Maiden Voyage (10 page)

When all was still, the far set of gates leading into the second lock opened and we waited while the massive propellers of the ship ahead churned into action and eased its bulk forward. We repeated this procedure twice, passed on through the third lock and motored out onto the peace of Gatun Lake, 85 feet above sea level. To the right rose the immense wall of the Gatun Dam, built from the excavation of Culebra Cut ahead, which blocked off the Chagres River and created Gatun Lake.

“The total amount of dirt dug from the entire canal prism,” Alberto told us, “would be enough to build a Great Wall of China from San Francisco all the way to New York City.” We were quiet as
Varuna
chugged from channel marker to channel marker, 23 miles across the serene beauty of Gatun Lake. The giant man-made pool
was full of birds and trees that grew like castaways on little island tufts popping above the water. The boughs of other, less fortunate trees, submerged when the land was sacrificed to the lake, protruded above the surface and appeared to be struggling for a last breath of life.

The panorama that surrounded
Varuna
was an eerie one. On my third voyage through the canal in as many days, the submerged trees were becoming symbols, reminders of the land and the country that had existed there before the ambitious canal project. If only the trees could talk, I thought, what stories they could tell of toil and tribulation and time swept away.

Alberto told us of how the French were the first to attempt to create the path between the seas in 1879. To dig the canal, the French contractors imported black Caribbean islanders, Central and South Americans, Italians, Greeks and Chinese. In horrendous swampy working conditions, diseases like malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis, typhus and cholera festered, with a toll of 25,000 dead. “People dropped like flies,” said Alberto. The French desperately brought in new reinforcements, but despite ten years of trying, bankruptcy, loss of faith in the project and the complete depletion of their manpower resources forced them to give up, and the Americans had jumped in.

Luc and I sat together at
Varuna's
bow and watched Alberto line up the channel alignment points that were set up on the hills in front and behind us. Two markers had to be lined up, one on top of the other, to let us know we were on course. When they separated, we knew that
Varuna
had drifted off the course, and therefore out of the channel, and we would hurriedly rearrange our position.

We approached Culebra Cut between Gatun Lake and the first descent in the Pedro Miguel Lock, while I went below and made sandwiches. I felt bad, knowing that everybody could have been on bigger and more comfortable boats, so I tried to make up for it with a feast. If nothing else,
Varuna's
crew would be well fed.

“You see here?” said Alberto, with his mouth full of ham-and-cheese sandwich. “This channel dug through the cliffs was the worst stretch in the whole construction. Here, the workers had to dig through the Continental Divide, three hundred and ten feet high and nine miles wide. After completing one-third of the work, these mountains were what destroyed the French. When the Americans took over, they hired eighty six thousand people; seven thousand of those died.”

We looked at the corridor of reddish-brown cliffs that lined the
passage. As Alberto told of the hundreds of times the dynamite had exploded prematurely, killing many people, the immense scope of the statistics began to blur. But there was no denying the awesomeness of the Canal; the toll of its building was legendary. Even the great French painter Paul Gauguin survived his stint as a common laborer on the project. I remembered a West Indian poem from Adrian's book: “The flesh of man flew in the air like birds many days.”

Varuna
descended the Pedro Miguel lock to the Mira Flores Lake and then down the Mira Flores locks in much the same way she ascended. The only difference was that this time the water emptied instead of filling and the commotion was much less severe. After fifteen hours, we chugged out into the Pacific. As we motored alongside the jetty of Balboa Yacht Club, I bid Alberto farewell, as well as my other line handlers. They hopped ashore as Luc fended
Varuna
from the dock and we motored to pick up one of the moorings for the night.

“Thea
is anchored in Taboga,” said Luc, after everyone had departed. “It is not far from here. If you want, we can sail there, Tania, and be together.”

