The Terminal: Eric Walrond, the City of Colo ´n, and the Caribbean of the Panama Canal Jennifer Brittan* All my readers must know—a glance at the map will show it to those who do not—that between North America and the envied shores of California stretches a little neck of land, insignificant-looking enough on the map, dividing the Atlantic from the Pacific. Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands Matter in the wrong place: five words waiting for the largest public works project in US history. Single syllables are best for being matter-of-fact, and the four in this phrase pronounce with a self-assurance that doesn’t budge. Not so the physical stuff in question; the generically identified matter identifies a material referent already neither here nor there. The phrase was put to use in 1908 by geographer Vaughan Cornish, who adds a particularly memorable superlative to the many used to describe the American Panama Canal. Reflecting on the mammoth labor of removing a width of that little neck of land separating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, he writes, “nowhere is the classical definition of dirt as ‘matter in the wrong place’ so appropriate as on the Isthmus” (167). Maps confirm this characterization; whatever the scale and however detailed, the canal is first and foremost the stretch where *Jennifer Brittan recently completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. American Literary History, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 294–316 doi:10.1093/alh/ajs077 Advance Access publication March 6, 2013 # The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com by guest on August 6, 2013 http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from