Panama (2 page)

We board a train to New York, then a boat to Panama, and that gets an item in the
Dayton Journal.

"The William Haileys of number 9 Hawthorne Street have sailed for the Isthmus of Panama, where Mr. Hailey's expertise in railroad management will be added to the Canal Commission team."

We get a fourteen-point headline on page two.

The Advance,
the Panama Railroad Line'S vessel that plies between New York and the narrow strip of land called the Isthmus of Panama, is no grand ocean liner, but it's far from Dayton and puts me in a state of perpetual excitement.

We have a little cabin, good food, and a dose of seasickness—green with it for three days. We're hardly able to get to the cabin door when they bring us apples and crackers, and those don't stay down either. I'm miserable but I wouldn't go back for anything. If it's the price of traveling to adventure, I'll gladly pay it. Then suddenly the sickness is gone—soft-boiled eggs, a walk around the deck, and we have our sea legs.

For the first time we sit in deck chairs as we move down the Atlantic to the new world. Sun reflects so bright in our eyes, we have to cover them with scarves—no experience like this in Dayton. We're landlocked Buckeyes. This is my first sight of endless water, not to mention ocean liners—the stately ones we saw when we embarked in New York.

I feel cut loose but we're still with Americans. The passengers sitting near us are mostly women, all bound for the Canal Zone, returning from home leave. They talk among themselves and boast about their husbands' positions—sanitation officer, steam-shovel engineer, materials expert—and it's soon evident that like us they're from all over the Midwest. Unlike us they're old hands at canal life.

We listen silently. Mother is socially shy, and though Father is a boss above all the positions the ladies are talking about, she isn't going to make that announcement. We look through our eyelashes to screen out the sun and the women continue to brag about their husbands' pay levels, where they live, and what kind of homes they've been given. In the middle of this shameless boasting Mother suddenly speaks up.

"My husband's working on the canal to prove his faith in Teddy Roosevelt and America."

The chatter stops. One of the women says, "That's very interesting."

It's a snub but Mother covers her eyes and doesn't notice. Gradually the chatter starts again but they keep it quiet and we're excluded. Mother's let it be known where she stands and that's enough. She turns her head away.

She actually disapproves of the way the Zone was acquired—American gunships in the harbor, Colombians told to leave, roughrider Teddy Roosevelt making sure Panama became autonomous so he can make his deal and build his canal. "Nothing democratic about that," Mother said when it was in the paper. "Who gave him those rights?"

I've recently read the Spanish Church thinks building the canal is blasphemous—if God wanted the oceans connected, he would have made them that way. Sitting on the sun-bloodied deck, I want to give her that piece of information to use against the snobby women. "You know, Mother..." She rolls her head toward me but I can't say it. "I can hardly wait to get there."

I didn't really want to say it, not on the high seas for the first time. She'd think the business about God objecting to the canal is absurd. We're Methodists, after all. We don't mix God and geography, and shoring her position against acquisition of the Isthmus with God as topographer is beneath her. Ludicrous. Good for her. Good for our family—sensible above all else.

They don't know I am resolved above all else to be less sensible.

Four days later we arrive in the Port of Colon, Panama.

Panama is even better than I hoped, thick with humidity, raucous noise, and heavy, sultry scents. I'm not in Dayton anymore.

The Chagres River cuts through the dense rainforest and disappears in ribbons of slick licorice blackness.

Big, leathery flowers surround us. Their exotic fragrance mixes with the smell of unfamiliar foods and oils.

Outrageous color is everywhere. Gorgeous, gaudy parrots swoop through treetops and flash yellow, blue, orange, and some wildly unnatural pink.

Dozens of languages come at us from faces that are black, beige, yellow, or the Cuban Spaniards' white—it's all far more than I imagined.

Women are half naked, wrapped in brilliant colors, wearing turbans. They carry fruit and babies and walk with an undulating indifference I've never seen before. I want that, that cool half-weary walk so unlike anybody in Dayton, a state of mind in a lazy gait. Amazing.

