The Wonder Trail

by Steve Hely

  Something like five thousand people died before they ran out of money. Five years in, the French Panama Canal Company went bankrupt in a haze of scandal, corruption, rumors of bribery. Years later, de Lesseps would be put on trial and found guilty for various financial wrongdoings brought on as he tried desperate ways to keep his scheme alive. He couldn’t do it.

  What the French couldn’t finish, the Americans could.

  So decided President Theodore Roosevelt. If you don’t know by now that Theodore Roosevelt was an incredible, bear-killing, book-writing, shooting-surviving tower of manly strength, then I weep for our public schools. Theodore Roosevelt was the kind of guy who declared, confidently, THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN.

  And it did.

  There were two keys to building the Panama Canal:

  Figuring out that malaria and yellow fever were caused by mosquitoes

  That was huge. The Americans pumped in clean water, they built sewage systems, they put up mosquito nets everywhere, they drained stagnant pools of water, and they sprayed the hell out of the place with experimental insecticides. They topped cisterns of water with layers of oil to kill mosquito larvae.

  Still, almost six thousand people died, most of them workers recruited from the West Indies. On top of the diseases they were killed in accidents. Twenty-three of them were blown up in a dynamite explosion at the Bas Obispo Cut.

  Digging was dangerous, and that’s why the second American insight was so important:

  Digging less

  There were already tons of water across Panama, lakes and rivers and swampy marsh. Instead of hauling in smoky steampunk mechanical digger inventions, the Americans as much as possible strung together the lakes and rivers that were already there. They flooded thousands of acres of forest and jungle, and built the largest man-made lake anyone had ever seen.

  The only problem was, now you’d have to raise and lower seventy-thousand-ton ships, up and down, to get them across the uneven terrain.

  How do you do that? De Lesseps thought it was impossible.

  It’s not. You just lift and lower the ships, floating them, in five of the world’s biggest bathtubs.

  The World’s Biggest Bathtub

  Panamax, that’s a word for a ship that’s at the exact hugeness limit to go through the Panama Canal. A Panamax ship can carry fifty-something thousand tons of cargo, it can be 965 feet long and 106 feet wide. The locks are only 110 feet wide. Ships are hauled in by a special train to a space so tight you’d think they might get squished, the metal doors close, and they flood the chamber with twenty-something million gallons of water, and up she goes. Or all that water rushes out, and down she goes.

  To see it would excite the eight-year-old in anybody.

  That’s it, I decided. I gotta get down in this thing.

  Fish the Panama Canal

  Great, I thought, how can I get in the Panama Canal?

  I could swim it, I guess. That’s what American travel writer and adventurer Richard Halliburton did, in 1928. He was charged a toll of thirty-six cents. So that’s been done.

  Well, there’re expensive tour boats, I thought, but that’s no fun. I’m supposed to be getting close to the ground here, or in this case the water. Maybe somebody will take me fishing?

  There you go. I googled “Panama Canal Fishing,” and that took me to www.panamacanalfishing.com. The next morning, I was down there in the thing in a motorboat, catching peacock bass as giant tankers and roll-on/roll-off car transporters passed by.

  “Just a terrific morning for fishing,” said Captain Rich, and I agreed with him. Captain Rich had been born in Panama, to American parents, and he loved it, he was proud of it, boyish about wanting to talk about the canal. He’d offer up little facts about it like they were cookies on a plate and he really wanted us to enjoy them. I ate up every one and asked for more.

  The other guy who’d paid to come out fishing that day was an American, too, about my age, from Oklahoma. He lived in Colombia now, where he worked as a coal mine engineer. He several times described the women of Colombia as muy bellísima, that Spanish phrase always. Access to muy bellísima women seemed to him like the main perk of his job. He had big wide eyes and smoked Winston cigarettes. He’d done a lot of fishing in the lakes of Oklahoma and Texas. Though it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, he and I were already reaching into the packed cooler of Panama beers the captain kept happily reminding us about.

