Maiden Voyage

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by Tania Aebi


  The second day after my arrival, after traveling by bus to Panama City to get some traveler’s checks and coming home late at night, I missed my stop, ending up in the middle of Colón. I had to walk alone through town back to the harbor, an action that flew in the face of every warning I had received since my arrival. On the doorsteps and stoops were shadows who cat-called without mercy. That night as I made my way through Colón, I didn’t get mugged, but I did observe the pathetic look of a city with a depressing history and dashed hopes.

  I didn’t want to be one of those people who leaves Panama knowing only one facet of its personality. The more I learned about it, the more this hybrid of a country fascinated me, and I empathized with the Panamanians. Their laboring ancestors had slaved and died over a canal from which they never really profited. Today, the military and a handful of rich families hold the mace of power while the rest of the population is left to fend for itself in a system with different rules for different people.

  In the early 1900s, the Americans were granted control within five miles on either side of the canal, establishing the Canal Zone that stretched the 60-mile width of the isthmus. It was cut off from Colón and the rest of the country by a barbed-wire fence and guards until the time the Zone was abolished in 1979, only six years before I arrived.

  During my stay at Cristóbal Yacht Club, I met some people who took me to their homes inside the old Zone compound. I saw how the American employees had been provided with modern hospitals, supermarkets, movie theaters, good roads and the semblance of a utopian suburban life in the tropics. In the old days, on the other side of the fence, all the descendants of the people who had struggled to excavate the monstrous canal lived in utter squalor and poverty, probably watching through the barbed wire the everyday workings of the American dream.

  If it hadn’t been such a luxury for all shipping to be able to use a shortcut over the alternative of going around the dangerous Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, Panama would still be rain forests belonging to neighboring Costa Rica and Colombia. It was sad to think that I was just another captain out of the thousands of ships using the canal for my convenience and, in a very removed way, contributing to the strife surrounding it.

  To get through the canal, I had to spend a few days filling out reams of documents and tramping back and forth in the humid 100-degree weather to one office after another. Varuna had to be measured for tonnage to determine the cost of transit and I had to become savvy with the specific procedures of taking my boat through the locks. Every sailboat is required to have four 100-foot-long lines and an equal number of people to handle them, not including the captain of the vessel and a canal pilot. I began to worry about Varuna carrying six well-fed grownups.

  To get a little experience and to see what was in store, one morning I took passage as a line handler on another sailboat, a common thing to do. While we were tied up to the dock waiting for a ship to pass, a pretty white French ketch motored up beside us. Its crew seemed to be in the midst of a party celebrating their boat’s canal entry, and I noticed one of the men staring at me. He smiled and asked in French if I spoke the language. Thoroughly shy about my American accent, I answered, “Oui, a little bit.”

  “Très bien,” he said, with a nice laugh. “I will speak English. I help this boat go through the canal today. Can you help bring my boat through tomorrow?” His accent was thick and his English halting.

  “Well . . .” I hesitated. I really hadn’t planned to do it twice in a row before taking Varuna through. That would seem to be a waste of time. “Well . . .” I looked at him awaiting my answer. He smiled. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

  “My name is Luc. We rendezvous tonight at the yacht club in Colón? We will talk, non?” The boat he was on began to pull ahead. “What is your name?” he called as they entered the lock.

  “Tania!” I called back.

  That night, after taking the train back to the yacht club, I waited for Luc at the twenty-four-hour bar filled with “Zonies,” those expatriate American Canal operators still living in Panama and helping the Panamanians learn the tricks of the trade. By nine-thirty, I’d had enough of the place and finally gave up on Luc. I went back to Varuna, penned a note and went out for ceviche with a kindly ship agent named Adrian who had adopted me soon after my arrival. Together, as we feasted on the spicy raw fish, Adrian shared with me his knowledge of the canal, and he gave me the book The Path Between the Seas, which recounted the story of the canal from beginning to end. As we ambled back to Varuna, I saw Luc waiting on the dock. “We must be ready at five in the morning,” he said. “I come for you with my dinghy.”

