“Sir, you can’t go,” says a square-jawed man, landing his heavy hand on my shoulder. Built like a bouncer, the Eastern European walks up a few stairs to tower over me.
“I just need my medication,” I say. “Can I go to my room? I’d hate to bother anyone.”
“The stair is closed,” he says. It’s almost midnight. He looks exhausted, and probably also tired of nosy passengers like me. “We bring you what you need.”
“Oh, my pills are impossible to find,” I lie.
“It’s not safe,” he says.
“I can sign a waiver if I need to,” I say. “I really am going to be okay.”
The man eyes my sturdy boots, really not unlike a bouncer deciding if my kicks are good enough for the club.
“Okay, write down your cabin number,” he says. “Someone will come with you.”
I’m traveling alone, on assignment on a cruise ship. For a luxury travel magazine, I was hired to rhapsodize about crystalline fjords, pristine mountains, and the tastefully decorated ship, whose interior is so Nordic that even all the wood fixtures are blond. We sailed up and down the coast of Norway, alternating between placid fjords and the open sea for more than a week. Each day, the ship dropped anchor at a new port and unleashed all 915 tourists onto snow-packed streets and into shops brimming with handknit sweaters. We rode in sleighs pulled by steaming reindeers, squinted our eyes at 7,000-year-old rock carvings, and bathed in sunlight filtered through the stained glass of a titanium cathedral. And we witnessed the northern lights—the reason many of us came on this cruise.
Today, as a freak storm lashed fifty-foot swells and eighty-mile-an-hour gales at us, the ship lost its power. All the engines shut down at once around two o’clock this afternoon. Without propulsion, the ship swung about like a possessed wedding cake. We came about a hundred yards from smashing against the reefs of Hustadvika, a notoriously dangerous stretch of the Norwegian coast.
Engineers have managed to restart three of the four engines. But they are not enough to get us out of the storm. Just when I think we’ll be all right, the ship plunges and rolls. The captain tells us that a couple of tugboats are still trying—and failing—to connect as we struggle to stay away from land. So we keep on drifting, battered but somehow upright.
I don’t need anything from my room. But after nine hours of huddling together with hundreds of other passengers in the atrium, I need to get away.
With my newly assigned minder, a woman half my height, I retrace the steps I took nine hours ago when we evacuated. Nothing seems out of the ordinary under the pleasant track lighting. But the ship is sick. It moans as the sea slaps and twists it from all directions. The elevator shafts, once noiseless, howl in a haunting tone I’m certain will return in my dreams. Distracted by the constant chamber music and smooth jazz, we forget that a ship is like a living being, gassy, noisy, and sometimes incontinent. Now, with nothing masking the sounds, I hear the ship losing decorum and control. I feel it deteriorating
Seven flights up, once I turn onto the hallway on my floor, I find a place transformed. The narrow corridor is crammed with men in tattered T-shirts and tight, faded jeans, piled into clusters and sleeping or playing games on their phones. These are not the cheery staff trained in small talk and wide smiles; these are workers who were never meant to be seen by passengers, those who toil in the bowels of the vessel operating machineries heavy and light, laundering, greasing, hammering.
All week, this hallway was a transient place, passengers politely excusing themselves as they passed one another sideways, or waiters scurrying with room service carts. Housekeeping staff materialized when most passengers were away on shore excursions or for meals, and disappeared just as quickly. And when they ran into passengers, they would smile as if elated. Those crew, trained in saccharine North American customer service, are downstairs now, tending to the evacuated guests.
The corridor glows harsh. Many of the men are covering their eyes with T-shirts and whatever pieces of clothing they have on hand. Is this the real reason passengers aren’t allowed back, in order to continue keeping these men out of sight?
Strange that they stay in packs, their limbs and torsos touching even though much of the hallway remains empty. The air is unpleasantly warm and brimming with body odors, so it can’t be for heat. Is it because they’re more accustomed to existing in close quarters, having spent months crammed on top of one another? Or maybe they’ve been ordered to stay in clusters, as we passengers are, so they’re easy to account for. Or maybe they find comfort in one another, the intimate proximity a reminder that we’re not alone at sea.
The reclining men are anything but deferential—a refreshing change. I tiptoe around and over them, and they don’t look up or budge an inch. As far as they’re concerned, I don’t exist.
A few of the doors are tagged with a red sign indicating its occupants have been airlifted. Helicopters have been lifting twenty passengers out at a time at a pace that would take about sixty hours to evacuate all of us. Once the injured people were winched away, the crew randomly picked out passengers to send away. On my doorknob, I see the same red tag. Wishful thinking. I don’t even want to entertain an alternate timeline.
