by Randy Denmon
I had a bigger problem. Where would I keep the car for several weeks? I went downstairs to the front desk and asked to see the manager. She wasn’t in, but the assistant manager, a middle-aged lady who spoke excellent English, came out of her office to greet me.
I explained the situation. “Would it be possible for me to keep the car here for a couple of weeks until the shipping agent has everything worked out? He can then come here and get it. If there’s a fee for parking, I’ll gladly pay it.”
When we’d checked in earlier that day, I’d told the assistant manager our story, and that several media outlets in the States were covering us.
She produced a big smile, apparently having done some internet surfing to confirm my crazy story. “I have been checking on you, Mr. Denmon. I didn’t know you and your friend were so famous.” She motioned to the front door and the head bellboy, a tall, slender Panamanian named José, stepped into the lobby.
The two commenced another one of those frustrating Spanish conversations, the words far too fast for me to comprehend.
The assistant manager then flashed her eyes at me. “This will be no problem. I just need you to write me a letter explaining all this to me, and stating the Marriott will not be responsible for the car. Do not worry, the car is in good hands, very safe, but I have to have the letter for my bosses. You understand. But we would be glad to keep your car.”
“Muchas, muchas gracias.” The Marriot to the rescue again!
Sometimes You Just Have to Wing It
Dean and I stood in the portico of the Marriott looking out into the mid-morning Panamanian traffic disaster.
I scratched my chin. “I booked us on the midday flight to Houston tomorrow.”
“I hope you didn’t sit us together,” Dean moaned. “I’ve had enough of your ass for a while.”
“Don’t worry.” I laughed. “We’re on opposite ends of the plane.”
The Tesla now refilled with kilowatts, we hoped to tour the city, the canal, and hopefully take some great pictures with the car. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Panama City, especially before dark, but we had some rare time to kill.
As I waited on the staff to bring the car around, (part of my ingratiation with the hotel staff upon our arrival had been letting them drive the car around the block to the hotel’s parking area), I looked at the casino attached to the hotel, one of many that filled the city. The suckers streamed into the money machine. The casinos reminded me that I hadn’t engaged in one of my favorite pastimes since before Christmas, gambling. I’m no junkie, and I steer away from the state-backed rackets—lotteries and casinos. I do have a degree in mathematics, after all. But I’m not afraid to let it ride on a horse race, card game, football game, or friendly golf match. I mean, after all, I am a red-blooded American. We need some vices other than nicotine and booze to get through the week.
The night before, I bought some new clothes. The four changes that accompanied me across the border needed more than a hotel wash. Now adorned in a new shirt and my only pair of clean jeans, we stormed into the chaos of Panama City.
I’d been here before, but couldn’t believe the city’s growth, metamorphosis even. Was it really a decade since I’d been here? The years all now merge and pass so fast I really had no idea.
New, glass high-rises pierced the sky everywhere, the construction crane seemingly the city bird. Panama City resembled a slightly smaller version of some of the world’s other major port cities, Hong Kong or Singapore. The last time I was here, the Hard Rock Café was the biggest Western attraction in town. Now, dozens of hip and snazzy restaurants and bars lined the streets.
Spurred on by its banking industry and the growth in the worldwide import/export industry spawned from the West’s insatiable consumerism and never-ending demand for more stuff at lower prices, the Panamanian economy, fueled by the canal, is now growing at about nine percent a year, one of the highest in the world, and well in excess of America’s measly 2 percent annual growth rate.
I’m not sure who these Panamanians are—a true melting pot of the Western Hemisphere. Like most of Latin America, they’re more brown than white or black. Almost nobody was here before the canal. The US government’s census of the Canal Zone a hundred years ago put the population at fifty thousand, and at that point the canal project was well into its fifth year. I think most everybody, or their parents or grandparents, have simply immigrated here in the last generation or two.
