How much he had to do with it we’ll never know for sure.
That was a couple of decades ago… when it started. He was at camp with his school. It had rained a lot and puddles had formed all around the camp site. He was idly walking around prodding the muddy ground with a stick, when he stopped and looked intently at two shallow pools of water. The larger one was on slightly higher ground than the other. Using his piece of tree branch, he proceeded to scrape out a narrow channel. He worked away until the groove was deep enough to allow water to run between them. This apparently meaningless activity stayed with him throughout the years that followed.
It remained as he finished his school years. It was there all through his studies at university. It never left him as he entered his working life. Civil Engineering had been his natural choice, taking him to a number of countries over time. Eventually, he found himself on an extremely large project. He was there from the beginning.
It would take around ten years to build at a cost of around four hundred million US dollars. There would be times when over forty three thousand people would work on it. More than five thousand six hundred would die during its construction. The groove being made was fifty miles long and the puddles being joined were the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It would become one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.
It would be the Panama Canal.
It’s really hard to know just how much he actually had to do with it.