The Terminal: Eric Walrond, the City of Colon, and the Caribbean of the Panama Canal

Abstract

All my readers must know—a glance at the map will show it to those who do not—that between North America and the envied shores of California stretches a little neck of land, insignificant-looking enough on the map, dividing the Atlantic from the Pacific. Matter in the wrong place: five words waiting for the largest public works project in US history. Single syllables are best for being matter-of-fact, and the four in this phrase pronounce with a self-assurance that doesn't budge. Not so the physical stuff in question; the generically identified matter identifies a material referent already neither here nor there. The phrase was put to use in 1908 by geographer Vaughan Cornish, who adds a particularly memorable superlative to the many used to describe the American Panama Canal. Reflecting on the mammoth labor of removing a width of that little neck of land separating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, he writes, “nowhere is the classical definition of dirt as ‘matter in the wrong place’ so appropriate as on the Isthmus” (167). Maps confirm this characterization; whatever the scale and however detailed, the canal is first and foremost the stretch where the continent isn't. With the completion of the canal in 1914, the transit route evolved into a perfect watery nothingness.