He could do or say nothing wrong. We struggled to communicate, I with my rusty French and he with his broken English. But, somehow, we got our stories across. Or so I thought. Already I had visions of sailing to the ends of the earth with Luc. We untied
Varuna
from her mooring the next evening and began sailing the 5 miles to Taboga, my first Pacific island. In the pitch darkness, the glimmering lights on the horizon were like harbingers of my future and I sailed toward them in hopeful anticipation.

I
n the sixteenth century, on his voyage to the New World, Magellan entered the Pacific Ocean and, finding it as smooth as baby's skin, christened it El Pacifico, the peaceful one. As far as the Europeans were concerned, he had discovered this ocean, and at that time, he couldn't have known that the great body covered one-third of the earth's surface and gave rise to vicious storms. Over four hundred years later, as
Varuna
forged out of the Panama Canal and away from the only ocean she had ever known, neither did I. The next year would be spent discovering the islands of the Pacific. It was to be an ocean of revelations, farewells and new beginnings.

Taboga Island is to Panama City what the Hamptons on Long Island are to New York. During the week the pace was slow and workaday, but come Friday afternoon a daily ferry disgorged a crowd of families dressed in their Sunday best, who swamped the small hotel and the empty village cottages for the weekend. Arriving midweek, we had the place to ourselves.

Our first day in Taboga, we followed stone paths lined with flowery, sweet-scented bushes and hedges that threaded through the tiny community. Children played in the streets while mothers washed and hung laundry to dry on their terraces and backyards. We counted about five cars on the island, which made for an odd contrast with carriages drawn by donkeys, their heads bowed down in the searing heat as their tails swished away hordes of flies.

Varuna, Thea
and a third boat,
Saskia
, rolled on their anchors off the beach with the incoming swell. That evening, we watched the sunset from the terrace of a small open-air restaurant overlooking the harbor containing ten little fishing boats, our three sailboats and, in the distance, as if put out to pasture, two ancient hulks of fishing seiners. Several knobby green islands protected the exposed harbor from the Pacific beyond.

“I will show you everything beautiful in the world, Tania,” Luc said over dinner. Squirming, I looked down at my untouched plate of shrimp as the waitress came to clear it away. Life was getting complicated.

From the first day on,
Saskia, Thea
and
Varuna
formed a sailing community, with
Thea
as the nucleus. She was the biggest, most commodious boat, stocked with the best food, and compared to
Varuna
, whose living space was hard-pressed to accommodate one small person, the 37-foot
Thea
seemed palatial.

One of Luc's favorite pastimes was cooking. He loved to conjure up gastronomic feasts from his galley, perfectly situated so that the chef was never alienated from the table's festivities. I joined in the teasing and jokes when sharing breakfast, lunch and dinner with these French musketeers, and in return washed the dishes whenever Jean Marie got tired of his dishwasher status.

Jean Marie was a Parisian who had been in the air force since he was eighteen. When he finally got out, he was thirty-three and set off immediately to fulfill his lifelong ambition to see the world. He had taken an airplane to Martinique, made the acquaintance of Luc, who was preparing to bring
Thea
to Tahiti, and joined on as crew.

René was from Brittany, a fiercely autonomous region on the northwestern coast of France. His wife had taken a teaching position in Costa Rica and had flown back to her school duties after transiting the canal a week before, leaving him on his own to bring
Saskia
to Costa Rica. René was vehemently French, and in testament, before leaving home, he had visited all the best wine châteaux and had built up an impressive wine cellar in
Saskia's
bilge and lockers, which were jam-packed with a thousand rag-swathed bottles of every bouquet. The three philosophers would sit around before dinner, sniffing, swirling and admiring as if they were important buyers in Alsace.

René was the character of the group, distinguishable from the other two in many subtle ways, and in one way not so subtle. The only thing René ever wore was his bushy black beard and a beret to
cover his balding scalp. That's it. Save for the hat, he paraded around stark naked in all his skinny, suntanned glory. I was taken aback at first, not knowing where to look whenever René approached, until I realized that Luc and Jean Marie never gave him so much as a passing glance. I finally got used to René in the buff, but I always wore my bathing suit.

