3. LINK TO THE PACIFIC
 Maps of Panama and the Canal from The Path Between the Seas. |
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An
age will come after many years when the ocean will loose the
chain of things, and a huge land lie revealed; when Tiphys will
disclose new worlds and Thule no longer be the Ultimate.
-
Seneca, Medea
Until I looked closer at the charts of the Caribbean during the planning of this voyage, I had assumed the Panama Canal is located not only south, but also west of Florida. It turns out the entrance to the Panama Canal lies east of the 80th meridian of longitude, which is east of Florida. It become odder still when I looked at a detailed map of the S-shaped landmass of Panama. As the isthmus twists itself in a curve to the north, from certain points in Panama the sun is seen to rise over the Pacific and set over the Atlantic.
The closest Columbus came to the great ocean holding his elusive Indies was on his forth voyage when he sailed along the Caribbean coast of Panama, which he named simply Tierra Firma. In the local Indian dialect, Panama means “an abundance of fish.” This thickly forested country has hundreds of enticing bays and coastal islands that make it a worthy cruising ground in itself. But with visions of Polynesia burning in my brain and the anxiety of organizing the canal transit and knowing the reputation for thieves in the main canal ports, I wanted only to get out of here as quickly as possible.
Ten years after Columbus passed this way, Indian guides led Vasco Nunez de Balboa and a group of Spaniards on a three-week trek over the low mountains of the Continental Divide and across Panama’s disease-ridden jungles. Upon reaching the Pacific shore, which in this region lies south of the Caribbean Sea, Balboa christened the waters El Mar Del Sur (The South Sea) and claimed all lands and peoples within this ocean now belonged to the monarch of Castile. Although Balboa’s reach far exceeded his grasp, he was among the first of Europeans to imagine the eventual reality of a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific. That dream obsessed explorers, politicians and engineers for the next 400 years. Thanks to their work, today's circumnavigating sailors can bypass the ice and storm hazards of Cape Horn far to the south.
Once the customs launch cleared me in, I lowered the yellow quarantine flag and rowed my plastic dinghy over to the “yacht club”, which resembled nothing more swank than a friendly small marina. Stepping past a pair of four and a half-foot tall Kuna Indian women hawking decorative hand-sewn molas, I set out on foot for the various offices holding the permits for a canal passage. Thus began three days of shuttling between the offices of Immigration, Port Captain, Admeasurer, and Berthing Department. Each place gave me a stack of paperwork to fill out or sent me somewhere else to get this stamp or that receipt. I kept scribbling on forms and handing over money. When all documents were finally placed in the correct files in the proper offices, Atom’s total charge for a canal passage was $130, including a security deposit to be refunded six months later by mail - provided my little boat did not damage the great locks.
In a perfect example of bureaucracy gone mad, small yachts are treated here as if they were miniature commercial ships. Skippers are faced with pages of cargo forms and pest control officers spraying insecticides below. Even an “Admeasurer” came aboard one morning with a bagful of forms, tape measure, calculator and slide rule, to determine my cargo capacity. I was stupefied at this gross inefficiency as the admeasurer led me around Atom’s deck and cabin at the end of his tape measure. Did they not realize the cost of these unnecessary labors exceeded their charges? It would be less unpaid work for them and lower fees for us if they just eliminated the majority of this pointless paperwork. Now that the Canal Zone has been handed over to Panama who in turn handed it over to a Chinese company, the delays in waiting to get through the canal are typically weeks and sometimes more than a month. Even more objectionable are the new fees, which were raised over a thousand percent. As idiotic as the old system was, the new Latin American/Chinese bureaucracy makes the Cape Horn route look considerably less disagreeable.
