A North American in the Darién by Dylan Streb

A North American in the Darién | Dylan Streb

“How much farther?” I called.

Sebastian, a bald Colombian with a long white beard, continued to hack at vines and leaves with his machete, stopping every few steps to puff on a joint. His sombrero-shaded head and muck boots faded into the thicket.

Cupping my mouth, I called again, “How much farther is it?”

On the crest of a mud-slicked hill, he and a German couple stopped and turned.

Lazily, Sebastian swung at the branches around his head, the lopped limbs tumbling toward the jungle floor. “Twenty minutes or so,” he said. The cherry of his joint breathed red in the canopy shade. “We aren’t far.”

Pushing under branches, I caught up and was offered the butt of the joint. “I’m alright,” I said, looking around, “this environment is intoxicating enough.”

All around, vines, bamboo, thick-trunked trees, thin-stemmed plants, flowers, and ferns, each a different green, wove walls and a ceiling that closed out all but a shatter of sunlight. Our path, more blazed than followed, traversed dark brown earth inset with stones. Some hours before, rain had come, as it did every day, and left the hot air heavy with a skin-coating humidity. The downpour had awakened the smells of fresh plants, of soil, of decay. High in the canopy, birds announced themselves with throaty, gobbling songs. A low cacophony of whining bugs was so incessant that, after a few days, I associated it with silence. The sense of fertility was incredible, humbling even, as it seemed all the seasons of life had converged into a uniform outpouring of energy.

“A marvel, isn’t it?” Sebastian said, smiling. He sheathed his machete and kicked a rock down the hill.

“Yeah… I mean… I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said.

“I’m so excited for the harvest,” the German woman said.

“There will be much harvest,” her boyfriend added, nodding.

The couple, Lina and Ben, were, like me, staying at Sebastian’s hostel at the edge of the  Darién jungle. Lina wore a single dreadlock in her drape of brown hair and had a calming smile surrounded by a face reddened and wrinkled more by cigarettes than time. Ben had the same redness and wrinkling, the same long hair, though he was jittery, and had begun to bald. Together, we’d set out from a dirt road and were headed to a plot of Sebastian’s land.

“Careful of branches and vines,” Sebastian warned, chopping deeper. “Snakes like it there.”

After a mile of walking, we arrived at a clearing set on the incline of a mountain foot. On the slope, rows of sharp pineapple plants grew. Mandarin orange, lime, guava, and avocado trees swelled with fruit. For two hours we harvested, hacking pineapples off of their stems, sowing new pineapple plants with fruitless buds, and plucking what Sebastian deemed ripe from his trees. They produced constantly, he explained, and anything unpicked would rot.

With bags filled, we climbed the clearing and sat in the shade of a tree to eat a late breakfast. 

Lighting a cigarette each, the couple exchanged excited German. They pointed to the foliage enclosing us and rolled the harvested fruit in their palms. Sebastian passed out some bread from his bag. He lit another joint.

Below us, where his plot met the jungle weave, an electric blue butterfly with wings like two palms flapped above the splays of pineapple plants. Birdsong, like a robot gargling water, issued from an unseen beak. In the distance, between the shoulders of green mountains and below a slice of white cloud, dark ocean roiled. I sighed, took my shirt off, and laid on it.

***

I’d found Sebastian’s hostel a week before, when I arrived at the coastal village of Capurgana, Colombia. The town is located in the Darién Gap, a region that straddles the Colombia/Panama border. Throughout the year it sees some of the world’s heaviest rainfall, lending its old-growth rainforests a density that only regional gangs, indigenous inhabitants, and small groups of settlers have succeeded in occupying. It is called the ‘Gap’ because from Alaska to Argentina, it is the only place the 19,000-mile Pan-American highway does not connect. Recently, it has become more widely recognized as one of the most trafficked and dangerous migrant routes on earth.

When I came to the region in February of 2023, I was 24, and towards the end of a stint in Colombia which had begun in November of the previous year. I’d traveled to the city of Medellín to learn Spanish and, having achieved fluency, I grew restless. Raised on a horse farm in rural Massachusetts, I am most at home among few people and much greenery. Thus, advised that the Darién was inexpensive to reach and forested by jungle impressive even to Colombians, I arranged an escape. At the time, however, I knew little of the individuals residing in the region – of the history of violence and the evolving reality of migration – and sought only adventure.

I carried the contact of “The Rasta”, a man a friend ensured provided cheap, reliable lodging. Upon arrival, however, he informed me that it was Semana Santa, a week-long holiday, and that all his rooms, and all those in town, were booked. Deeper into the jungle, he claimed, was another hostel. I trudged on. 