Then again, what if some enterprising man—one of the men who had been lying in this corridor, perhaps—slipped into my room, pulled on my clothes, and seized the opportunity to hop into the helicopter? If the ship does go down, will this talented Mr. Ripley live the rest of my life for me? The thought is so unsettling and thrilling that I have to scan the hallway one more time, looking for a passable enough doppelgänger.
I want to wave my arms and shout that I, too, am working. But that’s not completely honest. Being embedded on a luxury cruise ship as a travel writer is a strange in-between position. In my head, I know I don’t belong with the other passengers. I don’t belong with the crew, either. I’ve loved my cabin with a balcony; I’ve been indulging in the nonstop bacchanalia I didn’t pay for. Most of all, I have a shot at getting airlifted long before the crew.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s easier to imagine being generous when my privilege remains untouched. I want to yell Just walk right in. Every room is empty! Enjoy the ergonomic mattresses! Raid the minibars! but know that if I were still allowed to be in my own cabin, I would not be opening the door for strangers.
“Sir, please be fast and careful,” says my escort, opening the door to my room.
Stepping out of the bright hallway, I see another reason why nobody would want to be in the cabins. Mine looks like a hotel room trashed by a rock star battling meth-induced psychosis. Broken bits of wood and glass stick out from the carpet between upside-down furniture. The unhinged closet door slides back and forth with the rhythm of the ship; the drawers have vomited their contents.
Still, the quiet gloom inside the four walls is a welcome change. The sky is black, as is the sea, so the balcony door is just a dark mirror. I have to fight the urge to sink into the bed.
My minder clears her throat through the door left ajar. I have to return to where she thinks I belong.
“I just need my medication,” I say. “Can I go to my room? I’d hate to bother anyone.”
“The stair is closed,” he says. It’s almost midnight. He looks exhausted, and probably also tired of nosy passengers like me. “We bring you what you need.”
“Oh, my pills are impossible to find,” I lie.
“It’s not safe,” he says.
“I can sign a waiver if I need to,” I say. “I really am going to be okay.”
The man eyes my sturdy boots, really not unlike a bouncer deciding if my kicks are good enough for the club.
“Okay, write down your cabin number,” he says. “Someone will come with you.”
I’m traveling alone, on assignment on a cruise ship. For a luxury travel magazine, I was hired to rhapsodize about crystalline fjords, pristine mountains, and the tastefully decorated ship, whose interior is so Nordic that even all the wood fixtures are blond. We sailed up and down the coast of Norway, alternating between placid fjords and the open sea for more than a week. Each day, the ship dropped anchor at a new port and unleashed all 915 tourists onto snow-packed streets and into shops brimming with handknit sweaters. We rode in sleighs pulled by steaming reindeers, squinted our eyes at 7,000-year-old rock carvings, and bathed in sunlight filtered through the stained glass of a titanium cathedral. And we witnessed the northern lights—the reason many of us came on this cruise.
Today, as a freak storm lashed fifty-foot swells and eighty-mile-an-hour gales at us, the ship lost its power. All the engines shut down at once around two o’clock this afternoon. Without propulsion, the ship swung about like a possessed wedding cake. We came about a hundred yards from smashing against the reefs of Hustadvika, a notoriously dangerous stretch of the Norwegian coast.
Engineers have managed to restart three of the four engines. But they are not enough to get us out of the storm. Just when I think we’ll be all right, the ship plunges and rolls. The captain tells us that a couple of tugboats are still trying—and failing—to connect as we struggle to stay away from land. So we keep on drifting, battered but somehow upright.
I don’t need anything from my room. But after nine hours of huddling together with hundreds of other passengers in the atrium, I need to get away.
With my newly assigned minder, a woman half my height, I retrace the steps I took nine hours ago when we evacuated. Nothing seems out of the ordinary under the pleasant track lighting. But the ship is sick. It moans as the sea slaps and twists it from all directions. The elevator shafts, once noiseless, howl in a haunting tone I’m certain will return in my dreams. Distracted by the constant chamber music and smooth jazz, we forget that a ship is like a living being, gassy, noisy, and sometimes incontinent. Now, with nothing masking the sounds, I hear the ship losing decorum and control. I feel it deteriorating
Seven flights up, once I turn onto the hallway on my floor, I find a place transformed. The narrow corridor is crammed with men in tattered T-shirts and tight, faded jeans, piled into clusters and sleeping or playing games on their phones. These are not the cheery staff trained in small talk and wide smiles; these are workers who were never meant to be seen by passengers, those who toil in the bowels of the vessel operating machineries heavy and light, laundering, greasing, hammering.
