Panama Diary: A Tiny Boat Stages for a Big Ocean

Young Couple in the Waning Days of ‘America’s Canal’

Genevieve Jacobs Jan 27   ∙   Guest post

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The author is a longtime professor of Psychology and Communications. She landed in Vermont in 1987 after a decade of cruising under sail. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book tentatively entitled “Jenny: A Night Sea Journey.”

A man. A plan. A canal: Panama. Panama is not a palindrome. Or maybe it is.

I sailed through in 1983 with my husband and our cats on our 18-foot sloop we built together, as we headed for the Pacific and the unknown.

The city on the Caribbean/Atlantic side felt spare and lonely. Big tall buildings! Banks galore. Sidewalks. A lot of concrete. Nobody walking but poor sailors. All of everybody in cars.

One strip had carts with stuff that had “fallen off a ship,” a weird selection of mattresses and televisions and blenders which were of no interest to me but also: I scored my favorite cigs in a red pack with gold stripes called “mores.”

Normally they burn slowly and go out if not drawn upon. But these were stale and the brown paper perforated by worms who surely had long since perished of nicotine poisoning. But I fancied I could hear crackling carcasses as I performed their cremation. Such is life.

We anchored off but then managed a pretty funny maneuver into the quayside dock “butt first” which Claude had never attempted before, but I knew well enough from sailing Europe and heavily tidal northern waters.

Over the noise of our outboard I pointed where I wanted to drop anchor out ahead and pay back line for reversing into our spot. All was smooth until, just a couple feet from the dock, he got confused (when you stand facing aft, the handle of the outboard twists the opposite way you might think) and gave a bunch of idle spectators on the dock a really nice sloshing wake up call while also denting our Navik self steering wind vane mount with the sudden, crescendo crash into the dock.

It’s okay. These things happen. Of course I shouldn’t have been howling with laughter on the foredeck but…oh well. Our journey from Miami so far had not been very funny. It was nice to be snugged up like leaves on a stalk next to so many other sailing cruising boats. Most of them were twice our length over all.

Unfortunately, one of our cats managed to hurl herself an astonishing distance to the dock during the night, had a grand old time satisfying the old freudian drives, and returned with a thump and pregnant. Which we only realized much later. Much too late.

Anyway, we also happened to be next to a German yacht whose man was a brute and wife wore a bra—not a bikini, just a sort of really big heavy halter—white, no lace deceptions. When one morning he got mad at her and hurled his sextant box out the companionway at her. She shrieked and headed for the stern. I was sewing in our cockpit, with my sewing machine hooked up to the shore power, when this happened.

I heard it and some sort of animal thing took over, and I was dashing to get over our lifeline and on board their boat when my partner caught me by the right heel and stopped me, hissing “Chenevee, do not get HINVOLVE!” Well, he had a point. But the woman and I exchanged looks and the man backed down.

Yellow? Ooof!

The only other memories I have of that end of the Canal include meeting the 60-year-old transatlantic mini-class solo sailor Margaret, who repeated her sentences two or even three times in a crisp middle class British accent over and over, as if perhaps she doubted whether she’d actually said it out loud or only thought the sentence first.

Margaret had singlehanded her 24-foot micro-mini across the Atlantic in a race, and decided to just keep going. When I met her she was drying her scant few clothes strung in the rigging but dockside so plenty fresh water and somehow we got on the subject of colors. All I can tell you is she hated the color yellow and blamed it on her childhood schoolteacher, but that’s all I recall of the issue.

“Yellow. Ooof, I despise yellow. Ugly color. Really should be outlawed. Hideous in any application.” (She repeated this enough times that I can remember it effortlessly.) She herself had grown up to become a schoolteacher, the British kind who brook no liberties with wrong colors or wrong words.

She read one of my articles in progress and scoffed “Careering, there is no such word as Careering! You mean careening!” Hmmmm. She was probably right, but I’m damned stubborn when it comes to word choices. As you’ve probably noticed. That, and Claude walking back to our boat in a huff down the dock.