The city of Colon, located at the Atlantic entrance to the canal, is as bad as its name implies – truly the ass-end of Central America – which is not an easy distinction to earn. From all I've heard since I was last there, this tough town is little improved. Colon citizens either rob or get robbed, or do both, as circumstances require. Even the Panamanian Consulate staff in Miami, who issued my visa, warned me of the troubles. "The muggers work the streets in gangs, so don't go out by yourself, even in the daytime,” she said as she leaned forward to whisper through the bullet-proof glass. As I gathered my papers to leave, I overheard her tell her assistant in Spanish, “Such a nice young man. I hope he won’t get killed.”
A gringo couple from one of the sailboats in the harbor told sailors gathered around the yacht club bar that they had just been robbed by a couple of knife-wielding thugs who followed them into a supermarket and relieved them of all their cash and watches in front of the store’s armed security guard.
“You must understand,” the guard told them, "it’s my job to protect the store, not the customers.”
While I was in port, another man from a sailboat waiting to transit the canal was pulled off Colon’s main street at high noon, dragged into an alley, where his wallet, watch, and shoes were removed. Then he was stabbed, perhaps just for being a fat-cat gringo. It doesn’t help matters when the thieves know sailors have pocketfuls of cash to buy provisions and pay off officials for their canal permits.
I couldn’t afford to put any more money into Colon’s economy than was necessary. As a defensive bluff against the scavengers, whenever I ventured beyond the walled compound of the yacht club, I emptied and turned my pockets inside out, stuffed my money into a waist belt hidden under my shirt, and hung a large diver’s knife conspicuously from my belt. I kept one hand threateningly on its hilt as I walked fully alert with head twisting in all directions. I must have appeared somewhat crazed, but the security guards and police I passed didn’t look twice at me.
Everywhere here were beggars who followed and harassed nervous gringos down the streets. Other unemployed Panamanians sat hunched over in the shadows as if trying to make themselves disappear from a hostile city. On the way to Colon’s outdoor vegetable market, a trail of beggars and would-be muggers followed me as I walked quickly from one police guarded corner to the next. In a futile attempt to blend in with the darker-skinned locals, I growled Spanish expletives at anyone who stepped out of the filthy side streets and approached me. Some of these criminals may have had more money than I did and I was not feeling at all charitable. The “sharing of cultures” part of my journey would have to begin somewhere more hospitable.
At the yacht club bar I met a tall Texan, named Jim, who worked as an engineer for the Canal Company. He took me in his Chevy to see firsthand how the thousands of Americans who operated the canal, lived barricaded within the US Zone. As we drove through the gates into the US side of Panama, where Panamanian laborers kept the lawns well-manicured, he pointed out the supermarkets, movie houses, a Boy Scouts Club – a whole North American hometown transplanted into a cleared patch of Central American jungle. “Many of these Americans never leave the US zone, since they have everything they need right here," Jim said, "Going outside is getting too dangerous for most folks.”
Outside that fence was the other Panama, a fearsome place best avoided. Many Panamanians, particularly aspiring politicians and half-educated university students, were rancorous patriots. They held an ironic disgust for the American Imperialists who handed them their independence from Columbia some one hundred years ago and were the main employer in the country, paying Panamanian workers a fair wage. In 1984, Colon was a powder keg on the verge of all-out anarchy for the upcoming elections. General Noriega was in power and the American invasion was just a few years down the road.
Despite the acrimony, the street crimes were not politically motivated. Like the visiting sailors, the American canal workers faced the same criminals lingering in the dark corners like patient duck hunters in their blinds. With this thriving American colony right in its center, and the joint ownership of the world’s greatest canal, Panama should be an economic and social success story. Technologically the canal is a huge success – the social side a great failure. And who’s to blame, the Gringo “oppressors” or those who won’t help themselves?
Of course, I can only describe what I saw around the big cites on each end of the canal. From what little of the rest of the country that I saw, the rural villages and their uncorrupted inhabitants live in a world apart. The world over, a poor man raised in the countryside is courteous and respectful to all. Put the same man in the squalor of a broken city and he becomes sullen or vicious as often as not.
