Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I crane my neck around. In the seat directly behind mine sits an elderly man swaddled in clumps of wool
blankets. His eyes are closed. He isn't moving. Then suddenly the blankets rise up with great force. His
mouth gapes open. And there's the sound! I'd never imagined it could be produced by a human being!
It is an atomic sort of snoring, with a relentless rhythm. One deafening blast is followed by another, over
and over. I lie awake picturing the awful things I would like to do to this old man's trachea.
When a ferry employee making the rounds ducks his head into the room around 2:00 a.m., another sleep-
less passenger—having reached the limits of his patience with the snorer—unloads with a salvo of primal
anger. “This man is snoring so loud!” he shouts, pointing his finger toward the heaving blankets. The ferry
worker shrugs and makes it clear there is nothing he can do.
Frustrated, the angry man shouts, “It is also smelling!” Which is true. Many shoes are off. The air is
thick with the odor of feet and there's no sign of a ventilation system down here. Again, the ship employee
shrugs. When he turns and leaves, a sudden roll of the ferry slams the door behind him with a percussive
force. It briefly stirs the snorer—but within a few seconds he's settled back into his groove, louder than
before.
It's time to break out my secret weapon, which involves two ingredients. The first ingredient is a small
bottle of scotch, bought from our cargo freighter's slop chest, that I have been saving for a special occasion.
The second ingredient is a small bottle of Valium that I brought from home for just this sort of emergency.
Let me pause here to pay tribute to Valium and its many useful applications for the traveler. It's perfect
when you can't fall asleep and need to tune out the bestial snorer in your midst. Also handy when you're
nervous about missing your train or ferry connection. Or you can just use it to take the edge off the after-
noon when you're lying out on a fo'c'sle.
Within minutes of downing the pills and chasing them with liquor, I am feeling no pain. The loud snores
float off into the ether. I'm so relaxed, and so
not
fitting into this chair, that I slink down to the floor and
melt into the space between our row of seats and the row in front of us. This position puts my face adjacent
not only to the filthy carpet, but also to the snoring man's stockinged feet—which reek of a particularly
fierce strain of toe jam.
No matter. I am in a haze of pills. Soon after, I am in a deep sleep.
WE'RE awakened at 9:00 a.m. by an announcement over the ferry's loudspeaker. It's the voice of an eastern
European woman, I presume Estonian.
“Hi, keedz,” she says, profoundly bored. “Now ees facepainting in cheeldren's area.” Her tone straddles
the line between droning indifference and mild hostility.
I rouse myself from my Valium stupor. Most of our cabinmates are already awake, and farting. It occurs
to me that this is the worst room I have ever been in.
Leaving our packs behind (there's nowhere else to put them, so we just have to pray that nobody steals
them), we climb several flights to the ship's main deck. The sunlight here is blinding, after all the time
we've just spent holed up in a fluorescent-lit cave. We find a pair of seats in front of a window looking out
across the water.
The ship left the dock four hours ago. We're now cruising along at a relatively speedy—for a ship—35
mph. But we've still got more than twenty hours to go before we get to Finland.
A small child scurries past. A few desultory streaks of facepaint wobble across his cheeks. Rebecca is
inspired to do a quick impression. “Hokay, keed,” she says, eyes half closed, one hand waving a pretend
cigarette. She halfheartedly slaps at the nose of an imaginary toddler. “There ees paint. Now you leave.”
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