Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

People said that London was a center of theater and music but this is my second night here and there doesn’t seem to be much action in town.  Perhaps it was not London, Ontario to which folks referred.  Anyway, in between test-flying Diamond Star N505WT, I’m reading The Pencil by Henry Petroski, 354 pages that demonstrate conclusively that at least one area of history has been justifiably ignored.

It turns out that, before setting off for Harvard College, Henry David Thoreau devoted quite a bit of time to figuring out how to blend graphite powder and clay into a pencil that could compete with the best English and French products.  He and his father were very successful pencil merchants in the 1840s.  As cheap German imports made the business less profitable the Thoreaus moved into supplying graphite powder for electrotype printing.  In 1853 Thoreau’s friends asked him why he’d stopped making pencils.  He responded “Why should I?  I would not do again what I have done once.”

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Computer nerds are stereotyped by the public as a bunch of meek cubicle-dwellers who sit quietly staring at screens, taking orders from MBAs 6 levels up in a bureaucracy, until their jobs get outsourced to some villagers in India.  Though we might regret the U.S. government’s decision to grant citizenship to people who hate Americans we can be grateful to Maher Mofeid Hawash, the Intel programmer sentenced today for his efforts on behalf of Al-Qaeda (Mr. Hawash was attempting to enter Afghanistan in 2001 and fight directly against American troops… imagine Rambo with a copy of K&R).  Mr. Hawash picks up the struggle to reform the public image of computer nerds taken up by Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida computer engineering professor who was, in addition to a naturalized American citizen and member of the American Muslim Council, a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

A few more guys like this and Hollywood will start making films about action heroes with day jobs coding Java.

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Looking out the windows of the Boeing 757 taking me away from Panama it remains hard to believe that the railroad (1850-55) and then the canal were built.  They had no aircraft and therefore could not perform aerial surveys of a roadless unknown country.  They had no insect repellant in a place swarming with mosquitoes, sand flies, and other sources of nasty bites (so perhaps it was for the best that, until the Americans came along, nobody believed that mosquitoes caused malaria and yellow fever).  The development of this country is a remarkable tribute to the triumph of energy over natural caution. 

Most of that energy came from the American West.  The California gold rush of 1849 provided the impetus for the construction of the railroad and most of its initial revenue.  When the French effort failed two citizens of Medora, North Dakota played key roles.  The best-known is
that of one-time rancher Theodore Roosevelt.  As president of the United States in 1903 it was Roosevelt who encouraged Panamanians to secede from Columbia and subsequently approved taking over the French concession in the isthmus.  Canal historian David McCullough in Brave Companions writes about another Medoran in his book Brave Companions.

Antoine Amedee-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Mores, was a French aristocrat married to the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street banker.  Of North Dakota the Marquis wrote “I like this country for there is room to move about without stepping on the feet of others.”  He invested much of his wealth in the North Dakota badlands, in a local slaughterhouse, and in refrigerated rail cars to deliver beef to markets in the East, in competition with the Chicago stockyards.  Roosevelt was frequently a guest in the Marquis’s house in Medora until a cruel winter drove them and their herds out. The Marquis blamed the failure of his enterprise on “the Jewish beef trust” and, upon returning to France, satisfied the French public’s demand to know what had gone wrong with their sea level canal with the explanation that the Jews were to blame.  The Marquis successfully stirred many thousands of his countrymen to anti-Jewish riots regarding the canal and subsequently played an important role in the Dreyfus Affair.  He was less successful outside France. According to McCullough, the Marquis was “murdered in June 1896 by a band of Tuareg tribesmen in North Africa”, where he had been engaged in an effort to “united the Muslims under the French flag in an all-out holy war against the Jews and the English.”

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Today was my 20th and last hour of helicopter instruction in Panama (tomorrow morning I’ll get on an American Airlines flight to Toronto, staying at www.metropolitan.com).  After a couple of autorotations in which one learns how to land the helicopter after the engine quits we proceeded up the Rio Chagres.  This is a national park, established to protect the rainforest in the Canal’s watershed.  In the past few decades Embera Indians have moved up from the remote malarial province of Darien, on the border with Columbia, to this region where the jungle environment is the same but access to health care and tourism jobs is much easier.

Our approach to the little village of grass huts involved flying up the center of the twisting river, about 10′ above the water, at 50 mph.  Steep hillsides with big trees constitute the banks of the fast-flowing Chagres and constitute a bit of a distraction for a beginning student.  Thanks to the lack of development in Panama one is safe from powerlines, those perennial killer of helicopter pilots, but we rounded a couple of corners to find people motoring along in dugout canoes.

