The Wonder Trail

by Steve Hely

  The crew guys weren’t uninterested with this. She was being plenty sultry. She definitely thought so, at least. But these guys were from the tropics. The average Nicaraguan woman is sexier washing her shoes off than the average American is at having sex. I tell you honestly that a raisined old Nicaraguan woman projects more sexuality as she hobbles along the cobblestones than many much lither and younger women doing yoga in Los Angeles.

  She bent herself against the steel staircase and smiled at them as she lip-synced. They watched, but they weren’t impressed. They looked like they’d seen stranger performances.

  A Nicaraguan Canal

  There are plans, put forward by entrepreneur Wang Jing, CEO of the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Group, to build a canal across Nicaragua, spilling into and out of the lake.

  Based on my estimate of how things go in Nicaragua, completion of this canal will take roughly ten thousand years.

  Costa Rica: These Guys Are Awesome

  These guys are awesome,” the guide said, in adorably accented English and a voice like a cartoon animal. “I love them.” She was talking about a species of tiny tree frog. One was illuminated in the beam of her flashlight, just off a nature trail. The frog sat in the darkness on a wet leaf. His eyes made up a fifth of his body.

  I was in El Silencio de Los Angeles Cloud Forest in the Central Highlands of Costa Rica, taking a night hike. With me were some American parents and their children. So far I was crushing them all at frog spotting, and would continue to do so. Don’t think the guide didn’t notice.

  You might not need me to tell you that Costa Rica is fantastic. Close to a million Americans visited Costa Rica last year, and I bet most of them had a tremendous time. When you enter Costa Rica from Nicaragua, you are struck by, for instance, the pavement on the highway (that it’s good) and the streetlights (that there are some) and the cars (they’re less likely to be smoking). You might also be struck by the people. At least I was. They seemed happier. Calmer. Less burdened by the crushing weight of oppression and war and cruel history and poverty.

  That was my impression, anyway. When it comes to poverty we can measure it. The per capita GDP of Costa Rica is $10,184. (This is from the World Bank.) The per capita GDP of Nicaragua is $1,851.11.* Costa Rica is ten times richer. Why is that?

  GDP doesn’t measure everything, of course. It doesn’t measure happiness and culture and the smiles of children and so on. Some sociologist somewhere is probably measuring the smiles of children right now. I hope so, that’d be interesting. By my amateur glance, the numbers between Costa Rica and Nicaragua on that would be a lot closer. But Costa Rica would still win, I’d bet. Why is that?

  You can ask a Costa Rican that, like I did, and they might give you a thoughtful and nuanced answer. More likely they will shrug and say something like “Pura vida.”

  This is a phrase you will see and hear many times if you go to Costa Rica. “Pure life” is what it means. You may not have needed me to translate that one. There’s more meaning in it. Good life, real life, honest life, unworried life, unstressed life.

  Now, this is a great idea to tell people who are on vacation. If I ran a resort in Costa Rica, you can be damn sure you’d hear about “pura vida, pure life, our national way of living in Costa Rica, and our philosophy at Villa Hely” every damn day. But as far as I can tell, they really mean it.

  The first morning I was in Costa Rica, I went zip-lining. This is something you can do in Costa Rica: get hooked into a system of wires and ropes across the rain forest canopy and zip around. On the way there, I rode in a van with a happy family of English bird-watchers. At least the dad was a bird-watcher. The children seemed to be humoring him. His wife, without really trying, glanced out the window.

  “There! Chestnut-sided warbler!”

  The dad whipped his head around, binoculars already to his eyes.

  “Well done, Mrs. Thichett!” he declared, proud anew in his sensible choice of spouse. As excited as he was about bird-watching, Mr. Thichett was a bit trepidatious about zip-lining. The Costa Rican kids, half of them girls, who ran the place teased him. They wanted to strap him in facedown and let him zip seventy meters across like Superman.

