GENE DEMBY, HOST:
What's good, y'all? You're listening to CODE SWITCH...
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DEMBY: ...The show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby.
B A PARKER, HOST:
And I'm B.A. Parker.
DEMBY: So Parker, there's a lot of reasons why the cost of things in our homes might be getting a little more expensive right now. Like, there's inflation.
PARKER: A lot of which is just corporate greed.
DEMBY: All right. Very true. Rent keeps getting more and more expensive. So people are, like, more squeezed for everything. You know what I mean?
PARKER: I mean, I live in New York. So you don't got to tell me.
DEMBY: Yeah. Listen - whew - solidarity. But, OK, a little south of us in the U.S., there's something else that's happening that might be affecting how much we pay for things and that we're not maybe paying as much attention to as we should - the Panama Canal might be dying.
PARKER: Wait, what? Like, I didn't know that. Let me guess. OK. It's climate change, isn't it?
DEMBY: Yep. It's climate change.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: The Panama Canal Authority has been forced to cut daily ship numbers.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Brought on by a drought affecting the Panama Canal.
DEMBY: So this drought that's happening means that there's just not enough water for ships to get through the canal, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
PARKER: So they're just sitting on either side, backed up and waiting?
DEMBY: Yeah. And so Panama is now charging more to let ships pass through the canal, which means everything is getting a little bit pricier. It's just a mess. And since climate change isn't slowing down, people are wondering what this means for the future of the Panama Canal and the people of the tiny nation of Panama, which has been, you know, at the center of global trade for more than a hundred years, since the canal was built.
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DEMBY: And everything it took to build that canal is still reverberating through life in Panama to this day.
CRISTINA HENRIQUEZ: The story of the canal is the intersection of so many different forces, right? It's technology. It's engineering. It's medicine. It's politics. Like, it's all of these things. But one of the major throughlines of this story is race.
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DEMBY: And so Parker, on today's episode, we're going to turn back the clock from the canal's murky future to its turbulent birth.
PARKER: Ooh.
DEMBY: Stay with us, ya'll.
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DEMBY: OK. So I guess we kind of got to start with an explanatory comment here. Parker, come Run-D.M.C. this with me. Let's pass the microphone around.
PARKER: ...'Cause is also murky.
DEMBY: The Isthmus of Panama is this narrow tendril of land that tethers South America to North America, and it runs roughly east to west. So to the north, you have the Atlantic Ocean. And about 40 miles to the south, you have the Pacific.
PARKER: From almost the moment they arrived in the 1500s, the Europeans felt like it would be easier to do all the things they wanted to do - you know, conquering, settling - all that imperialist stuff - if they could just cut through this narrow band of land that separated the two biggest oceans in the world. But there were mountains and swamps and people in the way. Plus, they didn't have the technology to do it.
DEMBY: So yeah, fast-forward a few centuries to the late 1800s, and the French took a crack at it. And then they gave up because it was too hard. Then the United States was like, well, we want to try, because the United States wanted to be the biggest player in this hemisphere. And whoever controlled the shipping through there - you know, ships for commerce, ships for war - would be incredibly powerful. They started building the Panama Canal in 1904, bringing in people from all over the world to get to work, digging up and cutting through the land.
PARKER: It took 10 years to build. And officially, 5,000 people died cutting what was essentially a 40-mile ditch through the rainforest and swamps and mountains. But other estimates put the number at 25,000 people dead.
DEMBY: And in the end, you had this canal - this giant interlocking system of lakes and rivers. It was a triumph of engineering and hubris, and it shrank the world.
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DEMBY: Cristina Henriquez is a writer here in the United States, and her people are from Panama. She has a new novel. It's called "The Great Divide," and it's less about the engineering and politics of how the canal came to be. Instead, it's more about imagining the lives of all those workers - the people who built this thing.
