And make your chronicle as rich with praise
As is the owse and bottom of the sea
With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
                                                              ~Shakespeare

A tall order and not one without noble challenge: I just spent a week with Mother on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. For those of you who know me well, you can understand why this might seem a tad out of character, lean as I do toward unstructured solo third world travel. Well, treasure can be found in unlikely places…

This was a maiden sea voyage for both of us, and I discovered that I was completely unprepared by prior trips on the relatively diminutive Nile cruise boats. Our ship, the Enchantment of the Sea, of the Royal Caribbean Line, was twice as large as the Titanic, guzzled 48,000 gallons of diesel a day, and plowed through the sea under 68,500 horsepower. The demographics: on this voyage we had 2300 people from 37 countries and an exotic crew of 720 hailing from 58 different nations (not one Egyptian). Unfortunately, 2000 of those passengers were from the USA, most of them from inland states, 160 of them honeymoon couples, and 300 children, which made it seem at times like a gussied-up floating theme park or shopping mall. I eventually got used to the culture shock, which indeed existed, since to me it was a very foreign environment, yet full of Americans on holiday. Bewildering, since I do my best to avoid throngs of tourists and their haunts. I had to imagine this as a golden opportunity for an unforgettable experience. All the elements were there.

We had dinner that first evening with our week-long table mates: one thirtysomething couple from Scotland on their third annual cruise, he in construction, she a manager of the Scottish Yellow Pages, and another couple in their early fifties from Indiana, a nurse and a grocery store manager. They were sweet and enthusiastic passengers who loved the ease of the experience and Mother and I heard tales of earlier cruises during our delicious meals together. Fortunately, the food alone was complex and variable enough to carry quite a bit of the conversational weight. I say this because I quickly found that my idea of adventure and fun was a little over the top for our companions, so like a good girl, I tried to stick to more neutral topics like food, wine, shopping, etc. It was comforting to see familiar faces at the end of every day, though, and we were all soon quite endeared to each other.

At breakfast the next day, my eyes cast about for some small intrigue, and wandered through the panes of the Windjammer Café. With sudden pleasure I realized why ultramarine blue is the shade it is: color as a function of depth, color that water can appear only when in sufficient quantity, measured not in square feet but in square fathoms. I was inspired to visit the Oxford in the onboard library since the exact measurement of a fathom was not surfacing in memory. (Should it count as a memory if it's inaccessible? Latent, subconscious, stored for the long-term? I remembered knowing how long a fathom is, I just couldn't dredge up the number.) It turns out to be a unit of length equal to six feet, from the Old English word faethm, which was the length of the arms outstretched. Odd to imagine someone determining the depth of water with outstretched arms, buoyancy and lack of oxygen being small impediments to accurate underwater activity: in fact, downright hard to fathom. But then there remains the impulse to determine the depth of many things with outstretched arms, with the innocence of enthusiasm, even when the medium of sound coupled with objective analysis has proven safer. Depth sounding: it keeps one from getting out of one's depth, but the joy of the dive is missing. Bear with me for another unavoidable digression to the polarities of blues: robin's egg and ultramarine, baby and navy, sky and cobalt. We named them according to intensity, a reflection of their relative saturation, their associations with depth and density - an intriguing thought of ultramarine proportions, robin's egg importance.

Post breakfast rumination, I thought a little sun would be relaxing on my first day at sea. I decided to skip the main pool and ventured instead to the Solarium, the evocative name of an area where no children are suffered: the Adult Pool. It's tricked out like a Roman bath, all heavy marble and turquoise-patterned tile - quite dramatic, though a little incongruous on something that's supposed to be floating. Apparently, during inclement weather, of which we had none, this whole area can be covered with a huge glass roof called the Crystal Canopy. For sheer spectacle, I could have prayed for rain, but my brain went numb here as I succumbed to visual and auditory overload. The sheer quantity and variety of exposed skin was overwhelming, as I infrequently find myself on American beaches. Pounds, nay, tons, of geographic flesh paraded before me: rivers of veins and scars, whole ranges of amber, pink and bronze mounds and hillocks, variably tufted valleys, all breathing and glistening with sweat, salt water and suntan lotion. A tuxedoed waiter walked by with a tray of Mango Tangos. Hot and thirsty, I indulged, and he happily poured the rum into a milkshake of pina colada and mango. As I sipped on my deck chair surveying the landscape, the cacophony of laughter and poolside chatter bounced crazily on the hard surfaces around me. These notes and melodies painfully reconvened at ear level as an inhuman din with its own distinct weight and mass. The sun beat down mercilessly; the water in the pool was salty and overcrowded. I soon found this to be a most UN-relaxing environment and so packed up my latest Amis and hastened to the gym, er… the Shipshape Fitness Center and Spa.

There were a few less people here with a few more shreds of clothing, so I pretty quickly ran through the machines, hoping to keep my weight lifting routine somewhat intact during the cruise. Sadly, this was my last visit to the Shipshape Center, since an encounter with an unfamiliar exercise painfully tweaked my shoulder muscle for the next several days. Defeated, I ventured into the sauna, where the temperature was so high the tip of my nose was seared by hot steam. Now really bummed, I went back to bed for the day. Mother had beaten me to it and was already napping: what a pair we were. The old and the middle aged. Eeek.

But tomorrow the sun would rise again and by evening, Mother and I would be dancing. More on that in the next dispatch a few days hence. Cheers to all. Love, Zena

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