The Panama Hat Trail Page 8
A parade five-hundred strong followed the musicians. Women wore their finest dresses, many with sashes saying DAMA DE HONOR. Men showed off their best suits; their sashes announced their government rank. When I asked what everyone was celebrating, I was told, “Why it’s a civic fiesta!”
The civic fiesta came to a rest next to the plaza. An elegantly dressed lad of eighteen, sitting astride a horse, spoke to the throng. “In this time of economic crisis”—the sucre had been devaluating wildly that week—“we honor . . .” His words were lost to indiscriminate fireworks and a faulty loudspeaker. The formalities dispensed with, the townspeople milled about waiting for Los Amigos del Ritmo de Jaramijó, a five-piece dance band, to set up in an open-air storefront on Ninth of July Street. Crepe paper, ribbons, and paper globes decorated the setting.
A block away, Arte Típico was just opening for the day. Run by two sisters known as the gypsy ladies for their gaudy appearance, the store sold stylish Panamas and other straw products to tourists. On one counter they displayed a photograph of themselves giving a Panama hat to Sheik Yamani of Saudi Arabia at an OPEC meeting in Ecuador. A museum highlighting the area’s pre-Columbian history filled the back of the store. As in the other hat outlets in town, the Panamas at Arte Típico came rolled up in boxes made by Jorge Lucas, a Montecristi carpenter who turned sheets of waste balsa into three dozen boxes daily. Each box had the Ecuadoran flag stenciled on top, along with the words Montecristi Fino. Lucas sold them to retailers for thirty-five cents each.
In the 1970s, when more and more campesinos were finding hat weaving less and less profitable, a government program promoted the weaving of smaller items that required less time and brought in marginally more money. Among the straw items made of toquilla and other fibers now regularly turned out are placemats, baskets, and handbags, plant holders, dolls, and Christmas tree ornaments. Because these curios generate a higher income, fewer craftsmen bother with Panama hats. Rosendo Delgado mourned the loss of his best weavers who had ceased making sombreros de paja toquilla.
CHAPTER NINE
THE VISITING JUDGE
Pre-Columbian artifacts adorned every costeña home, but only at the coastal village of Salango were they methodically mined. An archaeological dig was taking place there, run by the central government and staffed by a few Ecuadorans and many workers from Europe and the United States. I went first to Jipijapa to board a bus for Puerto López, where the Salango expedition maintained a house.
According to a gringo I had met in Quito, a well-traveled veteran of South America’s third-class buses and threadbare flophouses, Jipijapa ranks among the ugliest towns south of the Equator. He did not exaggerate. The bus pulled up to the plaza surrounded by the best Jipijapa had to offer: two-story buildings whose upper balconies sagged under the weight of their years, walls from which all the paint had peeled decades ago, stores that dared you to enter, restaurants that repulsed the hungriest traveler. This was a town famous for its Panama hats? I could find none anywhere. Its reputation was ancient history. I ducked into a back alley to relieve myself before boarding the bus for Puerto López. My discretion was unnecessary in Jipijapa, for when I returned to the plaza the driver was doing the same on the side of his bus. One day the Quito newspaper reported that some men in Guayaquil had been fined five dollars each for publicly urinating. Erasing Ecuador’s 7.5-billion-dollar foreign debt suddenly seemed very easy.
Very willing to depart Jipijapa, I hopped on a sixty-cent bus headed west to Puerto López. Its bumper sticker read GOD WATCHES OVER MY BUS, the irony of which had been demonstrated the previous week. Although the route to Puerto López lacks ravines and gorges, the same bus had blown a tire and careened off the road. Most of its passengers required medical treatment.
Puerto López is a town full of fishing boats and nets, front-porch hammocks, and dogs, kids, and pigs all playing near each other. Next to an open-air barbershop, the local movie theater—thirty folding chairs surrounded by four see-through walls—advertised a kung fu movie. The town of three thousand showed a measure of prosperity: Houses were constructed of brick in addition to bamboo. Many had outdoor staircases with railings, metal grills over the windows, and second-story balconies overlooking the ocean. Local businessmen walked around in swimming trunks and open shirts. Workers were installing a new electrical transformer. A television set rested precariously on a porch railing as a crowd gathered around to watch test patterns from Guayaquil. Puerto López, one of the viewers volunteered, even had a red-light district of sorts. An afternoon breeze blew through some palm trees on the beach. A wooden bench faced the South Pacific. A Schwinn bicycle rested against it.