We passed by a neighborhood populated with big, ostentatious residences announcing the country’s newfound wealth. The Panamanians have invented one of the most humorous and unique names for these local showoffs, rabi-blancos. English translation: white-butts. I chuckle every time I hear it.
We headed for the Mira Flores locks right outside of town to see the engineering marvel and hopefully get some cool pictures of it and the car.
Whirling through the congested, roundabout streets, I picked Dean’s brain. “Seems a little reckless to just leave an eighty thousand-dollar car with a stranger in Central America, especially one that’s in such demand in the States. But I need to confirm with Mario—or not—today. What do you think?”
“Did you check him out? Search online to see if anybody has complained about him?”
“A little. Didn’t find much. On a deal like this, I guess you’ve just got to wing it. That’s how we got here. Not much else you can do. I’m not going to hang around for a month. The hotel clerk told me there are some good bars and restaurants on the Calle Uruguay, right around the corner. Be nice to down some rum and not have to worry about the car or getting up. I may smoke one of those Panamanian cigars tonight. You game?”
“Hell, yeah. If we can find our way back to the hotel.”
“You didn’t know you were riding with a master navigator. I put a waymark in the GPS at the hotel, and it’s recording our track now. We’ll get back.”
As I spoke, we accidently got funneled off the expressway into Panama City’s El Chorrillo District. Here, the American Army had bombed the old, impoverished Spanish neighborhood during the 1989 invasion, letting it burn. The gutted District was a major scar on America’s reputation and the operation. Dozens of international organizations subsequently waged protests and lawsuits claiming the United States had used excessive and indiscriminate force. Nobody knows the actual casualties. Estimates range from less than fifty to three thousand.
In the modern computer-generated information age of the first world, we seem to often forget what a military operation really is. It’s not a football game. I guess your opinion is based on what side of the line you’re on, or who your son fought for. Dean and I had once been on a side of this stark line. We knew well the consequences and benefits of American overkill.
A rough, unsafe no-man’s land in the decade after the invasion, El Chorrillo appeared to be recovering, many of the buildings rebuilt. I saw no overt poverty. Still, the District isn’t the safest place in Latin America. I quickly drove back under the expressway, disregarding the GPS and motored along a busy, four-lane road until I got back on the expressway, this time paying more attention to the abundant signs pointing the way to the Canal.
• • •
Before viewing the locks, we drove up to Gatun Lake through the Canal Zone and by the plazas of grand official buildings, symmetrically laid out, all with white walls and red clay roofs, and surrounded by parade grounds that gave a hint to the area’s ninety years as a US military installation. It all announced a sense of order, something odd in Central America.
We stopped to get a view of the Culebra Cut, once called the Gaillard Cut after Lieutenant Colonel David DuBose Gaillard, the American engineer in charge of the canal’s construction. In 2000, I guess in an attempt to remove some of the Americanization from the canal, the name was changed. Culebra is the mountain range the canal surmounts. So much for the men and machines that carved the passage from the thick jungle.
The cut is a working monument to man’s dominance of time an
d space, an 800-foot wide, manmade valley traversing the continental divide. Here, the eight-mile passageway lowered the mountains from 210 feet to 39, the dynamite and steam shovels removing more than one hundred million cubic yards of earth.
We tried to get a picture at the Pedro Miguel Locks, but were run off by some security guards. Approaching Gamboa, a small town housing canal workers, we were forced to cross a quarter-mile, one-lane, rickety old wooden bridge with a red light that allowed only one-way traffic.
The long, narrow bridge had a pair of three-foot-wide planks sitting a foot above a wooden deck. As we bounced over the loose boards, fear of disaster filled my mind. If we slipped off the three-foot wide path, with the car’s limited clearance, at best, we’d get stuck on the deck. The bridge would have to be closed, and a tow truck summoned to rescue us.
