Isthmiana/The Cruces Road

The Cruces Road
Ardent Californians, after a day of dragging in the mud and squeezing in the alloys of the Cruces Road, remember the Isthmus of Panama only as a geometrical line; a narrow, difficult, slippery, dirty path, paved like the bed of an Alpine torrent, beset with sloughs of despond and despair, with mosquitoes, tired mules, plundering natives, and bad provender. They follow this geometrical line on their way to California, as a pious Mohammedan treads tremblingly the slender bridge that conducts him to the seventh heaven, — looking forward, but very little around him, feeling painfully that the wire is cutting his feet, and regretting that the grave laws of his religion have not allowed amateur funambulistic practice. To American adventurers struggling towards their seventh heaven, the Isthmus seems to concentrate the obstacles of a continent. In dread of the thousand nameless terrors of the tropics, they hasten to Panama, eat one breakfast of eggs in their omelet stage of existence, and are off up the coast in the steamer.

From the moment of their arrival at Aspinwall an Isthmus fever floats before them, tangibly in the air. It bangs a yellow veil before every object. Their sight is jaundiced. They hurry over a railroad, laid, as they have been told, on human sleepers. The rich luxuriance of the forest along its course, now first opened to the eye of man, seems only rank, unwholesome vegetation. Instead of appreciating the almost superhuman enterprise that has placed such a trophy of civilization in the very home of unchanging repose, they growl because the prudent trains do not despatch them speedily enough to the discomforts of the next stage of their journey. It is nothing strange to them to be greeted by the whistle of a locomotive issuing from the depths of a tropical swamp. Nor strange to pass through an untouched garden of such magnificent, broad-leaved plants, and such feathery palms, as they had only seen before, dwarfed exotics, cherished in warm recesses of a conservatory. The twisted vines that drape the stems and swing from the branches of the massively buttressed trees, are mistaken by their averted glance for the terrible convolutions of gigantic serpents.

They embark on the river, are perplexed by the jabbering confusion of the boatmen, and again hardly observe the beauty that surrounds them. The Chagres is a pure type of the tropical stream. Forests, whose dense luxuriance is only known when you attempt to cut your way wearily through their mazes, overhang its course. High hills rise, covered to the summit with enormous trees, disposed in tiers to display the full effect of their great trunks and spreading foliage. Sometimes a grove of crested palms and cocoanut-trees marks the site of a native village. Its thatched bamboo huts have a shabby picturesqueness among the patches of plantains and sugar-cane. Near, laughing women are grouped in the water, washing clothes and themselves. Soft green savannas open, sprinkled, like a park, with groves and monarch trees; under their shade cattle, have taken shelter from the ardent sun. With constant change of scenes like these, the river winds along, but our party are too much preoccupied, too much distracted, for calm enjoyment.

The naked “bogas” with wild shouts thrust their canoe powerfully along against the current. They stop a moment at shabby Gorgona, to exchange emptied bottles for full ones. They pass the perilous whirlpool of La Gallina. Just at evening they reach the straggling village of Cruces. Their luggage falls into the hands of Philistine porters, whom they chase dispersedly. Arrived at their flimsy hotel, a hasty structure of whitewashed boards, the ladies are inducted into a chamber whose walls are paper, perforated with peep-holes. The gentlemen have “steerage accommodations” of board bunks in a public room. They pass a villanous night, to dream with dread of the morrow.

The morrow comes with row of mules and row of muleteers. The ladies of the party, with regretful remembrances of their last dress-promenade on horseback, are hoisted, califourchon, upon a pack-saddled mule, who, becoming conscious of his fair burden, hurries off down the street, with an inflexible determination to exhibit her at his stable, where his fellows, expecting a sensation, are already braying their compliments. At last the stragglers are collected, and, leaving Cruces to its curs, through a sunlit glade of the tropical forest they enter upon the unknown perils of the road.

Shall we here draw a veil over their progress, and exhibit the party only on the next evening, lounging, in fresh attire, upon Las Boredas, the Battery of Panama, looking out upon the beauty of the bay and inspecting the steamer which awaits them? Or shall we follow them through mud-hole and swamp-hole, through gulley and alley?

