Wonder

Forrest is grinning wide with his eyebrows raised.  He watches intently as the seven stories tall iron gates of the Panama Canal slowly swing closed behind a massive container ship and twenty-six million gallons of water from Gatun Lake begin to inch the hulk up.  His shoulders start to shake a bit as he does a little dance of joy.  Forrest is twenty-five, like me, and is visiting me over the long weekend he has off from law school.  It’s the first time either one of us has seen the canal.  I appreciate it because of its history and its impact on Panama as a nation and on the rest of the world.  I imagine Forrest appreciates it because he’s an engineer.  Neither of us can really believe that we are looking at one of the greatest engineering feats of the twentieth century.  Not a single part of the original Panama Canal has had to be replaced; the sheer size of the operation is hard to fathom.  In spite of being a mere twenty yards away from the ships, the crews waving back to the visitors at the Miraflores locks look like the toy men in Thomas the Tank Engine. Perhaps even if you don’t know the decades-long political, physical, geographical, and technical struggle its builders had to overcome, the sight of the canal is truly humbling…the first time.  

Fast forward to four months later when my parents visit.  I sit calmly in a plastic chair to avoid the pushing crowds vying for that perfect shot of a grain transporter coming through the locks.  Languages and an odd mix of khaki cargo shorts, cutoff jeans, button down shirts, and the occasional oblivious trophy wife swarm around me.  I am exhausted by tourism, dreading the next five visitors and our inevitable fight with the crowds at the lone visitors’ center along the canal.  The next time I visit the canal is with a group of Panamanian adult school students that I’ve been teaching English.  I don’t even bother with the observation decks this time.  I sit on the level below the observation decks and sip a coffee as a tanker rolls lazily by.

But even the simple fact that I can sip coffee while a hefty percentage of the world’s cargo floats by is something that most people I know cannot boast.  Many Panamanians, in fact, haven’t even seen it.  The day I sat below the decks with my coffee I realized that the canal wasn’t what I was coming to see anymore.    I realized I was coming to see people experience it for the first time.  Months later I stood pressed against the railing again with my brother as we narrated a ship’s passage through the canal.

There are too many things that I take for granted living here--fresh fruit at my fingertips, meat whose origin and diet I personally know, a plethora of carefully preserved and colorful traditions.  These things tend to get lost amid my struggles with the ten different commitments I manage in a week, projects that always turn out more informal than I had hoped, and day-to-day tasks that always take longer than I expected.   When people come to visit me, I get the chance to be excited about things that have gone normal. I get to step back and start to marvel again.  And you know what?  The people I live with get just as excited to share those things.  They know what they have.  Each time I’ve had a visitor, a friend has invited us over for fresh food, storytelling, and sharing.

When someone visits, they finally get what I’ve been trying so hopelessly to put into words.  There’s no way to understand the sensory overload of your first tuna until you’ve danced in the middle of one; no way to know what fresh sugar cane honey tastes like until you’ve licked it off a plantain leaf that a neighbor uses to scrape a giant cauldron with; no way to fully appreciate the immense hospitality of the people who take care of me around here until they’ve force fed you everything in their kitchen and sent you home with a heavy bag of fruit from the backyard.  If it weren’t for my visitors, I’d still eat honey and fruit; I’d still dance in the tunas.  It’s just that right when I decide I don’t really need these things or that I’m just plain tired of them, someone comes along to remind me they’re not lame.  They’re totally new.

So here they are, the celebrities that everyone still asks me about months after they've gone, whose photos are probably floating around on someone's phone,  and who were treated like family when they were here:

Forrest on a visit to a friend's parents' house in the hills.  The drying cow hide is just off to the left.

My parents with my friend Victor (dressed like a diablico) and a mejorana (the guitar) musician from town

Matt enjoying Macaracan street meat...maybe a little too much.

 

A side note:  my most recent visitor, less than a week ago, was my younger brother Matt.  He wins for having come during Macaracas’ foundation and experiencing a historical tuna where this year’s queen and last year’s queen had sort of a posse-showdown in the middle of the parade.  That’s all I can say about it.  Like I said before, you just had to be there.