Records of the Isthmus

They were called Zonies, Zonians, and Zone brats—kids growing up in the United States’ unincorporated territory of the Panama Canal Zone. In 1966, the sport of surfing was brand new to them, a sudden phenomenon that, for the two dozen or so who caught the bug, erased the political borders that had spawned those monikers.

Their parents were either stationed in the Zone or worked for the Panama Canal Company. There were a lot of limitations and rules because the Zonies’ temporal, curated existence in the area was a product of empire building. The U.S. military had long held an interest in a Central American interocean passage. The final spark came during the Spanish-American War, as warships stationed in the Atlantic were forced to sail around Patagonia in order to engage enemies in the Pacific. 

When the Republic of Columbia, which owned the isthmus, failed to cut a good deal on the planned route of a canal, U.S. backed Panamanian rebels seized the country entirely. The Panamanians gave better terms, including sovereignty over five miles of land on either side of the waterway across its 40-mile length. Culturally, the Canal Zone mirrored American society, which, for a time, included Jim Crow-era divisions of pay and housing. The New York Times once reported that “the Zone looks for all the world like a Hollywood studio set, a kind of Mayberry-in-the-tropics.” There were theaters and churches, American Legion and Elks Lodge outposts, even a yacht club. Residents enjoyed planned communities with trimmed hedges and lawns, and wholesale rates at the many commissaries. Zonies even enjoyed first-rate postal service.

Access to imported goods and technology was key. Outside of the Canal Zone lay primal forests, jungle cats, spider monkeys, and three-toed sloths—a raw world circumscribed by a looping, tropical coastline studded in mangroves, reefs, river mouths, and points. If young Zonies like Steve Bissell and his neighbor Ken Myers were going to explore the country beyond the Zone, they would need gear. The first critical items were a couple of butterfly nets. “We would go out into the forest and catch insects, giant royal blue morpho butterflies,” says Myers. “We’d also see things ordinary people just don’t see.” 

On these occasions, the boys would split up to avoid chasing the same prey. On one outing, a 12-year-old Bissell stepped onto a trail and locked eyes with a full-grown jaguar. The animal’s coat was “immaculate” and as black as night. Bissell was captured by its yellow eyes. The boy did not move. A long, fraught moment passed between the two. The jaguar then burst into the jungle in a motion “so powerful that it created a vacuum in the forest,” says Bissell, “and little leaves trailed in after it.” The cat may have moved on but not without leaving a mark. More than 50 years later, Bissell still remembers how its black coat both absorbed and radiated the jungle light. 

Myers noted the effect the encounter had on his neighbor. Bissell was a few years older and, by all accounts, kind of nuts: a kid who went to the pharmacy, purchased the ingredients in gunpowder, and mixed up his own little bombs. Myers looked up to Bissell and observed him—this older boy with “crazy, creative moods.” Of those trips into the jungle, Myers says, “I think that’s what inspired him to become a master of light. To this day he looks at something, and it’s all about light. He’s in a league of his own in that way.”

The next important pieces of equipment came through the mail. In 1966, the Myers family, which included Ken and his older brothers, took a vacation to a place that seemed foreign and strange. It was called California. And there, the boys discovered surfing, a First World contagion they carried back home to the tropics. Ordering from catalogs was standard practice in the Zone, and upon return the Myers boys teamed up with Bissell to purchase a trio of 9-foot-plus Hobies. The boards were delivered without packaging but “without a scratch on them,” all for the freight cost of $8 a pop. From then on, Myers says, “We were either in the jungle or in the water.” It was a life of capturing and catching: butterflies, waves, images, wonder. “We were spoiled, we had everything.”

Bissell estimates there might have been twenty surfers in Panama at the time: a mix of Zonies, G.I.s, and Panamanians. The Bay of Panama blocks a large amount of swell, which made it necessary for city surfers to travel. Bissell’s first trip was hosted by a pair of surfing brothers, Scott and Rick Williams, whose parents owned a cottage near a beach called Rio Mar. 

Bissell would later pen and photograph a handful of freeform articles about surfing in Panama. Of Rio Mar he wrote: “It resembles postcards of Hawaii, with many green and gold palms dipping their wares in the wind.” The text goes on to describe the split peak there as “Ranchy [sic],” and the few tourists as stunned by the view of the acrobatics on display. “Speed … speed … so fast … feel it … slash!” Bissell wrote.

Rio Mar also happened to be the haunt of Ruben Miro, the founder of surfing in Panama and its first surf champion. “He had an internal power,” Bissell remembers, “a charisma.” There was a shade of danger to the champ, too. His family was connected to rumors of dark political dealings, and Miro himself was “testing out communism.” He conversed with Bissell as an equal, a gesture that enamored the younger man.

Bissell was 18 then and things were happening fast. He met his future wife, Anna, a girl from the Zone who’d lived in San Clemente, California, and who liked the idea of a surfer boy in this foreign outpost. In fact Bissell’s surfing was, at first, partly conducted to romance her. Fortuitously, it was Anna’s father who loaned Bissell the final, critical import: a Pentax Spotmatic camera.