HENRIQUEZ: (Reading) Down, down, down into the Cordillera mountains, thousands of men worked in the rain, shoveling mud, wrapping dynamite, laying railroad track and swinging pickaxes at the sheer rock walls. Every morning, these men, who had come from all over the world, from places like Holland, Spain, Puerto Rico, France, Germany, Cuba, China, India, Turkey, England, Argentina, Peru, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Martinique, Antigua, Trinidad, Grenada, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Bermuda, Nassau and Barbados most of all, converged in one place, the Culebra Cut. They poured in on labor trains and scrambled down the mountainside, and when the whistle blew, they worked. From sunrise to sundown, they opened the earth. They were wet all the time. They could never get dry. They were covered with mud. They could never get clean. Their boots fell apart. They shivered with fever. They swung their arms, and they shoveled again and again.
DEMBY: Cristina came through to talk about her new book and how it was shaped by the stories of the actual people who lived through it, and how this multicultural army of laborers who descended on the Canal Zone shaped the country of Panama to come.
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DEMBY: There are just so many documentaries, so many books about the engineering of the canal, about the geopolitics of the canal, but your book isn't really about those things. It's about - and I'm going to oversimplify a lot - what it felt like for so many of the people who found themselves in the middle of this enormous and enormously consequential project. So where did you start your research into the lives of these people? I imagine those histories, you know, are much harder to find.
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. I mean, I started off just reading everything that I could, and most of what is out there in terms of source material is engineering histories, political histories. And that stuff got me far enough, you know? Like, I was like, OK, I get the context of what has happened, but as a novelist, what I'm always interested in is, like, the human element, the heartbeat of this project. And so I was like, I need to find out how people felt about it. And by that point, it became clear to me that there were some, sort of, major strains running through the canal story, right?
What was easiest to find out, by far and away, was how the United States felt about the canal and what it was like for Americans to be there. That is very well documented. I mean, there was a newspaper called The Canal Record, which was sort of an indispensable source material for me because it was created specifically to document every new development of the canal construction, right? And it had everything in there from, like, how many cubic yards had been dug in a certain week to all the new clubs that were being formed, the play that the YMCA was putting on in the Canal Zone, like, all of the new things that this commissary in this particular town now stocked as of this date, the train schedules. Like, it was every part of life in the Canal Zone for white Americans.
So then I was looking for, what was life like for Panamanians? You know, being half Panamanian myself, I wanted to understand what it was like to live through this time. One of the interesting things that I learned fairly early on, because I kind of came into it assuming that Panamanians had worked on the canal themselves.
DEMBY: Yes, that's what I assumed, too.
HENRIQUEZ: And I was disabused of that notion very quickly.
DEMBY: Yeah. That was one of the most surprising things, like, oh, yeah, this is not - there is an army of brown people here...
HENRIQUEZ: Yes.
DEMBY: ...But they are not necessarily Panamanian. That was really surprising.
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah. I mean, of - the reports vary, but 50,000 people who were on the, like, workforce at the canal, 357 were Panamanian.
DEMBY: Wow.
HENRIQUEZ: Right?
DEMBY: So you're talking, like, less than a percent, like, a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny...
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah.
DEMBY: Yeah.
HENRIQUEZ: Like, minuscule. And I was like, well - so this begged the question for me of, like, why, first of all, right?
DEMBY: Mm-hmm.
HENRIQUEZ: Some of it was a feeling that Panamanians were indolent, lazy. There's a quote from a U.S. congressman who's unidentified, but it's in a report from William Sands, who was a diplomat, and he - the quote is, "these people are of no more use than mosquitoes and buzzards. They ought all to be exterminated all together."
DEMBY: Whoa.
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah. I mean, so the feeling toward Panamanians was not one that was very positive.
DEMBY: Right.
HENRIQUEZ: Then there's also reports, oh, well, there weren't enough people in Panama; they didn't have actually enough of a population to draw from, which was also true; and they didn't speak English, which was also true in many cases. So if the United States were going to be the ones who were the foremans running the show, they needed people under them who could understand when they were giving orders in English.
DEMBY: Right.
HENRIQUEZ: OK, so fine. Now I understood Panamanians didn't work on the canal, but I also still just wanted to understand - this is happening in their country. It's the Panama Canal.
DEMBY: Right.
