Just another shot of the lake, with two giant ships in it. It never ceases to amaze me these things float. 

The sloth on the bow of the boat 

The sloth on the pole 

Me and the first catch of the day, with my new telescoping fishing pole (birthday present) 

President Bush's limo in my neighborhood 

Me in our towed ship next to a giant container vessel. 

The BIG catch of the day - Captain David Harril , son Jacob, and the 21-inch, six-pounder 

Fishing trip, Bread bowls, and George W.

The sun is up and a slight breeze takes the bite out of the heat. I feel like I’m back in Bali, with my breakfast of toast and coffee, sitting outside, determined to enjoy every moment of this place. It’s so easy to fall into ruts no matter where you live. This week, however, has been no rut.

The Bread Bowls
Way back when, Tamara and I decided it would be fun to throw a party, something like a bring-your-own-appetizer type deal. Then we decided on a date, and a theme: fall. Wear your favorite fall sweater or sweatshirt, we’ll crank the air down to 70, and pretend it’s fall. A couple of teachers got their study hall students involved in cutting out leaves (not quite enough for a jumping pile), and everyone brought their favorite fall food: pumpkin cake, mini-pumpkin pies, brats. Great time! Somewhere along the line the idea of soup in bread bowls came up, and I said, “Yeah, I can do bread bowls.” How hard can that be? It’s just bread!
I remember, now, that back in college apartment days, I murdered numerous bread recipes, and Andy did pretty much anything that required kneading and yeast. Bread was just never my forte. Still isn’t. So we had Thursday and Friday off, and President Torrijos declared schools closed for Monday due to President Bush’s visit. Nice, long, relaxing break – do some work, have some fun, nice. So Thursday morning I get started, deciding to be even extra cautious and try out this bread bowl thing before I have to make 16 of them. Armed with two different recipes from the internet, I entered the kitchen ready for anything. Except how long it would take to figure out and make these things.
Thursday, November 3, will henceforth be known as breadbowl day in the Penn household. I believe we will celebrate by crumbling and tearing any bread-related substances in the house. I haven’t worked out the details. Oh my word. Attempt #1 – spread the bread over an oven-safe bowl, bake, and “simple! Your guests can eat soup or salad out of a breadbowl. No dishes to clean!” Fast forward over the hour+ it took to mix, knead, let rise, blah blah blah. Attempt #1, which I attempted with two different types of bowls, failed to mention that 1) greasing the bowls isn’t enough, they either gotta be really greasy, or covered with something, and 2) you need to take them off of the bowls as soon as they come out of the oven. Chalk that up to learning. Attempt #2, make a ball out of the dough, flatten it into disks, let it bake into a ball shape, then cut off the top and hollow out the inside. Simple, I thought. Fast forward the mixing and kneading and rising to the flattening into disks. First, that dough does NOT want to be balled up! By the time I got to that step, the dough had already developed a mind of its own. I gave it my best, though, and got these sort-of-disk things, which I let rise the proscribed amount of time. Unfortunately, after baking them, I got four cow-plop-shaped things out which, although tasty, just wouldn’t work as bread bowls. Bread plates, perhaps, but not bowls. So that was 9am-2pm or so.
When Tamara and Angel (our friend) returned from shopping, they had plenty of advice for how to do it next time. Oh yeah, I have to make 16 of these blasted things… So 10AM Friday, off we go with attempt #1, MODIFIED with waxed paper between the bowl and the dough. And it worked, except I didn’t take the bowl off while the bread was hot, and peeling off all those little bits of waxed paper was FUN FUN FUN, let me tell ya! We just scuttle method #2 – no more bread plops. And by 6:15 pm, not only had I successfully made 16 bread bowls (having to repair a couple along the way), I’d also made a vat of soup, and made a brand new gash in my pinky finger with an incredibly sharp cutting utensil. Do you have any idea how important your pinky is in the bread-bowl making process? All for a 7pm get together.
In spite of the nightmare, the party was great, the bread bowls impressed one and all, and it’s kind of nice when your culinary skills are revered by your friends and colleagues. However, not without its price...two days of my life I shall never recover. When the last guests had gone home, we collapsed on the couch. I turned to Tamara and said, “There will be no bread bowls at or near our wedding.”

