Jerry Climbs the Magic Steps on His Way to New Worlds

The Intrepid Jerry is in Panama City recovering from an uncomplicated delivery through a long narrow channel that birthed him into life in a new ocean, the mighty Pacific! Enjoying a well-deserved rest, Jerry is now swaying on mooring lines that creak their protest whenever the La Playita Marina waters cycle through the incredible shrinking and swelling of liquid mass necessary to generate its 16ft tidal range.  Jerry’s crew have found it best to time provisioning runs by these tides, a lesson learned when they chose to cart a 40-lb bag of ice down an almost vertical incline to the floating docks at low tide. Ice well in hand, Mel finally has time to reflect on their transit through one of the world’s great engineering marvels.

First, some background. Before their Panama Canal transit, Mel did some history research.  This included listening to the abridged (8 hours!) audiobook of David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas. Not all that interested in civil engineering, political maneuvering, or fundraising, Mel was delighted to find that this book also gave interesting portrayals of some of the key people behind the canal’s construction.  This includes the charismatic Ferdinand de Lessups, best known for orchestrating France’s failure to build the canal by convincing politicians, investors, and even himself that, as a skilled fundraiser, his judgment regarding the canal’s construction surpassed those of his engineer advisors.  It also discusses how Panama owes its nationhood to Teddy Roosevelt, who “took the isthmus” from Colombia by wielding his “big stick” in a three-day military maneuver.  Quite an aggressive move for a famous tree-hugger!

The Panama Canal was now more interesting. Mel thought she might ponder Teddy Roosevelt a bit as she passed through the locks. But these characters were a little abstract and not particularly inspiring, and Mel wanted to be uplifted as she experienced one of humanity’s more ambitious attempts to leave its mark upon the planet.

Then she discovered the SS Richard Halliburton.

Richard Halliburton (no relation to the oil company) was a man after Mel’s own heart, having been over-educated at Princeton only to disappoint his family by traveling around the world and writing about it. A true adventurer, Richard was not satisfied with traveling on well-worn paths, instead choosing the wild and crazy route. One of the most entertaining Wikipedia pages Mel has read in a long time notes that his unusual gift for concocting creative journeys led to such adventures as flying around most of the world in an open cockpit biplane, being paid for a plane ride with shrunken heads, living as a castaway on purpose à la Robinson Crusoe in Tobago, and crossing the Alps à la Hannibal on an elephant.  A socialite who was friends with many of the influencers of his day, he of course wrote books about all of this, including the stunt most relevant to this post: swimming the entire course of the Panama Canal. His popular book about his trip, New Worlds to Conquer, published in 1929, is available free online in the Internet Archive.

So, to honor a fellow travel blogger, Mel will invite you all to raft up with Jerry and the SS Richard Halliburton as they prep for and transit the Panama Canal together.

Let’s start with Richard. Before his swim, Richard climbed Ancon Hill to get the lay of the land around the Canal, and he had a view remarkably similar to what he would see today:

I reached the top to find the view enchanting. I could see for miles around—the blue Pacific— the jungle—the Spanish city—the traffic of ships, ships, ships, specks on the horizon, steaming past the islands in the outer bay, crowding into the harbor from a hundred nations and a thousand ports, waiting to climb the magic steps and descend upon the other Ocean. Inland they sailed up the channel toward the Miraflores locks—battleships, tankers, tramps, huge long liners, sailboats, tugboats, freight boats, every flag, every color, the endless pageant steaming up the blue fiord through the sunshine on toward the most romantic voyage granted the ships of the sea.

Richard decided then and there to make his crazy swim idea a reality. Any good canal transit demands planning and logistics, and so while Richard was sweet-talking the canal authorities into stopping ship traffic while he slowly side-stroked through the locks, The Intrepid Jerry was working with an advisor to coordinate the two line handlers, one canal advisor, multiple fenders, and the giant lines required by the Canal Authority for their transit.

Just before the transit, given the possible need to provide up to three hot meals to a total of six people aboard, Jerry’s crew furiously provisioned with enough food for a 5-day offshore.  That night Mel prepped her mother-in-law’s breakfast ham casserole and her own chicken curry so they could be deployed in thirty minutes, keeping all the ingredients for lasagna rolls in her back pocket should the crew become ravenous.  Turns out that the breakfast casserole would have sufficed!

Richard’s preparation went a little differently. He went to a cabaret in Colon and partied all night. Of course he did.  There he met a “little wag” named Isabella, who asked him why he wanted to swim the canal despite his poor swimming skills.  His answer resembles the answer we give people when they ask why we cruise:

How could I tell her why? I didn’t know myself—the difficulty of it—the novelty of it—the drama of it—the appeal of a thing so powerful and so beautiful—the sport—the urge—the dream —the great adventure that would not pass. I couldn’t say it all intelligibly in English, much less Spanish. So I pantomimed wheels around my head and said “cuckoo,” and she understood.

Even in the modern age, the idea of traveling via ship through the Panama Canal evokes romantic excitement. Throughout these last few weeks at Shelter Bay, Mel has witnessed a universal dreamy expression settle on the faces of sailors discussing their upcoming transit.  Despite acknowledging this excitement, Mel found it hard to put into words what made passing through the canal so amazing. In the locks, she would discover the answer.