I came to a hotel where, on the first floor, lounging in hammocks and on chairs, a group of Somalians waited. They were heading to the US for a better life, they explained. Their destination, I replied, was my home. They stared. A few crept closer. 

Living in Medellín, I’d seen people hand cash to migrants at stoplights or point to them mockingly. And I’d seen on the news back home hordes of people pushed up against checkpoints, slowly being sorted by border agents. This, however, was the first time I’d spoken with migrants. A few wore black Nike shirts with white swooshes; their bodies were thin, shoulders curled. Silent and wide-eyed, they searched me. I wondered what I was to them – if it was the first time they were seeing blonde hair and blue eyes like mine in the flesh as opposed to on a screen or in a magazine. I sensed something – hunger or reverence, I’m not sure – and shuddered; whatever they saw, it seemed far from what I was. 

A heavyset woman stepped out of a back room. She scowled, her brow slicked with sweat.

“Do you have any rooms?” I asked.

“From where do you come?” she asked.

“The US.”

She shook her head. “No. No room. Look in town.”

I nodded to her and turned to the Somalis. I met their stares. The weight of their dreams and the reality of their past – whatever it held – shimmered in the shadows of their eyes. Unsure, I bowed, wishing them a safe journey, and carried on.

Before coming to Capurgana, migrants like these Somalis arrive by bus in a town called Necolcí. They then take a large speed boat, called a ‘lancha’, across the Gulf of Urabá to Capurgana. From there migrants contract guides provided by gangs. What follows is a three-to-five-day trek through some of the world’s most treacherous jungle. Hiking up hills, crossing rivers, and weathering the heavy humidity, a broken leg often spells death. The guides lead migrants for two days, then the groups are left on their own. The threat of kidnappers, rival gangs, and deadly animals are only a few perils that complicate the journey. Rotting bodies and impromptu burial mounds are a common sight. Stopped along the route, starving, exhausted, and injured migrants often beg for help. While mostly men make the crossing, countless women, children, and elderly attempt it as well.

Nearly a mile inland, I passed a crumbling airstrip, on which boys played soccer and women lugged bags of food on their heads. I saw the town dump, piled with bottles and bones, spilling onto the road. At the edge of the jungle, I came to a collection of houses with walls of pressboard and planks, roofs of rusted tin sheets, floors of worn earth. Barefoot and dirt-smudged children ran in the streets.

The barrio was what Colombians call an ‘invasión’: when a group of people, often poor, move onto a piece of land, private or state-owned, and erect homes. While not legal, this act of invading and claiming is difficult to combat as Colombia’s government and legal system lack resources. 

Craving a banana, I stopped in a wooden stall that served as the general store. While Colombians are relegated to the ugliest bananas of the bunch, their fruit stay on the vine longer and thus achieve a superior flavor and consistency. When I first ate a Colombian banana, I was convinced I’d never eaten a real banana before. The bananas in this store, however, along with the other fruits, had begun to spoil, and the sweet smell of decomposition assaulted my nostrils. Flies swarmed my head, landing on the blackening fruits and the shop owner. Though I’d seen patchwork houses and barefoot children before, the quality of the fruit – normally a national source of pride – indicated a destitution I’d not yet encountered. I turned and left.

I wandered further, the bows of the trees casting shadows across my path as the barrio tapered off into thicker and thicker forest. The shacks disappeared; now I saw bungalows and homesteads set away from the road. Men rumbled over exposed roots and packed earth on motorcycles with flatbeds and on horses pulling wagons. The dust they kicked up shined in bright motes across the path, illuminated by the sun. People sat in lawn chairs and in doorways. I smiled at them and nodded. They stared. A sign painted with a green tree frog appeared. It was the hostel.

When I found him, Sebastian was lying in a chair, shirtless and shoeless, getting high. To my luck, he had vacant beds. I got situated and later, as night fell, chatted with Sebastian and the Germans around a table. Sebastian explained he’d grown up in a place called Envigado, not far from where I’d stayed in Medellín. Envigado, I knew, was the long-standing headquarters of the cartel. Observing Sebastian’s white beard and creasing face, I reasoned he’d been born around the same time as Pablo Escobar. I shared this observation with him. He laughed. The Germans raised their eyebrows; Escobar was a typical fixation for us Westerners and generally a taboo.

“I knew him,” he said, “I used to see him playing football when we were kids.”

“Really?” I said. “Did you ever talk to him?”

“No, but I saw him often. My aunt even dated him in high school. He was just a kid from the barrio. Over time he became something more.”

