I wake in the morning.  The egg pan winks at me and I give it two bright yellow eyes, I grind the coffee with joyful, mechanized fury in my little coffee bean grinder, I boil water until the kettle yelps and I fill the French press.  I press down the plunger with an unabashedly sexual relish, feeling its’ slow compliance.  I am a palette.  My cat wraps around my leg, vinelike, and I purr.  The morning rolls majestically over my city and the day unfolds with possibility.

In the afternoon I crash to my bed like a hip-shot beast.  My wrinkles aren’t age-related, they’re from lying on my own face for too long while awake.  In actual, healthy sleep, there’s some shifting that inevitably occurs, which lessens the severity of the pillow imprint.  I lie there completely awake, watching the blackness behind my eyes, and I don’t really move because technically, I’m conscious.  My cat checks my pulse, and comes away confused when he senses that something inside me (the muscle of my heart) is still alive.  These wrinkles sometimes remain for alarming periods of time, but I apply two creams nightly (one with retinol and ascorbyl palmitate, one with aloe and pomegranate seed extract) that successfully combat the effects.

My neighbor, Debra, is very supportive.  She is very attractive and young, with a tight black Afro and smooth, earth-toned dresses, or other fairly tight clothes.  When I leave the house in the morning, I say “Good Morning, Debra,” in a cheerful voice, even if she’s not there, which is all the time, almost, I just say it to her stoop.  I go to work, I come home.  In the evening, I shift all my belongings to one hand and struggle the gate open, and, laboring up the stoop, I say “Good evening, Debra,” and usually her little white dogs bark at me from the window.  I practice constantly for the real thing, (I think Debra has a social life, because I greet the real Debra not very often), and the practice has paid off, twice.  Mostly, though, I made Debra up, but the greeting practice is still a form of support that I attribute entirely to her.  She is there, and this fact is somehow comforting.

I made up her support like my body made up this depression.  It feels like a rehearsal for the real thing.  Sometimes I am sad, sometimes I’m tired and sad, sometimes I’m just tired, but I’m always confused.  Where did this come from?  What is it?  I looked up all of the different antidepressants online.  According to the site I looked at, there are twenty-five in all.  I’m sure there are more.  In my mind, there is a small arrow that points from the pill towards the thing that comes next; that is, the place the pill takes you.  Just as Tylenol and Aleve and Bayer all have different light filters in their commercials and distinct personae for their anti-inflammatories, these antidepressants all have a different flavor of happy.  It’s easy – you can tell by the name.

I started with one I knew intimately, Zoloft.  I know people on Zoloft.  It seems to work for some of them, but not for as many as the name would make you believe.  ‘Zo’ as in ‘so’, ‘loft’ as in the heights of something, something above where you are now.  Or a loft in which you scheme as a child.  Also possibly the alien planet Zoloft, where everyone is happy.  You need to go to Zoloft?  Your spaceship is waiting outside/in this bottle.

Prozac.  ‘Pro’ as in the positive side of something, or a professional, or a golf pro, who isn’t a professional, but has an eerie pharmacological zest that makes me associate them with high voltage, loud patterns, logos, and a formal happiness.  ‘Proz’ as in prose, something expressive, which takes energy, which is impossible to have while depressed.  ‘Ac’ is just ac – they needed a suffix.  Or ‘active’, something all depressed people aren’t, except during busy days of projecting, blaming, rationalizing, and emotional hamster-wheeling.

I believe that you need to ponder and free associate intuitively and with diligence if you’re to find the brand of happiness that’s right for you.  I went through them all, and through my search for a cure to my afternoon depression, I found a new hobby.  I found a way to fight back.  It also gave me a new, fake calling: becoming a pharmacist.  I would have a snappy joke for every medication everyone ever wanted, and they’d get a well-timed, wry line just when they least expected it.

I discovered this secret life behind brand names when I saw ‘Smilin’ Bob’ on a commercial late-night.  Smilin’ Bob only smiles, and waves, and does other things off camera that make him smile.  He is a spokesperson is for ‘Extenze’, a male enhancement formula.  ‘Extenze’ isn’t classy or subtle, but it get’s the point across all right.  And people who would buy dick pills from someone named Smilin’ Bob don’t need subtle.  It’s there, though, in every pill, even if you don’t think it.  Viagra picked a great name that works on you in several ways.  Vi. Viable option.  No shame here!  Vi as in the vi in ‘viva’, live it up/get it up.  Or virile.  Makes me think vitriol, which makes me think car oil/aggression, then pistons, on to heavy, pounding sex.  Agra becomes agro, or stays ag-ricultural, fertile.  So basically, use some car oil to fertilize your lawn – a bit unnatural – and you’ll have impressive results, and streaks of blue light coming out your pupils.

But back to the SSRI’s.  Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors.  ‘Surmontil’ – surmounting your challenge, or a ‘mont’, really gets the French demographic subconsciously visualizing snowcapped glory.  ‘Pamelor’ – I can’t figure out this one, but Pamelor might be the alien sex deity you’re visited by each night after you start popping.  ‘Endep’, as in, ‘you really wanna end up like that?’  Fatalist and dishonorable, praying on the hopeless and fearful.  ‘Pristiq’ evokes the pristine emotional state of pre-depression, but reminds one too much of Compaq, a computer, which is what you don’t want to feel like, so I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t heard of Pristiq.

I read through them all and began doing watercolor/collage art pieces on news print, free-associating across the pages while meditating on each brand name, dowsing out how it feels to be on the drug.  For a while, at least, I’d feel as if I was actually on it, so I circumvented seeing my doctor by going through the entire list and hanging the watercolors on my wall.  Vestra and Serzone and Remeron and Sinequan, Vivactil, Buspar, Desyrel and Norpramin.  I plumbed the occult depths of Edmonax, the musical Cymbalta, the bi-lingual possibilities of Serzone, scoffed at the elementary Elavil and Wellbutrin, but painted their tapestries just the same.  The names made things simple, like a comic book, and sounded like heroes and villains and planets of some extraterrestrial robot universe where the rivers bubbled with dopamine.  I would never, I thought, feel so beige there, on planet Effexor, in the Pertofrane system.  But I am here, and this is my life, and I’m fantasizing about happiness by free-associating happy drug brand names.  This pain might be fake, but this obsession is real, and thus I need to rid myself of the fake pain, before it spreads out of my afternoon and conquers the rest of my daily planner, covering it with beige lichen.

My art was prolific, when I managed to avoid the post-work crash.  On my weaker days, I would come home from work and collapse.  Sometimes I would have the energy to turn on Animal Planet and I would be able to see half the screen, the lower half obscured by blanket or sheet or pillow, as my head was sinking into it, and I would lie there, TV on or off, and feel empty.  Once I go down I go down like a manatee on Quaaludes, and I am not budging.  If I were to open a restaurant, I’d call it Inertia and all the waitrons would be crying.  Sometimes ‘Meerkat Manor’ comes on as it’s getting dark outside and I see little meerkat heads popping up from beneath my blankets – vigilant, industrious little meerkats.  Nothing makes you feel lazier than watching Animal Planet, because while you’re vegging and wasting your afternoon watching meerkats, somewhere there are thousands – millions of meerkats all operating at maximum capacity – all within a highly developed, hierarchical social structure, which is yet another thing you aren’t doing.  Every time I turn on Animal Planet I instantly regret it but I’m too exhausted to reach for the remote to change it, so I watch the heads pop out of the blankets as they scan for danger, and I sob and sob.

I knew, though, that this wasn’t making me better.  My watercolor/collage policy of appeasement wasn’t solving anything, it was distracting me from whatever the root of the problem was, whether real or fake.  I could have gone back online and found more names to explore, but instead I chose to stop when I ran out of paint.  I ran out on a Monday, right in the middle of Celexa.  I seized the opportunity and convinced myself it was too great a task to obtain more, and thus broke the cycle of compulsion.  On Tuesday, I came home, and couldn’t paint and circle words, I couldn’t chase an elusive pharmacological pseudo-rainbow through the margins of the newspaper, and my hands started shaking.  I felt faint and my skin prickled, I thought my cirrhosis was flaring up again.  I might be genuinely depressed, I thought, and so I called up the Care Response Counseling Center and told them I was going to volunteer.

This may seem backwards, the idea of a sick person helping a sick person, but in wilderness survival situations, people with someone to care for make it out more often than those just caring for themselves.  It gives them a goal, it makes them feel like a rescuer, and not a victim.  Lost in the wilderness of my own pathos, I resolved to be a rescuer, and thus rescue myself.  Becoming a suicide hotline staffer requires a surprising amount of training.   It takes more than an open mind and heart (and the rare intrinsic strength to inspire the will to live), but also about 60 hours of training.  I felt confident that I would know what to say anyway, but I signed up for the next cycle of training, which began on Thursday night.  On Wednesday night, I came home and grabbed the bottle of Vick’s I had set up that morning, and took a large dose to try to go to sleep and circumvent my afternoon depression (AD), but the cocktail of emotions and chemicals mixed and backfired – my hands felt enormous, like they were swelling and floating, and my scalp itched and my dry eyes burned with sleeplessness.  I turned on Shark Week and didn’t cry, but watched; glassy, numb, blue.

