Alaskan Cruiseaphobia

By: Ralph Weinstein, Fiction | April 03, 2008 | Fiction

I didn’t want to go. God, how I didn’t want to go. I remembered cruises. A honeymoon cruise with my first wife, from L.A. to Honolulu, during the tumultuous Sixties. Something about sexual difficulty and the gray immanent fear of a future that looked like a gun barrel. Then an old guy dropped dead smoking a cigarette standing next to me on the deck, where we both escaped a terribly crowded after dinner dance floor, me temporarily, he permanently. A decade later, another cruise, to Mexico, with the very obviously pregnant woman who would become my second wife, together with my parents and my brother and sister.  My family is Jewish. That’s enough said on the anxiety scale. Anxiety is as Jewish as lox and bagels. Plus, there was a comely young shiksa also on that cruise, and for some unsound reason, she was attracted to me. Wherever I went she was there with the big blue-eyed stare like I was some kind of celebrity or something. The pregnant woman who would become my second wife did not fail to notice this, so when comely young shiksa sits next to me at a passenger get-together to tour the ship’s kitchen, pregnant woman who would become my second wife, not known for her sense of security and self-esteem in any month of her life, finally loses it and screams her rage at me quite publicly. Comely young shiksa, a lovely blonde with fabulous breasts and Marilyn Maxwell lips if memory serves, vanished like a wonderful dream when the alarm goes off. And I never did get to tour the kitchen.

No more cruises in this life, or so I thought. Then, out of the blue, Dan calls. A boyhood friend I hadn’t seen in forty odd years. I vaguely remembered him as a pompous pain in the ass. Some things don’t change. He sounds like an affected puerile fruitcake, a 62-year-old man using the expression “way cool” eleven times per paragraph, and so full of mawkish syrup about himself, his dogs, his wife and his grown children (in that order) I thought I’d puke into the receiver. I was fairly sure I never wanted to see Dan again. We had fun in the bad old days when we were fifteen, those rubber-burning joyrides in his father’s new l958 chromeboat Buick. Good memories remain. Why screw them up, I reasoned, by allowing this to go any further than one obnoxious phone call? Alas, reason is not the R. Weinstein mantra.

We decide to reunite in San Francisco, situated halfway between our respective homes. Dan is still planted in L.A. in the San Fernando Valley after all these years. I ran away from that wreckage ten years ago, live now in a remote corner of northeastern California near a town that has less population than a Tarzana bus stop. I have no idea what to expect when we, Barb and I, Barb being the latest and hopefully the last female companion of my life, enter the old restored hotel on Union Square Dan and his wife Linda have selected for the occasion. The desk clerk says, “Your friends are waiting for you in the restaurant”.

There they are. Dan rises to greet us. I’m amazed. He hasn’t changed much. He appears to be the same guy, grayer, heavier, flabbier, frailer with age of course, but didn’t his hands always shake when he was selling auto parts in his father’s Van Nuys store? Yep, the same tremor. Linda, to whom he has been married for four decades, (I want to ask her, Why?) is still the sweet, pert, pretty little thing I remember from high school. She looks like her father who I clearly recall being one of the genuinely warm and friendly adult faces of the time. This isn’t going to be so bad, I think. Then Dan orders another martini. And orders is the right word. He addresses the waiter imperiously, rudely, like the waiter is some kind of underling put on this earth to bow promptly to the pricks of the world. I’ve known other guys who pull this kind of shit with service people, my sister’s boorish ex-husband Harlan for one, and my reaction to these embarrassing scenes has always been the same: I want to disappear as quickly as a film cut.

