(Photo opposite: main street Ukupseni) There is nowhere to go. There is nothing to do. I have seen country stores that look more like airports than this airport. In fact, half of the airport is country store. The other part is warehouse. There’s a lean-to unisex baño attached to the rear. I am perched on a half-completed concrete wall, thinking about walking down the bridge to Ukupseni, which floats like a bamboo Oz in the still turquoise Caribbean.

I wonder why I do anything. I think about the goldfish in the aquarium back home, which sometimes darts amok in his little sea, then returns to its involuntary contemplation of rock and coral and the world swimming into infinity beyond the bowl. As if I have put myself into gear and let out my own clutch, I start walking. But instead of heading off toward town, I tromp off in the opposite direction, into the Darién mainland. That way I can keep an eye out for the plane, which could coast in and buzz out so quickly I might miss it.

In front of me lie some low steaming mountains. A blanket of mist sags down between the slopes and a column of smoke rises from what looks like a clearing on top of one low peak. I look for a while, and think that I’ve never experienced such silence, such an absence of engine sound and movement. All I can hear is the faintest mosquito-buzz of a fishing boat somewhere out in the lagoon, invisible in the immense haze. Eventually, I wind up at the end of a strip of wrecked and disused tarmac. On one side is the new airstrip, on the other a concrete building that is either vacant or unused because it’s early Sunday morning, just after sunrise. The building is L-shaped, one story, with a row of high plain windows along a long veranda. It is white, with a band of red underlining the windows emphasizing the L-ness. It looks somewhat like a de Chirico painting of a strange depopulated city. I tell myself it is interesting. Then I walk back again.

I say, “I recommend the walk to the end of the runway.”

The dance student has spread a towel on the sand next to the terminal and is lying in the dull light. I wonder why white people try to darken their skin. I myself am perpetually smeared with SPF50. She looks up quizzically. Or maybe it’s just the glare. The sun is blunted by thick rain clouds that reduce it, when visible at all, to a cold moon-like globe. The morning is cool, but the humidity is palpable, greasy: a single fat globule splats onto my baseball cap.

The dance student is hoping I have news of when our plane will arrive. She and Ana are stranded with me. We’ve been up since five, when we sat huddled over a breakfast of coffee and butterless bread. Panamanians often eat bread without butter. I don’t care much for the cuisine of the area, because it is so bland, and prepared almost entirely without salt. Back at the Yandup Lodge, where I stayed for two nights, I kept having to ask for salt, making the young server giggle. I wondered if somehow I’d insulted the cooking. For breakfast this morning, at least we had jam. Air currents dictate the time of day the small white prop planes can chug across the low cordillera of the isthmus, thus the early rising. The flights are all in the morning.

We knew that our group was too large to fit on one plane, but none of us dreamed we’d be listed for the second flight back to Panamá. Two hours earlier, tense on the tarmac, backpack positioned for a charge into the passenger compartment, I looked over the shoulder of a woman calling out passengers’ names as she checked them off her list.

“I cannot believe I’m not on this damn list,” I said.

I exchanged an ironic glance with the dance student, noting her shoulders sag as she too turned out not to be on the list. At breakfast, we had talked about the two separate flights, the necessity of being on the first, and “just our luck” that would probably put us on the second. She was a bit older and ironic of mannerism, a graduate student, separate from our group, the only one at Yandup Lodge the day before not connected with Florida State University’s microcampus in Panamá. Ana, the other exile, was an RA in the dorm, most of the population of which, several young women and a few young men, had come to Playón Chico. The cheerful pilot, sucking down a drag or two from a cigarette between flights, told us he’d be “right back.” It was only a 35-minute flight to Albrook Airport in Panamá.