All week, this hallway was a transient place, passengers politely excusing themselves as they passed one another sideways, or waiters scurrying with room service carts. Housekeeping staff materialized when most passengers were away on shore excursions or for meals, and disappeared just as quickly. And when they ran into passengers, they would smile as if elated. Those crew, trained in saccharine North American customer service, are downstairs now, tending to the evacuated guests.
The corridor glows harsh. Many of the men are covering their eyes with T-shirts and whatever pieces of clothing they have on hand. Is this the real reason passengers aren’t allowed back, in order to continue keeping these men out of sight?
Strange that they stay in packs, their limbs and torsos touching even though much of the hallway remains empty. The air is unpleasantly warm and brimming with body odors, so it can’t be for heat. Is it because they’re more accustomed to existing in close quarters, having spent months crammed on top of one another? Or maybe they’ve been ordered to stay in clusters, as we passengers are, so they’re easy to account for. Or maybe they find comfort in one another, the intimate proximity a reminder that we’re not alone at sea.
The reclining men are anything but deferential—a refreshing change. I tiptoe around and over them, and they don’t look up or budge an inch. As far as they’re concerned, I don’t exist.
A few of the doors are tagged with a red sign indicating its occupants have been airlifted. Helicopters have been lifting twenty passengers out at a time at a pace that would take about sixty hours to evacuate all of us. Once the injured people were winched away, the crew randomly picked out passengers to send away. On my doorknob, I see the same red tag. Wishful thinking. I don’t even want to entertain an alternate timeline.
Then again, what if some enterprising man—one of the men who had been lying in this corridor, perhaps—slipped into my room, pulled on my clothes, and seized the opportunity to hop into the helicopter? If the ship does go down, will this talented Mr. Ripley live the rest of my life for me? The thought is so unsettling and thrilling that I have to scan the hallway one more time, looking for a passable enough doppelgänger.
I want to wave my arms and shout that I, too, am working. But that’s not completely honest. Being embedded on a luxury cruise ship as a travel writer is a strange in-between position. In my head, I know I don’t belong with the other passengers. I don’t belong with the crew, either. I’ve loved my cabin with a balcony; I’ve been indulging in the nonstop bacchanalia I didn’t pay for. Most of all, I have a shot at getting airlifted long before the crew.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s easier to imagine being generous when my privilege remains untouched. I want to yell Just walk right in. Every room is empty! Enjoy the ergonomic mattresses! Raid the minibars! but know that if I were still allowed to be in my own cabin, I would not be opening the door for strangers.
“Sir, please be fast and careful,” says my escort, opening the door to my room.
Stepping out of the bright hallway, I see another reason why nobody would want to be in the cabins. Mine looks like a hotel room trashed by a rock star battling meth-induced psychosis. Broken bits of wood and glass stick out from the carpet between upside-down furniture. The unhinged closet door slides back and forth with the rhythm of the ship; the drawers have vomited their contents.
Still, the quiet gloom inside the four walls is a welcome change. The sky is black, as is the sea, so the balcony door is just a dark mirror. I have to fight the urge to sink into the bed.
My minder clears her throat through the door left ajar. I have to return to where she thinks I belong.
*
Even on a blue-sky day with calm seas, running a cruise involves choreography that puts any Broadway production to shame. Amid the uncertainty of possibly sinking, the ship is still a regimented troupe of several hundred who are scurrying around, tidying up and feeding us.
In the atrium, I notice a pattern. One crew member, usually North American or European, stays with a cluster of a few dozen passengers. Each chaperone, in turn, commands a handful of South Asian crew members who fetch items and take away unwanted items.
On the carpet littered with mah-jongg tiles, Scrabble scoresheets, and other remnants of our lives before the storm, I’ve claimed a tiny space between two coffee tables that I treat like fences against my neighbors: a British couple who’s doing their hardest to remain stoic, and a group of six elderly American friends who are doing their best to appear cheery. The concierge for this corner is Ceri, a Welshwoman.
“What’s your job on a normal day?” I ask. I’m secretly hoping she’d ask me about my job, too, so I can tell her I’m not one of them, those one-percenters she’s paid to babysit.
“Actually, I’m one of the two female vocalists,” she says.
I mutter something about not recognizing her without makeup. I don’t want her to know that I have never been to any of her nightly performances at the theater. She doesn’t seem to care.
Ceri would have made a great kindergarten teacher, humoring and praising us for doing the most simple tasks: “Well done, yes. One step at a time—fantastic. You’re doing really, really well,” she compliments a man she’s propping up as he limps toward the toilet. “Oh, he’s so strong, isn’t he? He’s the one who’s holding me up!”
