The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found (4 page)

At a hostel in Panama City I was lucky
enough to meet the captain of a catamaran. He was quite close to
the Kuna, despite the fact he was Swedish. One particular community
befriended him, most likely because they fell in love with his
blond five year old son. When he had enough tourists to make the
trip worthwhile, he offered to take me to a village where I hoped
to meet the village shaman. As a student of Jungian archetypes, for
me it would be a real treat to study the Kuna religious traditions
and participate in one of their rituals.

Our boat had three Australian
backpackers and a Colombian girl we picked up in Portobello. As we
approached this island I was awestruck by its pristine beauty --
lazy palms drooping over turquoise water and blinding white sand. A
group of Kuna men stopped playing basketball to watch us approach.
Unlike the women, the men were not a picture from National
Geographic. They wore modern clothes and drank Balboa
beer.

The Colombian girl on our boat started
shouting out to someone she recognized at the dock. “Matt! Matt!”
she shouted as she peeled off her jeans down to her thong. To the
protests of the captain, she slipped off her tank top, fully
exposing her breasts to the Kuna men, and dove into the clear
water. The Kuna have learned modesty from Christian missionaries
all too well. By the time the boat was moored all the men playing
basketball were gawking at the near naked girl.

As the Colombian girl emerged from the
water a group of twelve men surrounded her. The commotion brought
forth an old man, a village elder, and he did not look pleased. As
he approached the Kuna men looked nervous and quickly went back to
their basketball game. The old man shouted toward one of the long
houses and an attractive girl with long hair appeared squinting in
the doorway.

I was confused because when a Kuna
girl reaches womanhood, as pronounced by her first menstruation,
she cuts her hair short in addition to shedding the nickname she
carried in childhood. But she was clearly a woman and she had long
beautiful black hair. She looked Latina. She walked down to the
beach to the side of the village elder, who stared out to sea with
an angry expression. He spoke softly in his indigenous language to
the girl and walked away.

“
You do not have a
permission to dock here,” the girl said.

Our captain offered his apologies and
shouted, “Everyone back on the boat!” He was clearly
angry.

I spoke to the girl directly. She was
pleasant and smiled. “Excuse me,” I said. “I have come to see the
shaman. Would it be possible for me to stay? I will find another
way back.”

The girl’s expression immediately
changed. “The shaman is not here today,” she said
abruptly.

“
Get on the boat,” the
captain barked at me.

As we dejectedly walked back to the
dock, the captain’s son popped his head up from a nap. “Ooznahvi!”
he shouted. The Kuna girl responded immediately and ran to the boat
to greet him. She jumped on deck and cradled the boy, rocking him
back and forth and rubbing his blond hair. He giggled
uncontrollably.

Apparently our captain knew this girl
well. He departed with her still in the boat, without asking at all
whether she wanted to join us or not.

Suffice it to say, I was not happy.
The other passengers, Matt from Boston and his reacquainted friend
María, the Colombian with a penchant for getting inappropriately
naked, were fine with canceling the island visit in exchange for
snorkeling around a nearby coral reef.

“
Look,” I said, “seeing how
my only interest was to visit the island, I think it might be
appropriate that some of my money be refunded.”

“
Your money is in the gas
tank,” the captain said. “Besides…. You asked me to bring you to
the shaman. The village shaman is not on the island right
now.”

Ritual in the Bayano
Caves

By Mathew Hope

“
The only thing to fear is
fear itself.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt – U.S.
president and moron.

Okay, FDR wasn’t a moron. Steve was.
We were standing at a National Police check point on the highway to
the infamous Darien Gap, a lawless land of drug runners and
Colombian leftist rebels, when Steve decided it would be cute to
stick his finger into the barrel of a loaded AK-47.

