almosting

Final exams ended yesterday, and the Alumni Ball—a remarkably fancy dinner (we’re in the middle of the ocean!) for which students dressed formally, for the most part—was last night, in two seatings.  The faculty will be hard at work today computing final grades, and there are a series of programs designed to ease re-entry.  Tomorrow is Convocation and our final pre-port briefing.  Somehow packing and the computing of Customs declarations must happen too. 

The most remarkable thing about last night, I thought, was that somewhat heavy seas—maybe a bit heavier this morning, or maybe I was just up too late—seemed to trouble no one.  Not the waiters carrying full trays of soup—the crew in general get the biggest applause here, and surely deserve it—but not the rest of us either.  We lurched from side to side as we walked or sat, and we hardly noticed it at all.  The phrase “sea legs” isn’t sufficient to describe it. 

Jenna Lawrence from Columbia, who’s been teaching Marine Biology classes on the ship, had wanted all voyage to see an albatross but didn’t see one until yesterday, when Paul Muldoon, a poet who’s our most illustrious faculty member, came all the way from the stern to the bow to find her, in spite of his being up against a deadline.  And there it was, larger and more magnificent than one could have imagined, like everything at sea.

4 more nights

Certainly we have never been more like a typical college campus than these last couple of days: it’s exam time, and students have been hunkering down.  I met a student in a corridor yesterday who’d just completed his last exam—classes that have met on “A” days gave theirs yesterday, and the “B” classes (these are just scheduling designations and indicate nothing about the level or quality of the courses) will have theirs tomorrow, with a “Study Day” scheduled for today.  The faculty now face a very demanding time, with their grade deadlines fast approaching, and I am caught up in their haste, since I have 80 or so Global Studies papers to grade along with my preparations for the Convocation event that is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon and lots and lots of wrapping up (and packing).  The shipboard auction a few days ago included an item according to which Dean Vieira and I have to serve as waiters for a meal in his cabin tonight; that’s just as well, because in order to settle a conflict between staff members who wanted to hold a backgammon tournament in the faculty/staff/Lifelong Learners lounge this evening and faculty who wanted to be able to do their grading there, I volunteered my office for the tournament and offered to provide refreshment from the last dregs of my budget.  (That negotiation took much of yesterday morning, which will tell you a bit about what academic administration consists of.)  My family and I had a kind of farewell dinner in the special dining facility on Deck 5 last night—very pleasant, very celebratory, and as astonishing as everything else here: I mean, to be brought Cherries Jubilee in the middle of the Pacific!  So we are not entirely like a typical college campus.  We’ll be least so on Wednesday—a couple of days ago we had a logistics briefing in the Union to get ready for our final disembarkation in San Diego—at least from my point of view, because at home I’m used to the students’ leaving while the rest of us stay to get ready for the next round, the next semester, the next bit of writing.  But on Wednesday only the crew will stay, and the rest of us will say our goodbyes, transients that we are, have been.

the red-tailed tropics bird

 

We have our tug and have slowed way down: Honolulu’s right before us, and it’s a gorgeous, brilliant, sunny day. Everything gleams.  Planes are taking off and zooming right above us. In comparison to our usual muted dawn arrivals, this one looks, well, American, though our pre-port briefing last night made clear how distinct and important is Hawaii’s history.  We are not—except perhaps for the four Hawaiian students who were at the center of that wonderful briefing—home yet.

 

I just stood and watched our arrival at the spot on Deck 5, just around the corner from my office, where the red-tailed tropic bird sat for a day or two this week.  It turned up there, an astonishingly beautiful creature, one morning, a long, pointed, red tail and a sharp red beak book-ending feathers that my wife properly identified as just like angels’ in Renaissance paintings.  Why was it there?  Prof. Doughty, who knows, said it was “puffed,” needed a rest, and he and a student with some animal rescue experience set about trying to feed it a bit of fish and water.  The crew cordoned off the area—we could see the bird either from a distance on the deck or close up through a window, and every time I went in or out of my office someone was there, speculating on its state.  And then one day at around 3 PM, an hour or so after its most recent feeding, it was gone.  It had flown off after its hitch, ready, Prof. Doughty thinks, to move on.  It advertised itself so obviously as a metaphor or symbol for something about our voyage that I can hardly believe it was real—maybe that’s what it’s a symbol of—but I suspect I’ll figure it out at home some time.

 

We must stay on the ship today during our refueling here, and then we’ll all get off for one last round of adventures in Hilo tomorrow.

 

fog

A few observations, though today is a day when observation is in fact out of the question:

 

1)      That’s because now that the sea is calm, we’re encased in an astonishingly thick, white fog.

2)      Yesterday and the day before our faculty bird specialist, Professor Doughty, spotted a number of albatrosses, a couple of which came very close to the ship.  These he has now identified, with the help of a student photographer, as black-footed albatrosses and Laysan albatrosses.