Thank God this is going to be over in one day and one night, I’m thinking as we begin the deal. But you know how it is, the city in any case, uh, I mean The City, as effete Bay Area libs insist it spelled, can be an overwhelming distraction from minor emotional travail. The four of us jump in a cab. I feel the need to inhale surf mist in the bracing ocean air at Fort Point, to imagine cannons booming across the Golden Gate before there was a bridge. We can’t tour the Civil War era brick fortification (Security reasons, says the guard in his armored Hummer), but in this historic and hugely symbolic venue we can walk and talk, mostly the latter, because Dan has a bad ankle. We board a bus back to the hotel. We talk some more. About a cruise to Alaska Dan and Linda have planned, and wouldn’t it be great if Barb and Ralph could go too?  Why I didn’t reject the suggestion right then politely and firmly remains aloft with all the other mysteries that orbit my head like a cluster of blue moons. Maybe it was the great dinner that night at the Tadich (Since 1872) where the steamed clams and the petrale are the best, as are the waiters who have been there forever, at least two of whom I know very well from many years of patronage and banter across the bar. Dan was very quiet. I was feeling better.

It was April. The cruise was months away, in August. Then it was June. The cruise was getting closer. I was beginning to waver, thinking about canceling. Then I thought of Jim, who I’ve known at least as long as Dan. But for all the right reasons, Jim and I never lost contact with one another. I was best man when he wed his first wife forty years ago in Mexico City. I got so drunk before the wedding Jim had to help me into my tuxedo. You’d think it was me who was getting married. I believe I slept with one of his cousins after the ceremonies. All I remember is she was quite pretty and pale and she bit her nails down to the quick. Jim and his first wife divorced years ago. He is now married to Lovellen. They live and work in Orange County and I do not hold that against them a bit. Jim to me is what all best friends must be to each other, solace. Add that to the fact we always have a shitload of fun together and you understand why I called Jim and said, “Jim, Barb and I have booked an Alaskan cruise with Dan and Linda. I’m hoping, begging actually, you and Lovellen, come with us please, you’ll love the glacier calving and I need distraction, deflection from Dan, I know you don’t remember him well, but trust me, he’s a schmuck of nuclear proportions and you and I need to spend some together, it’s been too long.” God love him, Jim says yes.

August comes. Barb and I fly to Seattle from whence the ship, Holland America’s nine hundred and thirty five foot Oosterdam will embark with two thousand passengers and a crew of eight hundred plus the six of us on a two thousand nautical mile “Alaskan Explorer Cruise” of the waters of the southeastern Alaskan archipelago. We arrive a day early, as do Dan and Linda, to do some Seattle. Jim and Lovellen will meet us on the ship tomorrow. Dan and Linda have reservations at the Brooklyn Steak and Seafood House downtown. They say they loved it so much they ate there twice last time they were here. I’m skeptical. After all, this isn’t Brooklyn and Seattle is full of clueless white people who eat in trendy over-decorated restaurants and my experience in these places is to pay a lot of money for designer meals that, however they are pretentiously described on the menu and graciously served by urbane glib waiters and meticulously and artfully arranged on the plate, are just plain butt-ass mediocre. Fueling my skepticism is the afternoon Barb and I spend at Pike’s, Seattle’s old fish market. I see counters there where one can sit and order a beer and a fresh Dungeness crab the size of a vintage Cadillac’s hubcap steamed old Sicilian style, with the hepatopancreas still evident in the shell, laced with garlic butter. But I’m a good sport. We cab to the Brooklyn place. You guessed it:  Plain old butt ass mediocre, very expensive, and rooms full of apparently affluent people just seeming to enjoy the shit out of it. Where have standards gone, gone to graveyards every one.

Saturday morning. We bus it from our hotel in downtown Seattle, the Sheraton, with other dupes, whoops, I mean passengers, to the docks where the Oosterdam and three other cruise ships await embarkation. These are ships each ten stories high and longer than three football fields. If you have my disease, the mental illness that suggests two to three people are about all you can handle at once, you will understand that at this point I am wondering what the fuck I have gotten myself into. The cruise hasn’t even begun yet and I feel like I’m in the parking lot at a Raiders game in the midst of a tailgate party that has gone very wrong. In fairness, despite the throngs of passengers awaiting boarding, it’s mellower than that. The lines are huge, but they’re moving, controlled. People seem more dazed and confused than dangerous. The security checks are even more thorough than the airport’s. You are x-rayed. You are photographed. You are issued an ID card. Your credit card is imprinted. I look around at my fellow cruisers who probably represent a fairly accurate demographic portrait of America, from kids to the wheelchair set. Lots of obese people, including one woman with the proportions and roughly the same shape as an elephant seal, a human being who would seem to need a doubDanide toilet.