  The next morning, with eyes still glued together, I was presented to his boat, Thea, and his crew member, Jean Marie. The couple whose boat Luc had helped bring through the canal, René and Catherine, were aboard also, returning the service, and Trudy, an American from California, was washing the dishes. We drank steaming bowls of strong coffee, European style, waited for the pilot to arrive and talked about who we were and where we were all going after transiting.

  I found myself hanging on Luc’s every word. He gave me a tour of his rugged 37-foot sailboat and captivated me with stories about his childhood in Africa. He was the son of a captain in the French army who kept moving back and forth across the continent to different stations. Luc had gone back to France to attend college and, since finishing ten years before, his wanderlust and career had taken him to live in New Caledonia in the South Pacific. He was a dreamer, a poet, a gardener of the imagination, with the capabilities and faith to make his dreams come true. A faraway light made his eyes gleam when he told me about the South Pacific.

  “Oh, Tania, you are going there also?” he asked. “We must do it together. I will show you things that your cold American eyes would never see otherwise. I will show you places where the mango grows wild and untouched, where there are no footprints in the sand. I will show you waterfalls that will break your heart, and seals and fish that live in such peace that when we swim with them, they will take food from our hands and play with us like little children. I know the South Pacific and its gentle people. Don’t hurry through this magnificent island paradise to Australia or you will regret it. Take my word for it, Tania. See the islands with me.”

  I was speechless. For me, everything that this man said was a paradigm. “I want to be free, Tania. For me, money is simply a way to pay for my freedom. I work only to have enough to sail to the places of beauty on the earth.”

  “That’s exactly how I feel,” I found myself saying, over and over again. As I told him what I was doing, he said how lucky I was to be able to do it so young. Luc was one of the first people I had met since leaving New York who didn’t make me feel like a lunatic for being on a boat alone. He was one of the first people to recognize the beauty of the plan.

  “I, too, want to see as much as I can,” he said. “Before I die, I want to examine the farthest blossom on the farthest mountain peak.” Everything Luc said struck the chords of my own dreams. Sentence by romantic sentence, his eloquent vision of the potential of life painted colors on the blank canvas of my future. I will always remember that day as one of magic energy, of floating on a cloud and of falling in love.

  By the end of Thea’s canal transit in Panama City, Luc had agreed to help me take Varuna through the next day and I had finally pulled out of him that in the world of bills and deadlines and responsibilities, he actually worked as a designer of sewage-treatment plants. This struck me as particularly funny at the moment, although I couldn’t find the words in French to explain why. At least I thought that’s what he said he did for a living. The vagaries of our language barrier were to play several tricks on us in those early days.

  That night, I took the train back to the yacht club, began to prepare Varuna and waited for Luc to arrive later on. When he came, he helped get all the lines together and we did some last-minute repairs to the engine. At bedtime, I arranged his bedding up in the forepe
ak, we awkwardly said goodnight and I curled up in my own bunk. After a couple of hours of mutual tossing and turning, I heard Luc get up and quietly come over to my bed. Soundlessly, he caressed my head. I froze and pretended I was asleep. He didn’t try to awaken me, but just knelt there and then crept back to his bed.

  I had met two young Danish teenagers in Colón who were visiting relatives and wanted to see the canal, as well as the daughter of a yacht club member. With Luc, plus the canal pilot and me, Varuna had the requisite four line handlers. They arrived at the dock the next morning and, at o’dark-thirty, we stuffed everyone aboard and headed for the first lock.

  Our canal pilot was a serious young trainee named Alberto, who insisted on steering. The first set of massive steel doors opened before us pushing thousands of gallons of water in their path. In front of us, a large tanker motored into the cavernous pen 1,000 feet long and 110 feet wide, with another set of steel doors at the end. On the sides above the lock, little locomotives pulled the ship in and tightened the cables as it reached the proper position. We followed it into the lock, and four burly types launched messenger lines to us, thin ropes with loops and weights at the ends.