I am stranded with these two young women, both of whom I have taken meals with. They are quiet, resourceful, intelligent, quite a contrast to others on the tour. According to Richard Rodgriquez, women apply to overseas educational programs like ours at a ratio of two to one. “All over the world,” he says, “women and girls are on the move.” This movement, I would argue, is not without its human downsides. The previous day, I was annoyed by some squealing erupting from a canoe that was transporting, much to the horror of the former, several college girls and a land crab. Later, the girls would quickly fill my year’s quota of the word “like” and entertain me with expert and exploratory usages of a word beginning with F. Under assault by a Gatling gun of F-words and a discussion addressing, among other things, whether one had made her Barbie doll have sex, the three young men in the boat would smile, as if knowing they should be embarrassed, but not knowing exactly why. They were respectful, humble, a little awed.

The grad student, who it seemed had avoided the younger women, is even reading. She is reading a book titled Dirty Havana Trilogy. As an English teacher, I am happy when I see young people engrossed in a book, and I’m not a bit of a snob. Anything will do!

Yandup Lodge is a cheerful, clean, and well-organized resort on a roughly two-acre island known, not coincidentally, as Yandup. I stayed in a large bamboo palapa by myself and several friendly mosquitoes. Most of the weekend I swung in a hammock slung up on the back veranda of the hut. There, I could look out over the smooth blue pastels to another island, much smaller than Yandup, with its one palm tree, as in a cartoon about being stranded on a desert island. Once or twice a canoe slipped into view a couple of hundred feet from my verandah. Because the islands of the Kuna coast are, basically, coral obtrusions from a much larger reef, the water was very shallow, and the pilot propelled the boat along with a pole while another occupant fished. Not only shallow, the water was extraordinarily clear: a few inches under the surface, the rough coral protruded. I could see that walking would be very difficult, if not dangerous. There was a small beach on the other side of Yandup, but I was too lazy to go to it.

The palapas were organized for privacy from each other. In my hammock, I was aware only of myself and my own position in the wind and immense sea- and sky-scapes, the light lapping of the waves. The first day, I became aware of a black storm-cloud sneaking in from around a cape down the coast toward Colombia. It looked like a figure from a Japanese Noh play, ritualistically inching, oh so delicately, across the stage. A noh-cloud. It became very windy and it rained, hard. The second day, a Kuna man named Robinson appeared between my porch and the shore and we conversed a while in Spanish. The locals are serious in their demeanor, though usually quite friendly. They are almost overly ready to explain their customs. They take eco-tourism seriously, and assume that visitors come to learn. Hence my exasperation at the screaming, the self-involved chatter mentioned earlier. It was not humble. It was not polite. And it was not to be excused by youth.

Despite my relaxation in the hammock, it was essential to be on the plane, to arrive in Albrook early enough for a full Sunday’s activities. I fretted about it much of the night, sleeping poorly, my fatigue making it all the more essential that I be on that early flight. I had to be. Why? The very shortness of this paragraph reveals to me that I don’t know.

But I wasn’t on the flight, so now what was I supposed to do? Read? The night before, I finished an excellent short novel by Henry Shukman titled Darien Dogs. In fact, I just stole that image of the one palm tree from the novel. It exists as part of the collection Mortimer of the Maghreb. All of the stories and short novels in this extraordinary book are about burned-out middle-aged Englishmen stuck, uninsightfully, in various third world situations. Darien Dogs concerns a thirty-something investment banker named Rogers who falls in love with a Kuna prostitute in Panama City. When she steals his money, he embarks on a romantic and preposterous quest to Kuna Yala (the full name of the Kuna coast of Darién is the Comarca de Kuna Yala) to find her, setting himself in various scenes in which he shows off his ignorance of the inner mysteries of other, older cultures, all grander and vaster than the North American investment cartel that Rogers belongs to.

I don’t have anything else to read, so I take notes on my surroundings on the back of the cover of Mortimer.

