Panama (24 page)

People gather from all over the United States, from Europe and Asia, from all over the Zone. All of us board the labor train for Gamboa dike. Father has left in the early-morning hours to help prepare the auspicious event. I follow about noon.

It's my last trip rolling along the Panama Railroad Line and I have no feeling of nostalgia whatsoever. Not a trace of sentiment for those railcars I've ridden ... how many times? Five times a week for 150 weeks. I do the math. Seven hundred and fifty? No. Have to double that—I ride twice a day. And the other trips to other parts of the canal. It's a big number. Sixteen hundred, maybe...

It means nothing. It's a train, that's all.

"'Scuse us..." School friends press close to look out the window. Their parents are staying on. They've started another school year. I'm not a part of them anymore.

We're pulling onto the Gamboa siding and we can see the dike with men still working there. The train comes to a halt and we tumble out and find places along the platform to watch.

Yards away the water of the lake laps at the dike's edge, ready to spill in. On the other side is the Cut, still empty, a vast space that's been filled with noise and activity and trains all these years. Now there's only broken dynamite boxes, some switch shanties, watchmen's shacks, and a few warped and twisted rails, all of it ready to join the underwater world.

A tall, rangy boy from school standing near me says to whoever can hear: "What if the water doesn't hold up the banks? Could be big ol' muddy mush by tonight. Ha-ha..."

But nobody laughs and several girls roll their eyes—this fellow is not the brightest porch light on the block.

Of course, it's true. At least, it's an outside possibility—mud, mush, failure. And Father and all the other bosses and everyone on the Commission know that and are worried—they know anything could happen.

They're all gathered, engineers and electrical men and rail men (Father) and shovelers and crane men, and there's joy and pride and anxiety thick in the air.

People are filling in the platform around me and I see Father with the others—bosses and engineers—all of them smiling, talking and animated.

Among the laborers now climbing out of the work area is Federico in a red shirt. I spot him easily. He's wearing red for rebellion—that's no accident. He makes his way through the workers looking for a place to watch, and he talks to the men as he moves along. I've never seen him in a work situation before. He's the leader even there. Finally he finds a place and sits and looks out over the assembly.

He spots me right away.

He sees that I'm looking at him and raises an arm. Just raises it, no big salute.

I'm surprised at such a public gesture, but no one on either side of him could know who he's hailing, so it doesn't matter.

I raise my arm in response, just raise it like he did. Then I turn back to the activity. It's beginning.

Out in the lake the official launch is approaching with the colonel and other Commission bigwigs. They don't look a bit worried. Colonel Gaillard stands straight and proud not far below us at the viewing stand with Father. Everyone is present and ready. Even this momentous occasion is well organized, no time wasted, ready to go on the dot—time is a crucial factor in this show.

Suddenly there's silence. No announcement to the crowd, just the approach of Goethals's launch—the signal it's about to happen. In moments the seas will be connected, and it strikes me that after the deaths, false starts, lives changed, homes removed, populations displaced, shipping lanes redrawn, this really is going to happen.

There's a hush and not a voice can be heard, not a child's cry or a dog's bark, except for the rasping whisper of the rangy, pessimistic student. "Here we go..."

A Commission officer with a stopwatch in hand makes an announcement:

"It is now two o'clock. In Washington, President Wilson is walking from the White House to an office in the Executive Building..."

Eyes on his watch, all of us breathless except for me—I'm serenely watching from a great distance, numbed by the awful finality of it. Seconds pass.

"It is now one minute past two and the president has pressed a button in the Executive Building. One more minute, ladies and gentlemen..." All eyes are glued on the man and his watch.

Dead, expectant calm, a parrot's call off somewhere, sixty seconds tick by, then he looks up and says: "Now!"

As precise as the plan itself, it starts: a low rumble, a dull, muffled boom, and then a triple column of dirt shoots high into the air at the center of the dike and falls gracefully like a fountain.

