Is it really good for the soul?
Issue 73 : Jul/Aug 2010
I have a confession to make. I have booked a passage to Alaska on a cruise ship. I’m confessing because for years I’ve been saying to anyone within earshot that I would never, ever, set foot aboard one of those hideous floating luxury apartment blocks. Never, ever.
I first started hating cruise ships when I sailed my 31-footer, Freelance, from South Africa to the United States. We came across cruise ships in the Caribbean Sea at night. They were little islands of blazing light wandering slowly in large vague circles, just passing time between ports 20 miles apart and giving their passengers the impression of ocean passagemaking before shuttling them ashore the next morning to empty their wallets in a town with one main street and 50 jewelers’ stores, all owned by the shipping company.
We hated them because of the difficulty of dodging them. Their running lights were lost among the hundreds of bright white lights on board, so when we came upon them it was difficult to estimate their course in relationship to ours. Then we discovered that their courses were changing all the time as they cruised in big circles.
Years later we came across more cruise ships in the Pacific Northwest. My wife, June, and I would scoff as they squeezed past us on British Columbia’s Inside Passage on their way to Alaska. We’d sit in the cockpit of our 27-foot sloop and assure each other that those aloof, touristy people sitting high up there behind their walls of glass couldn’t possibly experience the “real” sea. With their cocktails in their hands and half a dozen stewards at their beck and call, they could know nothing of the natural wonders of Nature at sea level. They weren’t going to sea to get away from it all. They were bringing it all with them. The whole problem, we said, wiping the cold rain from our faces, was that they weren’t suffering enough. Suffering is good. Suffering makes you appreciate the subtleties and mysteries of Nature.
Coming to visit
And then, one day, my sister announced that she was coming to visit us from South Africa. She and her husband wanted to see glaciers in Alaska. Could we take them on our boat?
No way, we said. Too crowded, too wet, too cold, too miserable, and too long to get there and back.
“How about a cruise ship, then?” said my sister.
We told her how we felt about cruise ships.
“You’re just yachting snobs,” she said. “Does suffering really increase enjoyment or appreciation or anything? Does fear or hunger or freezing rain really whet your senses and provide something extra to your experience?”
I was taken aback by this. Her diatribe caused us to reconsider. Doesn’t an iceberg seen from the deck of a cruise ship look and feel and smell the same as an iceberg seen from the cockpit of a 27-foot Cape Dory? Are we really guilty of snobbishness, we wondered. Who says a beer-swilling landlubber in his fancy RV doesn’t get as much enjoyment from Yosemite as a Spartan climber camped out on a cliff face? Is there such a thing as intellectual snobbishness? Does physical suffering really bring some spiritual addition to pleasure? Is it truly good for the soul?
June said the point was that the person who suffers is testing himself. People on cruise ships are not testing themselves.
“That may be true,” I said, “but do we need to test ourselves, and if so, why? Does a ‘normal’ well-adjusted person need to test himself? I don’t need to test myself. I don’t need to sail around the world singlehanded just to prove something.”
“Nor I,” said June. “I just want to see glaciers in Alaska.”
That did it. Our epiphany was complete. We booked our cruise-ship passages the next day. But we did it our way. We deliberately chose the cheapest cabins on the ship, way down in steerage, right next to the thumping propellers and the rudder machinery. It will probably be as awful as we always suspected it would be. Seven days of sleepless hell. But we know within ourselves that the suffering will surely make the glaciers look better.
John Vigor is Good Old Boat’s copy editor and the author of 12 boating books and scores of articles in boating magazines on three continents. He is a sailing and navigation instructor accredited by the American Sailing Association and national winner of the prestigious John Southam Award for the book Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Sailing.
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