***

At the top of the clearing, I sat up and turned to Sebastian. It was not yet noon. We were all quiet and tired from the planting and picking. I wanted to know more about Escobar.

“This country was his,” he said. “In some ways, it still is.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Until recently, every powerful politician had direct ties to him. The director of infrastructure was his close friend. He approved many roads for the cartel to move its drugs.”

“Did drugs pass through here?” I asked.

He roared with laughter and stood up. “Saw the airstrip? He put it there to send product to the US.”

“But who runs things now?”

“Narcos. Only they’ve learned killing is inefficient – better to keep things quiet. But many people with ties to Escobar still make decisions.”

“What about local gangs? Have you had any trouble?”

“When I first came here FARC controlled the area. They never bothered me; I barely spoke with them. But fifteen years ago – almost twenty now, I guess – the government began a war against FARC by funding paramilitary groups. There was a cash-for-bodies policy; if you brought back a FARC member dead, you got a reward. Thousands of innocents were killed, dressed as FARC, and turned in for the bounty.

“The paramilitaries woke me one night – scared me half to death. I woke up with a machine gun in my face. They questioned who I was, where my papers were. I thought they were going to kill me. But they left, and the next week I fled to Medellín. They killed a community leader while I was gone. A good man who cared about educating the children of the town and who had nothing to do with FARC. They brought him into the town center and shot him in the head.”

Sebastian’s face was red. He paced back and forth in front of the tree.

“His wife still lives here,” he added. “She’s a good woman.”

***

Before crossing to Capurgana, I arrived by overnight bus in the town of Necoclí. Navigating hazy dirt roads, I found the room I’d rented and slept. At 1:00 pm I awoke, soaking in sweat. Out my window, towards the coast, I observed the corrugated roofs of squat concrete buildings. A low tide smell hung in the air, summoning memories from my youth of summer trips to Cape Cod. This smell, however, was heavier, steeped in the constant dance of birth and death that occurs in the tropics.

On the Colombian coast, to avoid the heat, people wake at 4:00 am, work until 11:00 am, and then rest until sunset, doing small tasks in the evening before bed. I knew this at the time, but still, I went for a walk.

Starting towards the beach, I took in the landscape. Now bathed in daylight, I saw beyond the town borders, leading to the sea, lowland swamps and pastures where emaciated cows huddled under trees. A flock of chickens pecked at trash, and a few skeletal dogs lay heaving in the shade. Townspeople peered from windows and porches. Thinking of Medellín where eye contact and a hello are customary, I tried smiling and waving at the eyes that followed me. Most scowled, averting their faces, with only a few offering nods.

A block from the beach, I began noticing stores and carts selling boots, water jugs, tarps, tents, and other gear. And further, at the beach, I saw hundreds of people in hammocks and tents. They huddled together, lugging gear from the stores to the shore. Backpacks, trash bags, duffel bags, and rolling luggage lay scattered on the ground. Children wove through the crowd, chasing a plastic ball. A woman lay against a palm tree nursing a newborn. The midday heat pounded down. The things I saw waited in my mind, unanalyzed, like bubbles in sludge. Slowly, they rose, bursting into my heat-drunk brain: these were migrants.

A group of cigarette-smoking Asian men wearing sweat-stained Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton t-shirts approached. Thinking they were fellow tourists, I stepped towards them, waving, and asked where they were from. The closest man shot me a look like that of a cornered street dog. “No! No! No!” he bellowed. I backed away.

At the top of a footbridge, I came upon a boy watching his two friends. One was up a tree, lopping coconuts off their stems with a machete. The other stood below catching and piling them in the sand. The boy turned and greeted me. His hair was short and black, his skin caramel. His head came to my waist and his cheeks bulged with baby fat; I figured he was six or seven. He asked where I was from. When I told him the US, his eyes widened and a smile spread into his cheeks. He asked me again, and then again, how it was true, how I’d gotten a passport and a visa. I was born there, I explained. Still, he stared.

After chatting for a while, he offered to show me around, and I accepted, feeling relieved to have found a companion.

He brought me along the beach to a secluded outcropping where two planks connected rocky shore with a small grassy island. He crossed, then I did. When I landed on the other side, he was jumping and spinning around the little island.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, beaming.

I smiled. “It really is.”

Before us, under a now cloud-choked sky, the Gulf of Uraba churned. Some 40 miles away, the Darién mountains poked through a shroud of humid air. To my left and right stretched palm trees and shoreline. I heard the crash of waves, the boy’s squeals as he dodged them, and, in the distance, the whine of a motor, growing closer.

“Over there,” the boy said, pointing to the outline of mountains, “that’s where the people who want to go to the United States go.”
“Have you been?” I asked.

