By Lela Stanley

Excerpted from A Mile in Her Boots edited by Jennifer Bové

“Excuse me while I drop my trousers,” Alex said from a few paces behind me. The sound of Velcro unsticking followed this announcement.

I kept my binoculars trained on the trees above, trying to see if their leaves had “winged rachises,” a concept I had only encountered in theory before this job. But it was hard to discern the leaf structure in the midday glare.

After a moment I said, “Want the tape?”

“No,” my waggish jefe said, apparently pulling his rain pants back on. “No, I think I escaped the invertebrate scourge this time.” He walked up to join me and brushed at my shoulder. “You, however, did not. I think you hit a tick bomb.”

If you had floated straight up from where Alex and I stood, brushing away the spider webs and Inga branches, the canopy ants and lianas, you would have emerged into the hot blue air of lowland dry season. The sun would have shone, implacably white and fierce, directly into your eyes. Spinning slowly, you would have made out the scalloped extent of our island, leaf-shaped in the sweet lake waters dredged brown with silt. The guayacan trees were flowering then, and their lemon-yellow blossoms starred the canopy and lay across the trails, crumpled like girls’ dresses. All around us was green in the dry shades of palms and nameless lime- and aloe-colored leaves.

In that country I had three constants: the island, the earth, and Alex. I worked as his field assistant on Barro Colorado Island, a field station run by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The island was born when the neighboring river valley was flooded to create Lago Gatun, a feeder supply of fresh water for the Panama Canal. Barro Colorado used to be a hilltop; now it hovers in the constellated midst of dozens of smaller islets. The island, famous for its research, hosts people from all over the globe as well as other luminaries like (once) a harpy eagle, a false vampire bat, and a resident, recurrent crocodile named Gloria. Several crocodiles have held the name over the course of the years.

The Canal channel runs through the lake, straight past the station. Great ships thresh slowly by, dozens a day, stained with black oil or sunk low in the water with huge loads of boxes. Cars, probably, Alex said. I didn’t understand how a brisk ocean storm wouldn’t just sweep the crates right off the ship’s deck. As we drove by the channel, our dinghy bumping over their wake, the ships looked like ruined cities sailing implacably past: desolate places, empty of humans and run by motors and the revolving eye of the sonar beam. At night, their lights were amber and red on the water.

When I consider the four months I spent in Panama, it astonishes me how confused the events become. There remains a distinction between wet and dry seasons, but otherwise everything that happened while I was there—the U.S. elections, Alex’s broken toe, adventures with sundry reptiles and flora—merge into a circular tapestry in which everything refers back to itself. Some highlights, mostly avian, stand alone and bright like flares: my first motmot or ibis, my only vampire bat. Unlike flares, though, they do not guide me in any direction, and they light only themselves.

If the events of those times are marked by anything, it is the people I came to know from around the globe. At one point five continents and ten countries were represented among my co-workers. April, who became a close friend, had come from Australia via Fiji before moving on to Africa. Christoph, with whom I fell in love, was German. Two girls from Canada were working for a massive census operation that kept tabs on all the trees in a plateau plot. And so on. Although the months wash together, I recall a sort of pre-Christoph era, and a time when April doesn’t figure in my memories. Still, I never know if she was simply away from the island, or if he was asleep, or out netting, or possibly still in Germany and we had not, had never, met.

The fieldwork itself, while it formed the very structure of our days, was a regime I took for granted. Rarely did I devote much time to consider anything beyond its immediate, callusing implication. I knew that each core we took, each air sample we mapped in blue and red lines on the chromatograph, was a step closer to Alex’s dissertation. But, increasingly, they were steps closer to the time when I would leave Panama. Or maybe I had trouble remembering what the end goal was. After four months of twelve-hour days, the work took on its own raison d’être.

Alex was writing his doctorate on nitrogen fixation by tropical legumes, and to that end our days went something like this: In the morning, we left the island by boat, or on some occasions hiked up to a plateau of old-growth forest. There, the trees were green leviathans and the forest floor was clear to our trails and spying.

We took random soil cores with mallets and PVC pipe, or spent the time surveying for the right trees, our necks arched backward for hours to gaze up through binoculars. Those plateau days were the worst for ticks; brushing past shrubs and low branches we knocked them onto our shoulders and backs in a silent, steady rain.

In the afternoon, we’d take our packs full of dirt and head home, scorching in the midday heat. There would be lunch, sandwiches usually, and a shower where I peeled off my ticks with masking tape. Then we would spend another five hours or so sorting through the cores with tweezers, looking for the root nodules that signaled nitrogen fixation. These nodules were tiny—the size of rice grains—and glowed a dull white beneath the red and black clay.

