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| S.S. Mariposa |
Nothing Can Go Wrong was published in hardcover and enjoyed only a single printing. The following year a paperback edition came out that had two editions, October 1982 and March 1983. Then, in October of 1983 he wrote a newspaper piece on cruising that appeared in the October 9 edition of the New York Times Magazine, titled “Afloat, But Not at Sea,” which is reprinted below. Special thanks to Trap of Solid Gold reader David Blankenhorn for transcribing this.
Afloat, But Not at Sea
JOHN D. MacDONALD is the author of the Travis McGee novels, of which the most recent is Cinnamon Skin (Harper); he has also published, with Capt. John Kilpack, a book about a long cruise, Nothing Can Go Wrong (Harper).
By JOHN D. MacDONALD
One time, off the North Cape of Norway, we stood amidships at the port rail of the promenade deck of the old Mariposa and watched the sun slant at a weird flat angle toward the horizon. We stood in a wind so cold and so strong that the tassel on the Norwegian wool cap that Dorothy had bought stood unwaveringly out behind her as if frozen into position. The bottom of the sun touched the horizon, moved along it, and then began to slant up again, in an Arctic parody of dawn.
I laughed, because at that moment the world was so strange it was grotesque. Laughing let the cold wind in. It blew my cheeks fat and stung my teeth. You know the feeling of unreality: What on earth am I doing here? At this moment in time, at this spot on our ball of mud.
If you are jaded by traveling by land or air, the thought of a sea voyage may amuse you. I myself have traveled 156,000 nautical miles on ships, and, if time permits, I will run up as many more again. I am fond of this mode of travel because, primarily, it saves a lot of packing and unpacking and allows one to avoid the broad, plastic, glassy squalor and the institutionalized anxiety of international airports, along with the drugged ennui of jet lag.
But there are also frustrations, limitations and random idiocies connected with cruising that the habitue will wearily endure and the newcomer will observe with disbelief and dismay. In what follows, I shall describe some of these. And, if you are a newcomer to cruising - and particularly if you are thinking about a long cruise on several oceans - I shall try to answer some of the questions you forgot to ask your travel agent.
The first rule for newcomers: If you can afford longer than a three-day cruise, do not try to find out what cruising is all about by going on a three-day cruise. The people who go on them are almost all uniformly young (except for the kindly uncles who take their nieces on vacation), loud, energetic and determined to go without any sleep at all for the entire cruise. They drink and sing and go barefoot. These are not crimes. Trying to use the same dance floor with them, however, is like trying to slip, unnoticed, into the Los Angeles Rams backfield. They butt their cigarettes into the rugs, engage in occasional fisticuffs and take 500 photographs a day of each other in front of ship fittings and slot machines that have just paid off.
Passengers and crew need at least two weeks to settle into the routines of shipboard and get used to each other's eccentricities. On three-day cruises the dining-room waiters are harried, sullen, insolent and unlikely to bring you what you ordered; the waiters and captains and barmen and deck stewards are all obviously wishing they had been on leave when this job was scheduled.
A two-week cruise is really the minimum for learning whether or not you like cruising. You can go from San Francisco to Glacier Bay and back - or from Copenhagen to the North Cape and Spitzbergen and back - or one way to London and Copenhagen, or Fort Lauderdale to Athens, or Athens to London, or Los Angeles to San Juan, or, in a little more than two weeks, from Rio de Janeiro to Fort Lauderdale. Most lines now have a return air-fare allowance, which deadens, somewhat, the sting of paying for the cruise tickets.
What kind of a stateroom should you get? The cruise ships, with the exception of the Queen Elizabeth 2 (and that only on trans-Atlantic crossings), are one-class ships. Whether you are in a penthouse suite or an inside cabin on D deck, you have access to all the public areas, order from the same menu and are provided with the same entertainment. And pay the same amount for your drinks. The QE2 discriminates only to the extent that people in the most expensive staterooms and suites eat in a different dining room.
Otherwise, everyone is treated almost the same. It is simple logic that the stewards and stewardesses become less experienced the closer you get to the waterline. And the chap in charge of the dining room is going to know which cabin you have when he makes the table assignments - and some areas of every seagoing dining room are less desirable than others. But these are minor differences. Whatever kind of room you have, you can get room service day and night. You will not be coddled the same way people were on the great old ships - the Queen Mary, the Bremen, the Normandie - but you will get more personal attention than you could expect in a first-class hotel.
It is silly to generalize about nationalities, but after cruises that add up to about seven circumnavigations of the globe, we have found that, on balance, the people who wait on you in any capacity, from deck steward to barmaid, and do so with a certain amount of pleasure, and who are aware of you as individuals, are the Italians, Latins, Portuguese, French and Turks. On our most recent cruise our two table waiters were Italian, and once we were acquainted, the four of us were in some pleasant conspiracy to find the very best of food and drink in spite of the whims of the galley chefs and hotel managers.
