The Old Man and the Sea

Unlikely encounters

Think of a very remote place and then go a little further: that’s where I am right now, sailing in Panama’s San Blas Islands, an indigenous archipelago territory belonging to the Kuna people. It required taking a big plane to a smaller plane to a chartered plane to a boat to get here, and it’s worth it: These are perhaps the most unspoiled bits of Planet Earth I’ve ever seen. Back on mainland Panama, Marco Rubio had just arrived to spread American ill will, but we were far, far away.

There are no accommodations in San Blas, so the only way to visit is by boat. A few catamarans bob around near the nicest of the three hundred or so islands, but you hardly see another soul. The bigger islands have tiny Kuna outposts, with the barest of services: A little jerrybuilt booth offering shots of rum for a buck; an ancient granny selling a few beaded bracelets. Pure peace! The other visitors, the folks on the catamarans, are an assortment of sailor-hippies, playboys, Belgian twenty-two-year-olds “finding themselves”, and chilled-out expats with walnut tans seeking authenticity. I’m not really a beach person, or a solitude person, or a boat person, but I’m digging it, and have spent the time lolling on the deck of the boat or flapping in the saturated, optimistically blue water.

On the first day out, we dropped anchor near the rum-booth island for an afternoon stroll. There were perhaps seven people on the entire island, and yawning yards of sugar-sand beach, and cauliflower-sized conch shells strewn here and there. Some Kuna men were having a meeting of some sort, sitting on palm stumps around a makeshift table, and the water lapped the shore like a kitten at a bowl of milk.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a couple sitting in the shade having a snack. They were puzzlingly overdressed for the climate and the setting, in long sleeves and gray woolens, whereas the handful of other humans on the island were barely dressed. My cousin noticed them, too, and later, as I was playing in the waves, she doubled back and chatted with them. Lo and behold, they were a Hasidic couple from Argentina, somehow washed ashore in this bikini paradise, and when they heard that most of our party was Jewish, the man responded with an eager brightness, like a fisherman whose line just got tugged. He would visit our boat! He would perform rituals, primary among them the laying of tefillin on the men in our group—that is, he would strap small boxes containing Torah scrolls on their heads and arms, an Orthodox tradition that is performed during prayer. “You will have WiFi to God,” he said, excitedly. “You will have antennae to God!”

I was not overjoyed at this prospect, having avoiding roving Hasids looking to upgrade my Wifi to God for most of my life. Somehow, the rank unfairness of being waylaid while savoring the San Blas and their sublime isolation got my goat. But my cousins are more accommodating than I am, and as the sky reddened toward sunset and we gathered on the boat to start drinking, our friendly drive-by God connection showed up bearing the necessaries. Boat-to-boat commerce is usually a delightful part of seagoing life. A few hours earlier, another boat had stopped by; it was piloted by a Kuna couple selling fresh-baked bread and the traditional textiles, all zigzags and swirls, that they’ve made for generations. That had been a treat, and the bread was delicious, but now I felt we were devolving.

Mordecai was roly-poly, with a scruff of coarse white hair and a rubber-banded beard. The minute he got onboard, he began a nonstop patter of heavily accented English with a busy energy that suggested he knew if he stopped for long we’d toss him off the boat. My cousins’ husbands got wrapped with the tefillin and blessed and then congratulated on how superior their divine communication upload would now be. In the meantime, our boat captain, a lithe and unruffled Chilean, had just noticed a few promising snappers and amberjacks flitting around near the stern, so he grabbed a spear gun in hopes of catching some dinner. Mordecai barely broke his stride, even as the captain shouldered the lethal-looking gun and disappeared over the side of the boat. It was such a crazy spectacle in such an unlikely setting that it melted me: This had to go into a special life-experience category of Things You Couldn’t Have Anticipated If You Had Lived to Be A Million Years Old. I started cracking up; I mean, how could I not? Surely I will remember the powder-soft beaches and the creamy curl of water over the reefs in San Blas, but I have a feeling I will remember even more vividly this odd, unexpected twist in the fabric of paradise. Mordecai didn’t have any rituals for the ladies on hand, so we just witnessed, with awe, the marvelous incongruity of the moment. Then his boat came back to spirit him off in search of another fertile field, another boat bobbing on the evening drift ready to hook up to eternity.

SHOW NOTES

—I just finished LOVED AND MISSED, the Susie Boyt book I’ve been reading, and it is great through and through. If you’ve read other books of hers and can recommend them, let me know. I’m a fan.

—Next up, WE DO NOT PART by Han Kang. If it’s good enough for the Nobel Prize, it’s good enough for me. I hope.

—I managed to leave one—ONE—Birkenstock on the boat, and I will never get it back. I was so mad that I left the other one in my Panama City hotel on purpose, so that when I buy a new pair I won’t have three. That would annoy me too much. I am nevertheless so glad I took Birkenstocks with me, and I continue to preach that you must travel with one pair of shoes that you can slip on fast. I happen to prefer Birkenstocks to flip-flops, but those will do, too. The night we arrived at my cousin’s farm in Panama, she informed us, gently, that there were frequent night visits by scorpions and that one should not wander around barefoot after dark. I almost bought an early return ticket but calmed myself and placed my Birkenstocks next to the bed and was grateful to have them. For what it’s worth, I didn’t see any scorpions and I’m glad of it.

—I really like the Netflix show “Asura”, a tender Japanese story about four adult sisters and their various dramas, mostly around relationships. It’s nicely underplayed and full of quiet observation.

More soon!