  As we scrambled around on Varuna, our voices echoed off the tall Canal walls while we tied our own four 100-foot lines onto the messengers and the men pulled them up and tied the boat off on four quarters. The steel doors banged shut behind. Every aspect of our environment—the air, the water, the walls—reverberated with the groan and grind of tons of meeting steel, rushing water, machinery and turbines.

  We were in the hands of this Cyclopean mechanical system from here until the top of the system at the level of Gatun Lake. We rose as the deluge of fresh water was pumped in from the lake, and Varuna strained to break free from her lashings, but the men on shore tightened the lines and took up the slack. I shared every captain’s worst fear and imagined my boat breaking free and tossing around in this boiling vat like a rubber ducky.

  When all was still, the far set of gates leading into the second lock opened and we waited while the massive propellers of the ship ahead churned into action and eased its bulk forward. We repeated this procedure twice, passed on through the third lock and motored out onto the peace of Gatun Lake, 85 feet above sea level. To the right rose the immense wall of the Gatun Dam, built from the excavation of Culebra Cut ahead, which blocked off the Chagres River and created Gatun Lake.

  “The total amount of dirt dug from the entire canal prism,” Alberto told us, “would be enough to build a Great Wall of China from San Francisco all the way to New York City.” We were quiet as Varuna chugged from channel marker to channel marker, 23 miles across the serene beauty of Gatun Lake. The giant man-made pool was full of birds and trees that grew like castaways on little island tufts popping above the water. The boughs of other, less fortunate trees, submerged when the land was sacrificed to the lake, protruded above the surface and appeared to be struggling for a last breath of life.

  The panorama that surrounded Varuna was an eerie one. On my third voyage through the canal in as many days, the submerged trees were becoming symbols, reminders of the land and the country that had existed there before the ambitious canal project. If only the trees could talk, I thought, what stories they could tell of toil and tribulation and time swept away.

  Alberto told us of how the French were the first to attempt to create the path between the seas in 1879. To dig the canal, the French contractors imported black Caribbean islanders, Central and South Americans, Italians, Greeks and Chinese. In horrendous swampy working conditions, diseases like malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis, typhus and cholera festered, with a toll of 25,000 dead. “People dropped like flies,” said Alberto. The French desperately brought in new reinforcements, but despite ten years of trying, bankruptcy, loss of faith in the project and the complete depletion of their manpower resources forced them to give up, and the Americans had jumped in.

  Luc and I sat together at Varuna’s bow and watched Alberto line up the channel alignment points that were set up on the hills in front and behind us. Two markers had to be lined up, one on top of the other, to let us know we were on course. When they separated, we knew that Varuna had drifted off the course, and therefore out of the channel, and we would hurriedly rearrange our position.

  We approached Culebra Cut between Gatun Lake and the first descent in the Pedro Miguel Lock, while I went below and made sandwiches. I felt bad, knowing that everybody could have been on bigger and more comfortable boats, so I tried to make up for it with a feast. If nothing else, Varuna’s crew would be well fed.

  “You see here?” said Alberto, with his mouth full of ham-and-cheese sandwich. “This channel dug through the cliffs was the worst stretch in the whole construction. Here, the workers had to dig through the Continental Divide, three hundred and ten feet high and nine miles wide. After completing one-third of the work, these mountains were what destroyed the French. When the Americans took over, they hired eighty six thousand people; seven thousand of those died.”

  We looked at the corridor of reddish-brown cliffs that lined the passage. As Alberto told of the hundreds of times the dynamite had exploded prematurely, killing many people, the immense scope of the statistics began to blur. But there was no denying the awesomeness of the Canal; the toll of its building was legendary. Even the great French painter Paul Gauguin survived his stint as a common laborer on the project. I remembered a West Indian poem from Adrian’s book: “The flesh of man flew in the air like birds many days.”

  Varuna descended the Pedro Miguel lock to the Mira Flores Lake and then down the Mira Flores locks in much the same way she ascended. The only difference was that this time the water emptied instead of filling and the commotion was much less severe. After fifteen hours, we chugged out into the Pacific. As we motored alongside the jetty of Balboa Yacht Club, I bid Alberto farewell, as well as my other line handlers. They hopped ashore as Luc fended Varuna from the dock and we motored to pick up one of the moorings for the night.

