Climbing Volcán Barú
By Mathew Hope
Steve has had many dumb ideas, but this one was in a class of its own. We met up with him and Estrella in a charming mountain coffee growing region in the town of Boquete. Steve said it should be on everyone’s bucket list -- the only place on Earth where you can see both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean at the same time – the summit of Volcán Barú. The dumb part was deciding to go at one in the morning and learning that we had to leave in an hour to get to the top to catch the sunrise. But Pablo, the guide that Steve had met over some tequila in a popular bar called Zanzibar, assured us that the trip was amazing. We would jump up and down on the top of the world, where few white men ever tread. When Estrella and María were persuaded to come, I was not allowed to say no.
We decided to catch an hour or so of sleep, and I was happily thinking this was the end to Steve’s stupidity. But Pablo showed up, blaring the horn of El Toro Rojo, a red Ford Bronco from the 70’s. I envied Dr. Mike and Usnavy, snoring away somewhere in a tent on Isla Iguana. It was four hours past our departure time – the one we had to meet to make it to the summit for sunrise.
We started our climb from a ranger station at the base of the volcano, and it immediately became clear that Pablo was no mountain man. He constantly had a cigarette hanging from his mouth, and Steve and I were the only ones who had thought to bring water (which María and Estrella were happy to drink most of). I didn’t have a day pack, only my big backpack which Pablo eventually used to house a bottle of cheap Panamanian rum called Panama Jack (which is actually pretty good). We learned that Pablo had not been to the top since he was a kid, and even then, that was by horse. María and Estrella looked as though they were ready to quit, but I wanted to make them pay… I wanted to reach the top… I wanted to see both oceans and reach a place where few dare to go.
The sun came up and humidity came with it. I regretted my heroism. We were exhausted and unanimously voted to rest. Pablo smoked and Steve cracked the rum and we got dangerously close to the bottom third of my water. The girls were chomping at the bit, eager to prove themselves.
I heard them first and told the others to sit quiet. They were coming up the steep path behind us.
“We are one in the spirit; we are one in the Lord.
We are one in the spirit; we are one in the Lord.
And pray that all unity will one day be restored!”
A group of about 10 people, mostly children, marched right by, smiling and putting us to shame, singing gospel songs as they went. They were followed shortly thereafter by a woman in her fifties on an ATV.
She stopped and glanced quickly at our bottle of booze. “Want me to take your bags to the top?” she said with a thick southern US drawl. As I said no, Steve said yes. I shot him a look, and we agreed in an instant that surrendering our packs to strangers, whether they be religious nuts or thieves, would be a bad idea.
The rest of the hike was even more grueling. The signs taunted us. I thought, ‘4 km to the top…okay, almost there, almost there,’ and when I thought the next steep hill would bring us to our final destination, I would see another sign… 2km… And then the clouds joined in on humiliating us by spitting rain.
We reached the top! Amazing.
We had clear views of the fog in front and behind us. The only bodies of water that were apparent were stinking under my armpits.
But then the fog cleared!
And we could see… buildings. Tiny ugly shacks sprouting radio antennas; gray concrete and graffiti. Where few white men have trodden?
But Pablo seemed triumphant. His spirits suddenly picked up and he headed to one of the concrete slabs and knocked on a door. We were making a house call. This was not an empty untouched oasis… it was a communications outpost! But we were happy to get out of the cold, and Pablo and our host were happy to see each other -- they were brothers actually. When they offered us water and coffee, I understood that this is what Pablo had promised -- not his mountaineer expertise.
We were cramped in a tiny room with bunk beds and rolls of copper wire. We had too many coffees and rums and lost track of time. There was a short break when the TV (with surprisingly bad reception for the amount of antennas here) cut out. In the silence we heard gospel singing. We poked our heads out of the antenna shack and saw the Christians that had passed us on the path. They were far in the distance on the other side of the volcano’s crater. They were holding hands and must have been singing very loudly for us to have heard the music from where we were.