HENRIQUEZ: So what is it like to live through a time when your country is being actually, you know, like, cut in half? And there was not a lot of material on that, and I found myself in a position where I was just basically forced to imagine it, which is - you know, that's what - the job of a novelist. I'm imagining other people's lives all of the time. But, yeah. I mean, I understood that there were sort of some people in Panama who were interested in the canal happening. They thought it would benefit Panama in the end. There were equally just as many people who were very suspicious of the United States coming in and building this canal, who didn't want to attach themselves to this kind of world power in this dependent way. And so I just wanted to try to represent both of those sides a little bit, which you see through Omar, who is the 17-year-old boy.
DEMBY: And Francisco.
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah. And then Francisco, who's the opposite side of that.
DEMBY: Because that's one of the central conflicts in this book - right? - between Francisco and Omar. Francisco is a fisherman. He's a widower, and he absolutely detests the canal. He calls it La Boca because he sees it as this, like, gaping, rapacious mouth that the Americans will use to swallow up Panama. But Omar is his teenage son, and he's drawn to the canal, drawn to the prospect of working there, mostly because - the way you write him is he's bored with his life, And he sees it as an opportunity to do something bigger. And so this giant cleave in the land has run a giant cleave in this family. Did you find a lot of those divides in your research?
HENRIQUEZ: I mean, I found some. I found enough to be able to feel confident that I could write these characters and that both of them would speak to a certain kind of perspective from that moment, right? I mean, I think for - in Omar's case, he's bored. And he's also just very lonely.
DEMBY: Yeah.
HENRIQUEZ: He's grown up in this house kind of at the outskirts of the city. And it's only been he and his father for all of his life. And he just wants to be part of something. And this happens to be the biggest something in the world at that moment. And so, you know, he wants to go and join it, much to the dismay of his father, who calls it the mouth - believes that it's going to swallow Panama. But, yeah, I felt like I needed to represent both sides of that through the Panamanian story.
But the other thread was the West Indians who came. And one day, I stumbled upon this trove. It was this most amazing discovery because in 1963, the Isthmian Canal Commission sponsored a contest where they asked people to submit letters recollecting their time on the Canal Zone, like, during the construction. And they are the most amazing sort of insightful view into what it was like for these men as they were working on the canal. And it's in their voices. You can hear them coming off the page. You understand something about their whole lives. They talk about the reasons that they had come - the reasons that, in some cases, they stayed, because by 1963, you know, some of them were still in Panama and writing these histories. That was, like, a sort of turning-point moment for me in terms of the research and being able to understand the real, like, human element behind the canal.
DEMBY: Was there a specific story that, like, really jumped out to you that you remember?
HENRIQUEZ: I mean, there were specific lines, right? Like, it was amazing to me how many of the people didn't complain about the conditions. Like, they stated them very matter-of-factly. And then they would say - they would end their letters with things like, you know, thank God to the Americans for the Panama Canal. And it's, like, reading that and then knowing, on the other hand, like, the number of deaths that had occurred - right? - and, like, the kind of danger that they were in at all times and that specter of death that was haunting them, that was shadowing them the whole time that they were working on the canal, and yet, to come out of that feeling, like, thank God to the Americans for the Panama Canal was always sort of amazing to me to see.
There was a line that is often quoted, but I found it very poetic and arresting, where one of the men says, the flesh of men flew in the air like birds many days.
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HENRIQUEZ: But that just - it's like, OK, as a novelist, to read a line like that and to understand what they were up against, you know, and the reality day to day of, like - there was another one who said, one day, you see, like, Johnny (ph) in the morning; in the afternoon, he's dead. Like - it's like, that was how quick that things were happening. Every day on the line, you would be friends with someone, and then they were gone.
And I think coming face to face with that as a novelist and then trying to, like, situate those characters within that context and think about then what it's like to wake up every day, walk down that mountainside and do this work for something that isn't even your country - for the benefit - like, many of them believed they were doing it for the benefit of all humanity. To have that kind of purpose and drive and doing this thing that was very dangerous and could cost you your life pretty easily - that, I think, gave me a whole new kind of dimension to thinking through these characters.
DEMBY: But you actually had another helpful lens to understand how the canal worked because your dad worked on the canal, right?
