Herbert DeMeza sat alone and silent on the first metal step leading down to the ship`s bow from the promenade deck.
The brim of his Panama straw hat hid the emotion in his face, the tears of joy starting to moisten his eyes.
He was back home. It wasn`t the first time since he left Panama 35 years ago, but it was the first time he would sail through the canal. And he was proud. He was Panamanian, and he had played a role-however small-in the Panama Canal`s history.
Standing a step above and crowded behind him, several hundred passengers on the cruise liner, MS Noordam, were jockeying for a spot at the rail to get a good look at the famous canal and see how the giant locks worked.
Their interest was keen, but their connection with the canal not as direct as DeMeza`s. A few had been through the canal as youngsters, but had not understood it then. A few had been here in wartime and wanted to see it in another circumstance. Some saw it in a historical context, others as a unique segment of a pleasant cruise.
U.S. control reassuring
There had been little talk among passengers during the cruise about the problems between the United States and Panama and of the unsuccessful coup on Oct. 3 against Gen. Manuel Noriega, Panama`s dictator. (This cruise took place before the Dec. 20, 1989, U.S. invasion.) The fact that the U.S. controls the canal area was enough assurance for most passengers that they and the Noordam would be safe.
Like many of the MS Noordam`s 1,150 passengers, DeMeza had arisen before 6 a.m., not wanting to miss a minute of the canal transit that was expected to take eight or nine hours.
The Noordam, part of the Seattle-based Holland America Line, was on its fall repositioning cruise. After sailing the summer in Alaska, the ship was being brought through the canal for winter-season cruises in the Caribbean;
the reverse trip north is done in the spring. Several other lines also operate trips through the canal.
A major portion of the Noordam`s passengers had begun the 18-day voyage Oct. 3 in Vancouver. More were added in San Francisco. The several hundred who had opted to end their voyage in Acapulco Oct. 10 were replaced by others for a 10-day trip though the canal to Ft. Lauderdale.
It was dawn, the water a steely gray. To our right, the sun`s early rays sparkled off the downtown buildings in Panama City only a few miles away.
The Noordam had joined four large freighters in the Bay of Panama at the Pacific entrance to the canal.
Lost in memories
On his stairway perch, DeMeza, lost in his memories, was unaware of the others all about him who were drinking coffee and eating breakfast rolls and straining for their first glimpse of the canal.
Dick and June Beil watched from the same deck. Dick Beil`s grandfather, Perry Orville Laughner, had specialized in pumping mud and water out of oil wells at the turn of the century. Laughner took his family to Panama for several months in about 1910 while he helped construction engineers devise more efficient ways to clear the canal after repeated landslides due to heavy rains.
Dick Beil also had spent two years in Panama during World War II as a pilot.
Boyd Fairfield, of Stockton, Calif., was a young merchant marine cadet on a freighter in 1934 when he made the first of five canal transits. ”I see something different every time,” he said.
Bob Delatour of Berkeley Heights, N.J., passed through the canal on a troop ship as a World War II GI ”more concerned about where we were going than seeing the canal itself.”
Many passengers said they had boned up on canal lore by watching an hour- long video from a recent Nova public-television broadcast; the program had been shown several times a day on the Noordam`s in-cabin TV sets.
An excellent guide
Several passengers who had spent the previous couple of lazy afternoons reading David McCullough`s ”The Path Between the Seas”-considered one of the best histories of the canal-had brought the 700-page volume on deck to refer to during the transit.
Without knowing something of the canal`s history and the engineering and personal hardships that went into it, the transit-except for the locks-could be a bit boring. The passage is along a smooth channel bordered by grasses with trees and thick underbrush covering low rolling hills 100 to 200 yards away. It apparently wasn`t the season for Panama`s famous orchids, we saw few birds, and the only wildlife were two alligators-a few passengers saw them in Gatun Lake.
For DeMeza, 67, the cruise was more of a pilgrimage to strengthen his connection and add perspective to the first half of his life, which he`d spent in Panama.
The three-day non-stop voyage from Acapulco, where he had joined the cruise, was fine, he said. ”But the canal is the reason I`m here.”
As Capt. Hans Eulderink slowed the Noordam to a crawl and eased it between the green and red buoys that marked the canal`s Pacific entrance, DeMeza settled onto his stairway perch for an unobstructed view.
”I wanted to see everything-but I didn`t want to talk. I wanted to be by myself and not miss a thing.”
Early life recalled
For the next seven hours, flashes of his early life would consume him:
memories of nine years as a lad on a small island northwest of the canal. Of learning English from his mother and Spanish from his father and living at times with his grandmother and his aunt. Of his father being accidentally killed when a U.S. Navy plane crashed into his fishing boat. Of studying music at a conservatory in Panama City. And of helping repair the Gatun locks during World War II.
The same questions came to him now that had often come to him since arriving in the U.S. on the first day of spring, 1954: ”Did I do the right thing by leaving Panama? What would my life have been if I had stayed?”
DeMeza`s career as a nurse`s aide at a New York City hospital plus working extra jobs had allowed him the funds to travel much of the world. But this was a journey long awaited-to cruise through the canal instead of simply watching from their banks.
As seven unmarked military helicopters passed over the Noordam, there were sad thoughts of today, too. DeMeza, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is concerned about the plight of his homeland and his friends and relatives who still live in Panama.
There are eight U.S. installations near the canal, but the helicopters were the only things military we saw during our canal transit. Eulderink said that on the Noordam`s spring canal cruise there were armed soldiers at several spots along the canal.
A mile ahead of the Noordam was the Bridge of the Americas, stark against the fog that hung in the valleys of the rolling green Panama hills. The $20 million, mile-long arched steel span was completed in 1962 and connects North and South America at the Pacific shore of the canal cut.
A half mile ahead, a large yellow and black Japanese car carrier moved through the entry channel past a causeway toward the bridge.
We followed.
Pleasure boats abound
To the right side of the narrowing waterway, about 100 pleasure boats bobbed gently at buoys. On the other side of the bridge, pampas grass flourished along the marshy canal shore.
There was shoaling in places at the canal`s edge, the result of the buildup of silt. Annual dredging is needed to keep the minimum canal depth of 45 feet.
A small tug brought to the Noordam two canal pilots, a historian from the Panama Canal Commission and a half dozen sailors to handle the ship`s lines when in the locks. (The pilots and the historian stayed for the entire transit. The crewmen left the ship after we passed the first two locks and were replaced by another crew that took us through the final lock into the Atlantic.)
While most of us had watched the pilots, DeMeza had watched the crews.
”Men from many nations came to Panama to help build the canal and then they settled,” he said. ”This Pacific crew was more Panamanian with dark skin and straight long hair and a bravado walk and style. They spoke only Spanish and would gamble at cards between the lockings.”
The Atlantic crew, he noticed later, was ”more West Indian in features and style, less bravado, more serious, more concerned about their appearance. A couple brought newspapers and did crossword puzzles.”
English is discouraged
In DeMeza`s day, in the 1930s and 1940s, canal workers were expected to speak some English. Today, as part of a strong nationalistic wave, English is discouraged.
We passed the Port of Balboa on our four-mile journey along the sea-level canal to the Miraflores Locks, the first of the three sets of locks in the 50- mile-long canal. Here, the channel narrowed, sometimes to less than 1,000 feet.
Here, as along most of the canal route, thick grass and bushes came to the waterline. Much of the shore land was level 100 yards or so back from the water. Beyond that, larger bushes and palm trees helped make up a thick jungle on the low, rolling hills. It is said that the entire route is bordered by the same kind of wilderness that confronted the early surveyors.
As we passed, the red buoys that marked the right side of the channel stood straight, indicating only a slight current. T-shaped poles with lights at the top were stuck in the mud 5 to 10 feet from shore and about 30 feet apart all along the canal. They mark the route for night passages.
The historian from the Panama Canal Commission, the U.S. government agency that operates the canal, used the ship`s loud-speaker system to tell us how the canal was begun, that it cost about $7 billion in today`s dollars) and an estimated 25,000 lives from disease and accidents, how the locks work, and the canal`s importance in modern commerce.
Passengers lounging on the decks enjoying cool rum drinks said they found it difficult to grasp the enormity of the project or to comprehend the heat and heartbreak of the thousands who worked on the canal from 1880, when the French began to dig, until 1914 when the U.S. completed the project.
The canal operates the same whether approached from the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. Sea-level canals take ships from six to nine miles into the interior to locks. The locks-two sets on the Pacific side, one on the Atlantic-lift ships 85 feet to the level of the Gatun Lake. The vessels then cross the lake, go through a narrow channel cut in mountains along the Continental Divide, go through the locks on the other side and cruise into the other ocean.
As we neared the Miraflores Locks from the Pacific, passengers familiar with Seattle`s Ballard Locks spoke of the striking similarities. But Panama was larger. Much larger.
Both lock systems are concrete structures with metal gates. Panama was completed in 1914; Ballard in 1916.
Panama has three sets of twin (parallel) locks of the same size to handle traffic going both ways at the same time. Ballard has one large and one smaller lock.
Both use tunnels in the concrete to send fresh water through the chamber floor and raise the ships. Tunnels also allow the fresh water to escape into the salt water, slowly lowering the water level and the vessels.
Locks 1,000 feet long
Each of the 12 chambers of Panama`s three locks are 1,000 feet long and 110 feet wide. Ballard`s large lock is 825 feet long and 80 feet wide, the small lock 150 feet by 28 feet.
Each large ship is required to have at least one specially trained canal pilot aboard to advise the ship`s captain during the transit. The pilots know the lock operation and the canal currents.
As ships near each lock, the canal pilot talks on a two-way radio with the operators of tugs helping to move the liner into position.
On entering the lock, towing cables from small electronic locomotives called ”mules” that run on tracks beside both sides of the locks are attached to the ship. Directed by the pilot on the ship`s bridge, the
”mules” help pull and guide large ships inside and between lock chambers. From four to six ”mules” are needed for each ship, depending on the size of the vessel.
In each lock chamber, the water rises 27 feet in 10 minutes. About 52 million gallons of fresh water is used to move an ocean liner through the canal`s three locks.
After moving through the two-step Miraflores Locks, we crossed the mile-long Miraflores Lake and through the one-step Pedro Miguel Locks. Engineers believed separate locks were needed on the Pacific Ocean side of the isthmus because the underlying soil could not support a single larger lock.
Looks like a ditch
Just north of Pedro Miguel Locks is the nine-mile-long Gaillard Cut, the area which, because of repeated landslides, was the most difficult to excavate. The brown water gives the impression that the entire route is a big ditch.
DeMeza searched the shoreline with special intensity as we neared the town of Gamboa, where the Chagres River meets the canal.
”It was a sleepy little town then,” he said. ”It was on the way when my friend and I would ride the train to Panama City. We`d stop at the home of an old friend of his, who would feed us and sometimes let us stay overnight.” At the north end of the Gaillard Cut, our water route opened onto Gatun Lake, a large pristine lake with numerous deep-green islands, lush with animals, birds and flowers.
The lake-now 163 square miles-was created when an earthen dam was built across the Chagres River near the Gatun Locks. Homes, schools, churches, whole communities were flooded. Today, that lake and Madden Lake, a 22-square-mile lake built in 1935 in higher mountains to the south, provides the water for the gravity-operated locks.
Canal experts say there has been some deforestation in the canal watershed, but that if conservation programs are effective, there will be plenty of water to operate the canal for many years to come.
A hot day
By the time we had crossed Gatun Lake, had taken on the new crew for the Gatun Locks passage into the Atlantic, it was early afternoon, near 90 degrees and not a breath of wind. Most passengers had left the sunny desk for shade and a cool drink.
But DeMeza hadn`t moved.
”When the middle gate opened, my memories flashed back. I remember
(1941-1942) being down at the bottom of that middle lock. There wasn`t a drop of water. It was big.
”I would go around and make notes on what work was being done and report to the foreman. I remember making friends with a Cuban. Most of the workers were West Indians, Jamaicans or Cubans. Very few Panamanians.”
As we left the locks and headed into Limon Bay toward the Atlantic, DeMeza watched the shoreline; he remembered swimming as a lad off the beaches near the port of Cristobal and in lakes near the town of Mt. Hope.
DeMeza said seeing the canal now from a cruise liner was perfect; he may be overly cautious, he said, but he would feel uneasy visiting Panama in its pre-invasion political climate.
DeMeza said that since retirement he has thought about moving back to Panama but has decided not to, at least for now. ”I have relatives and lots of friends there, but it`s too unstable right now.”
But that hasn`t tarnished his feelings and hope for his native land.
The 1977 Panama Canal Treaties will turn operation of the canal over to Panama on Jan. 1, 2000.
As a Panamanian, DeMeza is proud that his countrymen will be getting the canal. ”I just hope we`ll be ready.” –
