Panama // Socks on the Beach

PARTYDOLL ALMANAC

He said the sight of me was bittersweet. The softly sandy beach, the basketweave hat protecting my head and batik cotton scarf draped underneath, naked except for the socks on my feet. It was more than a hundred degrees.

Grey socks marled with recycled yarn on a rainforest-adjacent coastline. Every tropical peculiarity creates efficiency.

At high tide a river divided our campsite. Like a wet hallway we crossed it all day. I walked through the river ten times in an hour. With sand in my hair and a bruise on my spine, to keep my hook-and-eye camping boots dry, I sat at the river edge loosening their braided nylon laces and carried the boots across. Then on again. Then off. Untenable. Distraught.

But socks- Aha! Shoeless hubris. Socks were, with one hand, removed. Then replaced on the other side of the river without sitting. Socks held the bandages onto my feet. Socks kept my skin flaps from opening backward. Socks formed a shell around poisonous welts against which I could grind my ragged fingernails in all the itchy places without causing further abrasion. Socks limited exposure to my portals of open skin, and subsequently the arduousness of removing insects from them.

My sunburned calves and ankles, my stumps of rotted flesh. Puffed-up purple bruises sliced in half by bloody gashes. Tunnels underneath the skin. Blisters refusing to scab. Red bumps. White bumps. Oozing pink patches. Dozens of pinprick holes, all maddeningly narrow and bottomlessly deep. A spreading rash like a puzzle piece or single patch of camouflage, glossy strawberry for the most part but chalky grey around the edge.

Preening from the knees down was regularly necessary. Ants and other jungle bugs, blanketing the beachgrass, wandered uninvited through windows of ripped skin, contentedly crawling about in my juicy wounds, or maybe they were trapped, either way, they needed repeatedly to be washed out. By taking off my sticky socks and swish-swashing the length of the campsite coastline knee-deep in salt water.

Living where the river meets the ocean meets the rainforest. We exhausted the supply of clean water and things got messy. The sun was not high in the sky, it was inches up, it was boiling shoulders. Every morning, the sun reached down its stifling arms, fastened me into a heated coffin. Stingy shade cast down from skinny palm fronds, but napping under a coconut tree invites the off-chance coconut to fall and crack your skull open. Don't become a statistic. I loathed the snickering coconut trees. Nothing but coconuts to eat. Nothing but coconuts to eat. I resented the daily rain that prevented my moldy clothes from drying before I pulled them onto my body. 

Later, from the safety of the city, running water, air conditioning, I sat within pink hostel walls, murals and hammocks, checking my email. The hostel computer's desktop background showed two women on vacation, smiling in small bathing suits, posed under a palm tree. As if they stepped momentarily from luxury to the tree. Only to take the picture. It was the kind of smiling-in-front-of-a-coconut-tree photo my friends would be expecting from my month camping at the beach. But I was in the jungle. Magical, uninhabitable. I made friends fast and somehow survived on the scant supplies in my borrowed backpack and didn't take any photos. What I brought back was a body intact. Thin, withered, browned, unrecognizable as flesh from the knees down.