Ceri is also an interpreter. She translates our rambling, needy wishes into quick imperatives.
“You see, I think I have to let my daughter know that I’m okay,” says one passenger, “but my phone doesn’t seem to be working, and the screen is blank, so I just don’t know...”
“You’d like your phone charger,” Ceri says. “May I have your cabin number?”
She writes down the information and hands the slip of paper to one of the speed-walkers who always boomerang back to her.
“Does anybody need medicine fetched from their cabin?” Ceri asks, preventing other nosy bodies like me from heading upstairs.
“Honey, look around,” quips an older woman, sweeping her arm at the hall full of white heads. “We’re all on medication.”
The PA system turns on.
“Again, we are somehow keeping the ship under control,” the captain says.
Under her breath, the English passenger next to me mutters “Shit”—the first word I’ve heard her speak. Her husband turns to her, horrified. They quickly return to looking emotionless.
In the atrium, I notice a pattern. One crew member, usually North American or European, stays with a cluster of a few dozen passengers. Each chaperone, in turn, commands a handful of South Asian crew members who fetch items and take away unwanted items.
On the carpet littered with mah-jongg tiles, Scrabble scoresheets, and other remnants of our lives before the storm, I’ve claimed a tiny space between two coffee tables that I treat like fences against my neighbors: a British couple who’s doing their hardest to remain stoic, and a group of six elderly American friends who are doing their best to appear cheery. The concierge for this corner is Ceri, a Welshwoman.
“What’s your job on a normal day?” I ask. I’m secretly hoping she’d ask me about my job, too, so I can tell her I’m not one of them, those one-percenters she’s paid to babysit.
“Actually, I’m one of the two female vocalists,” she says.
I mutter something about not recognizing her without makeup. I don’t want her to know that I have never been to any of her nightly performances at the theater. She doesn’t seem to care.
Ceri would have made a great kindergarten teacher, humoring and praising us for doing the most simple tasks: “Well done, yes. One step at a time—fantastic. You’re doing really, really well,” she compliments a man she’s propping up as he limps toward the toilet. “Oh, he’s so strong, isn’t he? He’s the one who’s holding me up!”
Ceri is also an interpreter. She translates our rambling, needy wishes into quick imperatives.
“You see, I think I have to let my daughter know that I’m okay,” says one passenger, “but my phone doesn’t seem to be working, and the screen is blank, so I just don’t know...”
“You’d like your phone charger,” Ceri says. “May I have your cabin number?”
She writes down the information and hands the slip of paper to one of the speed-walkers who always boomerang back to her.
“Does anybody need medicine fetched from their cabin?” Ceri asks, preventing other nosy bodies like me from heading upstairs.
“Honey, look around,” quips an older woman, sweeping her arm at the hall full of white heads. “We’re all on medication.”
The PA system turns on.
“Again, we are somehow keeping the ship under control,” the captain says.
Under her breath, the English passenger next to me mutters “Shit”—the first word I’ve heard her speak. Her husband turns to her, horrified. They quickly return to looking emotionless.
*
In 2010, the Celebrity Mercury saw a norovirus outbreak so rapid that 413 passengers were stricken and the ship turned into a veritable vomitorium. In 2013, a generator fire aboard the Carnival Triumph, on the other hand, left that ship without power for five days, stranding the passengers and crew to float aimlessly without plumbing. Late-night talk show hosts were only too happy to nickname the ship the “Carnival Toilet” and the “Poop Cruise”—so it’s no wonder that Carnival Corporation quietly changed the ship’s name to the less triumphant Sunrise.
When you dig into it, you’ll see cruises are rife with incidents of all shades and sizes. Fan sites like Cruise Junkie and Cruise Mapper gleefully list frequent accidents ranging from catastrophic engine failures to ships running aground. It’s a wonder that those enthusiasts would go aboard in the first place—or why cruises should exist at all, for that matter. After airplanes overtook ocean liners as the preferred mode of crossing the Atlantic in the mid-twentieth century, the large passenger vessels could have gone extinct. Instead, the floating palaces grew larger and more lavish, always harking to some imagined past when passengers got to dress up each night for dinner and had servants catering to their every whim.
Cruises reflect modern travel at its most blatant. The word travel shares the root of the French word travailler: to work. Travail means strenuous labor. In Middle English, travelen meant “to torment.” One theory connects the word to tripalium, an ancient Roman method of torture involving impaling with three stakes. We’ve sure come a long way to think of travel as fun.
