There’s this guy in my neighborhood who I see every so often. He’s usually walking a dog with someone who I assume to be his spouse. They’re both a little older than I am, gen X or thereabouts, and his appearance is luxuriously shaggy. Chunky socks puff out between the straps of his Birkenstocks, and long, graying hair spills from his oversized beanie. I believe he wears eyeglasses, clear (yellowing?) frames and thick lenses, and is often layered in shirt over sweater over something else. And his pants are smudged, smeared, speckled with paint.

Few sartorial details speak to one’s profession as loudly as paint on one’s pants. The pants should be canvas, duck, or maybe denim, made by Dickies or Carhartt or maybe via a collaboration involving a streetwear brand. They might be cuffed over your Chelsea boots, or cut short and worn high on the hips. They might have a hammer loop, never used for its intended purpose (nobody uses hammer loops). Maybe they’re worn with clogs, and maybe they’re worn with Crocs, and maybe they’re worn with Chuck Taylors. Either way, paint-covered pants are likely to be the part of the ensemble which speaks the loudest.

Of course, having paint all over your pants is usually just one of many signifiers of your profession. On a recent morning during mid-winter break I sat, working, in a coffee shop after having dropped my kid off at day camp. It was cold, and the wifi was slow, and the coffee shop was filled with a stream of parents and their toddlers, the toddlers too young to enjoy six hours of magic camp and their parents happy to sacrifice a six dollar pastry if it meant they could sit down on a normally sized chair and kill twenty minutes. As the workday came into focus, the coffee shop’s dainty sheet metal tables were colonized by little labor units; I was one of them. A nearby table was occupied by two middle-aged men, engaged in what was obviously some kind of performance review. They were sitting in front and just to the right of me, at an angle that gave me an unobstructed view of the employee, who wore a beanie, a mustache floating vaguely over a field of stubble, and some of the paintiest pants I’ve ever seen. It was unclear who had requested this meeting. I suspected the employee, who referred to written notes, proclaimed sincerely and earnestly that “this” was what he wanted to do with his life, and dropped something at the end of the meeting about how he hoped that they might grow to work together “more as equals.” Even if there hadn’t been a large printing shop located prominently nearby, everyone in the coffee shop would have known: This guy worked with paint.

We broadcast our professional identities in so many clumsy ways. I do this too, only for the past four years my sincere and earnest proclamations have been less about the thing I’ve made my full-time job (writing this newsletter) than for the stuff I’ve done in the past. Over these four years, perhaps the most prominent example of this is the workshop I’ve occupied and managed – a light industrial space in Bed Stuy. I love the term light industrial; I love using it in sentences that refer to something that I do. I love mentioning the workshop’s size, two thousand square feet, which I like to think sounds respectfully large, business-sized. And I have loved having a respectfully large, business-sized box – a professional blank slate, covered with evidence of my labor. 

I would say that this workshop has been a fantastic way to broadcast my professional identity, but the reality is that the professional identity in question has belonged not so much to me as to someone who I used to be. I love the work that gets done in workshops, and even as I pack my tools out of this particular light industrial space in Bed Stuy, I find myself planning out a series of increasingly ambitious projects to undertake. This is fine, good; I am someone who does projects in his free time. But a business-sized thing is too big for those purposes — and anyway, this newsletter does a better job of broadcasting my professional identity these days.

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• Oh man, I labored over whether to write “this guy works with paint” or “this guy works with ink.” The latter is probably more accurate – my honest suspicion is that his pants were covered with latex screen printing ink, which appears to be pretty rare. Here’s one manufacturer, whose products are cured by heating to 60°C.
• There is apparently a tradition – dormant for a few decades but alive and well in 2024 – of painting pictures onto tan-colored corduroy garments to commemorate the graduation from college or high school. This (gift link) NYTimes article summarizes the tradition and practice well: One’s time at said college or high school is reflected upon, and objects, phrases, and ideas are recalled, and these things are painted onto pants and jackets and kept as mementos and fashion pieces. The Indiana State Museum has some nice vintage examples of this tradition, dubbed Senior Cord, here.
• If we're being literal, I'm less likely to have paint on my pants than PL, a polyurethane construction adhesive commonly used to adhere plywood sheathing to floor joists. Its manufacturer, Henkel, recommends cleaning PL up with mineral spirits – an activity that strikes me as unpleasant and potentially not worth the effort. I did, however, enjoy this video of Henkel's testing facilities, which reminded me of that time circa 2011 when I spent a while trying to figure out which adhesives would be best for bonding mahogany to anodized aluminum, and silicone to anything at all. The mahogany-aluminum combination turned into its own little disaster (a story for a different day), but the discussions I had with Henkel employees about silicone were particularly enlightening. I had not to that point understood the idea of surface energy, which silicone tends to have very little of; this makes it very difficult to bond to. This 3M explainer includes a chart of common plastics, noting that PTFE has a surface energy around 18 Dyne/cm; silicone is slightly higher at around 24 Dyne/cm. In the end we used a surface primer (which raises surface energy) and a cyanoacrylate (commonly known as instant adhesive or crazy glue) to reasonably good effect.

Thanks as always to Scope of Work’s Members and Supporters for making this newsletter possible. Thanks also to Ethan for helping provide links this week. 

Love, Spencer.

Links links links! Friday is for links.

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I first started reading SOW in 2018, and a few months later I emailed Spencer a zine I made about the global recycling industry. I was wrapping up a residency at Autodesk’s Pier 9 workshop and while I made pretty good use of their spectacular CNC machines, I was mainly focused on trying to prove myself as a writer. I’d been stringing together a livelihood as a wearable electronics instructor/bespoke eyewear maker but I desperately wanted the world to know that I didn’t just make things, I also thought a lot about why and how things get made.

I’ve had ample opportunity to prove that point in the last six years. For one thing, I went to grad school which is useful if you feel you need external validation about your ability to think. And of course, I’ve contributed at length to SOW, both as a guest writer and as a staff writer. This job has created the opportunity to have conversations with some of my favorite thinkers, like Adam Minter, Deb Chachra, and Thomas Thwaites. 

For the last few months, I’ve felt the pendulum swing in the other direction. I feel compelled to prove that I don’t just write about things, I make them too. Since I started focusing on writing, my art and design practice has fallen by the wayside. It’s time for me to get back into the workshop, so I’m resigning from my staff position at SOW to launch a product design firm with my partner. We don’t have much to show for ourselves yet, but you’re invited to follow along as we figure it out.

It’s been my honor to think about why and how things get made with this community, thanks for being a part of it. I’m still going to be active in the Members Slack – I can’t imagine a better wealth of knowledge to draw on to launch a product-focused company! Before I sign off, I’ll leave you with some marginalia from my research into the Panama Canal.

• My absolute favourite place I visited in Panama was the small, largely crumbling town of Gamboa. It was built by Americans, during the Canal Zone era. When the US controlled the Panama Canal, it also controlled a 16-kilometer wide strip of land along its banks. Gamboa, and other Canal Zone towns, were built to house and entertain the workforce that maintained and operated the canal. These towns are full of distinctive wooden architecture, designed to maximize air circulation in the humid tropical climate.
  
  When the US handed over canal operations in Panama in 1979, the Canal Zone was dissolved and so began the depopulation of Gamboa. At its peak, the town was home to nearly 4000 people; today, there are just a few hundred permanent residents. Gamboa is just 33 kilometers away from Panama City, but it’s isolated. It sits at the crook of the Chagres River and the Canal, and there is just one road in and out of town. With a modern city and newly developed suburbs all around, even many people who work in ACP’s dredging division (headquartered in Gamboa) prefer to commute in rather than stay in the tiny town at the end of the road.
  
  And so Gamboa sits somewhere approaching, but not quite falling into, ruin. Foliage is overtaking buildings, and iguanas roam free in the streets. But if you happen to find yourself in Panama, Gamboa is worth the trip: The town is sustained in large part by its immersion into the rainforest that’s reclaiming it. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute maintains labs and field sites on the outskirts, and the town is the launch point for ferries to BCI. A nearby trail, which follows an abandoned pipeline, is considered one of the best birding spots in Central America. Some of the old Canal Zone architecture is now home to recovering sloths and tapirs at an animal rescue. It’s a town that’s become half wild, and those who stay, stay because it’s wild. It reminded me of the forgotten coast from Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy – an area partially reclaimed by nature, beloved by the misfits who call it home. There is even a crumbling lighthouse at the edge of town, which VanderMeer fans might agree is a little too on-the-nose (strangling fruit, not included).
  
  I was in town visiting my friends Andy and Kitty Quitmeyer, who run the Digital Naturalism Lab, or Dinalab for short. They work with field biologists to develop sensors and tools for research, make all manner of objects from recycled plastic, and lead hikes out into the rainforest. Their Instagram feed makes their life look like a joyous ongoing collaboration with the rainforest, and I am happy to report that this is an accurate representation of reality. Our time at the lab was filled with sloth sightings, trips to gather food for a tapir, and building a sculpture for the backyard agoutis.

• Panama has the most popular flag of convenience, with ocean-going vessels from all over the world registering as Panamanian to avoid more stringent labor regulations and income taxes. The practice first emerged through a legal loophole: In the early 20th century, Panama had no ship-building facilities, so anyone from Panama who was buying a ship had to buy it abroad. You can’t sail an unregistered vessel, so Panamanian consuls abroad offered registration services. In 1916, this policy was expanded to allow vessels to be registered to corporations based in Panama. As these corporations could be foreign-owned, Americans looking to ship alcohol during prohibition soon began registering their ships in Panama. Not only was the registration easy, but Panama offered English contracts, and thanks to the canal many American sailors were already familiar with the country.
  
  The practice has been widely criticized, and seafarer trade unions are working to change regulations so vessels are required to fly bona fide national flags.

• The Pan-American Highway runs nearly 30,000 kilometers from Alaska to Patagonia, but there is a 100-kilometer section missing between North and South America: the Darién gap. Here, the dense rainforest that separates Panama and Columbia was not only difficult to build through, but local Indigenous groups didn’t want the forest to be disrupted.
  
  While there is no road, the difficult terrain of the Darién gap is extensively traversed by foot and by horseback by migrants. In 2023, more than half a million people made the dangerous crossing as part of a long journey to seek asylum in the United States. This Al Jazeera story about Chinese migrants making the trek covers the treacherous journey, and I recommend watching the video embedded at the bottom of the piece. Some people have become social media stars, live streaming their experiences in the jungle.
• Malaria and yellow fever were disastrous for the French effort in Panama, killing tens of thousands of people. Preventing malaria and yellow fever is largely about controlling mosquitos, but that was unfortunately not understood at the time. This passage from David McCullough’s book haunts me:

In the lovely gardens surrounding the hospital, thousands of ring-shaped pottery dishes filled with water to protect plants and flowers from ants provided perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. Even in the sick wards themselves the legs of the beds were placed in shallow basins of water, again to keep the ants away, and there were no screens in any of the windows or doors….had the French been consciously trying to propagate malaria and yellow fever, they could not have provided conditions better suited for the purpose.

• Napoleon wanted to build a canal at Suez but abandoned his plans after his surveyors erroneously reported that the Red Sea was 9 meters above the Mediterranean Sea.
• From time to time, I find myself down a rabbit hole learning about narrowboat living in the UK. So many people live on these charming little boats, floating around the country (or sometimes, managing to live in London on the cheap). Canal life seems so pastoral and leisurely, so I was surprised to learn that these canals were built in a speculative frenzy during the 1700s. The canal bubble burst long before the UK deindustrialized, but the waterways seem to have a lively second life.
• Thanks to everyone who helped me with my Panama research! Thanks to Herb and Sylvia for inviting us to visit, to Andy and Kitty for hosting us, to Miroslava from ACP for plugging me into the world of the canal, and to Orlando for being the keeper of canal lore. If you want to learn more about the canal, The Path Between the Seas is a great historical primer, then move on to The Big Ditch, which can only be followed by Beyond the Big Ditch. Erased is a good complement to temper the tone of American exceptionalism. I would still love to find a book that covers the contemporary ACP era of canal operations, if you have any recommendations, let me know.

And of course, thanks to you dear reader. It’s been an honor to think and learn out loud alongside you.

Love,
Hillary

I ate whale for the first and only time almost 20 years ago, in Singapore. This was at a place called Kazu, a perpetually smoky sumiyaki (literally “charcoal grilled”) joint in a one-building Japantown, a dilapidated mall whose upper levels were a motley of whisky/hostess bars, yakitori shokunin, two-person obanzai counters serving “grandma cooking” and sake, and a lone coffeeshop that catered to the local staff of the Japanese businesses. None of the many many eateries had an exhaust system that was actually up to the task, so the place existed in a karaoke-video haze. The building’s corridors were deserted while the businesses were packed, and some acoustical magic, or perhaps the thickness of the air, created an archival hush that reinforced the sense of timelessness. I have great affection for these vertical neighborhoods, strata-titled warrens that amplify Singapore’s urban density, the broken-off flotsam of a dozen countries lodged like unexpelled shrapnel in the city’s core. 

The whale came as a nose-to-fluke assortment of sashimi, wafers rather than the slabs in which most sashimi is cut. I mostly remember the pieces of fluke (the tail) with steakhouse marbling, its blubber the color of cream. The meat was simultaneously cool, raw beef clean, and somehow deeper and more marine than lean tuna, infrared to tuna’s crimson, and it had a stiffness, not quite a crunch, that I associate more with bivalves than fish. Like crocodile or frog, it had a chimeric quality – improbable associations stitched together in each bite. 

All this is by way of saying that I’m pretty sure whale oil in its most basic form (which I’ve never tried) would taste pretty distinctive. The historical record supports this: Even in a fat-scarce, pre-petroleum world, whale oil remained enough of an acquired taste that, the occasional batch of whale oil doughnuts aside, we used it mostly for lighting. 

I used to associate whaling with the era of oil lamps, three-masted whalers, and hand-thrown harpoons, but most whales were actually killed after 1945, by which time we’d forgotten most of our other uses for the products of whaling – spermaceti, baleen, heaps of lean whale meat. By the time we banned commercial whaling in 1986, the leading use of whale oil was in margarine. A huge fraction of all recorded whale hunting took place basically in order to provide the world with something that felt like a luxury as it rebuilt after the war. As Seth Miller memorably put it, “mostly, the whales were spread on toast.”

The invention that catalyzed this maritime Grand Guignol was the Wesson process, which deodorizes oil using a combination of superheated steam and vacuum. Most vegetable oil today tastes and smell of very little – you’ve almost certainly seen reference to “neutral vegetable oil” in recipes. This neutrality is an entirely modern invention, the result of a battery of refining technologies, effective industrial-scale deodorization being the most recent and perhaps most important one. 

The Wesson process arose from the abundance of cottonseed. By the mid-19th century, slavery had made cottonseed, a by-product of cotton production, so cheap and so abundant in the US that numerous inventors were trying to find ways to extract value from what was frankly an unpromising resource. Behind cottonseed’s tough hull lay a kernel from which you could press a rust colored, unpleasantly bitter, and mildly toxic oil with few if any applications in industry. But you couldn’t beat the price, so numerous inventors, beginning with William Fee in 1842 and ending with Wesson 50 years later, spent untold hours looking for ways to make cottonseed oil useful, laying the foundations for the modern edible oil industry in the process. As refining techniques improved, cottonseed oil became for a time the most commonly consumed vegetable oil in the US, the original base for Crisco, and a popular frying medium (for, among other things, doughnuts). 

Like cottonseed oil, unrefined, cold-pressed palm oil isn’t neutral at all. It’s the color of Jessica Rabbit’s hair, with a pepperiness that people outside Africa tend to associate with olive oil, softened by an almost vanillin warmth. But refined, bleached, deodorized palm oil – which is both a description and a term of art for the commoditized form of palm oil most commonly traded – is nearly indistinguishable from refined, bleached, deodorized oil from any other source. 

So it was with whale oil in the 20th century. As Miller writes, enough countries had enough invested in their whaling industries – industries that no longer served any real productive purpose – that we had to find something to do with the fruit of their slaughter. The market no longer had a use for whale oil as whale oil, a unique substance with specific, desirable properties. But this very lack of demand, combined with the advent of diesel whaling ships and explosive harpoons, made whales cheap – the cottonseed of the 20th century. 

In 1952, John Kenneth Galbraith posited a “dependence effect” in modern capitalist economies, that “production only fills a void that it has itself created.” He was writing about consumer goods, and what he saw as the need to use advertising to create desire where none existed before, but it’s easy to see a sort of dependence effect in the history of whale oil, and cottonseed oil, and now palm oil too. We were producing these commodities, so we had to find a market for them, or make one. If we couldn’t engineer demand for whale oil as whale oil, a distinct substance with particular properties, we would create demand by making whale oil indistinct and cheap. 

But hunger wasn’t invented by industry. We turned whales into margarine because in the middle of the 20th century, people genuinely needed something, anything, to put on toast. Global population and per capita income were exploding (however unevenly), and humanity’s collective appetite for fat exploded along with them. To paraphrase Galbraith, production only filled this void under the force of its own momentum.

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• I don’t know how many of the grills in the building where Kazu is were burning Binchotan, the classic yakitori charcoal, but they really should have been. Binchotan releases almost no smoke, the result of a production process that results in logs of almost pure carbon. When tapped, it sounds like porcelain, or glass. 
• The bleaching in “refined, bleached, deodorized” is accomplished by blending the oil with Fuller’s earth, also known as bleaching clay or diatomaceous earth, at surprisingly high concentrations – up to 2% – then heating the oil and filtering out the precipitate. 
• Before it was possible to fully deodorize cottonseed oil, it still made its way into the food chain, as an (illegal) “fortifier” for animal fats. The practice was discovered in 1884 by our old friends Armour & Co., when they “sought to corner the lard market and realized [they] had purchased more lard than the existing hog population could have produced.”
• I tried and failed to find a US military specification for frying oil, but I came across the MilSpec for brownies and oatmeal cookies, which was an internet phenomenon maybe 15 years ago. The writing veers between genius and horror – the recipe is only specified in parametric form, but some ingredients are specified in milligrams per pound. 
• The Lamb Chop dog toy complex might be my favorite example of an industry creating its own market. The last episode of the children’s TV show aired in 1997, but the production line for these puppets is apparently still running, because they’re now among the cheapest and most highly rated dog toys you can find. Also, the fluffy lamb my dogs regularly dismember is apparently a 3-star general in the US Marine Corps. 

Thanks as always to Scope of Work’s Members and Supporters for making this newsletter possible. 

Love, tw

p.s. - If you’re in NYC or Cambridge, coffee’s on me!
p.p.s. - We care about inclusivity. Here’s what we’re doing about it.

It’s Friday, and I’m back here slinging words. And links!

Scope of Work is supported by our awesome Members, and through support from:

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Last week, I wrote about how the Panama Canal works and touched on how the reservoirs are managed. This week, let’s take a closer look at how the canal authority, ACP, is adjusting its operations to get through this year’s drought. Panama has just entered the dry season, and will need to carefully ration water until April or May. Until then, every ship that passes through the canal will deplete the already diminished reserves in the two lakes that fill the locks, generate electricity, and provide drinking water for nearby cities. ACP has a laser focus on conserving water and has implemented restrictions on the maximum draft for vessels, begun charging water surcharge fees, stopped hydroelectricity generation, and for the first time, limited the number of transits per day.

First, an incredibly quick history lesson on ACP: The Autoridad del Canal de Panamá is the government agency that administers canal operations. ACP began its work at the turn of the millennium, when the United States handed over control of the canal to Panama, and now functions at arm’s length from the Panamanian Government. 

The reasons behind the handover are complex. The government of Panama had never been happy with the terms the canal was built under, and petitioned for a new treaty for decades. This issue came to a head in 1964, when a dispute about Panamanian sovereignty erupted into violence between Panamanians, US Canal Zone residents, and Canal Zone police. Panama then broke diplomatic relations with the United States until they came to the negotiating table four months later.

Negotiations did lead to a new agreement between the two countries: the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties. The US’s decision to rescind control of the canal wasn’t altogether an altruistic move. As Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu explain in The Big Ditch, by the 1960s the canal was less valuable to the US than it had once been:

The strategic and economic value of US ownership of the Panama Canal declined after WWII. The strategic benefits proved chimerical. The economic benefits fell as domestic cargoes made up less and less of the traffic through the canal, lured away by falling railroad and trucking costs.

The new treaties guaranteed ongoing neutrality of the canal, allowing the US to keep much of its strategic and economic benefits without operating it, and with the added benefit of mending its strained relationship with Panama. Panama was finally able to control the entirety of its territory and reap the economic benefits of the canal. Per the treaty, the transition from US to Panamanian ownership began in 1979 with the creation of the Panama Canal Commission, a joint US–Panama agency that worked to transition operations. ACP superseded the commission in 1999, marking the moment Panama took full control of the canal.

When this transition began, the canal was “barely a money making operation.” This trend was quickly turned around. Maurer and Yu explain how the Panama Canal Commission and then ACP oversaw a management revolution, overhauled the toll structure, and made long-term investments in the canal. In 1999, the canal had made just $138.1 million. By 2006 it made $569.7 million, and in 2023, $4.97 billion. Additional revenue was funneled into capital improvements, but also meant increased profits for its sole shareholder: the Republic of Panama.

The biggest investment ACP has made is to add a new, larger, set of locks to the canal. This expansion was approved by a referendum in 2006, was completed in 2016, and cost $5.25 billion. This third set of locks expanded the capacity of the canal overall: not only can more ships move through the canal thanks to added capacity, but much larger ships can now cross. The larger locks defined a standard, Neopanamax. During expansion, ACP also deepened the navigation channels and increased Gatun Lake’s level by 45 centimeters.

Even with the new lane, the capacity of the canal’s locks is the primary bottleneck for canal operations. Getting vessels into position and filling the locks is pretty slow work; every boat I saw move through took at least an hour at each lock. The expanded canal does use more water overall, but as ACP hydrologist Erick Córdoba explained, most years there is enough to go around. With the current drought, though, fresh water has become the bottleneck – and ACP has been implementing water-saving measures for over a year. 

Let’s take a look at some of the tactics ACP uses to conserve water.

Cross Filling

The original Panamax locks have two lanes, with chambers parallel to each other. ACP usually fills each of these lanes independently, which is to say that each set of locks takes in water from the lake above and then releases the water to the ocean. However, to save water they’ve begun cross filling the chambers, sending water between the two lanes. This technique moves water from one chamber to another using subterranean culverts. These culverts have always been in place, but have only recently been used to conserve fresh water.

Cross filling is complex because it requires intense coordination and scheduling to get all of the vessels in place at the right time. The operations team coordinates with ACP pilots and client boat captains to move everyone through the systems together. Compared to normal operations, cross filling creates delays – but saves about six lockages worth of water per day.

Multimodal Crossing

A vessel's draft is the distance between the lowest point of the boat and the waterline. Given the current low water level in Gatun Lake, ACP is enforcing draft restrictions: Normally, boats with up to a 15.2-meter draft may use the canal, but right now they’re limited to 13.6 meters. This is a problem if you want to haul thousands of containers through the lake, but lightening a boat’s load will decrease its draft. As a result, some freight companies are unloading a portion of their vessels’ containers at the ports on either side of the canal and sending them across the isthmus by rail. The lighter ships can then float higher in the lake, adhering to the draft restrictions. 

If you have a lot of vessels to play with, you can avoid sending your ships through the canal altogether, and use the railway as a leg in a multimodal relay race. Maersk has started unloading its ships on either side of the isthmus, handing the cargo off to the railway, then tapping in a different ship on the other side to complete the relay. 

This all keeps the flow of goods moving, but it’s not as good an outcome for ACP. A portion of the toll a containership pays to cross the canal is determined by how many containers are on deck, so ACP is missing out on some revenue when the boats unload. Instead, that money goes to Kansas City Southern and Mi-Jack Products, the companies behind the Panama Canal Railway Company.

Water Saving Basins

The Neopanamax locks are considerably larger than the original Panamax locks, with 2.4 times the capacity. However, they were designed with water savings in mind and each chamber is accompanied by three water-saving basins that can be used to recycle water. Water from the locks drains into the basins, and can be used again to fill the next lowest chamber before washing out to sea. With the basins, a Neopanamax transit can use 7% less water than a Panamax transit – despite its much greater volume. You can learn more about how the basins work in this video.

Unfortunately, ACP is not able to use the water-saving basins all of the time, as they end up concentrating salt water into Gatun Lake. It’s worth noting that some salt water has always entered the Panama Canal; even with the old locks, salt water is transported upward as ships move up and down. However, while the water-saving basins reduce fresh water usage, they also allow greater volumes of salt water to penetrate Gatun Lake. The water that fills the basins is taken from the bottom layer of the adjacent lock, where denser salt water settles. This means the water that gets recycled has high salinity, and eventually works its way up through the locks and into the lake.

This problem was identified in early engineering reports on the canal expansion, and it remains unclear to me why it wasn’t addressed at the design stage. As built, the more the water-saving basins are used, the more salt enters Gatun Lake – and because Gatun Lake is also the source of drinking water for many Panamanians, the use of the basins is limited. ACP is constitutionally required to prioritize water quality above canal operations, and ACP’s water management team meets with the operations team several times a week to track salinity and determine when the basins can be used. ACP’s head administrator, Dr. Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, claims the basins are used to the greatest possible extent.

Because humans cannot drink salt water, and drinking water is drawn from the canal and its associated reservoirs, ACP is looking for ways to both maximize use of the water-saving basins while also minimizing salinity at the points where drinking water is collected. So, as Dr. Morales explained, “instead of addressing the amount of salinity in the lake, we’re going to be focusing on salinity at the water treatment plants.” This is to say, ACP will identify locations in the lake where salinity is lowest, and draw drinking water from those locations. The solution right now is effectively slurping up water with a gigantic straw at the mouth of the Chagres River, and piping it 15 kilometers to the Paraiso water treatment plant (which sits right outside of the Cocolí Locks, and is therefore in a high salinity area). In the long term, ACP plans to build a water treatment plant where the temporary intake is, ensuring the water-saving basins can be employed full-time.

Creating Another Reservoir

Further out into the future, ACP is hoping to build another reservoir to secure more water for the canal. The Indio River is west of the canal, currently outside of the area defined as its basin. Studies on the project began in 1999, and it’s estimated that it would provide enough water for an additional 8-10 lockages a day.

This plan is not without its challenges – and challengers. When the canal was first built and Lake Gatun first flooded, it displaced some 40,000 residents. The new reservoir would require the relocation of six towns and villages, and the people who live near the Indio River today are not willing to meet the same fate. ACP had initially pushed for the Indio reservoir to be built alongside the 2006 canal expansion, but the locals successfully resisted. The referendum that approved the new locks to move also forbade the development of new reservoirs. ACP recently submitted a proposal to change the law and get permission to dam more rivers, but residents continue to resist development and the project’s future remains unclear.

It’s a reminder that, as Deb Chachra has written about so eloquently, all infrastructure systems define some people who benefit, and some people who are harmed. The Panama Canal, like Quebec’s hydroelectric infrastructure, reshaped a landscape, flooding lands where plants, animals, and a whole lot of people once lived. With all of my research into infrastructure systems, I’ve hoped to find something that was unambiguously good – some solution to moving energy and goods around that might point toward the bright decarbonized future we need to transition to. But it’s tradeoffs all the way down, and even infrastructure systems that work closely with nature are still defined by the logic of controlling nature. When I visited Barro Colorado Island, the Smithsonian research site in the middle of the canal, I took a hike with guide Natalie Ferro Lozano. Natalie is a soil scientist and PhD candidate who has been working on BCI for over a decade. I asked her whether she thought the canal had been good or bad for the rainforest. She said it’s impossible to say, and that “good and bad impose such a human perspective.” The ecosystem has been shifting for millions of years and it will continue to change. Every change benefits some species but not others. There is no easy answer written on the landscape, so instead we’re left considering all of the pieces and applying our human heuristics.

When I first started spotting headlines about water shortages at the Panama Canal, it struck me as something shocking that emerged out of the blue. But just because these challenges are news to me doesn’t mean the problems aren’t longstanding or well-studied. Seeking solutions for water scarcity in the Panama Canal is a decades-old project, basically as old as the canal itself. There are tradeoffs to be made, and they will be negotiated between Panamanians, ACP, market dynamics, and the changing climate. Droughts are a cyclical condition – this won’t be the last dry year, and by the time the next one happens those of us who are disconnected from the daily flows of the canal might be surprised all over again. In the meantime, ACP is tasked with finding ways to make dry years more tolerable for canal operations, protecting the water quality for residents, and continuing to bring in billions of dollars in revenue for the Republic of Panama.

Sometimes the weeks are just packed; this one was such a week. It included roughly six hours spent chatting with Members of SOW (about half in person), and an additional hour and a half chatting with readers. I also wrote two or three thousand words, about a third of which will eventually appear in this newsletter, and struggled with the workflow from Illustrator (which, like all of Adobe’s software, I will never truly understand) into Glowforge (whose software I really don’t care for). And I biked, as of Thursday evening, ninety-one kilometers – right about on track for the distance I like putting in, though I would have preferred if more of it had taken place under sunnier conditions.

Anyway, it’s Scope Creep Friday; this issue contains all the things I came across this week which you should very much know about, but which I don’t at this current time have the ability to write at length on.

SOURCES/SCOPE CREEP.

The thing that blows my mind about canned food is that canning existed for more than seventy-five years before the can opener was invented.

I did a little canning in my younger years, though of course I really mean “jarring.” It was the peak of summer, and more than anything else I remember the tomatoes. I believe I grilled them quickly to remove the skins, and I also believe that they didn’t stay in the cans for more than a few weeks. It had been a lot of work, done on a hot day, with liberal amounts of steam coming off of the canning bath, and also running outside to tend the grill. And then… impatience, on my part, twisting the jars’ rings back off while it was still summer, that counterclockwise motion, the pop the lid makes as it comes off, and the tomatoes really were amazing. But I could never bring myself to do it all again again. 

This was all before I lived in the city, and before I personally packed thousands of funny little FM radios into thousands of squat little mason jars. But that is a story for another day.

How canning works: You want your food to be dead, so that you can store it for an indefinite amount of time. You may want to cook it first, breaking down its cell walls and causing a bunch of chemical reactions that make it more palatable, or maybe you want to keep it more or less raw, like a pickle, so that it’s crisp when you eat it, rather than mushy. Either way you need to kill off any living parts with heat (usually with boiling water at home, with steam in industrial settings) and then seal it into a (relatively) inert container. Then it sits there on your shelf.

The cans in question – the ones in the picture above – contain peas, grown in southern Wisconsin in the summer of 1937. I’m not sure where the cans themselves came from, but here they are being unloaded from a boxcar, into which they have been stacked on their sides. Here the cans are being filled with peas, weaving this way and that in a machine whose horizontal surfaces are scattered with little fugitive spheroids, its operator apparently happy with how the work is going. And here the filled and capped cans are loaded into steam pressure cookers, where they’ll sit for “twenty or thirty minutes” and then emerge, animation properly suspended, and ready for storage. Or immediate consumption, if that’s your style.

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Panama marks the point where the sprawling masses of North and South America funnel inward to a minuscule strip of land. At its thinnest, the isthmus is just 50 kilometers across, compared to the 4,500 kilometers of the continental US. Being so narrow, it was the ideal place to build an interoceanic canal, despite the myriad difficulties excavation posed. While the country is largely defined by this piece of infrastructure – even the country’s independence is tied to the history of the canal – I was struck by how much of the Panama Canal appears to be natural rather than technical. Besides the locks and ports at either end, the canal is just a lake surrounded by rainforest. I find it fascinating that one of the most celebrated works of engineering is a collaboration with the hydrology of the region, and how this seemingly natural landscape is a highly regulated and monitored system.

That system runs the canal and provides drinking water, but it’s also part of the larger rainforest ecosystem. Barro Colorado Island (BCI) sits in the middle of Lake Gatun, and it’s a prime example of this ecosystem’s riotous biodiversity. The island is home to 335 species of birds, 35 amphibians, 71 reptiles, 110 mammals (plus 74 distinct species of bats), nearly 1400 species of plants, and so many types of insects that an accurate census is impossible. This abundance of life has been closely studied by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) ever since the flooding of the canal made an island out of what had been a mountain.

I visited BCI to talk to STRI meteorologist Brian Harvey about one of the challenges inherent in running a canal that relies on natural systems: namely, that its operations are susceptible to drought. As I explained a few weeks ago, Lake Gatun and its complementary reservoir Lake Alhajuela are filled with rain-fed freshwater and are vulnerable to annual fluctuations in precipitation. That vulnerability is evident this year: an El Niño event lowered rainfall, triggering a drought, and the reserves of water are running low. Brian calls El Niño an infamous large-scale oscillation, which is to say it’s a weather phenomenon that breaks into the mainstream and is recognized by us non-meteorologists. He explained it as an index that tracks the sea surface temperatures in the Pacific. The swing in temperature affects ocean winds and currents and cascades through local weather systems; in Panama, El Niño tends to mean less precipitation. That was certainly the case last year, as 2023 marked the second-driest wet season on record.

Erick Córdoba, a hydrologist at the Panama Canal Authority (called ACP for the Spanish acronym), is keenly aware of the challenges posed by the El Niño phenomenon. His team is constantly modeling the lake levels to plan canal operations, and keeps a close eye on the Columbia Climate School’s El Niño forecasting. He says, “We want to be able to make decisions in advance so we can avoid chaos.” Forecasting can determine what conditions are developing 6-9 months in advance, giving ACP some time to plan and prepare for droughts. Erick and his team carefully manage lake levels through the dry season, storing as much water as possible in Lake Alhajuela. It’s deeper than Lake Gatun and has less surface area, meaning less water is lost to evaporation. As the water level drops in Lake Gatun, water is transferred from Lake Alhajuela. All of this work is paired with water-saving restrictions on canal operations; until the next rainy season, the daily number of transits has been reduced, and the maximum draft for vessels is limited.

While drought is the defining story of the Panama Canal this year (as it has been for every El Niño year), others have been characterized by floods that bring a whole other set of problems. In a country where there are two seasons – wet and dry – and water is the engine that drives the most valuable piece of infrastructure, water management is everything.

For most navigable canals, the availability of water isn’t much of a concern. The Suez, for example, is a straightforward cut through the desert connecting the waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Since these two bodies of water are at the same elevation, the Suez Canal doesn’t require locks, which are generally used to negotiate a difference in elevation between two bodies of water. The Erie Canal employed 35 locks to step vessels down from Lake Erie, 174 meters above sea level, to the Atlantic Ocean. Both of these canals connect waters that are so vast as to seem limitless (although the water level in the Great Lakes is dropping, and the oceans rising). The Panama Canal is unique in the way its locks bring vessels up to, and then back down from, an intermediate body of water – Lake Gatun – which slowly depletes through the dry season. This, and Lake Gatun’s relatively small size, makes the Panama Canal more vulnerable to annual weather fluctuations: Lake Erie holds nearly 500 cubic kilometers of water, whereas the Panama Canal’s Lake Gatun holds just 1% of that. And because of Panama’s wet-dry seasonality, the water in Lake Gatun must be replenished every year. 

Relying on freshwater and locks to operate the canal might seem inefficient, but excavating down to sea level across the isthmus was attempted and (famously) failed miserably. This effort was led by the Frenchman Ferdinand De Lesseps. De Lesseps was neither an engineer nor a financier, but as anthropologist Ashley Carse explains, “He was a promoter, first and foremost.” He was also a diplomat with powerful friends. He had been instrumental in the development of the Suez Canal, securing a key concession from Sa'id Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, in 1854. Once it became clear that the Suez was a success, De Lesseps set his sights on Panama. Despite the mountainous terrain, torrential rain, and unfavorable engineering reports, he would settle for nothing less than a canal that blasted through the mountains and excavated a clear path between the two oceans.

In 1879 he began assembling a company to work on the project and drummed up widespread enthusiasm, public support, and capital. His surveyors found a low point in the mountains, only 64 meters above sea level, and in 1880 excavation began. The difficult terrain gave pause to the engineers, however. At Suez, they had been excavating a desert, and while a tremendous amount of sand needed to be moved, the work was straightforward. Furthermore, there had been no rain to contend with. In Panama, they were blasting through bedrock, managing landslides, and getting battered with rain for eight months of the year. Throughout the rainy season, rivers swelled, washing away equipment and flooding worksites. Enthusiasm and a dream were no match for the landscape. In the most mountainous section of the canal, the Culebra Cut, De Lesseps’ company spent nine years excavating 14 million cubic meters of material – and only managed to lower the summit by five meters.

The truly wild thing is that even if it had worked – even if his company had somehow managed to remove all of the rock and soil necessary to slice through the entire isthmus – the canal still would have been a catastrophe. De Lesseps failed to plan for the consequences of all of that torrential rain. Consider this: his canal would have been a deep and narrow valley, 64 meters deep and 90 meters wide cut through rock and soil. It would have disrupted the paths of rivers, which would then terminate as waterfalls, careening down the newly excavated cliff faces. During the dry season, these waterfalls might be quite pretty, but during the rainy season, they would become treacherous. The most formidable foe would be the Chagres River. Historian David McCullough notes that during the rainy season, it “could rise 10 feet [3 meters] in an hour. At flood stage it could run as much as 36 feet [10.9 meters] deep … and measure 1,500 feet [457 meters] across.” Imagine a wall of water, as wide as the Brooklyn Bridge, barrelling down a cliff; it would be disastrous, filling the canal with rapids, and scuttling any ship that attempted to pass. This is to say that during the rainy season, which is a full eight months of every year, a sea-level canal would make for a fraught passage. 

Perhaps De Lesseps believed a solution to these deluges would be forthcoming, but in practice, he simply lied about having it sorted. He claimed the Chagres would be “diverted” into a channel, but no serious work ever occurred. In 1885, five years into the project, he told a reporter that the problem the river posed was at last resolved, declaring, “we have changed the whole course of the river and made it run on the other side of the mountains altogether.” This was not true. By 1888, the project was out of money and De Lesseps ended his career in disgrace.

In 1902, the American government purchased the French company’s equipment and property and renewed the efforts to build a canal in Panama. They devised a plan that enlisted the floodwaters as a key part of the design, and the canal that exists today began to take shape. Instead of ignoring the torrential water that flowed through the wet seasons, hydrologists and engineers married themselves to it, planning to dam the Chagres River and collect its tremendous flow into an artificial watershed that would provide the services needed for all canal operations. Further, moving ships up into the canal greatly reduced the amount of excavation necessary. McCullough again:

The vital factor in the whole plan and all its structural, mechanical, and electrical components—was water. Water would lift and lower the ships. The buoyancy of water would make the tremendous lock gates, gates two to three times heavier than any ever built before, virtually weightless. The power of falling water at the Gatun spillway would generate the electrical current to run all the motors to operate the system, as well as the towing locomotives or “electric mules.” The canal, in other words, would supply its own energy needs.

Working with the Chagres, rather than ignoring its existence, was the shortcut that was needed to create a shortcut between two oceans. The rainforest was flooded to create Gatun Lake as a rain-fed reservoir for canal operations. But even in the beginning, rainfall was unpredictable, and low water levels were soon a problem. As Carse notes, “The canal was less than two decades old when a long drought in 1929 and 1930 raised concerns about the capacity of Gatun Lake to provide enough water for navigation and hydroelectric power generation.” Lake Alajuela (called Madden by the Americans), was dammed in 1935. This year’s drought isn’t unique: Since the canal opened, reservoir levels have been low enough to restrict operations every one year in fifteen.

In 1977, another El Niño-related drought prompted a major change in how the surrounding watershed was managed. At a conference on tropical deforestation, scientist Frank Wadsworth presented a paper titled: Deforestation: Death to the Panama Canal. Forests were being cleared for farming, but these plots were susceptible to sediment runoff that filled the lake. Further, rainwater evaporated more quickly from deforested land, so less rainwater flowed to the canal. The Panamanian government soon established two national parks that were, as Carse explains, “oriented toward ‘producing’ water for the canal.” This is to say that forests were protected in hopes of securing enough water for the reservoirs. Scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) have found that “porous forest soil acts like a sponge, helping trees to store water in the rainy season and releasing water during dry periods.” Increasing forest coverage regulated the flow of water into the canal throughout the year.

Protecting the forests also mitigates flooding. I recently spoke to Jeff Hall, an STRI scientist who oversees Agua Salud, a multidisciplinary research project that investigates restoration in the basin. The team compares water at different sites, including primary forests and degraded cattle pastures. Jeff told me that his team was able to prove the importance of the forest cover to the canal and watershed during a massive flood in 2010. If the forested national park had instead been cattle pasture, an additional 100 million cubic meters of water – 1/7th of Lake Gatun’s full capacity – would have flowed to the Madden Dam, which was already pushed to its full specification. He said, “If that area hadn’t been forested, our data suggests the Panama Canal would have been destroyed.” 

