Sea Trip LogThe sea, once it casts its spell, holds on in its net of wonder forever.
--Jacques Yves Cousteau
Day 1“Buddy of mine told me that. Cracked me up.”
So said the burly fellow from the East Coast who sat near us at the shipboard restaurant, shortly after telling his wife or girl friend the ancient joke that “it’s noon somewhere” when musing about whether it was too early to start drinking alcohol. And to think I’d always thought guys on the East Coast were ahead of those of us in the middle of the country. Not that I’m above using that old cornball, but I’m just saying.
After a scant five hours sleep (bring out the violins and let the pity party commence!) we open the door to the cabin, called “stateroom” (because we all know language matters), and collapse on the bed. I wake up an hour or two later, groggy with a slight sore throat. I’d been fighting off colds for three weeks now, with more near misses than George Washington’s army. The pressure was on - I couldn’t get sick on a cruise. So despite eating only three hours ago I knew the cure: more food. My father seems to think that food is the answer to minor illness, which always struck me as quackery, but it really works. Two “free” pieces of cheesecake later (and a ham sandwich) and I feel better than I’d felt in hours. I realize I can either get sick on this cruise or gain weight and I’m betting on the latter. The sheer availability of food is astonishing, all the more so by comparison with its unavailability at our house. Food without cooking (or waiting and paying for it at the point of sale) feels wrong - it’s as though God wills food not be so easily gotten, for the brow must sweat for it.
I hit the ship’s library early. The sight of the sea from the harbor gave me a hankering for Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner or maybe Herman Melville. They don’t have them (what kind of sea library is this? I see no Patrick O'Brian either). I walk out with Murakami’s “After the Quake” and a Bill Bryson travelogue through Europe. My ancestors arrived one hundred and fifty-nine years ago on coffin ships but this is anything but. The unreality of the interior is leavened by the scene from the balcony, the water rushing by. Nature as an antidote for mediocrity. You can’t look at the ocean and be uninspired, its very inexhaustibility is a foretaste of heaven. The bigness of this landscape requires something bigger than Bill Bryson, something more epical, like Belloc’s “Hills and the Sea”.
Sunday Mass today and the priest didn’t pull any punches. A retired military chaplain who derives his salary from Uncle Sam, he’s a ‘free agent’ who can pretty much say what he wants without any repercussions from peeved parishioners or bishops. And he does. It’s really odd how every time my wife, an evangelical, goes to Mass with me, the priest makes some sort of negative reference to Protestantism (although he admitted that term is almost meaningless since it runs the gamut). It’s odd because on 98% of all Sundays there’s nothing said that any evangelical could possibly take offense. (Later I would overhear my wife refer the ‘Catholic Church’ in a haughty, William F. Buckley voice, during a conversation with her sister.)
He pointed out his fellow ex-military retiree, an evangelical “Holy Roller” he calls him. And they get along fine. The holy roller accompanies him for meals and sits in the audience at all the daily Masses. Most novel was the ‘Q & A’ period this priest has after homilies. Today he was asked how he reconciled free will with Jonah’s refusal (initially) to serve God. Fr. Jose said that the OT is not the New and that we are in a new dispensation. In the New, God tells us to turn the other cheek while in the Old it was “an eye for an eye”. In the New Testament, God holds his hand out and we can either accept it or not. Free will. Fr. Jose also mentioned that with prayer we have a constant hotline to God – like the Kremlin had to the White House. “No one can do what I do. No one can confect the body of Christ from the elements of bread and wine. Oh there might be a priest or so somewhere amid the 4,000 onboard but none has the jurisdiction to change the bread to the body of the same Jesus who walked on the earth 2000 years ago.” Pointing outside the room, “oh and I don’t care if no one outside this room knows it.”
At the pool, the downside of capitalism is seen: no dollar is left on the table. That is, every square inch of deck space has a lounge chair, each recliner so close to the other that it feels like a large communal bed where everyone is wearing less clothing than the typical pair of pajamas.
