by Randy Denmon
The pace slowed briefly in the cities of Palmar Norte and Palmar Sur, a regional administrative hub where we got back on the Pan American Highway, weaving around a few tricycles laden with goods. In the small traffic snarl, the Ticos smiled and waved as we crossed the infamous Rio Terraba on an old three-span truss bridge, an omnipresent reminder of man’s unending struggle with nature on the Ring of Fire. Whoever designed the bridge knew what they were doing.
From here, it was only an hour’s drive to hopefully our last overland Central American border crossing. Looking forward to that is like sitting in the dentist’s office waiting to have a tooth pulled. But ahead lay a few more wild rivers, Esquinas and Piedras Blancas, and a few jaguars, pumas, and the venomous fer-de-lance viper.
Costa Rica plans to open its third international airport here in the near future. The sands of time here will soon fall faster through the glass. If I ever came back to this land of foaming, powerful rivers and secluded beaches, it might look more like Cape Cod than the almost virgin, wild paradise we saw today.
Redneck Engineering
The border crossing into Panama was standard. No signs, a few tourists, government employees bickering, stamps banging, papers ruffling. All made more complicated and time consuming because the copy machine at Morgan’s Cove had not been working and I had to get copies of everything made at the crossing. The hawkers were there on the Panamanian side, but not as fierce as previously. They followed us everywhere, constantly reaching for our passports.
The big problem here was that Dean and I were forced to go through two different areas, I with the car through one processing center, and he, as only a passenger, through another. The complications arose when he didn’t have a bus ticket. You can’t enter Panama without documented transportation onward. It was always something. Dean’s exchange with the immigration officer didn’t go well.
I finally paid a hawker to figure it out. The twenty-five dollars was ten more than we’d agreed, but at the moment of truth, our papers dangling in front of us, he upped the ante. It took over two hours, including a dollar for fumigation and fifteen more for Panamanian car insurance.
Pulling out of the border crossing, I slid three fingers of banana Skoal against my bottom lip.
Dean made an ugly face. “You’ve got a lot of vices, you know that?”
“I’ve quit one—sex.”
“At least we agree on something.”
“You’ve got vices too. You’ve liberally sampled every local beer for three thousand miles.”
“After ten hours in the car with you, I need it… and I didn’t drink any beer in El Salvador!”
David was only thirty miles on the other side of the border. Panama is the richest country in Central America, English more prevalent here than anywhere else. This should be a breeze. I’d been to Panama before—that is, I’d been to the Canal Zone before.
Panama has about three and a half million people, roughly like Connecticut, but it’s five and a half times bigger. Half the country lives in the Canal Zone, only about two percent of the area. Outside of the Canal Zone exists an entirely different, extremely rural Panama.
We drove over the Rio Chico, which experiences the fifth-highest flow velocity in the world. Three years earlier, the torrent of water had collapsed one of the bridge’s spans. Thankfully, we traveled during the dry season. In this area, the Pan American Highway is all that traverses the country. A bridge failure here would likely mean a days-long detour over dilapidated, mountain dirt roads. I’d experienced the ordeal before in Central America. It’s not pleasurable. You don’t go around the bridge—you go around the river.
We rolled into the provincial, slow-moving town of David, a onetime faraway garrison of the Spanish Empire. The remote oasis had little colonial charm left, the town built on a square grid, the architecture functional but uninspiring. The city felt like a frontier town on the American plains filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic and the ever-present honking.
The possibility for ample accommodations and a good charge looked bleak. We had over 90 miles of battery remaining, but nowhere to go. In the 274-mile stretch of road between here and Panama City, our 768-page Lonely Planet guidebook for Central America did not mention a single town along the Pan American Highway.
We made two or three passes through town, and finally, around four, pulled into the nicest hotel we saw, the Gran Hotel in the centro. I went in. Neither of the two men at the front desk spoke English, but I led them outside for the game of show and tell.
A bilingual guest stopped to look at the car and asked a few questions. He explained our problem to the hotel staff. The undercurrent of concern on the natives’ faces spoke volumes.
Soon the hotel manager arrived on the scene. More Spanish followed, the rapid version. I lost all ability to translate. They pointed, nodded, scratched their ears. One of the men got on his radio, and the manager motioned for us to follow him to the side of the building. There, he poked his head into a room under construction.
On the wall below the window was a big socket. I grabbed my voltmeter. Inside I went, to discover the valuable power source—240 volts. Dean quickly grabbed the car’s charging adapter, and I my plug bag. Through the heavy fragrance of palms and bananas, I quickly rigged up a plug, but got no green light. Two more attempts failed.
The Tesla’s adapter has a four-pole (four-prong) 240-volt plug with two hot wires, a ground wire, and a neutral wire. We hadn’t seen a four-prong plug since Texas. The problem with wiring a four-pole plug to a three-pole plug is that some plugs have two hot wires and a neutral, others have two hot wires and a ground.
Which was which was always the question. Before the trip, I had the plugs and adapters systematically arranged and prepped, but after seven countries of scalping together makeshift plugs, my once-organized bag was now only a bag full of random plug parts, loose wires, screws, and plastic covers.
