What Meg and I have been through since the day we got together in Ukraine cannot be summarised in a few sentences, so I am not going to try. What follows below is my attempt to give shape to those years in which we were trying to stay together, stay alive, and live on our own terms. I stop at our departure from Panama in 2023, because what has happened since we are still living through, and I cannot yet see the resolution to our statelessness and instability.

My escape and our voyage to meg’s home (2006 – 2007)

The two of us were living our lives on the opposite sides of the world. I, in Russia, was forced by my mother and society to abandon my dreams and marry a man. Meg too was uncomfortable in her world. Then we met each other online.

Meg blew my world to pieces. We got to know each other better and seeing for the first time in my life an example of the woman who lived her life the way she wanted, I myself started craving that freedom. Eventually, I was ready to do anything to achieve it. I no longer was afraid of condemnation, disapproval and violence against me.

On February 16, 2006, I ran from my home in Russia to Ukraine’s capital where Meg and I saw each other for the first time. Two weeks later my parents attacked us and kidnapped me in attempt to drag me back to Russia. I had to forget Meg and return home – back to my jail. I felt I had to obey my parents and society but by then I had tasted freedom. During those two weeks with Meg in Kiev I lived my life the way I wanted. It was truly my life. I loved Meg and for the first time I loved myself. I refused to go home.

Meg came to my rescue. There was fight with my parents and we all were taken to the police station. Yet, that evening, thanks to Meg being a Westerner, we were free again and we were together. My parents left Kiev without me but with my passport my mother stole from my bag.

By choosing Meg and my freedom over the life and the role my country demanded me to carry out I condemned myself to exile. There was nothing for me to come back to in Russia. I no longer had a home in Ivanovo. Had I come back, my parents would lock me up, or worse. I would never see Meg again and would loose my freedom, which to me meant my life. Russia was also no longer my home. I wasn’t willing to lie any more, to sacrifice my life for someone else’s prejudices and self-aggrandizement and there would be no support for me. Quite the opposite, I was a disgrace and aberration. I was the enemy and had to be corrected or eliminated. I didn’t want a husband or children. I wanted to love a person and I wanted freedom.

Our allowed time in Ukraine was running out. Meg and I had to be somewhere. Russia was out. There was only one place for us to go – to the country where Meg had a home.

I had no visa for Canada, couldn’t go to Russia to get it and the conventional way of reaching Meg’s home — by plane — was not an option for us. To my astonishment, Meg speculated about buying and fitting up an aircraft but in the end settled on the idea of reaching her home by a sailboat.

The instant I got my passport back (by sheer miracle), Meg and I got out of Ukraine and flew to Turkey. Meg found and bought a sailboat she thought was suitable for a huge offshore passage to British Columbia where her home was. We prepared the yacht the best we could and two months later headed for the open Mediterranean.

In Victoria, Meg had a daysailer, so she had some sailing experience. I, on the other hand, knew nothing about sailing or the sea. Not a thing! But we survived at sea one day, then the next, then one more. Eventually we were covering significant miles.

We crossed the Mediterranean from East to West. We weren’t allowed a stop in Gibraltar, so we just went on, heading into the Atlantic without charts, repairs or rest. We crossed the Atlantic and the Caribbean sea. Panama let me in and we slipped into the Pacific via the canal.

What followed was more days at sea, then weeks, then months. We got to the latitudes in the North Pacific where we got nearly killed. There was nothing else we could do, so we ran from winter storms, rounded the deadly quadrant and headed North again, towards Vancouver island. Until one day I saw a strange gray strip on the horizon. It took time for me to realize this was actual land.

The day Meg and I headed into Mediterranean sea completely changed our lives. At sea we became free. Truly free. Of social programming, self doubt and fear. We lived one day at a time and this is when we became the masters of our own lives. From then on, that freedom, that need to live our lives our way, has been always calling us. Our home was no longer one specific location but the whole of the world.

Stuck (2007 – 2012)

Jumping onto the boat with Meg in Marmaris, I knew nothing about Canada, and I didn’t really care what it was like. What mattered to me was being with Meg. Being myself. Keeping the feeling I had just discovered — that I had control over my life, and for the first time ever I didn’t feel like I was squandering it. I needed to keep that. So when Meg bought a boat and we pointed the bow into the horizon, I welcomed it.

