We interrupt this voyage for trash talk

Cruisers CALL IT A “BURN party,” a high-seas version of a block party, and the honored guests are small bags of garbage that each sailboat has accumulated in the weeks since we last saw a trash can.

We dinghy to the beach a couple of hours before sunset. Someone brings chips or crackers, everyone brings drinks, and with a strike of the match, the ritual commences.

We chat, we snack, we stoke, we burn. In between, we pick up litter that’s washed up with the daily tide and burn that too.

Garbage -- it’s the one trapping of civilization we can’t escape, even out here in the sparsely populated Pearl Islands, where cruisers in Panama go to get away from it all.

The Pacific Ocean has been our home for a year now, and the most depressing moments have come floating by in large debris fields. Mostly they are plastics in every form: water bottles, motor oil jugs, candy wrappers, armless or headless dolls, an unsettling number of syringes and a remarkable number of shoes. “A lot of people in Latin America are walking around with just one shoe,” my captain-boyfriend quips. And we can’t count the number of garbage bags that have snagged our fishing lines.

The last thing we want to do is contribute to the pollution, so we try to minimize our own wastes. We repack food into reusable Ziploc bags while we are in port. Small food scraps go overboard, where they become fish food or quickly biodegrade. When a bleach bottle is empty, it becomes a dinghy bailer; the Skippy peanut butter jar brews sun tea.

But inevitably there are paper towels, Kleenex, sandwich meat and cheese wrappers that accumulate long before we plan to return to any city or village where we might find a trash can. (And even then, there’s no telling whether the contents of those garbage cans will end up right back in the ocean, which is why most cruisers resort to burn parties.)

Tonight’s party is at Espiritu Santo, where eight boats are anchored for the night. A latecomer plops his bag on top of the flames, which quickly dissolves, its contents spilling out with a clank. Our heads turn at the noise. Cans.

“Sorry, I forgot to pull those out,” the cruiser confesses.

Only paper products and lightweight plastics are invited. Metal cans and glass jars are saved until we return to port or we are well offshore, where they are sunk to the ocean’s bottom. A fellow cruiser finally allayed my guilt for this practice: “Think of how you’re creating a nice little hidey hole for a crab or some other sea creature!”

When the fire dies out, the ashes are buried in the sand. By morning, evidence that anyone was here has washed out with the tide.

Like a perfectly manicured backyard, the setting is ready for the next gathering of neighbors.

To be continued ...