These Times

A supposedly fun thing I might try

Kirk Ericson | Jan 23, 20250

Last Friday at 8 a.m., the weather station at Sanderson Field outside of Shelton registered 28 degrees. At that precise moment at Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas, the temperature was “about 75 degrees,” according to a phone call I was having with Diane, a longtime friend who reported she was lying on a beach filled with people in sarongs.

“The water’s a little cold, but you get used to it,” she said.

Imagine the sympathy I was unable to summon.

Diane was on Day 14 of a 15-day cruise with her mother, and two of her mother’s friends, on the liner Zaandam, a Holland America sea beast that ran from San Diego to Miami, with stops at several spots, including Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Costa Rica, Antigua, and Cartagena, Colombia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. She showed me pictures from Cartagena. The colors were solid and striking.

Diane’s first cruise was a sudden thing — her mother, Shelia, informed her just a few days before departure that she had an extra ticket, and I learned from her husband only last week that she was asea. I asked Mike why he hadn’t joined them.

“I wouldn’t want to be on a boatload of Americans,” he said. Mike has traveled many places in this world, so his comment is not ill-informed.

His remark unshelved a memory. In the mid-1990s, the writer David Foster Wallace wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine that detailed in excruciating, comedic and depressing extent1 his first (and presumably last) cruise, a seven-day trip through the Caribbean. I first read the story about 20 years ago, and Mike’s words made me read the story again, and I was reminded again of what an incandescent thinker David Foster Wallace was.

His cruise story was included in a collection of his essays titled, “Another Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which is right up there in my favorite title list with “Deadeye Dick,” “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “The Great American Novel.”

David Foster Wallace was a wizard with words.

Here’s his take on looking down from the ship deck as his shipmates walked off the Zenith — he called it the Nadir — during a port call: “There is something inescapably bovine about a herd of American tourists in motion, a certain greedy placidity, I feel guilty by perceived association. … Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, greedy, ashamed, and despairing.”

Imagine his mother telling her son as a teen, “David, David, David. Why can’t you just enjoy yourself?” I can imagine …

David Foster Wallace had a hard go of it. He committed suicide at age 46 in 2008, and his father told a reporter from The New York Times that his son had been severely depressed for several months. Wallace’s obsessive eye coupled with depression become too much to bear. When you look at humans too closely, you can end up seeing too much.

Back to cruising … In the opening paragraph of his essay, Wallace lists some of the sights on his Caribbean misadventure, including watching “a woman in silver lame projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator.” That image stuck with me 20-some years ago, and it informed my entire attitude about cruise ships. To be clear, it made me not want to be on a cruise ship. Paying to see, and hear, someone projectile vomit is a deal killer.

When Diane returned last weekend and I went to her house to talk about her time at sea, one of my first questions was how much vomit she saw.

“I didn’t see anybody get sick,” she said.

“What about people who drank way too much?” I asked.

“Maybe I saw one or two,” Diane said.

Huh.

She then proceeded to disabuse me of everything I thought I knew about the cruise experience, which I had learned by internalizing the 30-year-old observations of a manic, tormented, beautiful soul in his early 30s who had zero ability to not be driven batty by dishonesty, callousness, advertising and pretension.

Diane said she spent her time reading, going to talks, walking several miles a day along the promenade on the top deck, starting conversations with people she came across, touring ports of call and being able to spend time with her mother, a lovely human.

“It was important to have that time with my mom.”

The four of them called themselves “The White Lady Brigade.”

The only complaint I could pry out of her was the entertainment was “mediocre … one guy was kind of funny, but some were not great. I overheard one woman say when we were walking out a show, ‘At least he was funny.’ That was funny.”

“One of the biggest things for me was being not connected to the internet,” she said.

Diane has a busy life. She recently left a full-time job in the business she led, allowing her to cut her work week down “to just 40 hours.”

“It was an internet vacation,” she said. “That in itself was worth it for me.”

1David Foster Wallace was known for his fondness for footnotes. Richard Jugge, an English printer who died in 1577, is generally credited with inventing the footnote. Talk about your footnote in history.

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