The little Embera village that we visited contained 84 people from 17 families, each of whom lived in an elevated grass hut.  A traditional anthropologist might spend God knows how long paddling around looking for this village and then 12 months living here in one of those huts.  The  helicopter anthropologist sleeps in an air-conditioned bed in a modern hotel overlooking the Canal, takes a 30-minute flight into the village, and waits for Johnson, the one resident who speaks English, to come down towards the riverbank as the rotors spin down.  Here’s what we learned…

The Embera sustain themselves by catching fish in the river, killing wild pigs in the surrounding rainforest, growing some crops, and harvesting various wild plants.  They manufacture their own clothing, which is nada for the young kids, a loin cloth for the adults, and a beaded bikini top for women.  They make some cash by guiding cruise ship passengers on package tours and selling them handicrafts.

Technological comforts are limited to three hours of electricity per night and one channel of broadcast television that can be received through a gap in the ridge.  Cable and Wireless, the telecom monopoly that has been restricting Panama’s economic growth (it cost $7 to make a one-minute phone call from my hotel to Canada), installed a pay phone around which the Embera built a thatch phone booth.  It has been broken for six months.

There are no shops.  You can’t buy bottled water, Diet Coke, or any other packaged food.

At the center of the village is a single concrete building:  the schoolhouse.  The Panamanian government sends a teacher out for the wet season so that the children learn Spanish.  Imagine the dedication of this woman, a Latino from Panama City, to live in such a small isolated community in which many residents speak only the native Embera language.

[http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/200401-panama-embera/ has some snapshots from the trip]

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The price of food and reasonable medical care have fallen so much that the world population swells to levels scarcely imaginable 200 years ago.  Whenever you get a bunch of people together in a tropical climate they inevitably seem to say to each other “Let’s go out and cut down all of the trees in the jungle so that we can grow crops or graze cattle.”

The last tropical rainforest left will very likely be the one right here in central Panama for it supplies one thing that is undeniably critical for the operation of the Canal:  rain.  The heart of the 80 km-long Canal is a big lake, 26 meters above sea level.  Every transit of a ship through the Canal requires that 52 million gallons of fresh water drain out of this lake into the Caribbean and Pacific.  The water is replenished from surrounding rainforest.  One thing that people in this part of the world have learned is that when you cut down all the trees it changes the local climate, generally cutting the amount of rain that falls.

Panama is one of the few places in the world where you don’t need a hippie environmentalist to talk up the value of the rainforest.  Here everyone knows what the rainforest is worth… $600 million per year in tolls.

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A Panamanian-American couple invited me over to dinner at their house the other night.  They are both well-educated and have excellent careers.  Their girls are 8 and 9.  I walked in the door to find an impeccably neat household.  No toys cluttering the floor.  Both husband and wife were relaxed and happy to chat.  Eventually an excellent meal appeared, cooked and served by one of two live-in nannies.  The dishes disappeared and the kids came into the room to hang out with the parents.

By dessert I’d figured out what was wrong with the picture.  These people had as much free time and energy to socialize as single childless Americans.  My American friends who are married with children are capable of straightening up the house and entertaining at home perhaps once every two months.  These upper middle-class Panamanians could do that every night if they wished.  Americans with kids are exhausted by the effort of driving them around and reshuffling the clutter.  Panamanians have their chauffeur do the chauffeuring.

All of the magic (two nannies and a full-time driver) happens for $1000/month.  A perfectly lovely house in a nice area can be had for $250,000.

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The hardest core person encountered so far on this trip is Eric Duquenoy (http://eduquenoy.chez.tiscali.fr).  He left France a little more than two years ago in a smallish 4WD diesel Mitsubishi, drove down through French Northwest Africa, shipped his car/home from Togo to Brazil, drove down to Ushuaia, Argentina, then came up the West Coast of South America as far as Ecuador before shipping the car up here to Panama City (there is no road link between Columbia and Panama and it is dangerous to drive through Columbia).  Eric is a 44-year-old former computer programmer who sleeps in a pop-up mattress/tent mounted to his car’s roof (similar to what you see at http://www.loftyshelters.com/).  Eric and I met in the old city this afternoon and he gave me a lift back to my hotel where I discovered the hardest core element of all in his story:  the Mitsubishi is unairconditioned.

