Seducing the Spirits

Louise Young

Meet Jenny, a 25-year-old grad student studying songbirds in Panama. She’s good at her job but made a classic mistake: She’s entangled in an affair with her supervisor.

Now, she’s been banished to a remote jungle village — ostensibly to gather data on the nesting habits of the harpy eagle, but practically to get her out of snogging range of her boss.

She’ll be living very near, but not with, the indigenous Kuna people — a real community that lives on a cluster of small islands just off the coast of Panama. The only advice her older ex-lover-slash-professor shared? ‘Don’t tick anyone off.’

Before Jenny’s arrival, the bird researchers had all been men. But now here’s Jenny: young, blonde, pretty, and tall; she towers over the relatively petite Kuna. The locals are not sure what to make of her at first.

And she is way out of her depth. The gig should be simple: Live in a tent on the mainland, sit in a blind in the forest, make notes about the harpy eagle family, and every Saturday, paddle 1200 meters to the Kuna’s island to attend the tribe’s community meeting.

But nothing is simple for a white lady in the jungle. She gets caught in the jungle after dark. She’s terribly ignorant about the animals and bugs that are her neighbors. She almost drowns while paddling to the weekly meeting. And because she doesn’t really know how to cook, she’s been subsisting on bananas and baked beans eaten cold from the can.

This is mostly the story of Jenny and the Kuna getting to know each other. Author (and anthropologist) Louise Young keeps the pace nice and brisk as Jenny is slowly invited into the community and the Kuna become individuals, rather than an opaque tribe. Bits about everyday life — how the cooking gets done, how the women interact with each other, the male-female roles — ring with authenticity, thanks to the author’s 20 years working among the Kuna.

The most fascinating character is the jungle, a place of seductive beauty where everyday life is deeply connected to the rhythm of the weather and the seasons. Cute sloths hang out in the trees; birdcalls constantly fill the air. There are tiny translucent frogs and bright blue morpho butterflies as big as a basketball player’s hand.

But danger is always there, too: jaguars and snakes, dehydration and disease.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to get off the grid and run away to the rainforest — fear of snakes and mosquitos be damned — this book is a safe way to give it a go.

Beneath us, the Caribbean Sea dazzles with its blue, a shade of turquoise I’ve known before only from postcards and dreams. The underwater topography paints coral reefs brown and teal against the darker blues. The mainland is deep green and smoky with the remains of clouds.

A river meanders out from the jungle hills and a minute later we pass over an island that reads an unnatural shade of gray. Squinting, I realize that the surface of the island is covered with an almost unbroken thatch of roofs. The houses of the Indians must be so tightly packed — like the bodies in the airport this morning — that there is virtually no space between them. In the turquoise water near the island, I notice bullet-shaped boats, some with billowy white sails, all pointed toward the mainland and the mouth of the river. — Louise Young

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