Luc was the glue that held the group together with the wild stories from his travels and adventures, and the first few nights I went to bed with a pounding head from trying to understand the bawdy French, full of clichés, innuendos and different dialects. Luc's passionate Gallic narrow-mindedness reminded me of my father, and Jean Marie and René reminded me of the rogues' gallery of my father's eccentric friends always huddled around our kitchen table back home—everybody laughing or arguing, full of great stories to tell about the exotic places they had lived and all the crazy things they had done.

During the ribald dinner conversations around
Thea's
table, my thoughts went back to our loft in New York and the artists, yodeling and fun of those childhood days. Over the years, as my father's artwork finally started meeting with success, he had made a lot of the kind of off-the-wall friends that can only be found in the art world. Most came and went, but the two main fixtures were always Christian and Fritz. Christian, who had immigrated with my father to New York, and Fritz, who arrived soon after, were his oldest friends, and so close to us that they had become part of the family.

In my father's circle of friends, one hand always washed the other. Once, before Fritz met success with his own artwork, he found himself short of cash and my father tried to help him out.

“Fritz, my building needs a paint job,” he had said. “If you're interested in doing the job, it's yours.”

“Great,” Fritz answered. “Ernst, I'll do it right away.” My father came back from a trip to Switzerland three weeks later and found his five-story Soho apartment building painted baby blue and covered by a mural of gigantic flying milk cows wearing parachutes. Now, 2,400 miles away from my family and friends, sitting around
Thea's
table of eccentrics, I was reminded of those days and friends and felt comfortably at home.

•   •   •

I lingered in Taboga for many reasons, not the least of which was Luc. But also,
Varuna
, as well as
Thea
and
Saskia
, needed repairs and some general maintenance to prepare for the next passage. Luc and
I helped each other, René spent his days methodically fixing things around
Saskia
and Jean Marie amused himself wandering around the island. On one of his excursions, Jean Marie met a striking elderly beauty who owned a Popsicle stand on the beach. He brought her out to
Thea
on our third evening at Taboga.

“This is Kerima de Lescure. She is very special,” said Jean Marie, “I wanted you to meet her.” Kerima spoke no French or English, so we had to get by with Jean Marie's broken Spanish, filled in by lots of sign language. But when she spied Luc's guitar, the communication problems were over. She picked it up and began to sing the songs of a dreaming, stargazing poet. Every evening at her Popsicle stand, she would read to us from one of her volumes of poetry, always referring to
el sol
and
las estrellas
, the sun and the stars. Easily enchanted, Kerima was fascinated by my voyage and Dinghy and often repeated with her tinkling laugh,
“Muchacha solita con su gatito,”
little girl alone with a cat.

One day, in a fit of back-to-business, the three guys put their brains and hands together to fix the starter of Luc's engine, a dirty job. The day was a scorcher, so for relief while they sweated, I jumped overboard to scrub
Varuna's
bottom. If left unattended for long, the hull began to attract all sorts of marine life and barnacles which would hamper speed when we were finally under way. Dinghy meowed down at me from the deck, while with a mask, snorkel and a coarse brush, I dived under the boat to scrub away the plants.
Varuna's
underbody looked as if it had five o'clock shadow, and as I scrubbed, tufts of the hairy green beard floated down and dropped away. Even though all the barnacles growing on her underbody had died and fallen off after passing through the fresh water of the Canal, it was quite a job scouring off what was left. The results were worth the effort.
Varuna's
speed, with a clean bottom, increased by at least half a knot, sometimes more.

All of a sudden, with one-quarter of the boat done, a burning sensation rushed over my body and, within seconds, I was in agony. Unable to scream, I also couldn't pinpoint exactly from where the pain was coming. It seemed to overwhelm me from everywhere—arms, shoulders, back, guts. Panicking, I surfaced, somehow managed to pull myself up on deck and began to go into shock.