When I got off the bus a man had instructed me to go to Carmita’s, a restaurant two blocks away on the beach. “Why?” I asked.
“Aren’t you here to see the Peace Corps volunteer?”
This was not the first time I had alighted from a bus in a small town to be met by the suggestion that I visit the local Peace Corps contingent. For what other conceivable reason would a gringo come to such a place?
Since 1962, when the Peace Corps sent its first trainees overseas, Ecuador has admitted an uninterrupted flow of volunteers—more than three thousand of them within the agency’s first quarter century. Occasionally helpful and innovative, sometimes ineffectual, they have become familiar to remote villagers and big-city dwellers alike. More than two hundred volunteers were scattered around the country. One was attached to the archaeological dig nearby, and she, along with the others from the site, gathered at Carmita’s after work every day for cold beer and cheap seafood. Carmita said they’d show up between five and six o’clock.
I wandered back to the main street, drawn by the sound of a brass band and a noisy crowd, and rounded the corner just in time to see hundreds of people parade by. The whole town, it seemed, was out celebrating the birthday of the Puerto López high school. Students wore homemade costumes. Each group in the parade adopted a different personality. Bands honked down the streets—El Trío was one, The Eight Ponchos another. A third, consisting of a drum, guitar, and tin horn, wore absurd wigs at forty-five-degree angles to their foreheads. “Los Hippys de Puerto López” was the next bunch, twelve boys affecting wigs, beards, and baggy clothes. Knapsacks hung on their backs. Carrying fake cameras, they ran over to the side pointing their lenses at the faces of onlookers. In retreat, they mimicked marijuana smokers, cheerful and loony. A pickup truck cruised behind them, broadcasting loud music from its bed for a gaggle of dancing clowns who twisted down Main Street. Pompom girls sashayed over to the onlookers, giggling at their friends. Girls danced with girls, boys with boys. One of the “hippys” ran over and handed me a popsicle.
“Excuse me,” a man said, approaching. “Are you a visitor here?” He introduced himself as César Aguilar, director of the school celebrating its anniversary. “We have two hundred fifty students and eleven teachers at Colegio Provincial de Manabí,” Aguilar told me. “Our students are twelve to sixteen years old. That class there”—some teenagers dressed in sailor outfits marched by, wearing imitation Panama hats made of paper—“those are our oldest.” He paused to wave to a blackface chain gang under the whip of the local police, who stumbled all over themselves. The police chief wore an evil mustache. “And these, we’re very proud of them.” More students pranced by, this time dressed as Colombians in two-tone straw hats and calf-length pants. A teacher holding a cassette machine playing Colombian music walked on the sidelines in step with the group.
“Would you like to be a judge?” Aguilar asked. “We need another one. Each judge selects the group he thinks is best in the parade. We’d be honored to have you. When the parade is over, come over to my office and vote for your favorite group.”
Word spread fast among the students. I paced the sidelines, catching each group at least twice. Everyone who passed me put on a special show. Musicians played louder, dancers stepped higher, clowns acted loonier. A striking fifteen-year-old in black stiletto heels, a white s
ailor outfit, and a Panama hat stared straight at me and smiled mischievously each time she marched by. This miserable little village by the sea seemed an inviting place to stay.
In the end I voted for the high-stepping Grupo Folklórico Consteño, as did two of the other four judges. When the winning group was announced at the school dance that night, my high-heeled sailor shot me a pout sad enough to melt the ice atop Mount Chimborazo. I kicked myself for not choosing her group. I had obviously come from a country that takes voting far too seriously.