The sea is remarkably uncapturable in photograph or words. In that way it’s like St. Peter’s in Rome. Bill Bryson says much the same in his trip to Rome of St. Peter’s. He said he’ll never think of any structure in the same way after seeing that one. If pictures of the ocean or St. Peter’s are ineffably puny compared to their actuality, I can’t even begin to imagine how pale my pictures of God are compared to God Himself.
Day 2My favorite moments on a cruise are inevitably the breakfasts, which are, for all practical purposes, breakfasts in bed. You circle what you want on the room service menu the night before and magically it appears within a given half hour specified the next morn. We mark the menu like naughty children, seemingly extravagant in our requests and yet we eat it all. We’re responsible even in our irresponsibility. To waste food because it’s “free” (or pre-paid) is still a foreign concept, though one that is beginning to seem less foreign.
I pick out a book to read. An early choice is Randy Wayne White’s “Captiva”, and lo and behold just one week after I quote
Zippy and say there is no such thing as coincidence I read this sentence from White’s novel: ‘There is no such thing as a coincidence.” Now there’s a coincidence that negates my previous statement.
Today is Labadee day, a Royal Caribbean beach on the edge of Haiti. Ten minutes after I say the groaner, “it’s hotter than Haiti”, a bastardization of “it’s hotter than Hades”, we overhear a stranger say the same thing. Cliches are us! The couple we’re here with joins us lounging on a sunny part of the beach. The boat looms large in the mid-distance and has about it a benevolent presence, feeding and sheltering us as it does. But feed and shelter it really does to the Haitians in the area.
Like West Virginia she’s almost heaven, though almost hell to her inhabitants, eighty percent of whom are unemployed. This is a state you so want to succeed – predominantly Catholic and the first black republic. We go on a historic walking tour and the guide was grim about her future. He also mentioned the comeback of voodoo and gives examples of how it kills the local economy by making people afraid to take the jobs of those who have been fired. Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, only the old people practiced voodoo. It was dying out. Now many of the young do, perhaps 20%, perhaps even the tour guide himself.
He was 7 or 8 years old when Royal Caribbean came and leased this beach area from Haiti and nothing was the same after for the little Labadee village. Before they lived in mean mud huts with thatch roofs and no telephone or electricity. Now they have houses made of modern materials and phones and electricity, all compliments of Royal Caribbean (there is no electricity bill in the village, he says, RC takes care of that.) Labadee village is off limits to tourists due to security concerns but it is where the workers come, the tour guides, the musicians, the sellers of cheap folk art. He’s glad there is no way to get to the beach from Labadee village except by boat, there being no paved roads, because it “keeps the bad guys out”. The less accessible the better - “let them swim here,” he says, and we laugh. He speaks excellent English and is obviously grateful for the money and education he’s received thanks to RC. (The money is $12 a day plus tips, which goes extremely far in the Haitian economy, such as it is.)
His gratitude is touching and I wonder how long it will last. At 28, he’s seen the before and after though his children won’t. He’s a “convert” in a sense and his children will be “cradles” and consider RC a given, an entitlement even though Labadee is among the riches of all Haitian villages. He reminds me I ought be more thankful for blessings both spiritual and material.
He said Haiti functioned well when it ate what it produced, which is basically the story of Africa. Subsidence farming seems to work better than having just a toe in the industrial world. They don’t want to eat potatoes or fish, they want french fries and trade for it. Perhaps french fries are to Haitians what alcohol was to the Indians. They have to go eight to nine miles off shore to catch fish and then take it far to market in order to buy…french fries. The human tragedy in a nutshell.
At the Haitian flea market I didn’t see much I wanted. They are tireless pushers of merchandise and I tell one honestly that what I really need is a watch, pointing to my wrist. It had been lost or stolen on yesterday while laying out on the pool deck. Losing stuff is never a question of “if” but “when” which is why I buy $20 watches and $8 sunglasses. I, for one, am grateful for a society that produces disposable things since I manage to lose them anyway. Quality, schmality, that just makes the losing the harder. So the salesman gets the attention of one of his buddies and next thing he’s taking the watch off his wrist. Where, I ask, in America will somebody sell you if not the shirt off his back then the watch off his wrist? Nowhere. And it’s kind of sad it happens here, although I expect he can get one much cheaper than the money I gave him so he made off fine.