For one thing, there are the land crabs, which keep scuttling around, avoiding us when they can, getting crushed when they can’t, eyeing us as if needing to know every human activity. With their eyes on stalks that seem to follow everything, they look like cartoons of astonishment. I wonder what is it like to be a crab, with your single asymmetrical claw, forever moving sideways, sidling around with your eyes on stalks, being screamed at by college girls, only to be stepped on after all of that indignity. The baño, which, like every other toilet in the third world has no seat and no flush mechanism, is fairly crawling with crabs. (In fact, it is the crabs that crawl, not the bathroom, but who’s counting?)

For some time, I sit under the terminal’s porch awning trying to keep track of what’s going on. The building is nothing but concrete blocks on a concrete slab, topped off by a corrugated iron roof. There is a sign saying “Cafeteria Pensionados y Jubilados de Ukupseni” over one of the doors. Apparently, in the interior of the building there is a store owned by Kuna retirees, one of which is the owner of Yandup Lodge, a friendly man in casual western garb who arrives out of nowhere and proceeds in a flourish of smiles into the dark interior of the cafeteria.

My two companions and I keep walking into each other, giving each other the speculative eye, as if we expect each other to have found out something new about the flight, which becomes ever more delayed. But how could we know anything new? There is no contact with the outside world, and that, I think, is what gets to me and to the two young women. There is no cell phone service; there are no roads, thus no way out of Darien if the plane does not return. But why would it not return? We hash it over several times; the little planes serve several other airports along the Kuna coast: El Porvnenir, Alligandi, Corazón de Jesus. As we are closer than others, the pilot will stop at more distant airports and take on passengers for seats that should be ours. We might miss the next flight and the next, and at a certain time of the day the flights will stop altogether. And what then? Would we stay the night on the rough plank benches at the airport? With the land crabs? What, in fact, is the flight schedule? Ana thinks that planes come every two hours, but is not sure, and seems uncertain, though she is Panamanian and thus more than fluent in Spanish, that she can find out. Everything is obscure; Kuna time itself seems folded in upon itself.

After some time, Ana gets the agent inside the storage room that doubles as Air Panamá counter to call headquarters on radio. The door is open only for minutes, and the agent looks surprised. He is shuffling boxes around, but stops to radio the call. No one answers in Panamá. Then someone disappears down the bridge to Ukupseni with the aim of phoning, but when, after a half hour or so, the answer comes, it is ambiguous, adding nothing. Maybe the connection has been intermittent; maybe the call was not even made.

At last, the dance student has spread her beach towel on the sand, and we all get into a little rhythm in the haze, under the storm clouds, in the sporadic drizzle and sun. The dance student reads for a while then chances a trip to Ukupseni; she reappears minutes later, a tall slim figure with gold hair swaying down the bridge. With her long strides, she walks in contrast to the Kuna women and children congealing in the liquid distance and advancing in small groups with little steps. She has paid a dollar for a bottled coke, still frosted. I am not sure where the power for refrigeration comes from; perhaps generators or solar panels; there is no sign of electric lines from the interior.

The more the morning wears on, the more Kuna people cross the bridge. There are two hunters, each with a brace of small dogs and a shotgun, going into the hills for game. Mostly there are women and children. Usually the women are dressed in colorful costume, familiar to anyone who has visited Panamá, where Kuna women are to be seen, always several together, at some bus stop or in Avenida Central. Some of them wear facial ornaments. Several of them stop to tell the dance student, whose blanket is right in the way, that they are going to visit the cemetery. It turns out that the column of smoke on the mountain emanates from the cemetery. Perhaps this is a Sunday ritual. If so, it is a ritual more faithfully observed than attendance at the large church nearby, which seems totally empty, or at the L-shaped building, presumably a school, into whose dark interior only one family of three has disappeared. Ukupseni, though it is continually adding to its square footage with refuse and sand, has outgrown its tiny island, about a third of a square mile in size. Before long, there might be a bamboo suburb growing up between the block buildings of the airport.