Finally aboard, I start to relax a little. The Oosterdam is so big it absorbs and disperses people to a remarkable degree. Barb and I find our stateroom located somewhere amidships on Deck 5. Alone at last. Then a loudspeaker blares. “ALL PASSENGERS WILL NOW ATTEND A CUMPULSORY LIFEBOAT DRILL. SECURE YOUR LIFEJACKETS TO YOUR PERSON AND REPORT TO YOUR LIFEBOAT STATION IMMEDIATELY”. Jesus, I think, this is a vacation? But of course these measures are necessary. I understand this. No one fails to remember the Titanic. Also, I’m wondering about Jim and Lovellen. Never saw them in the mob at the embarkation process. If Jim isn’t on board I’m outtahere no matter what it costs me. Ah, relief. I see his friendly face in a sea of faces on deck at the lifeboat drill. We embrace. I say, Jim, stay close to me buddy, I think I’m going to be all right but stay close, I may need counseling before this is over.
* * *
Our group of six meets in the buffet as the ship gets underway. I haven’t seen this much food at once since Fort Ord but they didn’t serve gravlaaks with capers and minced onions in the mess hall. The elephant seal woman is in the serving line directly in front of me. She turns and smiles at me as if to apologize she’s taking up the space of at least three normally proportioned people and gestures to that effect. She has a pleasant face. I feel compassion. I want to say, excuse me maam. I want to help you. I’m going to write down on a piece of note paper a reasonable low carbohydrate diet and an easy daily exercise regimen and give you a large caliber handgun to use on anyone who suggests you have your stomach stapled. Instead, I load my plate, pass on a dessert station that is the size of a French bakery and return to our table where Jim and Lovellen are getting their first dose of Dan doing his pretentious pontifical best to convince everyone he really isn’t a human cipher, a hole in the world. Barb is used to this by now. She is ignoring him. Ditto Linda. Jim, in his typical fashion, seems to be taking what is classic amateur tragicomedy with enviable equanimity. Only Lovellen, dignified intelligent lovely lady she is, an administrative executive at highly respected Children’s Hospital of Orange County, looks a little blanched.  I want to help Dan too. I want to say, Dan, I’ve heard your boring seventeen times now. Would it be possible for us to have conversation from now on more traditionally cadenced, like, you know, sometimes you actually listen to other people and then you respond reasonably without the over animated stand-up routine? But of course I can’t help Dan anymore than I can help the fat lady.

Shore excursions. Time to sign up for them well in advance because they fill up fast. The herd on board is in long lines again. Some of these activities are quite expensive but it doesn’t take long to get the idea: This is mass marketing and guess who the marks are? Dan and Linda opt for a helicopter tour of the glacier in Juneau. The rest of us think being on our own in Alaska’s capitol will be just fine. We’ve been on deck sunning, reading, and watching the emerald glory of the Inside Passage slide by for a whole day now. There is a huge crowd on the disembarkation docks in Juneau. Other cruise ships are in port here too. Hundreds are awaiting buses, ground transportation. A woman faints. Paramedics arrive. I look at Jim. He reads my mind. We’ve got to get out of here fast We run to a small tour van parked about a hundred yards away apparently awaiting to be engorged by a group. We slip the driver five bucks and implore him to take us to town immediately. He does. We take the tram to the top of 38l9-foot Mt. Roberts for superb views of the Gastineau Channel and a short hike in what is just a speck of the largest temperate rainforest in the world, the Tongass. We watch an elegiac video in the visitor’s center, a haunting portrayal of indigenousTlingit culture before the Russians and Christianity and fur traders and gold seekers and cruise ships showed up. This fecund land and the surrounding living sea was such a larder there is no word for starvation in their ancient language. The picture fills in further at the Alaska State Museum located at the edge of downtown where we get sorely needed sanctuary from the heavy traffic and the blare and the brain-deadening gauntlet of jewelry and souvenir stores stuffed with shoppers. Then back to the ship but not before reading this in Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams” while browsing in the museum bookstore:  “No culture has yet solved the dilemma . . .how to live a moral existence when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself . . . one must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.” All we can do, he writes, is try to lean into the light.
* * *
Connection is everything. Jim makes me realize that again. Together, we’ve shot gorgeous birds out of the sky. We raided a rival fraternity house, ripped off a couple of their precious heraldic beer steins. We’ve ridden off-road motorcycles foolishly, in a dangerous contemporary jousting game we invented called Sklang, object being to spin rear wheel and shower outmaneuvered opponent liberally with a rooster tail of rocks and dirt. We’ve cherry bombed mailboxes, and on one particularly memorable late summer afternoon, we shoplifted lobsters from the live tank at Gelson’s. There’s much more of course, but with his altar boy face and his impeccable manners and his charity (he raises funds for the hospital), you’d never guess Jim’s past is every bit as sordid as mine. Certainly Lovellen doesn’t know. She’ll never know. She doesn’t need to know. The sages say we are different from our former selves as any two people in the world are different from one another. I think the sages are dead wrong.