CHAPTER TEN
CARMITA’S PEACE CORPS BAR AND GRILL
Half a dozen workers from the dig at Salango pulled up at Carmita Yanchapaxi’s open-air restaurant for happy hour. King-size bottles of cold beer were plunked on the table as the sun began its slow descent beyond the Pacific Ocean. Carmita’s menu hung from the ceiling, each entrée inscribed on a separate wooden plaque. We had a choice of meat, lobster, soup, fish, snails, crayfish, and marinated seafood. When a sea breeze blew into Carmita’s, the snails clacked against the lobster and the crayfish against the meat. I ordered a shot of Cristal, the distilled sugarcane known for its fearsome potency, but Carmita suggested Caña Manabita instead. “It’s better than Cristal,” she boasted. “It’s made here in Manabí Province. We’re very proud of it. I sell it by the shot or by the bottle.” She played Zorba the Greek on her cassette deck as a boy bicycled by hawking bananas and oranges. Two young campesinos on donkeys followed. “Here, Lassie!” Carmita called to a nearby dog. “I’ve got some scraps for you.” Half the mutts in town were named Lassie, as far as I could tell. The dogs of Puerto López, far friendlier and less threatening than most Latin American dogs, passed their time copulating in the streets, oblivious to the kids playing soccer around them.
Just as the workers from the Salango dig began their second round of beer, a dusty jeep pulled up and Presley Norton, a portly man in a flak jacket, climbed out. Norton, an Ecuadoran-born anthropologist schooled in the English-speaking world, was the project director. His arrival was welcomed not only so his staff could brief him on activities and discoveries made since he left a few days earlier but because he brought their mail from a post-office box in Quito. Unwinding from a day that had taken him by air from Quito to Guayaquil, then third-class bus and jeep up the coast, Norton handed out envelopes from Europe and the States. Two contained cassette tapes; one of David Bowie, the other, Vivaldi. “They call this town the Acapulco of Ecuador,” a Scandinavian worker said. “There’s even an Acapulco Restaurant here. Is Acapulco as primitive as this?” “No, but it’s a darn sight more expensive,” Norton replied.
The Peace Corps worker, a cultural anthropologist by title, said she worked in community development acting as liaison between the Salango crew and the town. What this appeared to mean was that she was the first to arrive at Carmita’s and the last to leave. “This place first opened in 1966,” she said. “Carmita lives above the restaurant with her relatives. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that you don’t cross her. One night we went to that place on the beach across the road, and Carmita snubbed us for a long time. We told her we were just trying out the competition to see how much better her food was, but she didn’t believe us.”
Smuggling, the occupation common to coastal villages in every hemisphere and under all governments, plays a role in the economy of Puerto López. “Once or twice a week a boat anchors offshore just north of town,” one observer said. “They don’t carry drugs, although they do come from Colombia. They unload electronic consumer goods instead. We can tell when there’s a delivery because the local power always goes out then. It ensures a safe and worry-free landing. They say Carmita carries a revolver strapped to her thigh.”
By the time the next round came we had just finished analyzing British writers, having earlier dispensed with Russian novelists and Argentine poets. My theory that Panama hats were responsible for Ecuador’s great Liberal Revolution met polite approval. We were planning to divvy up the world’s resources in gold bullion when I told Norton of my fascination with Latin American buses. “You know,” he said, “the wife of Velasco Ibarra,” five times president of Ecuador between 1933 and 1972, “died in Buenos Aires where they lived in exile. She was trying to get on a crowded bus after it had started moving and missed the step. Velasco himself died six months later. They said it was from a broken heart.”
A middle-aged woman from the United States Midwest nodded, absorbing every tidbit of local international lore. She occupied the floating Earthwatch position, reserved for whoever had the interest to spend a few weeks helping out around the site and the money to pay for the privilege. From its office outside Boston, Earthwatch offers “learning vacations” to the public. People work for a few weeks alongside archaeologists, astronomers, anthropologists, art historians, biologists, and others at some eighty sites on every continent, paying more than a thousand dollars each for the privilege. One Earthwatcher I’d met a few weeks earlier spent fourteen days on the Galápagos Islands watching turtles defecate. “The Earthwatcher we have now is useful,” Norton allowed, “but we’ve had problems with some of them. Most have no experience and false expectations. Some just stand around and watch like it’s a spectator sport. A number of them get frustrated. Overall our experience has been good, but since each one stays only a couple of weeks, as soon as that one starts to work well with us he’s gone and we have to start all over with a new one. The money they bring in is enormously helpful, though. None of them knows it, of course, but they could work for the same period of time just by writing to me.”
