Making Mama Nido: A Mothership in Panama
by Monte Richardson

In 1515, Captain Antonio Tello De Guzman pointed his ship’s launches shoreward in an effort to bring home the bacon to Mother Spain. What he found was an indigenous village, which he interpreted to be named “Abundance of Fishes.” The locals called it Panama.

These days, Panamanian textbooks label the word to mean, “the abundance of fish, trees and butterflies.” In the native Kuna Indian dialect there is “bannaba,” interpreted to mean far away or distant. Even lost in translation, the Central American nation of Panama encompasses all those meanings and more.

Despite its slivery appearance on a map, it is a vast land: vast in all kinds of nature, where the sun will burn you quick and the rain rivals steelheading on the Olympic Peninsula. It has strange animals, some of which will only eat rotten mangoes and will only defecate in fresh water. It has trees as large around as a pickup truck and canopies of foliage that block the sun as if it were midnight. And it has those creatures that make our hair stand up straight on the back of our necks—the ones that swim—and in abundance.

For all that Panama has, its beauty can also be seen in what it [Read more…]