On Thursday, I showed up for my entrance interview at 8:30 (thankfully, training was definitely in the night part of the day, to accommodate saints of all vocations), and it went like this.

Interviewer: “Good evening, Miss.”

Me: “Good evening.  How are you?”

Interviewer: “I’m fine, I’m fine.” [shuffles through my application]

Me: “Is everything there?  I can tell you whatever you need to know if there’s something missing that you’d like to know.” [stop talking suddenly, clasp hands, sheepishly hide paint-stained fingernails]

Interviewer: [looks at me over her glasses – classic!] “No, everything’s fine—tell me, though, to get us started out.  Why are you doing this?  What about it appeals to you?” [her crow’s feet grow claws during the word appeals]

Phew.  I was ready for this question, I knew exactly what to say.

Me: “Because I’m depressed!”

The Interviewer looks at me over her glasses, then through her glasses, and then takes off her glasses.

Interviewer: “Really.”

Me: “Yes, really.”

Interviewer: “So you feel that, because you are depressed yourself, you might be better suited to understand [crow’s feet] the motives of our callers?”

Me: “Absolutely.”

Interviewer: “And, thus, you may be better equipped with appropriate responses?”

She really knew what she was talking about.

Me: “Yes, absolutely.”

Interviewer: “Well, good.  So….tell me.  What would your first step response be to a caller who calls, and says to you, “I’m thinking about killing myself.”

Me: [I sit up straight, clear my throat] “I’d say: ‘Me, too.’”

I didn’t end up volunteering for Care Response.  I believe that I could’ve secured a volunteer position had I approached the interview more analytically, but I value honesty above almost all else, and I’m glad that I said exactly what I felt inside.  According to my interviewer, if I expressed exactly what I felt inside to a potential suicide, they would probably kill themselves – I disagree, because people on psychological pain appreciate honesty above almost all else.  In any case, I resumed my search for a new coping mechanism.

I developed some very creative activities to cope with my afternoon depression, and, had I not been horribly depressed for those 3-6 hours, I would have had a lot of fun.  Did you know that you can play ‘Alphabet’ from your couch, just so long as your couch has a view of your bookshelf and coffee table?  I would slouch into the cushions, making sure my neck muscles were dangerously limp, and let my head roll grotesquely against the wall, and then I would squint my eyes to see the titles and authors and the letters in them.  After a couple hours of ‘Alphabet’, I had to consciously choose different books, because it had become less of an adventure once I knew where to find the letters like ‘V’ without even really searching.  I forbade use of the discreetly placed Victoria’s Secret ‘Angel’s Collection’ 2006 Catalogue, or the dog-eared Victoria’s Secret 2007 Swimwear Catalogue to obtain the letter ‘v’, which is ironic, because they are my most treasured works, my desert-island literature that I return to when I emerge from my depression around 7-10 p.m.  I do not know why I keep these volumes so discrete when I live by myself, but I can’t keep them in my bedside drawer – instead, I tiptoe from my bed to my bookshelf in the living room, then back to my bed with one or both catalogues, and then back to the living room some time later in the night to press the slim volumes back into their places, almost invisible against the left-hand sidewall of my historical fiction shelf.  Anyway, I mostly used Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ for my V’s, and I could alternate citing the title and authors name as my letter source.  When I triumphantly arrived at Z (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Jazz Age’[ also alternating the author/title citation for ‘z’]) for the third or fourth time, I was usually so horny from trying to not think about all of Victoria’s little dog-eared Secrets that I almost felt happy, and had a good enough reason to go to bed.  This split brain activity of articulating new alphabetical maps along the collective spine of my library while allowing swimsuit and lingerie models to float Zenlike in and out of my mind’s other half was an excellent distraction exercise, and usually left me twisting inside my sheets, breathlessly touching my vagina as silently as possible, which was also great therapy.

I tried several other methods to deal with my afternoon depression.  The only one that had any real palliative effect was baking bread.  I have always resisted buying products that contain a large amount of air – such as marshmallows, cereal, cotton swabs, and bread.  Balloons are acceptable, because you’re buying a concept more than an object, and usually you add your own air.  Once, I squashed a loaf of bread down to a very small pat of matter for a camping trip, and ever since I have felt as if Arrowhead Mills is taking advantage of me, and I get angry when I have to buy bread.  I enjoy toast, but hate to buy bread, and thus, maybe baking bread allowed me to pretend that I was taking action, that I was stopping up a real source of my Pain.  Also, there’s a lot of waiting involved in bread making, which allowed me to make the dough, collapse from emotional exhaustion and sob while it rose, knead the dough, cry while it rose, etc. and then at the end, I’d have bread, almost for free.  I couldn’t eat the bread fast enough, though, and giving it away negates the ‘value’ argument, so I once again found myself marooned.  Then, two weeks ago, I had a strange dream.  In my dream, which felt very real and displayed a sub-conscious knowledge of the industry specs on different electric cutting tools, I walked to the Home Depot down my street dressed in only my Victoria’s Secret PearlShimmer Satin nightgown, where I purchased a Fein brand ASTXE 649 24 Inch OD Max Cut Electric Hacksaw.  I walked home with the hacksaw as the sun rose vermillion into the sky, and, standing on my bed, sawed a large circle through the wall above my headboard, with bits of drywall dusting my nightgown and snowing upon my pillowcases.  I pushed the drywall, which swung outward into space like an oculus window.  I leaned forward into the next apartment, blew some drywall from my bangs, looked down at the upside-down, smiling face on the pillow below me, and said “Good morning, Debra.”

I woke sweating, and on my computer, I found a window opened to AceTool.com describing a certain Fein ASTXE 649 24 Inch OD Max Cut Electric Hacksaw.  This made me uneasy, not just because it was undeniable that I had been looking up hacksaws online while asleep, I had been….looking up hacksaws.  This unexpected turn threw me.  I decided to bake bread for Debra, and to bring it over to her, and to get to know her a little bit.  Maybe showing myself that I could just walk out my door, down the steps, then over one stoop and up her steps, instead of sawing through our mutual wall.  I didn’t think that I really wanted to know Debra all that badly, but maybe I was feeling a little alienated from humanity in general.  I baked a three-seed raisin bread with a honey-and-egg wash brushed on top to make it shiny.  This was a strategic recipe, because I made the dough early in the morning, let it rise during work while I was gone, then put it in the oven to bake when I got home, and by the time it was ready, I was almost done crying.  I put some aloe-and-pomegranate-seed-extract cream on underneath my eyes to reduce redness and swelling, put on a clean blue dress that looked like someone you might like might want to bake something in, and carried my steaming loaf of bread out of my house and to Debra’s front door.

It was heavy, and I couldn’t take away one hand for fear of dropping it, so I carefully clunked the corningware dish three times against the door, and carefully means very slowly, which sounds ominous when you’re knocking on an almost-stranger’s door, and I immediately felt self-conscious.

“Come in!”

The voice sounded like it was right behind the door, as in two feet away from my face, which was one foot away from the door.  Her little dog barked once, and Debra shushed it.  I freed a hand by pressing the corningware up against the door with my hip and stabilizing it, and it was really hot, so I opened the door fast and stumbled over the threshold, catching the bread before it crashed to the floor.

“Hello.”  Debra was slumping on her couch, which faced away from her door, and was arching her neck back and looking at me upside down from not more than two feet away.  She smelled like almond or some other expensive oil, and it was funny to me that I was looking at her upside down for the second time that day-and-night.  She was wearing an old-looking white shirt with no sleeves with some kind of geometric windsurfer on it, but I couldn’t tell because this was also upside down.  I looked at her face, which was smooth and smiling, and for a moment I had the optical illusion that it was a right side up face with an Afro-like beard obscuring the mouth completely, the eyebrows were two wings of a thin French mustache, with the nose and mouth just distant confusions stranded somewhere in the forehead.  I must have looked strange at that moment because she smiled a little more and when her mouth moved, the entire face flipped over in my mind again and I could speak.

“Hello, Debra.  I brought you bread.”

“Did you bake that yourself?” she asked.

This is the question you know you are definitely going to get when you bake bread yourself, because it’s completely obvious when you’ve baked bread yourself, and it provides a lot of satisfaction when you get to answer yes.  Baking bread is one of those things that isn’t that hard at all, but requires some specific steps that aren’t completely common knowledge, like making an origami crane that actually moves, or windsurfing.  Baking bread, shows initiative, and so does meeting your neighbor, so in Debra’s mind, I had some initiative, which gave me some points already.

“Yes, I just pulled it out of the oven.”

Debra rose from the couch and walked around it to stand in front of me.  She was a little taller than me, and looked like she played sports, and moved like a dinosaur or a sand crane or something vaguely avian and graceful.  She bent forward towards the loaf and wafted with her hands, rotating her birdlike wrists, and said mmmmmmmmm.

