Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
"Be careful, whatever you do," said Dorothy Claasen, the Canadian owner of Cocomo-by-the-Beach as she cleared our breakfast dishes. A fly buzzed around the little bottle of homemade passion fruit syrup. We looked at her quizzically. "Just be careful," she repeated, wearily. I shooed away the fly. Hank picked at his sixth heart-shaped biscuit. We'd come late to breakfast and eaten everything she offered, peppering her with nosey questions about property values and land grabs and the changing demographics of the islands. Now overstaying our welcome, we stared onto the improbably blue sea and continued our interrogation.
"Be careful of what?"
Dorothy, a restrained woman with rounded edges and graying yellow hair, had made paradise her home but now she seemed tired of it all. Her husband was not well, was already in Canada undergoing testing and she'd been left there to continue running the bed-and-breakfast by herself until the place was sold: $219,000 for a four-room B&B and a house.
When pressed for details about other places to purchase, she pursed her lips and issued enigmatic warnings. "There's buying land and then there's buying land." She exhaled and shook her head. "The situations I've seen ..."
"You mean con artists?" I said, waving the fly away.
"People don't always get what they think they're getting." She watched the fly climb the syrup bottle. Hank swatted it.
"Do you know Marty from Isla Solarte?"
"Yes, I know Marty ... I'll just say you should make sure you buy land with a title."
Hank snickered. "What idiots buy land without a title?"
I pushed down the cork of the bottle and it ended up inside, floating in the golden puddle at the bottom. The fly crawled in and Dorothy watched.
She leveled her gaze at us briefly -- exhaustion seemed to bring her to her feet. "I really should get back."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Marty is a great, very nice man." Harold, a handsome, insouciant young black guy was carrying us in his motor-powered dugout across the waters to the nearby Isla Bastimientos to visit Red Frog Beach and Salt Creek, a Guaymi Indian village.
"Dorothy Claassen?"
"She is very great too."
So far Harold had offered a rousing endorsement of every person we had mentioned. Yet his approach seemed no less scrupulously cautious than Dorothy's. On the way back from dipping in a 92-degree ocean and pathetically passing out candy and pens in exchange for pictures posed with deadly serious native children, we pulled into a tiny wooden dock leading to a beach dotted with baby palms and goofy little signs like "Marty's Marina" and "Sheppard's Sleepy Cove."
The little knoll still had a few fruit trees but much of it had been cleared in preparation for the houses to come. Twisty paths crisscrossed the hillside impaled with little stakes delineating the building plots. Bread fruit weighed down the bows of trees; a flock of wild parrots screamed across the flawless sky; goats grazed on brilliant grasses. The place was unbelievably perfect, a living cliche. One could almost expect to see Gilligan and Mary Ann scramble out of the brush with piña coladas in hand.
It was at breakfast the next day that we overheard Marty describing "his fantasy island." But given Dolores' caveats, we were suddenly in no rush to buy. Hoping to do some comparative shopping, we hopped a boat to Isla Carneros, a wee island just spitting distance from Colon.
After taking down phone numbers from the surprisingly numerous hand-painted real estate signs, we happened upon a house under construction where a light-skinned, blue-eyed Afro-Caribbean carpenter was working. He introduced us to the owner, a salty American retiree called Capt. Tom Williams, who had bought a patch of flooded ocean-side property and proceeded to turn it into a piece of prime white sand beach property.
"How did you manage that?" I asked.
"Illegally," Williams crowed. "Wetlands are supposedly protected wilderness." His carpenter leaned on a saw horse and watched his boss with bemusement but no sign of disapproval.
"Did they fine you?"
"Naw." He rapped a wall of lacquered hard wood. "Knock on teak."
We read a name on our scribbled list and asked if he was good person to buy real estate from.
Williams and his carpenter looked at one another and broke into ribald laughter. Tears formed in the carpenter's eyes. "Stay away from him!" the Captain inveighed with some relish. "He says he's a lawyer, he says he owns property, but he's just a piece of work."
Launching into an exhaustive description of the land laws in Panama, the Captain explained that titles were hard to come by on island property, because legally now the government was no longer selling island property to individuals. But one could obtain the "right to possess," which was almost as good as a title. "That's what I've got here," he concluded, sweeping his hand across his idyllic outpost.
"Have you heard of Isla Solarte?" I asked.
The men exchanged glances with conspiratorial chagrin. "I really can't say anything about that," the Captain sighed. "Sheppard and Marty's mad at me. They say I been ruining all their deals."
"Do they have the right to possess?"
"He probably does, but I don't think they have the right to subdivide it and share the right with the buyers."
"So what exactly are they selling?"
"Well." He chewed an imaginary straw. "I believe what they're selling is the 'right to pick fruit.'"
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