It was only after months and then years in Canada that I began to understand what the place was — and what it did to me and Meg. It wasn’t good. Suddenly, we were brought to a halt. A complete halt. We lost control over our lives, over their direction. Suddenly we needed papers to go on. I was told I was a refugee and that I needed protection. Nobody ever asked me what I thought of that. The reality is, I never felt like a refugee, never wanted to be one. I wanted to be with Meg and be free. That’s it. Being stuck in Canada was the complete opposite of my dreams.

We spent five years in Victoria, jumping through immigration hoops, waiting for papers that were supposed to grant me something (I wasn’t sure what). First fixing Meg’s home, then stuck on our boat in the marina, surrounded by boat bums. In limbo, with constant rain, darkness, and floatplanes gassing us daily. Only in 2012 did I become a permanent resident of Canada — a title that had to be worshipped. In reality, all it meant was that Canada finally deigned to let me stay, while all along my spouse was a Canadian citizen. By then it was clear to us that Canada would never grant me citizenship. Not without more adulation, more submission, and us wasting yet more years of our lives. Still, I applied.

We abandoned it all in the summer of 2012. We left the Strait of Juan de Fuca and pointed the bow south, hoping to reach Southern California, where we could get warm again.

Years of delusion about becoming a Canadian citizen while clinging to North America (2012 – 2019)

Sailing down the American West Coast was one of the hardest stretches of our lives. The good thing was that it wasn’t long. It took us just several weeks to get to Los Angeles.

All along, I couldn’t understand why we lived the way we did. Why were we at sea? Why didn’t we have a home? A country? Why did not a single person in our lives give a damn but wanted us hurt, quashed, defeated? None of it made sense. All I knew was that we had to go on. Things weren’t that bad, I convinced myself. Meg and I were still together, and though constantly on the run, we had a life. We just had to keep going in a world where everyone else had a home, a car, acquaintances, safety, stability — and didn’t always end up back at sea. And they had families.

Over the years, the concept of family became a puzzle to me. Meg was my only family. What it was like to have more than one person in your life who knew you existed or cared about you — by then I had lost all sense of that.

We were trying to do the impossible. We were living a kind of life that clashed with a world where human existence is dictated by governments and papers — by someone who doesn’t know you exist and couldn’t care less about you. My stays in countries where I was allowed as a tourist were constantly running out. We weren’t living; we were being bounced from one shore to the next. Staying for a while, then running. That way, we saw Southern California and Mexico. Eventually we reached the Panama Canal, which we were excited about crossing. We were making miles back toward the part of the world that meant something to us — where it all began, where it felt right. That we might one day actually end up in Europe — I couldn’t even dream of it. I had no right to return. I was a refugee; my life was in danger. I had to be in Canada, asking for permission to do anything and waiting for more papers.

We reached Charleston in South Carolina. There was history there that connected us to Europe and reopened old wounds. I traveled with a document issued by Canada to refugees. When it expired, there was only one way I could get a new one — by getting myself back to Canada.

In the meantime, years were flying by. It was 2017, and my application for Canadian citizenship was by then well and truly buried or botched. But Meg and I kept hoping it would all work out somehow. We loved each other; we had done so much to be together; surely they — the Canadian government — must see how much we needed that citizenship, that it was our safety. This was our hope. Our gut (our experience) told us the opposite, of course. I knew there was no way that country would let me be its citizen. What I was, how I was living — that wasn’t allowed. I had to be stuck in Canada, slaving as a cleaner. The fact that Meg, my partner, was Canadian didn’t bother them. In fact, I believe it made the whole “let’s see how soon they’ll keel over” thing more exciting. They weren’t only hurting me, the immigrant — they were showing Meg, the Canadian, her place.

With my expired travel document, I couldn’t just cross the border like everyone else. Meg and I embarked on yet another massive haul — a 2,000-kilometre run from Charleston, SC, to Halifax, NS. This was the only option Canada left us.

All my life with Meg, I kept wondering how she could keep doing this. How could she keep being humiliated, denigrated, and put in danger by staying with me? She keeps telling me it isn’t my fault I am Russian. On our way to Halifax, in horrible weather, I kept wondering whose fault it was. Mine, for not being a member of “the West” club? Meg’s, for loving me and sticking by me no matter what? Canada’s, for treating her like shit along with me? Or Russia’s, for having people who left me no other option but to run as far as I could?

We loved Nova Scotia. The people were nice and the nature spoke to us. I applied for a travel document and… nothing. There were no signs of life from Canadian immigration. They continued playing the same game — they would not let me have a new travel document. This was my sixth attempt, and they were sticking to their guns. We got in touch with the local paper. They used our story to spice up their pride week. Eventually we came across a person who cared, and he managed to get the government moving. By then Meg had a call with the local MP, who screamed at her for going to the media.