“I really, really love the smell of just-baked bread.”

Thus far our conversation would be the marketing-strategy-devised cartoon on the side of a breadbox, if there were still such a thing, and so I was very glad when she said “Let’s eat some” and got a circular cork-looking platform to put on the coffee table on which to set the bread.  She got a plate with butter on it from her kitchen and brought it into the living room, and we cut thick slices of the bread while it was still steaming an explicit amount of steam, and spread too much butter on it and talked, and ate the bread, which was, she said, “really, really good.”  We talked about our lives and jobs, and we talked about what we both liked to do, and I had to think fast and creatively during this section – I don’t often talk to people about what I do, and so I made up some acceptable activities, including ones I liked a moderate amount but never really did.  I included a couple slightly outrageous ones, so I could show my potential for spontaneity, such as rollerblading.  Debra said she thought rollerblading was pretty silly, but we both agreed that we both owned rollerblades, which seemed like an agreement to not tell anyone else this fact.  We talked about books, and the neighborhood, and good vacations we’d been on, and all this time ate more and more bread, and after a little while I started to feel almost drunk on the butter, or the gluten, if this is possible.  During a break in the conversation, Debra said she’d get me a napkin, because I had butter on my fingers from a reckless slice of bread, and I said I didn’t need it, and then we made love upside down on the couch, whatever that means to you.

The day after that, Debra came to my apartment, but didn’t sleep there.

The day after that, I showed her my catalogues, and she liked them.

The day after that, in the morning, I came clean about what it was that I actually did with my time, and she told me about her various obsessive-compulsive habits, which are evidence of a rich inner life.

Then came the weekend, and since we finally had time, we each went out and bought a large poster or wall hanging.  I bought an imitation alpaca ‘tapestry’ that doubled as a poncho that was blue and red and yellow, had an alpaca on it, and looked Peruvian, roundabout.  The reason why I picked the ugliest one is forthcoming.  Debra picked a feminist-looking work of art, the kind where the women in the artwork are silhouetted and beautiful and have more or less stick figure bodies, except for ample hips and breasts and wild hair, which make you think of unbridled femininity.   Have you seen ‘The Shawshank Redemption’?  That’s what we had in mind.

The next day, Sunday, we went to Home Depot together, and then came home and sawed a circular passageway from my apartment to hers.  Her dog hid under the coffee table, but we soothed it, cleaned up the bits of drywall, and stepped back to observe the circular opening.  It’s strange to look at a wall that normally blocks your vision and to suddenly be able to see further.  It’s like looking at a falling waterfall, and then looking at the trees at the top of the waterfall – no joke, they bend downward, as if preparing slowly to separate from the earth and plummet, but they never do.  I felt my face moving through the opening in the wall into Debra’s apartment, though I wasn’t actually moving.  My hands and forearms were still buzzing from the 115V vibration produced by the Fein brand ASTXE 649 24 Inch OD Max Cut Electric Hacksaw.  I looked through the hole in the wall.  I held Debra’s pinky with my pinky.  There was a light creeping across the wall in my quiet apartment, a distinctly Sunday Afternoon light, and it moved several inches while we stood and looked.  I thanked my subconscious for faking depression so convincingly, and we looked past the wall into the apartment beyond, into another life.

His life wasn’t an adventure.  Not a wilderness to be navigated.  It was a doldromous expanse of simpering, unexamined subsistence.

Henry LaFleur was the most boring person on earth.

Henry couldn’t quite remember if it had always been as such, but enough time had passed since when he might have possessed some semblance of a life that he had forgotten altogether whether or not it had existed at all, and by the particular morning on which we join him, had stopped remembering to check.

But on that particular morning, all that was about to change.

Sleepy, numb Henry LaFleur sat hunched inside his mauve two-door hatchback, driving to work.  Though his sparse whiskers grew at an excruciatingly slow rate, he had shaved every morning for as long as he could remember, leaving his chapped face a raw, mottled red.  This morning, it took the pallor of spent and melted wax in the early morning sunshine. Then –

A brilliant flash of yellow, orange, afterthoughts of a pair of gorgeous gams sighing against floral print; red, ochre. Dark locks overflowing, not quite in control, a mane splendiferous and glimmering, a frankly and honestly perfect form clung to by a thin fresh sundress (infinitely jealous of whatever slender textile mysteries hugged still closer underneath), that dress knowing the skin and flesh taughtly connected, that soft, fine skin, yet even all that likewise jealous, still, of the curls.  After a long and uninterrupted vacancy, blood began to fill Henry LaFleur’s veins.

Henry LaFleur stiffened, holding his breath in his itchy car seat, and stared through the crisp glass. He blinked and found her again suspended, a blaze of color, a haughty puckered midstride look thrown askance over her bare coffee-colored shoulder, that one look piercing him. Shimmering on the backs of his hot eyelids.

Henry turned the wheel before he realized what he was doing and followed, oh god, he slid past her again, each fine line blooming on the smooth stretch of fabric across her round rocking hips, the soft clop of her brown sandals plopping against the pavement and recoiling faithfully back to the pads of her heels with a barely audible yet highly satisfying smack, two steps, three steps he saw her for, breath held, hushing, gliding past, and then he had her eyes for the second time, eyes zinging like darts, staring, knowing, waiting there for him, jungle green agates in the sideview mirror when he flicked his eyes there for the briefest, most regrettably modest of modest moments, the briefest connection between them an electric blast through his guts, and maybe a slight engaging of the soft floral lips, plumped barely into an idle smirk, and Henry LaFleur swore and his eyes flicked back as if magnetically repelled, exiled to the straight drab view straight down the droll road, and again before he knew, he had turned his car off the street and was staring at the no parking sign on the gray cinderblock wall of the gas station he found himself in.  The engine off.  The waiting silence.  And then the slow, subtle faraway crescendo of her feet sliding in her brown flop shoes, a whisper at first, and then movement in the mirror (he dared not look) and the slow fade – Henry LaFleur began to breathe again. He backed his car towards the road and, after a moment spent slung over the sloped threshold of the sidewalk, turned his head and saw her crossing the street in front of a slowing blue Caddilac, saw her climb the curve and disappear into the leafy jumble of shaggy potted plants flanking an old greenhouse door, and after the soft bell chime ceased as the door swung closed, she was gone.

Next to the greenhouse, which appeared to engage in the retail sale of only the most exotic tropical flora, was a decrepit old shoe shop.

Henry LaFleur bought more pairs of shoes that week than he had in his whole life. Henry found cause to visit the store no less than nine times in five consecutive days, each time striding mechanically past the greenhouse, jerkily, as if resisting a strong magnetic attraction, and executing a sharp, crisp ninety-degree turn upon reaching the breathless latitude of the shoe store, and each time exiting the shoe shop wearing on his sweating feet a new pair of confused merchandise, having mumbled some unnecessary justification to the uninterested clerk, who never made a sound, leaving his previous pair abandoned on the counter. Each time he passed the fogged greenhouse windows, though, all he could make out were the tangled, seething vines and the broad, cool leaves, the air murky and humid, glowing multicolored blossoms distorted and strange behind the ancient, age-glimmered glass coated by a film of well-adhered grime, the close air stewing inside, thick and tumescent, the scent of flowers in bloom, a scent which Henry LaFleur thought was both mysteriously secretive and brazen at the same time.  The smell made him blush, as if he had witnessed something heinously indecent and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Henry LaFleur passed by in soft felt shoes, suede ones, black-and-white street-clattering wingtips, worn and tasseled black leather loafers smooth and tender-soled, always with the self-conscious deliberate crunch and scrape of each slow reluctant footfall, at first terrified to approach, and then to walk slowly away from the shop with an air of flowering blooms (that olfactory come-hither) and fragrant old shoe leather hanging in his nose, his hair, hovering amid and in between his clothes, until this too faded and he kept alive only the memory of the smell, a sweetness seared into the hollows beneath his sweating eyeballs, a sweetness without which, in his morbid imagination, dry lamenting winds would twist and scuttle his former skin and his old, dead bones.

Henry LaFleur could not sleep.

He rolled inside his rumpled, aching sheets, sweating rank sweat that pricked his skin and clung his pyjamas to him like cellophane.  Seven days and nights had passed since he saw her, and each night was worse.  A swollen, groaning insomniac moon lolled heavily in the sky through the open window. Pale blue light woven into subtle leafthrown moonshadow crept and shimmered, whispering across the bare moonstained walls, and Henry LaFleur watched them creep.  When a waft of midnight wind ruffled the translucent paperthin white curtains it bore with it the smell of flowers.