On my way back to the seaside hovel where I’d rented a room for $1.50, the local pharmacist stopped me to say good night. His English, of which he was very proud, was reminiscent of Beat the Clock, the television game show in which a dozen words were randomly placed on a magnetic board, then a contestant would put them in sequence to form a sentence. He shook my hand vigorously as he smiled and said: “Sorry, we will be yesterday, no?”
We left early the next morning for the site a few miles south of Puerto López. The residents of Salango, accustomed to the comings and goings of the international expedition, waved hello as the jeeps rolled by. The dig itself adjoined a sardine-processing plant, the only other industry in the town of a couple hundred people. A wire fence surrounded five large holes, each about three to five feet deep. Trowels and sieves were handed out. Dirt from each hole, five to ten centimeters at a time, was dumped into a bucket, then shaken back and forth across a screen. Solid artifacts such as ceramic shards or pieces of pottery remained on top, while broken-up clods of dirt fell through the sieve. As each significant particle was uncovered, it was carefully labeled and cataloged with others found in the same spot. Sometimes an excavation team would be lucky enough to fit two newly found shards together. The previous day the crew had found a skeleton and remnants of a stone wall that dated back to the Valdivia period, 3000 to 1500 BC. Other discoveries came from the Manchalilla period, encompassing the next five centuries. Bowls, pots, and eating utensils gave some idea of how and what prehistoric Americans ate. The work went slowly, trowelful by trowelful, each successive pile of dirt representing another decade further back in time. When these piles become archaeological paydirt, they can yield finely sculpted impressions of animals and humans, some with musical instruments, showing domestic life among primitive Ecuadorans.
Figures of prehistoric costeños displayed at the Central Bank Museum in Manta had headdresses flaring up a foot and more from the forehead, as if wearing a vase fitted tightly to the skull. Could these have actually been the first hats woven from toquilla straw?
Whenever the crew at Salango made a genuine find, Clive, the British site photographer, came over to take a picture for the archives. “At another dig near here we used to have a little Ecuadoran boy,” he said between shots. “He’d stand around and watch. Finally we hired him at a dollar fifty a day to carry things around. Then it was up to three dollars a day. He had more enthusiasm than any
one else on the team.” Clive excused himself to go through some pottery shards. “I’ve got the world’s best collection of photographs of the pigs here,” he said upon his return. “They come up to the site to bathe in the sludge piles, they run alongside on every road, dogs chase them, they’re in and out of every house, and they lounge in all the yards. There isn’t much here that pigs aren’t involved in. I’ve been watching them very closely. Do you suppose there’s much of a market for a picture book on the pigs of Puerto López? I’d like to publish my collection.”
Soon everyone retreated to the site headquarters, a large old building that housed the dig’s findings and the crew’s dog, Earthwatch. Upstairs, in the living quarters, I made a discovery of my own: a book called Manabí, by Marshall H. Saville, who wrote that toquilla fiber is so tough because it grows in coastal soil filled with salt and lime. “The most skillful Panama hat weavers,” Saville reported, “receive seventy-five dollars gold for their efforts.” The book was published in 1907.
The next morning I took the five o’clock bus back down the coast to Guayaquil, where I hoped to catch up with Domingo’s straw from Febres Cordero. The open-air wood-frame bus had five rows of closely spaced tiny benches. There was barely enough room between the benches for my legs to squeeze in. By synchronizing his route with low tide, the driver was able to use the hard-packed moist beach for a highway as we headed south. If he strayed too far to the left we’d get stuck in the looser, drier sand; too far to the right and we’d be swamped by the onrushing tide. As dawn broke we passed fishermen rowing their wooden crafts out to sea. A bracing mist slapped my face. I reached out my right hand and practically touched the Pacific Ocean. At that moment I wanted to ride that bus, uncomfortable as it was, forty-five hundred miles straight down the coast through Peru and Chile, and all the way to Tierra del Fuego.