To Panama and back

by Henry T. Byford

The hotel had an aged and careworn look and seemed to be more in need of the mild climate and salubrious surroundings than any of the guests who were lounging in its shadows. It was two stories high, and consisted of a long row of rooms, below and above, which extended in single file parallel with the beach and about a hundred feet from it on one side, and along a back street on the other side. Which was the front side, I could not tell. Wide verandas bordered each floor in front and rear, the rear (or front) ones serving as outdoor sitting-rooms and the front (or rear) ones as passageways from the rooms to the stairway outside. Thus each room had a back (or front) door and window facing the sea and a front (or back) door and window facing the town. At the end of the building on the right there was a large bath-house with several cold rain-water shower baths but no tubs. From the bath-house a wing extended toward the sea, forming with the main building an L-shaped structure. In the wing the rooms did not extend through from veranda to veranda and therefore possessed a door and windows on one side only; a poor arrangement for tropical dormitories, in which through and through draughts of air are necessary for health and comfort.

The grounds consisted of a well-kept lawn in the rear (or front) bounded, near the water’s edge, by a shell road and a fine row of lofty cocoa palms, the conventional ornaments of inhabited tropical shores. On the back (or front) verandas one could sit and contemplate the ever youthful charms of nature, enjoying the constant fanning of the cool sea breeze and forgetting the hollow-eyed and unattractive, double faced appearance of the building. The only indoor lounging place was a small combination sitting-room and barroom; but as there ought to be no indoors in the tropics except for protection from night-biting insects and beasts, this defect was apparent only.

I found the manager busy at his desk in a little office about ten feet square, that opened on one side into the hotel barroom and on the other into his grocery and provision store, from which he bought provisions of himself for his hotel. After finishing his business with the clerk, who had the right-of-way, he greeted me passively, and informed me that there was not an empty room in the house, but that by night he might be able to put me in a room with another occupant or two. In the meantime he had my trunk and bag put in a room in the wing of the house. The room contained three single iron beds, two old water-worn wooden washstands, worth $2.00 each, if any one could be found willing to buy them, a center table two by three feet in diameter, worth $1.50, and two chairs worth nothing. It had neither a closet nor a wardrobe, and the two windows and the door were on the same side, and that side was not toward the sea. For three to sleep under mosquito bars in one room without an opportunity for a breeze to blow through it, would have been existing but not living. I did not then know that in the tropics people sleep with doors as well as windows wide open, utterly indifferent to the presence or proximity of others, and that they subordinate all other comforts and callings to that of keeping cool. Seclusion is, according to tropical standards, an over-refinement of our Northern modesty. In the tropics strangers eat, talk and sleep in common and in public in spite of the tedium of small talk all day and the annoyance of snoring and snorting all night; in the North we eat, think, sleep and weep as privately as possible, annoying our friends and relatives only. But I was not born in the tropics nor for the tropics, and longed for the comforts and privacy I had endured on the S. S. Limón. I wished I was on my way back to the States. Freezing and its accessories were not so bad after all and I would in the future cultivate them, and try to see their bright side. I was completely discouraged, and could not reconcile myself to a communistic life of this kind; so I resolved to keep on the move until I found a place where I could live in a civilized manner even if I did not stop moving until I arrived home.

I asked about trains and was told that the morning train had gone and no other would go until afternoon. But I went to the railroad station and learned that a special train would leave in about an hour. It was organized to take the passengers of our Italian boat across the isthmus to catch a Pacific Mail S. S. I therefore returned to the hotel and hired a negro to take my trunk back to the station. This negro produced a tiny dray-cart, drawn by a tiny four-legged skeleton of a tropical horse and offered to haul both myself and my trunk. If an able-bodied man had been harnessed to it, I should have accepted; but I had pity on the skeleton and walked to the station, allowing the trunk to ride. I was soon booked and baggaged for Panama, and was happy again at having escaped the annoyance and discomforts of rooming with strangers in a strange land, and at having the certainty of arriving in three hours at my long journey’s end—at Panama, the oldest city on the continent. Quaint old, cute old, historic old Panama! where picturesque revolutionists were as plentiful as commonplace millionaires in New York. Panama meant rest, clean clothes, baths, sight-seeing and siestas; and it could not be much hotter than Colón. I felt like one of the world’s elect, for although many go to a hotter place, but few get to Panama.

