David McCullough

If at dawn you walk the streets of Nha Trang, Vietnam, you may see blocks of ice being hauled by modified bicycles, bound for paying customers. In looking at this you may remember your grandfather, who mangled his legs as a kid in the 1920s when he got drug behind an ice truck (if I remember the story correctly, he was trying to nab some free ice). His injuries were severe enough that when later he tried to join the military during World War II, he was refused.

Also, you may recall a footnote in David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas, in which he details how ice made its way to Panama in the mid-1800s. It’s fascinating:

The ice was supplied by the Boston and Panama Ice Company and it sold for as much as fifty cents a pound when first introduced on the Isthmus. One ship from Boston carried seven hundred tons of ice packed in sawdust all the way around the Horn to Panama City, with a loss from melting of only one hundred tons. But in the process of getting the ice from ship to land to the Panama icehouse, a distance of two miles, another four hundred tons melted. Yet such was the demand that the sale of the remaining two hundred tons paid for the voyage. Within a few years, ice on the Pacific side was being supplied by ships from Sitka, from what was then knows as Russian America.

Finally, in looking at this scene—particularly if you notice the dripping—you may consider ice as symbolic of the human condition. The ice does in a matter of hours what your body will do in a matter of decades. What begins as defined blocks commences a change of state from the moment it is released into the world. The race is on.

The scene conveys a sense of urgency, speaks to the value of time, mirrors things about yourself. You stand and watch the ice drip till the driver returns. Then you walk on toward the beach, stretching your own block of flesh and spirit further into space and time, feeling it drip. And as you settle into the sand to watch a blazing sunrise, this is what you hope: that you will have more value than even the best cargo from Boston or Sitka, and that one day when you finally die all the way, you’ll be nothing like the wasted puddle on asphalt.

On Christmas Day 2008, about three minutes before two stern-faced policemen approached to inform me that I would be robbed if I didn’t leave the park for a safer part of town, I took this picture of a man reading about Lance Armstrong.  As the man held up his paper (“Miracle” is the headline), and as a man on an adjacent bench made sure I knew Lance had only one testicle, I appreciated how even in a place like Panama City, Panama, people are interested in Armstrong’s phenomenal story.

This week, as Armstrong and others are zigzagging their way through the Tour de France, I suspect the guys I met in December are keeping tabs on their miracle rider.  There was a time, however, when instead of Panama reading about France everyone in France would have been reading about Panama.  And the subject, instead of bicycling, would have been about an undertaking much more expensive, deadly, and even grand—the construction of the Panama Canal.

Armstrong’s coverage tends to be positive thanks to the sheer feat of his victories.  In the late 1800s, however, coverage of the canal's construction, which was a French undertaking, was positive because the construction company had bought off all the French papers. “No less than 2,575 different French newspapers and periodicals had shared in the company’s beneficence,” writes David McCullough in The Path Between the Seas.  “Some little fly-by-night publications had even been founded for the sole purpose of getting in on the take.  In addition to such giants as Le Temps and Le Petit Journal (which received the largest sums), the full list included such publications as Wines and Alcohols Bulletin, Bee-keeper’s Journal and the Choral Societies Echo.”

France would spend more than ten years sweating and dying on the canal, during which time the French public—many of whom had invested their life savings in canal stocks—was left completely uninformed about the tremendous setbacks plaguing the endeavor.  When construction finally had to be abandoned in 1889 (the U.S. would pick it up again several years later) and after an estimated 20,000 workers had lost their lives, French newspapers, embarrassed and no longer in dubious partnership with the canal company, continued to print many a bold headline as newspapers tend to do.  “Miracle,” however, surely wouldn't have been one.

So here's to the independence of the press.  And, I suppose, to not being robbed in public parks, to retired men sitting on park benches, and to a 21st-century news culture which allows a Panamanian to enthusiastically expound on the testicular status of an American bound for France.

Today I finished reading David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914.  I first laid eyes on the book on December 23, 2008, while anchored in Gatun Lake on the Panama Canal.  I was aboard the Matarua, a Canadian yacht whose skipper had offered me free passage through the Canal in exchange for helping to handle ropes in the Canal’s three sets of locks.  We had left the Atlantic port of Colón late that afternoon and passed through the first set of locks that evening.  After a night's sleep, we would resume our passage at dawn, reaching the Pacific about 2:00 p.m. 

I was excited to find that the Canadian couple had a copy of The Path Between the Seas in their library.  I had wanted to read the book while visiting Panama, and had almost ordered it before coming.  But I decided against it on account of the extra weight it would’ve added to my pack.  Now, however, as it was set on the table as Joyce, the skipper’s wife, fixed us gin and tonics after dinner, I had the chance to glance through it.  The next day I would borrow it again for the above photo, taken as we passed through the Miraflores Locks.  The photograph was meant to illustrate the symbiotic relationship between a book and place in travel, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

I’ll be sharing a few excerpts from the book in the year ahead.  For now, since it’s nearing my bedtime, I’ll just pluck a quick tidbit from near the end of the book:

Construction of the canal would consume more than 61,000,000 pounds of dynamite, a greater amount of explosive energy than had been expended in all [of the United States'] wars until that time.  A single dynamite ship arriving at Colón carried as much as 1,000,000 pounds—20,000 fifty-pound boxes of dynamite in one shipload—all of which had to be unloaded by hand, put aboard special trains, and moved to large concrete magazines built at various points back from the congested areas.

My thanks to David McCullough for putting together such a readable history, and especially to Peter and Joyce for inviting me onto their yacht.  The Matarua was among the last of 14,702 vessels to transit the Canal in 2008.