  Piloting the boat was a black Panamanian, Victor, a serious guy. He looked like he hadn’t laughed in at least four years. Captain Rich spoke of Victor with awe and gratitude for the good fortune of finding him.

  “He’s the only man in Panama who doesn’t drink,” said the captain. Victor didn’t even look up.

  The pilot said nothing the whole trip except single words yelled when exasperation finally overtook him and he needed to jerk me out of my general haze of idiocy and wake me up to some obvious point, like I was fishing in exactly the wrong spot.

  We were after peacock bass and, if we were lucky, enormous fighting tarpon in from the ocean. Peacock bass are native to the Amazon. They are yellow and green and the shape of the flying bird-fish in Super Mario Bros. 3. (They’re called “Cheep Cheeps,” don’t think for one second I don’t know their proper name.)

  To catch them, we took the boat over what was once rain forest flooded to make the canal. The water level was low, a dry early spring in Panama. The pointed tips of old flooded trees spiked through the surface of the water like pylons from a rotted-away dock.

  “Eerie, right?” said Captain Rich. “Eerie.” Behind him an enormous tanker glided along, filling the horizon on its transit across Earth, moving with a steady intelligence though you couldn’t see a person on it.

  The peacock bass were easy enough to catch, especially with Victor pointing exactly where I should cast my line, like there were underwater bull’s-eyes he was baffled I couldn’t see. Since they’re invasive and all, I didn’t feel bad catching them, reeling them in, unhooking them, and tossing them in a cooler—just doing my bit to rid the canal of enemy agents. Who cared about the fishing anyway? Down on the waters of the canal, you could see the genius of it: that instead of digging a huge ditch, the Americans had strung together natural waterways and made a river that God surely meant to put here but he just forgot to finish off. Ingenious, really, and no less impressive for using what was already there. Bobbing on the water, drinking beers, watching international shipping come and go, feeling a tug on the line now and then? A terrific day, I was having a blast. From some vines near a bank, some monkeys came down. Captain Rich fed them Pringles. I wasn’t sure monkeys were supposed to have Pringles, but these monkeys knew what they were and wanted them bad.

  “Yup, these guys are old friends,” he said as a mother monkey and the baby on her back begged for more chips with an almost scary urgency. “I don’t know where Pop is today. Sometimes he runs off.”

  The coal engineer from Oklahoma, though, wasn’t having as great a time.

  “Look at this,” I said, “we’re in the Panama Canal! How great is this?”

  “Be a whole lot greater if we tuck into a few more fish,” he said. He hadn’t come here to appreciate engineering marvels. He knew all about those. He came here to catch tarpon.

  We nearly did, too, both of us. Trolling fast closer to the Pacific mouth, we both hooked into unseen fish that sent the line singing out with a jerk you could feel in your shoulders and the muscles of your back. Mine got away easy, to the unsurprise of Victor. Just as well, I figured. What am I gonna do with a tarpon anyway? But when the Oklahaman lost his, he was pissed. He sucked on his Winston with a new intensity, and his eyes stayed wide the rest of the afternoon.

  “Man,” said Captain Rich, “you’re gonna be thinking about that tarpon all day.” He smiled like “It’s all part of the fun, right?” but the Oklahoman just smoked and looked off
.

  “Hey,” I said, pointing to a giant Maersk container ship, “there’s a gigantic container ship, right there!” The Oklahoman looked, but it didn’t do much for him. Not everyone’s as into container ships as me.

  * * *

  At a restaurant on the bank of the Chagres River, they fried up our peacock bass for us and served them to us with a spicy Cajun sauce and French fries. We were joined by a South African charter pilot, fat and in his fifties. He seemed to know Captain Rich well. The polite but unwelcoming way the captain spoke to him made me suspect there was something disreputable about this guy. Like if you let him even get a hint you two were friends, sooner or later he’d tell you a story you wouldn’t want to hear.

