A SHIMMERING MIRAGE, PINPOINT small, hovered on the horizon—one big ship floating on two razorthin hulls like ice-skate blades. It grew slowly, so it must be approaching us. We were a crowd of forty people on a sixty-five-foot cabin cruiser waiting by a dock at seven o’clock in the warm breezes of a January morning in Panama. To our southeast, in the direction of that strange, distant craft, the Pacific Ocean spread out, dotted with tankers and container ships; to our northwest lay the passage over the continent, the Panama Canal, the world’s most monumental work of civil engineering, opened in 1914 and in its essentials unchanged ever since, a forty-mile chain of deep channels, thousand-foot-long locks, and man-made lakes, stretching from sea over the continental divide to sea. This day we were to transit the canal, Pacific to Atlantic.

WE HAD SPENT the week on a study tour of the canal organized by the Society for Industrial Archeology, an organization devoted to appreciating and preserving engineering landmarks, and we had already gone behind the scenes, visiting locks and dams and other pieces of the canal and talking to many of the people who run it, so we felt in every way ready for our trip. But we had to wait for the pilot. The Panama Canal Commission, which runs the canal, employs 240 professional pilots (just one of whom is a woman) who take over command of every craft for as long as it is in canal waters. They never actually touch the controls of a ship, but they have absolute authority over its movements, and it can not enter the canal without them.

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