake. To other foreigners, it looks like any other island, interchangeable. But I can recognize Salar.
Give me your Jarrito!
Never!!!
Someone shakes my shoulders. I am in the way. A nylon sack is handed down. The boat bobs beneath a concrete dock, dripping w/ seaweed. The sky is dimmer.
Siéntete, the driver says. Sit. He shoves the bag under my seat. I feel the creature in the sack probing my leg. The slow death shuffle of a lobster.
W/out ceremony, we rip back out to sea. The plancha is like a bee cross-pollinating the islands, each one shabbier & more crowded than the next, the closer we get to port.
How far to Porvenir? I shout over the wind. Eh? Says the driver. Porvenir? I say. He shrugs, gestures w/ his chin. I squint to see the flash of glass. SUVs, buses & cold concrete buildings.
Civilization.
* * *
—
The longer we stayed in the remotest of places, the more easily we felt crowded in. I felt it too; we were changing. We were learning things we couldn’t unlearn.
Before Michael left, we sailed Juliet east of Snug Harbor, into a tiny, empty anchorage surrounded by a collar of jungle, where he thought we’d be safer. I assumed we were totally alone, but moments after