Henry LaFleur inhaled slowly and held his body taught and motionless. His eyes closed and an image materialized in his head, at first mere whispers, tendrils of pale spiced green, silver-black and cool indigo, the wavering points of stars, and then it settled, and the image cleared, like staring at a night sky from underneath a pool of clear, slowly calming water. It was a desert night sky thickly laden with stars, like pale glowing snowberries hung above a silverscape of moonbathed sand dotted with saguaro, and in the foreground the silent dome of one such cactus’ top, and on its side, a single snow-colored bloom splitting slowly out of the tightly wound green bud, each pale white fragrant tender petal furling slowly open to the heavens and horizon, a deep sigh, and Henry LaFleur felt it was this flower, this one that he smelled now, in his real and wonderful life, laying in bed.

Henry LaFleur opened his eyes and rose from his dusty crypt of blankets and padded softly to the window. He stood before it, like a child, his chest pressing against the sill, his hands gripping it, wondering outward onto the currents of air slowly circulating above quiet lamp-lit sidewalks and chirruping lawns, the shimmering light phantasmagorgic, Henry LaFleur Phantasmagorged on it, the chilly pearled blue, that smell; drunk on it.

Henry LaFleur dressed shivering on his closet threshold in his usual gray slacks (pleated) and a modest, monochrome drab button down shirt, his favorite oiled brown leather boat shoes with thin clean black socks on underneath, and his tastefully conservative yet elegant swiss army watch, which winked subversively back at the moon as Henry LaFleur tied the clumsy leather laces (hurriedly, absent-mindedly, without his usual smug relish at his own ceremonious, extraneous repeated habit) and he walked smoothly and quietly through the living room, pausing and bending once to pat his sleeping dog, also named Henry LaFleur, on his twitching brow, and then he exited the front door, locking it quickly.

Henry LaFleur turned to face the dark, and found that it actually wasn’t dark at all. His usually drab, color-starved clothing and hair, the unremarkable hue of his fair skin – all of it burnished suddenly bright and silver. He was moonlit like a big fish winnowing softly in creek shallows, and, thus anointed, he looked left and right to make sure no gossipers lurked. He stole silently out of the neighborhood inside his modest, sensible automobile and disappeared into the womb of the night.

Heat lightning flickered across the sky, the air was perfectly still. The moonlight made all appear frozen, statuesque, save for the flashing platinum apparitions periodically calling and answering its fleeting self around the heavens’ dome, throwing sudden reversals of light and shadow against the sleeping houses Henry slid past, and thus illumined, they seemed to change their mind back and forth over the issue of their state: sleeping, waking; flashing, darkling. The silent world moved by, scarcely managing to assert its own barely witnessed existence, and Henry LaFleur was suddenly reminded of watching an old horror movie on mute; the lightning blaring, the silent thunder crashing.

Henry LaFleur parked down the street from the greenhouse. Her greenhouse. Aware of his heart gulping in his chest, he walked past the dark-windowed shops without seeing them, his eyes fixed on the greenhouse, waiting there. He caught the faint smell of the shoe shop. He passed it, stopped, and stood in front of the greenhouse door. He shouldn’t have come, he thought, this was trespassing. Or loitering. Something. He cursed himself silently, gritting his perfectly corrected teeth together, a moment of doubt passing before him, but then it was gone, and he could think only of her, a fertile luster, and then his hand was on the cool iron doorhandle, and he was inside, the door swinging shut and rattling the panes in their loosening latticework.  Standing there in the steamy murk, he realized he had never even considered the possibility of the door having been locked.

Silence. But not quite silence, Henry LaFleur thought, because though no actual sound – no titters of insects, or trickle of water – could actually be heard – and Henry LaFleur, breath suspended indefinitely and precariously between inhale and exhale, would have heard – the intimacy of the very air of the place, its embryonic warmth and closeness, a presence about the long damp wooden tables crowded thick with geenery and dark, slumbering flowers, their colors smouldering within the obscurity, produced something akin to sound, and filled him. His ears, every pore of his skin, washed with it. Henry LaFleur inhaled through his nose and mouth and remembered every garden he had ever been in, each shrub, the resin’s spiced perfume inside his neighbor’s juniper bushes when he was a child, each small, sheltered sapling and bloom, every rose and tall, defiant lupin, each lilac, every zinnia. And Henry LaFleur felt that every garden he had smelt or ever seen had been this dark mystery, this melodious blend of scent awash inside his head, that it all was this garden; and this is impossible, not actually possible, but at that moment moving breathlessly through overflowing rows of slowly growing flowers and ponderous, pregnant bulbs, the unnameable species in their fragrant torpor, this is what Henry LaFleur felt, and he could not awake himself to his regular policy concerning instinctual truths, which would have been to convince himself otherwise.

Then Henry LaFleur closed his eyes and swayed slightly on his feet inside those shoes and just breathed in the smell, and then his body flushed and tingled as if sensing the presence of some unseen spirit.  He felt a feathering of fingertips across his chest, and his eyes snapped open, but no one was there. It must have been his own fluttering heart, he thought.

And then Henry LaFleur found himself standing at the far end of the greenhouse, the translucent wall in front of him glimmering with innumerable glistening dewdrops of water clinging one next to the other next to all the others, and in each the tiniest pinprick of light that pinwheeled slowly as Henry LaFleur slowly turned himself around to peer back down along the misted rows laden with rising steam and back into the greenblack void beyond. Henry LaFleur listened, though he had been listening as hard as his ears would let him the whole time, but now he expected to hear something. He waited. A full minute passed, maybe more, he couldn’t tell, and then he decided with one swift and bitter assertion that she was not there. Stupid, foolish Henry LaFleur – he cursed himself, and suddenly he felt ridiculous, sweating alone inside a greenhouse, chasing a dream of a woman who hardly knew he existed; who he barely could convince himself was actually real. Maybe she was a hallucination elicited by nearly two decades of crippling repetition and boredom, caused by an extreme, slowly accumulated deficit of actual feeling. A towering despair engulfed Henry LaFleur. He hunched his shoulders up and, like a turtle suddenly remembering that he is a turtle, crunched his head down into the suddenly scant and immodest folds of his clothing and jammed his hands up past the thin wrists into the stretched fabric of his pants pockets and strode quickly down the rows of plants and pushed his way out the door, which cooed softly at him as it closed, letting out a silent waft of steam. Shut up, Henry LaFleur said aloud to the door. He looked at his watch, and for some reason the numbers on its fogged face seemed jumbled, did not make sense. It was surprisingly cold. The cold sucked the breath of the greenhouse straight out of Henry LaFleur’s rapidly dessicating clothes, and by the time he had clopped back to his car and sat once again behind the wheel, his teeth chattered and his thin body spasmed from the sudden cold. Henry LaFleur drove home, feeling very much like an ass, and, on three evenly interspersed occasions, he chuckled bitterly to himself and shook his graying head. Back home he stole secretly into his quiet house, said goodnight again to Henry LaFleur, who was a terrible watchdog, and undressed quickly. Then: getting into bed and drawing each successive layer up to his chin and folding each over delicately, smoothing himself in, then drawing his arms carefully underneath the sheets so as not to disturb them. Henry LaFleur lay on his back, and there, in the darkness, he remembered secretly to himself, and then he realized he had forgotten the moon, which wasn’t where he had left it, but wasn’t yet outside the square of his bedroom window. Half of it still peeked in the right side of the frame, and as long as its brilliant icy light (like light sparkling through the crystalline depths of an iceberg) shone into the bedchamber, Henry LaFleur stayed awake. It wouldn’t let him sleep. Slowly, it crept away, and Henry LaFleur watched it grow smaller with tired, aching eyes, and when it seemed about to slip from view entirely, the last sliver lingered, lingered and shimmered against the window frame like the glowing dregs of a glimmering tropical sunset, only sideways, and then it lingered some more and then was gone and Henry LaFleur dropped straight to sleep. He dreamt that night, could not keep the dreams from coming, but in the morning could only recall that they were the kind of dreams whose content fully escapes but took with them a piece of you when they departed, leaving Henry LaFleur feeling cheated when he woke, like having missed a brilliant shooting star because one ties their shoe or looks at their watch, even though one only suspects there might have been such a star.

Henry LaFleur, covered in sunlight, and back in drab daytime technicolor, lay in bed on his back, the wrappings of covers intact around his thin straight body. He stayed there, not moving, and stared past the lumps of his knob knees and his feet under the blankets, foot hills, he thought, past them to the window, which opened onto a scene which the sun had robbed of all its’ subtlety and covert majesty of the night before. The grass was already dry, and the sun had bleached the pavement, trees and sky into more or less the same hue. Henry LaFleur lay there until he was nearly about to be late for work and then he abruptly threw back the covers and emerged from his cocoon, slithering his pyjama-ed legs off the bed ‘til his feet met the floor. He undressed, then dressed quickly and mechanically, yet, this time, sumptuously, forcing himself to take modest, controlled pleasure in doning the same hastily discarded clothes he had worn the night before. Henry pulled on his jacket and felt a bulge in his left breast pocket. He inserted one finger, fumbling, and felt a stab of pain, pain like a bolt of bright color through his brain. His finger welled one dark red pearl of blood. He staunched it quickly with a tissue, and using the same tissue brought the offending object out, holding it inside the tissue, like a piece of evidence, by its short, thorned stem – one slender, slightly parted blood red rose. Henry LaFleur’s heart beat faster as he stared at it, bringing it closer to his shocked faces, smelling it slightly through flared, trembling nostrils. He thought he had felt it. Felt something. Last night. Her. He had felt it. He slowly touched his pocket.

