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.