There are cheers and applause and shouting. Several hundred charges of dynamite have blasted open a hole more than a hundred feet wide and water is gushing from the lake into the Cut.

Hats fly high, the crowd roars with applause, and there's whistling. Water gushes and the bosses shake hands—Father and Colonel Gaillard and all the others are exuberant and relieved. Backs are slapped, hands are grasped in strong grips, and men are embracing with relief to see it, some of those strong male eyes moist. Mine are. It moves me, this grandeur. Or maybe it's something else.

The stately official launch with the colonel moves toward the dike's opening and the cheering continues.

I watch from my distant planet, and then suddenly something happens that brings me back and makes it all worthwhile. It has to please Federico, and I know Harry loves it.

From the brush come two nearly naked brown men carrying their
cayuca
over their heads. It happens quickly. The men drop their dugout into the foaming water and hop in. They make their way expertly along the surface, through the Cut, rushed by the flow. All eyes are on them, the first men to use the connected seas—Panamanian men, indigenous men, slicing through the continent in their hand-hewn log boat, the first men to do it. It makes me smile. Harry better be seeing this, and I search for Federico's face again but can't find him. He's nowhere in the crowd. I never see him again.

I watch the two brown men until they are no longer visible, well on their way to the Pacific. The pessimistic teenage naysayer beside me watches, too, envy in his eyes. And that's it, the moment I'll remember: the great flush of water and the indigenous men using the passage as they should and the crowd smiling at them and pleased to see it, and my teen passion eclipsed by all of it.

The great event has seized me. I've become one of Goethals's unstoppable Americans. We've split the continent in spite of the odds, the earthquake, a warning from the Church, death and all the rest of it, and it's done. The canal is built. The seas are connected.

I feel pride and I'm surprised. It's the last thing I expected to feel on this day, but there it is.

On top of my misery.

The sides hold. It's not muddy sludge. It's an open passage that requires constant dredging, which they're prepared to do forever if necessary.

Self-propelled dump barges, tugs, a drill boat, and a crane boat are brought up through the locks, the first procession from the Pacific side passing through Miraflores and Pedro Miguel. The dredges take up positions in the Cut; barges shunt in and out, dumping mud in out-of-the-way corners of Gatun Lake. Floodlights are installed and work goes on day and night.

Two months later an old French ladder dredge named the
Marmot
makes a cut that opens the channel enough for deep passage. The first complete passage, using the locks from ocean to ocean, takes place almost incidentally, part of the workday routine on January 7, 1914.

I'm in Oberlin on that day, deep in research on Spanish seventeenth-century art with new Oberlin friends, one of them a fellow so much like Harry that I can't resist liking him and his tales of life in Kentucky and squirrel hunting and reading Tolstoy in the woods.

Tolstoy. I've found a friend.

On that day in January, an old French crane boat, the
Alexandre La Valley,
just going about its work, comes down through the Pacific locks and out the other side without ceremony, without much attention of any kind, and papers carry the item. I notice it right away. They point out how appropriate it is that the first passage should be by a French vessel, however humble. The French did make the first brave effort at a canal.

Sometimes great countries have moments of great civility.

I'm studying for term exams, doing well, making friends, while in Panama thousands are being let go, hundreds of buildings disassembled or demolished.

Engineers are relocating to factories in New York and Detroit, where there are opportunities in the new automobile industry.

Families are packing to leave, and there are farewell parties somewhere along the line almost every night.

Ships from every country begin passing through the canal at ninety cents per cargo ton; I read about that, too. And the most impressive aspect, the papers say, "is the ease with which everything works as though the canal has always been there, oceangoing vessels passing through day and night."

Goethals is kept on as governor and he runs the operation smoothly.

Harry's long gone. We never hear from him again. When I think of him in class, I don't doubt he's tramping around the world, shaking his head at inequity, talking to the "small fellow" in each country and breaking bread with him, partaking of his life and learning his language, searching for another Ruby.

And of course there's always news of unrest in Spain. It's heroic to go there and fight for the "small fellow," though the politics have become complex and I want—need—to talk to Harry about it.