She had put it there.

It was on that fall day in September that Henry LaFleur was filled with such a redemptive effervescence as to make him almost want to cry, and to feel as if he were seeing and doing all for the very first time. He felt awe and wonder for the tender weight of each simple thing. The feeling of the morning newspaper in his hands. The surprised musical clatter of a big shiny spoon half deep in sweet milk garbling inside a pure white bowl. The first newspaper of the day! He unfurled it for the very first time. Indeed, it was the very first time he had or would ever open that particular paper on that particular day, which also made it the very last time he would do so. And the same with the cereal bowl, his quiet farewell to his dog, Henry LaFleur, who watched him walk out the front door with such a profoundly forlorn countenance that Henry laughed out loud. The first and last time (that time) to ever putter down the quiet street in the beginning of that brisk fall morning, the flurry of white exhaust disappearing as soon as it was created. Following the previous night, when hope had deserted Henry LaFleur, he felt filled to bursting with these things, though with a certain indefineable sadness that wasn’t quite sadness at all, but was closer to the gladness of having once loved. Henry greeted each new happening with breathless, silent salutation, and with clear robins’-egg blue eyes, watched them pass. It was nearly unbearable for Henry to say hello and goodbye to each small wonder and moment in the exact same instant, which made him feel that he had always lived every moment countless times before, and also that he never would see one quite like the present one ever again. But Henry knew only that he could barely stand it, and the only way he could continue without succumbing to the physical sensation of imminent and glorious rupture was to allow himself to be filled with it and allow it to flow through him like cold water and be gone again.  She was real.  He drove his car towards his work with a fiery tingling in each one of his limbs, the clean black tires of his car crunching against the blacktop the battered husks of fallen leaves that, distracted by gentle morning air, couldn’t get out of the way in time.

On that singular, particular, most mysterious morning, Henry drove his sputtering car through the swishing autumn air and was slowly overtaken by a creeping panic that started at his toes and crept up his legs, his body, slipped outward along his arms and encroached upon his rapidly pulsing neck, up onto his face. Thirty five miles an hour seemed far too fast, the rush of air and the road outside deafening. The brand new world was too much with him, and almost without realizing it, he pulled his car over to the side of the road, got out and walked straight across a small park with half-dead grass that whispered underneath his brown leather shoes, straight to a rickety steel swingset on the far side of a lonely playground. Henry LaFleur sat in the still swing. He was hatching too quickly. He grasped the thin, rusty chains in his sweating hands and pulled back, pulled again and pulled until the world moved up and down around him and the sick feeling slowly subsided to the lyric creaking of metal joints. Henry swung higher, and felt the heady weightlessness waiting at the top of each back-and-forth, felt his blood and cheeks sink earthward at the bottom near the ground, his legs jammed straight out in front, swooping towards the sky, and he felt better. Henry LaFleur stopped pulling and swung for a long time, slower and slower until he didn’t move at all and the playground was once again silent and still. Henry moved slowly across to a set of old wooden bleachers still sodden with nighttime dew, and sat some more, and watched the empty playground, holding onto his breath and not moving, keeping one moment as still as he could. He felt he hadn’t ever noticed how time actually elapses, and couldn’t imagine how many moments had slipped by him undetected. Millions, he thought. How long was a minute, anyway? Long, or not long at all? Henry LaFleur, usually quite distracted and vacant, thought for a long time about time, something that – he couldn’t decide which – took forever, or no time at all. The entire time, though, he remained perfectly still, and the dew climbed slowly into the fabric of his trousers, and the sun climbed slowly into the blue sky, and then, satisfied that, for the first time in his adult life, he had witnessed at least one moment from start to finish without looking elsewhere, he descended the bleachers with big steps, crossed the dying grass, and drove to work, two and a half hours late.

Henry walked into his building and sat at his desk – one desk in a sprawling field of desks, and listened to the sounds of the workers in their cubicles – something like mice whispering to themselves and preening in a dry field, he decided. His supervisor interrupted him as he sat staring at his screen. He was tall and broad, but gaunt, with a pale mustache perched on his flat upper lip like a lost caterpillar.

“Henry,” he said, “you’re fired.”

Henry smiled at him, said nothing, and turned on his computer. His supervisor stalked off, and Henry began and finished a report due at noon in nearly no time – the phrasing perfect, the font elegant and simple, and each indent and bullet point deftly and artfully arranged, the characters each in their own place as if pebbles in a Zen garden. Henry hit ‘print’ and watched the seven pages slip slowly out of the humming printer, each nestling against the other’s warm surface. He stapled them together with one sharp staple (perfectly horizontal), making a crisp crunching noise like teeth sinking into raw sweet corn, and he dropped the stack on his supervisor’s desk.

Suddenly, Henry LaFleur thought of long ago. This remembrance: an afternoon in May biking through the plush south of France towards gay paree after graduating high school. He remembered his breath, the wind scrubbing off the persistent itch of the ceremony, the coarse black polyester mucked with sour sweat, a stifled waiting moan, the hot sun, the waiting. In his automobile he could just press his foot down on the accelerator and just fly away up over the smooth black ribbon road past rushing sideburns of winnowing thick babygreen spring grass, while instead on this grudging garage sale bought machine he had to put his foot down, and up and down, and up and down and up and down and up and down again and up and down again and again and again and up over the hot black shimmer of endless rising asphalt soft and whirring, purring under the snick of the clean smooth worn threadbare tires and the tick and click clacks of the gritoiled moving metal pieces, soft grinding clank over soft grinding clank as he suffered each glorious moment closer towards the shining distant city, fragrant winds wafting across the swollen bellies of smooth rivers running silver and deep carrying grass and cut hay and honeysuckle and the damp loamy spiced earth smell that he took for the crackling blaze of green and sky that spread out in mounts of heatsteaming earth rolling slowly by, a sting, a crackling scent of nettle maybe and then the name is gone and then it’s only the smell and again, the smell, drunk on it, gorged with heaven scent and burning with road and wind every solitary up and down of each foot pedaling through the stark cold majesty of the craggy sparkling Pyrenees or the Alps he couldn’t remember and the slow lazing crawl across the vast brilliant gentle flat of shimmering farmland draped across old, low hills, all the way, all the way there to the Eiffel tower at its center. He thought about how he had stopped once, leaving the trussed and shitburdened slim bike in a loose dark thicket and crossed a short hedgerow, through a cornfield with overhead high chirping thick rows of big-stalked buttersweet ripe corn and how he jumped up and grabbed the ear at the top of one plant and brought it down with a juicy snap and twist, and then the short walk to the river through a fine migrating dust silky and murmuring underneath his feet, and then the creek, fresh and smooth and icy cold still, and how he wrapped the ear entire in smooth wide maple leaves, green and supplicant, and stuck the bundle into the glinting underwater sand and sat and rested for a while, and then, when it was about time, how he rose and drew out the dripping mass and then, peeling off the slough of spongy wet and stripping the thing clean of its husk with a rubbery squeak a pale perfect-tiled obelisk of dewed shining plump riversweet fresh dripping corn, and oh god, then the crunch.

“Dammit LaFleur, what are you doing?”

Henry LaFleur rose from his memory and blinked, realizing he had no idea how long he had stood there.

“Oh,” he said, “I was just remembering the sound that an ear of corn I ate once sounded when I bit into it. Stapling those pages made me think of it. How good it felt. I was thinking of that.”

Henry LaFleur floated through the rest of his day with the events of the past night always hovering in the back of his mind, his strangely suspended state of epiphany following him like a nimble spotlight.

He soared home through the glinting city like a lone seabird returning across a shimmering ocean, humming to himself.  LaFleur, not the seabird.  Henry walked in the door to his house, and his dog, Henry LaFleur, did not bark, but rose to greet him sleepily, which was unusual, and he drooled slightly more enthusiastically, the more ebullient than normal dog-chop froth smearing onto Henry’s pants, leaving a dark, obvious stain, but Henry LaFleur didn’t care, because they were just pants.