It was the very end of September when I finally received the travel document. And it was November by the time we were ready to sail south. By then winter was in full swing in Nova Scotia. Crossing the Gulf of Maine, we were freezing. Again, I couldn’t believe what we were living through. Was someone forcing us into this, or were we doing it to ourselves?

In December 2017, we sailed south via the Intracoastal Waterway — freezing, stopping wherever we could, getting warm, getting provisions. Seeing how others lived — on land, with homes, families, routines, safety. Christmas was, again, hard for Meg. She had told me stories of Christmases she used to have as a child — cozy, safe, surrounded by family. Now she was a grown woman who loved a Russian and who, to the dismay of her remaining family, had no home and kept talking nonsense about needing to bounce around the world on a boat.

After Florida, it was the Bahamas. Then Florida again. Then Charleston. We were back to our stomping grounds and could almost fool ourselves into a sense of security. A stranger from Canada contacted me. She turned out to be the daughter of the immigration lawyer in Victoria who, back in 2007, had started my immigration process to Canada. For some weird reason, Canadian Immigration contacted his office — not the lawyer who was currently representing my case.

Did you notice I mention lawyers a lot? Yes – the money it cost us to keep constantly fighting the Canadian government, proving to them that I had a right to safety, to having a country was huge. We were bled dry. But according to the government, I had forfeited that option (to have a country) by traveling, by living my dreams, by not being in Canada. The response they sent to my now-deceased lawyer made it clear: my citizenship application was refused. I got the answer six years after I applied. For six years Meg and I kept hanging around North America, hoping against all odds for a miracle. Convincing ourselves there was something there worth sticking around for.

My time in the USA ran out again, and it was back to the Bahamas for us — another insignificant haul of about 700 km. To a place that had less than nothing for us. It hardly even had food in the areas where we anchored. Still, we convinced ourselves we were having a good time, because it was, well, the Bahamas. What can you have there if not a terrific time? People would be jealous, had they known.

Our allowed time in the Bahamas ended, like it always did everywhere else, and we had to choose where to go next. It was a crapshoot, and neither of the two options we settled on was going to improve anything. But crossing the Caribbean on our way to Panama — little did we know — we were heading for our greatest challenge yet.

When I was in Russia, I saw the Russian version of Survivor, filmed in Bocas del Toro. Today, I’m not even sure what thrilled me about it. But while we were in the Bahamas, I thought Meg and I should experience the place, since we were “in the area” — some 2,000 km away.

Years of hell (2019 – 2023)

Marina 1

We had a destination — Panama’s Caribbean coast — but we had no idea where we were going or why. The truth was: we had to be somewhere. Panama, lying beyond the horizon, was just another chunk of Earth I, a Russian, was allowed to enter. That was all.

I felt a flicker of relief when I saw the jungle after we reached Panama days later. That feeling disappeared the same day. We needed to clear in, so we went to a marina on one of the islands. We could hardly understand anything. We were in shock. We had just crossed the Caribbean. We had spent days at sea, knowing nothing but sea — and suddenly we had to act normal, to smile, to pretend land was unimportant to us. That’s when the creep tried to latch onto us. Onto me, especially.

It was the only marina in the whole area with decent services and — we thought — without boat bums or patronizing American/Canadian male cruisers. We were wrong. And the marina manager descended on me like a hawk. In my email to the marina, I had explained who Meg and I were, hoping to gauge their attitude toward two women on a boat and maybe secure some safety. Instead, it only excited the marina manager at the idea of a “hot Russian chick” who would be right on his doorstep — he lived in the same marina on a small sailboat.

With no accommodation anywhere around, Meg and I had to live on our boat in the marina. On the very day we arrived, we had to entertain the manager at a local joint while he made sexual jokes and remarks. Only weeks later did we figure out a sort of plan: ignore him. But with the guy being the manager and living there, ignoring him was impossible. And the local men working in the marina had a look in their eyes that made me think they were ganging up on us too, resenting us for reasons I never understoond.

Beside our boat lived a drunk and his mother. His proximity bothered mostly Meg who was still expecting the behavioral norms of the wealthy world she once was a member of. Now, we could do nothing but try to avoid the two as much as it was possible. We switched our lives: awake at night, asleep during the day. I pretended not to speak English to reduce interaction. That only made the guy hate me more.

