A Man: A Plan: A Canal: Panama

A hot, hot and humid day…sun beats down on us as we stand or sit along the railings of the ship as we slowly creep into the first channel of the Panama Canal the tugboats and pilot boats come along side, the pilot boards our ship. A marvel of engineering that takes water from the river which pours into the lake and dumps 26 million gallons a day into each of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, all relying on gravity. Hot people, sweaty people, pushy people, obnoxious people, people who won’t let others get the photos they are getting, people who are happy to complain about everyone else, people who are happy to lend a hand to someone else, who are generous of spirit and railing position.
The lush thick green jungle on either side of this human-dug waterway was pregnant with animals and birds. Every second we expected to see some creature make its appearance on the water’s edge. Finally, a small crocodile came out of some weeds on the shore and went for a swim just close enough for us to see it with our binoculars.

It was exciting to go through the canal, yet I can’t quite figure out why. The actual process was slow and tedious. The ship moves slowly, the gates close behind you, an act you can only see on the aft deck, so if you are anywhere else, you don’t notice. The boat stops for 30-45 minutes, raising or lowering almost imperceptibly. The gates in front of you open (which you can’t see because even if you are at the bow, you are too far above and your own ship gets in the way. The ship slowly moves a little bit, then repeats the process. After the first lock, it’s the same thing three times, a slow sail through a lake, then more of the same on the Pacific side. So why was this exciting? Was it crowd mentality? Nearly 2,000 people lined up around the edge of the ship waiting with antici------pation for this to start. Was it a sense of history? The nature of seeing something we learned about in history class in person, for real, ourselves? Was it the fact that this was something to do, something mildly exclusive? Not everyone, in fact no one I knew had ever been through the Panama Canal, so although the actual passage through was not exotic, the act of the passage was. Learning about the failed French attempts to create a canal, and then the eventual success of the UNITED States, the more than 20,000 deaths that resulted from its construction , how it was actually constructed, the political machinations and corruptions: these are all interesting and somewhat exciting to me. The actual, boring process of going through the canal was not exciting after we were halfway through the first lock’s machinations……so why did I take over 500 photographs today? Why could I not turn away from the activity, moving from bow to stern to port to starboard, up to the highest deck, down to the lowest? Why the hell was I so excited?