He decided to take the dog out for a walk – in part to discover if he could hake it walk, as he hadn’t taken more than seven consecutive steps (required to reach the dog bowl, only four to hop down the front steps to the lawn to pee) in a very long time.  He located the old leather leash, glazed with cobwebs, and as he turned away from the kitchen counter he caught in the corner of his eye a pair of red garden shears sitting on the otherwise vacant white tile.  That’s strange, Henry thought; very strange.  He didn’t recall putting them there.  But just at that moment Henry LaFleur (the canine version) smeared another smear of slobber onto the marred trousers, panting sheepishly, as if slightly embarrassed with his newly discovered zeal for movement.  They pattered down the sidewalk, rising and descending each abrupt and angular cement hillock, small and stately peaks upthrown by frost heaves, each wondering if the other was enjoying the sun – the way it was shining both on and from everything as if each ray unlocked each objects’ own inner luminescence – quite as much as the other.  They went for several full turns of several full squares of blocks, and, flushed and breathless, turned back into the driveway.  Henry paused to relieve himself (not the human), and simultaneously sniffed the neat rows of roses on the edge of his neighbor’s yard.  Henry adjusted the leash to his other hand, and regarded the blooms for a moment.  Dread grew within him, though at first he didn’t know why.  He stood, and the dog finished and stood there, tail wagging, looking expectantly up at his human to determine the next move, but Henry had forgotten about his dog and stared with a burning pair of desperately blue eyes at the brown, thorned stem of one would-be rosebud, recently and neatly clipped, conspicuous among a row of red blooms.

Henry ran.  He darted into his house, the garden clippers on the counter flashed in his vision again as he ran to the bedroom, where he found the flower lying wilted on the bedside table. He snatched it up and ran outside to the rosebush where his very confused dog still stood.  With trembling fingers he took the rose by its barbed stem and placed it on top of the empty stalk.  It fit.  The seam was exact, the angles precisely complementary, the smooth, muscular stem barely interrupted by the thin line where the shears had bitten through.  A terrible weight gripped Henry LaFleur – he did not know what was real.  Had he dreamt it all?  Was she a real person?  His brain churned, sweat sprang from his temples and scalp, and the day’s light slowly drifting towards cooled azure seemed suddenly stormy and violent to Henry LaFleur.  Pitched into a fugue of self-doubt and perilous despair, he grabbed his dog and gunned his startled automobile across town with only one thought spinning in his head: to get to her shop.  If she was there, and she was real, there was still hope for him.  If not – if it all really was a dream – then he was lost.

Henry raced the dying sun down the final stretch of street.  He neared the greenhouse and lept from the car, leaving the door open, and he threw his hands to his head and nearly began to sob, because there was no greenhouse.  There had never been a greenhouse.  There, in its’ place (or rather, in its’ own place), was a bicycle repair shop.  A carpet of thick, swirling clouds, charged with different swaths of light and dark, was flowinig slowly from the west, filtering the last rays of the vermillion sun sinking beneath the earth in the distance, just visible in the column of sky visible between the bicycle shop and the shoe store.  Henry LaFleur’s breathing slowed, and as his sweat cooled and began to dry on his flushed skin, he began to laugh.  Not a bitter remission, but a helpless release that began as a chuckle and slowly, haltingly grew into a torrent.  Henry LaFleur laughed as hard as he had ever laughed.  His dog began to bark in the passenger seat, the wet nose smearing the window.  Henry looked at the bicycle shop through tear-flooded blue eyes.  The clerk inside the window was staring back at him – slightly terrified, yet curious.

Henry was still there.  The world’s colors were still bright and luminous.  He had invented her, after all.  And if he had invented her, and she had re-invented him…it was too much for Henry to think about.  He was shaking.  He felt happy.

The clerk warily opened the front door.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, leaning his head out from behind the glass, “is everything alright?”

Henry almost started cackling again, but caught himself, and in a voice thick with barely restrained laughter, replied.

“Yes.  Everything is wonderful.”  He briefly considered trying to explain, and he began a meaningful gesture towards the store’s facade, but he scratched his nose instead.  The clerk continued to stare.

“It’s just that, ah…” he paused and rummaged for an explanation.  “Ah.  Ah, it’s just that I drove out here, all the way out here, and I, ah, I forgot to bring my bicycle.”

The clerk seemed partially appeased.

“O.K.”

“I used to ride a lot, many years ago, and, ah, I guess it’s about time to get back on it again.”

The clerk, still a sharp diagonal suspended across the threshhold of the store, nodded, and said,

“You know, if you really want to get back into cycling, you might want to consider just buying a newer bike.  We have some here you might want to take a look at.”

Henry looked at the multicolored kaleidescope of gleaming spokes and metal frames inside the shop window.

“Well, I think I’ll actually just stick with the one I’ve got.  I’m kindof fond of it.”

The clerk shrugged.  “Suit yourself,” he said.

Henry nodded. ”I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said.  And he really meant it.

Henry climbed back in his car, turned for home, and then turned again, going for a nighttime drive through the dark velvet wind with his dog, who drooled all over the side of the car ang got some much-needed wind in his ears for the first time in a very, very long time.

On the map, Panama is an unimposing sliver of land, a mere comma connecting North and South.  At just under 30,000 square miles, it’s still smaller than South Carolina.  Zoom in, and you’ll find that, mile for mile, Panama makes better use of its precious landscape than perhaps any other country in the Americas.

Surprisingly, this land bridge boasts one of the largest contiguous rainforests in the Western hemisphere, second only to the Amazon.  A bi-national reserve spanning the southern mountains of Costa Rica into the Panamanian central range hosts the most abundant array of endemic species of flora and fauna in Central America.  The reserve contains many of the 1,000 species of birds, 220 species of mammals, and 354 species of reptiles and amphibians found within Panama.  A visitor can expect full immersion into this dazzling array, but should respect some species with a bit of distance (Amerindians used the poison dart frog’s toxic secretions to poison the tips of their blowdarts).  The reserve’s altitudinal variance – from tropical jungle to high alpine grassland – provides unique habitats for the area’s diverse wildlife.  Sunrise in Panama alights on pristine white sand beaches on the picturesque Bocas del Toro islands, penetrates the dense coastal mangrove swamps, raises mist from the multi-canopied tropical inland forests, and melts frost from the high peaks and plateaus of the central mountain range, the Cordillera Central.

Panama’s reputation is shaped by its location.  Just as its function as a land bridge gives it an elegant biological articulation of both North and South American climes, Panama was home to hundreds of endemic tribes that, while they were permanent neighbors, maintained distinct languages and traditions.  When Columbus first investigated the isthmus’ interior, he wrote that ‘every (village) has a different language and they don’t understand one another’.  Our knowledge of the Cuevas, Coclé and other tribes of the region is limited, as the area’s indigenous peoples were largely wiped out during the 16^th century Spanish colonization.

Both geographically and ethnographically, Panama is a zone of transition.  It is the land link between North and South, and hosts the only East-West water passage between the icy Northwest Passage and the storm-tossed Drake Passage at South America’s most austral clime, Tierra del Fuego.  From west to east, you’ll travel through largely mestizo villages, only to encounter a distinctly Afro-Caribbean vibe once reaching the Carribean Sea.  Today’s ecological marvels of Panama’s nearly impenetrable interior and highlands provided refuge, and a new home, to cimarrons – self-liberated African slaves who escaped and settled along Panama’s Camino Real.  Try to descend into the Southern continent through Columbia, though, and you’ll find yourself discouraged by the only missing link in the Pan-American Highway.  The Darien Gap, an impregnable zone of swampland, tropical forest, and Northern Andean highlands, has no official road.  Any attempt to traverse the wilderness would be ill-advised, though, as the majority of the human inhabitants likely belong to one of Columbia’s leftist paramilitary groups such as FARC (the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia).

Better stick to the rest of what Panama has to offer.  Whether it’s carving world-class waves in the idyllic Bocas del Toro, exploring Panama City’s historic Panamá Viejo (the Spanish staging point of Inca conquest South America), or wandering some lost footpath in one of the country’s thirty National Parks, Forests, or Preserves, Panama offers a confluence of history, ethnography, and wildlife that makes it a land unto itself.

To travel to the Yucatan is to transport oneself to the early ages of the world. On the peninsula’s northern edge, a depression 110 miles across – Chicxulub Crater – is our 65 million-year-old epitaph telling of the dinosaur’s extinction. This massive meteor strike triggered megatsunamis reaching thousands of feet into the air, some of the largest in Earth’s history. A more lasting effect of the impact, though, are countless cenotes – watery openings into a vast subterranean network of rivers, caves and sinkholes extending across the entire peninsula.

The cenotes are an apt metaphor for the Yucatan’s fusion of natural and cultural elements. As the only source of fresh water, they enabled the consolidation of the region’s separate indigenous peoples into a vast, flowering civilization: the Maya. The formation of Mayan city-states commenced in 2000 BC and peaked between 250 and 900 AD. Urban centers such as Tikal and Palenque were focal points for the Classical Mayan cultural, religious, and intellectual explosion that, at its’ zenith, boasted a complete writing system, advanced agricultural techniques, accurate calendar systems, prescient mathematical and astronomical proficiency, and a sophisticated aesthetic and architectural tradition still that continues today.

The cenotes weren’t just the water source for Mayan cities; they serve as a physical embodiment of Mayan religion and cosmology. A modern witness on the edge of these calm pools senses the same watery underworld as the Maya did. At night, we see the same sky reflected in the still water. The cenotes are the openings to an underwater maze that cavers have only begun to map – a labyrinth that, according to the Maya, is the physical embodiment of the Underworld, the afterlife. Entering the depths of a cenote carries the awareness of entering another world; consequently, the Maya agree. In Mayan cosmology, the Milky Way – or, Xibalbá be´, is known as the “road to the Underworld.” We see this myth depicted in carved bone from the temple at Tikal, as the Maize God descends into the Underworld in his ‘cosmic canoe’ along the Milky Way – or, along the reflection of the starry Xibalbá be´, into the mythic depth of the cenote.

