Being in Omoa

Yesterday I was supposed to return to Omoa, but with the situation there, I am instead still in California. I deferred the trip for a week and hope that by then I will be able to follow through.

But not being in Omoa has me thinking about what it was like throughout June. Omoa is small, so that we walked to the site every morning. Because of the earthquake, our original plan for where to stay was delayed. So for the first two weeks, we were in the only hotel in town that was not located directly on the Caribbean beach.

Instead of a beach-front view, our first hotel was on a dirt road that once was quiet, until around 2003. That was when a natural gas depot was built, illegally, at the end of the road. So every morning and far into the evening, parades of natural gas trucks went back and forth down the road.

The gas depot involved construction of breakwaters that have destroyed the beaches I remember from my first visit in 1977 to the Omoa coast. The speed of the damage is evident when you talk to people who own the businesses along the beach. Some of these are now half in the water-- restaurants that literally have one post offshore.

The place we moved for our last two weeks, after water service was restored in the wake of the earthquake, is a modern small bed and breakfast right on the beach. If there were beach. Instead, the owners have put in place a stone retaining wall to try to keep more erosion from happening. They pointed out that when they bought the property, there was a street in front of it and the beach on the other side. Now all this is gone.

But as we discovered, there is still a way to go into the ocean, down masonry steps the owner put in place. Once in the caribbean, the water is clear as glass, and small fish nibble at your toes. Floating is by far the best way to experience these waters.

On a clear day, you can see the distant point of Manabique, today over the Guatemala border. For us, the names along this coast are redolent of history: Manabique guards the bay of Amatique, and between Omoa and Manabique is the town of Masca. These are all places mentioned in colonial documents as pueblos de indios.

When I walk through Omoa's streets, I see histories glittering in the heat of the sun on concrete. The indigenous past comes through in naming; the colonial period asserts itself in the bulk of the 18th century fort, but also more subtly persists in the layout of the main streets.

More elusive is the nineteenth century, the early republican period. Reportedly graves enclosed within the walls of the original Spanish fort, El Real, built in the 1750s, commemorate people from that period, poorly documented in archives and almost ignored in contemporary presentations of the Fortaleza. But the fortress itself actually is a testament as much to that period as to the colonial one that gave it birth, as it was rebuilt to house prisoners of the new republic.

Most occluded today is the modern history, when banana companies thrived for fifty years. But much of this history persists in the memories of the people whose families came to Omoa then, or later, when the Fort became a notorious jail holding prisoners of a dictator.

Being in Omoa confounds the idea that time passes. Time persists. The traces of its accrual are everywhere, they have not gone away. The fort, built originally on the edge of the sea, today faces a soccer field, beyond which is the mangrove swamp that promotes the advance of the shore away from the fort itself. Between the mangrove and the walls of the fort time is literally sedimented.