I didn’t have any trouble falling asleep last night. In fact, after my head hit the pillow I had so much trouble staying awake long enough to finish the chapter I was reading that I read the last paragraph so many times I ought to know it by heart now.

The Path Between The Seas is David McCullough’s history of the building of the Panama Canal. If you rewind your memory all the way back to high school history class, you might remember that Teddy Roosevelt built the Panama Canal with his bare hands. At least, that’s what I remember, and I didn’t even have the distractions that kids today have.

Before Teddy took a crack at it, France tried to build a canal across Panama, and failed in a truly epic way, largely because they put Ferdinand de Lesseps in charge of it. De Lesseps had no training in engineering, in fact no training at all in how to build a canal, and yet he was somehow the mastermind behind building the Suez canal. A wildly popular man, practically a tabloid celebrity, he caused cheering crowds to spring into existence wherever he went that would do almost whatever he asked them to. He also had a global social network that gave him access to almost unlimited sums of money. Thank goodness he didn’t want to conquer the world, that’s all I can say.

The Panama Canal was just waiting to be built when de Lesseps came along. The United States had already completed a detailed survey in preparation to build a canal across Nicaragua, but de Lesseps had what they didn’t, namely the political momentum to get it going. There was just one little problem with his plan: He really didn’t have one. His plan was: Dig a ditch, fill it with water, drive boats through it. That was it. He was sure the engineers would figure out the rest, like how to dig a sea-level canal through a mountain. And I suppose they could have, given an infinite amount of money, time and engineers.

But he didn’t have any one of those things. The money and the time ran out in less than ten years, and the cream of the crop of the finest engineering schools in France died like flies from yellow fever in Panama, and from this enormous expense de Lesseps had little to show, hard as he tried. He went quietly daffy, and France was nearly torn apart by the scandal of it.

Then along came Teddy. That’s the part I’m on now. I’ll have more than a few nights getting to bed late now that TR’s on the scene.