  “I have quite severe vertigo,” he told them, “and I don’t care to go facedown. I’ll go faceup.” So he did, and his children congratulated him. It wasn’t easy for him, and he was proud he’d done it. On the ride back he was exhilarated. He asked me where I’d come from, and I listed off the countries I’d been through.

  “Well. I’m quite taken with Costa Rica.”

  * * *

  Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua: These countries are all, to be blunt, fucked up. Costa Rica has plenty of problems, but compare it to its neighbors and it’s a paradise. Why?

  Because they don’t have an army is one answer you hear. In 1948, Costa Rican president José Figueres symbolically sledgehammered a stone wall at the country’s military headquarters. Then he handed the keys over to the minister of education. Since then, Costa Rica hasn’t had an army, a navy, or an air force.

  A smart move: If you’re a Central American president, especially a reform-minded one like Figueres, there’s a good chance the military will end up overthrowing you. He’d just come out of winning a civil war, and the military was not on his team. How he pulled it off without getting killed is impressive, and it lasted. In 1987, while neighboring Nicaragua was still fighting its civil war, Costa Rica’s president Óscar Arias won the Nobel Peace Prize for working to end it.

  Because they didn’t piss off the United States. That’s another answer. Figueres stayed friends with Allen Dulles and the CIA. He was friends with Castro for a while, too, but they had a falling-out. He wasn’t a pushover, Figueres. In 1958, he testified before the US Congress, and gave them a pretty stern lecture that veered into discussing “the fragile virtue of female stars” in Hollywood. But he was skillful and cagey, and the phrase “CIA-sponsored” appears less in Costa Rica’s history than it does in those of some other Central American countries.

  Because José Figueres was a great man. Seems like it to me. Vain, maybe, but as far as I can tell, from 1948, when he brought the country out of civil war, to 1991, when he died, he navigated a very narrow path very dexterously. He credited himself with 834 reforms. He called his farm La Lucha Sin Fin, the struggle without end. He married two different American women, too. No doubt that helped, perhaps in ways we may never know.

  Because Costa Rica protected its environment is another answer. Twenty-five percent of Costa Rica is some kind of national park or biological reserve. In Costa Rica you can find something like 5 percent of the species in the world. But that might be an effect of being a great country, not a cause. I’m not sure.

  Because Costa Rica’s democratizing coalition redistributed elite property early and exercised effective political control of the countryside. That’s an answer I’m paraphrasing from the back cover of Professor Deborah J. Yashar’s book Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala, 1870s–1950s. I read it when I got back and was still wondering about why Costa Rica seemed so much better off than its neighbors. A politcal scientist friend recommended Professor Yashar’s book to me.

  It’s a little dry. There’re a lot of sentences like “Yet, by focusing on individuals, the moment of change, and efforts to redirect conflict, these choice-oriented approaches theorize neither the source of political conflict that generates democracy’s overthrow nor the conditions under which democratization is likely.” But Professor Yashar certainly seems a lot smarter and better informed than me. She points out that, politically, Guatemala and Costa Rica were on pretty similar tracks until around 1950. After that, it’s coups and civil wars for Guatemala, and tree frogs and pura vida for Costa Rica.

  Professor Yashar discounts what she calls “agency-oriented approaches”—the idea that a few great people can make the difference at the right
moment. She points out that Costa Rica had more equitable distribution of land than Guatemala. That makes sense. I bet she’s right.

  Or maybe they’re just lucky.

  Or maybe constant reminders to yourself and your countrymen to live pura vida might work.

  Panama: Cut That Thing!

  Look at Panama there, on your world map or globe: a taunting dangler clinging North and South America together. It’s like one of those plastic thingies that keeps a price tag attached to a shirt: Don’t you just want to pop it right off?

  The temptation to cut through Panama has been around since the world map got filled in. Just that thin strip is gonna keep the Atlantic and Pacific apart? Really? C’mon, surely we can get through that.