If our fieldwork was the skeleton of our time there and other people its marrow, then the island itself was its transcendently gorgeous incarnation. All around us was wonder. We walked past trees with buttress roots ten meters wide, flaring thin and winged to flank the trail. In deluges, land crabs the size of mangoes skittered balefully across the path, regarding us with tiny dark eyes. Cacao trees flowered weirdly, their cauliflorous blooms ballooning straight from their trunks. Lianas fell dozens of meters to coil roughly, thick as my waist, at the tangled floor. And the birds! Jewel-like, spangling the forest’s dark veil. Dove-gray tinamous with their marble-sized brains and unearthly calls that sounded like people playing wine glasses. Mealy Amazon parrots flying in raucous pairs above the canopy. Emerald hummingbirds zipping to Heliconia flowers; blue-faced antbirds swooping across the trails; a trogon sitting regally in the branches above.

My dreams changed. The howler monkeys woke us at dawn, with roaring that sounded like a charging steam engine. Just before they started, I’d remember images of red-capped manakins hurrying through the underbrush on little human feet; incongruous spruce grouse beating drums with African rhythms. The cove waters at evening, stained golden and lilac, still appear in my dreams, as do the bats.

When I met Christoph, he was working on his Ph.D. in ecology, studying how Lago Gatun bat communities had changed in response to a massive fragmentation event ninety years before—the flood that created the lake. He drove a boat out to smaller islands and caught bats all night with transparent mistnets that looked like gigantic hairnets. I went out netting with him three times, twice before we started dating. With me stumbling through the dark over angled trails and palm leaves, we circled the island’s nets and I watched as he disentangled the bats and put them in cloth bags to carry back to camp. Occasionally the nets caught other things. I saw giant cockroaches, glinting copper in our headlamps’ light; long, delicate walking sticks tangled high in the canopy nets, twenty meters above the ground. When April was his assistant, they caught a mottled owl and showed me pictures the next day. In one, the owl glares directly at the camera, its furious eyes violet in the flash.

Christoph or April took down each bat’s vitals—weight, sex, reproductive status, number of wing mites. She always read the scale numbers out in German, with her Melbourne accent. Then they tagged them with tiny ID necklaces and let them go. The nectar-eaters were fed from a bottle of sugar water to pay them back for the alien-abduction stress of the last few minutes. Sometimes they’d be too tired to fly away immediately, and Christoph hung them head-down from a clothesline stretched over his head. Otherwise, he held them in both hands and let go. They flew right past my face, close enough that the breeze from their wings swept my hair. That is the feeling I remember in dreams.

There are plenty of tiny stories. The time when Alex and I went out to my first off-island site, and when we stopped for water he tossed his pack down in a nest of Paraponera. Those are two-centimeter-long bullet ants with a sting that is incapacitating. When they’re roused to fight, they keen a high battle whine and emit a compound that smells like garlic. I have a terrible sense of smell, so the second event did not help me, and Alex’s pack muffled the shrill noise of the ants. When he hefted it to swing it cavalierly over his shoulder, they were furiously swarming over the straps and back. Cursing, he dropped it and jumped out of the way, gesturing me back to higher ground.

Once we forgot our randomly selected study plot numbers, and I sat down under a liana tangle in the shade to spin some out with a stopwatch. When I got up, I ducked past the hanging ropes of plant, just missing one with my shoulder, and walked up the slope to where Alex stood taking notes on the tree. He turned to look as I came toward him, blanched, and said loudly, “Oh, Holy Mother of God!”

“What?” I yelled back, a meter from his face.

He pointed. Balanced on the liana tangle that I had so narrowly missed disturbing lay coiled a baby fer-de-lance, its amber eye lit with sunflecks. As we watched, its tongue darted out once, twice, and it turned its head slightly in our direction.

“The babies are worst,” Alex explained, “because they don’t have any self-control yet. They’ll give you all the poison they’ve got in one go. Older ones look scarier, but they won’t hit you with as much.”

“Which means?”

“If that had been an adult and it had bitten you, we could have gotten you to the hospital on time…depending on where it bit you.”

If I had knocked the liana out of my way, the snake would have fallen directly on my head.

Before they started dredging the lake, it was possible to swim in the island cove. For a while I went out every afternoon, between our fieldwork mornings and the hours spent sorting dirt in lab. A decrepit steel raft floated in the cove, about a hundred meters from the dock and fifty from the other side. I normally dove off the sandpapery dock and swam out, did a few laps around the raft and returned. Slowly. (I should preface this by explaining that I am not a strong swimmer. My earliest memory of trying to swim is of a young instructor holding me under water to make me learn how to hold my breath. At best, I can do a sort of tortoise-like sideways stroke, but mostly it’s doggy paddling.) I was twenty meters from the raft one day when I surfaced to see a floating log where none had been a minute before. Treading green water, I eyed Gloria as she glided blithely around. Crocodiles move through the water without seeming to work at all. I made it to the raft and perched there for ten minutes before her surveillance eased and she glided away toward the far side of the cove.

