Shopping for paradise

The next day I confirmed my guess about Sheppard Johnson at the tiny Bocas airport with the brand new airstrip -- mysteriously subsidized by the American military. Riding in on his bike, he came to see off two couples who had bought into the development. He unfurled blueprints and chatted regulations. After he left, one of the men confided that he and his wife didn't have a title because Marty and Sheppard were still "working out the paperwork" with the government. "We're going to be the first ones to break ground, though," he added proudly. "We're sort of the guinea pigs."

Since then I've heard a rumor that the phrase "buying land in Panama" is another way of saying "getting robbed." But despite all those wide-eyed buyers who discover they've bought only the right to pick a coconut, there's no question who finally gets robbed in expat land grabs. Today Panamanian paradise has a bargain basement sales tag slapped across its face. Indians and locals are selling their land and within the confines of the current economy, they're getting rich. But this is only a passing phase in an exorable process of Maui-morphosis. Only individuals like me can turn back. The islands and their inhabitants don't have that choice.

We did not buy land. Nor did we regret it. We indulged a fantasy of purchaseable paradise as far as it could go and then left it for other less tentative, less morally torn dreamers to tender. But the gradient shades of property ownership in Panama have left me dwelling on the meaning of land with the same compulsion I once reserved only for weird literary theories. With its squatters' rights, rights to possession, agriculture and even rights to pick fruit, Bocas del Torro seems more and more like a real estate siren -- attracting foreigners and capturing them in a new paradigm of possession where everything is suddenly up for debate.

Back home in San Francisco, where the housing market has become desperate and combative, I face the same dilemmas. Since I'm the owner of a tenancy in common, an arrangement that allows people who can't afford a single family home to share the title of a duplex or apartment house and thereby "buy" a flat, I don't need to buy an island to exploit Indians; I am already the enemy. TIC's generally remove rental property from the market, leading to the characterization of TIC owners as an encroaching yuppie invasion on working-class neighborhoods. Although we never evicted anyone, the El Salvadorean peasant family who lives below me will probably be evicted now that my TIC partner has decided to sell the flat downstairs.

It's so easy feeling smug about not indulging in the fantasy of foreign real estate even as we indulge in another. It's easy to feel that people like Sheppard Johnson have stepped across the line from traveler to tourist to colonialist. I call him at his home outside of Sacramento to hear from his own ears just how closely he relates to Bocas's first colonizer: Christopher Columbus.

Sounding sympathetic and guileless, Shappard Johnson explains that once the government allows them to, they will be selling titled property. In the meantime, he says, buyers do have the "right to possess." They did incur a fine, which he blamed on his allowing Panamanians to clear the property in his absence. "Fining," he said, was "very subjective." Despite such bureaucratic delays, the colony is finally underway -- they have broken ground for one house and they hold permits for five more.

When I ask about any ethical quandaries he may have had, he speaks of "making a difference," of compost toilets, developing scholarships and schools, coral protection zones, rain forest awareness and outreaching to indigenous communities. Then he tells me a story about a five-hour plane ride home from Bocas with an ecology professor, who had been there studying the rain forest.

"Finally, I said to him, 'There's a question I have to ask you and I'm scared to death of your answer. I'm developing a community of 500 houses on a rain-forest island. Am I being irresponsible?' And the professor said, 'You're not doing any damage at all. If you compare what you're doing to what is happening around the world, you're helping the community, with jobs, capital infusion, technology and teaching people to appreciate the rain forest.'" He paused. "Of course, that was music to my ears."

I get off the phone abruptly. I am feeling precariously premature contractions. As I begin timing the surges of my belly in my beige cubicle in a brick high-rise at the sirening heart of a city, Sheppard's words echo in my head. Rain forest awareness, yes! Coral reefs, yes! Compost toilets. Yes.

The breed of people who yearn to lay their heads down on "Gilligan's Island" and call it their own are not so different as I want to believe. They simply act on dreams that few of us really finally take seriously. Politically, it may be a questionable dream, but it springs from the same tender utopian place inside us that makes us think we can create a place where our children -- or even ourselves -- can experience natural beauty and another way to live. That's all.

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