This avuncular host went off his rocker when he began to talk about voodoo. He explained how there are many zombies walking around, and that one of them he hired to tend his garden. Zombies are those raised from the dead by a voodoo priest. He also explained that he doesn’t eat steak because only some people can tell whether it’s the meat of a bovine or meat of a bovine who was changed into a cow but is really a man. Something like that.
Time waits for no man and the whistle doth blow. The ocean mist gathers about her shore-ish hem as we make way, following the relentless Western ache for adhering to schedules. Haiti leaves us in the gloaming, and leaves us all a little poorer. But I recall the fervor of the tour guide, who stared at me unnervingly during his long soliloquy on voodoo. Very unnervingly. He even pointed to me saying, “You’re a businessman and you hire me and then fire me and then you replace me with someone, I might go to a voodoo priest to have my replacement killed.”
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At dinner tonight Tom told us that he hated cheese due to a traumatic childhood accident. He’d gotten Dominos, or maybe Donatos, and the pizza was very hot and the cheese stuck to the roof of his mouth. Ever since then he has sworn off pizza in particular and cheese in general which seems a shocking lifetime loss. Post traumatic cheese disorder is nothing to laugh about.
Day 3The sea forms a bright clear line at the horizon, neat as geometry, as ordered as a chess set. The clouds hang like poignancies, phantasms of unreachable nostalgia, the kind that induces a sort of physical thirst. Wind whipping on the balcony, I wonder if this is how it felt to be on watch on one of Buckley’s sailing trips across the Atlantic.
The cruise director and I are at cross purposes. I want to be bored, to have time to stop and recharge the batteries, to gaze out at the full sea like a lover, to paraphrase the Little River Band. Our cruise director wants to distract us, make time fly and make it less of a “nature vacation” to the extent one can make a trip with 4,000 others a nature vacation.
The worst time on this cruise might’ve been the short episode at the Casino Royale, where the crowds were so thick you couldn’t move and where the master of ceremonies was supposed to draw winning tickets but was taking his time about it, first having us look under stools for some free gaming coupons. Getting over-stuffed people of a certain age to squat on a rocking boat looking for gaming coupons is a tough sell, and he complained about how so few were found. It’s funny that gambling is so popular and yet I relish it so little. Would I were a Baptist I could start off 33% righteous.
The shows on board are generally cotton candy entertainment. Jugglers, magicians, flashy dancers. But tonight this man seems a cut above. He produces a thrill-chill moment when he sings “Mr. Bojangles”. He set it up by explaining how Sammy Davis Jr. changed his life. Said he saw one performance and quit his moderately successful rock band, the one that took him all over Europe. For the first time in his life he was hungry, with no source of income except the joy of impersonating Sammy’s music. Probably not the most paying gig in the world. Eventually he opened for Bill Cosby and before the very first performance he had a special guest. Sammy Davis Jr. himself.
My reading list has expanded. New entrants include Arroyo’s “Mother Angelica”, baseball manager Jack McKeon’s autobiography, and Martin Dugard’s “The Last Voyage of Columbus”. McKeon is a lover of cigars, a former manager of my beloved Cincinnati Reds and a daily Mass goer devoted to St. Therese of Lisieux. How can I not read his autobiography?
Stories of saints, or near saints like Mother A., are oft perfumed with the scent of predestination such that one is tempted to say, “oh they were saints because they’re supposed to be saints” as if that charism is limited to them and others like them. And yet God must go to extreme measures to show that we are nothing without Him – such as in the Old Testament where the Israelites’ army was about to go into battle and Yahweh had only a tenth of them go in. An impossible situation made possible only by God. Renewal in the Church has to come about similarly, through a great saint whose actions can only be ascribed to God. God is a ‘credit mon’ in our household parlance, and rightfully so, being not just the source of love but Love itself.
