After driving for six hours; accidentally almost-spraying a parking lot attendant with my windshield wipers; nearly running over one of the five passengers in our mini-van; forking over $85 to park in an empty parking lot; and wandering through baggage check in a stream of 2,000+ vacationers, I stepped onboard the Carnival Fantasy.
I had never been on a true, collegiate-stereotype “spring break” before – I had never been on a cruise ship either. My only frame of reference was David Foster Wallace’s literary essay, sardonically titled “On a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.” As you might gather, he doesn’t think too highly of cruises, and the essay details his many reasons why. He goes on for 50 pages, bemoaning the crush of middle-aged flesh and manufactured pleasure. “There’s something about a mass market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad,” he writes. “It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die.”
Doesn’t exactly sound like a great way to vacation, but there I was, floating into the Caribbean with my closest friends. Determined to relax, I got to work:
I ordered appetizers of crab cakes and chilled cucumber soup as if they were glasses of water. I saw a bad comedian mime masturbation and make drunk people laugh. An achingly beautiful Macedonian crew member named Spasia smiled at me every morning and night, and a truly genuine man, a Philippine server named Fernando, served me cake and ice cream whenever I wanted it. For midnight snacks, we got peanut butter and jelly sandwiches room serviced to our door.
On the top deck of a 70,367 ton boat, I lay in the sun, sipped rum and read a book; on the white sands of Nassau in the Bahamas, I lay in the sun and listened to the locals hawking cigars, weed, rum-filled coconuts and scarves. In Freeport, I lay in the sun – and realized I was sunburnt.
On my last night, I gambled $20 and got down to my last four bucks, only to hit on roulette twice and walk away with $40 in my pocket. This was after I puked tequila and half a portobella mushroom into a tiny toilet in our even tinier cabin, making it the greatest puke and rally of my life.
In all these things, I searched for the unbearable sadness that Wallace noted. I found it in the Bahamian locals who hustled a living from the horde of Americans that invaded their beaches. I found it, too, in the crew who worked 10-12 hour shifts seven days a week – for $50 a month. This sadness was heavy, and I will not soon forget the true cost of my vacation at sea.
But for the most part, I found that my cruise was the best week of my life because of the people, the close friends I spent it with; perhaps Wallace’s experience was so singularly miserable because he spent his cruise alone, mired in himself.
One thing he had right, though, was the sense of confronting one’s own death. It came swift and unexpected in the moments spent gazing at vast open water. The swaying of the ship and the sounds of naughty grandma competitions and the beaches full of spring breakers from around the country … these memories will fade and die, inevitable as the sun and its sinking. The individual ego I live in is small and weak and selfish, and it, too, will disappear with the tide.
But the feeling is not unbearable, not for me. How liberating, to recognize that there is no such thing as “I” or “one” (for to have “one” is to have something “other”); to look upon the ocean at dusk, when the horizon is no more, and wonder at the incredible dependency between sea and sky; to contemplate the togetherness of a boat and the water it floats on.
Even the best experiences of pleasure – in this case, the best week of my life – are merely momentary vibrations that begin and end, crests and troughs of an endless wave that rolls us onward. But if there’s one thing I learned at sea, it’s to embrace the inevitability of endings. Just as certain are the beginnings that follow.
R.J. Vogt is a senior in College Scholars and can be reached at [email protected].