  The South African was on a mission, it seemed, to hunt and kill one of every species of fish in the world. He said the names of different fish from around the world, and the way he looked at us after he said them made it clear which ones he considered formidable opponents. He spoke of fly-fishing while standing on shallow coral reefs in the Caribbean for strong and vicious kinds of barracuda, crafty fish not easily fooled and that knew how to fight. There’s a darkness to a man who travels the world looking for dangerous species to battle and kill. There was a solemnity, too, in the way he talked. A respect. Like the only thing he cared about, perhaps the only thing he enjoyed, was confirming his belief that the world was a ruthless place, all life carrying in its blood the true understanding that this life is an unending competition played by all, consenting or no, where the cost for the losers is death. Sharp as you are, you can never be sharp enough. Stack up your thousand victories and they could all be undone by the smallest slip tomorrow, and though you learn every trick and master every skill you, too, are doomed to vanish. Death alone will win in the end, as pitiless life consumes its own creations.

  Dark wisdom this may be, but it’s a little much at lunch. I spaced out, sipped my beer, and stared at the water and the butt of the waitress and enjoyed my peacock bass, fatty dummies that tasted delicious.

  Thought That Just Occurred to Me

  Geez, I hope that bespectacled Frenchwoman got home from Colón okay. Might’ve been chivalrous to keep an eye on her.

  Meh, I’m sure she’s fine.

  The Ruins of Old Panama

  Scattered across the world are 1,031 sites, natural and man-made, ancient and modern, designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to be of such outstanding value to humanity that they’re declared World Heritage Sites.

  The Parthian Fortresses of Nisa. The Sacred City of Anuradhapura, the Saloum Delta, the Tomb of Askia. Just reading the list makes me happy. Man, if I could I’d go to all of them.

  Now, don’t get me wrong: Some of them are better than others.

  Some of them are astounding: Angkor Wat is one. So is the Redwood National Forest in Northern California.

  Some of them, like the ruins of Panama, are . . . well, they are not amazing, let us say.

  Look, how could they be? How could they all be equal? How could you even compare, really, the historic center of Gjirokastra in Albania to the Grand Canyon?

  To be honest, it wouldn’t shock me if UNESCO were slightly corrupt. If some kind of money didn’t change hands to get, say, the Neolithic Flint Mines at Spiennes or the Struve Geodetic Arc on there. But hey: Having a list of the world’s wonders is fun.

  Already on this trip I’d seen six. Mostly, they were amazing. Tikal? Absolutely. Oaxaca? Yup, deserves it. The ruins of León Viejo? Well, the casual traveler could skip those, no problem. I myself didn’t bother with the Pre-Columbian Chiefdom Settlements with Stone Spheres of the Diquís, in Costa Rica. Someday perhaps I’ll regret it.

  Oh, they’re right there, I said, in a bar, to my map, might as well go, then, so I got a taxi and went.

  Look. I’m not saying they should destroy the ruins of Old Panama or anything. Maybe, if someone lavished money and thought and time and design on them, they could look almost interesting. If this book makes more than a hundred million dollars, I promise to donate a generous portion to the project myself.

  But for now? As a UNESCO site the ruins of Old Panama suck. They bring down the whole franchise.

  What’s there are the vacant shells of a few stone buildings—Old Panama. We can’t blame the Old Panamanians for the fact that the ruins of their city suck. If they had their way, they wouldn’t be ruins at all. Old Panama would still be there.

  What happened was Captain Henry Morgan, he again of the rum and the destroying of Granada, managed to navigate and paddle a thousand pirates down the rivers and swamps from the Atlantic coast and attack Old Panama from the undefended jungle side. All the cannons and walls were pointed seaward, and while the Old Panamanians were turning them around, everything and everyone got destroyed and raped and killed and burned. The gunfire stores exploded and the whole place was wrecked.

  So the ruins can’t be expected to be that great.

  Actually, it’s kind of impressive they’re still there at all.

  No one was there at all. Just me. The buildings are far apart. Old Panama was big. Whatever adornment they may have had, though, had long ago been blasted off or otherwise extracted. They’re hollow and empty. Birds roost in the empty windows and open roofs. There’s no one around and it’s lonely.