In the States, the different wires have a designated color. That’s rarely the case here. It’s a never-ending guessing game with Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison’s potent force, Latin Russian Roulette. And when you’re playing the game, never get too hasty. Always make sure your leads have good connectivity and that there are no cross-overs. Triple-check there are no exposed wires in the plug where you’ll be handling it when you finish all this redneck engineering. I had found in recent days that my heartbeat jumped just touching the prongs of my voltmeter to 240-volt leads or sockets. This was precise wiring. A contractor might get his welder fired up without everything perfect, but the Tesla was much more finicky.
As the manager stepped away, Dean took interest in the wiring. “You going to get this worked out, or am I going to have to navigate and take over the wiring?”
I fumbled with the hopeless wires. “In the States, there’s no telling how many laws I’m violating, rigging this jumble of shit up. This is strictly off limits for novices. I need to get out of the heat, get my charts, and start over.”
We checked into a room above the car, and I went upstairs to sort it all out. I’d prepared some plug charts before the trip for every combination I could imagine. Starting from scratch, I carefully put together a plug for the adapter and socket.
Back downstairs I went, and the Tesla was soon charging at 240 volts and a modest 13 amps. I inspected the charging operation. The Gran Hotel didn’t have secure parking. One of my biggest fears on the trip had been the one piece of equipment where there was no redundancy, the Tesla’s charging adapter. I had considered buying a backup, but the price was north of 1,000 dollars and delivery time not adequate for our spontaneous departure. If somebody stole the adapter, the trip would be over.
The price of copper has skyrocketed, and even in affluent, suburban America, available copper was quickly pocketed. This year, in tiny Monroe, Louisiana, I had all the copper stolen from three air conditioners at an office I own a stake in. The thieves had taken the time to dissemble the units and strip out the valuable loot right beside a private Catholic
school for the town’s well-to-do kids. Here, all the prize required was a rapid unplugging.
I pulled out my second backyard engineering marvel. It had gotten us this far. The fifteen-foot, three-eighths-inch cable had meshed, banded eyes on each end. I looped it through one of the car’s wheel rims, and with two locks, secured it to each end of the adapter. The adapter could still be stolen, but only with some effort, and I always augmented my masterpiece with a teaser, connecting it to one of our long, 50-amp extension cords. With more than thirty pounds of copper, these were twenty times more valuable than the adapter on the underground market, and I could buy the materials to re-fabricate them at any Central American hardware store. I never secured the extension cords.
Only a fool, even for a thief, would mess around trying to cut the cable holding the adapter to the car when a much grander treasure lay beside it, begging to be stolen.
I stepped back to admire all my handiwork—the fabricated plug leading from the hotel room window and my foolproof security contraption. I even went a little further, a first for the trip. I moved the adapter’s green sensor-light over to an area where I could see it flashing from our second-story room. I wouldn’t have to get up all night and come outside to make sure we were charging.
My work of art complete, I needed to make a call. I’d gotten an urgent work-related email that morning. Knowing how many trivial things I was daily required to approve, I had ordered a blue signature stamp before I departed. But only I could answer this inquiry, a question about some specifications I’d written on a levee-repair project.
This was a reminder that everything around me was only a temporary interlude from the cumbersome world that awaited me in the near future. And focusing on engineering specifications brought it back all too quickly.
• • •
After I graduated from LSU, I was sent off to the intoxicating town—oops—village of Amelia, Louisiana, population 2,459. That was my bonus for all those years in college. I’d really only gone to graduate school to extend my time partying and chasing girls, and only selected engineering because my major professor had coaxed NASA into paying the bills (which makes you wonder what else our government wastes money on). It wasn’t exactly a free ride. I did have to maintain the minimally acceptable GPA in classes filled with whiz kids setting the curve.
For surviving this, I was rewarded with a job writing project specifications for new offshore oil and gas platforms. A few months after my arrival in Amelia, I was offshore working when my boss came out for a couple of days to look around.
One afternoon, he said, “Randy, I want to go take a nap. Give me that book of specifications.”
I handed him the two hundred or so bound pages of technical jargon I had slaved over for months.
He scanned the cover page. “Nothing puts me to sleep faster than reading this shit.”
• • •
The burdensome phone call over, I went upstairs. Amazingly, Dean had not yet confiscated my computer. Checking my inbox, I had more than a dozen emails about the trip, many from unknown senders. Some of the emails congratulated us. Others asked for pictures, information, videos.
I checked EV World’s web page. The article now had thousands of views and a bunch of comments. I did a quick Google search. Antony Ingram had done a story on the trip for Green Car Reports, another industry webpage, and Yahoo, the Christian Science Monitor, and several outlets had picked up his story. One of the comments was completely pleasing.
Leave it to some guys from Louisiana to come up with something as dangerous as this.
I briefly searched the Tesla Motors and Tesla Motors Club message boards. Already several pages of posts were up. A few comments on the first page:
• Panama run—most daring road trip yet?