Just as the Maya believe in the duality that terrestrial life and heavenly eternity reflect one another, ancient Mayan culture persists intact in the contemporary Yucatan. Despite centuries of warfare, colonization and repression, the people, language and culture live on. Mayan strongholds resisted Spanish rule as late as 1697, but even complete military domination could not dissolute a culture with no clear political center. In the mid-19th century, Mayan forces rose up to push their colonizers out of the peninsula for fifty years. Though the result of Spanish occupation is an eclectic fusion of cultural elements, the Maya persist as the true soul of the Yucatan.

The Yucatan’s culture, history, and natural splendor are too much to take in all at once. At the brink of a cenote, one can only imagine what lies beneath. Atop the massive stepped pyramids at Tikal and Teotihuacan, one can begin to peer into the past. But it’s the Yucatan’s mystery that is its’ most powerful draw. While the Maya themselves span four thousand years of history, they are descendents of inhabitants who arrived on the peninsula at least ten thousand years before the birth of Christ. In our present-day Yucatan, we walk through an ancient energy that makes us breathlessly aware of the persistence of a fantastic, living past.

Two friends and I decided to spend a few months in rural Sierra Leone working on a fledgling aid program. I worked most closely with the schools, and helped my buddies with a micro loans program that hadn’t become self-aware, and a crop collective that, in time, we hoped would become a source of public works funding for the villages. Our first challenge, and our steepest trajectory, was learning how to eat.

“Do not eat the palm oil,” Munir had told us. “It is very heavy.” The first night, we listened to him. We made our dinner over an open fire (built by our future loyal audience) in a borrowed pot. Spaghetti. We stirred it and fanned the flames until we were just past al dente and then I spilled nearly half of it in the dirt trying to drain it. The villagers watching us moved in and proceeded to eat it off the ground with their hands. We poured a can of ‘Laser’ brand baked beans over the starchy noodles and ate the slippery pasta with spoons. Laser beans + spaghetti + spoons= a diet. Many a wounded noodle fell to the earth to be picked up by an African.

As the jungle started to fade from green to black, we realized that it was Thanksgiving.

“For a man to cook is a sign of scrotum,” Bockarie informed us. Thus, we worked to muster our culinary independence early on. Not only was it uncomfortable for us to be waited on and cooked for, but we wanted to show them that we, too, possessed scrotum. Bockarie had, inexplicably, several different facts and observations regarding scrotum that we grew used to hearing, but we felt that this one regarding cooking was the most accurate.

We had arrived in the village with an unreasonable 50 kilos of white rice – we were told not to eat the Mende rice, the brown rice they grew in the village – because it had rocks in it. Our first dinners were dismal. Bland white rice, boiled into a slimy gel, served with “Laser”-brand beans and tuna fish. Spaghetti smothered with beans. Tuna fish on Butter Bix, the Liger of the wafer-shaped carb world; sweet like a cookie and serious like a cracker. Basically, any possible combination of foods that were never destined to coexist. Our canned goods were all carted in from Kenema, the regional capital and third largest city in Sierra Leone. The tallest building in Kenema was the mosque tower from which prayers blared several times a day, but our personal Mecca was a dusty, cluttered supermarket called Choithram’s that served us well in the beginning. We relied heavily on the canned goods, but realized our mistake when we made our first African rice dish.

“There are two kinds of dinners in Sierra Leone,” remarked Bockarie. “We have One Pot – this is when you use only one pot to cook – and we have Two Pot. This is when you have two pots.” Bockarie counted out the pots on his fingers as he spoke. “The difference, you see, is the number of pots.” He couldn’t have been more correct. We ignored the cryptic warnings against Mende cuisine and began to experiment.

The Essentials:

1 bottle of palm oil – this blood-vermillion oil, culled from the palm fruit, has the base for any sauce. We have a healthy glug of palm oil each night to thank for not wasting away in the bush. It cost us around 1,000 leones per bottle – about 30 cents.

Patete leaf – this slightly bitter green went for about 400 leones – 12 cents – a bunch.

Pepper – 100 leones for a good handful of these semi-dessicated flavor-and-heat intensive little guys. Don’t rub your eyes. 3 cents.

Groundnut – ground peanut, usually about 500 leones (15 cents) worth, sold in small plastic boluses, oil-slicked and fragrant. The pleasantly sweet paste was an awesome base for an oil and pepper sauce.

Onion – tiny sweet onions, grown in small jungle garden patches, went into the pepper, patete and groundnut sauce. Can we stop mentioning the prices? I think you get the point by now.

The only extras not grown in the village were salt – sold in small plastic bags from a store in the center of town, Maggi – a seafood flavored taste explosion that looked like a sunbrowned piece of Bazooka Joe, and pure crystalline MSG, which is, unfortunately, delicious. These all combined ran us around 300 leones – 9 cents – a night.

The staple of our meal: Mende rice, a rich, almost nutty flavored jungle grain that oozed health, but also might break your teeth. We would cook three dry cups a night, paying 400-450 leones a cup. The total price for a luxuriant, scrotum-tingling two-pot meal: $1.50, if we were feeling crazy. Enough food to stuff three gluttonous Pumoi (white guys), ample leftovers to keep in my clamp-shut pot for the next day, and extra goodness to feed a couple adult friends and give a solid after-dinner snack to a group of younguns.

The first step towards making a dinner was to procure the materials. “Shopping” meant walking through the village at dusk from cookfire to cookfire and inquiring as to what was available. Gomusu, our two-huts-over neighbor, lent us a half gourd that became our shopping basket. While one shopped, the others would wash up and get a fire going – we had a flattened can onto which we would balance a couple borrowed coals from our neighbor’s cookfire. Our neighbor had some tri-syllabic name that reminded me of the curves of a musical instrument, but to us she was simply MegaBabe, the incarnation of all things Womanly and Carnal. Until we saw the effect that gravity had had on her enourmous breasts. For me, this only made the attraction more complex, and not any weaker. Sometimes Foday – a three year old with a gigantic head – would steal our can and run away, only to return bearing colas and a huge, shy grin. We would thank him and then he’d put his arms over his face and stand there in our yard. The ostrich approach to cross-cultural interactions.

Before we could cook the rice, it had to be cleaned. When the Mende harvest their rice, they would lay it out on tarpaulins or sheets and then would beat the grain from the stem. Mixed in was the earth from which it came. It paid to eat the rice slowly, without hard chomping, lest you split a molar on some hidden pebble. Or a diamond. This was the one part of the process that we couldn’t do ourselves. No men seemed to know how to do it – the washing of the rice required a mysterious dexterity and confidence that none but the women had been chosen to inherit. Plus, I was still skittish about food handling after the spaghetti incident, and wasn’t about to push my luck. The rice, mixed with water, would be poured from receptacle to receptacle, and the stones, with an occult motion of the hand through the water, would be winnowed to the bottom and removed with a sweep of the palm.

Our Frisbee was our cutting board. “This knife,” said Bockarie Sheku, testing my Leatherman’s pliers, “is very fine for catching scrotum.” We couldn’t disagree. Bockarie would come and sit with us with a hand-fixed radio and listen to some distant station – an African news broadcast or music from Kenema – Bob Marley or some other reggae soaring in through the waves of static, the acrid smoke from the fire billowing around our simmering pots.

The cooking involved the following: boil the water to sterilize, add the rice, add water as the large drains drink it in, simmer the delectable glorpy sauce of groundnut, palm oil, onion, pepper and greens, add our various crystalline and chemical flavorings, and wait. We estimated that about 70 or our calories came from dinner. A mound of rich, steaming African rice, a thick peanut and pepper vegetable sauce, salt. Our scrotometer soared nightly at around 7:30.

After we had eaten ourselves into a sweaty, engorged and almost carnally pacified state, we would save a few scoops for lunch and give the nod. We would offer our prodigious leftovers first to the adults, and then to the kids. It was a well defined pecking order: older to younger, but everyone got a meal. If you’re wondering if this felt a tad strange, the answer is absolutely a yes. Having five-to-ten Sierra Leoneans watching you wolf food down is a funny thing. It took some getting used to, just like everything else. Events in our day, new information, customs: these became dots when they happened, and they would become connected slowly. Or never.