It was on account of Bissell’s frequent use of the Pentax that Ruben Miro invited Bissell to a new spot they called “Malibu,” in essence an offer to wade deeper into Miro’s exotic country. That “night journey” to the mouth of the Chame River kicked off a furious few years of collective exploration and documentation. There were mangroves, savannahs, and swamps, potholed roads leading to places loaded with malaria and yellow fever. “Some spots were discovered by air,” Myers says, “then we’d get into a car and try to find them.” While searching for a little known break in a roadless place, a friend was treed by a troop of wild pigs.

Meanwhile Bissell was falling in love, with Panama and with Anna, but also with the act of wresting his environment into art. “An artist’s job,” Bissell says, “is to heighten one’s sensitivity—to take it to the Mount Everest of feeling. And I am an artist.”

That striving to recreate the world in words and photos can be seen in his earliest work. Sometimes assuming pen names, he both obscured and romanticized Panama in the articles he wrote: “A place where warm, uncrowded waves always seem to break perfectly and the past is the present which was the future.” He also described his crew and their outlook. “The guys who surf in Panama have a different philosophy than surfers elsewhere. They have an easy-going, almost-lazy attitude,” Bissell wrote in a 1971 Surfing magazine piece. “Things move slower in the tropics and all the regulars, since they are not motivated by competition, the economics of surfing professionally, or status, surf basically for themselves.”

However, two things that move as fast in the tropics as they do anywhere else were soon at play in Bissell’s life: politics and nature. The lopsided power balance between the Canal Zone territory and the nation surrounding it had culminated in riots in 1958, 1959, and, most violently, in 1964, after which Panama cut political relations with the U.S. The impasse sparked a series of negotiations, leading to the Torrijos-Carter Treaties and the canal’s eventual transfer of ownership. During this time, born and bred Zonians could see that their time in Panama was impermanent. Their Mayberry came with an expiration date. This occurred as baby boomers like Myers and Bissell were just beginning their adult lives and careers. 

Everyone they knew had, up until that point, worked for one of three entities: the local government, the U.S. government, or the Panama Canal Company. Suddenly the existence of those entities in Panama was in question. When Anna became pregnant with Bissell’s daughter, Sunday, he decided to try and make a go of photography. To do this he needed training, so he moved his young family to Santa Barbara, California, and enrolled in the Brooks Institute. In his writing, the new locale is not subtly referenced as a “a lesser place . . . a colder place.”

Splintering off from a vibrant cast of international characters deeply involved in a moment of inspiration was hard on the teenage father. But he loved Rincon, made quick inroads in the California surf community, and excelled in his studies. Upon graduating at the top of his class, Bissell was treated to a private plane ride above Santa Barbara by Ernest Brooks Jr., son of the school’s founder.  

California offered more opportunity for a professional photographer. Surf media was a growing entity at the time and the Bissells could have stayed. With an eye on a job as a Panama Canal Company archivist and photographer, however, the family moved back to the Zone and in with Bissell’s parents. The return was met with some disappointment. Part of the negotiations concerning the canal stipulated that, after a certain point, the Panama Canal Company was prohibited from hiring American citizens on a full-time basis. Despite his new bona fides, Bissell could gain no more than part-time employment as a shooter in the PCC “graphics branch.” The work was interesting, like documenting the removal of a foundered Chinese ship but, as a family-supporting career, the situation was unreliable. Plus, Bissell, it seems, was focused elsewhere. 

He bought a jeep and painted it with the flag colors of both nations: red, white, and blue. The vehicle was his tool to “see if we had any Rincons” and to get to “where the swell was hot.” These adventures were fueled with surf obsession and alcohol. On one manic night drive to an unknown spot on the coast, Bissell hit a series of potholes that launched his “Captain America” jeep off of the narrow road, over a 12-foot embankment and “into thin air.” Mid-flight, passengers saw only darkness. Then a crush of bugs against the windshield. And a final upheaval of water as the jeep came to a “soft, smoothing landing on all four tires.” The engine died, water hissing against its hot casing. Santana continued to wail on the tape deck. They’d landed in a swamp. Everyone was unscathed. “It was some kind of miracle thing,” Bissell says. 

The adventures bled into the Zone as well. On a bender one night, Bissell and friends stopped by the yacht club to buy more beer and noticed a Canal Zone police car parked up front. The motor was running and there were no policemen in sight. Bissell opened the driver’s door, stepped in, and sat down. A buddy jumped in the passenger side. “Tilly,” Bissell said to him, “are you ready for a ride?” 

They lit onto the causeway to “see how fast the thing could go.” This descended into donuts and burnouts. Then Bissell parked the car “in a little spot in the jungle I knew.” He could hear and see sirens “like someone had smashed a beehive.” He instructed his partner to wipe “any prints you can think of,” and they walked away. “There was a thing in me that wanted to break rules,” Bissell says. “That goes for both the law and [artistic] composition.”

