Not Bored on Board/Celebrations

January 23, 2009/Midway between the Bahamas and Spain

MV Explorer: Bahamas

Today was Jo’s seventeenth birthday, and she spent it at sea. I think she was missing her friends from school tonight. It’s Friday evening, after all, and her entire crew would be headed to the European Republic in Huntington, to eat bags of long, greasy fries dipped in honey mustard sauce, to hang out, to see each other, and to be seen. But her wistfulness was fleeting. She’s had no time for wist.

Me neither. The schedule on board has been daunting. When we first arrived last week, the staff and faculty had four days of orientation, with endless meetings in which procedures were explained, staff introduced, pedigrees exchanged---all the rituals academics engage in when first they convene: one graduate degree battling another, one discipline seeking domination. On the Spring 2009 Voyage of Semester at Sea, the scientists reign supreme. But there is a small but flourishing underground of faculty from the humanities, and I gravitate towards them. Jo goes to the “dependents school” every day with about a dozen or so faculty kids, some being home-schooled, and others taking courses on line. She has a roommate her age, by the way, and lives on the floor above me.

Cleavages in world-view aside, a community on board begins to form. On Tuesday, we gathered in the “Union,” the large lecture hall on the ship, and watched the inauguration of our 44th president. Here we are, a thousand souls plowing through the Atlantic Ocean, and yet the miracles of satellite technology made it possible for us to feel a part of things. I scanned the wobbling screen for the faces of good friends in that undulating mass on the Mall, but to no avail---but I was with them in spirit. And there was plenty of spirit here too. We cheered, we clapped, we hugged each other, and we shared a hushed silence as he spoke. I find myself so worried for this serious young man who has become our president. So much on his shoulders, and to me, he had aged. Standing there on the platform, he looked cold, somber---and grey. I worry that we will lose him. After all these years of having nothing to lose, it feels foreign to me---to experience flickers of sorrow over imagined loss. On Tuesday, I learned that tears wreak havoc with my new disposable contact lenses.

We only spent two days in the Bahamas. On the first day, at the urgings of everyone, we made the pilgrimage to the Atlantis resort, an opulent, lugubrious extravaganza ---Walt Disney does Las Vegas, decorated in a maritime theme carried out with a vengeance. Everywhere I looked, multi-storied concrete mollusks held up ceilings and formed balustrades, and all the many cavernous rotundas sported fountains, pulsing with water and galloping dolphins, or galloping mermaids, or galloping sea horses. (Not so easy to gallop without the legs.) In the dark, marble hallways roamed the rich from all over the world, buying designer bags, golf clothes and Columbian emeralds, drifting in and out of the casino and the over-priced shops and restaurants. Atlantis’s only saving grace was a wonderful aquarium located on the lower level that allowed you to meet a fish face to face. At one end of the resort, a shopping center wound its way around the docks loaded with yachts. It was a simulacrum of the Bahamas. You could shop at The Gap and Coach and Starbucks, all ensconced in faux clapboard houses with pink and pale blue siding. Reggae music played over the loud speaker. It was possible to pretend that you were not at Tangier Outlet on Long Island---to pretend that you were traveling.

On our other day in Nassau, we had a few mundane shopping missions before our trans-Atlantic crossing: to buy batteries, an alarm clock, and a pair of shorts. Jo and I, her friend Erin (the brunette next to my blonde daughter in the picture above) and her younger brother, Ryan, took the Number One bus, and enjoyed a rollicking half an hour ride through Nassau Town. The conductor played his radio at a deafening decibel level, music that sounded like a fusion of Reggae and Jesus rock. We hung out of the open, steel-rimmed windows, and felt a steady rush of warm, tropical air on our faces. The driving was utterly irresponsible, and utterly thrilling, and we had a fascinating ride through the downtown, through wealthy residential neighborhoods, through a very poor section of town, through an industrial complex. Sometimes things looked poor and depressed; sometimes things looked very prosperous. The houses were splashed with colors that we might decorate a birthday cake with, and yes, some of them were made of genuine wood clapboard, pink and pale blue. The kids and I were the only Americans on the bus, or in the store where we shopped; everyone else was dark-skinned and Bahamian. I thought to myself: I would like to come back to this sunny place and know more about it.

I almost forgave myself the trip to Atlantis. Almost.

The view from my pillow.

People keep asking: are you sea sick? Neither of us is affected, and for that I am deeply grateful. Others are, and the boat does more than rock. It rocks. It rolls. It stutters. It dips. It lurches. It even groans and grinds. The experience is vertiginous, and for some, incapacitating. One faculty wife has been in bed since we left port, nauseous, and very ill, and probably wishing she were dead. Just a guess.

We have been on the ship for eight days, and reach Spain in four days. Here is a sign that we are midway: we are running out of fresh fruit on the ship.

Canned peaches. I have never understood the canned peach. LH.

Sunset from the ship.