Weeks passed. I kept telling myself it wasn’t so bad. We were on a tropical island! Russian Survivor had been filmed there! I had to appreciate the place, break myself and embrace it. And surely Meg and I were being unreasonable disliking the marina manager’s advances — this is how the world works after all. Men own everything, including women. Women have nothing, must submit and be grateful for being raised and treaded as sex objects.

That was the message delivered to us by a coordinator from the company managing the marina during one of his visits. He told us we were imagining things. That we were the problem. That the manager’s behavior was nothing extraordinary. We posed no threat — two women with no home, no safety, and no men to defend us — so they won and we withdrew. We slept during the day to avoid everyone. We lived at night when no one was awake to hurt us.

I went to the resort store in the mornings — which were our evenings — to buy food. Meg and I had dinner when it was 10 a.m. for everyone else. Their day began when we went to bed. It went on like this for months, then years.

I didn’t know how Meg was surviving. I was consumed by my own survival. I didn’t realize our situation was destroying us. But what good would that realization even do? We had no support. No one to talk to. No families. No way out (when lockdowns spread around the world). All we had was that tropical island I grew to hate, the marina docks filled with people I wanted to run away from, and the locals — adults and children — barefoot, toothless, killing whatever crawled in the jungle.

The horror we were living through began breaking us. I became obsessed with my health – this was how I started to crack. Meg had her own mental hell. Later she told me she solved sudoku puzzles to keep her mind from collapsing — believing that when she finished another puzzle, she would die. I had no idea. I was preoccupied with what was happening in my mind.

We were sinking in a pit, and I didn’t realize it. My days became nightmares. I kept telling myself I wasn’t seeing things right. Everyone in the world would kill or die to be on this island. I was the lucky one. So we went on. Day after day. I went to the store. We hid on the boat. Around us, boats and people came and went, the manager lurked, hating us and avoiding me, the “nasty Russian.”

In October 2021, my anxiety got to such a level I could no longer function. I had no idea what was happening to me. We had no access to any medical assistance, all I had was Internet. And having health anxiety and access to Internet is the strait way to disaster. By looking for answers online, I was digging my own grave.

There were awful symptoms, all in my brain, that convinced me I was insane or getting there. Only when I started showing physical symptoms that Meg realized how bad it was and that I was actually on my way out. I got terribly thin. I had no appetite. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t sleep. I had violent thoughts, racing thoughts. And I had the scariest experience when out of nowhere, a though — more like a feeling of sheer terror — would hit me. I was horrified. I was convinced I was a goner and because of intrusive thoughts I concluded I was an awful person who at any moment could stub Meg or could kill small creatures.

Meg got me on Fluoxetine — 20mg a day. I began recovering slowly, but the environment hadn’t changed. Still, there was progress. I started coming back to life.

It was now February 2022. I was listening to Russian state radio. Something terrifying was brewing. Putin was eyeing Ukraine. Reports of Russian troops amassing were hitting the news.

We left the marina for good just days after the war in Ukraine began.

Marina 2

Meg and I just untied our lines and pointed the boat into the mangroves.

To this day I keep asking myself: would we have done it if we hadn’t been forced? But you have to understand — that dock, with power, fresh water, and access to land, was all we had known for three years. It was our only stability. The only life we had in that place. We didn’t know if, or how, we would survive anchored somewhere out in the mangroves.

By then, the animosity toward us among the marina residents had reached a new height. We ended up with a boat parked beside ours with a couple (Meg is convinced they were Mormons) living on it, and of course we got in trouble with them. Once they ran their engine for what seemed like hours (yes, people do that in marinas), which prompted Meg to shoot onto the dock and express her disapproval. Later, they complained to the marina, claiming we were doing heavy construction at night. Management informed us in writing that it would be best for everyone if we left the marina. When the manager threatened to throw us out, we untied the lines that very day and headed for the mangroves.

It felt surreal — I was seeing the mangrove islets up close for the first time. Until then, they had just been part of one green expanse lying in the distance beyond the marina.

We weren’t going to anchor, not then. We were convinced we wouldn’t survive without a dock. So we found another marina not far from the one we had been at. It looked suspicious. We had been there once before — it didn’t seem operational and it had just one boat moored. The owner wrote in very strange English. My impression after reading his messages was that he didn’t need customers, and the marina was just a side gig for whatever he was doing on his massive property.

My suspicion about the man was spot on. Seeing him the day we arrived at his “marina,” I knew instantly he was creepy and possibly dangerous, but I silenced my concerns. We needed a dock. His marina was the only option in the area Meg and I thought we could stomach.