As happily anticipated, I’m spending much more time with Jim than with Dan. The six of us are together every night at Table 36 in the ship’s main dining room, but Dan is stunned speechless, even rendered nearly inert, by the amount of food Jim and I are consuming. We are each ordering all the appetizers and five or so entrees and sharing so we give each other a taste of everything. Dan, to his credit one night, orders a fifth of Aalborg aquavit and bottles of Carlsberg with which to chase freezing shots of Eric The Red’s favorite beverage, and so it is thereafter we feel like raiding an English coastal village. We settle for doing our level best to intimidate Kevin, our formally attired Oosterdam table host, who is a fine young man from Auckland doing his level best to keep us at bay. He errs only in showing us a photo of his girlfriend Oksana, to whom he is engaged. We inquire of her ceaselessly, her likes, her dislikes, her loyalty. Not once does his dignity crack, only that wonderful smile that tells us, unflappable these Kiwi chaps. So fortified, we retire to the casino to participate in one of mankind’s oldest and most perilous vices. Dan the accountant quite literally craps out in every sense of the term. The dumb shit exits early leaving some of his money still in play. We rescue it. Jim the investment specialist for one of America’s nastiest blue chip corporations gets the picture right away. You pray for the dice to roll a continuum of unlikely numbers before the most likely number, the killer seven, rears its ugly head. Jim says, hey, this seems like just what I do for a living every day, the odds of which are only slightly better. Damn if we both don’t win fifty bucks. Jim actually thinks I know how to play the game. I tell him, Here’s all I know, if someone gives you fifty bucks just for being a nice guy, you die of boredom. But win fifty bucks off this green velvet and you’re freaking. Goes to show you. We’re addicted to risk, in its many forms. The little woman will never understand.
* * *
Chunks of ice, some the size of small commercial buildings, calve from the towering six-mile wide face of Hubbard Glacier and crash thunderously into the sea in what seems like slow motion given the sheer scale of what we’re witnessing from several hundred yards away on Deck 9 of this 82,000-ton floating city. We’re cruising at a crawl in the terminus of Yakutat Bay beneath this massive wall of ice on a sea eerily calm and gray with glacial push and dotted white with slurry. The coastal mountains of southeast Alaska, the highest in the world, loom beyond, far higher in the pale sky. There is perspective here made even more overwhelming by the sight of another behemoth cruise ship in the bay that looks from a mile or two away in this awesome amphitheatre of the Ice Age to be the size of a child’s toy. How trite is it to observe we are but small players on this stage. It doesn’t matter how trite it is. A piece of the truth is a good message to receive now and then. I think it was later that afternoon as the ship was heading south to Sitka, I happened to glance out our stateroom window just in time to see a pod of Orcas rolling by in the silver light, their dorsal fins shining black a yard high and tumescent as two by fours, not like poor Willy’s fin gone flaccid with incarceration in Tankworld, courtesy of well-meaning human do-gooders who think this great top-of-the -food-chain toothed whale, who hunted Oligocene seas 27 million years ago, wouldn’t if it had the choice choose cat food rather than do ball tricks for a demented land-bound species who got here 27 million years later. I call Jim’s stateroom. Jim answers. I ask, did you see them? Yes, he says, I did. I want to ask him disturbing questions. But I don’t. We’re on vacation. We’re happy. We’re cruising.
* * *
Sitka. My dream in this old Russian capital is to have a Russian lunch. How about solianka, that traditional Russian soup made with beef and whatever’s leftover from yesterday? I remember it was always wonderful when I traveled in the motherland several years ago. My grandmother was born and raised near Kiev. I remember her cooking, would give anything to have a taste of it now. The bad news in Sitka is the Russians are long gone, sold the whole 600,000 square miles of Alaska in l867 to the U.S. for $7,200,000, the best American real estate deal since the Louisiana Purchase sixty four years earlier. We get some mediocre beet borscht in a local mediocre restaurant crowded with cruisers, but that’s it. No caviar, no blinchiki, no tolcheniki, no galushki, no kapustnyak and of course no solianka. Whatever. Dan and Linda have signed up for a tram tour of the town. That bad ankle again. Jim, Lovellen, Barb and I opt for a nature walk in Sitka National Historic Park, led by a German guide by the name of Wolf Corduan who is married to a Tlingit Indian woman. Wolf tells us her family wanted to know what clan he was descended from, the Eagle or the Raven, before they would consent to