HENRIQUEZ: He did. He told me this. So my dad helped me tremendously with this book. He was kind of my research assistant in a way. Every time I would encounter any problem, I would call him and ask him questions, or he would send me links to things. So he knew what I was working on. And, like, a few years into writing this book, at some point, he suddenly drops on me that he, yes, had worked on the canal two summers after high school. (Laughter) I know. It was like, oh, that would have been nice to know.
DEMBY: Why are parents like this?
HENRIQUEZ: (Laughter).
DEMBY: Why are they this way (laughter)? What did he tell you about that time in his life?
HENRIQUEZ: I mean, so this was - there was a time of, sort of, political unrest happening in Panama, and his school started late because of that. And so he wasn't able after high school to, like, move on to college as he was supposed to. And so there was this weird, indeterminate time where he had to get this job, essentially, and he was training - he wanted to be an engineer. He ended up being a chemical engineer. So, you know, of course, the canal is known as the greatest engineering feat of all time. So if you're an engineer in training, where are you going to go? And he went there and worked. Basically, it was the dredging division, and he was sort of monitoring the levels of, like, silt and mudslides, you know, just because of its ever-present threat of mudslides and rockslides, to this day.
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DEMBY: When we come back...
HENRIQUEZ: It's like, we tried to do this thing and here comes the land, like, coming back at you. And it would - and it just did it over and over again. It would just demolish months' worth of work, like, overnight, and the men would come back in the morning and just see this huge pile of mud, and the foreman would look at them and then just say, dig it out, boys.
PARKER: Stay with us.
DEMBY: Gene.
PARKER: Parker.
DEMBY: CODE SWITCH. So we've been talking to Cristina Henriquez, the author of the new novel "The Great Divide." And her novel is about the people who built the Panama Canal. And those people came from all over the world, but all those people doing that hard labor who were literally in the mud, they were brown folks. All the foremen, all the people making the decisions, they were white. And so I asked Cristina about that divide and what it augured for Panama.
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah. I mean, this is one of the major stories. Like, the story of the canal is the intersection of so many different forces, right? It's technology. It's engineering. It's medicine. It's politics. Like, it's all of these things, but one of the major throughlines of this story is race. And the way that it was so rigidly segregated was just part of life, right? It was part of the fabric of that time and that place, so the way that that system was set up was through something called the gold roll and the silver roll.
Now this is started because of the payroll system that had come out of the era when the Panama Railroad was being built, and they adopted this gold roll and silver roll, and it just meant that people some people were paid in gold and everybody else was paid in silver. So it started really as a payroll system, but then it spread to encompass every part of life in the Canal Zone.
So by the time that the United States starts the construction era in 1904 - so if you were on the gold roll, you got furnished housing. If you were on the silver roll, you were really, sort of, in these barracks. I read some statistic that men were - essentially had about 20 square feet of space that was, like, their own, and that was it.
DEMBY: Wow. Wow.
HENRIQUEZ: Everyone was sort of packed in in the silver roll. In the gold-roll housing, for example, they were prioritized for when they got screens on their windows, and the screens were important because the screens were what was stopping mosquitoes from getting in, and mosquitoes, as everyone was just discovering at that time, were the vectors that were propagating yellow fever and malaria. If you were on the gold roll, you got unpaid sick leave. If you were on the silver roll, you did not. If you were on the gold roll, you got paid vacation leave. If you were on the silver roll, you did not. If you were on the gold roll, your dining was in, like, these kind of kitchens and hotels where you had seats and tables, and in the silver roll, you were in these, like, messes where you had no tables, no chairs. You sat on the ground and ate.
It just went on and on. The post office had a gold-roll window and a silver-roll window. The train cars were silver and gold. The schooling was silver and gold. Like, every element of life on the Canal Zone was segregated in this way, and I mean to me, like, reading that, you know, and then I'm trying to write a novel about these characters, it's like, how do I get that to come through? How do I get it to come through in ways that feel powerful but not didactic, right?
DEMBY: Mm-hmm.
HENRIQUEZ: So you end up with scenes where one of the characters, named Ada, decides - now, she technically, by virtue of the color of her skin, should go into the silver-roll commissary, but she decides to go into the gold side instead, and she has a confrontation with a woman in the store there who kind of - she has to tell her, you don't belong here, you know? And so that idea of, like, belonging and where people do or don't belong, where they're told they do or don't belong and what their place is was something that then just became very important to me as I was working through all of these issues in the book.
