Free Panama by Shelby Hiatt Page A

efficiency, no doubt about it, and it's always on schedule. Our train slips out of the station at ten past, exactly.
    Harry is my tutor in politics, geography, and language, whether he knows it or not. He points out the villages on the way.
    "Matachin, named for a Chinese man who killed himself. That's what they tell the tourists."
    "Sounds like a play on words to me," I say.
"Mata,
'kill';
chin
for 'Chinese.' Probably Indian, don't you think? Some ancient glyph on a rock somewhere?"
    "Probably." He gives me a sidelong look. "You're good with language, you know that?" I look away, embarrassed. That's a big compliment coming from Harry. Federico wafts through my brain.
    Bas Obispo rolls by.
    Jungle after that.
    We go through Gorgona, the Pittsburgh of the Zone, acres of machine shops working on some of Father's tracks and engines, Federico's face and words doing a lot of wafting at this point. Then we go through stations that are small and wasting away: Bailamonos and San Pablo and Orca L'garto. Harry knows them all and points them out. I take notes and sketch.
    "Tabernilla—look," he says. What used to be a village is now stacks of lumber being loaded on flatcars. "Moving it toward the Pacific, they'll build it again."
    The same thing is happening in Frijoles when we pass it—dismantling, loading, moving the entire town with everything from police station to homes, five years after founding it. Creating, destroying, re-creating on higher ground, whatever it takes to build the canal. Make way for the encroaching waters of man-made Lake Gatun. Already the jungle vines and foliage are crawling in, taking over the one-time towns, and soon man's visit will be sunk deep by progress. At least, that's the plan, and it's not likely to go wrong.
    I write this in my notes, not to please Mother but for my new self: the injustice and inevitability and helplessness of the locals being warned and moved and warned again, stripped of planting grounds, of dwellings, village communities split and scattered to make way for progress. Harry teaches me well.
    It is beginning to get to me, even while I concentrate on Federico and my new world with him.
    "It'll all be flooded," Harry says. "They're closing the Gatun spillway in February."
    "Will these tracks be under water?"
    "Tracks, railway, all of it on the bottom of the lake. Steamers will be gliding over those palm trees and mangoes and big ferns. They'll all still be standing in the water, ships steaming back and forth over them until they die."
    "That's eerie."
    "Yeah."
    ***
    An hour and we don't see the canal, only jungle and the occasional group of huts, then we burst out of the growth and onto the lake. The water is licking at the rails under us. The Zone city of Gatun is on the hillside, to my left the locks and the dam. I don't bother sketching—it'll be there for a long time. So will the station we're sliding into; it's stone, not meant to be moved. It's permanent and out of reach of the flood, built to stay. We get out, look around.
    "You know when your train leaves?" he asks. (Always the good uncle.)
    "Yes, I'm fine."
    This is where Harry and I split up. I plan to go back without him.
    "Be careful."
    "I will."
    His questionnaire ready, he goes to the laborers lined up at a station window for their paychecks—yet another way of reaching them for enumerating. I go to see the locks as Mother has instructed.
    She doesn't know my real plan.
Thirty-Eight
    I was there the year before with Father but the change is enormous.
Gigantic
is a better word.
    It's nearing the end of construction, and the size is so monstrous, it looks like aliens landed and tried to dwarf their machines to fit planet Earth but didn't manage to shrink them enough.
    There's a giant aerial tramway swinging buckets of concrete to sky-high steel forms. These are for uprights that stand hundreds of feet in the air. And inside the unfinished walls I can see an enormous bull wheel lying on its side. I've read