“No,” he said, looking down, “but I want to!” He looked up, smiling. “Over there, the water is clearer and the beaches are more beautiful!”

“Here in Necoclí the beaches are nice,” I said. “We don’t have so many beaches like these where I’m from.”
“Really?” he said.

I nodded.

The motor grew louder, and a speedboat appeared. It skipped across the waves, slapping the surf. The boat carried passengers, many of them migrants, to Capurgana. The next day I would take the trip myself, and upon arriving would see the crystal waters and white sand beaches the boy spoke of. 

As the sun began to set, bringing with it the coolness of evening and the movement of people, we returned to town. We stopped at a corner, and the boy went into a shop. Motorbikes whirred past me, and at food carts men ignited grills, their fires blazing red against the rising night. There was a slowness to everything, to the way people walked and moved. The boy emerged with a small rectangular sack of potable water. He bit into the corner and slurped.

“I have to get back to my room,” I said, “but thanks for the tour.”

“Of course!” he said. He held out 100 pesos in coins, roughly 2 cents. “This is for you!”

I smiled. “It’s okay,” I said, pulling coins from my pocket, “I have enough.”

“No, I want you to have it,” he said, “my parents taught me it’s important we help the people passing through here.”

***

We’d finished our food, but, much to my excitement, Sebastian was still telling stories. It seemed as if something had dislodged within him, his cool demeanor now engulfed by a passion that roared in his eyes and drove his pacing steps.

The Germans were silent, twiddling leaves and smoking cigarettes. I asked him why so many people had worked with Escobar.

“Money,” he said, “we are a poor country with many hungry people.” 

“But how would they do it? Recruit people, I mean.”

“Imagine this: two gangsters drive into a poor barrio, one that is high up along the side of the mountain valley. In this barrio there’s no work, nothing to eat, the houses are made of salvaged garbage and whatever can be found.”

He paced in front of the tree, puffing his joint. I thought of the invasión, the dirty and barefoot children, the spoiled fruit.

“Imagine this is your barrio. You’re 14 or 15. You don’t go to school because your parents need you to work, and when you get home from work – as a street cleaner, say, or a fruit vendor – you hear your parents fighting. They yell, getting louder and louder, until you hear the sound of skin smacking skin, the squeals of pain from your mother, the grunts of rage from your father as he beats her. Then you see these two guys drive up in a shiny black SUV. They get out, wearing tracksuits, crisp white tennis shoes, maybe some shiny watches. They walk right up to you and tell you if you come with them and do what they say, they will give you money. You’ve never seen a car so nice, nor people dressed this way in the barrio, and you are hungry, so you go. They bring you to a secluded spot, maybe a farm just outside the city, and have you practice shooting at a bottle with one of their guns. They show you how to hold the gun, how to remove the safety. Then they drive you home, give you some money, and promise they’ll be back. They return after a few days and have you shoot a chicken, then the next time, a cat. Finally, they come back a fourth time and drive you to the same farm, but this time there is a man there on his knees with his hands tied behind his back. One of the men hands you a gun; the other puts his palm on your back and looks you in the eye. He tells you that if you do what they say from now on, your family will never have to worry about food or money again; even if you were to die, he explains, they will be rich.”

Sebastian stopped pacing, and we met eyes. My heart raced. A tree branch swayed in the breeze low over his head. I smelled the faint aroma of oranges and pineapples drifting from an overturned burlap sack.

“What would you do?” he asked.

***

In the days since arriving at the hostel, I’d been waking with the sun and sleeping with its setting. I began walking the dirt paths that led deeper into the Darién, often passing mules driven by grime-streaked masters. On the shores of rivers and in the nooks of tree roots, I saw soiled baby clothes, food wrappers, shoes, disintegrating backpacks – residue of migrants. Once, while walking with tourists I’d met along the paths, I noticed a lizard the size of a small cat perched on the root of a tree. When I approached, it dashed across the surface of a stream.

“Jesus Cristo,” a girl from the region called it – Jesus Christ, as it walked on water. At the end of that day, our group bathed in the ocean. Floating in warm tides, the father of a young girl told me one of his proudest moments was when he brought her to Disney. Sitting on his shoulders as fireworks exploded over the castle and Tinkerbell soared overhead, she leaned down and whispered, “This is a dream come true.”