Today’s passengers drown in a pampering we feel we’ve earned. We might even throw around words like sybaritic. And lest you accuse me of hypocrisy, let me be the first to cast the stone. I have made a living as a professional tourist who’s used the word sybaritic once or a dozen times in my magazine career.
From a cruise ship, we passengers with the correctly colored passports get to waddle down the gangway to the concrete pier, where hired locals greet us with folk dancing and shower us with flower petals. At the end of the day, we return to our bubble, ready to float across the very national borders we’ve built to keep many people exactly where they are.
The whole sleek façade of cruises is built upon the travails of workers. The employees, in turn, keep up their own code of hierarchy that waterfalls from Mediterranean officers in uniforms and Eastern European department heads. Fair-skinned entertainers stand before the Filipino musicians outside the spotlight. And housekeeping staff who are conversant in English collect tips that may never get trickled down to the launderers tucked deep inside the ship’s bowels: It’s a Small World After All of horrors.
Then again, don’t the workers sign up knowing exactly what they’re getting into? Don’t the remittances they send home pay rent, send kids to school, build houses, change lives? Aren’t the bright young staff broadening their horizons while seeing the world, meeting people around the globe, learning life lessons? Aren’t many of them doing exactly what I try to do?
Travel really does change us. It’s changed me. It’s been the best private education I’ve received. And like many other backpackers, I could do so on a shoestring because of the price our parents paid in advance, in the currency of education and encouragement. To refute this privilege—the very privilege my immigrant parents worked so hard to grant me—would be the ultimate act of privilege.
The cruise industry didn’t create the disparity; it’s merely holding up a mirror. And if it makes me uneasy, it’s because I’m too aware that I prefer not to dwell on the widening distance between upstairs and downstairs.
Besides, looking away in denial has become my second nature. I’ve gotten real good at ignoring the obvious.
When you dig into it, you’ll see cruises are rife with incidents of all shades and sizes. Fan sites like Cruise Junkie and Cruise Mapper gleefully list frequent accidents ranging from catastrophic engine failures to ships running aground. It’s a wonder that those enthusiasts would go aboard in the first place—or why cruises should exist at all, for that matter. After airplanes overtook ocean liners as the preferred mode of crossing the Atlantic in the mid-twentieth century, the large passenger vessels could have gone extinct. Instead, the floating palaces grew larger and more lavish, always harking to some imagined past when passengers got to dress up each night for dinner and had servants catering to their every whim.
Cruises reflect modern travel at its most blatant. The word travel shares the root of the French word travailler: to work. Travail means strenuous labor. In Middle English, travelen meant “to torment.” One theory connects the word to tripalium, an ancient Roman method of torture involving impaling with three stakes. We’ve sure come a long way to think of travel as fun.
Today’s passengers drown in a pampering we feel we’ve earned. We might even throw around words like sybaritic. And lest you accuse me of hypocrisy, let me be the first to cast the stone. I have made a living as a professional tourist who’s used the word sybaritic once or a dozen times in my magazine career.
From a cruise ship, we passengers with the correctly colored passports get to waddle down the gangway to the concrete pier, where hired locals greet us with folk dancing and shower us with flower petals. At the end of the day, we return to our bubble, ready to float across the very national borders we’ve built to keep many people exactly where they are.
The whole sleek façade of cruises is built upon the travails of workers. The employees, in turn, keep up their own code of hierarchy that waterfalls from Mediterranean officers in uniforms and Eastern European department heads. Fair-skinned entertainers stand before the Filipino musicians outside the spotlight. And housekeeping staff who are conversant in English collect tips that may never get trickled down to the launderers tucked deep inside the ship’s bowels: It’s a Small World After All of horrors.
Then again, don’t the workers sign up knowing exactly what they’re getting into? Don’t the remittances they send home pay rent, send kids to school, build houses, change lives? Aren’t the bright young staff broadening their horizons while seeing the world, meeting people around the globe, learning life lessons? Aren’t many of them doing exactly what I try to do?
Travel really does change us. It’s changed me. It’s been the best private education I’ve received. And like many other backpackers, I could do so on a shoestring because of the price our parents paid in advance, in the currency of education and encouragement. To refute this privilege—the very privilege my immigrant parents worked so hard to grant me—would be the ultimate act of privilege.
The cruise industry didn’t create the disparity; it’s merely holding up a mirror. And if it makes me uneasy, it’s because I’m too aware that I prefer not to dwell on the widening distance between upstairs and downstairs.
Besides, looking away in denial has become my second nature. I’ve gotten real good at ignoring the obvious.