Picture a net fisherman standing on the bank or on a small boat. The net starts small in his hand, and with a single practiced motion, it opens wide across the water before he even knows if there's anything there to catch. That's not luck. That's technique built over time. It's also, more or less, how I research the Canal Zone.
Some may wonder what that actually looks like: what goes into researching a community that lived and died in ninety-five years, left behind treaties and photographs and yearbooks, but never got its own complete telling. So I want to walk you through it. Not the finished posts, not the final Substack piece, not the eventual documentary; the actual method underneath all of it.
THE THROW
I don't start with conclusions. I start with a concept, a topic, sometimes just a question and I put it in front of the Canal Zone community without deciding in advance whether it matters.
I’ve been surprised by different posts. A Facebook post on churches produced some of the biggest response I’ve ever seen! I had no idea how many there were, or how much they mattered to where people lived and who they became. Swimming pools, of all things, resonated in a way I never predicted. Cemeteries, by comparison, drew less attention overall, but turned up some of the most interesting history I'd otherwise never have found: a French cemetery I didn't know existed, and a West Indian cemetery with active restoration efforts underway. Someone else found and photographed Pedro Miguel Cemetery, swallowed by jungle — Angel Cruz, out documenting what's left before it's gone. I deciphered a name on one of the markers and made sure it landed somewhere it wouldn't be lost again. That's the same role I play with most of CZD right now. I am not yet the one holding the camera, but the one making sure what's found doesn't disappear a second time. More than once, that kind of open post has led directly to something I couldn’t have found any other way. A National Park Service researcher reaching out with documents nobody else has seen, a retired intelligence contact sharing a detail that never made it into any public record. You don’t get those by staying quiet and waiting for a document to surface. You get them by putting something out there and seeing who responds.
