ANOTHER KIND OF AMERICAN EXPORT.

• Author: WIESNER, PAT

Our way of business is respected and envied the world over: this report from the Panama Canal.

You think you know your wife of many years until she says one day, "You know, I've always wanted to go through the Panama Canal." Well, since the canal was soon to be turned back to the Panamanians, we decided to do it sooner rather than later. We got there a couple of weeks before the turnover.

Two things impressed us greatly. The first was the realization of the incredible engineering feat that is the Panama Canal. It is about 50 miles long. In the late 1800s, the Frenchman who had built the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, had hoped to become an even greater hero of the times by connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific through what was then Colombia. He tried for years to build a trench connecting the oceans. After some 20,000 workers died from dysentery, malaria, yellow fever and snakebite, they gave up, defeated and bankrupt.

Enter Teddy Roosevelt and an engineer named John Stevens. New drugs helped deal with the bugs and a new concept for removing the dirt got them started. The key was to abandon the idea of a ditch in favor of a system of locks. They created a lake in the middle of the isthmus from the rain-forest runoff, which provides a head of water to operate a set of three locks on each end of the canal.

You sail into the first lock (able to hold huge ships). The rear gates are closed and...