A cruise for newlyweds

Word on the street was that our marriage would never work. Of course my parents were hopeful. They had put up with a lot from me and they wanted this to be it. I didn’t think about longevity. I was just glad to be with someone I loved who loved me back. After four months of married life, during which we lived in Paris where Strong With A Spear had been working for two years, he said he wanted to see The States. And here I was all prepared to improve my French and learn how to deal with all the stores in our neighborhood closing from noon until four every day so everyone could go home and eat lunch and have sex and nap. Well, one thing you learn fast in a marriage is flexibility.

So he arranged a leave of absence from work so we could go back to America and he could take a good look around. I was back on the road with Strong With A Spear, this time aboard the only cruise ship that still separated passengers by class, as in First Class, Cabin Class, Tourist and the ever popular Steerage. On this ship the classes were separated by locked glass doors. Guess which one we booked? Keep in mind, young marrieds, just starting out, Strong With A Spear who could have just as well been named Bavarian With A Tight Fist on leave without pay from the only job between us.

Traveling by ship is always romantic, no matter how far down inside the hull your cabin is located. Ours was as far down as it gets – D deck – and all the way forward under the ship’s prow. The crossing would take six days as this was one of the last of the Italian liners designed specifically to make crossings between the old world to the new. It had two sister ships. Together they constituted the Pinta, the Nina and the Santa Maria of the late twentieth century.

We hit our first gale on the third day out, halfway across the North Atlantic in December, a time of year I would avoid if I were you and thinking of a pleasant ocean crossing between anywhere on the European continent and America’s northeast coast. We were headed for New York, that great port of call where so many have arrived completely exhausted after puking their way across the Atlantic Ocean.

On the third day out I knew something was up when I got off the ship’s elevator on my way to the dining room and A) the large public area where the elevators and the stairways were located across from the bursar’s office had been crisscrossed with heavy ropes about five inches in diameter that were hooked onto the walls with heavy brass tackle and B) people were hanging onto these ropes so they wouldn’t fall all over the floor.

Now I grew up on and around boats. I was taught water safety from my earliest memory.

“Always respect the water,” my father told us. “You’re no match for what the sea can dish out.”

I immediately reconsidered my options. I could die there in full view of everyone hanging onto those oversized lifelines, or I could go down with the ship safely hiding under my covers in my Steerage cabin.

I failed to grasp one vital piece of information. To whit: as far forward as our cabin was situated, the up and down motion would be at its absolute zenith right in my bed.

By the time I got there I was bouncing off the walls of the passageway oblivious to everything but my ultimate goal – to collapse and die in my lower berth.

I doubt that any reader has actually been face to face with the gaping open mouth of a gray whale swimming at high speed in a beeline right at your head, but that’s just what it felt like in my bed in that cabin down below the water line and as far forward in that ship as one could get without actually being in the water swimming like hell in front of its bow like some crazed dolphin.

Every wave hurled us up and over its crest. After the crest we dipped way down. The sounds that accompanied this joy ride are hard to describe without the actual sound track itself but I shall try. Imagine that you are a very, very large mastodon of the Pliocene era. Now imagine that a group of resourceful cave people has decided to harness you and drag you away against your will. Further imagine, if you will, that the implement they have chosen to wrap around you is made of a very stretchy rubberized material that grates and pulls against your smooth skin (you are not a wooly mastodon but a leathery skinned one). The resulting stress when these two materials meet at the great forces exerted by you, the mastodon, trying to break free and the cave people trying to overpower you makes a fearsome wail that reverberates throughout the prehistoric world first in your direction and then in the cave people’s. This noise continues unabated, rising and falling with each round of galactically powerful heaving and tugging.

I admit it. I cried out to no one in the room with me to just let me die there immediately.

And then Strong With A Spear flung open the door.