We had thought the marina we’d been staying at was bad. What we didn’t realize was that it was the most civilized place in the whole Bocas del Toro archipelago. There were paved paths to walk, a few restaurants, staff at the reception who spoke English. There were regular deliveries of food and necessities to the resort store. And there were taxi rides to Bocas Town.

In the place Meg and I now found ourselves, there was only the dock to tie a boat to, and a freshwater tap under lock and key. There were no people around. There was one gravel path leading to a house on top of the hill, and occasionally a native or two would sneak through the surrounding jungle. Later we were told that for food they killed any animal they could find in the woods, and washed their clothes in the creek. They would take your garbage for five dollars and, instead of disposing of it properly in Bocas Town as promised, they would chuck it right there. The owner and his girlfriend — both from Europe — also told us that the native women had on average seventeen children, that births and deaths weren’t recorded, and that girls often got pregnant as early as fourteen, sometimes by their own grandfathers.

But it wasn’t the natives who made us run from the place. It was the owner. From the very day of our arrival, he developed a deep hatred for me. I was taken aback. He looked at me with dismay, barked more than he spoke. Later we learned from his girlfriend that he hated confident, self-actualized women. And there you go — he suddenly had two such women in his marina. And since we were his only customers, with no one else around, all of his attention and vitriol was aimed squarely at us. You might think that’s bad business practice. Not in Bocas del Toro. The man was a god on that property. He was lord of the land and could do whatever he wanted.

All this was happening while Meg and I were still fragile. We had just escaped one hellhole and ended up in another. But we kept convincing ourselves that we should cling to it, try to make it work. If we didn’t, we’d end up anchored — and then what? How would we survive? Where would we go? I couldn’t imagine surviving at anchor. I didn’t yet know that such a life wasn’t the worst option for us.

When we were still in the marina we got kicked out of, Meg and I walked everywhere there was a path. I also walked into jungle alone when Meg refused to go outside during the day. I saw the island’s jungle and some of its creatures. But only when we arrived at the creepy European’s marina did I see real jungle. The kind you need rubber boots and a machete for.

It was an unsettling combination of my mind still messing with me and me seeing something I had only seen in documentaries. The truth is, the place I was crawling through was astounding. It was the jungle the way everyone imagines it: thick, wet, loud. There was no way through without rubber boots. That’s why I couldn’t get far. I was in cheap running shoes (the only shoes we could get in Bocas Town), and eventually I had to turn around. The path turned into a creek. I could see that the natives could go farther by jumping from one board deliberately placed there to the next — but they were wearing rubber boots, and I wasn’t.

On the way back I saw an amazing frog. Bright orange with darker spots. I wished Meg had been with me, and my mind was still racing with fear and worry but I made myself watch the frog longer trying to memorize the moment — the moment when I saw real jungle, with a real tropical frog.

We got to know the owner’s girlfriend, a woman in her late fifties, on the very day we arrived. She was jumpy, clearly terrified of the man. She would sneak to our boat and tell us how much she envied us for not being with men, for being in charge of our lives. Meg and I assumed we had found a friend. We even developed a soft spot for the woman. We were desperate — we trusted and got attached to anyone who showed us even a hint of understanding or compassion.

But we opened our hearts only to have them stabbed. When the woman got herself into yet another fight with her psychopathic, controlling boyfriend — after he discovered she had been planning to run — she told him it was our doing, that we had conspired against him and encouraged her to flee.

We had the guy running down from his house on the hill, his girlfriend with him, terrified, her hands shaking, telling us to get out of his marina or else. Or else meant him ratting us out to the Panamanian authorities for whatever misdemeanor he decided to accuse us of. Fearing the guy wouldn’t let us stay in his marina, Meg had told him that we were just crew on the boat and said nothing about us being a couple. His girlfriend told him we were — and now he was screaming that we were liars and had something to hide.

I remember the two of them on the dock: him yelling at us, waving his hands, pacing back and forth; and the woman, shaking like a leaf, terrified of him, terrified of contradicting him. I remember not being able to believe that she had betrayed us just like that. After all the food and booze we shared with her, after all the heart we poured out, all the support and understanding we gave her. To this day I wonder why she did it. Was she truly in danger of him hurting her, or was it simply more convenient to betray us — to take his side instead of standing up for herself and for what was right?

We untied our boat and moved away from the place — just barely, a few miles at most. We anchored and could still see the house on the hill. I saw the woman through binoculars, pacing on their large balcony. What was she upset about, I wondered? That things had turned out so unfortunate for her? Or was there some small part of her concerned about what would happen to me and Meg? I don’t think she cared about us. Which meant that the only human connection we had in the entire area was gone. The only tiny dot blinking on the map had disappeared, leaving us alone in a massive mangrove archipelago.