And running through all this a few yards from the footpath is the canal itself. The center of everything. Not a ditch. Not even a big ditch. It's the largest man-made canyon on planet Earth and they call it the Cut. Filled with laborers and machinery as far as the eye can see, this teeming mix of metal, flesh, and boulder spreads gaping beside us as Mother and I ride along wide-eyed in the gleaming Canal Commission passenger train taking us to Culebra, fifty miles on the other side of the Isthmus. Panama runs east-west. The canal and the Zone and the Commission railroad run north-south. I picture it as we ride, my map study paying off.

The Zoner ladies from the ship are seated nearby and pay little attention to us or to the new world outside; it's not new to them. But we're first-timers and we're dazzled. The blinding sun, the sounds, and smells boggle us into silence.

In Culebra, Father is waiting, smiling to see us. He's so excited, he hugs us twice each. He keeps saying, "My best girls," then wipes his forehead and replaces his hat. It's not a fedora. It's a heat-worthy woven hat with a wide brim, the kind worn by the bosses, the Americans in charge. Father's a canal boss and stands out in the crowd. I puff a little with pride.

"Be careful, now," he says and helps us into a horse-drawn wagon. There's a Canal Commission emblem on the side and a canvas canopy on wobbly poles protecting us from the sun.

"Comfortable?" he asks.

"Pretty hot," Mother says.

"You'll get used to it."

I'm suffocating.

The driver clucks to his nag. We move off and Father starts talking. I've never heard anything like it, not from my reserved father. He's usually quiet and thoughtful, speaking when he's spoken to. But now, this unbridled enthusiasm that Midwesterners take pains to avoid, because it's too revealing of emotion and too fast, pours out of him. He speaks with no restraint and his enthusiasm is simply harmless bubbling energy. It's genuine. Mother knows that, although I can see it puts her off a little.

He recites details of canal construction and of his work. Mother responds with "How is that, again?" and "Good heavens." On he goes, a hyped rattle that interests me just because it's from Father and so unlike him.

"It's organized. Whole operation runs like clockwork, department for everything—supplies, personnel, living quarters, buildings, architecture"—Mother smiles at his rush of words—"machinery, of course, and maps, topographical and substrata—we use those every day ... and there's a printing and climatic-conditions department, and river hydraulics because we're so close to the Chagres, and the communications department—we'd be lost without them..." I've never heard him say this many words at one time. "...all set up before I got here, of course—engineers worked it out—" And he's about to go on but ... "Ah, look. Now you can see it."

The Cut in full view below us.

It seems we've landed on another planet.

Half a mile across at the top, thousands of laborers on the floor looking like insects. Trains stacked up the side moving back and forth, carrying off dirt and rock. All of it, men and machines, minuscule in the distance against the vast excavation.

"Yours?" Mother asks. "The trains?"

"Yep. And on the far side, see the trackshifter?" A steel pterodactyl is dozing there. "Darnedest thing," he says. "Picks up the rails every evening and moves them like toys. Workers find out where to show up in the roundhouse each morning." He shakes his head in wonder. And he's not done yet. He points in another direction.

"See those steam shovels? They're ninety-five tons each. Outfit called Bucyrus makes them for us. Three times the size of anything you'll ever see in Dayton—anywhere else, for that matter. Two men on each shovel—one controls the crane and picks up dirt, the other's got his hands and feet on levers to control the rest of the machine. They're like bronco riders, those fellas." Then, with genuine respect, "Strong, thick-skinned boys—they're in that blasting and heat six days a week. It's hard work and dangerous."

It looks like he's finished for a while and he gazes at the operation satisfied.

Mother clears her throat. She sits ramrod straight as though in our quiet Dayton home. "Well, it certainly is going to be one of the wonders of the world," she says. Father grins.

I finally pipe in. "Where does the dirt go?"

"Gatun Dam in the Chagres. Whole towns being built on that landfill."

As wonderful as everything is (I've seen nothing like the Cut ever in my life), I'm still watching for something really exotic, not sure yet what that would be. I badly want my life to change. So I can't help being disappointed when we arrive at our new-world house that looks very much like the old-world house in Dayton—typical Midwestern clapboard with a long screened porch. Maybe I was expecting a thatched roof, I don't know.

