Cruise ships. Taking the whole

September 24, 2002

Cruise ships. Taking the whole town on the road. Splendid isolation? Safety in numbers when there’s no land in sight. I would bet the population of one of these behemoths rivals that of most small towns. My youngest and I were day tripping on the seabus to Vancouver and pulled up alongside a huge Nassau registered seagoing resort. It had two glass elevators, a climbing wall, hundreds of rooms with deck chairs and patios, swimming pools, ballrooms and on an on. I figured a cruiseship culture documentary would be damn interesting. Double feature it with that one about ballroom dancing. From the staff to the patrons, back room to ballroom it would be fascinating. I say this having never been on one. I bet people change when they are plucked from their day to day environments and dropped down into a well fed, open scheduled situation in a gold plated floating gerbil cage. Gaining weight and getting down. Aside from the regular innuendo (Cruisin’ Cruises, Booze Cruises, Singles Cruisin’ with Singles) it would be a good place to experiment. I mean...if you’re a scientist. Here you have a controlled environment populated by content humans. You could apply tinctures to the food and be certain everyone would be getting a sample. Wait one day for the reaction. You could test the speed of rumours -- they would boomerang back to you pretty fast I would bet. You could study common patterns of migration -- from shuffleboard to libation to berth to dinner to libation to dancing to berth. Communicable disease would be an easy study on board ship. So as not to darken your imagination I will start with the common cold. You could study the arc of temptation and its relation to age. Are the old people cheating too? Can you cheat and have the person you came with not notice? I would suspect the staff first. Most of the temptation would be linked to gluttony. They had all these triangles developing on the Love Boat but plausibility was not one of the strong suits of the show. Each episode ended these triangles with a quasi Christian resolution. This is important to reassure people that life always ends well. Disneyesque and dumb. Nobody leaps from the ship in desperation or exasperation. No husband and wife ever walk down separate gangplanks at the end of the voyage. Maybe this actually is what it is like on cruise ships. Since I haven’t been on one I can only guess. Maybe it is a Disneyland for the older set? Maybe people do experiment on the patrons just as Walt Disney did. Walt made sure he kept the folks in moral order. Is this the controlled environment you graduate to after the Matterhorn wears off? Club Med without the wieners and donuts? From controlled environment to controlled environment. An extension of the dream of the 50’s all the way into the sunset. From birth to Disney to berth to death. Palm Springs on the half shell. Please tell me its hipper than that. Are there cruises with different value systems that you can pick from in the departures lounge (see Cruisin’ Cruisin’)? Here’s to the idea of the gentle rocking, fresh sea air, and space to think about crazy things.