Compromised Eden

Off and on for 20 years during the 1980s and ’90s, Martin Mitchinson concocted plans to visit the fabled Panamanian province of Darien—perhaps even to possess it in the way that ambitious and self-delusional young travellers tend to “collect” rare territories and deposit them in their backpacks.

But he never made it. On a succession of aborted trips, his car broke down, his wallet got stolen; he joined a Honduran circus instead.

And we are the beneficiaries. If, as a 20-year-old, Mitchinson had reached this remote territory just south of the Panama Canal—had he in effect got it out of his system—we would not have his fanciful and captivating new travelogue, a book that could only have been written by a man whose sensibilities have been honed by time and whose understanding of the world is no longer primarily about himself.

As we meet the author (40-something, melancholic, beset by self-doubt), he is alone near his thatched hut at Cavimál, contemplating how long it would take a man to disappear entirely if he were to sit in the nearby rainforest and simply let it take him. The sailboat on which he arrived in Darien is disintegrating, he has no money to fix it, and his partner, Kathy, is unhappy and on the verge of heading out (as she does without fanfare in Chapter 2).

Mitchinson’s original plan—to stay three weeks, write a travel article and leave—gets scuppered, when, as he puts it, “I realized that Darien was complex, many-sided and confusing. I’ll dig deeper, I decided. For once in my life I wanted to understand a place down past the scenery.” And in so doing perhaps better to understand himself.

For those who don’t know, or have forgotten, the Province of Darien, which spans the isthmus of Panama just north of the Colombian border, is an all but impassable tract of rainforest, swamp and mountains, a mystic ecology and conundrum, famous as the single land link between Alaska and the southern tip of South America where the Pan-American Highway does not exist. Cannot exist. Hence the “Darien Gap.”

The territory’s rivers are inhabited by crocodiles, its palm-thatched villages by Kuna and Chocó tribespeople, its forests by jaguars and monkeys.

More famously, these days, the Darien forest is an impenetrable shelter for Colombian guerrillas, whose tactics include the kidnapping and murder of foreigners, particularly those whose countries are seen as inimical to the interests of Latin American self-realization.

Not that terrorists are in any way new to Darien. The first of them arrived as Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s, practising murder and plunder, demanding obeisance to God and the Spanish monarchy, which in the eyes of the natives were more or less the same thugs. Then came English and French pirates. And Scottish colonialists. And later the United States military, which, when its aircraft carriers became too large for the Panama Canal in the late 1940s, hatched a plan to blow a new canal through Darien, using 275 successive nuclear bombs, each up to 200 times as powerful as the bomb they had just dropped on Nagasaki.

It was only in 1966, when the Kuna Indians, who had originally supported this maniacal project, grew testy about it and withdrew their cooperation, that the U.S. backed off. And so here it was, in this compromised Eden,

one of the poorest parts of the planet, that, for a year or two, Mitchinson took up residence among the villagers, planted a garden, fished the rivers, travelled by dugout through the rainforest, sometimes in fear of terrorists or jaguars, invariably attempting to find in his adventures both himself and the poetics of a culture.

His reports on those adventures are laced with vivid and detailed observations: on the plants, the animals, the history of the territory; on legends and landscapes and local politics; on the unseen inhabitants of the forests, the spirits of the dead who, according to Chocó mythology, wander the jungle spreading good and evil, responsible for any events that cannot rationally be explained (events aplenty in a territory where most people do not understand the basics of science or geography).

In the village of Mogue one night, Mitchinson’s hosts pepper him with questions: How does an outboard motor work? A submarine? Why did God make the world so that the sun comes up at different times in various countries? “I draw a crude map of the world on a grapefruit and I use two limes for the sun and the moon,” reports the writer. “When I tell Manqueque that astronauts have walked on the moon, Autemio looks down at the floor. He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he doesn’t believe the astronaut story.” Autemio eventually asks Mitchinson whether he can find the Darien wells drilled by Gulf Oil in the 1960s … and whether if Autemio breaks the padlock on one of those wells, he can get unlimited fuel for his outboard motor.

While Mitchinson is estimable in his ambitions and resourcefulness, he is more recognizably human in his ineptness. He is lousy at business, lonely in romance, a duffer at provisioning and staying healthy. At one point, a villager is shocked to discover that the writer possesses no medication, not even an aspirin, to alleviate the brutalizing headaches that accompany an attack of intestinal parasites. Marooned on a sandbar one night, Mitchinson clings to a sharpened stick as protection against quarter-ton crocodiles.

While the book is not driven by an overarching storyline, it eddies with narrative impulses, intense little stories: about the beheading of Balboa at Acla; the kidnapping and torture of the village storekeeper; the drowning of a twelve-year-old and the recovery days later of her perfectly preserved body.

The most sustained piece of narrative in the book comes toward the end when Mitchinson decides to cross Darien from sea to sea, beginning at Caledonia Island on the Caribbean coast, traversing the coastal mountains to the Chucunaque River, and following the river valley through the rainforest to the Pacific. The trip, on which the writer is accompanied by two Kuna guides, is a harrowing series of blunders and ineptitude. Mitchinson and his guides bring no food, each assuming the other has taken care of it. The writer’s shoe falls apart mid journey, so that he has to tie it on with vines. At journey’s end, the guides disappear back into the jungle, while Mitchinson takes a plywood motel room in Metiti, which is pretty much where we leave him. “I lie down on the bed,” he says, “and for the first time in so many months, maybe even years, I am at peace. It feels as though I’ve done what I came to do.”

Mitchinson leaves us hopeful for his own rather tortuous destiny (a hope borne out by his fine and compelling book)—and ambivalently optimistic about the chances for Darien, where in recent years the people have organized against those who would buy up the rainforest and log it or otherwise degrade it. We are left equally hopeful that Darien’s historic capability for survival, for the wise husbanding of the planet, will eventually be perceived as a lesson, instead of a mere curiosity.