But too often the potential passenger thinks of life on cruise ships as being an unspeakable elegance of Champagne, caviar and ballroom dancing. It isn't. Take Champagne. Unless you have the wine steward bringing the stuff to your table at $24 to $35 a pop, all you get is what you can take on at one of the captain's receptions, where too few harassed waiters try to serve too many thirsts. If you have the agility of a broken-field runner and the voice of a hog caller, you might get one of those little shallow glasses filled enough times to give you a remote little buzz.
The most dubious item on any cruise menu is the so-called fresh fish, which appears soon after leaving a port. Seldom do the purchasing people buy fish ashore, especially if the ship visits the port rarely. The fish that you get aboard ship is generally something from Scandinavia, deep frozen for so long that it can vie with glacial mastodon meat, and has the same taste as kitchen curtains.
The sheer quantity of food stowed aboard affects the quality of preparation. The Royal Viking Star, for example, is not a giant ship: 28,000 tons, 674 feet long. On its 1983 Pacific cruise, it left California with 480 tons of food; after 30 days cruising, the executive chef's computer printout showed that, among other things, the passengers had already consumed 3,870 dozen eggs, 19,700 pounds of meat, 18,600 bottles of beer, 1,330 bottles of Champagne and 680 pounds of peanuts. For those of mathematical bent, there were about 500 passengers aboard.
Some rules for surviving meals at sea: Avoid ethnic foods when the ethnic is other than the kitchen staff. Don't order anything you can't pronounce. Don't eat everything in sight just because you have paid for it. Clothes that have ceased to fit take the pleasure out of dining. Ask your waiter what looks good. When something is in too short supply to be put on the menu, it is often very good indeed. Like papaya.
A long cruise gives you a chance to observe the strange fads and fancies of the human condition. Think of this: You are part of a group of 600 people, most of whom have come aboard in pairs, as on Noah's Ark. They have come from all over the world. Now that long cruises are increasingly segmented, you can have 150 Australians getting on in Sydney, or 100 Germans in Hamburg. But the majority of the passengers on almost all cruises will be your fellow Americans. In the shoreside terminals where you wait to come aboard, you look at all these strangers with the same curiosity and suspicion with which they regard you. You look at the clothes, the deportment, the carry-ons, the demeanor. You listen to the accents. You wonder what most of them are doing on the same cruise you selected.
Cruise passengers are separated from the artifacts of their identity - house, car, circle of friends, club membership - and dumped into an unlikely environment that attempts to amuse them even as it glides from here to there. There is a useful word in Spanish that refers to the habit of a certain kind of bull in the ring: This is a bull that has begun to feel uncertain, and so he will locate his querencia, a space in the bull ring where he feels most secure. He will make his stand there, and when the matador manages to dislodge him from this station, he will make a single charge and then return to the querencia.
So it is with cruise ship passengers. The cruise is nothing like what they expected. They cannot readily identify the social, financial or educational status of their fellow passengers. And so they find corners where they feel safe. Whole groups find places they like better than other places, and they use hats, scarves, purses, books and programs to save the nearby chairs for their chums. In this manner they create a smaller society in which they can feel secure - a society small enough to be comprehended.
Pecking orders are established, bores identified, boors avoided. The booze people stake out the bar stools they like best, and the deck walkers circle endlessly around the promenade deck, past the deck-chair people, the ones who have brought a thick book to read and the ones who sleep, jaw agape, looking uncomfortably dead.
On a long cruise, or on a middle cruise in a series of short ones, expect several things to be broken, and in that way you will not suffer disappointment. On a recent cruise on a five- star vessel (in both the Fielding and Fodor ratings) three out of the five automatic washing machines in the laundry room gave up the ghost and the waffle machine quit early on, so that though they had waffles on the menu every morning, there were in fact no waffles at all. The air-conditioning system went quite mad for a time, creating areas of stifling heat and tooth- chilling cold. A pressure hose broke and all the toilets quit and could be flushed only by filling wastebaskets with water in the tub or shower and upending them into the bowls.
And so on.
What you have to remember is that a large ship is a very complicated mechanism. When it is trying to be a ship and at the same time be a hotel, a chain of saloons, a lecture hall, a health farm, a country club and a flock of nightclubs, only extraordinary pre-planning and superb management can keep the whole top-heavy thing running like a $1,000 watch. Pre- planning and good management are a couple of the things they don't have too much of. Docking presents its own problems. At last your ship comes into port. It is made fast to the long pier, lines taut, tin rat- guards in place, gangways lowered. The big engines are turned off, and it is dead against the pier, like some huge slain animal. It is now at the mercy of the ant-swarms of bureaucrats, the customs and immigration officials, the port agents, the vendors of this and that. The big ship is far from home and helpless - it is at the mercy of the venal, the greedy and the mischievous.