  The idea really got appealing in 1849, when it appeared California might be chock-full of gold, and the extra five thousand miles of sailing it took to go all the way around Cape Horn started to seem ridiculous. The more impatient gold rushers took to stopping at Colón, on the Panamanian Atlantic coast, and trying to walk across to Panama City, on the Pacific side. Lots of them, both humans and the mules they hired, died. One solution was a railroad across the country, which is what our boy John L. Stephens was working on when he, too, died. Something like six thousand people died building the railroad, which was finally finished in 1855, many of them Chinese or Caribbean workers. They died from malaria and cholera and yellow fever, some of them killing themselves during the depressive haze that can follow a case of malaria. There was a whole side business of putting the corpses of dead workers of the Panama Canal Railway into barrels of preservatives and selling them to medical schools. Supposedly, one of the doctors involved in the railroad bleached skeletons of dead, relation-less workers in the hopes of creating a museum of skeletons of every race in the world.

  You can contemplate all this horrifying mortality in pleasant comfort as you take a ride on the Panama Canal Railway. On the porch of the Panama station, there’s a parrot that says “Hola!” over and over again. Somehow it seemed like a true wonder to me that a parrot might speak in Spanish. But, duh, why would a parrot care? I wonder how many languages have a parrot speaking them. Is there a parrot that speaks Inuit? (Maybe I should train one? Job for another day, I guess.) There must be several polylingual parrots. I wonder which parrot in the world can speak the most languages?

  Luckily, I didn’t have WiFi or I might’ve watched videos of parrots all day instead of experiencing the Panama Canal Railway.

  A one-way ticket on the Panama Canal Railway, Atlantic to Pacific, costs twenty-five dollars. That’s what it cost back in 1855, too. Back then, that was an absurd amount of money for a forty-seven-mile ride. The alternative might be weeks at sea in the furious storms off Tierra del Fuego. William Mulholland, the badass who brought the water that made Los Angeles, couldn’t afford a train ticket. He walked.

  The train, for me, was easy. It’s quite comfortable now, the seats have an antique glory, and so does the bar where you can buy Pringles and coffee and cold green cans of Panama beer. You rattle through jungle, and out the window sometimes you can see enormous ships, tankers and freighters ten stories tall, three hundred yards long, traveling right by your side like they’re cars in the next lane, lining up to go through the locks that raise and lower them twenty-six meters up and back down again. You go through labyrinthine swamps of the Chagres River, and through the cut at Gold Hill, killer of hundreds, thousands maybe.

  Man, I love a good train, and this is a great one, one of the best maybe, when you think about what an accomplishment it was, what Stephens did, the ambition, the stupefying cost in money and energy and lives.

  “He’s not enjoying the scenery.”

  That, whispered, by a French woman, bespectacled. My age or maybe younger, poised and thin and elegant, traveling alone. With a very subtle movement of her eyes, she indicated a Russian guy, one of four huddled into the tabletop seats across from us. I’d heard these guys come in. They were drinking and sunburned and sweaty already, first thing in the morning. They’d clearly been rolling hard. One of them was straight-up passed out, facedown on the table. His fist still held a beer erect. The others looked woozy, like they might soon be casualties, too.

  We were on the Gatun causeway, which works its way across five miles of the fifty-mile lake. It’s true, he didn’t see anything. Me and the French woman looked at each other. We smiled, just enough, to let each other know we both agreed we were having a much more engaging experience of the Panama Canal Railway. Although I, at least, thought that the way the Russian dudes were rolling also ruled, in its own way.

  Kidnapping

  When I went to Central and South America, many Americans warned me I’d get kidnapped. I found this a little insulting, both to me and to Central and South America.