“Hey Lela!” a grad student said at dinner. “Did you know you were swimming with Gloria?”

A tiny anole lizard skittered up a fallen trunk. I watched its movement with one eye as I worked at the soil core jammed intractably in its plastic pipe. Dry season dirt took twice as long to work through, and so we spent even more time crouched in the leaf litter with its armies of chiggers. These are tiny mites that, horror-movie style, burrow under the skin and dissolve small quantities of your flesh to consume. They itch terribly, and people who don’t know what they’re getting into—like me in October—do not take the right precautions against these monsters. Even now, I have faint lavender scars on my stomach from the bites. The ubiquity of chiggers, and the time it takes people to build up resistance, means that at any island gathering the bulk of people sat scratching their ankles and calves, or fidgeting with the attempt not to. I was constantly reminded of some simian relations of ours.

A manakin bird snapped over my head. My fingers were blistered from breaking up dirt clods with the tweezers. Unheroic injuries.

It’s human tendency, and mine especially, to pick favorites. But when it comes to the seasons in Panama, they were so differently beautiful that it’s hard for me to choose. The wet season, of course, was all about rain. Gray gusts and squalls sheeting down across the Canal, blinding us as we drove. (Sebastian, another German grad student, gave me a plastic helmet and visor he bought on Halloween to keep my face dry. The visor part was antifreeze-green, and the helmet read a convincing POLICE.) Midnight downpours that woke the howler monkeys outside my window. And every afternoon, a vertical green sea: water pouring from the heavens without cease or restraint. In this climate, paperback books went limp and curled, leather wallets rotted, and my field clothes started to smell like mushrooms. I went out netting with Christoph and the rain slammed down on our blue tarp tent all night. No bats were out, but he had to keep checking the nets anyway, soldiering out in a waist-length poncho.

In contrast—clear, glimmering contrast—the dry season was a time of air. By December I noticed a cool, high breeze blowing some nights. “It’s like this all the time in the dry season,” said Christoph, watching palm leaves flicker. When I came back in February, the rains were over and this breeze blew soft and constant on the water.

My time with Christoph spanned both seasons, yet I have trouble remembering what happened when. In January, between stays on the island, I worked briefly in North Carolina and forgot my journal at a Comfort Inn during a surprise snowstorm. When I called later, a woman told me room number 413 didn’t exist, and in any case nothing had been turned in. So the first season’s thoughts are lost to me, and I have to rely on my sketchy memories to draw it into focus. I remember meeting Christoph for the first time, outside the Smithsonian’s headquarters in Panama City, sun glaring hazily down and his red hair that was bleached almost white in the light. We shook hands, formally. A week later I went out netting with him and Sebastian. That night was when the unreality of my situation finally closed dizzily around me. I climbed out of the boat behind these two boys talking animatedly in their own language and looked behind me. The sun was nearing the lake waters, in plum and scraped-pink, and all the little islands which appeared Seuss-like in their tufted vegetation, seemed to calmly float. A narrow path led us into the forest.

Two nights before I left Panama for the second time, I was in the lab weighing dried litter samples and listening to Brazilian music. Christoph and April were out netting, and I was getting more miserable by the song, thinking about the months—years—ahead without them. I turned off the CD and walked down the hall, into the common room and kitchen. Christoph was standing there in the lowered light. He turned as the door shut behind me, and beamed broadly at my delighted face.

“I’ll live,” he said cheerfully.

Then I noticed his left hand, held close to his stomach. A gash ran three-quarters of the way around his thumb, and both arms were scraped raw to the elbow.

“Oh my God!” I yelled.

“He’ll live,” Alex said briskly, appearing back in the room. “I washed out the bite already. You sit down now.”

Christoph obediently sat down and held out his arm.
“What happened?” I asked.

“A crazy spider monkey attacked us. Oh, wait,” he said as Alex pulled out the iodine. “There is a wonderful Swedish herbal tonic up in my room—”

“None of that, mister,” Alex said. “We’re using Western medicine tonight.”

People had started to gather round. “A spider bit you?” the island mammologist asked. “You’re going in for a rabies shot tonight, I hope.”

“What happened?” I hissed at April, who had materialized next to me.

“Oh, Christoph was amazing,” she said, beaming. “This crazy male spider monkey showed up as we were setting up the canopy nets, and started yawping and scent-marking all over the place.”

“A lone monkey?” said the mammologist. “That’s weird.”

