'Ah, yes, unsophisticated,' I said. 'I couldn't help noticing that they've dumped red paint on the bust of Balboa in front of your school.'
'That's the school colour,' he said.
'Do they study Panama's history?'
This gave him pause. He thought a moment and then said uncertainly, 'No, but when they're in the sixth grade they have a few classes in social studies.'
'Good old social studies!'
'But Panama history - it's not what you'd call a subject or anything like that.'
I said, 'How long have you been here?'
'Sixteen years,' he said. 'I consider this my home. Some people here have houses in the States. They go home every summer. I don't do that. I plan to stay here. Back in 1964 a teacher of ours ran away - he thought it was the end. Remember the flag-burning? If he had stayed he would have had nearly thirty years service and a good pension. But he didn't. I'm going to see what happens here. You never know - this treaty business is far from settled.'
Another teacher, a young woman, had wandered over to hear what the principal was saying. When he finished, she said, 'This isn't home for me. I've been here ten years and I've always felt, well, temporary. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and open the curtains and see those palm trees and I think, "Oh, heavens!" '
'What'd you think of the students?' asked a male teacher, smiling, as he accompanied me out of the building.
'Pretty noisy,' I said.
'They were behaving themselves,' he said. 'I was surprised - I expected trouble. They've been raising hell recently.'
Behind us, I heard the unmistakable sound of glass breaking, and youthful laughter, and a teacher's exasperated yell.
It was the high school students who nick-named this train 'The Balboa Bullet'. Like the canal, it is American in character, of solid appearance, efficiently-run and well-maintained. Boarding at Balboa Heights you could not be blamed for thinking that this was the old train to Worcester. In the way tickets are sold and conductors in pill-box hats punch them and hand you a seat-stub (Keep This Check In Sight) it is slightly old-fangled and very dependable. But that too is like the Canaclass="underline" both Canal and railway have worn well, lasting through the modern age without having had to be modernized.lt travels from the Atlantic to the Pacific in under an hour and a half, and it is nearly always on time.
I had been in Panama long enough to be able to recognize some of the landmarks - 'The Building' overlooking Stevens Circle, the mansion houses on Balboa Heights, and Fort Clayton which has the look of a maximum security prison. Most of the houses had a monotonous sameness - the two trees, the flower-bed, the boat in the breezeway. There are no pedestrians on the side-walks - in most places there are no pavements. Only the servants lounging at kitchen doors break the monotony and hint at life being lived.
The first stop was Miraflores: 'Mirror-floors,' in the corrupt Zonian pronunciation. And then the Canal drops behind a hill and does not reappear until Pedro Miguel where, at that set of locks, there are dredgers whose shape and smoke-stacks gave them the look of old Mississippi riverboats.
The train, unlike any other train in Latin America, contains a cross-section of the country's society. In the air-conditioned cars are the American army officers, the better-paid Zonians, tourists, and the businessmen from France and Japan who, at this crucial time, have come down to make a killing in real estate or imports. I was in the non-air-conditioned car by preference, with an ill-assorted group of Panamanians and Zonians, enlisted men, canal workers on the afternoon shift, blacks in velvet caps and some with Rastafarian dreadlocks and octoroons in pig-tails and whole families - black, white and all the intermediate racial hues.
In the air-conditioned car the passengers were looking out of the windows, marvelling at the Canal; but here in the cheaper seats many of the passengers were asleep and no one seemed to notice that we were passing through woods which thickened and, shadier and with hanging vines, turned into half-tame rain-forest. It became jungle, but it remained to the east; on the west, next to the Canal, there was a golf course, with brown tussocky fairways and forlorn golfers marching towards the rough - snakes and scorpions plague the duffers on this course. There are no billboards, no signs at all on the roads, no litter, no hamburger stands or petrol stations: this is an American suburb in apotheosis, the triumph of banality, a permanent encampment of no-nonsense houses and no-nonsense railway stations and no-nonsense churches, and even no-nonsense prisons, for here, in Gamboa, is the Canal Zone Penitentiary and it looks no better or worse than the barracks at Fort Clayton or the Zonian houses at Balboa. The severity is given emphasis by a policeman in a state trooper's Stetson leaning against the fender of his squad car, filing his nails.
Only in the tunnels was I reminded that I was in Central America: people screamed.
Out of the tunnel deeper jungle began, tree jammed next to tree, vine creeping on vine, pathless and dark. It bears no relation to the Canal; it is primeval jungle, teeming with birds. That is the margin of the Zonian's world, where Panama resumes after the interrupting ribbon of the Zone. And it is in its wildness as unreal as the military manicure of the Zone. It does not matter that there are alligators and Indians there, because there are puppy-dogs and policemen here, and everything you need to ignore the jungle that does not stop until the Andes begin.
At Culebra we crossed the continental divide, and two ships were passing in the Cut. For these two ships to be sliding sleepily along, seven years of digging were necessary; it was, said Lord Bryce, 'the greatest liberty ever taken with nature'. The details are in David McCullough's canal history, The Path Between The Seas: to dig nine miles and remove 96 million cubic yards of earth it cost $90 million; 61 million pounds of dynamite were used to blast open the canal, and much of it was used right here at Culebra. But it was a hot sunny afternoon; the birds were singing; Culebra seemed little more than a natural river in the tropics. The Canal's history is unimaginable from what it is possible to see in the Zone; most of it is underwater, in any case. Bunau-Varilla's remark that 'the cradle of the Panama Republic' was Room 1162 of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City is true, but seems, like all the other historical details connected with the Canal, monstrous and fanciful.
And what could be odder than the sight of a great sea-going ship in the jungle? Inland, swamps and lagoons were more frequent, and then the lake began. Gatun Lake was formed by the Canal; until the sluice gates opened in 1914 there was only a narrow river, the Chagres. Now there is a vast lake, bigger than Moosehead Lake in Maine. Near Frijoles, a cool breeze blew across it and whitened the water and made it choppy. I could see Barro Colorado Island. As water filled the valley to create the lake the animals made for Barro Colorado, the birds flew to its trees, and so this hill was turned into an ark. It remains a wild-life sanctuary.
All the transistor radios - there were five - in my car were playing a current hit, Stay in' Alive, as the train crossed the causeway from Monte Liro to the Gatun side. It was like being in Louisiana, not merely because of the blacks and their radios and that music; but most Zonians had been recruited out of New Orleans, and this passage was practically identical to crossing the long lacustrine bridge on Lake Pontchartrain on the Chicago train called, not entirely by coincidence, 'The Panama Limited'. The islands in Gatun Lake are so young they still look like hilltops in flood-time, but there is no time to examine them. Here, the train does sixty, going clickety-click across the causeway. I regretted that it was not going farther, that I could not simply sit where I was, puffing my pipe, and be taken to Colombia and Ecuador. But no good train ever goes far enough, just as no bad train ever reaches its destination soon enough.