Tide Out, Showing the Sea Wall and Bottom of the Sea
We arrived in a few minutes at the end of the lovely but lonely promenade where it turned upon itself and led us down to the low ground just inside of the sea wall. Here the soldiers’ barracks, the city jail and a good parade ground of three or four acres were situated. We saw many prisoners and a few soldiers. The prisoners were confined under the vaults that supported the promenade. Hence the name Las Bóvedas, the vaults. They were closed on the outer side by the solid sea wall and on the inner side by iron grating. Light and air entered the cellars thus formed from one side only, through the iron grating, leaving the deeper portions so dark that we could not see into them. The light space near the grating was teeming with prisoners of both sexes, mostly negroes and mixed breeds, who seemed to be uncomfortably crowded in an exceedingly unhealthy place. Just beyond the jail was a plain, rectangular brick building, in which the soldiers were lodged, and beyond this were some dilapidated frame houses, ragged children, dirty goats and drowsy vultures.
Doctor Echeverría wished to buy a herd of goats for his children and take them to San José; but although goats were plenty he could only find one good one. They had subsisted on straw hats and stray shoes so long that most of them were getting bald and leathery on their backs and sides. Cows and fodder are rather scarce in Central American cities and the facilities for keeping the milk fresh are not good, hence the desirability of a herd of goats which can be starved when corn husks are dear, and can be driven from house to house to be milked as milk is wanted for use. This provides sterile, undiluted milk, rich enough for coffee and more digestible and nourishing for children than the best of cows’ milk that has been milked several hours before being used, or that has been artificially sterilized. I should think that Central America, and particularly Panama and the neighborhood of the Canal Zone, would be a profitable place for large goat dairies. The goats could eat all night on the sabanas, manufacturing morning milk from the midnight grass and stubble, and walk the streets of Panama city all day, clearing the town of rubbish and giving certified milk to all. They could take a daily siesta from 1 to 3 P. M. in the Parque de la Catedral and in Parque de la Iglesia de Santa Ana, giving the town rubbish a chance to form fresh milk for afternoon delivery. It would be a blessing to our children in the United States if milch-goats could replace milch-cows, which can not safely be starved and neglected, and it would aid materially in clearing our homes and streets of tuberculosis and waste paper—the two white plagues.
In returning we passed through quaint and narrow streets with their small and old-fashioned houses, and here and there a ruin. Some of the old church ruins are very picturesque and very ruinous, although none of them so ponderous, pretentious and dangerous as was our old Cook County court building at Chicago, the world’s most magnificent specimen of popular and political ruin. “Si caput videas, ferias,” was its motto, and for a long time it threatened to crush the head of the solitary passerby who did not keep his distance, or to lie down suddenly on the crowd that ventured too near. The citizens had to be protected against it. Experts on architectural degeneracy reported that its angle of velocity was accelerated, its angle of repose faulty, and that its lateral parts showed great fatigue. So complete and perfect a ruin was never before matured at so rapid a rate. It made a new record and set a new pace for municipal dissolution, for without the aid of quakes, tornadoes or the help of time, it crumbled so rapidly and steadily that it could not be kept up long enough to get into guide books and attract tourists. Thus Chicago leads in ruin as well as in rush. In its place we have the new county building, which is a ruin of architectural art—a columnated parallelopiped. Its two-story basement is an example of bewindowed weakness. Its high and heavy columns have but little support and support but little; they are too stuck up, too desirous of being looked up to. But Chicago is not yet a great architect; the University of Chicago is a better one. Chicago’s specialty lies in a rampant repetition of rectangular windows without any walls, its variety in a massive superfluity of meaningless stone carved and crusted with architectural trumpery; its exception in an occasional magnificent success.
The Panama sidewalks were too narrow for the enjoyment of a walk. In order to walk side by side, two of us had to walk on the cobblestones, and as the third one was too polite to monopolize the whole sidewalk, we all walked on the cobblestones, and thus took up the whole street. But as we never met a vehicle in these parts it did not matter except to our feet. We might have walked single file on the sidewalk, but as I was the only one not too polite to walk ahead, and both of the others were too polite to take the second place, the cobblestones were the only alternative. An advantage, however, of the use of the street was that we did not have to step off the sidewalk into the depression intended for a ditch every time we passed anyone. This passing of people on the twenty-five inch sidewalks in Panama was almost as difficult as passing people in Chicago on our twenty-five foot sidewalks.
When we reached the hotel it was time for an appetizer, which we dutifully drank in preparation for a tour-de-force dinner. I formerly thought that in the tropics men lived mostly on fruits, rice, light vegetables and, if they worked hard, an occasional egg, taking but little meat or greasy, mixed dishes. But my experiences in Cuba, on the Italian ship and in Panama have taught me that the people eat as heartily, or more so, of greasy food as in northern portions of the United States, where we subsist too much upon our home-made cereals that overfill and underfeed us.
As it was Thursday evening there was to be a concert in the Plaza de la Iglesia de Santa Ana at eight o’clock, and my companions dined with some friends in town preparatory to attending it with them. So I had to go through the paces of dinner alone—and succeeded. I then sat around the hotel corridor until eight o’clock when the air had become cooler, but not cool, and my stomach lighter, but not light, and strolled leisurely to the Plaza de la Iglesia de Santa Ana, about half a mile away. The musicians were playing in one corner of the square and the people promenading in the park which, as in Plaza Centrál, occupied the entire square except the peripheral space taken up by the streets. The men were, as a rule, dressed in evening or afternoon dress, as if for protection against cold, while the ladies were draped in all sorts of flimsiness appropriate to the weather—white, gauzy, fleecy, fluffy and pretty. Their clothes were as appropriate as those of the men were inappropriate, which is quite the reverse of the methods of dress in the North, where the men dress for comfort, and the ladies for the men. Around and around the outer edge of the park they walked, some in one direction, some in the opposite, passing and repassing each other, laughing and talking and apparently unconscious of the increasing monotony of it all. But a large proportion of the promenaders were young, and to youth nothing is monotonous but inactivity.
The main street passed by the plaza constituting the front side; the church occupied the opposite side, forming a fine background with the dense, electrically lighted foliage in the middle, and the illuminated, brilliant throng moving around the edges. Whenever the music started, the crowd became more animated and the whole scene presented something romantic or fairylike to the spectator. The music was of a loud Spanish character, very appropriate in the open air, and the pieces, which varied from popular to classic, were well played.
After becoming somewhat weary from carrying my course dinner around, I stepped into the shadows of the trees and took a seat on a bench to listen with comfort to the music, and watch the young people chatter and enjoy each other as only the young can. I resolved that if providence or a vigorous digestion should ever give me back my youth I would make myself enjoy trifles also. But some men never grow young, and trifles never become important to them.
I concluded that the Panama Physicians must also have overfilled stomachs and an apathy for trifles, for none of them were there promenading and lemonading.