Fishing
Four and a half hours of sleep after the bread bowl party, I hit the snooze on my alarm and began to reason out in my head why I didn’t have to get up yet: “I need my fishing pole, I know where that is, I don’t have to shower because we’re going fishing and I’m gonna smell anyway, lunch: just pack the leftover pizza from Thursday night, got a hat, got sunscreen, yep, I can stay here until 5:30.” But at 5:30 I knew it was time, so I up-got, made the coffee (the all-important first part of any healthy morning routine!) and began assembling the goods. Thirty minutes later, Dave and his four-year-old, Jacob, pulled up pulling their 22-foot boat. After a discussion and some confusion about where the other two were supposed to be, we located them, they located us, we piled in the Explorer, and off we went.
When many people think of a canal, they think of something rather like a ditch – a straight line deal, like the “canals” of Venice, or all over south Florida, even the Suez. But Panama’s canal was made by damming up a river and allowing low-lying areas to flood, creating a gigantic lake (once the world’s largest manmade), and something much more like a river. In fact, if you didn’t know what it was, you’d think it was a river. There are no straight lines, and no cement-reinforced walls (except at the locks). For most of its 47 miles, the Panama canal is one huge, winding lake-river. What makes it even more fun is it’s accessible to the public, it’s relatively clean with surprisingly clear water (since water is constantly being pumped in by the river and let out by the locks), and it’s just full of fish.
Ten miles up the road Dave pulled off to the side and, after a few minutes’ negotiation, came back with a bucket full of minnows. Another few miles, some twists and turns in the road, and we arrived at the boat dock. Several local fellows helped us get the boat into the water, we eagerly loaded the gear into the bark, and turned the key. Nothing. Turned again. Nothing. “This battery is fully charged!” Dave exclaimed. But it wasn’t listening, because it refused to start the motor. So after much discussion and debate, we decided to jump the boat motor from the car, then take the car battery out to use in case we needed to start the boat later; and, we reasoned, in the worst case, we have to use the rip cord to start the boat again. And even if that didn’t work, patrol boats mind the waters of the canal constantly, so we’d be spotted and helped in no time. After our plans were actualized, we sped off for the waters of the canal.
I could feel for a moment what the earliest explorers of this continent must’ve felt – the wildness of the place, the strange sounds coming from within the thick forests. What was out there? What is it that draws me to it? Since the US held the canal zone, five miles on either side of the canal itself, it was virtually untouched, save the occasional station for patrol vessels. And aside from the parts of the jungle cleared for electric wires, signal lights, or some other canal-related purpose, it’s pretty much wild, untamed jungle. Butterflies and birds of every color crossed our path, and when the engine was quiet, the sounds of monkeys echoed off the trees.
Dave is a pro who has lived most of his life in Panama, and after checking on one of his spots, we dropped lines to see what we could net. I caught the first fish of the day – I have no idea what kind or how big – big enough to keep is all that really mattered. And let me tell you, once we found where the fish were, it was a matter of dropping in a baited hook and waiting less than two minutes. We hauled in ten to twelve fish within as many minutes. I may have caught the first, but the honor of the biggest went to Dave. We all had our lines in the water and suddenly Dave shouts, “Whoa, this is a monster!” He fought it for a few minutes, reeling it in, letting it run, reeling it in again, letting it run some more, until finally it was tired enough to reel in. Reggie leaned over the side with the net and brought in the Catch of the Day: A twenty-one inch, six pound something or other – a full inch longer than the only fish Dave ever mounted on the wall. We were all impressed, knowing that there were more down there waiting for us… although I must admit they managed to elude us quite effectively.
After several minutes of no nibbles, Dave decided to move on to another spot. Now since the lake was created by flooding existing jungle, thousands of dead trees still stand on the floor of the thing, creating a virtual minefield for any boat wanting to venture about. Fortunately, several channels have been cleared through the lake, and these are marked by posts sticking out of the water. You may veer out of the channel at any time, but at your peril. So we’re cruising through the channel at 28mph when Dave points at what looks like a dirty mop head wrapped around one of the channel posts and says, “Whoa, look at that! A sloth!” I looked around – we were a good half mile from shore. No floating trees nearby, no way that thing could get out to this post except by swimming, or freak accident. A brief discussion ensued – should we rescue it? And being a boat of four men, we decided Of Course! “Now they move very slowly,” Dave explained, “but their reach is a lot longer than you think, and their claws are really sharp!” Given that the only tool with which to rescue the sloth was a fishing net, I decided I didn’t need to be a hero. “Chris,” I said to the daredevil surfer of the group, “why don’t you take the net, and I’ll video the experience for your wife.” Chris’s wife, Kalika teaches science and has been dying to see a sloth. He was giggling, “She’s gonna be so jealous!” Reggie volunteered to steer the boat so Dave, the closest thing we have to a native Panamanian, could assist in the rescue as well. We all pitched in to keep Jacob away from the critter he probably would have hugged.
