CHAPTER I
Accommodations at Colón
Arrival—Queer Methods of the Manager of Washington Hotel—Driving People Away—The Astor Hotel and the Swiss Hotel—The Town Noises—Advantages of the Washington Hotel—Reason for the Peculiar Treatment—The Veranda and the Breeze—A Delightful Room to Sleep in—A Healthy Situation at Last—The Shower Bath and “Next”—A Bald-headed Dude in a Three-bedded Room—The Meals—No More Siestas Needed—Gathering Cocoanuts and Throwing Them into the Sea—A Fine Place for Useless Windmills—A Doctor Goes Hunting—A Tropical Shower and a Glorious Morning.
The remainder of the Western contingent, including myself, arrived at Colón about 10 A. M. on Saturday, January 7th, and went to the Washington Hotel. As usual the manager had no vacant beds. A guest arriving in the morning would find him busy with his little grocery store that adjoined the hotel office, and could not ascertain whether any vacancies would occur before night or not. If a guest arrived in the afternoon the places had been given to those who had arrived in the morning. I knew this and waited until the manager could give me more definite information. Doctor and Mrs. Crile and Doctor and Mrs. Palmer, however, were square-dealing and plain-speaking North Americans, and took him at his word when he shrugged his Italian shoulders and said in French that he had no empty beds or rooms. They went to the Astor Hotel where Doctor and Mrs. Brower were stopping and which was located near the center of the town, one short block from the main street and main noises. They said that the food was quite satisfactory after it had been supplemented by the fruit laid in by them and which could always be obtained at the public market. Doctor Brower and his followers seemed to think that in Colón man could live by fruit alone, but many of us felt that we could live by water alone; and thus we were divided into two camps, one near the market and the other near the sea. A few Westerners who had no patience with the foreign diplomacy of the Washington Hotel manager found good rooms and eatable food at the Swiss Hotel, which was located on the main business thoroughfare called Front Street. There it was noisy within as well as without, for the building was a wooden shell that conveyed the indoor sounds from hall to hall and room to room until the last guest was in bed. A merry-go-round with its shrill music marred the early evening, the carousing public disturbed the late evening and the switch engines and freight trains puffed and rattled all night along the main street in a way that suggested insomnia. As the town was only three streets wide and the third street was on stilts over stagnant water and inhabited only by negroes, it was impossible to get far away from the noises and noisomeness. Besides, the sea breeze did not blow through the town as it blew at the Washington, and the rooms were so hot that refreshing sleep was impossible, even when the din subsided for a few moments.
SQUARE IN COLÓN
Showing Tent of the Merry-go-round
The Washington Hotel was, in fact, the only one in which one could live without suffering in health from the heat, noises and inconveniences. It was not a good hotel, but it had three features that rendered it attractive, viz., its name, a bath-house and a sea breeze. The reason for the difficulty in obtaining lodging was that it belonged to the Panama railway and was leased to the manager rent free, with the proviso that he was to be ready at all times to take care of any of the railroad employees that might be sent there. This made it necessary for him to wait until late in the day before filling all of his rooms. His foreign diplomacy that repelled the doctors was dictated by American business methods.
While I was waiting, Doctors Frank and Newman invited me to camp with them for a few hours or days until I could get a bed elsewhere. I accepted, and found them located in the same old three-bedded, one-sided, breezeless bunking-place in the wing of the building, that had driven me away two weeks before. It was a sort of room-like receptacle used for late comers. The third bed was occupied by a stranger, and the place was so full of the belongings of the three occupants that there was not even space for me to sleep on the floor.
After piling my things behind the door and under the table I went to the combination sitting-room, writing-room and barroom. This was about twenty feet square and the only place to sit in unless we except the barber’s den, which was about ten feet square, and the hotel office, which was of the same size but more than half filled by a large flat desk. The hotel conveniences were practically all out-of-doors, and every one sat on the lower veranda, where the steady sea breeze blew as if from a thousand electric fans. The veranda was worth forty parlors and sitting-rooms, and no one complained.
I waited patiently until the hotel-keeper had taken the indispensable siesta, and was rewarded by getting a bed in a double room on the second or upper floor. It had a door and window facing the sea to let the breeze in, and another door and window on the opposite side to let the breeze out, and covered verandas on both sides. By keeping the windows and doors open a veritable gale could be kept blowing through the room and over the beds day and night, thus making sleep not only possible, but delightful and refreshing. It was like being blown into the temperate zone, like going home for the night; and I felt that with this room and the lower veranda I could remain at Colón a month with great benefit to my health, instead of daily losing ground as those who were staying at the other hotels certainly would.
