The wheelhouse deck is eleven stories above the waterline, and the bridge is so wide the navigator has to communicate with the helmsman by walkie-talkie. The Ever Right is not so much a ship as a cargo transfer machine.  Operating on a 12-day turnaround between L.A. and the Taiwanese port of Kaohsiung, she was designed to move the amphora of the modern age—steel containers that fit directly onto the frames of semi-trailers and railroad cars.  To maintain this schedule she must be back at sea in less than a day. Hovering over the foredeck, a pair of spider-like gantry cranes pluck forty-foot containers from the hold and drop them onto the line of waiting trucks at the rate of one every fifteen seconds.^[15]

The cargo manifest, a foot-thick computer printout, lists the contents... 16 cases, parts for automobiles... 847 packages, parts of compact disc player...  5432 packages, basketware & rattan furniture... In most cases, the paperwork reflects the reality.  The exceptions are the responsibility of Chief Customs Inspector Wayne Kornmann, but like the other lawmen along the border, Kornmann has no illusions.  “We’re able to check about ten to twelve containers per shift,” he says.  “We look at less than two percent.”^[16]

Sixteen hours after the first dock line coiled down from the foredeck, the Ever Right slips her moorings and eases back into the main channel bound for the open sea. On the broad tarmac of the terminal island wharf, the cargo she left behind is already on the move—over two thousand containers rolling out through the gates on trucks and railroad cars heading north and east. Not a single container was inspected by U.S. Customs. “This ship is from Taiwan,” says the supervisor. “We barely have time to check the cargo coming straight from South America.”

The Ever Right is only one of a dozen ships to come up this channel in the last 24 hours.  A dozen more are due tomorrow, and out across the Pacific over a hundred others are making for the port of Los Angeles at this moment. At the great harbors that ring the nation, at Boston, Norfolk, Galveston,