  When is a ruin not a ruin? I wondered. When does it cross the threshold into, just, like, a pile of stones? A ruin has to have some kind of structure, right, some skeletal resemblance to what was once there? The ruins of Old Panama are so ruined they’re barely even a ruin.

  Outside the park, there’s a highway, and then the city starts right back up again. In the travel guides and wikis and forums, it’s said that the area around there is one of the most dangerous in Panama, but it looked fine to me. I could hear a brass band playing.

  Fuck the ruins, I thought. Lemme see what’s up in Now Panama. So I followed the sound of the brass band, and I stood there listening for a while.

  Then it dawned on me that whether this street was dangerous or not, I was the creepy one, standing there outside a school smoking and listening to a kids’ brass band, so I got out of there.

  Wallet Stolen in Casco Viejo

  On top of the ruins of Old Panama, there’s also Casco Viejo, “Old Casco,” which is still an old part of the city. The streets are narrow and the buildings are epic. It’s a maze to walk through, and intriguing things are happening on every side of you. Stalls are selling coloring books, and women will sell you thick black stews and single cigarettes, and men are playing card games, and kids are doing all kinds of what might be normal Panamanian activities or just insane kid things, I’m not sure.

  One afternoon I set out walking, watched the sun go down, had a cocktail, stopped at my hotel, and then walked on into the night. Saturday night. A street was blocked off for a film festival, and on the causeway in the distance, fireworks were going off and I could hear a concert. Heading that way, an old man recommended a diner to me, so I popped in and sat down. It looked like a drugstore counter from the 1950s, but the food was spicy and good and the beers were cold. But when I went to pay, my wallet was missing.

  Goddammit, I thought, Panamanians are a bunch of wretched thieves. Maybe that old man tricked me. Dammit, here I am trying to be an adventurous traveler and some bullshit like that overtakes me.

  I’m embarrassed now by how steamed I was.

  To the woman behind the counter I explained the thing, she explained it (not pleased at all with me) to her boss, who waved it off. Off I went, fuming, back to my hotel room.

  When I got there I found my wallet lying on the bed.

  So off I went, back to the diner where I paid my bill, to the confusion of everyone, and then, by way of apology to the Panamanian people, I had a beer at three different bars.

  They’re a good people, the Panamanians. It’s a damn shame the pirates burned down th
eir city. That was an asshole move by Captain Morgan. I suspect he was an asshole, and from now on I won’t be drinking his rum. I sure as hell didn’t order it in Panama.

  The pirate experience was about to become much more real to me. I was headed into a lawless region with lawless people who made the most of their lawless opportunity.

  Around the Darién Gap and Colombia

  On the Beach in Guna Yala

  WE ARE IN THE GUNA YALA! THERE ARE NO TAXIS HERE!”

  The German man wasn’t wearing a shirt. He hadn’t earned that right through physical beauty. His Gorgonic corpulence was heaped on top of itself in fleshy rolls. He was yelling into a cell phone to some lost party of Australians who were trying to make their way to his boat.

  We were indeed in the Guna Yala, a kind of autonomous state within Panama where the Guna people live. The Guna people have coffee-ice-cream-colored skin, they fish from dugout canoes, their women weave outlandish depictions of birds and fish and plants into colored cloths called molas. They wear bright patterned dresses made of these molas. I saw no Guna man or woman who was taller than five feet or so. The Guna are somewhat famous, medically, for having low average blood pressure and low rates of cardiovascular disease—perhaps, goes one theory, because of how much hot chocolate they drink, or perhaps because they spend their lives on the undeveloped coast of their own land or paddling between the many islands of the San Blas, surrounded by shallow fish-filled reefs and dotted with coconut trees. Still, though they live in what looks like paradise, I can’t imagine their lives are easy. A Guna woman in her mola dress and blouse and head scarf, face wrinkled and weathered by unidentifiable age, held a baby on her hip, waiting on the beach, for a boat, I guess, taking her to or from who knows what errand.