The police guard flipped –
angry and scared he pointed the automatic weapon at Steve’s head.
Steve smiled and raised his hands. Guards from inside ran out and
there was a whole lot of commotion and guns. Steve was wearing
shorts, flip flops and a t-shirt that said
Yo estoy a favor de la ampliación de todos los canales
with a picture of ship entering a girl’s
metaphorical canal. Since the vote for expanding the canal was only
a week away, the police captain found it amusing enough to disarm
the situation. Nothing like sexism for macho bonding which
infuriated Steve’s new girlfriend, Estrella. We all filed in to
register our entry into the Darien, which I guess is something you
have to do so that they know what to write on the toe tags when you
show up dead. It was touch and go there for a while if they were
going to let us pass or not.

The leader of our adventure
was a psychologist everyone called Dr. Mike. He was kind of a short
wiry haired version of Robin Williams. He kept trying to name drop
important Panamanians he knew which amused the guards but didn’t
seem to help. I think he did it more to impress us or at least
Usnavy the half Kuna half
gringa
he had a hard time hiding his interest in. It
wasn’t until María calmly explained with a disarming smile where we
were going that guards seemed ready to let us pass.

Our destination was not
Colombia or the dense jungle, but a cave recently made accessible
when Lake Bayano was flooded to build a dam. It is in on the
highway to the Darien, inside the independent
comarca
, or reservation, of Kuna Yala
where Usnavy is from. María and I met Usnavy and Dr. Mike on a boat
on the San Blas islands. Because Usnavy felt bad we missed a visit
to her island village she persuaded us to let her take us here
instead. Her name really is Usnavy, a name not uncommon among the
Kuna. Her father disappeared before she was born, and the only
thing they know about him was that he was in the U.S. Navy, so that
became her name.

In a small Kuna village, we got out of
our rented bus and onto a 15 horse power dugout canoe. The Kuna
women there had heavy metal jewelry hanging from their noses, and
bright red circles colored their cheeks. They sold spicy dried
plantains and bright embroideries called molas. Kids ran around in
their underwear playing guns with sticks and cardboard.

We motored past the tops of trees that
were once rooted on the forest floor, now at the bottom of a lake.
The cave was at one time high on a hill, but now we could motor
right up to it.

I don’t think this is the kind of
place I would have approached on my own. We drifted under reeds and
mangrove and kept our hands in the boat, worried about the caimans
said to infest the cave. Once in the dank cavern, we got an idea of
how many bats there were – tens of thousands that came within
centimeters of our heads. The nervous banter stopped when the sandy
bottom of the cave creek dropped below foot range and we had to
swim with flashlights in our mouths.

The cave is a kilometer of cave,
canyon, cave, canyon. It ends with a nice sunny spot with smooth
limestone walls, perfect for relaxing and swimming. After we got to
the end I floated for a while, just staring up at the cliffs and
the birds circling above. I emerged into a discussion about
phobias. Claustrophobics, hydrophobics and especially
chiroptophobics (bats) would not have survived this trip. Dr. Mike,
among some of his many talents of which he constantly reminds us,
was an expert at treating phobias, and María admitted to a fear of
falling. It was a reoccurring nightmare of hers.

Dr. Mike is a Freemason. He often
drops this casually into conversations. At first he did this I
think just to inform us-- like it might mean something to us or
maybe so we would ask him what the hell he was talking about. On
our four hour cave journey he captivated Steve with mysterious talk
of rituals, and even I actually found it kind of
interesting.

The cave, Dr. Mike told us, is death.
It is fear. It is the underworld. It is the primitive symbol of the
unconscious. And if we confront our fears on this perilous journey
to the underworld we can learn to tap into the secrets of the
unconscious. A ritual is nothing more than a journey to the
underworld to learn control and to learn from our
unconscious.

We decided to do a ritual at the
sunny, open pool at the back of the cave. It was like the classic
trust exercise where the person falls back with their eyes closed.
Except María wasn’t just going to fall back, she was going to fly.
We all held our hands high, supporting her as you would a crowd
surfer in a mosh pit. But instead of just easing her down, we eased
her onto Steve’s back. He was crouched down over the pool, and the
curve of his spine perfectly supported Maria. Maria stared up at
the clouds and each of us, Usnavy, Dr. Mike, Estrella and I, held a
limb and moved them in a random swimming motion.