“You got the pre-exposure already, so you have forty-eight hours to get the shot,” Alex said, winding tape around Christoph’s wrist. “The game wardens are waiting to take you in.”

The ride into Panama City was strangely great. We slid along the lake surface, lit only by the small red lamp of the games wardens’ boat. Close to Gamboa dock we passed the dredging operation, lit and humming with machinery, but mostly it was the dark sky and water, and red shadows, and the wardens’ murmured conversation behind us as they drove. The wind made it almost too loud to talk.

When we reached the pier, we climbed into a waiting Jeep and started the curving drive down to the city. “¿Entonces, que pasó?” one of the wardens, Mario, asked. What happened?

“A monkey attacked us as we were setting up our mistnets,” Christoph said in Spanish.

“A monkey?”

“A spider monkey. It jumped onto our nets and started tearing them apart, and then it came after us. We tried to get back to our camp, but it beat us there and started throwing things around.”

He had told April to get back to the boat while he followed, but in the melee the monkey lunged and bit him.

“La rabia,” Mario said.

“Si, entonces necesito la vacuna.”

The private hospital was elegant and empty. Two doctors waited aimlessly in the emergency room, swooping on Christoph as soon as we walked in. Two and a half hours later, he walked out with stitches in his hand and a bottle of antibiotics. “I’ve never taken these before,” he said, bemused.

“Well, you better take them this time,” I said, shocked. “You were bitten by some wild primate! Who knows what awful things are swimming around in your blood now!” I paused. “When do you have to come back for the next shot?”

“I didn’t get the first one,” he said. “They don’t have any rabies vaccine here. The Ministry of Health doesn’t either.”

“What?”

“Well, I don’t know, but that’s what they said. I have to go to this place in the morning,” he said, waving a slip of paper, “so I have to stay in the city tonight.”

We checked into the Hotel Lisboa, in a part of town I hadn’t seen before.

“If this were Africa, it would be a different story,” Christoph said mildly. His elegant hands were crossed over his chest, the stitches lividly visible. “I just read about these people who caught some monkeys carrying Ebola.”

I went to the window and looked out. The Lisboa’s sign glowed crimson in the open air, casting a faint pink light onto the street below. This feeling of awful nostalgia in the present, for things still surrounding oneself, has occurred elsewhere in my life—in the final months of college, for instance—but never as strongly or sadly than at field stations. Even with a place like Barro Colorado, where people reliably turn up again and again, the pang is there. In tropical island and northern mountain and all sorts of other field camps of the world, people are thrown together for a brief, intensively scripted moment. They know what they need to do with every instant of their time, down to the last sample; they know the precise hour of their departure.

What no one can count on is the alchemy that crackles to life between people, and that is what makes departure so painful. April, who is in Uganda as I write, e-mails to tell me about her work there, and I read the e-mail moments later, so that in a sense she may as well be next door. But, of course, she isn’t, and the connection is kept cruelly strong through these artificial means. It is the expectation of separation that makes the moment so dear to us, as with every part of life. In fieldwork, though, the end is known from the outset, as our own deaths are not.

Back on the island the next afternoon, the light was a hazy pale pink, equatorial sun glaring through a conch. Playing euchre on the balcony with April and the Canadian girls, I was having trouble paying attention: the sharp lines of diamond and spade seemed to warp and twist in the gauzy light, Rachel’s shocking blue eyes, the hiss of the deck itself playing out on the table. The face cards, flipped over, stared straight at the geckos stuck to the ceiling. I imagined a showdown: Jack of Spades versus translucent amphibian. The jack would pull a vicious little knife from his boot; the gecko would wrap him in its cold gluey tongue and pull him in, his feet kicking vainly.

“Pick it up,” April said. The king of clubs lay on top, waiting.

Christoph walked out of his office and came up the balcony towards us. “What are you crazy people playing?” he asked.

People at the Smithsonian had finally tracked down rabies vaccine for him late that morning, after I left to catch the early boat. He had had to drive out to some seedy clinic, pick up the vaccine, and drive to another medic to have it injected. His left arm hung loosely at his side as he sat down on the chair behind me. I rested my free hand on the top of his foot, tapping out melodies.

Later they switched to canasta. I didn’t know the rules, so I pushed myself back against his knees and watched. Sheelah dealt the cards neatly, her wrist playing out in rhythmic little flicks. Some dreamy house music was playing, drifting up on the rising cool wind of evening. There was a plate of green and orange limes next to me, a violet sky to the west, and I felt the clear thin map of Christoph’s bones under my fingers. We could have been anywhere, but we were right there.

---

Location

Panama

Lela Stanley has had the tremendous luck to work outside in four countries, from 44'N to 1'S. Interests she hopes to explore include pelagic seabirds, Latin hip-hop, and cooking with garlic. She lives in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Location

Panama