I had paid each of the negroes who had carried my trunk the fifty cents which they demanded. But I learned afterward that they meant Central American silver, which is worth only half as much as gold. Hence I paid each of them the equivalent of a dollar in their money, or double the amount they asked. However, I would recommend this double method of paying tropical negroes, as it secures good service and doesn’t bankrupt anybody. My second negro was very attentive and had my baggage weighed for me, and thus enabled me to pay $2.50 for it without any trouble. When, however, I had finally settled at the rate of three cents a pound for my baggage and about that much a rod for my fare, I discovered that the delegates to the Medical Congress were entitled to free transportation for themselves and baggage. The negro had thus cost me $11.50 more than I should have paid. He was literally a born blackleg and I was a natural born greenhorn, but we were both innocent, and doing the best we knew how, and no harm had been done.

After my great disappointment with the hotel and all of the activity involved, I felt faint, for I had breakfasted at break of day on the conventional nothing, viz., a dry roll and coffee. So I stepped into a combination saloon and restaurant to get an appetizer to prepare me for a real breakfast, for in Central America, as in France, they rightly call their first meal coffee and their second meal breakfast. When I had drunk my beer the bar-tender asked fifty cents for it. “This is too much,” I thought. “If they charge fifty cents for beer, they must charge about a dollar and a half for a highball and five dollars for a beefsteak. I had better get back home where I can afford to eat and drink.” I handed the bartender a silver half dollar and to my surprise he handed me a silver half dollar back. Thinking that he had made a mistake, I gave it back to him. He took the coin, looked at it and again returned it to me. Then I also looked at it and saw that it was a Columbian half dollar, equal to our quarter dollar. I felt greatly relieved—my glass of beer had only cost a quarter. So I drank another and made him keep the money, and he apologized for having tried to make me take the money instead of another beer. I learned that beer was one of the most expensive drinks on the isthmus. It was an exotic from Milwaukee. It had to be brought a great distance in bottles, and instead of costing two thirds as much as a highball it cost nearly twice as much. The regular price for ordinary drinks at the bar, excepting beer, was only fifteen cents in U. S. money, which was consoling. I should be able to drink even if I could not afford to eat.

After getting some real breakfast at half price I felt better as well as wiser, and went to the station and found the officials still weighing baggage. The extra train was proving profitable and would probably be crowded. Hence I hurried into the cars to secure a seat, and was glad I had done so, for pretty soon they were filled until there was hardly breathing space. It was not that the passengers were too numerous, but they had brought countless bags, bundles, blankets and other unperfumed traveling furniture all done up in hand packages, and had piled them up on and between the seats. They could take them thus without paying for them. We had first-class tickets, but were transported like emigrants and were nearly two hours late in getting off. But I did not mind that, for the other S. S. Limonians were there, and we were enjoying each other’s company and the privilege of commenting freely upon our strange surroundings.

We were hardly out of the station, when the genial champagne-cider-Englishman from San José, who had telegraphed to the Pacific Mail S. S. Company to hold their boat for his party, and who had been mainly instrumental in getting the extra train put on, came down the aisle with a bottle of that most wine-like whiskey, called “Scotch,” and our S. S. Limonian Englishman produced three bottles of that most wine-like water called “White Rock” out of one of his dozen traveling bags. So we had a Scotch treat. Pretty soon nearly every person in the car had reverted to his atavistic emigrant nature, and was eating out of his hand and drinking out of his bottle. It was quite an enjoyable picknicky experience, only I could not eat. I had taken a hearty meat breakfast before starting, instead of waiting for this sociable lunch.

HUTS ON LINE OF PANAMA ROAD