I'd like to apologize to all my fan out there for having ignored you for so long. Long days in front of a computer screen. So when I get home, the last thing I want to do is turn on my own computer.

.

.

.

Last March I was in Panama to finish up a project that I'd been working on. We were installing a new AM transmitter in a tiny little town on the pacific coast. All went well.

While I was there, I went to the production centre to do a little maintenance work on the computers. The Centre is located on an aboriginal reserve about forty-five miles inland and up into the mountains from the transmitter site. Juan and Bernardino drove me up there.

To say there's a road to that town is a serious exaggeration. It was the end of the dry season in March and it was hot. I remember sprawling myself in the back seat of the radio station's Toyota 4X4, being bounced around like corn in a popper, staring aimlessly at the landscape. The ground was baked brown and there was smoke in the air. Apparently, the dry season is synonymous with brush fires.

The farmers in the hills grow trees along their property lines for fencing. It only takes a few weeks to grow a good sized tree during the rainy season. Anyway, they cut the trees at about shoulder height and string barbed wire between them. Pretty clever, eh?

Peering through those stumps I could see huge valleys surrounded by mountain ranges. The clouds cast moving shadows so that they looked like giant ghosts walking along the valley floor. They probably were.

That Toyota climbed around like a big clumsy spider - over boulders, washouts and ruts the size of canyons. It was just like in the movies where you look down out of the side window and you find yourself ogling several hundred feet over a cliff. It took two hours to travel those forty-five miles.

Yesterday I got an e-mail that Juan and Bernardino were in an accident that totaled that truck. Juan�s in the hospital.

Arc