the marriage. Genealogy records were consulted. When they got down to Attila The Hun they figured he would be a good provider and so he has been with children and much happiness over the years. An amateur botanist of sorts, Wolf points out everything from lichens to a thousand year old Sitka spruce. Crossing a bridge over the Indian River in the park we gaze down at thousands of spawning Pink salmon lined up in the water like legions of soldiers who’ve come to do their final duty. Last stop, a look inside the vestry of St. Michael’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral in town. There’s a charge, but we have shirt stickers indicating it’s part of our tour. Whoops, mine is gone, lost somewhere on the park walk. An elderly sourpuss female docent buys my excuse but only with an obvious grudge. I want to tell her, Look, I’m a Russian Jew. He was our Boy before you turned him into a fairy tale.  But I don’t. Like I said, we’re happy, we’re cruising.
* * *
At sea the Oosterdam consumes 257,000 gallons of fuel, more than 300 tons of gasoline and diesel, every day. With the ship docked again for excursions in Ketchikan, I feel like we’re doing the world a favor. Dan and Linda decide to just walk around Alaska’s fourth largest city (pop 14,000). Doesn’t sound like such a bad idea because a century of fishing, logging and mining heritage here seems less subducted by the usually crass commercial overload of a cruise ship port.  Jim, Lovellen, Barb and I opt for a combination boat/floatplane tour of Misty Fjords National Monument, a 2.2 million acre preserve of sheer granite cliffs that rise thousands of feet above narrow sea lanes scoured by glaciers eons ago. It goes well. We see harbor seals, bald eagles, stare in awe at stunning vertiginous beauty from the deck of the tour boat. Additionally we’re supposed to be treated to an aerial view of Misty Fjords via return trip to Ketchikan by floatplane. But it gets too misty; the planes are grounded by fog. I glance over at Jim. We hoped to have a look around town, but a slow boat ride back is scotching that possibility. The Oosterdam is departing promptly at 1:00 pm. And we’ve learned when they say promptly they mean it. Our idea is to purchase some fresh local seafood (deep water Alaskan prawns?) and sneak it to our table for an unscheduled hors d’oeuvre. We’ve already been told by a crewmember this is strictly forbidden, liability reasons of course, but there’s always Kevin, our accommodating Kiwi mate. He’ll figure it out. When we get back to town, with only minutes to spare, Jim and I speed walk to a Ketchikan sea fare establishment of some renown interestingly called Good God run by a Portland, Oregon transplant, Everett Bryant. Everett tells us he came up here on vacation twenty years ago, never went back. Phoned his boss, told him I’m done, outtathere, mail me my final check. He looks like a very happy man. But no prawns today. We opt for a couple of small jars of salmon roe caviar, ikura the Japanese call it. Small jars, very sneakable, no need to endanger Kevin’s employ. We rush to the docks. Busy crewmen are in the process of hoisting the gangplanks. They look at our hasty approach like we’re errant Martians. But they pause momentarily to allow us to scamper aboard. Once aboard we hear a chilling announcement on the loudspeaker. We are being summoned brusquely. Call the ship’s office immediately. We do. An all business female voice says icily, a touch wearily, Thank you, sir. That’s it. No admonition. No glad to have you back aboard. Just thank you, sir. I understand. They’re trying to control two thousand other schmoes on this voyage and we’re not making it any easier on them.
* * *
Victoria, British Columbia. We’re not in Alaska anymore, Toto. This is it, our final port of call, and we only have 6:30 pm to midnight to get a dose of this provincial Canadian capital that looks and feels distinctly British, which isn’t all bad. Another madhouse scene at the disembarkation docks as hundreds scramble anxiously for buses, taxis, jitneys, minivans, anything to begin enjoying a truncated Victorian evening. The six of us are initially in trouble because we’re too many for a taxi and heaven forbid we join a group. Saved by Driver Dave and his white l969 Daimler limo in which we’re a perfect fit. Dave asks where do we want to go? Doesn’t matter, we say, just far away from this mob with as much alacrity as you can muster. Dave immediately gets the idea. Minutes later we’re treated to lovely leafy quiet neighborhoods lined with sterling examples of Victorian and Edwardian architecture. We have a look at Craigdarroch Castle, built by a wealthy coal baron for his wife, a striking example of what too much money can do. Then a stroll in the rose gardens of the Government House, the Lieutenant Governor’s residence, where we marvel at the view of the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula piercing the sky across the Strait of Juan De Fuca shimmering in a vermilion sunset.

