A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (47 page)

11

Traveling at sea for the first time is a chance to realize that the ocean is not one ocean. The water changes. The Atlantic that seethes off the eastern U.S. is glaucous and lightless and looks mean. Around Jamaica, though, it’s more like a milky aquamarine, and translucent. Off the Cayman Islands it’s an electric blue, and off Cozumel it’s almost purple. Same sort of deal with the beaches. You can tell right away that south Florida’s sand is descended from rocks: it hurts your bare feet and has that sort of minerally glitter to it. But Ocho Rios’s beach is more like dirty sugar, and Cozumel’s is like clean sugar, and at places along the coast of Grand Cayman the sand’s texture is more like flour, silicate, its white as dreamy and vaporous as clouds’ white. The only real constant to the nautical topography of the m.v.
Nadir
’s Caribbean is something about its unreal and almost retouched-looking prettiness
⁷³
—it’s impossible to describe quite right, but the closest I can come is to say that it all looks:
expensive
.

12

Mornings in port are a special time for the semi-agoraphobe, because just about everybody else gets off the ship and goes ashore for Organized Shore Excursions or for unstructured peripatetic tourist stuff, and the m.v.
Nadir
’s upper decks have the eerily delicious deserted quality of your folks’ house when you’re home sick as a kid and everybody else is off at work and school, etc. Right now it’s 0930h. on 15 March (Ides Wednesday) and we’re docked off Cozumel, Mexico. I’m on Deck 12. A couple guys in software-company T-shirts jog fragrantly by every couple minutes,
⁷⁴
but other than that it’s just me and the ZnO and hat and about a thousand empty and identically folded high-quality deck chairs. The 12-Aft Towel Guy has almost nobody to exercise his zeal on, and by l000h. I’m on my fifth new towel.

Here the semi-agoraphobe can stand alone at the ship’s highest port rail and gaze pensively out to sea. The sea off Cozumel is a kind of watery indigo through which you can see the powder-white of the bottom. In the middle distance, underwater coral formations are big cloud-shapes of deep purple. You can see why people say of calm seas that they’re “glassy”: at l000h. the sun assumes a kind of Brewster’s Angle w/r/t the surface and the harbor lights up as far as the eye can see: the water moves a million little ways at once, and each move makes a sparkle. Out past the coral, the water gets progressively darker in orderly baconish stripes—I think this phenomenon has to do with perspective. It’s all extremely pretty and peaceful. Besides me and the T.G. and the orbiting joggers, there’s only a supine older lady reading
Codependent No More
and a man standing way up at the fore part of the starboard rail videotaping the sea. This sad and cadaverous guy, who by the second day I’d christened Captain Video, has tall hard gray hair and Birkenstocks and very thin hairless calves, and he is one of the cruise’s more prominent eccentrics.
⁷⁵
Pretty much everybody on the
Nadir
qualifies as camera-crazy, but Captain Video camcords absolutely
everything
, including meals, empty hallways, endless games of geriatric bridge—even leaping onto Deck 11’s raised stage during Pool Party to get the crowd from the musicians’ angle. You can tell that the magnetic record of Captain Video’s Megacruise experience is going to be this Warholianly dull thing that is exactly as long as the Cruise itself. Captain Video’s the only passenger besides me who I know for a fact is cruising without a relative or companion, and certain additional similarities between C.V. and me (the semi-agoraphobic reluctance to leave the ship in port, for one thing) tend to make me uncomfortable, and I try to avoid him as much as possible.

The semi-agoraphobe can also stand at Deck 12’s starboard rail and look way down at the army of
Nadir
passengers being disgorged by the Deck 3 egress. They keep pouring out the door and down the narrow gangway. As each person’s sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from
cruiser
to
tourist
is effected. At this very moment, 1300+ upscale tourists with currency to unload and experiences to experience and record compose a serpentine line stretching all the way down the Cozumel pier, which pier is poured cement and a good quarter-mile long and leads to the TOURISM CENTER,
⁷⁶
a kind of mega-Quonset structure where Organized Shore Excursions
⁷⁷
and cabs or mopeds into San Miguel are available. The word around good old Table 64 last night was that in primitive and incredibly poor Cozumel the U.S. dollar is treated like a UFO: “They worship it when it lands.”

