Cruising

We are home from the Valiant Lady, our weeklong poker cruise now at an end. With Gary Shteyngart receiving heaps of praise for his (admittedly hilarious) new essay , I feel honor-bound to defend the cruise life from sophists such as he and his condescending coterie of sniggering elites.

I would also like to note that it takes a sniggering elite to come up with the sentence, “I feel honor-bound to defend the cruise life from sophists such as he and his condescending coterie of sniggering elites.” In other words, I am exactly the sort of person who should hate cruises. I do not. If anything, I feel more myself aboard some mammoth oceanic strip mall than I do pretty much anywhere else.

How could that be when I genuinely hate all of the same shipboard activities (jewelry shopping, karaoke, buffets, interacting with old people) when performed on land? Why does the simple addition of salt water transmogrify me from landlubbing curmudgeon to leader of ersatz conga lines?

Why do I like this stupid, stupid activity so very much?

I think it has something to do with walking the gangway. Embarkation and disembarkation are words one only ever hears when used in reference to cruise ships.  They are usually conjoined with the word “process” to describe the system each cruise line has in place to ensure the successful boarding and disgorging of great masses of people in as short a time as possible.

Embarking requires weeks of preparation, as one downloads the cruise app and digs through the sock drawer for the passport and boarde a plane and shuttles to the dock and wait in long queues as ship staff inspect documents and take your picture and then passing through security and reassembling in a holding area before finally crossing from land to sea, where one is given a wristband which serves as both ID and wallet for the duration of the voyage. One has no need for a wallet or driver’s license aboard, only the cheery RFID chip affixed by a thin flexible cord to one’s body. Without it, one’s identity is erased. The wristband is life.

Now you have embarked. You have shed the dry flaky skin of the workaday world and emerged, fresh and glistening, as your Sea Self, the one who wears open-toed shoes and has opinions about rum. This Sea Self is a person you may not even recognize.

Now you are free.

Sort of. There remain shadows from land life that must be erased.

The first thing one must overcome aboard any cruise ship is white guilt. The staff aboard any boat upon which I have ever ventured tend to be young and gloriously global. One encounters folks from every impoverished nation on the planet and very few of the poverished ones. What are their onboard lives like? Are they overworked? Underpaid? If I were to look into the engine room, would I find a peloton of shirtless men rowing the Valiant Lady around the Caribbean? Am I participating in a system of grotesque capitalistic exploitation? It’s hard, when consuming a key lime gelato served by a tired-looking Malaysian woman at two o’clock in the morning, not to believe so.

On the other hand, the gelato is spectacular!

People always ask about the food aboard the cruise ship. My friend, the comedian Jade Catta-Preta, with whom I performed this past week, described it this way: “The food is really good and also a little bit bad.” Which is exactly correct. I have now been on four or five of these trips and the food is almost always both fully delicious and also a little bit disgusting. I don’t mean that some of the food is like this. All of the food, every bite, is like this. Every single swallow follows the secret cruise formula of three parts yum to one part yuck.

Pictured: the author cruising

This formula could be equally applied to the totality of the experience. One need only adjust the sliders of “yum” and “yuck” depending on temperament. The shipboard music, for example, which leans heavily on the whomp whomp whomp of techno, is, for me, the reverse: three parts yuck to one part yum. The free retro video arcade, however? All yum.

When cruising, one must also abandon any sense of ecological righteousness. As I said in an earlier column, cruise ships are floating brownfields. They generate terrible amounts of food waste and CO2 emissions.

In fact, for much of our week at sea, we didn’t even travel. Instead, we just lazily circled between Miami and our next port of call, sending bulbous puffs of white “We have a new pope!” smoke into the cerulean skies. These boats are objectively bad for the environment. On the other hand, they’re incredible conduits for infectious disease, so one must take the bad with the good.

The negatives pale, though, when compared to the positives. Days of unstructured time, time enough for long hours of blank seagazing and digging into books and strolling to the galley for a snack when the mood strikes.

There’s also something different about the social contract aboard cruise ships. Folks tend to be more pleasant and accommodating when they know they’re going to be running into the same people every day for the next seven. I think this pleasantness also has to do with the vulnerability of our situation. Even the largest cruise ship is no more than a speck in the sea. We do not feel vulnerable, particularly, but we’ve all seen Titanic. Those idiots didn’t think they were vulnerable, either. Maybe it was only my imagination, but I felt like people look out for each other just a hint more on ships than they might when their feet are more firmly planted on soil.

One witnesses a lot of casual conversations between strangers, which sometimes lead to the kinds of easy friendships that somehow escape us when we are home and behaving like adults. Dinner invitations are extended, drinks paid for by others, late nights naturally extend to early mornings without any worry about having to rise for work or, really, anything at all. These are cruise friends. Maybe those friendships will carry over when our time on the ship is at an end and maybe they won’t. It doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters, which is the cruise life’s greatest gift. It is the gift of short-term amnesia. Out in International Waters, the rancor of the world dissolves to background noise. Whatever news there might be of Ukraine and Gaza and our gerontocratic presidential race barely penetrates our awareness. Why give one’s attention to the problems of the world when dueling pianos is about to begin on Deck 15?

We can do nothing from our berths and our berths ask nothing from us. Here, we are more merpeople than humanpeople. Our problems concern cloud cover and the wait times for the soft shipboard pizza, the quality of which would be unacceptable in any environment outside of a middle school, yet which somehow tastes unbelievably good when consumed at sunrise.

Crossing the gangway invites people to make a choice between maintaining our day-to-day dignified selves or, instead, unscrewing our heads and placing them inside the little safe that comes with every cabin. I spend so much of my life in my own head it’s a joy to be able to self-lobotomize for a week. Worry can find no purchase on my balcony railing, nor anxiety, nor any particular thoughts unrelated to the quality of my nascent suntan.

It’s days like this, days and days of snacking and sipping and reading and napping. It’s bliss, and it’s over far too fast for my liking.

Disembarkation is much quicker. They get you off the boat fast fast fast. Thousands of new arrivals are waiting to begin their own vacations. One need only ook down when crossing the gangway back to land to see forklifts lifting massive palettes of bananas and coconuts aboard the ship, the slightly embarrassing mechanics of shipboard living now exposed for all to see, the spell now broken, brains now sliding back into skulls despite our protestations.

No! I wanted to yell as I descended the escalator returning me to the Port of Miami with its porters and taxis and the hubbub of life lived at sea level instead of far above it.

Now we are home. The world is once again familiar and I am in mourning for the water outside my window. I miss frozen drinks. I miss my ship companions and the low expectations all of us had for each other. It’s not the boat I miss so much as the experience of thoughtlessness boat living affords me. I don’t mean it in the sense of being dispassionate or uncaring – the opposite, actually – I mean I miss the sensation of being without thoughts.

No wonder sniggering elites such as myself look down their noses at the cruise life. These are people who rely on their intellects for their sense of self. Cruising holds little space for “thinking.” Their entire purpose is to eliminate thought, altogether until we are left like a couple thousand floating fetuses. We are self-contained. We’re the empty husks powering The Matrix. We are simply bobbing, our wristbands the only things tethering us to reality, frozen pizza filling our bellies in the following proportion: three parts yum to one part yuck.