3)      Last night Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet on our faculty, gave a reading from his works. These include not only poems but song lyrics, so he interspersed his readings with sound recordings of the songs being performed by his band and also a student-filmed video.

4)      The other night we all went to the crew talent show, a boisterous event filled with good spirit, whoops, and hollers.  The excellence—the efficiency and the generosity—of the ship’s crew is one of the most remarkable features of the voyage.  I’m not sure it can ever be conveyed sufficiently.

5)      Even as I write this, the fog is receding a little.  I say that with slight regret, because the fog has seemed appropriate in a way.  Tomorrow, after all, comes a day we’ve all been long anticipating—at least those of us on the voyage’s administrative team have long anticipated it, since it has muddled every schedule we’ve tried to concoct.  Tomorrow is the day that, because of our crossing the International Date Line, we will experience twice.  It happens to be the seventh birthday of one of the ship’s passengers, and his parents are being very creative about providing him with a celebration worthy of a double birthday without setting unreasonable precedents.

 

rolling

We are at sea again, and, given how windy and rainy it was during the end of our time in Yokohama, the rough seas are no surprise.  It seems to me that most of us have long anticipated this next stretch as the most challenging part of the voyage—simply because we will now have so much scarcely-interrupted time at sea.  But not many of us (the exceptions being the few folks who have previous experience with this kind of SAS itinerary) could have imagined the particular challenges of facing this long stretch after a series of successive intense times in a sequence of Asian ports.  Since we reached Singapore, on March 22, which now seems years and years ago, our time on land has been scarcely interrupted, by brief (two- or three-day) periods at sea.  It’s not just that we’ve gotten used to having lots of mostly free time in the ports; it’s that we have, most of us, rather exhausted ourselves in the ports.  Last night, as we left, it was evident that a lot of folks are weary.  I’m told that lots of folks have colds.

 

Still, everyone I saw or spoke to yesterday seemed to be in very good spirits.  I think the fact that we arrived in Japan at the height of the cherry blossoms made especially vivid to everyone our astonishing good fortune at being able to do all this, and the fact that people dispersed so much in these last few ports means that there is a lot to share and celebrate now that we’re all back together.  It’s rather easy, even automatic, to contextualize whatever challenges we’ll now confront—we’ve to conclude our semester between here in Hawaii, with each class meeting four times between now and April 23 (though that schedule’s made a bit merciful by some days when we won’t have regular classes scheduled: today’s “reflection day,” which will have no classes until our final meeting of the Global Studies discussion sections at 3 PM; then a “reading day” next Saturday so that students can get caught up in anticipation of the final class sessions on April 22 and 23; and finally a “study day” on April 24, so that everyone can be ready for final exams, which begin, with the Global Studies exam, on the day after we leave Hawaii, April 26) and final papers to write, exams to get ready for, etc.   This part of the voyage will be further elongated by a sequence of time changes that will each cost us an hour (of sleep, usually), and by our crossing of the International Date Line, which will mean we’ll have April 20 twice.  Still, the sea’s vastness—we’ve a light blue sky today and whispy white clouds above the big “wine-dark” waves—means we can’t help but be aware of a bigger picture, in relation to which what we’ll be doing for most of the remainder of the voyage seems both urgent and small.

 

Kobe

Dean Vieira’s reference, at last night’s logistical pre-port session, to Japan as the last of our international ports drew deep groans, and not the kind of ironical half-chortles that similar comments had elicited on earlier occasions: the end of the voyage is now in sight, and that’s the source of a good deal of unhappiness, at least on those occasions when we’re made to acknowledge the facts of calendar life.  We’re in Kobe now, and the crew is just now going through the rapid and odd process the rest of us completed in the past hour, according to which a squad of Japanese officials has us all marching through the Union, in one door and out the other, having our temperatures’ taken by a machine that looks like a camera on a tripod and that doesn’t even require us to slow down as we walk past.  We have been warned that this country’s serious in its desire to limit the spread of viruses and such—we’ve all been coached on where and how it is and isn’t OK to sneeze—and this temperature-taking process thus is for us comprehensible, even if bizarre.  Out the window is a kind of scene we’ve become rather accustomed to since it first appeared to us in Cape Town—a busy city with high mountain walls behind it; in the foreground lots of ships; and on shore lots of containers. 

 

And if you’ve been reading this, you may by now feel you know the drill.  In a few minutes a US State Department official will board and brief us; we’ll then go through an immigration process; and we’ll then disperse to various places around this country, reconvening here a few days later to compare notes and get ready for what’s next to come.  When we return this time we really will be in the home stretch, mostly final class sessions, final papers, final exams.  One day off the ship in Hawaii , but otherwise all at sea.  A friend of mine who sailed last year told me that on final arrival he and his family and everyone else he knew on board would have been content for the ship to turn around and start over again, and that now seems entirely understandable to me.  (We’ve a family member who doesn’t like me even to say the words “San Diego,” for all my promises of baseball and zoos and long longed-for food items and such.) 