Before her epiphany, on Saturday, Jerry’s crew learned they were assigned the one-day transit format, which meant their day would begin around 4 AM Sunday, March 22. They would complete their 10-12 hour transit by 3:30 PM the same day. This was a tight schedule, as Jerry’s arrival and departure at each lock was booked by the minute.

Jerry’s day began in the dark. In the wee morning hours, their agent, Roy, dropped off the fenders, lines, and two line handlers, one of which was his son, Roy. Jerry then motored through Limon Bay, where a fast-approaching vessel expertly came alongside and dropped off their canal advisor, Roy.  Mel’s half-asleep brain appreciated the simplicity of this.

Meanwhile in 1928, Richard was swimming through the same bay, dodging typhoid and working on building his endurance, which would have improved quicker had he not gone partying every night at the clubs.

At last, after watching the sun come up behind the Atlantic Bridge and rafting up with the Leopard 40 catamaran Cosmos, Jerry approached the three Gatun Locks that would stepwise lift the twinned boats up 85 feet, more than 6 stories, above the Caribbean Sea.

Just as Jerry was rafted up to another catamaran, back in 1928 the SS Halliburton was not alone in his transit.  He had hired a rowboat, Daisy, manned by a humongous armed sergeant to protect him from barracudas and crocodiles.

When Richard finally reached the first step of the “magic stairs” of the Gatun locks, he got out and discussed his plans with the “magician” gatekeeper of the locks.

“Do you see all this?” the magician repeated. “Look out the window there.” The majestically beautiful thirty-thousand-ton California, the hugest passenger ship ever built in America, was ascending the magic stairs. “It takes all this’”—he swept his hand across the ocean of engines, down toward the California and the three one-thousand-foot chambers—‘‘to lock you through. It will take nine million cubic feet of water three times displaced to raise you into the lake.

After expressing his annoyance at having to stop ship traffic for him, the gatekeeper mentioned fees, and Richard was prepared with his response.

“Governor Walker and I agreed I was to pay like all other ships—according to my tonnage. I’m the S. S. Richard Halliburton, registered in Memphis, Tennessee. Length, five feet ten inches; beam, one foot; tonnage, one hundred and forty pounds—that’s one-thirteenth of one ton.”

“One-thirteenth of one ton, eh.” He got down his tables. “You’re the smallest ship in the history of the Panama Canal.” And then after a bit of calculation: “You owe me thirty-six cents.”

We paid $4500.

At last, Jerry & Cosmos, and Richard & Daisy, maneuvered into the Gatun locks. With ship traffic stopped for him, Richard missed out on the excitement of being instructed to approach a giant cargo ship, its massive stern looming higher and higher into the sky as Roy the advisor encouraged Greg to motor closer and closer.  In the end, Jerry and Cosmos were situated uncomfortably in what must have been a huge blind spot of a metallic behemoth that, once retired from duty, could easily play the part of the whale in the space opera-version of Moby Dick. 

Not needing line handlers, Richard also did not experience one of the more stressful parts of a canal transit: the attachment of the boat to the canal via lines. To accomplish this, a canal worker positioned thirty feet above the water hurtles a lead ball with a spindly line at your boat, repeating this maneuver until someone, hopefully a trained line handler, finally catches it.  That’s right. Your boat gets fly-fished. It is quite terrifying to be the fish. In our case, the first throw missed, and the lead ball thunked against the side of the boat, making a sound terrifying to anyone with a fiberglass hull.  Fortunately, there was no damage. Mel instantly regretted not taping out a giant bullseye on the hull so she could score the throws.  That first throw?  Zero points, Miguel.  Zero.

After a couple more tries, the line is caught, Daniel the line handler hooks another rope into it, and eventually Jerry is moored to the wall. The crews’ excitement builds, and they search the walls for signs of rising water to mark their ascension. After what seemed like forever, the floodgates underneath the lock finally open, releasing a cargo-ship-sized mass of fresh Gatun lakewater to fill the lock and then flow down to the Caribbean Sea, free at last.

Being embedded in the canal itself, Richard had a more visceral experience of going through the Gatun locks:

Once more the magician in the tower raised his wand, and opened not the gates but the doors of the three great conduits, each the size of a Hudson River tube, which allows the water to flow in underneath from the upper lock into the lower. Gravity is the chief engine. When the levels of the two locks become the same, the gates open again and the ship glides on. The inflow is very violent and caused such whirlpools and suctions that I was forced to hold on to the Daisy [his safety rowboat] as the submarine geysers boiled up and lifted, lifted me. It was a most dramatic experience to look down the vast chamber and realize what was happening: this entire rock-walled lake, and two more like it, being filled and emptied that this infinitesimal speck upon its surface might climb the magic stairs! What sensation could approach that of feeling one’s self carried up by these superhuman forces just as if one were the biggest battleship on earth, cruising forth to fight the battles of the nation, or a great liner laden with a thousand passengers.

