Lee Hunnicutt

When I was eight years old my parents moved from Marlin, Texas to Panama and worked for the Panama Canal Company. The Canal Zone was a ten by fifty mile strip of land that was owned by the US government. It had US schools, courts, police and hospitals. It was a small piece of the US carved out of the jungles of Panama.\nIt was a tropical paradise and as a kid, it was a magical place in which to grow up. When I wasn’t in school I was either swimming, skin diving, fishing or in the jungle panning for gold and exploring.\nPanama is the home of the shortest Indians in all of the Americas. At one time, Panama had a race of seven foot tall Indians. The first Indians came to Panama ten thousand years ago, so graves and burial caves abound. \nSlaves were brought over from Africa by the Spanish. Many of the slaves escaped into the jungle and fought the Spanish with a fierce hatred. They eventually mated with both the Indians and Spanish and were called the Cimarrons. Many of them still live in the almost impenetrable jungles of Panama’s Darien Province where they practice the dark arts of a mixture of voodoo and black magic.\nThe Darien Indians have their own magic which is quite amazing and baffling. I don’t have time to go into it now, but the ceremony for choosing a shaman could wow audiences on the stages of Las Vegas.\nMy first book, The Travelers, begins with some of this Indian magic. Who is to say that these amazing Indians knew things that we have yet to learn?\nI thought growing up in the Canal Zone was exciting. Panama was settled by Indians about ten thousand years ago. The Spaniards conquered and slaughtered the Indians. The Scots unsuccessfully tried to colonize a part of Panama. The 49ers used the isthmus to cross the continent going to the California gold fields. The French spent years trying to dig a canal and died like flies. The US came in 1903 and dug a canal. \nThe Isthmus is a bottle collector’s paradise. All of these cultures left garbage dumps filled with bottles, pottery and glass ink wells, just to name a few. As a kid, two of my friends and I paddled up the Chagres River in a dugout canoe, ported the boat over three sets of rapids to where the Indians wore nothing but loin clothes and carried long spears and blow guns.\nI had the privilege to grow up in this wonderful place and I want to share some of this magic with you in my book.\n