We live in an odd grace/free will atmosphere, that impossible admixture, where sinners prove free will exists and saints prove that grace exists. It’s sort of disturbing that there’s more sinners than saints around though it’s not as binary as I make it out to be since it’s a journey and we’re in a contiuum. Sometimes I think the tragic-comedy is the saint and the sinner meeting and each immediately thinks of the other: ‘your life is so hard’. Sanctity is hard but then so is sinfulness, at least in the long run.
Saints are good for despair and for presumption. For despair because they offer hope. The apostles, seemingly picked at random, were average sinners who became saints. For presumption, they offer unnerving acts. Like St. Augustine, who sometimes didn’t take the Eucharist due to a sense of personal unworthiness, and who, on his death bed, recited the penitential psalms with tears. Saints are *really* sorry for their sins, which is the opposite of presumption.
Day 4 (if you’re scoring at home)It’s 11 am and somewhere Jerry (not his real name) is drinking. He is a happy drinker and he certainly knows what he’s here for – drinking and gambling. He’s not getting distracted by musical shows or ice dancing or rock climbing. He closed down the casino – 2:30 am – which is the time of night I haven’t seen since I was 26, other than waking up in the middle of the night due to insomnia. You gotta say he’s getting his money’s worth, except you have to pay for the drinks and the slots. He’s subsidizing the rest of us, keeping the cruise price down. And I’ll drink to that.
Financially speaking, there are levels here, starting with the crew, who come from second and third world nations and who are able to send home serious money to support their families (serious money at least in terms of their respective economies; they work extremely hard, but grumbled only about next week, when the ship would be chartered by group of all homosexual men). One level up are those who don’t drink and gamble, and who thus support the crew members. Another level up are those who do drink and gamble who support those who don’t.
Went to “Stingray City” today, which isn’t a real city but a spot off the Grand Caymans. (It seems you can tell the wealth of a Caribbean island by its degree of flatness, and the Grand Caymans are very flat and very rich.) Forty years ago fishermen used to come to this shallow sand bar to clean their fish. Stingrays came in great numbers to feed off the entrails. And a tradition was born that continues to this very day in the form of tourists feeding them.
We were on a tour with a large extended family from Philadelphia. The 40-something man with graying hair at the temples is sitting next to his mom and has a tattoo just above his ankle that says “Mom”. Sweet. The men in the group are very talkative and funny, which seems a common trait among large Philadelphia-area families.
We were passed to increasingly rough-looking characters. Levon was a baby-faced man with a wispy mustache and Spanish features. Then we went to an old bus driver and a woman who, by way of emphasizing a need for tips, told us she is struggling to feed her baby. We were then taken to a fishing boat where two lean and weather-beaten dudes promised us a “three hour tour, a three hour tour”. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Miguel and Manuel were both missing a distracting number of teeth. They did a good job, their dark skin and wiry frames perfectly suited to the task.
We get out into the three and four-foot high water and the guide holds a stingray for us to kiss as a photo op. He also gets a picture of us with a stingray behind us, horizontal and belly side up, looking in size and shape like the the cartoon character the Tasmanian devil.
Day 5 God is good. I’d marked 8:30-9:00am as breakfast, per my wife’s preference, though it meant I’d not be able to receive Communion at Mass due to the hour fast. Yet, inexplicably, breakfast came not only in the 8-8:30 half-hour but early in that half hour. I looked at my watch after that last sip of coffee: 8:28. Later, I looked at my watch as the priest began to distribute Communion to the fifteen souls: 9:28. Wonderful!!