The two marked features of the Cruces Road are its mud-holes and its callejons, or alleys. Mud-holes need no description here. The two most profound are “La Sanbujedora” and “La Ramona.” In these I have frequently seen mules sunk to the neck, while their riders vainly endeavored to put a “soul under their ribs of death” by the aid of stout saplings applied upon and under. The callejons are narrow passages cut and worn from ten to twenty feet deep in the soft, friable rock of the frequent transverse ridges. They are wide enough only for a single mule. Long processions of pack-trains passing in perpetual succession have marked the path within with regular footsteps. Dark and cool passages they are, refreshing refuges from. the glare of noon, overhung by the thick forest, draped with delicate mosses and ferns; — convenient channels after the heavy showers of the rainy season, when the steps are concealed, and your mule flounders through, crushing your legs; — nice spots, too, for an ambuscade. When our party, entered the first, there was determined cocking of six-shooters. There are brave deeds in unwritten history. We make a hero of Putnam cantering down the church steps at Horseneck to escape a leaden shower; but till now no chronicler has sung the praises of our party, mule-galloping down the dislocated pavement of a Cruces Road hillside, vainly seeking shelter from the peltings of tropical rain-pellets. Down the hill, and something else is down; for lady No. 2 is over head and ears of her mule, while lady No. 1, who is in advance, ascending, has preferred to dismount at the other end of the animal. Meanwhile the mule of gentleman No. 2 has put the wrong foot foremost in entering a narrow callejon, and, trying to right himself, has gone down like a Polkist on a parquet, carrying his partner with him. Gentleman No. 1, who has already entered the callejon, looks back laughing, but is recalled to his own peril by meeting a pack-train in the narrowest spot. The mules, mischievously twinkling their ears, successively “scrouge” him into the rock; he escapes with the loss of left spur, boot, book, bowie-knife, half pantaloon, and portion of cuticle.

Disgusted with falls backward and falls forward, with mud, with rain, with revengeful beating of their mules, with the whole Cruces Road, our friends are indisposed to admire the luxuriance of the forest, the noble trees of its open glades, the gleams of glowing sunlight through its rain-spangled vine-tracery, the dewy darkness of its moss-covered rock alleys, the glimpse of a far-reaching expanse of dark, untrodden woods.

But mule exercise like this is appetizing; our party are hungry. They stop at a hut decorated with many bottles, bearing classic names, and, not waiting to cast a glance of laughing admiration upon the plantain-fed, cherubic rotundity of the naked urchins, José Marco, José Maria, and José Manuel, who toddle out, they ask for something to eat. All the oranges, all the bananas, all the chickens, all the eggs of the two first classes, are carried off by previous passers. There are still a few third-class eggs, boiling eggs; but on being brought, these are found to be impregnated with a perfume not esteemed in Yankee land, except when public characters already in bad odor are to be further anointed. There is nothing edible except a few rolls of dry-as-dust bread, washed down, perhaps, by a bottle of ale or beer, the nectar of the Isthmus, bearing the unfalsified names of Worthy Bass, Byass, Muir, Tennent, or Whitbread.

With this momentary refreshment onward goes our party. Wearily they plunge through the yellow mud of La Sanbujedora, and emerge yellow; wearily through the blue-black mud of La Ramona, and come out blue-black over yellow; wearily through many-tinted muds, each of which, like a picture-restorer, deposits a new layer of ugliness upon the original, until the original has to be scraped like an old picture to find out the fond. The gentlemen have long ago thrown away their india-rubber coats, and the umbrellas of the ladies have left their last gore upon the briers. In general, the whole party are fit subjects for a chiffonnier, if he would deign to insert his hook into such a mass of mud.

At last the fresh-flowing waters of the Cardenas announce their approach to Panama. They wash away their masks of mud to perceive the exquisite beauty of the tree-embowered ford. Then by the park-like savannas, which they are too tired to see, through the gayety of the suburb Caledonia, which they consider very mal-apropos, across the drawbridge never drawn, under the rusty gateway, they enter and bury themselves in the discomforts of Panama.

In the evening perhaps they take the air upon the Battery, are désorientés by finding the Pacific lying eastward instead of westward. They think everything looks very shabby, and totally unlike the staring newness of a Yankee town. They sleep in an Americanized caravansary; are lulled by the murmur of returned Californian curses, that permeates the house; dream of the alligators and boa-constrictors they ought to have seen. Nightmare comes to them in the shape of the mules they have bestrode. Next morning, wakened by the clinking of the cathedral’s cracked bells, the gentlemen invert their boots to search for scorpions, and the ladies regret that they have anticipated mosquitoes, as one would wish to do strawberries, by three months.

They take boat for the steamer, allow themselves to be bullied and cheated by the boatmen almost as much as strangers in London and New York are by cabmen. Mutual condolences and mutual congratulations are exchanged with the other passengers. Mutual exaggerations of dangers passed and dangers feared are held up for mutual admiration.

All are completely unconscious that not a hundred miles from Panama is a most charming country, a veritable Arcadia.