Last year about this time I was in Panama. It’s not a spot I’d recommend visiting. Far and away the two best things about the place (we stayed in Panama City and on the truly depressing island of Taboga) were the Bed and Breakfast we stayed in while in Panama City, Casa Las Americas, and the touristing we did related to the Panama Canal – the canal itself, and the canal museum located in the “old section” of Panama City. Nothing in this museum is in English, and Ted and I speak no Spanish, but we still managed to spend almost three hours there, looking at all of the exhibits and trying through the decipherment of cognates to piece together what the panels of texts throughout the museum were trying to tell us – part of the fun actually turned out to be this construction of our own, poorly translated history: “Holy shit! Teddy Roosevelt conquered France!”
Anyhoo, while we were at the canal itself, which has many displays in English, and where you can (and we did) eat lunch while overlooking the Miraflores locks, waving to the sparse crews on the enormous ships that pass through on their way to and from the Pacific, we also hit the gift shop, ’cause, c’mon. While there, I got a Panama Canal t-shirt – OF COURSE – and a book by David McCullough, “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914”.
I finally got around to reading it, and the chief reflection I have after it is that reviews of good books are much, much more boring than reviews of bad books. “The Path Between the Seas” is a dense historical account, but McCullough, who won the National Book Award twice, once for this book, and the Pulitzer Prize twice, is an able narrator. The book must surely be the definitive account of the building of the canal – no stone is left unturned by McCullough, either in the account of the failed French efforts on the Isthmus or the triumphant American ones. Considering that the book was written in the 1970s, McCullough even does an admirable job of addressing the lives of the massive population of oppressed black laborers that built the canal, though his account is still very much a part of the “Big Men Doing Big Deeds” style of history. Despite its density of fact, the book is very readable. Basically, all of this boils down to, if you have any interest in the Panama Canal, American history at the turn of the 20th century, or engineering history generally, you should check this book out. Even if you don’t have an interest in any of those things, you might be surprised at how interesting this book actually is, if you’re patient with it.
The other book on the table for today is “The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct” by Bert Holldolber and Edward O. Wilson. You see, while we were having breakfast one morning on the shaded veranda of the Casa Las Americas, we had the pleasure of watching some leafcutter ants at work. They came up the side of the building, to the second story where we were seated, marched along the edge of the porch, and began to swarm gently over some flowering bushes that were planted in the large, deep planter that rimmed the entire porch. We could see them carefully chewing out pieces of the leaves and bright pink flowers, which, when finally freed, they then carried over their heads like little sails or parasols (in the southern U.S., leafcutter ants are known as “parasol ants”), marching off in a train that passed the incoming train of ants exactly. It was fascinating and lovely in its way, each little ant with its brightly colored confetti, tromping through the shade and sun. Said our host, the American ex-pat owner of the B & B, “They’re not good for the bushes. I guess I should kill them or something, but they’re just working so hard – it doesn’t seem right.” He watched them with us for awhile, and then went about his work.
With these industrious little Panamanian ants in mind, Ted picked up, not too long ago, from the Borders as it went out of business, “The Leafcutter Ants.” It is a small, shiny book with lots of pictures, and I figured it would make a nice thematic coda to the book on the canal.
Well, let me tell you, just because a book is small and shiny and full of pictures doesn’t mean it’s going to be a light read. This book reads like a scientific paper. It is dense with particularized terms and scientific details – this chemical, this sensory lobe structure, this genetic marker, etc. Now. That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting – these little ants inhabit a fascinating world, where they live in symbiosis with not just fungi but bacteria as well, and in competition with different fungal and ant foes, and the way they’ve evolved in tandem with their mutualist partners to cope with these threats is a testament to the beauty and intricacy of natural selection and the world of life in general. I’m just saying, don’t pick up this book thinking that it’s shiny and small and full of pictures and think that it’s going to be an easy read. Ants might be wee, but they are COMPLEX.
Well, I guess I’ll cross Panama off my list of places to visit… it wasn’t terribly high anyway (probably just a bit above assorted war-torn countries).
“Panama: Not War-Torn” is about the best tourist slogan I can think of for the place.
Now, Puerto Rico, on the other hand – I had a fabulous time in Puerto Rico.