The Model S, almost every legitimate consumer advocate’s Car of the Year for 2013, had gotten very little negative press, but what negative press it did receive related to several fires that occurred when the battery pack at the bottom of the car collided forcefully with something. The concern was extremely overhyped. Hundreds, if not thousands of gas-burning cars catch fire every year. In the Model S, there is a safety plate below the floor to ensure that any fire, though rare, never reaches the cab.
But bumping over the wooden bridge, soaked with creosote for no telling how many decades, the thought did occur to me. A fire here would not just burn up the car, but likely the bridge too. Even now we’d only be home free when we got on that plane tomorrow, and when the car got back to the States, whenever that would be.
We took a few good pictures, including one at a big sign for the canal, and several with grand ships in the background before stopping at the Mira Flores Locks and Canal Museum. The crowd was enormous, sightseers from every continent. I’d visited these locks before, but due to the growth in the canal’s popularity, a new museum and visitors’ center had been constructed since.
The museum tells the story of the canal’s amazing construction, ten years in all, and costing the lives of 5,600 workers. The French had failed in bridging the seas a decade earlier, but here, the American nation announced to the world that we had arrived. The construction project had many additional benefits—not just the development of new construction technologies, but also aiding significantly in the world’s knowledge of how to combat tropical diseases.
From the museum’s top deck, tourists can view ships transiting from sea to shining sea, and also gaze on the new locks under construction that will more than double the canal’s capacity and size of ships it can accommodate. The new locks will also finally allow maintenance on the three sets of existing locks, in operation almost continuously for one hundred years.
• • •
I’ve always been astonished by the setting. What egos, if not pure arrogance, the men and young nation must have had to attempt such a massive undertaking in such a desolate, hostile locale.
We Americans don’t build things like this anymore. We can barely keep our own roads patched up. There are no more Hoover Dams, Central Parks, or Golden Gate Bridges on the docket. It’s not because we don’t love them. I mean everybody, from the new immigrant to Donald Trump, loves this stuff. The crowd around me testifies to that. I myself felt proud, a little conceited. My country and engineers like me built this marvel that’s now filling their faces with awe and admiration.
We’ve been brainwashed by the government—told it is better for them to spend our money taking care of us, and hence, making us dependent on them. Sadly, the days of America triumphantly leading the world to the moon, purely as a symbol that our system is better than yours, that free people can do anything, are gone. Our instinctive desire to go or do because it’s fun, what we want to do, human nature—our love of the impossible has been stolen from us. Something like this canal, or the Apollo program, would now be considered government waste, better spent on more pressing domestic issues.
We got here without a drop of gasoline. I’m glad Elon Musk and the other wonderful engineers, scientists, and dreamers at Tesla haven’t bought into the dependence mentality.
Sitting on the museum’s top deck, I looked at the jungle, reflecting on the trip. Above all odds, we had made it. Feeling almost in a dizzy state, it seemed surreal. What a testament to our perseverance and sheer boldness. It had been special, fun, exciting, more difficult than I’d ever imagined, and always in doubt.
The days, though long, had flown by too quickly, sometimes feeling like the carelessness of a high-school summer. Though often worried, I rarely felt a sense of dislocation. Instead of being harassed by thugs, we were most often saved by the kindness of strangers. As far as I was concerned, we could have gone on forever.
But tempering the joy was the knowledge that this trip was finite, a momentary anomaly from my fate. The feeling of freedom could never last. In a second, I’d turn around and drive back, if life were only that simple and easy. And the little car that now amazed the world would have loved nothing more than to do it again.
Already, my transient ecstasy had begun to fade, the urgent need to get home starting to rule my psyche. My mind danced with the daunting list of things that needed to be done back in the States, stacking up in my brain like a pile of papers on my desk. Begrudgingly, I had to return to the first-world life of capitalism and comforts that most of the world craves, and again start the mind-numbing, daily tasks that prop up that world.