Fr. Jose is a curious mix of “conservative” and “liberal” tendencies and thus pleasingly unpredictable. He emphasizes that God is just, that he can’t imagine serving a God who is not just, and that no repented sin goes unforgiven but that all sin must be “paid for”. “You have to pay,” he repeats in his Cuban accent. The story of David illustrates this, he says, in that David’s child with Bathsheeba was stillborn and that his dream of building the Temple would not be fulfilled, but would be by his heir. He goes on to say that criminals ought to have to work each day instead of enjoying three squares and a television and such. Fr. Jose also shows a softer side. He says that mortal sin is extremely difficult to achieve.You have to basically say to God, “to hell with you!”. He said in the early church only three sins were considered what we would call ‘mortal’: killing someone, committing adultery and blaspheming (apostasy). He said it was the Middle Ages when monks got carried away with imagining that falling asleep during the Divine Office was a mortal sin and this lead to scrupulosity. He said back in the ‘40s the Dominican brothers taught him that you could steal $4.99 from your parents and it not be mortal, but $5 was. So he got to thinking you could just keep stealing $4.99 indefinitely. It would seem the Church pre-Vatican II was not as spiritually healthy as many children of the ‘70s might think.
The 35-minute ferry ride today to the Mexican mainland from Cozumel was almost like a glimpse into Purgatory. The waves were tremendous and the seasickness fierce. Within ten minutes people were wailing and within twenty perhaps a third were vomiting. A man handed out plastic bags to everyone saying “just in case”. The crew was ready for this even if we weren’t.
My wife closed her eyes and tried to block out the noises and sights of the sick, the power of suggestion being what it is. In the beginning it all had seemed almost funny, like a ride at an amusement part. Soon I had to loosen my belt and unbutton my pants and I began to perspire, the precursor to your basic vomitation. I managed to make it without throwing up, though I could’ve kissed the terra firma of Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
We went to the ruins at Tuluum, the site of the Mayan temple and city. Afterwards, a child of nine or ten tried to sell an embroidered handkerchief for ten pesos. That’s a dollar, which I knew, but I had some sort of brain fade and I thought that was ten cents. I kept offering her a quarter, and to make matters worse I offered to take multiple kerchiefs since I thought I’d offended her pride by overpaying. For dumb American tourists I’d wished she’d have said “One dollar”.
Day 6The ship is replete with little undiscovered nooks and crannies. This was our second cruise and I didn’t realize there was a little cigar haven, with lots of leather chairs and a calming, rich décor, a refuge from the frenzy of the promenade. It’s full of dark polished marble and Aztec imagery, which reminds of how ironic it is to be going to Mass at the Ixtapa Theatre, with its statues of Indian gods. It’s like how David made pagan Jerusalem the Holy Land and how Christians made pagan Rome the seat of Peter.
Earlier I’d relaxed in the hot tub – the early bird gets the worm and the hottub – listening to a Chieftains tune and watching the ocean beyond, like a vast blue moving sidewalk. It reminds me of spring break Ft. Lauderdale circa 1986, an age of constant drinking and no detectable inner life. One moment resounds with absurd clarity; standing by a pool that overlooked the ocean, the bright blue of the pool segueing to the deeper blue beyond. I had, not surprisingly, a beer in hand and Marty was nearby with the camera, ready to record for posterity my holding it aloft, like the Statue of Liberty carrying her torch, and the subsequent fall into the warm bosom of the still waters. To this day the sight of a pool next to the ocean awakens that memory. Sin was in the spring break air and I was pulled in equal and opposite directions like a wishbone. I wanted, naturally, to have it both ways.
I read a bit of McKeon’s book. His idea of exercise isn’t bad. He walks 2-3 miles smoking a cigar while saying the rosary before games. He matter of factly says that he prays and goes to church because it makes him feel good, like he can handle whatever challenges the day brings. His simple spirituality is heavy on petitions and gratitude and how “when God closes a door, he opens a window”.
I have a theory there’s more creativity and eccentricity in small towns and religious folks than in cities and the more secular. They say that saints are very dissimilar because they are more uniquely themselves, not putting on airs. McKeon seems eccentric in the right ways. Daily Mass is an eccentricity I suppose but more impressive is how nonchalant he is and was with respect to his career. In a profession with little security, he’s not concerned because he knows God will take care of him. He also did other eccentric things, and offers a host of them, like the time he sent a batter to the plate without a bat since the team wasn’t taking enough pitches. Or the time as a minor leaguer when he ran out ground out and continued to the foul pole in right field, climbing half way up. Perhaps eccentricity thrives in small towns and religious people because both possess more feelings of security.
