The Panama Canal and Television
Essay Posted May 20, 2008 by James E. Nelson
On Saturday my brother T.K. and I went to see the visitor’s center at the Panama Canal, located at the first set of locks on the Pacific side of the canal. The museum looks at the history of the canal and also provides an overview of the expansion project that is currently underway. The new set of locks will allow super-tankers to pass through the Panama Canal. On Monday we traveled across the isthmus and watched a couple of ships pass through the last set of locks prior to the Caribbean Sea. After that we rode the train that parallels the canal back to Panama City.
It’s hard to offer an overview of such a trip that makes any sense because the scope of the canal is so huge. As a result, what stuck in my mind was trivia. Last year just over 14,800 ships passed through the canal. The average toll is $67,000. The highest toll ever paid to date was a cruise liner that had to pay over $300,000. When the new locks are completed, it will cost a fully loaded super tanker about a half million dollars to pass through. Since it costs them about $8 million to go around the bottom of South America, this will be a huge savings.
All payments for going through the canal must be done in cash or wire transfer. No credit or checks allowed. This is why there are so many banks in Panama. Shipping companies need to have a branch of their bank present in the country in order to transfer money to the canal authority. It also means that nearly $1 billion in cash comes into Panama every year because of the canal. That number will go up substantially when the new locks are completed.
When the canal was built the Corps of Engineers planted a grass native to India along the banks in order to prevent erosion. It looks a lot like sugar cane. It has come to be known as canal grass and has become one of the worst weed problems in Panama. On Sunday we went to the town of El Valle, high in the mountains, and the canal grass has even managed to spread there.
It rained hard for an hour or so while we were at the visitor’s center. The rain is the single most critical aspect of canal operation. A huge reservoir was built in the middle of Panama and most of the trip the ships make is not in a canal (as we would typically think of a canal) but across the lake. The water used to operate the locks comes from the lake. It flows down through the locks and eventually into the two oceans. The whole system continues to work only because Panama receives a lot of rain which replenishes the reservoir. The rainy season has just begun. At the moment the lake is critically low (because of the dry season). If it doesn’t rain a lot in the next couple of weeks, canal operations will have to be cut back significantly because of the water level.
Getting to see the canal first hand was definitely worth it, but I actually got a far better tour of the canal sitting in front of my television set at home watching the History Channel. A project as huge as the Panama Canal cannot be appreciated standing on the ground looking at one of the locks, or passing by Lago Gatun on a train. The length of the canal, the size of the lake in the middle, and the engineering that went into the project simply cannot be appreciated on site because it is all of such massive scale.
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| A ship passing through the Gatun locks. |
The amazing art of moving a ship through the locks is lost, to a certain extent, while you are standing there watching. The ships are so big that the sense of scale is lost because we just can’t grasp what’s going on when looking at it directly. That’s why my perceptions are reduced to what is essentially trivia.
Television, on the other hand, helps to bring the scale to a size that is comprehensible. Through fast motion camera techniques the viewer can watch a ship go through the canal (an eight hour journey) in a matter of minutes. Watching the action at that scale helps the viewer to conceptualize the overall process. Similarly, both aerial and close up shots allow the viewer to get the canal, the ships, and the whole isthmus into perspective. Television cameras can be given permission to film in places that ordinary people are simply not allowed to go. The television show is, in a sense, a far more complete experience than a visit to the canal itself.
Purists will no doubt complain that watching it all on television is an antiseptic experience. The t.v. viewer doesn’t feel the heat and humidity, nor do they experience the pelting afternoon rain. The t.v. viewer doesn’t see the canal in the context of jungle through which it was dug. They don’t see the wide expanse of colonial buildings in the canal zone, the abject poverty of the neighborhood where Manuel Noriega grew up (and where the American invasion of Panama began back in 1989) that sits right across the fence from and in plain sight of the lush and opulent canal zone, even though the fabulous wealth of the Canal Zone was absolutely off limits to the poverty stricken slum dwellers across the street.
And it is true that the television can dull the sense of wonder and adventure by offering a slightly artificial experience that is artificially more wonderful than the real thing.
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| A view from my motel room window. |
But in spite of the fact that I write this amidst the amazing sky scrapers of downtown Panama City, just a few miles from one of the modern wonders of the world, what I am actually writing about is the wonder of television. There is no substitute for immersion in real foreign cultures and real physical and technological wonders—whether it’s the Panama canal, of which I saw a tiny slice, or the extremely rare golden tree frogs, which probably surrounded me in El Valle, but which I never actually spied—and the world-expanding sensibility that such experiences bring. But the fact is that very few people ever have the opportunity to experience such things first hand.
There is no substitute for traveling this wonderful world, but we live in a truly remarkable and wondrous age in which we can bring pictures of those things directly into our living rooms. That is a “wonder of the world” which is truly amazing. I know, there’s a lot of junk on television. Overall it no doubt promotes more stupidity than genius, it dumbs us down rather than smartens us up. But in spite of all the nay-saying the nay-sayers can say about television, it can show us things that would otherwise be completely inaccessible to us.
And that should be counted as a wonder of the world.
Copyright © 2008 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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