I thought of this girl some days later when, again, I went walking. From above, howler monkeys bellowed, tossing branches toward me. Through the thicket, I noticed a neon orange color, and when I turned a corner I found several people wearing high-visibility vests. Between them, almost a hundred migrants stood under a makeshift overhang. Around their feet, backpacks were set on a wet layer of trash. I noticed a young girl with a pink backpack standing behind her parents. She was around the age of the tourist girl. I wondered about her and her parents’ dreams of America, how they had come to them, and if, like the tourist girl’s dreams, they would someday be realized. It was strange to be in a place where people were risking their lives for something I was given. I felt guilty – responsible for who I was and where I was from. I wanted to scream at them, “It isn’t what you dream it will be!” I wanted to wish them luck. Instead, I walked on.

***

After Sebastian finished his stories, we returned to the hostel, and I took a nap. When I awoke, my room was bathed in the brown light of dusk. I got up, brushed my bug net aside, and went to the porch. I journaled, taking in the smell of earth, now ripe on the air for it had rained while I slept. The outside lights, past which dove fruit bats, flickered on and off. The power went out consistently, sometimes for six hours or more, only to come on at random. The Colombian grid had never been extended to Capurgana. Instead, a generator run by the local cartel provided the power. However, because of the generator’s limitations, energy was rationed between the two sides of town, hence the coming and going of the lights.

I had set aside my journal and lay down in a hammock when I heard whooping and guitar playing. Lights shone from the third level of Sebastian’s main house. I went up to investigate. At the top were six people: the German couple, a Frenchman, a bald man with a guitar, a woman in her fifties wearing loose clothing, and Sebastian. In a hammock strung between wood beams, the Frenchman limply held a bottle of aguardiente (anise-flavored liquor). The others stood in a circle singing as the bald man strummed and tapped his guitar. Empty beer bottles lay strewn about. Though it was only 8:00 pm, everyone moved as if the floor was shifting and gazed with unseeing eyes. I received a tambourine. The woman began to sing.

“El pescador,” she sang.

“Habla con la Luna,” we responded.

“El pescador.”

“Habla con la playa.”

I tapped the tambourine to the beat. The woman raised her palms.

“El pescador–”

“Habla con la luna.”

“El pescador–”

“Habla con la playa.”

“El pescador–”

“No tiene fortuna, solo su atarraya.”

The Frenchman rose and began hopping from leg to leg, like a jester. The bald man plucked the strings. Sebastian smiled, the steps to his dancing short and arrhythmic. The woman locked eyes with me then, nodding, drawing closer. I felt the heat of her body and smelled her sweat.

She bellowed: “Va subiendo la corriente, con chinchorro y atarraya, la canoa de bareque, para llegar a la playa.”

We cheered.

I took in my impromptu bandmates. Each had arrived here for different reasons. The Frenchman, for example, had lived in Colombia for ten years. He taught at a high school in Bogota and had driven fifteen hours to Necoclí on his motorbike. He’d purchased land adjacent to Sebastian’s. At the moment, his plot was a place to plant things, but in the future he hoped to build a homestead himself. The Frenchman often marveled at leaves and fruits, chatting at length with Sebastian about biodiversity and climate change, much like how Lina and Ben did. Though they had not bought land, they’d come for it – to observe it, consume it, immerse in it. Both were seasonal workers, Ben a carpenter and handyman, Lina a caregiver. They worked half the year and traveled the other half. Then there was the guitar man. He wore dangling earrings, hole-ridden clothes, and generally looked pirate-like. The woman next door, the one with a formidable voice, was allowing him to stay with her given he helped install windows. She, on the other hand, had arrived in the Darién some thirty years ago, had bought her land and built her home, sustained herself, I assume, by some inherited or already made money. And of course there was Sebastian, who, with his long white beard swaying, was dancing, drunkenly, in front of me. The Darién had been his home for forty years. He’d come at 24, my age at the time, to do conservation. Quickly, he grew enamored with the place, the horse riding, the strange, fresh food falling all the time from the trees, the remoteness and simplicity of life in ancient jungle.

The guitar-playing man strummed faster. Everyone was dancing now. The Germans lurching, eyes wide and glazed with drink; the Frenchman hopping from foot to foot, giggling with the bottle in his hand; Sebastian and the singing woman dancing close together, staring into each other’s eyes. I danced as well, swaying from side to side, rolling my hips, and following the rhythm as my Colombian friends had tried to teach me. (“Don’t look at other people–the music, the music!”) Earlier that day, I’d searched through Sebastian’s guest book, flipping through fifteen years of yellowing pages. Out of hundreds of entries, mine was the first from the US. As I danced, I wondered what that meant. Was I a harbinger of change? Or just lost? From across the way, staticky reggaeton music competed with ours. The infinite bugs droned their ceaseless sounds. I heard a woman yelling and a child crying. The man playing the guitar began to howl. The others joined. I followed too, crying out from my depths.

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