Fun Thing

As my comment on the previous post indicates, I have just read David Foster Wallace's well-known essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

m.v. Zenith

The essay details1 DFW's experience aboard a Caribbean Cruise ship, and what is most interesting is that I, perhaps a few years after DFW made his voyage, made my own voyage aboard the very same vessel: the Celebrity Cruises' m.v. Zenith2.

I was around 12 at the time, and so did not have the same perceptual abilities of DFW vis-a-vis irony, issues of privilege, and the literary resonances of the Celebrity Cruises brochure. I definitely did not have his wit. I probably had a similar amount of arrogance.

Anyway, my memories of the trip are much spottier. I remember being disappointed in the ship's library (probably because it didn't have any books about Star Wars 3). I remember being prepared, with my sister, to clean up in the kids' mixed doubles ping-pong tournament before our aggressive style of play sent five ping pong balls out to sea 4. I remember wearing a black suit with a mustard-colored clip on tie that I thought was the height of practicality because if I were to drip any mustard onto it, it would disappear. Mustard was and is my favorite condiment.

Most of those memories are neutral (except for the ping-pong story, which I treasure). I don't feel the same level of snide hostility that DFW feels towards cruising in general, though I recognize, as he does, the myriad injustices that pervade and sustain the luxury cruise industry.

But my best memory of a cruise ship comes not from being on board one, but of seeing one from afar. It echoes the end of the essay, where Wallace writes: "...seeing, from the perspective of this nighttime sea, the good old Nadir complexly aglow, angelically white, lit up from within, festive, imperial, palatial . . . yes, this: like a palace."

SSV Corwith Cramer

I had that point of view once. During my offshore seminar at the Williams-Mystic program, our brigatine, the SSV Corwith Cramer encountered two luxury cruise ships in the Bay of Maine. Probably not the megaships that cruise the Caribbean, but nonetheless answering to DFW's description.

My watch was on deck duty that night, and I forget who was at the helm, but I was standing bow watch. Bow watch was my favorite duty on the Cramer, especially at night. The work entailed tethering one's safety harness to one of the forward stays and peering forward into the darkness, untethering and walking aft every hour, or to report navigational lights or other oddities. So it was that, on the lookout for a small green light, flashing every 3 seconds, I spotted, far out on the horizon, one, quickly resolving into two, yellow lights. I untethered and walked aft, reporting to the helm and to our watch officer, both of whom seemed very unconcerned. I returned forward, and over the course of the next three hours, saw the lights become clusters of lights, then lighted ships, then, just as we were about to be relieved of the deck, two cruise ships docked side by side. Cabin lights, lights atop their false stacks, a glow that, from a few nautical miles out, appeared to be strings of Christmas lights strung up on their decks, all glowing into the darkness, all of this doubled, as the ships seemed close enough to be passing drinks back and forth. See DFW's description, excerpted above, and the full text, at the end of "A Supposedly Fun... etc." for a poetic description.

I remember that clearly, leaning with my leg on the boom, tethered to the forward stay, glancing back over the Cramer, dark, except for her port and starboard, green and red lights, and shivering, thinking of all those people, ostensibly aboard a ship. It is only in regard to this that I join DFW in his snide hostility towards luxury cruises, and wish to say this to cruisers, and even to DFW's ghost himself: disabuse yourself of the notion that you are on a ship. Find a real ship, one that does not seek, via stabilizers and thrusters, to divorce herself from the motion of the sea. Get out of sight of land, out of sight of floating protuberances big enough to be land, then say that you have been on a ship.


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1 And I mean details; in my paperback edition, it runs just under 100 pages and divided into 13 chapters 13-14 chapters, the discrepancy deriving from a 30-page, hour-by-hour catalog of one day's events, which could comprise a significant part of chapter 13, or be considered its own chapter.

2 DFW consistently refers to the ship as the Nadir, which, until I just now looked up the more technical, astronomical definition of Nadir, I did not find particularly funny.


3 The film franchise, not the missile defense program.


4 We made it to the semifinals, and had a decent chance at glory before the kids' program staff decided to cut their losses and not give out any more balls.