The horror stories of damaged spars and even the sinking of a yacht in a canal lock when a tugboat broke loose and crushed it against the lock wall, made me expect a scary passage. I had been through dozens of locks in the Great Lakes system, but the scale of things here dwarfed those. As it turned out, I had less trouble actually passing through the canal than I had complying with the complicated regulations. Each yacht, no matter how small, must have in addition to its captain, a canal company appointed pilot/adviser, and four line-handlers each with 125 feet of heavy mooring lines. Instead of hiring these extra crew, I transiting the canal twice, first as a line handler on another yacht, whose crew reciprocated by helping me when my boat’s turn came.
On that first transit through the canal, I was line-handler on a 50-foot yacht from France. After this passage, I returned to the Atlantic coast via the transcontinental railway, which was the first of its kind in this hemisphere, built almost 60 years before the canal opened. This railroad was financed by American businessmen looking to cash in on an alternate route to the dangerous three-month voyage around Cape Horn for the mobs trying to reach the newly discovered California goldfields. Thousands of imported African, Chinese, and Indians labored in the tropical heat to finish this first rail link between the oceans. Many of these immigrants stayed and contributed to present-day Panama’s rich racial mix.
Some railroad workers, exhausted by the poisonous insects and reptiles, and the rampant tropical disease, were driven to suicide by the intolerable conditions. After several instances when the dead bodies of workers were found swinging from trees behind their barracks, guards were posted outside the laborers quarters to prevent more from hanging themselves before their contracts were up. Finally, in 1855, the railway was completed and passengers rode in comfort across the isthmus in three hours at the then incredible ticket price of $25 in gold. The human cost to complete the track is estimated at 12,000 dead - their ghosts said to be forever pounding spikes on the bloodstained track.
I re-crossed the continent on this train in two hours for a ticket price of under two dollars. Now under Panamanian control, the railroad, which had been so convenient for local commuters, commerce, and travelers alike, is closed due to lack of maintenance. "We can operate the canal as well as the Yankee", is how Panamanians expressed their national pride so earnestly when demanding Americans give them full ownership of the canal. Once it was given to them they promptly leased it to a Chinese government sponsored company to operate. At least the canal has fared better than the railroad.
The French couple and their two crew from the yacht I had assisted through the canal, kindly offered to return by train to help me bring Atom across. Arriving the night before our scheduled transfer, my French guests, each with a long mooring line thrown over their shoulder, managed to find bunks inside Atom’s small salon and even smaller forward cabin. I slept the night on deck tucked into a cockpit seat.
The pilot came aboard at dawn and we motored upriver to the first set of locks to await the opening of the 800-ton iron doors. What a sight this would have been for Antonio Cerezo, a humble priest I’d read about who constructed a canal-like ditch connecting Colombia’s Caribbean flowing Atrato River with the Pacific flowing San Juan River. Incredibly, this Atlantic to Pacific canoe canal was dug by Columbian Indians under the priest’s direction and completed over 200 years ago.
The canal of today, takes ships from the Caribbean port of Colon, 50 miles through canals, locks, a dammed lake, and a cut in a low saddle in the Continental Divide to the Pacific port of Panama City. From the Atlantic side, three double locks allowing two-way traffic, raise ships 85 feet to the level of Gatun Lake, which they cross to reach another set of three locks that lower them to the Pacific. It’s a deceptively simple-looking system, but the design and construction problems took the world's best engineers some 25 years to overcome.
A
French company began the dredging on the canal in 1881 under the direction of
Ferdinand de Lessups, the genius builder of the Suez Canal. Full of
self-assurance and the backing of thousands of French stockholders, he proposed
a sea-level canal by either tunneling under the mountains or making a 300-foot
deep cutting through them. Nine years later, after completing about one third on
the digging, the bankrupt French company gave up. It had become obvious that a
sea-level canal incorporating the wild torrent of the Chagres River was
impractical. Proving it’s impossibility took the lives of nearly 20,000 men
who died of malaria and yellow fever, which the French doctors blamed on “mephitic vapors,” or swamp gas.