The sloth made it abundantly clear he did not like the net and, as Chris persisted despite hissing noises, the sloth lowered itself below the water line and began blowing bubbles. Answer to the “Do sloths swim?” question… By this time the boat had drifted past the pole and we needed to take another pass at it. “He looks pretty bad,” I remarked.
“Yeah. All sloths look pretty bad,” Dave replied. The boat swung around to approach the pole again, and Dave hit on an idea: use the oar, extend it, let the sloth climb on, and we’ll just hope he hangs on to it for the boat ride to nearby Isla Colorado, managed and protected by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. We approached again, and Dave lowered the oar. With all the skill and agility of an 87-year old arthritic, the sloth grasped the oar as Dave swung him onto the bow of the boat, where he sat like an ancient, Yoda-sized wookie. He remained pretty calm as we crossed the fifty-foot “do not cross this line” perimeter of the island, and as the boat nudged into the shore, grazing a tree, the sloth put his hands up, grabbed onto the tree branches, and crawled off into the brush. “Pretty stupid animals,” Dave said. “They only come out of the trees one day a week to take a dump. And it takes them all day to do it.” Ya learn something new every day.
We returned to the spot we’d been heading for when we met the sloth, and, having little success, pulled the boat out into the middle of the water and took a much-needed swim. “They don’t usually come out into water this deep,” Dave said in response to my query about alligators, crocodiles, and caimans. After about twenty minutes of splashing about and cooling off, we set off for one last spot. That’s when the sputtering began.
We were two minutes away from the last spot of the day when, after several sputters, the engine died. No big deal. We’d cut it off earlier in the day and restarted it with the rip cord. Easy enough. This time, though, the engine would not cooperate. Jacob was cranky, we were all hot, and the engine would not start. We looked off in the distance, towards the canal part of the lake, and watched a giant container ship ply the waters. Probably not the type of ship we could count on for a rescue. As Reggie and Dave tried unsuccessfully to start the engine, Jacob stretched out on my chest, and Chris and I eyed the distant thunder clouds. The nearest shores were jungle – miles from civilization. And with one oar in the boat, civilization was far, far from reach. Worse had come to worse.
After about forty-five minutes, we noticed a patrol boat alongside one of the giant container ships in the canal. Standing on the seats, Chris waved a red lifejacket, trying to get the boat’s attention. It worked. Several minutes later the patrol boat was heading right towards us – and whizzed right past us to a signal tower on shore. “Maybe he thought we were just saying hi,” I said to Chris, as Reg & Dave continued working on the engine. “Flag him again.” This time the boat stopped.
After taking our names and ages, the two security officers hitched our boat to theirs and we were off! Just in time for the rain to start. It was soothing, though, even a little chilly, after our hot day under the sun. And what an amazing thing to be cruising right alongside some of the largest ships in the world, in the most famous canal in the world. Pretty cool.
The return was pretty uneventful. Due to our immobility we were unable to stop at Monkey Island and see (what else?) the monkeys, but we’d had quite enough adventure already. Guys at the docks cleaned and gutted the fish for 10 cents each, and last night I carried on the Penn tradition of fried fish (as only my dad can do) with broccoli casserole. Frying those fish was MUCH easier than bloody bread bowls…
George W. comes on Monday – he’ll be stopping just down the street from my house to make some speech, and I intend to try to see him. There’s only one way in and one way out of the compound in which I live, and since he has to pass through here on his way to what he’s doing, we’ve been instructed that we cannot drive from 1-3, and that we’ll need to carry ID at all times. It will be interesting! I’ll be sure to take pics if I can and update you. Hope your weekend continues to be wonderful.
PS - GW came and went. Got within a few hundred feet, only pics of the motorcade. He was a little hard to see. We WERE allowed to roam our neighborhood fairly freely, however, which was nice. Apparantly some people holed up in the church to see him drive by, and could tell that Laura was wearing green. Oh well...