DEMBY: And so many of these people were from different places. You get the sense that Ada - there were almost certainly different, sort of, racial mechanics at play in Barbados, but these were very different in Panama, right?
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah.
DEMBY: And because she was light-skinned and biracial, the implications of that just meant something different in Panama.
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah. No, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Coming from Barbados and then coming to Panama to - into this system and understanding very quickly what it was. Like, there's a line in the book, I think, that says something like - you know, where this woman is accusing her of being in the wrong spot, and Ada's, like, thinking to herself as if, you know, she didn't know what that meant. She was like, you know, there's not a soul on the isthmus who didn't understand.
DEMBY: As you write in the book, the prospect of work and decent pay in the Canal Zone, like, lured people from all over the world, and we're toggling between their stories and motivations and their ways of speaking. And as I was reading it, I was just really curious about what all these different cultural - like, what did these people leave behind in Panama after the canal was built? How did all those different folkways and languages and foods shape the Panama that came after?
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah. I mean, it's left a enduring legacy in Panama, you know, the fact of the canal and all of these places. I mean, there were people from 90 different countries in all who came and worked on the canal. You know, the majority - the vast majority - were from the Caribbean, especially from Barbados, but to me, these are the people who not only helped build the canal; they helped build Panama. I mean, there's Chinatown in Panama because of the Chinese labor that was brought over during the railroad era in the 1850s, so that still has a presence within the culture, for sure. Of the people from the Caribbean and from the West Indies who came to Panama, I think at least half, from what I've read, stayed after the canal...
DEMBY: Wow.
HENRIQUEZ: ...Construction ended, didn't go back to their home countries, and that was part of what I was trying to do. In the, like, last chapter of the book, I wanted to show some kind of, like, permanence for some of these characters who had come for a certain reason, maybe intended to go back and then ended up finding that they had built homes here, had started businesses here and really felt part of Panamanian culture. Now, whether or not Panama welcomed that and accepted them was a whole different story, and it has taken many, many years of real, kind of, like, fighting for that to happen, but that was also part of why it was important to me to include them in this novel and not only include them, but to center them, right?
DEMBY: Hmm. So much of the story is about displacement and, I guess, fears of displacement, but in the case of Joaquin and his wife Valentina, Joaquin sort of - we're introduced to him as this sort of gregarious dude who works at the fish market, and he's kind of reluctantly enlisted by his wife, Valentina, to go to her hometown, the village where her sister still lives, which we find out is about to be at the bottom of this giant man-made lake that we now know is Lake Gatun, which is needed for the canal. What happened in real life to all the people who would have lived there, who were forced to move from that town? That is, presumably, if there's any ruins, they're under, you know, 60 feet, 70 feet of water at this point.
HENRIQUEZ: There's a wonderful book about this called "Erased," by Marixa Lasso, and it's all about the displacement and depopulation of the Canal Zone, which was an actual executive order that was ordered by Taft in 1913, to depopulate the Canal Zone. So starting earlier than that, starting at about the time - 1908 - my book takes place in 1907, and these people in this town of Gatun are fighting to try to save their town from being demolished or from being moved, being relocated, them having to be forced out of the place where they've been for centuries. That - starting in 1908, that becomes a reality, where Gatun actually does get moved for the first time. It gets moved again later, outside of the zone.
But this is not just Gatun. This is - every Native village along the Canal Zone has to be either flooded, moved or destroyed. And in many places, it is because of the needs of the canal. But sometimes, whatever they need to build is, like, miles away from the actual town, but they say, like, oh, but we need that town cleared, too, because we have, like, this military defense, and the town will be in the way then. What becomes, I think, clear is that of the United States' many objectives within the Canal Zone, one is that they want to make it a place that appears to the rest of the world as though it's inhabitable for white people, right? Like, all of these native villages with all of these people who are not white Americans are kind of, like, messing up the vision, right? So they need to move them out, essentially.
DEMBY: So obviously, this had a huge human impact. Can you also talk a little bit about the environmental consequences of the canal's construction? I mean, if you're basically rending the country in two, you know, dynamiting through mountains, creating these artificial lakes - there had to be enormous ramifications to that.
