We sit, anchored at what we call Flamenco, an expanse of Pacific Ocean filled with container ships, yachts, car carriers, junkers, the greenpeace sailboat, and other various ships. Panama City is in the distance, a hazy mirage of skyscrapers glinting in the afternoon sun. A hot breeze wafts across the water – one that’s just breezy enough to life the hair from the back of your neck but still hot enough not to cool your down. The humidity is so high that, if it were a concrete expanse, you would see the heat radiating. As it stands, I just feel it. Even indoors, where the air-conditioning whirs at top speed, my clothes stick to me and my hair clings to the back of my neck. I remember why I chop my hair off at the beginning of each season!
When the sun goes down, the lights go on. Skyscrapers in the distance light up – a veritable New York City in the middle of Panama – one of the poorest/richest places in the world. The city just sparkles. above, lights from planes flying in dot the starry sky. They fly over Taboga, the island of flowers, where so many Panamanians have their summer homes. The planes come from all over.
Still, we sit, waiting. Soon, a pilot boat will come and deliver a canal pilot – one of 250 people who are qualified to transit through the canal. These boats are like rockets. They fly up to the ship, nose into our fantail and off hops the pilot. Large rubber fenders ensure no damage to either vessel. Once he’s on board, we can lift our anchor and begin the transit. It will take nine hours to transit the 48-mile long canal.
We cruise slowly past the new Frank Gehry museum, a bright juxtaposition among the silver skyscrapers and verdant palm trees. It’s a pile of legos strewn across the peninsula that separates Flamenco from the canal. The causeway is long and cars fly past us, to and from the city. Up ahead, the Bridge of the Americas heralds our approach into the canal proper. Tradition has it you kiss a loved one as you go under the bridge. Panama City disappears behind the hills so quickly, you might never have known it was there.
And soon, Miraflores Lock. It’s the first lock of the Pacific to Caribbean transit and – being so close to Panama City – grandstands line the canal and lock chamber. Hordes of tourists – Panamanian and other – crowd in to watch the historic canal in action.
It’s the 101st year of the canal. Centennial banners from 2014 still adorn the lock buildings and not much has changed since 1967 when my grandfather transited on his way to the far east. His picture and mine look eerily similar.
But the canal doesn’t look to the past, even though so many Americans have family history tied to it. Hundreds of thousands of men worked on the canal and over 27,000 died (ed. note: that is a total from both the French period and the American period of work.) Recently, two women came on board with pictures of their fathers hard at work and play in Panama.
We look to our pasts, but the canal looks to the future. As I write this, Panama is building an expansion to the canal. Currently, Panamax vessels – those ships with only one or two feet of clearance on every side – are the largest vessels that can go through the locks. With the expansion, post-Panamax vessels – ships that are too large to go through the current locks (and presumably ships will only get larger) – will be able to transit the canal.
We see the expansion during daylight hours, and we see work being done in Culebra Cut. It doesn’t look like much. And now the canal has to compete with the one being built, or cut, in Nicaragua. Why go all the way to Panama when you can transit through Nicaragua?
But onward we must go. Past the crowds looking on at Miraflores and into Pedro Miguel. At each lock, line handlers in a rowboat watch as a line is tossed from the handlers on the lock wall to those on our ship. I don’t see the line handlers on our ship – they take over the bow and the fantail and I stay away. They leer, they offer you cheap trinkets; they’re escorted every time they need a restroom and watched at all other time to make sure they don’t sneak off somewhere. Not that there are many places to go. We’re not a Panamax vessel, after all. We are only 152 feet long and a line handler sticks out like a sore thumb.
When the lines reach from ship to shore – or lock wall, as it were – then we are linked to locomotives. Small ones that go along, moving us through the lock as the gates close behind us and the water level rises. These locks aren’t like the ones on the Columbia River or in Scotland. You don’t get tied to a ballast and stay stationary as the water rises. No, you’re still moving forward, however slowly, attached on four sides to tiny trains. Like I said, the canal is always looking forward.
Into Culebra Cut. Now, we are 80 feet above sea level, in the mountains that extend across the central reaches of Panama. Crocodiles sometimes line the banks, lazily sunning themselves in the murky water. Someone once swam through the canal. Not surprisingly, you can’t do that anymore. Now, our ship pays over $10,000 for each transit. We’ve never heard a final number from the office, but we have a vague idea of how much we pay for our 16 to 18 transits each year.
Gatun Lake stretches out in front of us now, a flooded plain once called the Chagres River, it’s fingers finding any bit of lowland to take over. If you wanted to run away, you could hide on one of the thousand islands in Gatun Lake and no one – save the crocs – would ever find you. It’s a jungle out there. On Barro Colorado Island, one of the many Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute sites, howler monkeys herald the dawn, screeching and swinging through the trees. Lyme disease is prevalent and everyone wears long pants and long sleeves, even in the dead heat of summer. On other, smaller, uninhabited islands, the trees and plants fight for space. Green upon green as far as the eye can see. The shipping channel is narrow and ships constantly pass each other, some in opposite directions and others overtaking.
Gatun Lock takes almost two hours to transit, with four lock chambers. Finally, we are at sea level on the Caribbean side. We aren’t out of the canal though. We pass the expansion’s new gates, being constructed just past Gatun, and at the same time part of the old French canal. For a brief minute, past, present and future are in the same place.
{I have done 15 transits of the Panama Canal. it’s extraordinary and impressive, but by the 15th time, it’s also kind of boring.}