Maiden Voyage (9 page)

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More than a country, the narrow Isthmus of Panama is an enigma that connects by a crooked finger the vast continents of North America and South America. But Panama—everybody's lover but nobody's child—wears a deep scar of progress across her slim wrist. That scar is called the Panama Canal. For me, the canal represented only a gateway to the Pacific. I didn't think too much about the living, breathing country outside the barbed-wire fences of the manicured, 10-mile-wide Canal Zone. But, by the time
Varuna
had traveled through the awesome lock system, I had not only seen another side of Panama, but I would begin to uncover another side of myself.

On the morning of July 27, after nine days' sailing from St. Thomas,
Varuna
closed the coast and joined the international parade of ships passing the immense jetty and entering the deep-water anchorage for vessels awaiting transit through the canal. A sailboat out on a jaunt turned around and sailed toward us. The lone sailor hollered over, the sound once again of a human voice unbroken by radio static.

“Hey, are you Tania?” he called, waving.

“Yes! Hello!” I called back, waving my hand out of whack.

“Welcome to Panama,” he said. “We've been waiting for you.”

After checking in with customs and immigration, I tied up in the marina near a sign that said Cristóbal Yacht Club and went ashore. The yacht club was bustling with people of many languages preparing their boats to transit the canal, as well as operators of local boats belonging to canal administrators and engineers. The focal spot was the twenty-four-hour bar filled with people lounging around, downing cheap drinks, looking for crew and line handlers, or kicking back after a day of hard work. Not quite the kooky bar out of
Star Wars
, the place had the interesting atmosphere of odd types, lounge lizards, wayfarers and action. Advice was cheap, and I was immediately and repeatedly warned about the danger of crossing alone over the railroad tracks that separated the club's premises from the surrounding town of Colón.

“There is danger,” one canal operator warned me. “Every day, people are being mugged, raped and murdered in Colón.”

“Please do not go there by yourself,” stressed another.

“I'm from New York City,” I said. “How violent could Colón possibly be compared to that?” The first operator answered with stories of people's fingers being cut off for rings, of men being forced to surrender their shorts, of individuals threatened with knives, and of chains being ripped from around necks. To make peace, I promised that I wouldn't press my luck and would only venture into town during daylight or with other people.

They were right. But, seeing it for myself, I couldn't help thinking that there was an exciting Latin air to the place, aside from the fact that crime really was rampant, every kind of drug was available and stolen goods were hawked left and right in the streets. The city was lined with dilapidated colonial housing around a teeming market, with double-decker tenements and projects surrounding the old French and Spanish quarters. The thumping bass beat of salsa and disco blared from every open window, laundry hung limply between the buildings and crooked TV antennas clung to the roofs. Old American bombers of cars sputtered up and down worn streets, while the reputed Latin temper flared on every corner.

The second day after my arrival, after traveling by bus to Panama City to get some traveler's checks and coming home late at night, I missed my stop, ending up in the middle of Colón. I had to walk alone through town back to the harbor, an action that flew in the face of every warning I had received since my arrival. On the doorsteps and stoops were shadows who cat-called without mercy. That night as I made my way through Colón, I didn't get mugged, but I did observe the pathetic look of a city with a depressing history and dashed hopes.

I didn't want to be one of those people who leaves Panama knowing only one facet of its personality. The more I learned about it, the more this hybrid of a country fascinated me, and I empathized with the Panamanians. Their laboring ancestors had slaved and died over a canal from which they never really profited. Today, the military and a handful of rich families hold the mace of power while the rest of the population is left to fend for itself in a system with different rules for different people.

In the early 1900s, the Americans were granted control within five miles on either side of the canal, establishing the Canal Zone that stretched the 60-mile width of the isthmus. It was cut off from Colón and the rest of the country by a barbed-wire fence and guards
until the time the Zone was abolished in 1979, only six years before I arrived.

During my stay at Cristóbal Yacht Club, I met some people who took me to their homes inside the old Zone compound. I saw how the American employees had been provided with modern hospitals, supermarkets, movie theaters, good roads and the semblance of a utopian suburban life in the tropics. In the old days, on the other side of the fence, all the descendants of the people who had struggled to excavate the monstrous canal lived in utter squalor and poverty, probably watching through the barbed wire the everyday workings of the American dream.

If it hadn't been such a luxury for all shipping to be able to use a shortcut over the alternative of going around the dangerous Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, Panama would still be rain forests belonging to neighboring Costa Rica and Colombia. It was sad to think that I was just another captain out of the thousands of ships using the canal for my convenience and, in a very removed way, contributing to the strife surrounding it.

To get through the canal, I had to spend a few days filling out reams of documents and tramping back and forth in the humid 100-degree weather to one office after another.
Varuna
had to be measured for tonnage to determine the cost of transit and I had to become savvy with the specific procedures of taking my boat through the locks. Every sailboat is required to have four 100-foot-long lines and an equal number of people to handle them, not including the captain of the vessel and a canal pilot. I began to worry about
Varuna
carrying six well-fed grownups.

To get a little experience and to see what was in store, one morning I took passage as a line handler on another sailboat, a common thing to do. While we were tied up to the dock waiting for a ship to pass, a pretty white French ketch motored up beside us. Its crew seemed to be in the midst of a party celebrating their boat's canal entry, and I noticed one of the men staring at me. He smiled and asked in French if I spoke the language. Thoroughly shy about my American accent, I answered,
“Oui
, a little bit.”

“Très bien,”
he said, with a nice laugh. “I will speak English. I help this boat go through the canal today. Can you help bring my boat through tomorrow?” His accent was thick and his English halting.

