John and I were in Panama a decade ago. We went there a few weeks after we were married, and our travel agent decided it had to be a honeymoon and arranged for flowers and champagne to be provided for us in nearly every hotel. It was slightly embarrassing. One of the things we did on that trip was to take the small passenger rail line from Panama City to Colon. It goes right by the Canal at many points, and that had given us a sense of what the Canal looked like. But I was still excited to actually go through it.
The story of the building of the Panama Canal is pretty-well known, and I do not think that I could do it justice in a few sentences. One thing that did strike me, though as I was reading up on all of this for my trip, was just how badly the French messed up the first attempt to build that canal. And that was not because they were stupid or lazy. It was just the opposite. But it was their success building the Suez Canal that did them in. That had been such a brilliant success that they were sure that the same approach could work elsewhere. It seems like many of the public policy failures of the last few decades were the sad result of previous triumphs.
The first sets of locks, coming from the Caribbean, are the
Gatun Locks. These are a series of three locks that raise the ship 85 feet from
sea level to the level of Gatun Lake. This is the approach to the first lock.
As the ship comes close to the lock, cables are attached to it and electric rail cars, called “mules,” pull the ships through it.
At each stage, there are two locks adjacent to each other.
One is for ships headed towards the Pacific; the other is for ships headed
towards the Caribbean.
As the water from one lock drains, lowering the ship, the
water flows by gravity into the adjacent lock, raising that vessel. It is an
ingenious system.
The lock doors are impressively huge, the size of a
seven-story building. They are hollow inside, which allows them to float
somewhat in the water.
None of this is fast or interesting. And for the crew of a
vessel, it’s obviously pretty boring. I snapped a picture of the crew on the
tanker next to us.
The old control center was located at the front entrance to
the third lock.
Once we cleared the last lock, we were in Gatun Lake. This
is a man-made body of water, created by damming the Chagres River. Having lived
most of my life in the West, I am certainly familiar with the idea of fake lakes
created for any number of reasons. But somehow Gatun Lake seemed less fake than
reservoirs like Shasta or Emigrant. It was hard to get an interesting picture
of a large open body of water surrounded by thick, tropical forests. So you
will just have to take my word for it that it looked more natural than one
might have expected.
The far end of the lake is what is called the Culebra Cut. The
guide who was narrating our journey through the canal kept on talking about how
it was “the continental divide.” Maybe water flowed in different directions on
either side of this range of hills, but we were not talking about blasting
through the Sierra Nevadas. The hills are made of very soft materials, and the
real problem was endless rockslides. The solution, not a particularly elegant
one, was to terrace the hillsides after a section was removed.
Yet even this is only partly effective at stopping the
continuing erosion of the soft rock in the cliffs. Endless dredging is needed
to keep the Canal open at this point.
The final set of locks, the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores
Locks, were less impressive to me than the ones at Gatun.
Or maybe I was just a
little bit bored with the Canal at this point and ready to be in the open
water. From these locks you can see the skyline of Panama City. Compared to
ugly, dirty Colon, the capital seems like the Emerald City.
And right as you come into the Pacific, you can see one of
most memorable buildings in Panama City.
When John and I were here the last time, the building was
not open and frankly appeared to be decaying rapidly. My recollection was that
it had initially been intended to be an environmental education center and that
had not quite worked out. And I think it had been an art gallery for a while,
too. I have no idea what is going on there right now, but it is a fun building.
We’re now in the Pacific. It seems noticeably cooler than on the Caribbean side. We have a day at sea before we come to Ecuador.