Locals along the Cozumel pier are offering
Nadir
ites a chance to have their picture taken holding a very large iguana. Yesterday, on the Grand Cayman pier, locals had offered them the chance to have their picture taken with a guy wearing a peg-leg and hook, while off the
Nadir
’s port bow a fake pirate ship plowed back and forth across the bay all morning, firing blank broadsides and getting on everybody’s nerves.

The
Nadir
’s crowds move in couples and quartets and groups and packs; the line undulates complexly. Everybody’s shirt is some kind of pastel and is festooned with the cases of recording equipment, and 85% of the females have white visors and wicker purses. And everybody down below has on sunglasses with this year’s fashionable accessory, a padded fluorescent cord that attaches to the glasses’ arms so the glasses can hang around your neck and you can put them on and take them off a lot.
⁷⁸

Off to my right (southeast), now, another Megacruiser is moving in for docking someplace that must be pretty close to us, judging by its approach-vector. It moves like a force of nature and resists the idea that so much mass is being steered by anything like a hand on a tiller. I can’t imagine what trying to maneuver one of these puppies into the pier is like. Parallel parking a semi into a spot the same size as the semi with a blindfold on and four tabs of LSD in you might come close. There’s no empirical way to know: they won’t even let me near the ship’s Bridge, not after the
au-jus
snafu. Our docking this morning at sunrise involved an antlike frenzy of crewmen and shore personnel and an anchor
⁷⁹
that spilled from the ship’s navel and upward of a dozen ropes complexly knotted onto what look like giant railroad ties studding the pier. The crew insist on calling the ropes “lines” even though each one is at least the same diameter as a tourist’s head.

I cannot convey to you the sheer and surreal scale of everything: the towering ship, the ropes, the ties, the anchor, the pier, the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky. The Caribbean is, as ever, odorless. The floor of Deck 12 is tight-fitted planks of the same kind of corky and good-smelling wood you see in saunas.

Looking down from a great height at your countrymen waddling in expensive sandals into poverty-stricken ports is not one of the funner moments of a 7NC Luxury Cruise, however. There is something inescapably
bovine
about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become
Peregrinator americanus, Die Lumpenamerikaner
. The Ugly Ones. For me, boviscopophobia
⁸⁰
is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port. It’s in port that I feel most implicated, guilty by perceived association. I’ve barely been out of the U.S.A. before, and never as part of a high-income herd, and in port—even up here above it all on Deck 12, just watching—I’m newly and unpleasantly conscious of being an American, the same way I’m always suddenly conscious of being white every time I’m around a lot of nonwhite people. I cannot help imagining us as we appear to them, the impassive Jamaicans and Mexicans,
⁸¹
or especially to the non-Aryan preterite crew of the
Nadir
. All week I’ve found myself doing everything I can to distance myself in the crew’s eyes from the bovine herd I’m part of, to somehow unimplicate myself: I eschew cameras and sunglasses and pastel Caribbeanwear; I make a big deal of carrying my own cafeteria tray and am effusive in my thanks for the slightest service. Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor.

At 1035h. there are just one or two small clouds in a sky so blue here it hurts. Every dawn so far in port has been overcast. Then the ascending sun gathers force and disperses the clouds somehow, and for an hour or so the sky looks shredded. Then by 0800h. an endless blue opens up like an eye and stays that way all
A.M
., one or two clouds always in the distance, as if for scale.

There are massed formicatory maneuvers among pier workers with ropes and walkie-talkies down there now as this other bright-white Megaship moves slowly in toward the pier from the right.