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah. I mean, there was one travel writer who was quoted as saying it was the greatest liberty man has ever taken with nature. And in certain...
DEMBY: Oh, wow.
HENRIQUEZ: ...Ways, it was superlative in the sense that, like, when the cut was made through the mountains - in the Culebra Cut - it was at the time - I think, as it says in - one of the characters in this book says, the deepest cut ever known to man. Also, the Gatun Lake, when it was formed, was the largest man-made lake ever at that time - was the - 166 square miles, which is the size of Barbados. I mean, it was huge. So yeah, they were doing enormous kind of things to the land. I mean, the motivation was always just the idea of progress - the idea of civilizing Panama. But there was just this rush to do it and no, seemingly, foresight into, like, what did that mean for the land?
And it was - what was so interesting, partly, to me, was learning about how often the land would fight back. I mean, that's, to me, what the mudslides and the rockslides are, right? It's like, we tried to do this thing and here comes the land, like, coming back at you. And it would - it just did it over and over again. It would just demolish months' worth of work, like, overnight. And the men would come back in the morning and just see this huge pile of mud. And the foreman would look at them, and then just say, dig it out, boys.
DEMBY: Right. Back at it.
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah, exactly. It was just this feeling, like, we're just going to get it done, no matter what. And Mother Nature was not going to be the foe that was going to get in the way of that. I mean, I also think what's interesting is that - right now what's happening in the canal, right? In the year 2024, we're facing climate change. And the canal is now in a very perilous position, where they can only accept approximately half of the transit that they used to because there's not enough water.
DEMBY: So there's been a lot of reporting about the way climate change is really hurting the Panama Canal. I mean, there's been this drought there, which means obviously there's less water in the canal, which means fewer ships can get through the canal.
HENRIQUEZ: Yeah.
DEMBY: And that's adding all sorts of strain to how goods travel around the world. And, you know, the global supply chain is already sort of dealing with the Suez Canal - caught up in the violent spillover from Israel's bombing of Gaza. And so shipping companies are looking at the Panama Canal and trying to think through alternatives to it. Like, if this drought is going to be the new normal, do we need to do something else? So what do you think it means for Panama and its people if the canal dies?
HENRIQUEZ: Well, they chose Panama partly because, you know, it had this very narrow stretch of land that they had to get through, which they thought was doable, but also because it got so much rain. So now the fact that there's these drought conditions, I mean, it is very terrible in the sense that it has impacted the shipping tremendously, but also for Panamanian people. I mean, when the water level is so much lower, then you dredge up some of the silt at the bottom of the water, right? And you have, like - this is where the water supply is coming in from. So now that the...
DEMBY: Oh, wow.
HENRIQUEZ: ...Now the quality of the water, for example, the Panamanians are drinking, using for cooking, like, all of that kind of stuff has also been negatively impacted by all of that. Those are the things that we don't, like, think about, or certainly a hundred years ago are not the things that people were thinking through.
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DEMBY: Cristina Henriquez is the author of "The Great Divide." Thank you so much for coming on CODE SWITCH. We appreciate you.
HENRIQUEZ: Thanks for having me.
DEMBY: All right, y'all. That's our show. You can follow us on Instagram at @nprcodeswitch. If email is more your bag, ours is [email protected]. Subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app, which you should be downloading, or wherever you get your podcast - no judgment. You can also subscribe to the newsletter at npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter.
PARKER: Just wanted to give a quick shout-out to our CODE SWITCH+ listeners. We appreciate you and thank you for being a subscriber. Subscribing to CODE SWITCH+ means getting to listen to all of our episodes without any sponsor breaks, and it also helps support our show. So if you love our work, please consider signing up at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.
This episode was produced by Christina Cala. It was edited by Leah Donnella. Our engineer was James Willetts.
DEMBY: And we would be remiss if we did not give a big shout-out to the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Jess Kung, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams, Xavier Lopez, Cher Vincent and Lori Lizarraga. As for me, I'm Gene Demby.
PARKER: I'm B.A. Parker.
DEMBY: Be easy, y'all.
PARKER: Hydrate.
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