What’s wrong?

“I have go up to de bar, and they HINSULT me about the size of de boat!” They may have had a point. But I noticed that his beard had grown long and sort of jutting out making an exaggerated sort of “jutting chin out belligerently” profile. So that night I trimmed it way down. He needed no extra provocations to incite fights with any random strangers. Get the beard under control.

Tons of grey metal filing cabinets and those super heavy military type desks that filled me with both awe and dread of bureaucracy. How the hell do you spell bureaucracy? How the hell do you survive it? Autocorrect is currently useless. I carry on nevertheless. The other friends we made there were Belgian Alex and his blind dog Oscar on a 23-foot racing class sloop, and Per Bengtzen with his very seaworthy Swedish 23-foot Calidris.

We were the small boats. We all passed through the canal in a matter of days and had varied experiences but met on the other side and across the Pacific over the next several years.

There were also some with larger boats among our société du seau. The society of buckets—we who did not have working heads down below. That’s all it took to belong to our little club.

Jean Claude had a 40-foot chined metal hull, in the Trismus style so favored by French sailors. A trismus is a tooth cavity or a dental filling, an apt image for these flush deck aluminum or steel hull designs.

So, we’d made friends back in Miami before serendipitously meeting again in Panama. We struck a deal that he would try to speak only English and I would try to speak only French to improve our skills. As a result we had very odd conversations.

We hopped a bus, these glorious confetti style trucks replete with flashing multi colored string lights and windows hand painted with icons of a romantic and/or religious themes, like Madonna and Child next to Marie y Jesus troo luv, streamers streaming from their handlebars, always packed to the brim.

They race each other wildly and play the salsa very loud—so I had to raise my voice even louder to say to Jean Claude, “Hey Jean-Claude! Vrais Bonne decor, eh?”

Like so many Zonar French men, he practiced being blaise and unimpressed by everything.

But this declaration got a reaction, finally! My statement electrified him and Claude both. They panicked and whipped their heads around the crowd as if to fight. They thought I had said, “vrais bande de cons” which would be “a real bunch of cunts, eh?” Fortunately everyone aboard was as clueless as I was about French.

Canal Memories

Okay, there were dozens of military offices to enter and exit, after which our wallets were emptier but pockets stuffed with documents. The boats tonnage had to be calculated, which I learned was an acrobatic feat to determine volume not weight. I think we weighed something like the Egyptian feather by that time. We’d eaten and shared everything we brought from Miami.

Finally, we received clearance to pass the much storied Panama Canal on a Tuesday, with a designated pilot aboard. Our pilot had a prodigious black waxy moustache, dark glasses, and a snappy well-pressed uniform. Claude, although I had trimmed his beard, was still acting out the sort of belligerent thing that, having reached a certain age, seemed quite ridiculous to me.

The pilot was matching his puffery until it seemed the two of them would explode before we ever got through to the other side. It reminded me of two roosters in the same henhouse. They chest bumped all the next 12 hours as we putt-putted through. There’s not a lot of room for such pageantry aboard an 18-foot sloop.

I gathered that the pilot, who was Panamanian, had taken grief from his buddies for the indignity of taking our little boat through, in the very wake of the grand ocean liner the QE2. Speaking Spanish, he told me that the U.S. had a 90-year lease coming to a conclusion shortly and after that it would only ever be pilotes de Panama to guide boats through. This thought gave him much pride and satisfaction. I nodded and said “bueno!”

My Spanish wasn’t good, but he did share that these stunted burnt tree stumps sticking up all over Gatun Lake were left over from the construction of the Canal. Spooky. Spookier even than the Dismal Swamp Canal that I had traveled years earlier—and reaching my hand to loop a line around to a piling by a lock, discovered a dead bat hanging upside down from a nail.

Did the bat die there, clinging to the piling? Evidently so. Why? Will never know. The locks were breathtakingly huge and mossy and turbulent, and we went up up up up and up.

