A Different Sort of Christmas

I woke up at 4 am this Christmas, but not from excitement over the getting of something. I was really excited about going through the Panama Canal. I tried working on some email, as it was really dark still, but the boys from Morehouse, who had been up all night and were tweeting while having drunk a fair amount over the night, kept me distracted, so nothing of import was written.
When it got light I went up on the 7th deck, to watch the approach to the Canal. The geography is very confusing. We were approaching from the Pacific side, but the sun was rising behind me as we came into the channel. As it goes from the Pacific side to the Atlantic, we go east to west with a little jig to the south as we go north. It felt very confusing, but the sun kept rising.
Panama City was another surprise. After the small port villages that we had been going into, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, suddenly a city full of significant high rises appeared on the horizon. Panama collects funds from all over the Americas these days and has become a center of finance, hence the excuse for the high rise buildings. Plus they do not have many earthquakes, or any volcanoes like its canal competitor, Nicaragua. An obligatory Frank Gehry building guarded the entrance to the Canal’s channel.
The channel took us about 2 miles past Panama City to the first set of locks, the Miraflores. As locks in the world go, they are big, but so are the boats that go through now, and Panamanians have decided that they would like to build another set of locks that are larger, to accommodate even bigger container and cruise ships than is possible now. Beside the Miraflores locks, you can now see the beginnings of another dig, with new locks planned to be open by 2014. Nicaragua is planning, in conjunction with the Japanese, a’dry’ canal across the old route through Nicaragua. It will be interesting to see which happens first.
So we entered the first set of locks with all hands on deck, and learned that there are webcams beside each set of locks (there are 3 lock sets – two on the Pacific side, the Miraflores and the PedroManuel, and one set on the Atlantic side of the Gatun Lake, the Gatun). To see a video of our boat going through the locks, go to //Fs2.semesteratsea.net/public/panama_canal. It is one of those situations where a picture is worth a thousand words. The brilliant simplicity of the idea of locks is transformative, but hard to explain.
But I will try as it is a real challenge to understand why the French failed to build a canal at sea level, and why the Americans were able to as soon as they decided to build the locks. For several days now, I have been asking the question, “Why is the sea level higher on the Pacific side than on the Atlantic side?” That is the reason for the locks, but it has not been the simplest thing to understand – at least until someone finally said that it had to do with the tides. The tide on the Pacific side has to come way up into a shallow bay, and so is higher than that on the Atlantic side. That, in combination with the huge amount of water that flows down the Chagres River into Colon on the Atlantic side, makes for a more difficult situation than what occurred when the French built a sea-level canal at Suez, hence locks became necessary.
Nearly twenty years ago, I went with my son, David, his father, and some family friends on two small motor boats 20’ long, down Lake Champlain in Vermont, down the Champlain Canal and through small, 175 year old locks to the Hudson River, down the Hudson River to Troy, N.Y., up the ‘Mohawk Stairs’, - 5 locks rising 100’ up the Mohawk River, - out the River which becomes the Erie Canal, through dozens of nearly 200 year old locks on the Canal built for canal-sized boats. We hung a right on the Erie Canal onto the Oswego Canal, went through more locks and came out onto Lake Ontario at Oswego, crossed the Lake and entered the St. Lawrence River. Down the St. Lawrence we went, through the Thousand Islands and the Akwesasne Reservation, to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the locks there and on to Montreal. After Montreal, we continued down the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Richelieu River at Sorel, went up the Richelieu and through the tiny wooden locks at Chambly, and on up the River to Lake Champlain and home again. Wherever they are, locks operate in the same way – water comes in, gates open, the boat comes in, water goes either up or down with gravity and the boat floats up or down with it, the gates open and the boat floats out – whether the locks are small ones like the ones at Chambly, large ones like those on the St. Lawrence, and medium-sized, ancient ones like those on the Erie Canal.
Locks on the Panama Canal work the same as all the others; it’s just that they are bigger. Water flows into and out of them in the same way; ships float up and down in the same way whether they are 20’ motor boats or 1000’ long container ships. It is size that makes for the drama here. And it is size that is now the problem. As you can see in the photos, I hope, the scale of the container ships sooooo enormous now that they are beginning to dwarf the Canal; one false move by a tug or a hand on a throttle, could doom the whole project –even after 100 years. But the plans for the expanded locks are here. Is there a limit? Can we just keep building bigger and bigger things on our smaller and smaller planet? It is a dilemma. I’ll be watching to see what happens here in Panama. In the meantime, it was a very different sort of Christmas!

Upon editing, and with help from the techno wizard Rita on board, I know have some canal photos to share: