Forty percent of everything America imports in a container passes through a fifty-mile ditch it gave away twenty-six years ago.
Thirteen thousand ships a year, five percent of world trade, all squeezing through lock chambers barely wider than the ships themselves.
America built it under a treaty it wrote with a Frenchman, not a Panamanian, and the word in that treaty was perpetuity.
Carter signed it away in nineteen seventy-seven, and on the final day of nineteen ninety-nine, at noon, Panama took the keys.
Since then the canal has handed its owners thirty-one billion dollars, and now funds nearly a quarter of everything the government collects.
But the canal was never the whole prize — the ports at either end were, and one Hong Kong company had held both since nineteen ninety-seven.
Last year thirteen thousand crossings paid five point seven billion dollars in tolls, the canal's strongest year since the drought nearly closed it.
Because the canal runs on rainwater — in twenty twenty-three the lake fell so low that Panama had to ration crossings for months.
The fix is a one point six billion dollar dam, unfinished until twenty thirty-two, that will move about two thousand five hundred people.
Then this February Panama's supreme court voided the Hong Kong contract outright, and by presidential decree both ports changed hands overnight.
A Danish carrier took one, an Italian-Swiss carrier took the other, and the company that lost them is now suing for two billion dollars.
Panama owns the water; the ports keep changing hands. The canal stays neutral only because everyone needs it more than they can hold it.