Sometimes we would cling alongside a tugboat. Sometimes I’m just standing like an ant on the foredeck as monkey fist hawsers come hurling and unfurling down at me from the spidery men on the bollards way above. I was pretty lucky and good at catching these without concussions. The pilot decided I was alright.

That was climbing the ladder upwards. Then the broiling waters gave way, and we could just navigate the still waters gliding like a dream across the Gatun Lake, watching the green and red markers, the squares and triangles shining like a strange runway towards the edge of the world. The Lake is well above sea level and I felt that in my bones.

I had visions of death and felt the agonies of the builders—the laborers who had dug all this “engineering” into being. I felt deeply impressed by the souls who hovered there. My mood was dark and as deceptive as the placid silvery sheen as these still waters sort of mirrored the burnt grasps of the dead trees: they claw upwards. I said nothing, but I listened hard.

The pilot began to have bigger problems with my French-Canadian husband as we descended down the remaining stairs of the lock system. The water would surge out the gates, we would surge forward, the enormous hawsers I had bent to our little lines would yank taut, and water shot out the spirals, but in the cockpit the two of them—they’d be yelling at each other in their respective languages, with no let.

I made hasty spaghetti with our last reserves. A precious onion, a clove of garlic, tomato paste on my frying pan over the kerosene Primus. A saltwater pot of pasta. Nobody would eat. On the Pacific side: It was dark, and there were unpleasant epithets in both French and down rosy Spanish as our pilot stepped off the deck. Had to climb up a ladder. Kinda ruined the flourish of his exit.

I can still see his khaki bum ascending. I’m sure there’s music for that.

We get to the anchorage below a bridge across the wide channel. Hardly any gas left in our Jerry jugs. Nobody told us the tide on this side is an 18-foot raging torrent twice a day. It’s half-mile row across this maelstrom twice a day for supplies. We only have a ridiculous little orange dink shaped pretty much like a donut.

I timed it so we always do errands on the slack and get back on the slack. I’m super lucky to land a job paying cash—American green from the wife of an American pilot named Bernasconi. I made a rare phone call by pay phone to my parents and mother put us in touch.

So, I painted her kitchen cupboards a nice shiny white with bright red doors. We bought enough provisions to get us over the horizon. We hope. Two arms of plantains complete with gnats and fruit flies (who will only mysteriously appear much later in the doldrums.) At a grocery store I cannot find any cat food. I am at the counter: “Yum yum para la meow meow?”

The bag boy lights up and plays my game. “No, no solamente yum yum para la woof woof!” And grabs me a big bag of dog food. Okay, gracias!

Movie Night

One day we small boat friends pitched in to pay a taxi to take us to a movie, “Sophie’s Choice.” On the way we get stuck. I ask the driver about the protest blocking the road. I’m the only one in car with enough Spanish to gather it’s about something political. This is a “manifestation,” he says. I chew on that a while. Manifesting what? He wouldn’t say, or I couldn’t understand.

Nobody else really cared. They just want to get to the movie already. Some of the signs were about the U.S., a theme I would see repeated years later on the island of New Caledonia. It’s about a fight for independence, I explained. The crew was like massively unimpressed. But the people were throngs blocking all the roads. Something mattered to them.

The streets were also full of men dressed in uniforms. I recognized some uniforms as military or police, but who were these big bellied old guys sitting in the pickup trucks with various colored sashes and magazines of ammo and casual firearms idling or racing around, drinking and smoking as they watched everyone? I was told they are self appointed neighborhood militias. To keep people safe. I didn’t feel safer.

The movie was dubbed in Spanish with French subtitles. I followed okay except for the scene where Sophie is getting her skirt pulled up by some official in a side room. I think part of me checked out then. We walked, the five of us, all the way back to the harbor.

The tide wasn’t too strong at the time, so we all somehow got back to our boats at anchor, and I said:

We need to sail out tomorrow.

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