Incompetent Abroad: Life at Sea

To use official naval nomenclature, the Queen Mary 2 belongs to the “Big Mother” class of ocean liners.  Two football fields long, it towers 23 stories from keel to penthouse. Take a turn around its outer deck and you’ll find you’ve aged visibly.

The fourth-deck cabin in which my two brothers and I currently reside is a cheery but compact affair, wide enough for us to slide between the feet of the three beds arrayed hospital-like in a row and the opposite wall—but barely.  The bathroom, however, is surprisingly spacious, large enough, in fact, to swing a cat in, provided, of course, one swings the unfortunate beast up and down rather than horizontally. Our claustrophobia is somewhat alleviated by the fact that our cabin opens onto an enclosed balcony.  It is furnished with three comfortable deck chairs, on one of which now hangs David’s and my hand-laundered underwear. Since the humidity hovers at around 95%, our unmentionables will probably take longer to dry than our trip is scheduled to last.

For the most part, the gray seas have been calm.  Last night, though, there was a bit of turbulence, a sensation not unlike walking across a Walmart parking lot on ice skates after having downed a six-pack.  Roger, an internationally prominent authority on wine and other assailants of the liver, let it be known to the ship’s publicist that he would be writing about our voyage.  Sure enough, when we sat down to dinner our first night out, we were elated to find a complimentary bottle at our table. Had the bottle actually contained wine, the gesture would have been more impressive.  But that’s life as it goes. We retaliated for the slight by stealing our napkins and keeping them for souvenirs.  

It will surprise no one who knows Roger that he likes to dress formally for dinner.  His regal appearance may explain the quality of passengers who’ve elected to join us at our table.  The first night, it was an elderly seafaring couple from Rhode Island who used to crisscross the Atlantic under their own sails.  The following evening, we (or he) attracted two comely women from Germany, one an actress, the other a psychotherapist. During the course of our dinner conversations, Roger, David and our tablemates—globetrotters all—dropped the names of so many world capitols and retreats of the rich they had visited that I felt like I’d ingested a year’s worth of National Geographic.  Since my most exotic journeys have been to Lima, Ohio and Owensboro, Kentucky, I kept quiet and gnawed thoughtfully on my dinner rolls.

Ours is an intensely white crowd.  The only dark faces we see are those hovering over trays.  All in all, though, an air of robust democracy prevails throughout the ship.  It is not at all uncommon for dwellers of the upper deck to give a jaunty thumbs up as they jog past the drudges who have just cleaned their rooms.

Ah, the majesty of travel.