I bet he seizes a rifle and goes. Maybe not. He's a wanderer, not a warrior. But Federico's there, no question about it. It's what he lives for.

Or dies for—I'll never know.

All this is before I graduate with honors.

Before I marry.

Buy a house.

Have two sons.

And my Panama diary is packed away.

It's not a thick book, the last entry so bitter and pained that I can hardly stand to look at it. But I don't throw it away. And occasionally, like now, clearing the attic and searching through the trunk, I find it and I'm not able to leave it alone.

A few cubic inches of space—I should just leave it there. But I pick it up and the last pages fall open.

Funny—I see the whole thing again just looking at those last paragraphs. Maybe it's not so funny.

November 1913. The last time I'll write here, I'm sure. Seven more days at sea and all I can do is sit on the deck and try not to cry and write. If Mother finds this in Dayton she'll be
curious—she doesn't know I've kept it. She might even open it against her better judgment, although it breaks one of her strictest rules—privacy. But with no one else in the house, she might take a peek. She'll see a phrase, something shocking from a time when she thought everything was under control, her family's lives virtuous and unwavering in Panama. And she'll continue reading, horrified, and then fascinated by her horror and horrified by her fascination—deeper and deeper, not able to stop—like me with Federico. She'll read, listening for footsteps, but I'll be away at Oberlin and Father at work, so she'll be safe but guilty and completely drawn in. A long time will pass and finally she'll finish and sit on the side of my bed, shaken, wondering what to do.

But it's all over. There will be nothing she can do. To confront me she'd have to reveal she's pried into my private life. And my offense, which she's just discovered, would be passed and over with. She doesn't know that Federico is so large a part of me now that nothing else can come in, no one else, ever.

I'm writing and squeezing back tears because people are walking on the deck and I don't want them to see me sentimental and teary—I'm stronger and tougher than that. Federico's tomboy.

This much I know—the pain will go away. I know it. That's just common sense. But right now my heart hurts, my whole chest hurts—no wonder they call it heartbreak. My skin hurts to touch—it hurts when it's not touched. And that will go away; it has to. So will Mother if she finds this and reads it. She wont do anything to me; she wont evenconfront me. She'll close the diary and slip it back into my dresser drawer and sit there stunned. And things will go on as usual.

Cheerful Dayton. Orville no longer tinkering in the shop because he's making trips to Washington and Europe, which he doesn't enjoy—he's famous now and that's no fun for him. Me moving dreamlike until I get my wits back. Mother pretending she knows nothing of "soap foam sliding down his arms and chest to his legs in the dark," and each time I come home from Oberlin she'll introduce me to nice Dayton gentlemen, good-natured Methodist boys eager to know me better and wanting maybe to have me between crisp Dayton sheets, the kind meant for proper conjugal unions that produce good-natured children in sensible homes not too emotional in nature, with all things under control, no lush Panama foliage that can turn to a hot streak of desire in a heartbeat. No heavy floral scent in the Dayton air. We're a clearheaded people, anxieties suppressed and kept in order at any cost. There are always two or three unbalanced citizens around, but we're a sensible bunch and tolerate them well. I'll soon be back there, back home. And all this will pass. I come from good Kentucky and Missouri stock and know that. I've experienced it.

I know common sense will prevail and I'll be fine.

Close the book, Mother—it's all over.

Shelby Hiatt got the idea to write about the Panama Canal after visiting it and getting to know many Zoners, descendants of the people who lived and worked on the Canal. She has written for movies and television, though this is her first book. She lives in Brentwood, California.

He's beautiful.
And that is what I'm visualizing: Federico sitting at his desk with a book, perfect, like a photograph. In my brain his image comes into focus with the one that's been floating there for years—a spiky urging in me since Father first spoke the word
Panama.
A smoky, intuited vagueness that formed slowly and became a shape that represents all I don't know. Outside the cabin I realize Federico is that shape. At least I think he is.