When the United States took on the enormous project in 1904, the first obstacle was how to deal with the fractious Columbian government who held Panama as one of its provinces. When the Columbian Congress dragged on the debate over the terms of the canal treaty too long, the US simply declared Panama independent, installed a local government, and wrote their own terms for the canal project. With the US flushed with confidence over their recent easy victory in the Spanish American War, they were not interested in making concessions. A century of progress later and it's obvious building a canal today would be an impossible task. Politics and environmental concerns would stop it cold before the first shovel full of dirt could fly.
Within a year of taking control of the project, US engineers had brought the disease-carrying mosquitoes under control by filling in swampy breeding grounds, fumigating, and burning large areas of grasslands. The Chagres River was dammed to form Gatun Lake, six sets of double locks were constructed, and actual mountains of earth were moved in the ten-year project. Under the revised treaty signed by President Carter, the US was turning over the canal and its zones of jurisdiction to Panama a piece at a time until Panama regained full control in the year 2000.
Like a minnow dropped in a swimming pool, we entered the first 1,000-foot-long lock and made fast to a tugboat lying against the lock wall. Several other larger yachts were tied two and three abreast, held in center chamber by mooring lines pulled up by line handlers on top the walls. The steel gates slammed shut and the lock began to fill from below by cavernous aqueducts in the floors pouring in millions of liters of freshwater fed by gravity from the lake. As the water level rose, the tug adjusted its mooring lines with squealing hydraulic winches that stabilized us in the turbulent waters. When cables break under this kind of tension the whiplash of wire has cut men in half. It was a parting tugboat cable that sank a yacht when the tug then careened across the lock, using the yacht like a giant fender as it smashed up against the opposite wall.
Despite the increased risk, at the second and third locks our pilot again arranged for us to raft next to the tugboat so we would not have to take a center chamber position and tend four lines of our own. In the third lock, a Russian container ship was hauled in behind us by steel cables connected to four locomotives, called mules, riding on tracks at the top of the lock walls. I watched with nervous amazement as the ship towered almost directly over us before inching to a stop. Once the waters raised and the doors began to open, we cast off from the tug and shot like a scolded cat out the lock before the ship's thrashing propeller and the four mules could push its bow over the top of us.
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From the third lock we entered 23-mile-long Gatun Lake. This huge reservoir is fed almost entirely from the moisture-laden clouds coming in from the Caribbean during the rainy season. For our passage, the lake poured a phenomenal 200 million liters of water into the locks that was then dumped into the sea. A rough calculation based on three gallons of freshwater use per day, meant I could sail for the next 48,400 years before using that amount of water again. This thought put my notions of resource conservation in a new perspective. Despite man’s enormous efforts to shape the forces of nature, it is the nine months of tropical rains each year that is the only thing keeping the lake level up and the canal in operation. A slight change in the climate of the region could close the canal with more finality than a hundred terrorist’s bombs.
Though the canal is not in immediate danger of running out of water, it is threatened by the farmers, called campesinos who have encroached on the canal zone and are continually burning large tracts of forest within the canal watershed in order to plant their crops. This fragile forest is the only thing holding the soil from running into the canal and choking the locks with sediments. These days, dredges work continuously to clear the mud from the canal. If a solution is not found, the canal could be choked to death long before the inevitable climate change shuts it down.
As we approached the lake, our pilot was informed by handheld radio of a one-hour delay at the next lock. With the pilot’s agreement, we dropped an anchor at the edge of the lake and leapt from the sun-fired furnace on deck, into the warm bath of the lake. Our French crew took turns keeping an alligator watch from the boat as the rest of us, pilot included, swam leisurely under the shade of moss-laden trees overhanging the flooded valley.