 

I think all the time how different this would have been if we’d gone, as many SAS voyages do, in the other direction, if we’d begun with our big Pacific crossing and then this rapid barrage of ports, one after the other.  I feel as if our itinerary has been just right, but I suspect every voyager feels that way.  Today we are in Japan; it’s just three days ago we were in China, fifteen days ago in Vietnam, a little over three weeks ago in India. How can that be?  India feels so literally as if it were in another lifetime—I’m perhaps influenced by time spent in Buddhist temples, which will resume tomorrow in Kyoto—that it seems impossible to imagine putting it together with our time here, though that is just what, via email, I just asked the faculty to think about doing with their students on the day after we leave Yokohama.  None of this seems, in any case, like part of a life I can recognize as mine: I never thought I’d see these places.  Indeed, I spent months before the voyage saying that I’d always been happily resigned to that fact of missing these places.  Now that seems like a very stupid thing to have said even once; now I think that visiting China ought to feel like an obligation for every educated American.  The more this goes on, the more we’re struck by how little we know of the world.

 

It’s sunny here and cool, just lovely, though rain’s expected for later in the week.  And everyone I saw in the long line passing by that weird machine seemed hearty and happy and ready to go.

 

PS And I wrote that and then the diplomat came on, and then some Kobe city officials, and now it’s the evening, and everyone’s all around everywhere.

 

ports

Hong Kong’s harbor at night is a magnificent thing to see, lights on massive buildings flashing everywhere in deliberate patterns.  This is one of the rare stops on this voyage when we’re docked in a central location—the cruise ship terminal is a magnificent shopping mall in its own right (as one of our Chinese students noted during our cultural pre-port session a couple of nights ago), and from there one can get on the famous Star Ferry or pick up any one of a number of different forms of transportation—and yet it’s also one of the stops from which we’re dispersing most fully.  A hundred or so people will remain on the ship when it leaves tomorrow night for Shanghai, while many of the rest headed off today in the direction of Beijing or Tibet or elsewhere.  Some folks will leave us for good in Shanghai—among them Senator Charles Robb and his wife, Lynda Johnson Robb, who’ve been with us since Cape Town; our visiting medical team from the University of Virginia will depart then too.  And last night at the logistical pre-port session Dean Vieira noted that we’ve only about 30 days left, an observation that drew painful, plaintive groans.  Here, for the first time on the voyage, our ship seems small, dwarfed by the buildings’ size and brightness.  Like any community we’ve been diminished too by the passage of time—by injury, by loss, by error—even as the community has almost visibly grown in stature through all it has learned and experienced. 

 

It has long seemed to me that one of the most delightfully unbearable human types is the first-semester freshperson home for Thanksgiving break: the beginning of college is jerry-rigged to provide such a person with an inflated sense of how much she or he has learned, and that trip home at Thanksgiving is necessarily an occasion to show high school friends that one has become...something more.  And parents, poor parents, and other relatives are almost incidental to those demonstrations of grandeur: the showing off, like the mating displays of some exotic birds, are very precisely directed at particular peers, and while the freshperson may be ready to primp and perform for those high school friends, the relatives are simply supposed to concede that that freshperson has outgrown them.  The parents and aunts and grandparents gathered at the Thanksgiving table are to be only mute witnesses to the freshperson’s heft.  Now one thing that has been obvious to me about Semester at Sea is that it necessarily renders its participants insufferable for an extended period after their return: all they want to talk about is the darn voyage, how they went to this place and that, had this experience and that experience, were dumbfounded by this and that newly discovered aspect of life.  The returned Semester at Sea voyager, that is, is much like the returned freshperson, only worse, much worse.  (I’m already resigned to a life of a kind of isolation come May, in which I’ll be able to converse only with people who were with me on this voyage and maybe some folks who were on others.)

 

The first goal of all the adults on the ship is to keep the students safe, to return them home well to their families.  A not-too-distant second comes some notion of growth: to my mind the program is still developing a precise idea of what that growth might entail, but some version of it will, I feel sure, be evident in every returned passenger.  In the meantime, any reader of this blog should feel confident, if, as is likely, you are reading it with one particular voyager in mind and are wondering where exactly that voyager is right now, that that voyager is walking a little taller, possessed of a new kind of alertness, able to anticipate situations that some weeks ago would have seemed baffling.  Travel’s never easy on the folks who stay at home—I often think of the end of Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, one of the strangest of sea-going tales, which ends with what I’ve always thought of as a kind of perfect gesture epitomizing the situation of the one left behind, a kind of nautical version of what one does when one foists an umbrella or an overcoat on some departing house guest who’s headed off into a stormy night—but what should reassure you is the sense that we wanderers are, by this point of the voyage, doing it a good bit differently, have gotten better at it.  You’d might as well relish that, because when we all get home in a few weeks we’re going to be a bit tough to take.