  Sure, kidnapping got so bad as to become a way of life, in some times and some places like, say, Colombia in the 1980s and Venezuela now. People do go down the wrong road someplace south of the border and never turn up again. A friend of a friend of mine, Harry Devert, went riding his motorcycle across Mexico. Last time his girlfriend heard from him he was headed to Zihuatanejo, on the Pacific coast, and then he disappeared. Six months later they found pieces of him, and his motorbike, on the beach. He went missing right before and around the place where Mexican special forces captured cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán, “El Chapo,” so who knows what was going on. My friend who knew him said Harry was a great guy who could charm anybody, and he had a real integrity to him, and he was very brave and knew how to handle himself, and he loved adventure.

  He loved adventure more than me, for sure. The way I traveled, you’d have to be pretty lucky to kidnap me. I moved fast and didn’t stick my nose anywhere that felt too kidnappy. Trust your feelings, that’s the best kidnap-avoidance advice I heard, and I did.

  The only time on the whole trip my kidnap alarm went off was in a car from Colón on the Atlantic coast back to Panama City, on the Pacific side. When the train brought us to Colón, I took one look around the place and decided not to wait all day for the train back. Instead, I was gonna turn around. From what I’d read, it was a bad-news situation in Colón, and it sure looked that way to me. The people I saw looked like they didn’t want me anywhere near the place, and couldn’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to come there voluntarily. The French woman appeared determined. I nodded her off and wished her well, and I went to the swarm of taxi guys hustling for business.

  I’ve probably been in two thousand cabs or taxis in my life, in China and Mongolia and rural Australia and India and Cuba and New York and Vegas and plenty of odd towns in America, and this was the only time the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and it seemed real that this guy might do something truly crazy on purpose. Ominous mutters turned to shouts and then disappeared, all in some patois he must’ve known was incomprehensible to me. He’d snort like a dragon and then a minute later cry out and bare his teeth at me.

  Guessing on it now, more experience under my belt, I’d say he was probably just high out of his mind on cocaine. He drove at ninety miles an hour down roads that didn’t seem right at all. While I tried to seem cool, I felt around in my backpack for anything that might be heavy enough to hit him with. Best I could do was a seven-inch flashlight that wasn’t gonna do much more than annoy. A cigarette lighter, maybe, aimed at the eyes?

  He jerked the car over. He wiped sweat off his face. It was soaked. Fingering my lighter, I waited. If he was gonna make demands, let him do it.

  But wiping the sweat: That was it, actually. He might’ve been fucked up, but he was trying at least to do something like his job and not perform any crimes on me. He jerked the car back into action. He made me understand he was gonna take me to see the locks at Lago Miraflores.

  * * *

  The Panama Canal Railway is impressive enough as a human accomplishment, a triumph of vision and grit and engineering.

  Compared to th
e Canal, it’s nothing.

  How Did They Dig the Panama Canal?

  The biggest problem was that Panama was a pesthole. That’s not my word, that’s the word the great historian David McCullough uses. His book The Path Between the Seas is the best book I know of about the building of the Panama Canal. What I say here comes from what I learned from him, or what I learned gaping at the actual thing, watching the informative movie, and asking questions.

  The French tried to build a canal for twenty years. They were led and inspired by Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was everything magnificent and grand and ridiculous you’d want from a Versailles-born genius of the age of steam. He wasn’t an engineer at all, he was a diplomat and a big-idea man. Through sheer willpower and promotion and trickery and enthusiasm, he brought the Suez Canal into existence, cutting right through Egypt. You could sail now from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and on to the Indian Ocean. It cut the trip from Europe to India by something like four thousand miles. No one could believe what de Lesseps accomplished. He became an international hero. Everyone knew his name, they threw banquets for him, mobs cheered him on the streets of Paris, Queen Victoria of Great Britain gave him, a Frenchman, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of India.

  Then he came to Panama.

  Thousands of people died before the French gave up. Mudslides, explosions, collapses, but mostly disease: malaria and yellow fever. All medical people at the time agreed that digging up mucky earth caused pestilence in the air, but the French did it anyway. De Lesseps was determined to keep his canal at sea level the whole way across, no locks to raise or lower ships, so the amount of sheer digging involved was incredible.