As successful as reforestation has been, there doesn’t seem to be any more room to increase water flows through forest conservation. This paper conducted a cost-benefit analysis of ecological investments in the watershed and found that land-use changes alone are not sufficient to avoid restrictions on canal operations. This is to say that while there are other benefits to increasing forest coverage, like carbon sequestration and habitat protection, the gains for water retention have already been made. 

I asked ACP hydrologist Erick Córdoba how wet years compare to dry years for him. He said the floods are scary, but while they’re intense and dangerous they’re mercifully short. In contrast, “the dry years are more difficult – droughts last much longer, it’s more painful.” There are no quick fixes to resolve the drought, so Erick and his colleagues face months of challenging work balancing all of the water needs within the canal watershed. The design of the Panama Canal is unique, and it manages to work with rather than against seasonal changes in precipitation. But ACP doesn’t get to dictate those changes. To work with nature is to accept the fact we do not control it – instead, we forecast, prepare, and adapt the best we can.

Writing these Scope Creep issues – which are similar in many ways to old issues of The Prepared – is honestly kind of a treat. I enjoy the serendipity, the surprise; picking up a crumb and realizing it’s actually a strand of something, woven in umpteen directions at the same time, and now that I’ve got it in my hand I can pull this way, and then that way, and every way I pull I find more things to pick up and look at and pull on.

I suppose in this way knowledge is like light, and I would encourage you to think of each idea below as both a particle and as a wave. Ideas are granular, discontinuous... but they are also samplings from within fields, the surfaces of which stretch and warp and undulate as we observe them.

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You know who doesn’t spend much time noodling? The Maine Cabin Masters.

I do not understand how this show works. Produced by the DIY Network from 2017 until 2022, when DIY was absorbed into Chip and Jo Gaines’ home makeover empire, Maine Cabin Masters offers a lo-fi view of a radically scrappy construction company based in Manchester, Maine. The show’s protagonists (brother and sister Chase and Ashley Morrill; Ashley’s husband, Ryan; their two senior-ish carpenter types, Jedi and Dixie; a ragtag group of usually unnamed tradespeople and subcontractors) are friendly and rambunctious, often adorned in Phish shirts and sunglasses, gesticulating wildly as they give project updates to an emotionally charged soundtrack. Chase – ostensibly the most responsible person on the show – hoards a wide variety of dingy construction materials in his backyard. Ashley often refers to her “design team,” which is perpetually off-camera, burning the candle at both ends to craft and collect knick-knacks to accent their completed projects. Ryan’s demolition tool of choice is a limp “karate kick,” something he executes once every episode or two. Accidents happen not infrequently, and injury is often barely avoided. In one episode, the center portion of a building is demolished by felling a large tree directly through it. In another, while lifting a heavy (yet somehow still decorative) beam into place, Dixie takes a big fall off of his stepladder – a moment which for my family was teased multiple times before nonexistent commercial breaks on an ad-free streaming service. Ryan has (accidentally) fallen through a ceiling at least once, not to mention the many times he (intentionally) crashes through a wall like the Kool-Aid man. All of these hijinx are amplified by the show's production aesthetic, the hallmark of which is to strap a GoPro to whatever beam, wall, or window that the crew is demolishing, giving the viewer a sense of vertigo as that object is then smashed, shattered, or dropped dramatically into the dumpster.

In short, I find the Maine Cabin Masters’ jobsite safety practices to be scandalous. And yet I must admit that their approach has a number of positive qualities.

In addition to shoveling massive quantities of snow, I spent a lot of time noodling during that first full winter I spent on Donner Lake. I was working alone; I had hired a couple of off-duty ski patrollers to swat nails with me over the previous summer, but they had gone back to the slopes when the weather turned and I was left to spend a few months walking around my jobsite, trying to figure out how I was ever going to complete it.

I was noodling, mostly, on the staircase. It was to span three floors, zig-zagging back and forth on itself twice, its first flight resting on the basement slab below and its second flight floating above the first flight. I had never built a staircase before, and this one was kind of fancy, and for a time I was paralyzed at the thought of actually erecting it. I’m sure I spent weeks on end at the jobsite, going up and down the undulating extension ladder to look at the stairwell from this or that angle. I was at work, but for a long time there was almost nothing to show for my work.

This is not the only period of my career in which I have noodled extensively. When I was designing robot doors – another activity for which I was woefully underqualified – I would often roam the building where our shop was located, looking for inspiration or distraction or just something that was more broken than whatever I was trying to fix. The building’s main feature was a yawning old airplane hanger, built by Grumman in the 1950s to build, among other things, the F14 Tomcat. Grumman moved out in the ‘90s, and by the time I got there the hanger was a full-blown window factory, but we still had access to the old air traffic control tower and a few floors’ worth of unused administrative offices. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person to roam them from time to time, but doing so still felt a little transgressive. At best I was going for a walk on company time; at worst I was both avoiding my coworkers and also potentially trespassing.

I’m trying not to noodle too much these days. For years, this newsletter was the product of me noodling on the internet – an activity which began feeling psychologically destructive sometime in the latter half of 2016, and which I’ve slowly replaced with exercise, time outdoors, and (finally) a nascent and hopefully regular writing practice. But I look forward to someday having a project which I can noodle on again: Waking up early, getting to the workshop or jobsite before anyone else, and just walking around, observing it in the quiet, and waiting for inspiration to strike me.

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Ah, what a week. Such a different cadence, no? I, for one, found it energizing. It takes a lot of focus to compose a single long email, and it feels like five medium-length emails resulted in a potentially healthier schedule – and some writing that I'm pretty proud of.

Anyway, today is supposed to be easy – all scope creep, all the time 🤙 This week we've got about a dozen ish items, spread across ~1100 words: On foam mattress manufacturing, Baedecker guides, nuclear-cogenerated district steam, and the geological history of true cobblestones.

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