Day 7 This is the last day, a drinkin’ day, a day to reflect and visit more parts of the ship. The only time I feel rich is when I’m buying drinks onboard. $4.85 for a Guinness? $6 for a rum runner? I must be rich to afford these prices.
I started out outside Two Poets Pub, listening to a violin player accompanied by two guitars. They were playing Hungarian waltzes and then “Moon River”, both having the hint of mourn appropriate to the last day of a cruise. A couple of elderly eastern European women happened by and are thrilled to hear the music. I can tell they are probably Hungarian because of their reaction to the music but also by their eyes and shape of their noses. One of them is thrilled to find a young couple dancing to the music of the Olde Sod, and rushes over to instruct but is taken aback when the girl suggests that she show her husband how to dance to this. It’s rare to see a babushka taken aback, and I smile. She says, “No, No, but you dance closer… Closer!” and proceeds with more of the impromptu lesson.
By 4pm the 25mph winds on the top deck, and the increasingly fragile sun combine to create a climate unfit for swim suits. The guy in front of me actually has a jacket on. A guy with a tall chef’s hat is carving some sort of ice sculpture on the pool deck below us and the crowd is appreciative. Cruises seem like a nice fit for those with obscure, non-utilitarian skills like ice sculpting.
I’m reading both Dugar’s “The Last Voyage of Columbus” and Bryson’s trip through Europe. While Dugar is sympathetic to Columbus, he takes cheap shots at the church like “luckily for Columbus, the Catholic Church wasn’t burning adulterers.” Bryson also made especial effort to say that the Church has done a tremendous amount of harm. But apparently no good. Dugard uses as his sources Durant and Tuchman, no friends of Christianity.
Now the sun has dipped under a bank of clouds and I’m freezing but because it’s a Caribbean cruise I really can’t be cold, can I? Never trust your feelings except when they’re right. The wind topples a near full rum runner; earlier I’d lost my FDNY cap to a wind gust while jogging around the outdoor track.
The end of a cruise is a fine time for multiple listenings of the Irish ballad “Kevin Barry”. It’s five pm – last drink o’ the trip and the ocean looks like a plowed field full of young crops made of sparkle. Or like white steeds galloping to the horizon. The sun rays in the distance emanating from the clouds would look corny in a painting. My head rests against the railing, soaking up the dying rays of this dying Gaul. The waves are lit as if from below, whitecaps tumulous as pregnant bellies constantly regenerating. The main glow is in the distance and I wonder if locals here in the Caribbean or residents of Southern California, where summer is perpetual, suffer a spiritual disadvantage since those in wintry climes understand the sun is to be shared, that her absence means she is giving succor to someone else. Do they lose the advantage of having to adapt to something larger than themselves or will they find it elsewhere?
It’s been nice to spend consecutive mornings with my wife. How rare! The weekends are the only possibilities and on Saturdays she goes to Weight Watchers and on Sundays to our respective churches. The end of the trip would not be uneventful. We were rushed to leave the cabin since the estimated time that Royal Caribbean would call our group was 8-9am but ended up being around 7:45. I looked in the safe at least twice, saw nothing, but it was at eye level and there’s a ledge and you have to feel inside it. Big mistake. I never use safes in hotels, perhaps trusting too much of the hotel cleaners, but my wife thought it best to have it in the safe. So we went through customs and all the rigamarole and we’re about to board the bus to the airport when I notice my wedding band is M.I.A. We found a busy Royal Caribbean rep and she radioed someone ship board and then she disappears. Ten, fifteen minutes later she came back with the ring and a smile!
Beautiful isle of the sea, Smile on the brow of the waters.
--George Cooper
Iguana at Tuluum
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LITTLE ROCK, AR--Taking Machiavelli's The Prince as his guide, Roger Bilderstrung is attempting to climb the ladder of blogger success.
