Brisbane to Los Angeles - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 104

Across the room, I spot the only two passengers aboard the ship who are younger than Rebecca and me.
I've been curious about them the whole time, as I've seen them around the bars and restaurants and at the
evening shows. They're in their early twenties, pretty obviously gay, and even more obviously rich. The
skinny one is handsome, with twinkling eyes and pants that seem tighter than is medically advisable. The
pudgy one wears loafers whose buttery leather, even from thirty feet away, smells pungently of boarding
schools, country clubs, and inexhaustible trust funds.
“What's the deal with those two?” I ask Max.
“ Yeah, those guys,” he says. “They're a couple. The rumor is the fat one is the heir to a huge fortune and
he and his boyfriend just ride cruise ships all year round. They never work, or spend a day in the regular
world. Come on, let's go say hi.”
Max leads us over and introduces us. “I hear you guys really like cruise ships,” I say, with about four
quarts of rum on my breath. “I'm curious—what is it about them that appeals to you?”
“Oh, we just enjoy it,” says the skinny one.
“It's relaxing,” says the pudgy one.
And with that, they give a silent, nearly imperceptible, and yet unmistakable signal that the conversation
is done. We follow Max back to the bar.
“It's really hard to talk to them,” says Max, apologetically. “They treat the nonrich as another species.
They're curious about us, but they don't understand us, and ultimately they can't be bothered with us.”
Social chasms aside, I'm appalled that anyone would choose to spend his days floating in a cruise ship
bubble. That goes not just for these two young dudes, but for the retired couples on board who take five or
six cruises a year. They wear sweatshirts and windbreakers emblazoned with the logos of the other cruise
ships that they've been on. They openly refer to themselves as “hard-core cruisers” (a vaguely pornograph-
ic locution I take pains to avoid) and claim they're never happier than when they're at sea on one of these
bobbing wedding cakes.
Living as a hard-core cruiser would quickly prod me into suicidal urges. Just a few days ago, sitting out
on our balcony on a moonless night, I found myself tempted—in an abstract way—to tip over the railing
and let the inky Pacific envelop me. It's strange, but the ocean seems to call to you in moments of spiritual
emptiness. It offers an escape into something so incomprehensibly enormous that your own petty troubles
are small and meaningless by comparison.
“I know exactly what you mean,” says Max, when I tell him about my dark night of the cruise ship soul.
“There's a numbing quality to being on a cruise. It starts to drive you batty.”
“It's a way to slowly, comfortably die,” Rebecca chimes in, bolstering her point by waving her drink at
all the white hair and wrinkled faces in the room.
She's right. The elderly people on board are very obviously fading into the sunset. Each day of pamper-
ing aboard the Mariner is another painless step closer.
And now we're starting to get at what so disturbs me about cruises. It's that cruise ships are, fundament-
ally, a lie. A charade.
When airplanes stole passenger ships' reason for being, the ships had to reinvent themselves. The ocean
liner companies scrambled for answers. Cunard, the proud shipping name behind the Queen Mary s and the
Queen Elizabeth s, changed its slogan to “Getting There Is Half the Fun”—implicitly acknowledging that
the getting there, while perhaps fun, took twenty times longer than it did on an airplane. Ships were forced
to pitch themselves as a more romantic, less convenient option.
Eventually, all pretense of functionality got dropped. And thus was born the cruise ship. Most people on
board are literally going in a circle, embarking and disembarking at the same place. The ship may look like
one of those old-time passenger liners—the kind that took people where they needed to go. But a cruise
isn't a form of transport. It's a way to kill time.