Shipping out

Our ride

This was the year I "agreed" to let my mom take my daughter and I on a cruise. She's a travel agent and sells them, and for years I'd promised that one of these winters when we come down to Florida to visit we'd give it a shot. It's one of those things that never seemed really for me — they're over-programmed, they offer only a surface-level peak at interesting places, they suggest luxury as an end in itself, they're environmentally suspicious, they're popular with noroviruses. But I figured it would be nice to get out in to the sun for awhile, to see the sea, to turn the brain off for a few days.

I'd been thinking a lot about cruises because I had my students read David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (though I always have them read the "original" "Shipping Out," as it appeared in folio in Harpers. There are important reasons of intellectual honesty for this). This was the article, I explained to that, that really set us on fire when I was in J-school. Sure, you can admire Gay Talese and Joan Didion and Joseph Mitchell, but DFW seemed to capture, at that moment, the potential magic hiding in nonfiction. I'm happy to have noticed that my students still seem to respond to it all these years later.

Wallace describes the weird predicament of being "pampered" to death, and what it means that we find recreation in being entertained and distracted from the bleak awareness that we are floating around on an ocean of nothingness, and are small and insignificant and dooomed. "All of the Megalines offer the same basic product," Wallace writes. "Not a service or a set of services but more like a feeling: a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that's marketed under configurations of the verb 'to pamper.'" As with everything he wrote, it's impossible to avoid the heaviness underlying all this, which would lead to his ultimate sad end. You can't go back and reread it without seeing it through that lens. In fact, in the past few weeks I read DT Max's biography of Wallace, and realize how greatly the problems he was having at the time shaped his reporting — particularly the weirdly abrupt ending, which suggests he wasn't kidding and the agoraphobia was a bit more than "borderline."

I constantly compared our experience aboard the good old "Jewel of the Seas" to Wallace's, and spent a lot of time noting the differences. I didn't quite feel the level of luxuriousness he describes (because we were on a different cruise line?) and we weren't on a junket, so things had a certain value. Also, unlike DFW, I didn't find it too strenuous to occasionally turn my critical thinking faculties off, and enjoy getting a blotchy tan/sunburn with a melting pina colada within reaching distance.

So my complaints and observations are of a much more down-to-earth sort. Like: no matter how rich it was intended, nor how copiously it was presented, nor how pretentious it was described, the food always felt like it came from a freezer. Also: there is something very annoying for many of us about being kept on an insanely tight and mean schedule. Like in Key West, I'd spent awhile on the Hemingway House tour, had a Papa Doble at Sloppy Joe's, and was settling in at a bar near the seaport for a fish sandwich, watching the shadows lengthen and wondering who all these people were that seemed to have stepped out of a Jimmy Buffett B-side, when it was time to get back to the damned ship already. We could have used a few more hours on the beach in Cozumel but... damned ship.

The ship itself is so big that it doesn't feel crowded (unless you try to take an elevator), but the laws of herd dynamics dictate that there are times and places that are incredibly crowded. On the upper decks when the sun is out, morning in the gym, the first few minutes after the dining room opens, any buffet situation.

There were plenty of great things as well. Those same herd dynamics meant that if you had successfully broken away, some places would feel like a ghost ship. In the evening, for example, when everyone else was watching an embarrassing simulacrum of a Broadway review in the theater, or plugging away at the casino, you had the decks entirely to yourself. Just the open sea, the windswept deck, the moonlight glinting off into the distance. That would have to be my favorite part; that, and the fact that sleeping on a gently rocking ship is primordially relaxing.

There are a number of big issues about cruising which didn't come up, particularly the possibility of disaster. Hovering over everything like a ghost was the story of the Carnival Triumph, which was all over the news in the days before we sailed. There was everything you feared, being dead in the water with no power, with the plumbing failing, with little food or water. I'm sure everyone was aware of what happened, but no one mentioned it. And overall, everyone studiously avoids thinking about the constant reminders that you are on a self-contained vessel adrift in a hostile environment. The first thing you do when you get aboard is figure out where your lifeboat is and how to get there. You are always reminded how finicky the toilet and plumbing system is, and every public restroom advises you to open the door with a paper towel in your hand. You're always aware of how weird this is.

When I assign Wallace's piece, I also assign James Agee's "Havana Cruise," a feature he wrote for Fortune magazine in the 1930s at the very birth of the idea of taking a ride on an ocean-going vessel to a tropical place solely for fun. If Wallace represents a kind of fully ripe postmodernism, Agee is high-noon, overripe modernism. Once you get past the high-falutin' purplish Joycean prose — and his unfortunate way of thinking that calling someone a Jew says everything you need to know about him — he saw a lot of important themes early on. While Wallace theorizes about the experience, Agee looks closely at his shipmates and presumes in true Freudian fashion to explain what's going on in their heads:

"Leisure, being no part of the natural lives, was precious to them; and they were aboard this ship because they were convinced that this was going to be as pleasurable a way of spending that leisure as they could afford or imagine. What they made of it, of course, and what they failed to make, they made in a beautifully logical image of themselves: of their lifelong environment, of their social and economic class, of their mother, of their civilization. And that includes their strongest and most sorrowful trait: their talent for self-deceit. Already, as their eyes darted and reflexed above the grapefruit and the coffee, they were beginning to find out a little about all that."

He makes a point of looking at the ways people's social barriers remain and break down on the ship, particularly in the young women who are apparently looking for a husband and the young men astonished at getting such attention.

I don't know if that really worked on our "megaship." Everyone seemed to be locked in a compartment of their own. There were people who were obviously part of a larger group, and kept to themselves. There were the seriously elderly folks, who you couldn't believe were let out of the hospital and you only saw getting on the ship, getting off, and shuffling in for dinner. There were lots of youngish families, who I usually saw dropping off and picking up at the kid's club was a regular part of our routine. And there were the young 20-somethings, who I saw in passing but were very busy doing their own group of activities. The entire experience was scalable and compartmentalized more than I would have thought.

This even though there were very talented and highly-skilled staffers seemingly everywhere to make everyone feel at home. Dennis was our cruise director, and you saw him everywhere. Greeting you as you got off at port, when you got back on, introducing the theater shows, on the television explaining the day's events on an endless loop. He was freakishly, naturally good at his job — you were always glad to see him. I don't know if this is something you learn through years on the job, or if cruise lines deliberately seek out these sociable freaks and cultivate them. 

Everyone must have been at the buffet.

Dennis had an equally peripatetic assistant, the "activities manager," who matched him in professional smiles and omnivorous sociability. But unlike Dennis, who was doughy and goateed, this guy was tall and lean and set off many cultural markers that suggest he was gay, and rather flamboyantly at that. One evening, while hosting some sort of "sing the next part of the song" game in one of the bars, I watched him make fun of a middle-aged, pot-bellied dude from Florida in front of a room of peers for wearing socks and sandals. It made me think that gays are the closest thing we have today to court jesters — those on the margins who use sharp wits and finely tuned social radar to gently mock the mainstream's foibles.

In the end, the whole thing was fun and fascinating. It would be worth it alone just for how much my daughter enjoyed herself. I'd say the worst part was coming home. There isn't a sense of longing for the sun and warmth and never having to wash a dish or prepare a lunch, or anything simple like that. It is more immediate, a short-temperedness with real life, where winter lingers on, work is frustrating, and the horizons are very close. I'm not sure I can blame the cruise on that — it might just be what happens when you get out a little.