The year in the mangrove swamp

This was the very first time when Meg and I had no access to land in Bocas del Toro. There was nothing around us but water and mangroves in the distance. There was also Bastimentos Island surrounding us — land, supposedly. Only it wasn’t really land; it was jungle, where tropical birds and animals lived, and where the natives built their huts close to the water.

When the creep with the marina was wooing Meg — trying to convince her to become an overseer of his property — he suggested, so nonchalantly we could barely hear him over the roar of the panga we were riding in, that we use his kayaks to explore the surroundings. We did, of course — someone else was being kind to us, or so we convinced ourselves. That was the first time we went deep into the jungle, to the creek that tourists used to reach a local attraction, a cave with bats. But since we had somebody else’s kayaks with us, which could be stolen, we didn’t go ashore. We just paddled around, seeing what undiscovered and new we could find.

Years before then, in the USSR and later in Russia — having in my life things like hospitals, roads, central heating, buildings made of brick or concrete, literature — everything that represented “humanity” to me — I would never have imagined what I saw in the Panamanian jungle in 2022. Meg and I paddled deeper and deeper until we began coming across the natives. The real ones. The ones tourists don’t see — the ones nobody sees or imagines in the West or even in Russia. We didn’t see any women or children. There were only men, very few of them, blended almost seamlessly into the jungle and the rubble they lived in. Motionless, almost catatonic. They didn’t seem to be doing anything, not even moving. I assumed they were fixing outboards, because outboards were everywhere — screwed upright to boards or lying on the ground.

Something about the first man we paddled past made me think he was aware of our presence. I think he looked us in the eye and his facial expression changed. The second man was older. He stood up on the bank of the creek, leaning against a board to which an outboard was screwed. He just stared at us, his face blank, his eyes void of any thought or emotion. It was eerie. Before then I had never seen a human being — one who wasn’t anesthetized — who seemed completely unaffected by anything around him. There was literally no sign of consciousness on that man’s face. Meg was convinced the natives were being given fentanyl and ketamine to keep them subdued. I don’t know. I’m not sure.

This was the environment we were starting to live in. We moved to the next anchorage, then the next. Eventually we ended up in a kind of bay that was protected by mangroves on three sides out of four. That island was our home from May 2022 to May 2023, when we finally left Panama.

You might be wondering how we could be in Panama for so long if foreigners are allowed a maximum stay of six months. We had overstayed. We had entered Panama for the second time — from Costa Rica and without the boat — in October 2019. We were thinking of flying to Ukraine, that’s how bad things were for us in the first marina we stayed at. But we didn’t. The flight was long and expensive, and we couldn’t afford to keep the boat moored in Panama while renting a flat in Ukraine. So we stayed — and in December 2019, the COVID madness engulfed the globe. Everyone was stuck, pinned down, locked up, and so were we. Even if we had left Panama then, we wouldn’t have been able to land anywhere else in the world.

We were living — or rather surviving — in an absurd world. The boat, with us on it, was sitting in a swamp with nothing but a plain of water and mangrove outcrops all around. That was it. Occasionally a barracuda would swim under us, or a dozen Amazon parrots would fly over. The worst were the local Indians.

The sight of a wooden canoe gliding out from behind the mangroves made me feel sick. This was my “community,” the way they say in the West. And they really were — there was nobody but them around. How they sat in their canoes, who they were, what they did — all of it affected my day and my perception of the world. Because they were my world. I was a human, and they were — supposedly — also humans. I had to have things in common with them. I had to like them, appreciate them. This is what I told myself, because this is what I had been brainwashed to believe by the media. The reality was, I couldn’t stand the idea of living another day among them. I wanted to run, to flee — but there was the Caribbean to the east of us. And the wind was always against us. And the boat was on its last legs. And so were we.

The swamp, and the silhouettes of the locals hunched over in their canoes, was all there was for us — every day. For months.

Despite the isolation and sensory deprivation, we hated the idea of going to Bocas town (we called it Bogus Town). We waited until we had nothing at all to eat on the boat, and only then would we make the two-hour motor trip there. We would hail a local on his panga, pay him five dollars, and only then would we have access to the food store run by Chinese owners.

We bought only as much as we could carry in several trips from the check out to the store’s van. The guy then would give us a ride back to one of the panga docks. Then we paid another five dollars to yet another panga guy, moved all the food onboard, and made another two-hour trip back to the anchorage where we were staying. The amount of food we bought lasted us about two months.