Dr. Mike soothed her by saying “Rays
of sunshine rain down on you as you float. You are floating. And
slowly you gain control. You can fly.”

As I moved her right arm she began to
tense up. “No,” she murmured, and she stiffened. The edges of her
mouth tightened into a frown. She pulled her arms in and Estrella
and I lost our grip. She slid off of Steve’s wet back, into the
water. I didn’t see it, but she must have hit her head on the edge
of a rock because the wound she got on her head at the pilgrimage
of the Black Christ reopened. She was bleeding from her
forehead.

María stood up in the shallow water
and tripped over the rocks as she waded into deeper water, where
she swam to the opposite end of the pool. We were silent -- shocked
actually-- that this little ritual triggered the phobia in María.
She sat at the opposite end with her back to us. I think she was
crying. Blood flowed down the side of her cheek.

The mood soured and the sun was
getting lower. On our way back, the narrow slit at the top of the
canyon let in scant light, and there seemed to be even more bats
swarming around us. It was a wonder they didn’t hit us. María
walked ahead, ducking the flying rats. I wondered if the bats would
be attracted to her blood.

If I had been alone down
there, I would have been downright petrified. I was petrified. I
just did my best to hide it. I pretended I was in an
Indiana Jones
movie. The
only thing to fear is fear itself. Sometimes the only thing to fear
is fearlessness. We are built for fight or flight. As evolved as we
are, I’m not sure we always know what the right response is. I saw
everyone react to fear today. Estrella got angry, Steve became a
moron, Dr. Mike dropped big words and names, Usnavy became silent
and María broke down.

There was a moment in the cave on our
quiet walk back to the boat when we passed through a cathedral-like
cavern. I stopped and shut my eyes and just listened to the voices
echo. María startled me. I thought I was alone in the darkness but
she was so close she could just whisper to me -- “I want to show
you my tattoo tonight.” She is the type of girl I know could be
bad… she would take me on a rollercoaster. She scares me. I don’t
know what will have the greatest rewards -- running from the fear
or fighting it.

We started talking again in the van
during the ride home. During a lull in the conversation, María
said, “Let’s try again. I want to try again.” And we decided that
these caves in Panama would not be our last adventure
together.

Casco Viejo Under
Siege

By Dr. Michael
Anderson

One of my favorite things to do is sit
and read today’s paper, drinking years old wine, listening to
decades old music, in a centuries old citadel, in the shadow of a
millennia old symbol.

The paper is from Miami, a little
conservative perhaps, but the only English daily in Panama. The
wine is a Merlot from Chile, very good value. The music is Latin
Jazz played in the restaurant where I come to sit and relax every
Saturday. It is called Las Bóvedas, which literally means ‘the
vaults’ or ‘the crypts’. The crypts are part of a citadel that was
built in 1688 when the infamous pirate Henry Morgan destroyed the
former Spanish settlement at Panamá el Viejo, established for the
plundering of Incan gold. Centuries later Las Bóvedas was used as a
military prison. In the early 1900s, prisoners were chained to the
outer wall to be swallowed by the rising tides.

The ancient symbol I mentioned before
sits as the focal point of the citadel, and for that matter the
entire colonial neighborhood of Casco Viejo. But to understand why,
and to understand why it holds so much power, you have to know
something about the Egyptian goddess Isis and her lover, the god
Osiris.

Osiris had a brother, Set, who coveted
both his brother’s throne and wife. So Set tricked Osiris into
climbing into a golden chest which was buried in a distant land
under a sprig of acacia. Isis searched the lands in vain until
resting against a tree. She used the sprig of acacia to help
herself up and pulled the bush right from its roots. She correctly
deduced that something had recently been interred and so began to
dig. She found Osiris and, using what we Freemasons call the Lion’s
Grip, raised him from the dead.