• • •
In some ways, the coming days would be simpler. How easy it’s going to be to drive a half-mile down the street and fill up with gas when I need to go somewhere. There’ll be no cows in the road to worry about, and generally, everybody will drive on the correct side of the street. I won’t have to constantly scan my mirrors for disreputable characters. Lunch and dinner will be easy. I’ll order out what I want. My days of freely smoking cigarettes are over. That may be a good thing.
Of course, there’ll be the rules, the social norms, the rigid schedules, the meetings, and the punctuality of everything. And the family.
A part of me was already starting to yearn for the friendly Southern accents, the steamy, damp air, the inviting smell of the verdant pines, oaks, and cypresses, the wonderful panorama of miles of cotton and sugarcane, and frogs and insects belching and buzzing around the black water of the bayous and rivers of Louisiana. Those are a part of me as much as I belong to them. I can’t help that, and never want to change it.
As only traveling can do, the trip had taken me to a faraway, foreign place—a human delight that never ends. The words of the twentieth-century Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, W. H. Auden, ring as true today as ever:
Man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep.
At least for now, I felt content, my tormented soul at peace. Hopefully, in a month, or a year or two, I won’t be itching to be as far from my life as possible, but I was already starting to ponder the viability of bringing the car back to South America to drive it on to the bottom of the world.
Postscript
The weeks that followed our return to Louisiana were as hectic as the trip, and included a few more days of press. Motor Trend, AutoWeek, Hybridcars.com, and several other outlets did stories, and I did a few interviews. The car didn’t return to the States for forty-six days. I’ll admit, on more than one occasion I wondered if it was actually on a ship somewhere between Panama City and Houston, or driving around Bogotá.
Worries were amplified by the fact that my insurance had expired while the car was in Panamanian customs. I asked the shipping company about insurance, 2.5 percent of the value! After traversing Central America, being “self–insured” didn’t seem that radical. But the car finally arrived, safe and sound.
I didn’t have a cigarette for a month, my immediate daily problems not inducing any urge. Obviously, this doesn’t include the Mardi Gras parades. That’s kind of like Central America anyway, everyone leaving us alone for a few weeks, at least for now. Even in the Bible Bel
t, the open-container laws are suspended and the jails closed to all but murderers and rapists so the well-to-do can stumble around like drunk college kids.
In no time, my days were again filled with too much to do. It took a few weeks for me to stop flinching and cringing when my cell phone would incessantly chirp that hideous sound to tell me somebody needed something. Or Gwen, at the front desk of our office, would break my thoughts and buzz me.
“Randy, can you take a call?”
It was as if she interrupted a funeral.
But I have to keep up with the Joneses in case I ever do end up with the 2.2 kids and a high-maintenance wife. Should we have stopped at that organic campground in Costa Rica? There, I might have found it all, a future family with few needs who’d let me roam.
A few people inquired: “Why go on a vacation like that, constantly on the move? How do you get to truly experience and know the places you’ve visited?”
What folly and naiveté. What do you learn on the typical week-long vacation filled with guided tours? A much better education comes from driving the open road. Seeing the land. Haggling with natives, bureaucrats, or machine-gun toting policía. Watching locals pitch in and help when not paid to, or facing the daily trials and tribulations the citizens endure every day, be it traversing a derelict rural road or experiencing the delight of discovering the cop who just stopped you on an isolated stretch of road is not a crook.
• • •
Though they had numerous requests from media outlets, Tesla never made a formal statement about our trip. This didn’t bother me at all. Doing the trip autonomously and without corporate support or acknowledgement added to its glory—the fewer resources, the better. With enough money and support, you can get an electric car to the moon.
I’m still a big fan of the company. I actually can’t blame Tesla for not promoting our trip. Its car is designed to motor around suburbia, and it’s a wonderful machine to do that. From the company’s standpoint, having dozens, if not hundreds, of rednecks and hillbillies, especially ones not as technical or careful as we were, thinking it’s cool to motor off into the wild in their electric car is probably a bad idea. Accomplishing what we did is likely the exception, not the rule.