And then in the late
A.M
. the isolate clouds overhead start moving toward one another, and in the early
P.M
. they begin very slowly interlocking like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the color of old dimes.
⁸²

But of course all this ostensibly unimplicating behavior on my part is itself motivated by a self-conscious and somewhat condescending concern about how I appear to others that is (this concern) 100% upscale American. Part of the overall despair of this Luxury Cruise is that no matter what I do I cannot escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. This despair reaches its peak in port, at the rail, looking down at what I can’t help being one of. Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and am thus
ex officio
large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy: the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore.

Here, as in the other ports, Jet Skis buzz the
Nadir
all morning. There’s about half a dozen this time. Jet Skis are the mosquitoes of Caribbean ports, annoying and irrelevant and apparently always there. Their noise is a cross between a gargle and a chain saw. I am tired of Jet Skis already and have never even been on a Jet Ski. I remember reading somewhere that Jet Skis are incredibly dangerous and accident-prone, and I take a certain unkind comfort in this as I watch blond guys with washboard stomachs and sunglasses on fluorescent cords buzz around making hieroglyphs of foam.

Instead of fake pirate ships, in Cozumel there are glass-bottom boats working the waters around the coral shadows. They move sluggishly because they’re terribly overloaded with cruisers on an Organized Shore Excursion. What’s neat about the sight is that everybody on the boats is looking straight down, a good 100+ people per boat—it looks prayerful somehow, and sets off the boat’s driver, a local who stares dully ahead at the same nothing all drivers of all kinds of mass transport stare at.
⁸³

A red and orange parasail hangs dead still on the port horizon, a stick-figure dangling.

The 12-Aft Towel Guy, a spectral Czech with eyes so inset they’re black from brow-shadow, stands very straight and expressionless by his cart, playing what looks like Rock-Paper-Scissors with himself. I’ve learned that the 12-Aft Towel Guy is immune to chatty journalistic probing—he gives me a look of what I can only call
withering neutrality
whenever I go get another towel. I am reapplying ZnO. Captain Video isn’t filming now but is looking at the harbor through a square he’s made of his hands. He’s the type where you can tell without even looking closely that he’s talking to himself. This other Megacruise ship is now docking right next to us, a procedure which apparently demands a lot of coded blasts on its world-ending horn. But maybe the single best
A.M
. visual in the harbor is another big organized 7NC-tourist thing: A group of
Nadir
ites is learning to snorkel in the lagoonish waters just offshore; off the port bow I can see a good 150 solid citizens floating on their stomachs, motionless, the classic Dead Man’s Float, looking like the massed and floating victims of some hideous mishap—from this height a macabre and riveting sight. I have given up looking for dorsal fins in port. It turns out that sharks, apparently being short on aesthetic sense, are never seen in pretty Caribbean ports, though a couple Jamaicans had lurid if dubious stories of barracudas that could take off a limb in one surgical drive-by. Nor in Caribbean ports is there ever any evident kelp, glasswort, algaeic scuz, or any of the sapropel the regular ocean’s supposed to have. Probably sharks like murkier and scuzzier waters; potential victims could see them coming too easily down here.

Speaking of carnivores, Carnival Cruises Inc.’s good ships
Ecstasy
and
Tropicale
are both anchored all the way across the harbor. In port, Carnival Megaships tend to stay sort of at a distance from other cruise ships, and my sense is that the other ships think this is just as well. The Carnival ships have masses of 20ish-looking people hanging off the rails and seem at this distance to throb slightly, like a hi-fi’s woofer. The rumors about Carnival 7NC’s are legion, one such rumor being that their Cruises are kind of like floating meat-market bars and that their ships bob with a conspicuous carnal
squeakatasqueakata
at night. There’s none of this kind of concupiscent behavior aboard the
Nadir
, I’m happy to say. By now I’ve become a kind of 7NC snob, and when Carnival or Princess is mentioned in my presence I feel my face automatically assume Trudy and Esther’s expression of classy distaste.