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Flew from Miami to Panama City, Panama yesterday.  While sitting in a comfortable leather seat aboard an American Airlines 757 and eating a filet mignon lunch, I looked down at Cuba.  Supposedly they have everything to which we Americans aspire, i.e., universal health care and an excellent public education system.  Yet Cubans are dirt poor and it is we ignorant and infirm residents of the United States who designed and built the 757.  The comparison isn’t quite fair but really you’d think that the Cubans, being so well educated and blessed with a large and fertile country, would have done better for themselves.  Perhaps politics do matter, a sobering thought as Election 2004 sweeps across the U.S.

Graham, a Kiwi flight instructor from www.helipan.com, picked me up at the big international airport here (PTY) and, after a brief stop to change into shorts, we went to the small domestic airport and preflighted a Robinson R22 helicopter, removed the doors, and, with the Pacific Ocean at our backs, took off north along the Canal.  A moderate rain, unseasonable this time of year in Panama, pelted my bare skin though the gaping holes in the sides of the machine, now approaching its 100 mph (160 kph) cruising speed.  Soon the rain ended, however, and we were abeam the magnificent Miraflores Locks. After skirting the airspace over a prison and a rainforest resort we dropped down to 500′ over the jungle bordering Lake Gatun, the heart of the Panama Canal.  A few minutes later we were coming up on Colon, the big city and free trade zone at the Caribbean end of the Canal. After a quick glance down at the collapsed rusting rooftops of downtown Colon it is not hard to believe that this is the unemployment, poverty, and crime capital of the nation.

“… children run about in rags and the city’s largely black
population lives in rotting buildings.  … If you walk its streets,
even in th emiddle of the day, expect to get mugged.  It really is
that bad.”

— Lonely Planet guidebook (this is a publisher that thinks
   Columbia is a nice safe country to visit!)

Cruising at 80 mph west from Colon, 50′ above the breakers, we reached the mouth of the Rio Chagres, whose prodigious flow in the rainy season stymied the Canal builders.  This is the river that the pirate Henry Morgan used in 1671 to gain access to the original settlement of Panama City.  On the cliffs above the sea is the ruined Fuerte San Lorenzo, built to protect the Spanish gold trade from guys like Henry Morgan.  Adjacent to the fort is a partially fenced grassy area. Graham decided to put the R22 down there.  We walked around the fort for a bit, looked at the rusty cannon, and then fired up for the return trip to Panama City, landing just at sunset.

Then it was back to the hotel for a shorts-and-T-shirt dinner at a table outdoors, on a patio overlooking Canal-bound ships going underneath the Puente de las Americas.  The helicopter pilots talked about their jobs on the tuna boats here.  The 200′-long tuna boats carry a light helicopter so that the captain can go up and coordinate the action of little speed boats that collect the nets.  When the work is done the pilot has to land on a rolling metal deck, often spread with a net to provide friction.  “Sounds like landing on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier,” I observed.  “Oh, it is much harder than that,” the pilots noted.  “Remember that this is a very small ship and it goes up and down with the waves a lot more.”  Tuna boat helicopter pilots tend to be young and unmarried.

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One full day in South Florida so far:

• under blue skies and 75-degree temps, walked through extensive Japanese garden and bonsai exhibit, set amidst vast gated communities in Delray Beach
  
• toured the visitor center and botanical gardens of the American Orchid Society
  
• had a snack at sunset looking out over the Atlantic at the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, whose bar is a wrap-around saltwater aquarium (mostly clown fish); you actually set your drink down on top of the acrylic
  
• went to Muvico to see the movie Monster, a brilliant portrayal of an average lesbian prostitute murderer, a glimpse of the Florida lifestyle outside of those iron gates and away from the private armed guards

Plan for today (Monday):  Vizcaya, lunch with a physical oceanographer, afternoon at friend’s mom’s parrot rescue operation, evening with some oft-removed cousins

Tuesday:  fly to Panama on American Airlines, get into Robinson R22 helicopter with instructor at http://www.helipan.com

Note to gourmets:  One great thing about South Florida is that you don’t have to watch the signs on I-95 carefully to figure out which exits have McDonald’s.  Every exit has a McDonald’s!  And a gas station.  And a couple more gas station/convenience stores.  And a couple more fast food places.  And a strip mall.

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There is an interesting discussion forum thread on Edward Tufte’s site right now.  It is inspiring because it shows that good things happen in the New England winter after all and it is also an inspiring use of an Internet discussion forum and photos on the Web.

Much as I love the depicted cold and snow, however, I think it is off to Miami and then Panama…

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