Mother isn't disappointed—it's what Father promised. "Will you look at that," she says, a big smile at the familiar structure.

Inside it's the same layout as our house in Dayton (these Canal Commission builders knew how to replicate the heartland). Nice living room, kitchen with laundry, and dining room on the first floor. Two bedrooms and bath above. Plenty of closet space. Rockers on the porch. "So you can watch the sunset," Father says. Then he says to the black men who've unloaded our cases,
"Gracias. Ustedes pueden vayar."

Now, that's something different. Spanish from Father—simple, proper, but effective, and the men leave, just as he told them to.

Father begins pushing the sofa nearer a window according to Mother's orders and I see that furniture arranging could go on for a while. I go upstairs.

My room looks across the Cut and it's better than the one in Dayton, if only because it's empty. It's a grown-up room—plain, no pictures on the wall, none of my drawings trying to be young Michelangelo with sepia pencil crosshatching. Just clean, bare walls and a big window.

I've brought some light clothing and a few notebooks and that's it, no décor. I'm going to leave it simple. Adult and not Dayton.

In the evening when we are "put away" and "hung up," Mother discovers ants threading across the kitchen floor. She sweeps them out. Father plasters puttylike goo around the door and windows. I scrub up.

Mother cooks us a fine little meal from the goods Father has laid in and all's well.

When we go upstairs and fall into bed, I wonder if my parents will make love after being apart so long, but the thought is only a streak through my teen brain already packed with uneasy excitement. I keep wondering if this is it, the place I've conjured for years. Does it match my fantasy?

I lie in bed and study the shadows on my ceiling, leafy and stretched oblong, not so different from the ones in Dayton. I try to work out what I feel about this new place, think I'll never fall asleep. Then the scent of Mother's Dayton soap in the sheets blurs me and I'm anesthetized into deep, dark Panama night.

The fantasy is out there. I'll find it.

And I do. But not right away. It gets worse before it gets better. I continue to be cranky with the heat and look to Mother for sympathy, but I get none. She's doing fine and that too irritates me.

Her cake falls from the daily blasting that shakes the house and the oven but it doesn't bother her. She serves "flat cake" with thick dollops of whipped cream. It's delicious. So is everything else she makes. Panama's fruit and vegetables are abundant and fresh and cause some inner chef to bloom in her, producing wonderful platters unlike any she ever concocted in Dayton. As for her new house, it's better than the one she left behind. So all in all, the place she dreaded is not dreadful in any way. She's content.

But not me.

After a week I realize with a fair amount of horror that the Zone is really just like Dayton. It's meant to be. And not just the houses. Coming to us in weekly boatloads are favorite American foods, books, magazines, clothing, and hardware, as though we were on Main Street U.S.A. All around us are the familiar men's clubs—Kiwanis, Elks, Masons—and women's groups and all in English—there's not even a foreign language. It's devastating. All the hope and expectation built up in me is drained away. Even hopes that school would be different with kids from other lands speaking different languages are crushed. (What was I thinking?) It's just like Dayton—American kids from Zoner families. No workers' kids at all, and they're the ones I want to know.

I go to school by train, the only thing that's entirely new. Balboa High is in Cristobal, forty miles on the other side of the Isthmus. But the building is wood clapboard like all the others—square and functional, with an occasional breeze through screened windows—very Midwestern.

The students are bored, uninteresting adolescents full of pranks and pimples. Nothing new there.

"Where are you from?" says one.

"Dayton," I say. "You?"

"Indianapolis."

"You're good at art," I say. "I saw your drawings. I'd really like to see what else you've d—"

"See that boy over there? I think he likes me."

"Where?" This Hoosier girl points him out.

Nothing's different. Boy-crazy girls and friendship by way of collusion. Nobody remotely like the Wrights. Certainly nobody inventing anything.

A few weeks after arrival I go sullen.

The train ride is always social hour, so there I continue to make an effort. I engage in friendly gab as best I can. Of course, I disguise what I think of these morons, while outside the train are indigenous Panamanians and workers from everywhere in the world, literally, with lives and stories I've never heard.
I WANT TO MEET THEM.