WASHINGTON HOTEL, STREET FRONT, COLÓN
Behind the lower sign a short passageway leading
through to the water front
Although the bath-house was accessible from the ground floor only, we had a shower bath on our floor that was very convenient and very popular. Every morning soon after daybreak and every evening before retiring, the guests put on bath-robes or overcoats, whichever they happened to possess, stole along the veranda to the shower room and had a refreshing time under the shower. The water which was rainwater, was not cold enough to be chilly and could be enjoyed for an almost indefinite time, or until one was obliged to give place to “next.”
As a roommate I had Doctor Morrow of San Francisco, a genial young man of wholesale proportions, who had a ready laugh and knew a thing or two about bubonic plague, leprosy and other interesting curiosities. I was more than satisfied.
But not so Doctor Frank. The stranger who shared the hot air of the one-sided, three-bedded room with him and Doctor Newman, was a bachelor and a dude who filled the place with toilet articles and perfumes, and spent most of his time undressing and dressing. His best and most constant, possibly his only, friend was the looking-glass. Doctor Frank pointed him out to me in the afternoon as he came sauntering along the walk in front of the veranda: an immaculately dressed, red-whiskered, delicate-skinned dandy who had polished the hair off the top of his head and was proud of the incandescent horseshoe fringe that connected his beard with the back of his head. As he sauntered along beaming with self-satisfaction and shining with bare-headed brightness, we gazed at him; and he seemed to think that we were admiring him, and was apparently not displeased. Moral: Be vain and you will be happy.—Vanity had at least made something out of him. Those who have no vanity live in darkness, undiscovered and unappreciated.
I did not feel compelled to take siestas here and preferred to stroll about along the breezy beach hunting shells, or sitting on the veranda smoking and talking with Doctors Waite, Senn, Newman, Frank and Morrow, and with others who came to visit us from the other camp.
While we were there the negroes gathered the cocoanuts and trimmed the cocoa palms that fringed the beach. This was a very interesting sight. A bare-footed negro would put a hatchet in his belt, catch hold of a tree trunk with his hands and rapidly walk up the tree just as a man with spikes fastened on his ankles walks up a telegraph pole, except that he used his bare toes with which to cling to the corrugated bark. A monkey could not have done better, nor looked better. The cocoa palm that grows on the seashore, although tall, is always slender and somewhat inclined, and is thus favorable for climbing. Nevertheless the climber must have the great strength of his remote ancestors in his toes, as well as a steady head, to climb so high in that way. Upon arriving at the top he chops off the branches that bear nuts and then trims the tree by removing those that hang downward. In less than ten minutes he is down and toes up the next tree. When all trees were trimmed, the negroes cut off the end of several of the cocoanuts, drank the milk and threw them into the sea. Most of the nuts, however, were left lying around, for nobody seemed to want them.
PATH LEADING ACROSS THE LAWN FROM
WASHINGTON HOTEL TO THE BEACH
Showing One of the Cocoa Palms that Bordered
What a place this would be for a row of windmills to be kept going by this steady seabreeze! I wondered why I had not seen any windmills in Panama. But the negroes did not seem to have much to do but gather cocoanuts and drink the milk and be fanned by the breezes; and as windmills can neither gather the cocoanuts nor drink the milk they would be quite useless and superfluous. Perhaps as the years pass on the canal will be finished and the 20,000 laborers and the high-salaried employees be discharged and the stores that feed, clothe and saloon them be closed; and it may then become necessary to work the land and develop the industries and build windmills and factories. But that time is a long way off. Millions of dollars must find their way to Panama, and thousands of deaths be died while windmills wait. Neither windmills nor factories are tropical institutions.
On Sunday morning Doctor Morrow stumbled audibly out of bed at five o’clock and went hunting up the river. But he came back safe and sound in the afternoon, without having gotten anything but plenty of exercise and a few pounds of alligator mud upon his clothes. Not being deaf, I was wide awake when he left, and embraced the opportunity to take an early shower bath and thus turned annoyance into pleasure. Returning from the bath I witnessed the shower bath he was caught in, and wondered if it looked as beautiful to him in the swamps as it did to me on the covered veranda. It was a tremendous, I might say terrific, downpour of water. It darkened the heavens and lasted about twenty minutes, administering the greatest Colonic flushing on record. It started suddenly, soon after sunrise, and when it began to pass off the sun shone through it with great brilliancy, developing a heaven full of aurora tints which turned rapidly into deep blue and finally brightened into a glorious, cooled-off, tropical morning.