We snorkelled to get off the boat and move our bodies. But really, snorkelling was our way to go on. We exercised, and at the same time we saw something that wasn’t our boat — wasn’t our trap.

At first, I was afraid of being in the water, despite being a good swimmer. The fear of everything was the residue of the trauma I had experienced in the first marina we stayed at — the one attached to the resort. I was afraid of being stung by jellyfish, of nurse sharks, of anything that looked off underwater. And I was afraid of myself — of going mad.

I was convinced that after my experience in the marina, I was on the brink of slipping again. I monitored my thoughts constantly, everything that was going on in my head. It was exhausting and terrifying at the same time, because I kept concluding that nearly everything I thought was a sign of me losing it. I was afraid of hearing voices in my head, afraid of words like brain, mind, thoughts, schizophrenia, psychosis. While snorkelling, I was terrified that I wanted to smash the little fish I saw. I was convinced I especially wanted to harm the cuter ones — the more innocent ones — the baby damselfish.

We snorkelled every day, our faces down underwater. For hours. I started using the GoPro camera Meg had bought years back in San Diego. It became my way of surviving. Clumsy at first, my videos improved drastically with time. I realised I was good at it. That way I managed to capture local skates, various fish species, and nurse sharks on camera. Then, when we started our “coral garden project,” I filmed us excavating old coral, moving it, and relocating live coral from afar to our underwater garden. The work was massive, but it kept us alive. You can still see the trenches we made — where we removed old coral — on satellite images.

I can hardly remember what we did on the boat beyond fixing various systems that constantly broke. Meg and I were surviving, that’s all I know. The internet was slow. We didn’t have Starlink then; we used Panamanian SIM cards. Meg was always responsible for the internet — she understands plans, usage, the right words. I’m a troglodyte in that area; all I know is whether my computer has internet at the moment or it doesn’t.

Watching movies and TV shows online also helped us survive. It gave us a sense of belonging, of knowing people, of being part of something. It was mostly British television. We gobbled the series down one after another, despite the slow and frustrating bandwidth.

Where did the power come from? From two small solar panels, and from running the engine. All of our fresh water came from the sky. We collected rainwater using two massive sheets of Sunbrella that also served as our solar shade and our roof. Each sheet had a hole with a plumbing connector attached to a hose that ran to the openings in the deck of our freshwater tanks. All the fresh water we consumed between April 2022 and May 2023 in Panama came from the sky. We didn’t have access to a tap once.

Every once in a while, we would remember Meg’s family — that they were out there somewhere in Calgary, living the lives they lived. In houses. With heat. With unlimited power and fresh water. With people around them who knew them. With routines. Saturdays when Meg’s mother would go to Costco. I always remembered the fridge in her house — large, comfortable, full of food. And the ice that was always available. Did I want that life? I wanted the comfort. I didn’t want that life. Not even in Panama, in the hell we were going through.

We moved around, anchoring in different places, looking for something more thrilling underwater than just brown muck of varying density. It was all the same. Very few fish and creatures were trying to survive in an environment humans had destroyed — filthy, poisoned water filled with runoff from locals dumping everything into it, and chemicals from farm fields.

For the locals, keeping the environment — their home essentially — clean was not even a consideration. Empty motor-oil containers were everywhere. So were tyres and wrecked machinery. They abused their animals and birds too, in sick ways. They tied chickens down with string. We saw a goat in Bogus Town tied in the heat with a rope so short she could barely move. We saw kittens with their tails chopped off. We saw a dog running along the resort path with a sloth’s head in its teeth. A baby shark, nailed to a palm tree with a spike through its head.

It was madness. But it was madness nobody in the West knew or cared about. Which meant it didn’t exist. And I knew that if I spoke about it, I would be deemed an arrogant, spoiled Russian. Or a racist. In today’s world, I learned, you are a racist if you describe things as they are in a place you weren’t born into and that isn’t the West.

Panama was not going to become our home. That world was killing us, and there was no way we could legally stay. They don’t want Russians in Panama, and they don’t want anyone without a lot of money. I was Russian, and we didn’t have the money required.

There was only one way out for us: to cross the Caribbean, against the wind. To tear ourselves away from that dip on the map called the Gulf of Mosquitoes and keep heading northeast, toward the Windward Passage.

