A book and some thoughts

I've been scourging the internet and local library for as much information as possible on my new home. There is some on Panama, more on the canal, but less and much less on Gamboa or Ella Puru/San Antonio (my neighboring communities). And I didn't think this was possible but Wikipedia comes up with an astonishing nada for queries on the Embera and Wounaan languages (native languages of the tribes of Ella Puru and San Antonio). Google does scarcely better. I think for the first time ever I have been disappointed with that magical little Google search button.

I did pick up a great book at the library by David McCullough entitled A Path Between the Seas; all about the history of the Panama canal. And since I will be living not only in The Canal country but within the 10 mile watershed area around it I figured this book would be all the more pertinent. History never did much for me but I have to say this book has the stuff of an incredible movie. I already have a title too...A Man A Plan A Canal Panama. And to further represent the palindromeness of the title, I think the movie should be made so you could watch it from the end to the beginning just the same.

So, in reading this book I noticed this description of life in the Panamian jungle circa 1880ish. "...They chewed on Havana cigars as they squinted into the brass eyepieces of surveying instruments. They slapped at the interminable mosquitoes; they picked scorpions the size of a hand from their boots in the morning. They shot alligators, some twenty feet in length, and brought back the stripped pelts of jaguars. And they were extremely good at their work."

I didn't even realize jaguars existed. I guess I knew they had existed at one point but just figured they had all been killed off. I was accustomed to only seeing them from a safe distance on the hoods of expensive automobiles.

Then there’s this one. "...The men worked in constant fear of poisonous snakes (coral, bushmaster, fer-de-lance, all three among the world's most deadly reptiles) and of the big cats (puma and jaguar). Days and nights were made a living hell by bichos, the local designation for ticks, chiggers, spiders, ants, mosquitoes, flies, or any other crawling, buzzing, stinging form of insect life for which no one had a name."

Not only jaguars but Pumas! Wow! Awesome! The bichos, well not so much.