  “Thea is anchored in Taboga,” said Luc, after everyone had departed. “It is not far from here. If you want, we can sail there, Tania, and be together.”

  He could do or say nothing wrong. We struggled to communicate, I with my rusty French and he with his broken English. But, somehow, we got our stories across. Or so I thought. Already I had visions of sailing to the ends of the earth with Luc. We untied Varuna from her mooring the next evening and began sailing the 5 miles to Taboga, my first Pacific island. In the pitch darkness, the glimmering lights on the horizon were like harbingers of my future and I sailed toward them in hopeful anticipation.

  4

  In the sixteenth century, on his voyage to the New World, Magellan entered the Pacific Ocean and, finding it as smooth as baby’s skin, christened it El Pacifico, the peaceful one. As far as the Europeans were concerned, he had discovered this ocean, and at that time, he couldn’t have known that the great body covered one-third of the earth’s surface and gave rise to vicious storms. Over four hundred years later, as Varuna forged out of the Panama Canal and away from the only ocean she had ever known, neither did I. The next year would be spent discovering the islands of the Pacific. It was to be an ocean of revelations, farewells and new beginnings.

  Taboga Island is to Panama City what the Hamptons on Long Island are to New York. During the week the pace was slow and workaday, but come Friday afternoon a daily ferry disgorged a crowd of families dressed in their Sunday best, who swamped the small hotel and the empty village cottages for the weekend. Arriving midweek, we had the place to ourselves.

  Our first day in Taboga, we followed stone paths lined with flowery, sweet-scented bushes and hedges that threaded through the tiny community. Children played in the streets while mothers washed and hung laundry to dry on their terraces and backyards. We counted about five cars on the island, which made for an odd contrast with carriages drawn by donkeys, their heads bowed down in the searing heat as their tails swished away hordes of flie
s.

  Varuna, Thea and a third boat, Saskia, rolled on their anchors off the beach with the incoming swell. That evening, we watched the sunset from the terrace of a small open-air restaurant overlooking the harbor containing ten little fishing boats, our three sailboats and, in the distance, as if put out to pasture, two ancient hulks of fishing seiners. Several knobby green islands protected the exposed harbor from the Pacific beyond.

  “I will show you everything beautiful in the world, Tania,” Luc said over dinner. Squirming, I looked down at my untouched plate of shrimp as the waitress came to clear it away. Life was getting complicated.

  From the first day on, Saskia, Thea and Varuna formed a sailing community, with Thea as the nucleus. She was the biggest, most commodious boat, stocked with the best food, and compared to Varuna, whose living space was hard-pressed to accommodate one small person, the 37-foot Thea seemed palatial.

  One of Luc’s favorite pastimes was cooking. He loved to conjure up gastronomic feasts from his galley, perfectly situated so that the chef was never alienated from the table’s festivities. I joined in the teasing and jokes when sharing breakfast, lunch and dinner with these French musketeers, and in return washed the dishes whenever Jean Marie got tired of his dishwasher status.

  Jean Marie was a Parisian who had been in the air force since he was eighteen. When he finally got out, he was thirty-three and set off immediately to fulfill his lifelong ambition to see the world. He had taken an airplane to Martinique, made the acquaintance of Luc, who was preparing to bring Thea to Tahiti, and joined on as crew.

  René was from Brittany, a fiercely autonomous region on the northwestern coast of France. His wife had taken a teaching position in Costa Rica and had flown back to her school duties after transiting the canal a week before, leaving him on his own to bring Saskia to Costa Rica. René was vehemently French, and in testament, before leaving home, he had visited all the best wine châteaux and had built up an impressive wine cellar in Saskia’s bilge and lockers, which were jam-packed with a thousand rag-swathed bottles of every bouquet. The three philosophers would sit around before dinner, sniffing, swirling and admiring as if they were important buyers in Alsace.

 

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