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Outside Magazine September 2004
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Panama's Darién Gap
An Impossible Place To Be (Cont.)

SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER my Yaviza visit, in March 2004, I return for another look. As soon as I arrive, I call the police and request permission to fly over the park to investigate the deforestation. Four days later I'm told that the national director of police, Carlos Bares, is personally "indisposed" to my request, because of the security situation along the border.

So I phone a tour operator, ANCON Expeditions. Loosely affiliated with the environmental group ANCON, the outfit flies ecotourists to an abandoned gold mine as far inside the Darién Gap as you can get, just five miles from the Colombian border. The mine, known as Cana, is halfway up a 4,000-foot mountain and 30 miles from the nearest town. It's so isolated that the police consider it too much of a hike for the guerrillas, and therefore safe for foreigners. The only way to get there is by plane.

A few days after my call, I squeeze aboard a charter carrying 14 American birdwatchers to Cana. During the flight over the park, all I can see are clouds, mountains, and a lush lowland rainforest.

At the mine, a path leads into cloudforest, and along the way I can see over waves of razor-sharp ridges into South America. Nothing but a horizon-spanning canopy and layers of dark rain clouds fill the view. From here, crossing the Darién Gap looks as formidable as a trek across the Sahara.

During my first night at the Cana Field Station, a converted mining camp, I wake up at 1 A.M., having soaked the bed in sweat. The next day my temperature is all over the place, and a worker at the lodge discovers me shivering in bed. "Uh-oh," he says. "Looks like malaria." I later find out it's hepatitis A combined with amoebic dysentery. The Darién Gap has started taking a toll on my body—I've lost ten pounds—so I'm extremely happy when a plane shows up the next day to take me back to Panama City.

I've been expecting its arrival: I chartered it before I left Panama City. Shortly before takeoff, I beg the pilots to let the ten-seat Islander "drift off course" by a few miles, and fly at a lower altitude.

Once in the air, the Islander starts its usual route west before banking sharply to the north. Instead of climbing, it remains wafting above the treetops, buffeted by columns of warm air rising out of the jungle. A low ridge signals our entrance to the Tuira Valley, and suddenly below us lies the landscape that the police so determinedly tried to shield from our eyes—the area revealed by the satellite images as a minuscule yet potentially catastrophic fracture in the otherwise perfect seal of the Gap.

To be fair, it hasn't been turned into a wasteland. More than a few trees remain. Here and there, in fact, it appears that the ecosystem is already on its way to recovery. But one would never describe this landscape as "forested." On the contrary, it appears indiscriminately and brutally cut, and in many places burned. Moreover, much of the destruction looks fresh—new fires burn below as we fly over.

Going back to at least the 1880s, when the U.S. Congress passed legislation calling for a hemispheric system of railroads, the end of the Darién Gap has been confidently and even gleefully predicted. But, like the oceans, the Gap's resilience seems endless—and yet, as with the oceans, we know it is not. Sometime during this decade or the next—without fanfare, almost certainly—a milestone will be reached. The last trees will go down and the first breach between North and South America will open.

"How far to the border?" I ask the pilots. One of them unfolds a map and measures the distance with his fingers.

"About 20 kilometers," he yells over the roar of the engines. Roughly 13 miles. Thirteen miles of dwindling Gap dividing the hemisphere in two.
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