Pablo’s brother pointed at them and muttered something to Pablo. Pablo translated. Those people belong to their own church… the local Panamanians believe they came to escape something in the US … taxes, the law… they believe that the Earth’s days are numbered and that God will return with a great flood on a full moon in 2009. Every full moon they come here, waiting for God to destroy the sinners below. And every full moon, Pablo’s brother says, they return from the volcano disappointed that the earth has not been destroyed.
We retreated to our bunker. Rain started pouring heavily now, eliminating all TV reception, so we played Texas Holdem’ with coffee stir straws and finished off the rest of the rum. I managed to grab a top bunk and I wandered out to take a leak. The rain had stopped and I felt dawn coming. Instead of crawling over the bodies and copper wire in the bunker I stayed outside, shivering. The fog cleared. I have no words to describe what I saw at sunrise.
But after seeing this I believed that Pablo’s brother probably had it wrong. I don’t think they were waiting for the flood -- they came here to be closer to God.
The Power of Your Dreams
By Dr. Mike Anderson
You are thirty something years old. At ten in the evening, for some unexplained reason, your old middle school friend pops into your head. You wonder what they have been up to and you feel the urge to look them up in the phonebook. You find them. You feel kind of reckless… what the hell, you call them. You pick up the phone. There is no dial tone. Hello? Hello… Oh, someone is on the line. You picked up the phone just as someone dialed you. Who is calling? !!! It is your old middle school friend calling you!
If you were to say this is one in million I would agree with you. If you were to say that this is a kind of psychic connection I would also agree with you. But you cannot say this was a supernatural event. It is really quite natural.
Getting struck by lighting is unlikely but natural. Winning the lottery is unlikely but natural. It is human nature to ignore all of the daily uneventful situations. You don’t talk about all the days you walked home and didn’t get struck by lightning. You don’t read so much about all the UFO sightings that are explained. We focus only on what cannot be explained and then fixate on it.
Let me give you more details for the above scenario.
Imagine again that you are that thirty something. The city you are in has a population of about one hundred thousand. Enough, say, for about fifteen radio stations. You are in your thirties, about the time in your life when you reminisce about the eighties and about the time eighties retro radio stations come about. Now that morning you were driving to work, busy concentrating on traffic, when one of yours and your old friend’s favorite song was played. It triggered something in your unconscious, a memory of your friend, but being busy it was filed away in some recess of the brain. Like so many others, you spent your day at work, battled traffic home, had dinner and watched CSI at prime time, and then when you switched off the TV, you had time to let your unconscious drift to your conscious. Without knowing that the song on the eighties station had triggered a memory, you thought it was some supernatural vibration that drew you to call your friend.
Still it is one in a million. But there are millions of people and millions of chances. We forget the explained and focus on what seems unexplainable.
I don’t mean to belittle this experience. Far from that -
- I wish to marvel at the power our unconscious has in our lives. My only point is that to dismiss this only as supernatural is a disservice to yourself and the wonder of your second self. Dive into it! Find out what it is all about. And the gateway to your unconscious is your dreams. Pick up the remote control to your dreams and discover lucid dreaming.
Try This at Home
By Steven Banks
Two nights ago my shrink friend taught me and my friends the art of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is like porn, chocolate ice cream and magic mushrooms rolled into one.
Pick a day when you are not stressed and draw a symbol on your hand, any kind of symbol. Then keep looking at it as you fall asleep. Eventually you will start dreaming, but you’ll still be looking at your hands. You will notice that the symbol has changed. This clues you in that you are dreaming. Dr. Mike says finding your hands in your dream is the key to controlling your dreams. When you control your dreams you remember them better. They are more lucid. And you can have sex with Jessica Alba. (Tell her Mr. Spanky says hi)
My new favorite place is Isla Coiba. It was the destination of my lucid dream. The prison was full with shouting inmates banging machetes on the iron bars. Rasta Man was there wearing his smile.
“I'm the ghost-catcher! Take your chance! Prove yourself! Oh, yeah!” he said. I was in his former cell but there was a metal plaque in front of me. “Push on through,” he said and so I put my hands on the plaque and this seemed to give me control. I pushed and the plaque swung open.
To give you an idea of the power of lucid dreams, get this: When I googled what he said to me, “I am the ghost catcher,” I found out that it is a Marley song. But I had never heard it before. How did I dream it?