Time is pressing. We’re hungry. Dave steers the Daimler downtown. The Parliament Buildings and the famous Empress Hotel are lit beautifully as evening descends. Dave, where would you suggest we have dinner? I’ve been pushing for a place in Chinatown, Victoria’s being one of the oldest in the West. The girls are in the mood for something more Caucasian. Lovellen has been accusing me of late as having an anti-white bias in this regard. She’s right, but Dave is a diplomat. First we cruise Chinatown, which looks wonderful, roast ducks hanging in restaurant windows, the redolence of thousands of years of cooking wisdom in the cool night air, and then we pass a number of traditional seafood places along a dockside street. What the hell, I think, how bad can something here be? We spot an obviously old establishment called Chandler’s. How about it Dave?  You’ll love it, he says. In we go. The menu at least looks good, pricey, but the selections are tempting. We order copiously, several appetizers including scampi, calamari, clams, oysters raw and Rockefeller. I order steamed Dungeness crab, remembering the big beauties at Pike’s. Can I get the hepatopancreas?, I ask the waiter. Oh no, he replies, we used to do that for some of our Asian customers, but no longer, liability you know. Yeah, I know. I know plenty. The food starts arriving and I can tell what everyone else, especially Jim, is thinking. Butt-ass mediocre. All of it. My crab arrives. It’s undersize. It’s dry. It isn’t fresh.

I think to myself, what a fine final celebratory evening this is, as we cab it back to the ship. Our sextet looks as glum as groupers. Not so the Victorians on the bustling downtown streets, however. The nightspots look lively. There’s music in the air. A sexy young girl is dancing alluringly at an intersection. At first I think, not so different from nighttime revelry in any comparable-size city in the U.S. Yet there is a difference. Something is distinctly missing. Then it occurs to me. There’s no malevolence apparent.  People seem calm, mannerly, under control. As if to validate that impression, I don’t see police presence anywhere. I ask our cabbie about it. Not much of a crime problem here, right? Oh, he says, things are changing somewhat, what with the growing influx of drugs, but essentially you know we Canadians are quite obedient. I believe that’s precisely the word he used, obedient.

Suddenly then, it’s over. We say our goodbyes on the ship that night because we all know early tomorrow morning is going to be a disembarkation zoo in Seattle. Over a nightcap, Jim asks me if I’m really going to write a story of this experience. I tell him if I can make any sense of it at all, I will. The question is, did I? You can be the judge of that.

Bookmarks: Page 1 of 1 pages