“Well . . .” I hesitated. I really hadn't planned to do it twice in a row before taking
Varuna
through. That would seem to be a waste of
time. “Well . . .” I looked at him awaiting my answer. He smiled. “Sure,” I said. “I'll help you.”

“My name is Luc. We rendezvous tonight at the yacht club in Colón? We will talk,
non?”
The boat he was on began to pull ahead. “What is your name?” he called as they entered the lock.

“Tania!” I called back.

That night, after taking the train back to the yacht club, I waited for Luc at the twenty-four-hour bar filled with “Zonies,” those expatriate American Canal operators still living in Panama and helping the Panamanians learn the tricks of the trade. By nine-thirty, I'd had enough of the place and finally gave up on Luc. I went back to
Varuna
, penned a note and went out for ceviche with a kindly ship agent named Adrian who had adopted me soon after my arrival. Together, as we feasted on the spicy raw fish, Adrian shared with me his knowledge of the canal, and he gave me the book
The Path Between the Seas
, which recounted the story of the canal from beginning to end. As we ambled back to
Varuna
, I saw Luc waiting on the dock. “We must be ready at five in the morning,” he said. “I come for you with my dinghy.”

The next morning, with eyes still glued together, I was presented to his boat,
Thea
, and his crew member, Jean Marie. The couple whose boat Luc had helped bring through the canal, René and Catherine, were aboard also, returning the service, and Trudy, an American from California, was washing the dishes. We drank steaming bowls of strong coffee, European style, waited for the pilot to arrive and talked about who we were and where we were all going after transiting.

I found myself hanging on Luc's every word. He gave me a tour of his rugged 37-foot sailboat and captivated me with stories about his childhood in Africa. He was the son of a captain in the French army who kept moving back and forth across the continent to different stations. Luc had gone back to France to attend college and, since finishing ten years before, his wanderlust and career had taken him to live in New Caledonia in the South Pacific. He was a dreamer, a poet, a gardener of the imagination, with the capabilities and faith to make his dreams come true. A faraway light made his eyes gleam when he told me about the South Pacific.

“Oh, Tania, you are going there also?” he asked. “We must do it together. I will show you things that your cold American eyes would never see otherwise. I will show you places where the mango grows wild and untouched, where there are no footprints in the sand. I will
show you waterfalls that will break your heart, and seals and fish that live in such peace that when we swim with them, they will take food from our hands and play with us like little children. I know the South Pacific and its gentle people. Don't hurry through this magnificent island paradise to Australia or you will regret it. Take my word for it, Tania. See the islands with me.”

I was speechless. For me, everything that this man said was a paradigm. “I want to be free, Tania. For me, money is simply a way to pay for my freedom. I work only to have enough to sail to the places of beauty on the earth.”

“That's
exactly
how I feel,” I found myself saying, over and over again. As I told him what I was doing, he said how lucky I was to be able to do it so young. Luc was one of the first people I had met since leaving New York who didn't make me feel like a lunatic for being on a boat alone. He was one of the first people to recognize the beauty of the plan.

“I, too, want to see as much as I can,” he said. “Before I die, I want to examine the farthest blossom on the farthest mountain peak.” Everything Luc said struck the chords of my own dreams. Sentence by romantic sentence, his eloquent vision of the potential of life painted colors on the blank canvas of my future. I will always remember that day as one of magic energy, of floating on a cloud and of falling in love.

By the end of
Thea's
canal transit in Panama City, Luc had agreed to help me take
Varuna
through the next day and I had finally pulled out of him that in the world of bills and deadlines and responsibilities, he actually worked as a designer of sewage-treatment plants. This struck me as particularly funny at the moment, although I couldn't find the words in French to explain why. At least I
thought
that's what he said he did for a living. The vagaries of our language barrier were to play several tricks on us in those early days.

That night, I took the train back to the yacht club, began to prepare
Varuna
and waited for Luc to arrive later on. When he came, he helped get all the lines together and we did some last-minute repairs to the engine. At bedtime, I arranged his bedding up in the forepeak, we awkwardly said goodnight and I curled up in my own bunk. After a couple of hours of mutual tossing and turning, I heard Luc get up and quietly come over to my bed. Soundlessly, he caressed my head. I froze and pretended I was asleep. He didn't try to awaken me, but just knelt there and then crept back to his bed.

I had met two young Danish teenagers in Colón who were visiting
relatives and wanted to see the canal, as well as the daughter of a yacht club member. With Luc, plus the canal pilot and me,
Varuna
had the requisite four line handlers. They arrived at the dock the next morning and, at o'dark-thirty, we stuffed everyone aboard and headed for the first lock.

Our canal pilot was a serious young trainee named Alberto, who insisted on steering. The first set of massive steel doors opened before us pushing thousands of gallons of water in their path. In front of us, a large tanker motored into the cavernous pen 1,000 feet long and 110 feet wide, with another set of steel doors at the end. On the sides above the lock, little locomotives pulled the ship in and tightened the cables as it reached the proper position. We followed it into the lock, and four burly types launched messenger lines to us, thin ropes with loops and weights at the ends.

As we scrambled around on
Varuna
, our voices echoed off the tall Canal walls while we tied our own four 100-foot lines onto the messengers and the men pulled them up and tied the boat off on four quarters. The steel doors banged shut behind. Every aspect of our environment—the air, the water, the walls—reverberated with the groan and grind of tons of meeting steel, rushing water, machinery and turbines.

We were in the hands of this Cyclopean mechanical system from here until the top of the system at the level of Gatun Lake. We rose as the deluge of fresh water was pumped in from the lake, and
Varuna
strained to break free from her lashings, but the men on shore tightened the lines and took up the slack. I shared every captain's worst fear and imagined my boat breaking free and tossing around in this boiling vat like a rubber ducky.