Three years into Bissell’s return, his parents retired from the Company and his permission to stay in the Zone ended. He and Anna retreated to the only other American place they knew, Santa Barbara. “No longer will I see the dazzling beauty of an iridescent Royal Blue [sic] butterfly,” he wrote in a piece for Surfing titled “Tits and Other Classic Peaks.”  Other articles he wrote for the magazine—“Devil’s Island,” “Metabolic Voyage: Panama & Costa Rica,” and “Island of the Moon”—were all attempts to get back home. During that period, Bissell’s close friend Richard Icaza discovered Santa Catalina, the jewel of Panama’s Pacific, and Bissell returned to score the wave with his new Santa Barbara pal George Greenough. Another trip was made to a surf-drenched prison island, and another to a then-under-explored Costa Rica. 

Bissell offered Surfing everything a surf publication could hope to receive: exotic, untrammeled perfection in electric, tropical color. For Bissell, however, the trips always ended in a kind of failure, simply because he couldn’t stay. “It seems that as soon as I became conscious as a kid, I had a love of Panama,” he says. “I hated the idea that I had to leave. I was born to be there.” That feeling of separation would ripple through the rest of his life. “A blank feeling,” Bissell describes it, “like I lost a sense of myself.”

In Santa Barbara, he curated his Central America images into a two-hour slideshow that became immensely popular. It was set to a soundtrack that include the Rolling Stones and Santana. On a visit north, Ken Myers remembers, “I actually arrived as a slideshow was happening. Showing up in the flesh from Panama, people were freaking out. I was like a hero.” Bissell displayed the slides across Southern California. Surfer magazine photo editor Jeff Divine reviewed it in print as “like a film you will never see.” Bissell once screened his slides for a benefit. The venue was packed. “Of course, I had to have a couple of beers to enjoy it.” Later that night he found himself “surf-sliding through beer suds on tables and chairs.”

He charmed and influenced all of the image-makers in his circle, including George Greenough and a young Dan Merkel. But by the 1980s, Bissell decided that surf photography was not going to support his family. He was not going to get back to Panama. In a rage, he destroyed his hand-gathered butterfly collection, including the blue morphos.

Sometime later, Ruben Miro fled Panama to hide out in Texas. Politics at home had become dangerous and he feared for his own safety. Miro paid Bissell a visit at home in Santa Barbara. For Bissell, Miro’s “powerful presence” brought the spirit of Panama into the home. They celebrated and Bissell decided to give Miro a private viewing of his famous slides—of all of the places and waves they’d known together. As the images clicked over, the men became moody and then homesick—Bissell the expelled, and Miro the escaped. At the show’s end, Bissell noticed a tear on Miro’s cheek. He had never seen his mentor cry before. Bissell teared up too. “I was always trying to escape the feeling of wanting to be in Panama,” Bissell says. 

After viewing the slideshow over and over and then with Miro, he says he “couldn’t take it anymore…reliving it.” Bissell carried the 12-slide carousels to the backyard, emptied a bottle of lighter fluid on the stack, and lit a match. “We just sat there and watched them burn down to nothing.”

He eventually took a position as a guard at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where he wore a business suit and dress shoes for twenty years. His own work as an artist trailed off. “He’s gone through without being known,” Ken Myers says. “Here’s a master [who is] guarding artwork on walls. It’s like Van Gogh sweeping the floors after all of the people have left.”

Friends and compatriots have described Bissell’s ability to distinguish between shades of color as extrasensory, like people born with other innate sensory abilities. He once asked, “How do you explain to somebody, ‘I can see this but you can’t?’” In Bissell’s writing, photography, and personal history, it’s possible to comprehend that his sensitivity to color belonged to a host of sensitivities in a spectrum—connecting with his subjects, identifying the precise moment, innovating composition—and there were times when he would attempt to take them to his “Mount Everest” of sorts. But his friend Mike McCrory says there are also times when Bissell seems to lack that “part of the brain” that regulates and balances. 

“I couldn’t go the normal way,” Bissell says, “the way someone else would put in the papers.” After two decades, he grew bored of looking at the artwork of others and decided to become an artist again himself. One day, during shift breaks at the museum, he walked across State Street to a bar and ordered double rum and Cokes. He did this for most of the day. In the afternoon, a patron reported to the museum staff that their guard was passed out on the floor. The police were called. An altercation occurred. “The next thing I know, I’m waking up in a cell in my suit,” Bissell says. The museum let him go. “I’ve never known how to quit like a normal guy,” he adds.

He returned to shooting photos and occasionally printmaking. He sorted through what was left of his archive to assemble the remaining images. He continues to advise photographer friends.

“All is forgiven in the name of art,” he says. “Some artists just have problems with their lives. Sometimes they can’t handle it. You tend to hurt yourself. [At one point] there was nothing I could do to express myself other than to hurt myself. If you’d known what I knew in Panama, you’d understand. I wanted to feel alive.”

[Feature image: Bissell’s M151 jeep, painted with the American flag on the chassis and the Panamanian flag on the grill, was indicative of his split sense of self: born to American parents stationed in a foreign nation, a surfer, artist, and explorer raised in the imperial bubble of the Panama Canal Zone, fascinated with the jungle and coastlines beyond it. Parked at “Malibu,” early 1970s.]