The leverage is, of course, clearance. ''Be very very nice to our civil servants, Captain, or it will take a long long time to clear this ship and your passengers are going to get very angry at you.''
On short cruises in limited areas, such as the Caribbean and the Greek Islands, these matters tend to get worked out because the particular ships are in port so often. There are many ports in the Caribbean area, from Nassau down to La Guaira, and if one port gets too greedy and obstructive, it is crossed off the list, and the merchants ashore whip their officials into line.
Recently we left a cruise ship in Kowloon, Hong Kong, tied up to the big pier there that adjoins a glossy shopping center of hundreds of shops offering treasures from all over the world. The officials had mixed emotions. They didn't want to clear the ship so quickly they'd lose their self-respect, but they were under pressure from the shopkeepers to let the buying begin. The solution was to delay clearance for a long unnecessary time but let the passengers wander off regardless, unstayed by gangway guards.
The compartmentalization of ships services is another point at issue. On all large passenger ships you will usually find a shore tour office and a shore tour director. You will find a cruise office, to advise you about future trips, make reservations and so on. You will find a purser and a hotel manager and various other people behind the big counter where you put your goodies in locked boxes, ask for cabin phone numbers, buy stamps and cash checks.
All of these people have a home office counterpart, and apparently the home office people do not keep each other informed any more than do the ones afloat.
Because of this strange lack of communication, a year and a half ago a well-known passenger vessel went on a cruise around Africa, arranged in such a way that the shore tour people could not book a shore tour to an African game farm. And so the cruise was a failure, the ship traveling far below capacity. Such stupidity has to be seen and experienced to be believed.
Actual physical layout is another area in which lack of communication within the cruise lines shows plainly. For example, the Royal Viking Star was ''extended'' a few years ago, an additional 93 feet added so that up to 720 passengers could be accommodated at one sitting. The advertisements speak of all the wonderful big windows in the main dining room - which for some obscure Norwegian reason they call the ''restaurant.'' In all of that dining room, the layout provided for only eight (8) window tables for two. And the ship boasts 19 very expensive suites, usually occupied by couples who can afford them and who expect, after presenting themselves with a green handshake to the maître d'hôtel, to get one of those tables as their God-given right. Whoever designed the layout could not have conspired more effectively to create manic-depression among the dining-room staff.
One thing cannot be blamed on the lines, the ships or the people. But it can be a disappointment. Unless you go far from any land mass - such as from Honolulu to Yokahama - you will be sailing on a gray-green sea under an oyster-colored haze. Paul J. Weitz, the commander of the first flight of the Challenger, reported that, ''Unfortunately, this world is rapidly becoming a gray planet.''
And, near the land masses - such as through the canals, the Mediterranean, along all coasts - there is no longer pure blue sky and dancing blue sea, the way it looks in the posters and the cruise pamphlets. In some places - Bombay harbor, Hong Kong, Venice, Amsterdam - you begin to get the feeling you are in a kind of eternal twilight, no matter what time of day it is. This twilight has an odd brassy sheen to it, a look of chemicals and a smell of fuel and solvents. Perhaps it is the twilight of a world, a winding down of our time and our place in the history of the galaxy.
But, so what, you can still get a sunburn on deck, perhaps an even more violent one than you would get had you the direct sunlight to warn you. I am not an expert on tan. My skin turns red, blisters and falls off. I am a hat person.
Finally, when you take your cruise, do not expect to be told very much by those folks up there who run the ship. On every ship they have a public address setup so designed that a message can be sent to every area of the ship, or to the public areas only, or to the crew areas only.
A good and rare captain will break in now and then and say, ''This is the captain speaking. We are coming up on some gray whales, a pod of them a mile or so off the port bow.'' Or: ''That ship passing to starboard is a new Russian container ship on her first voyage.'' Or: ''Off the starboard bow you can begin to make out the first sight of Cabo San Lucas. We'll stay close as we can to give you a good look.'' But no captain has ever told us enough. There were always things we saw that puzzled us which were never explained.
As I said, however, we will take more cruises in the years ahead. We will complain bitterly about the broken doohickeys, the rotten weather, the singer who can't carry a tune in a bucket, the drinks that seem to get tinier and more expensive every trip we take . . . But we will keep on boarding because it is the last good game in town.
Why? Not many months ago, Dorothy and I walked forward into a stiff, warm wind, up to the bow rail of the promenade deck of a cruise ship heading through the Torres Strait en route from Australia to Bali. The moon was almost full, the sea luminous. We could see all the navigation lights, near and far, and we could watch the small lighted buoys appear quite suddenly after having been far away for a long time, sweeping by us, bobbing astern. It was a magical two hours traversing tricky seas explored by brave men long ago. That warm night lasts forever in memory.
And so we shall see you aboard. You and I will regard each other with deep suspicion, circle like new kids in the schoolyard and maybe end up friends. Some of the very best we have, we found on the white ships.
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