As we got underway again, we passed through a swarm of bees flying in rapid nervous circles around the boat. As they pressed in closer, the pilot warned us not to swat at the bees or make any sudden movements. “Killer bees,” he said softly. “They particularly don’t like anything colored red.” We all looked at one of our crew who was already wrapping a white towel around his bright red shorts.
One of the bees was hovering in front of my face and I had an almost uncontrollable urge to swat him away. I asked the pilot, “What should I do if this killer bee lands on my nose?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just try to make him as comfortable as possible.”
Our pilot had been stung before and knew of what he spoke. When one of these bees feels threatened, he releases a scent into the air, which sends the rest of the swarm into a rage and they attack with fury. These Africanized bees had recently arrived in Panama on their relentless migration towards Mexico and the United States. It was hoped the bees would become less aggressive as they interbred with those laidback Latin-American bees, but as of now their temper seems as bad as when they first got off the boat from Africa.
As we approached the opposite end of the lake, the dead trunks of trees emerged from the shallows like drowning totem poles. Passing ships seemed strangely out of place in this flooded tropical forest.
For two hours we motored through Galliard Cut, gouged through the mountains of the lowest point in America’s Continental Divide. I tried to imagine cutting through its few hundred feet of elevation occupied 6,000 men working day and night for seven years. The scars of the digging are now mostly covered by jungle growth, although the tiered layers carved into the mountainside to prevent landslides remain clearly visible. At the end of the cut, we entered Pedro Miguel Lock where we were graciously lowered, along with our millions of liters of freshwater, to the mile-long Lake Miraflores. Across the lake, we descended the final two locks to the level of the Pacific Ocean. Moving down the final stretch of the canal, we passed under the Bridge of the Americas, the single road link between North and South America. Along shore I saw it was now low tide and the high water mark lie some 20 feet above. On the Caribbean side the tidal range was small enough to be barely noticeable.
My line handlers and the pilot disembarked during a one-minute pit stop at the Balboa Yacht Club dock. I was told that mooring fees here were $25 a day and that yachts were prohibited from anchoring anywhere else in the harbor. This clever bit of corruption sent me scurrying out the harbor to Taboga Island, where I anchored freely just as darkness closed in.
This
little island in the Gulf of Panama lies within sight of the rolling green hills
of the mainland. Here was a peaceful place to base myself for a few days and
gather fresh provisions for the passage ahead. Facing the horseshoe-shaped bay
with a few local fishing boats and six other cruising yachts at anchor, was
a small white-washed and red-tiled village. The next day I watched from the
public square as fishermen hauled their boats out of the water on a steep cement
ramp. At the village store I bought half their meager supply of bread, onions,
cabbages, and oats. There was little else available. Fortunately, I was still
well stocked with provisions from Miami and Colon supermarkets. And I had hardly
made a dent in the ten kilo bag of granola I had prepared in Miami.
Part of the old-world quality of Taboga was the lack of any cars to disturb the peace. The roads are just wide enough to allow pedestrians to brush by the overhanging branches of hibiscus and fragrant oleander blossoms. While walking around the hilly island, I looked down a cliff face to see the battered hull of a steel sailboat fully exposed on a reef at low tide. Washed up on the rocks, as rusted and abandoned as her owner’s dreams.
Atop
the highest hill in Taboga, I scanned over the scattered islands stretched along
the horizon like stepping-stones to the misty slopes of Panama in the distance.
Here, captured by the contrast of mountain and sea, began in a small way my
relationship with the mountains of each island I was to encounter. I looked down
on the harbor and the little dot that was Atom. From here she seemed so small,
so suited to her name. Held back by her two anchors, her bow sniffing the open
sea, she seemed to be saying, “Don’t delay. This great ocean holds the
treasures you are seeking. They lie there to the west, just over the horizon.”
With the last of the great lock doors slammed closed behind me, ahead lay a long
watery road to somewhere.
Atom
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