• It seems some owners from Louisiana decided to drive to Panama. Yes, the country.
• That is probably the boldest trip yet.
• Wow, this is a crazy drive! They’ve already reached Jaco, Costa Rica. They report to be tying directly into 240v lines (i.e., no plugs!). This trip makes driving from LA to NYC look like a walk in the park.
• That is crazy cool!
• Yowza. This is making our drive to Alaska seem like a walk through a substation!
• Wow, just wow. Some big cojones there.
To say that this brought a smile to my face or filled my soul with utter bliss would be an understatement, but I was beat tired. We hadn’t had a day off since the mountain village of Comitán in Mexico, all the days ten to twelve hours on the road with never a break or even a stop for lunch, then the very taxing charging, planning, etc. There were no weekends on this trip.
I still needed to see where we might go tomorrow. Nothing lay ahead for almost three hundred miles. We needed one more charge to make it to Panama City. Surely, we could find something in Panama’s northern bush?
The Real Jungle
By ten-fifteen the next morning, we had 233 miles in the tank and stormed into the green wall of vegetation to see what we might find, ready for the challenge. I’d fallen asleep the night before at eight-thirty. I never do that. It was me instead of the car that needed charging. I wasn’t sure how I got to sleep because Dean persuaded a poor local trumpeter, outside the window, to serenade us for much of the night.
• • •
The citizens of David had been kind and helpful. Panama is the one country in Central America where the residents should like Americans, the one place where our meddling, at least in my opinion, has been to their benefit.
We created the country. Teddy Roosevelt stole the almost-empty jungle from Colombia to set up the little puppet state. We then built the country’s extensive infrastructure, including the great canal. Mr. Roosevelt was certainly a man of action, summing up the entire process in a sentence:
I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.
Decades later, we gave it all to the Panamanians free of charge. In 1989, we invaded to remove Manuel Noriega, the country’s military dictator. Mr. Noriega had been helpful subduing the Red Menace, but after we licked the Commies the United States government finally decided it was time to quit overlooking his drug trafficking and abysmal human rights record. There have been a few small issues over the decades, but America’s presence here in the Canal Zone, an American Territory for seventy-six years, has meant general peace and stability for the country for over a hundred years.
• • •
A few hours into the drive, we’d seen nothing but green hills, the landscape the most rural of the entire trip, along the base of the five thousand-foot Serranía de Tabasará Mountains. In three hours on the road, all we saw were two gas stations and a three-structure settlement. More disconcerting, for most of the drive, I saw no power poles along the road, a first for the trip over such a long stretch.
The road was okay, your standard potholes, one every mile or so that could ruin your day, but we stumbled onto a long, raggedy patch of concrete filled with jagged, sharp edges where the surface had buckled or failed. The worst stretch of paved road we’d yet crossed. I kept waiting for a tire to pop, if not two. The Goodyears passed the test, rolling over the vile concrete as I held my breath.
I turned to Dean. “Go, Goodyear, go!”
“Your elitist heart is going to be broken when you find out they were made in China or Malaysia.”
“We ain’t home yet. This is a lost world.”
“Yeah, I think we finally found the real jungle.”
We were forced through two police checkpoints, the officials displaying the Latin courteousness and happiness we need more of in the States. At one, we went through the “show and tell” again, the entire security staff at the isolated post requiring pictures with us and the car before we were allowed to depart.
The sights were minimal. I did see a few big, round birds, brightly-colored like a rainbow, and sporting long beaks. Macaws? Toucans? Despite constant scanning, to my disapp
ointment, I saw none of the sloths that populate the region. They’re hard to see. Clinging to the thick tree canopy, the chubby creature’s only defensive mechanism is its stealth and slow locomotion.
We did pass right by the Barro Blanco Hydroelectric Dam, under construction, the white concrete monolith climbing up out of the jungle right beside the road. If not for the slim power in our batteries, I would have stopped to gawk. We rarely get to see something like this in the Western Hemisphere these days, man conquering nature so brazenly and in such a rural, inhospitable setting. I’m currently an engineer on the largest dam built in Louisiana in several decades, but it’s small potatoes compared to this. The two hundred-foot-tall concrete structure rose above the green canopy, announcing a better world for everything.
To say the dam has incited controversy, locally and worldwide, would be a massive understatement. Protesters have blocked the Pan American Highway for days (we don’t need that now), and even in the last year, locals have been murdered by cloaked assailants.
Two outside, independent authorities were brought in to analyze the situation, world-renowned experts with no skin in the game. Their conclusion: no environmental impact, but significant harm to the local residents. The controversy has taken the focus away from its proper target: providing adequate compensation for the people impacted.
An important point in the environmental debate is often overlooked. The wealthier a society is, the cleaner the air and water—and a longer and happier life for little Kristi or Gabriela (or baby panda, for that matter). We dominated the American West, overpowered it, damming every river, pushing a rail or highway across every pass, populating every scenic valley. Today, the air and water in most of the American West is some of the cleanest in the world, the residents no longer worried about how they are going to eat, but how they’ll get their kids into a better school.