* * *

By then we were stuck so profoundly, and for so long, that I could hardly imagine us out in the Caribbean, let alone getting out of Panama against the winds. How would we do it? Was it even possible? We heard stories — you don’t do that. You just can’t. A sailboat doesn’t sail against the wind. So what people do is wait for a lull and only then motor like hell, either north toward Nicaragua or east toward Panama’s Colón, or to Colombia. Both of those options were not only physically impossible, they were nightmares. We didn’t want more Panama — we needed to run from it. And Colombia and Nicaragua, rogue, gang- and pirate-ridden places, were out of the question. There would be no land for us, literally, until we reached the Bahamas.

The boat also needed to be ready for the open sea and big waves. So we started preparing it, gradually repairing its systems.

Doing anything on a small sailboat is torture. Why anybody claims otherwise is beyond me. First of all, you can never reach the tool you need because it’s buried deep under everything else. Then you can never reach the equipment that needs to be fixed or replaced. Parts are an issue too in shitholes like Panama, where there is no postal service, no running water, no sewer system. And even if you do have the part, get yourself a tool, and manage to cram yourself into the location of the repair, the boat has by then become a demolition site. Being in the middle of it, seeing your home torn apart and suddenly full of shit you never wanted to see — makes you want to die. So many times I thought that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. That it would be easier to just not be.

It was by going through those steps that we were fixing the boat. Keep in mind, these are the tropics, and we were always sweating, our sweat dripping off us. It is awful and there is no way to stop it. I know what people think of the tropics. To them, it’s a magical place, with all the sounds of insects and birds, bright frogs and juicy leaves with water dripping off them. What nobody knows — and they don’t have to, I always reminded myself — is that if you aren’t watching TV but are actually in the tropical forest, it is nearly unbearable. You aren’t wet like you just walked out of the shower. You are salty-wet. Your own sweat makes it impossible to survive the tropics because the humidity is so high that it never dries. Meg and I were always naked. We forgot what wearing clothes was like. What making yourself look good before going out was like. Wearing clothes and needing to look good was for people far away, who weren’t us, I told myself. For people who, by some magic circumstances, didn’t have to live the way we did.

I can’t remember everything that was no longer functional on Flower. All I know is that it was a lot. Our navigation had been shot long ago. Our autopilot was on its last legs. We had no windex, no depth meter, no speedometer. We had no power for the radar. We had a hole in our deck after being hit by lightning. Radios didn’t work or were falling apart. Keel bolts were rusting and diminishing in size. The hatches were old and ready to crack under our weight or that of a wave. The freshwater system was springing new leaks every two weeks.

Now imagine yourself trapped on that boat, in a mangrove swamp, overstayed, with no country, no family, nobody to call or write to, holding a pathetic Russian passport that denies you entry to countries — and then you see another bloody Indian gliding across the neck of our mangrove bay, sitting in his dugout canoe like a brainless lump. Let’s just say that doing anything on the boat took a massive emotional effort from me and Meg. I guess we had no alternative other than to lie down and die. But that wouldn’t be fast or painless. And I just couldn’t see myself going through with it. I knew I would get up and start doing things. I guess they call it survival instinct.

By then we have gotten ourselves two smart phones and a passel of tablets. There was an electronics store in Bogus town, and Meg was able to buy all of that. I think it contributed considerably to her survival. Computers, gadgets, operating systems, programs — this is how her mind works. Whereas I am only a user. I have no idea how those things work. I couldn’t believe that Flower was now full of electronics that just twenty years earlier would have been science fiction to someone like my grandfather, or even to me. Until this day I remember the massive TV set my parents bought in the ’80s, back in the USSR. That was a huge event for us.

After spending so much time in Bocas del Toro, I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else. The place had become our jail, our trap. I felt as if I was stuck in a nightmare that wouldn’t end. I didn’t see how we would get out of there. I wasn’t sure it was doable — not on a sailboat, not with everything we’d been through still sitting inside us, affecting us, eating away at us. Was there even life out there, people beyond Latin America and the Caribbean?

We reached Bocas del Toro in April 2019. We left in May 2023. It had been four years. Four years of our lives spent in a place that was killing us from the very beginning. And yet, as much as I couldn’t see how we would escape, one day the course line on the application that had become our navigation pointed southeast. We weren’t changing anchorages — we were getting out!

Hungrily, I peered at the opening growing wider before us. It was the Caribbean Sea. Four years earlier we would have been out there on the horizon, Flower gradually getting larger as we approached. I couldn’t think about it — it hurt too much. Instead I held on to the open sea before me, a promise that my and Meg’s life could be different. Maybe even with less pain.

We left the islands behind. For a while we could still see their pale green humps. Then they were gone. There was nothing but water around us. We were no longer in Panama.