Today at sea. Passing St Lucia on the starboard side. I'm sleepy. Drowsy. On that Kroger brand of Dramamine. Taken this morning around dawn. The ship groaned and creaked, starboard to port and back. Sunrise may have draped the morning sky with a coating of yellow stringent, but I could not tell, our two portholes hidden behind a heavy drape. So dark. A sleeping in kind of day. No ports of call. No excursions. Just cruising the sea. Sails full. Sea smudged with small white caps. I had a massage, Swedish style. My masseuse was a young, short, athletic looking South African woman with rough scratchy hands and her hair pulled back in a ponytail. At lunch, I overhear two couples at the next table talking about the other Windstar cruises. Wind Spirit. Wind Star. Smaller 100 person cruise ships. In the Mediterranean. And this ship, the Wind Surf, carrying 300 passengers, cruises there in two weeks, done with the Caribbean.
A realtor from Dallas yesterday complained to me about how this cruise was too big compared to the other Windstar cruises. I’m thinking to myself – any cruise is too big for me. I hear from the Pittsburgh couple, Don and Becky, about the 5,000 person cruises on Carnival or Royal Caribbean. Ships eight, nine, ten stories tall. Small cities afloat with tiered auditoriums, multiple casinos, people in lines at buffets, comedy clubs - I cannot imagine a much less desirable thing.
The El Paso couple Roger and Carol, don't much like this cruise. He is an employment attorney in his late 40’s, thinning hair, Texas twang, and Carol is his trophy wife, a Mexico native, very pretty, who wears black bikinis and large stylish sunglasses. Roger complains about there being too little to do on this cruise compared to the big cruises. He didn't like Tunisia or Morocco either. All men there, very few children or women visible in the streets. Kind of scary. He thought Mayreau looked sketchy yesterday, where litter scattered dry hillsides and dark skinned men stood in the shades of doorways. When Kim and I walked there, we watched two puppies clamber over each other in the crackling grass, tumbling and playing, while momma dog strolled here and there with her teats hanging low with milk.
Don (our resident smoker, non-drinker, concrete contractor and schmooze master) and his wife Carol, newly annointed empty nesters from Pittsburgh, ate lunch with another couple in this "sketchy" open air restaurant on Mayreau, saying they ate delicious fresh grilled lobster probably caught that morning. That sounded great but I hoped they wouldn’t come down with food poisoning. Kim and I strolled up and down the single concrete lane in Old Wall village on Mayreau, and at the mountain peak, not far from a fairly new and beautiful Catholic church facing west and above the sea, a tall lanky woman, her girls playing behind her in their school uniforms, asked if Kim and I could donate to a local fundraiser for the church, showing us a sign up sheet just like fundraising sheets back home for community causes. We had not brought any dough with us. Which made it possible to decline gracefully, for better or for worse.
It is strange to travel so far away from home because history comes rushing back. I took a Royal Caribbean cruise twenty years ago with my first wife Debbie when she was pregnant with Riley (now 19 and a freshman in college!), but I don't remember much more than a smoky casino in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a private beach in Haiti, bingo games, and the long forgotten faces of friends made and Christmas cards no longer sent. So I really have no claims to make on taking other cruises like the rest of the 300 people aboard. Some grandiose part of me thinks that my nearly cruise free past somehow makes me better than them.
I am curious about a talent/skill/habit of mine - ask probing questions and drop comments to pinpoint shared experiences and common topics of conversation (usually travel related) amidst a field of possibilities – other cruises, Disney resorts, adventure travel, Hawaii, rainforests, zip line tours, river rafting, Costa Rica. And those become the topics of conversation. Small talk to wile away the daze. I find too many interactions painfully awkward (ugh small talk) and classify those other folks as shallow, fearful, un-adventurous, bored with too much money to spend and not enough sense. I suppose the reality is that there are so many different people in the world and I am often surprised that there are so many people different from myself. And all those judgments (projections) come from inside myself – my own shallowness, my own fears, my own boredom.
So El Paso won’t go back to Africa but he will sign up for another one of the bigger cruises. I think Don and Becky will return to the bigger cruises too. They are social butterflies. And I hope to return to independent travel, and am even now thinking of more U.S. travel. Zion and Grand Canyon were incredible sights. Why not see more of my own country? Many beautiful and interesting places. Yosemite. Moab. Niagara Falls. New Orleans.
ANGELS LANDING - ZION NATIONAL PARK
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