An example: our friends, our acquaintances, and people we had never met and didn’t know at all would come to our hut during the day or at night to “spend time” – which, when you don’t speak the same language, means sitting. I was sitting on a bench during our first week, feeling stifled and claustrophobic, and was enjoying my first moment alone in several days. A new friend walked up the path and said hello, and sat down on the bench next to me, his thigh touching mine. He didn’t say anything for a full ten minutes, and it was torturous. Then he said goodbye, and got up and left. As he left, I noticed that his lavender colored shirt was a woman’s shirt, and was embroidered with lace around the collar. It was lycra, and nice and snug, and displayed his nipples quite well. Judging by the importance of masculinity in this culture, I figured he didn’t know. That evened the score. I didn’t know about the silent sitting, he didn’t know he was cross-dressing. It’s necessary to realize that not understanding is OK. At least, that’s what I clung to.

I love telling the “This one time, in Sierra Leone” story about our breakfast being interrupted by the hellraising screams of little boys as they were being circumcised behind our goat shed. Normal is different wherever you go. We learned not to sweat the stigmas and just make extra rice, because it’s a gesture we could all get behind. I can’t emphasize the value of the “go with it” mentality enough.

Anyway, the kids would scrape the pot clean and help us wash them, and then we’d hang out around the fire and try to talk. We learned very few words, but we learned them many times. “In Mende,” Sheku said for the tenth time, “we call the fireflies ‘Tubeekee’, but we call the stars ‘Tubeke’.” This lay the perfect segue into “We call the moon ‘Gawee’, but the ground squash is also called ‘Gawee’. The hen’s egg, this is also called ‘Gawee’.” No dinner was truly complete without a vocabulary lesson, and no vocabulary lesson was productive unless it was of a repeat word, because Mende was so damn hard to memorize.

“In the olden days,” Sheku said quietly one night as we warmed ourselves around the fire, “people used to warm themselves around fire.” He said no more. Sometimes it was better to accept his smooth, incomprehensible grace than to dig for meaning.

After dinner we would go two huts down the hill to Gomusu’s house for our most exciting purchase of the night: Breadie-de. Bread. Squat, spiraled pats of sweet cloudsoft bread – we would take ten and give the required 60 cents in return. She would give us one or two extra as gracious thanks for our patronage – because originally, we had bought our oven-crafted starches from Breadmaker, an old, almost impossibly spindly man who lived across the village and about whom we had genuine concern for his chances of surviving until the next breadmaking business day. Sadly, Breadmaker’s flour supply was inconsistent, and his husklike truncheons of hard bread soon fell to the Invisible Hand of Gomusu’s soft, sigh-inducing rolls.

We made a delicious caramelized dessert by frying boiled palm fruit in palm oil and sugar – a concoction that dentists across West Africa definitely wish was a traditional staple dessert. Nope. Just Americans in the bush trying to figure out endemic ways to fry things.

Frying, not surprisingly, turned out to be the Missing Link in our creation of Pumoi –Mende fusion cuisine. A simple pot, when filled with strips of yam and palm oil, becomes a Fryolater! The sticky, chalk-white yam, with a texture not unlike slimy jicama, was a riproaring success when fried until crispy in palm oil and dunked in a spicy peanut, pepper, palm oil and bean sauce. A success that will send your riproaring to the latrine five minutes after you finish eating, for another riproaring experience that smells disturbingly similar to the first one. On my first encounter with The Fries, I ate myself into such a gastronomical tizzy that, in my haste, I missed the hole of the latrine and discovered a new, more vivid sound than I had ever heard in a bathroom.

Yam fries, in moderation, were an unexpected delight. It was also a great way to get rid of yams in a more pleasant way than boiling them for breakfast. A common morning meal was boiled green plantains and yams – but we always ended up with yam slurry with plantain chunks. Vegetable Mucus with Plantains. And we were too hungry not to eat it. We would often, at the end of some meeting at a school or farm in a village five or so miles away, be presented with a magnificent yam. Accepting the graciously offered gift with a smile, we would think about the pile of yam gifts rotting in our hut, think of the five-plus miles to walk home, now with a large yam, and try not to selfishly think about how we wished the yam was a pineapple. Yams are a staple food, and as anyone who’s read Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” knows, West Africans are serious about their yams. Yam fries were a savior because they changed our reaction to the gift of a magnificent, plump yam (“Oh. How kind. A yam.”) to a sincere upwelling of gratitude and a Pavlovian response to the mouth-watering fried goods to be made in the near future with our gift, this most dirt-encrusted and venerable of all root vegetables.

Consumption is a mainstay of humanity no matter where you go – take that however you will. Idiotic statement of the obvious, economically and cynically tinged tru-ism, or kitschy common-thread blabber, I don’t really care. It’s how it is. Once one learns how to do that in an original way, it becomes a beautiful thing, and I have so much respect for food as a life-affirming force, for the meal as a central congealer of community.

Gomusu would make coffee in the mornings in the center of town – the sun would be slumbering behind the jungle hill, Joki, to the east, the town would be slowly waking, the cooking fires sputtering smoke out into the surprisingly cold dawn. Last night’s bread and a cup of coffee – people would commune and talk, and I’d mostly sit, and drink an unreasonable large quantity of watery, heavily sugared coffee out of my Nalgene, and eat a roll or two. The coffee was terrible, and carried with it the risk of intestinal worms (depending on how long Gomusu boiled the water…I never knew. So I might have worms.) but the ritual was essential. I have one snapshot of a morning in Jokibu near the end of our three months there, in early February: the cold of Hamatan keeping everyone swaddled in colorful clothes (including ridiculous foreign aid clothing: either 50 Cent really is that big, or people only enjoy his t-shirts for a week or so and then immediately buy more after donating the old ones), the coffee fire burning, men and women greeting one another, farmers heading to their rice paddies and farms, children in green uniforms heading down the path towards school. I could sit there and feel as if I were a part of it – that in some strange and inexplicable way, this reality had a place for me.

I sat on a log with Section Chief Koroma and his two-year-old granddaughter and commented on how lovely the morning was, which it was. Then, chief Koroma offered me his granddaughter’s hand in marriage, and after she refused to consider me, I walked back home for a Yam Slurry breakfast.

John Babbott worked as a volunteer in Kailahun District, Sierra Leone. Get informed on development efforts in the region at http://www.onevillagepartners.org/.

Wolverine visits Sierra Leone

Thoughts cannot be pushed, they must be allowed to flow. A life change cannot be made, it must be cultivated. In the same way, finding balance in your life, no matter how committed you are to creating it, can be like grabbing the soap in the bathtub – the harder you try to grasp it, the quicker it flies into the murk.

With yoga, you cultivate your balance softly, quietly, with serenity and persistence. You trust that it will grow. In the practice of yoga, there is a kind of faith. You balance your body and trust that your mind will follow. You quiet your mind and your body settles into equilibrium. Putting faith in this process allows you to step forward more completely into yourself.

An observer only has to watch me wobbling precariously on one leg during Tree Pose to see that in order to cultivate balance, I must embrace situations that challenge my balance. Inside that challenge, a transformation occurs, and through the physical action of Vrksasana (tree pose) I discovered that the balance I sought already existed within me.

Before I turned fifteen, my family had moved no less than nine times. Four of the moves took me to opposite sides of the country. You might think that this turbulence would leave me reeling, but this experience has had the opposite effect. There is a wonder and joy in a constantly changing environment. As with yoga, travel and adventure stretches, expands, and challenges all of us.

Try both at once, and see what happens. Silhouetted against a completely new environment, with all the baggage of home stripped away, a traveler is most singularly themselves. Surrounded by total originality, you can feel more connected with your universe than you can in the safety of your familiar life. Travelers and yogis are discovering what transformations await at the crossroads of yoga and travel. The joy of exploration flows from a deepened practice in a breathtaking environment – steaming Icelandic hot springs, mythic depths of underwater caves in the Yucatan, secluded coves alongside Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. Put yourself out there, and see a little more clearly, love more fiercely. Remember that the balance you are seeking is ecstatically dynamic and alive – just like yourself.

John Babbott
Freelance writer and traveler
Solyoga Trips
Recommended Read: Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of The World by Pico Iyer

Imagine a young earth.  Travel to Þingvellir and stroll through the spreading gap between tectonic plates, and witness the passage of time from a completely different perspective.  Stand inside this rocky seam and feel the earth’s dynamism, its’ relative youth.  As the famous Geysir spouts boiling water skyward, can you imagine more vividly the awesome convection of our entire planet, cycling slowly beneath the crust?  At Blue Lagoon hot springs on Iceland’s southwest coast, feel raw geothermal power simmering beneath these outdoor cauldrons.  This planetary vibrancy, so integral to Iceland’s enchantment, can be your keystone to connectedness, no matter where you choose to travel and practice.

Each day, SolYoga’s Iceland travelers experienced sunlight for nearly 24 full hours.  Such sustained, wakeful alertness re-structured their conceptions of natural human biorhythms.  Iceland reminds us of the intimate relationships our bodies and spirits maintain with our natural environment.

Along this constant pathway of discovery, travelers honed their practice in concordance with the phases of the moon.  Imagine a yogic approach that, wherever you are, embraces a more complete awareness of our own human cycles, the grander rhythms of earth and sky that surround us, and a new discovery of our place within them.

Imagine your dream trip, in your place, where the world is full of magic, and make it so.