So Near and Yet so Far

N-A-M-E-R-I-C-A and S-A-M-E-R-I-C-A are two names printed in large letters across my map of North America and South America. Namerica and Samerica sound like brothers: Nam and Sam Erica. They look as if the Creator had pulled them just as far apart as He could without pulling them quite in two. They are held together by a little piece of land called Central America, and the very thinnest part of Central America—the part as thin as a leaf stem—is called the Isthmus of Panama: spelled “isthmus,” but sounded “ismus.”

On one side of the Isthmus is the Atlantic and on the other side the Pacific Ocean, so near to each other and yet so far. Ships that wanted to get from one ocean to the other couldn’t get across this little strip of land—they had to go the long way round, all the way round the bottom of Samerica, thousands of miles out of the way. There was no way at all round the top of Namerica, for both land and ice were in the way up there. It seemed a terribly long distance for a ship to have to go just because it couldn’t cross this little strip of land. It was as if you were motoring and the road came to a river and there was no bridge, and a sign said “Detour 10,000 miles.” It was the longest detour Naturally, people tried to find a way not to make that detour. Some men suggested wheeling ships across the Isthmus. They said, “Let us lift a ship out of the water on a kind of huge elevator, then put it on a huge truck, push it across the Isthmus to the other ocean, then lower it into the water again by another huge elevator.” But it seemed simpler to cut a canal across the Isthmus so that a ship might sail straight through from one ocean to the other. On the map this looked easy enough—just a snip with the scissors or a nick with a knife; but that little stem of land was over thirty miles across and there were mountains in the way too.

They have many earthquakes in Central America, and if one of these earthquakes had only cracked the Isthmus of Panama across and broken Namerica and Samerica apart it would have been very convenient; but earthquakes don’t do helpful things like that—they make cracks where you don’t want them.