The idea of sharing the same forces meant to move battleships was one of the reasons Richard was driven to swim the Canal.  It was in the locks that Mel realized another reason why witnessing this particular example of civil engineering was so compelling. Most of the massive constructions on the planet that took thousands of people years to design and build are static. You experience them by looking at them, getting a thrill from comparing the size of the monolith to your own tiny structure, and finally grasping the huge scale of the enterprise that built it. This realization is a worthwhile experience to seek out, as the tears that rolled down Mel’s cheeks upon viewing Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam attest. However, transiting the Canal eclipses all of these emotions, as it is interactive, an advantageous feature in the modern age.  You experience the canal in space AND time, just as you would experience a living, breathing thing, and a twelve-hour experience of a 50-mile transit leaves a big footprint in your memory.

The Canal is also a compelling example of how technology can be beautiful. Witnessing a 125-year-old mechanical system skillfully shift around gigantic amounts of water in a deliberate way, all so humanity can subvert the whim of the stubborn land mass of the South American continent in order to connect people more directly across the globe, highlights some of the good things about our species in an age that recently has brought out a lot of the bad.

After transiting the three lifting locks, which were a little fuller than usual due to Mel’s tears of joy, Jerry spent a few hours crossing Gatun Lake, well above sea level. As everyone on the boat dozed for a few hours, Greg was at the helm with canal advisor Roy, who for unclear reasons insisted Jerry almost kiss every red buoy on the way to the next set of locks.  

Richard of course did not get as much sleep as Jerry’s crew, as he would hit the clubs every night on his multi-day swim through the lake.  One night, Isabella noted his severe sunburn and gave him a parasol for protection, which was carried by Sergeant Wright, who, as I plunged in for the twenty-four-mile grind across the [Gatun] lake, raised Isabella’s pink sunshade above his pine-tree frame and settled back into the boat to watch for crocodiles.

We are fortunate that Richard took the time to construct a map of his journey.

Richard’s progress across the lake was marred by an infected sunburn, a close encounter with a freighter, and numerous crocodiles, which Sergeant Thomas aboard Daisy dispatched handily.

Finally Jerry made it to the last three locks for his descent into the mighty Pacific.  This time he was rafted up to Cosmos and a multi-story tourboat, and the tourists proceeded to observe Jerry’s crew as the crazy anthropological specimens they are.  Once again there was a delay after the boats were connected, a delay they were all thankful for once the reason for it was revealed. Slowly behind them loomed the massive Magdalena Schulte cargo ship, which Jerry had surprisingly lapped in the lake, who thankfully approached Jerry’s stern cautiously to prevent the mass of water it displaced from lifting the rafted boats up and shoving them against the gates. This was especially important in these last three locks, as the attraction and tides of the Pacific prompted a brisk forward current that the lines and engines strained to resist.

Richard’s thoughts: The Miraflores locks are even more stupendous than those at Gatun. The gates here are eighty five feet high and doubly strong to resist the tremendous Pacific tides. When the water in the last chamber had been lowered to sea level, and these last and greatest gates of all began to swing wide, I plunged in from the Daisy and, when the jaws were no more than fifteen feet apart, was catapulted through them by the rush of the swirling water, for the tide was going full speed out to sea.

Transiting the last three locks, interrupted briefly by the Miraflores Lake, happened in the blink of an eye. As Jerry dropped with the draining water in the locks, it was as if the walls were rising all around us. After the water level stabilized, an awed silence descended on the hundreds of people on the rafted boats and Miraflores viewing platform as the final double-gates opened and released the boats into the Pacific.

Meanwhile, Richard still had some swimming to do to the Balboa Yacht Club. Almost to the finish line, barracudas conspired to cut his eight-day trip short:

There was a wild splash in the water ten feet ahead, a wild yell from the sergeant, and I was dragged into the boat with such violence I thought the Daisy had run over me. Barracudas! …The sergeant in a cold perspiration from anxiety, stood up and lashed the water ahead and behind with—in desperate need —our pink parasol, letting forth with each lash a shout that must have driven even the barracudas in terror out to sea…And thus did this yelling, ocean-thrashing, parasol-wielding, oar-hugging, barracuda-fleeing outfit sideswipe across the line.

Kicking herself for not getting a pink parasol to brandish in Richard’s honor at the end of their own transit, Mel and Jerry’s crew nevertheless emerged from the canal ecstatic. Jerry was finally in a new ocean, with new worlds to explore, and new adventures on the horizon!  For his part, Richard furiously blogged his experience and completed his map. Task completed, he was unable to bask too long in his accomplishment. His drive to explore new worlds was too strong, and he was not one to live in the past. He went on to explore South America in a quest for Incan gold, meet the President of Peru, and adventure throughout South America.

Those who like happy endings, or who get a little nervous about our future plans to sail the Pacific, should not research what happened to Richard in the end.

Meanwhile, Jerry’s crew as well are looking to the future. Their long-stay visa for French Polynesia has been approved! Greg, Mel, and Jeremy are finishing up projects and provisioning and will begin to look for a weather window. They are considering targeting Pitcairn Island and eventually, the Gambiers. Who can resist exploring black pearl farms? Mel will keep you posted! Farewell, the SS Richard!