At the same time, several men begin working on a concrete slab beyond the fence by the new airstrip. (The old airstrip, much shorter than the new, and fallen into disrepair, was made obsolete perhaps by the demands of tourism and the need to accommodate larger, double-prop planes. Only single prop planes would be likely to be able to use the old one.) Sand is mixed with dirt and concrete dust and shoveled into a circular pile, which in turn is hollowed out in the interior like a miniature volcano. Water, probably from the line of fetid pools between the airstrip and the fence, is poured into the center and stones are added. Everything is mixed together, then spread on the expanding slab.

I have no idea what is being constructed. I have the impression that this labor is being conducted for my benefit, as something to entertain me. At random, various men appear from nowhere and help for a while, then disappear.

Morning advances to late morning, and by this time I have visited, more times than I care to, the major attractions: the end of the old airstrip, the crab-crawling baño, the exterior of a large building with a sign over the front door saying “Iglesia de los santos de los ultimos días.” Church of the Latter Day Saints. Somewhere along the line I have been told that there are seven churches, including the Southern Baptist, in Ukupseni, the largest of the Kuna towns. This does not include the indigenous religion, which, our guide the day before took pains to explain, views the earth as “mother.”

It is now about three and a half hours after the departure of the first plane, at least an hour and a half after we gave up hope of being collected on the second flight of the day by Air Panamá.

The dueña of Yandup Lodge has come in on the Lodge skiff, which materializes from a line of suds on the horizon, the perimeter of the lagoon. She talks pleasantly with Ana. From her expression, I take it that there is nothing to fear about the plane, and as if to prove it, there it comes, tilting already toward the runway. You would think there would be some build-up, some engine noise, but events in rural Latin America operate on their own invisible schedule and there is no more reason for the plane to appear in one minute than the next.

Next there is the wait at the door of the plane, then Ana and the dance student climb the ladder and enter the passenger compartment. I follow, and find my worst fears realized.

There is no seat for me.

Ana is looking back anxiously from her seat toward the front of the plane, in front of row after row of full seats. The dance student has wedged herself illegally into a space carved out from two others at the very rear.

Someone says, “You can sit on the cooler.” I look down and see that, at the end of the single row of seats on the left of the plane, is a red and white cooler. It reminds me of the color of the lonely building at the end of the old airstrip.

“Are you serious? You mean I can sit on this cooler?”

“You can sit on it and I will take your picture so you can prove you did it,” said a woman in the back of the plane.

By this time the pilot has disappeared. I sit on the cooler.

And wait.

Hoping that this was not some joke.

Eventually, the door closes, and suddenly we are in motion and in the air. I look for a window so that eventually I will be able to describe circling over Ukupseni, then flying over the low cordillera into the suburbs of Panama City. But I am sitting by the door and there is no window nearby.

The nice woman in the back of the plane takes my picture and gives me her card, promising to forward me the photo. Everyone is in a good mood, amused, and maybe a bit horrified, by my station on the cooler. I will take this opportunity to assert that coolers do not have seat belts.

The dance student leans forward and shakes my hand. “I don’t believe I’ve introduced myself and we’ve just spent an anxious morning together. My name’s Adrienne.”

I will not go into the further adventures of a college professor here; suffice it to imagine that, after having ridden back to town on a cooler, I am confronted with the fact that Air Panamá does not have a record of my departure, two days before, to Playón Chico. I am almost denied entry at customs, into the very country I am already in.

Two weeks later, I am left with little more than fragments, a memory here, some scribbled notes on the back of a book cover there. I wonder now what, during that morning at Ukupseni, all the anxiety was about.

It comes to me that it was a fear of nothing to do. I dreaded nothing changing and having to deal with the here and now on its own terms, in deep focus. Walking back up that airstrip and finding the same unfinished concrete block school, the same as it had always been, would have been intolerable.

I feared being beat. In fact, the Beat movement of the fifties—all that racket of jazz and Kerouac and living “On the Road”—was about the same thing, but with this difference: that you accept being beat.

In this acceptance there is liberation. You are alive, in the elements, with nothing to do. Everything is temporary, unfinished, contingent.

But beautiful.

And you are aware.

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