Tuesday, 21November -- AT SEA
Up at 0430 a.m. Em still asleep, on his back and snoring. His cold, or whatever it is, has worsened and he was up half the night – as was I. Promptly at 0700, room service delivered oatmeal, toast, tea and juice, as ordered, but the kitchen forgot the warm milk, and my whispered remonstrations over this lapse awakened Em and made him so cross that I felt sorry for the room boy, Diosdado (The God-given) and rashly tipped him, which Em had forbidden me to do until the end of the cruise. Fortunately, I had no time to debate the etiquette of shipboard largesse, as I had signed up – in a moment of apparent insanity – for a daily eight o’clock yoga class, for which I have paid a non-refundable $100 for five lessons.
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| Lotus |
Seated, as usual, in the "Lotus" position, we spent a few minutes in meditation, then moved on to the "asanas." I felt like a bit of an assana myself. Hopelessly outclassed, I was awkward, irritable, clumsy, grumpy, wrinkled, sclerotic, and old. Having expected a coven of lumpy septuagenarians thumping about in ill-fitting sweats, I was more than a little surprised and none too pleased to encounter a bevy of twenty-somethings swanning around in spandex, each more nimble than the next.
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| King Pigeon (NOT Solitaire) |
Under the direction of the Yogi, they zestfully flung themselves skyward and back in seemingly endless repetitions of “Sun Salutations” and all those other agonizing pretzel-like poses with animal names --
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| Camel |
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| Crow |
Monkey, Cobra, Scorpion, Camel, Crane, Rabbit, Armadillo, etc. -- on a pitching deck. Accosting Yogi Derek at the end of the hour – only an hour, dear God! – I questioned the wisdom of characterizing the class as Hatha or “gentle” yoga, when obviously it was “hot” yoga, to which he countered, very gently, that he had not said “Hatha” but “hot,” which he pronounced in a flat-tongued mono-tonal way as “haht.” Just as I was limping out the door, he reminded me of my four o’clock pilates class, for which I had paid another $100 up front (not including the return trip).
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| Yogi Derek |
What the ship's "Library" has is exceedingly comfy chairs; what it does not have is books. Well, one can't have everything. In all fairness, they do boast the entire backlist of Harlequin romances and Reader’s Digest abridgments, but also some singular lapses; for instance, not a single word of Hawaiiana -- ie, flora, fauna, cultural mores, mating customs or cheap Honolulu hotels.
While I was happily re-reading Matthew Kneale's splendid novel English Passengers, Em, unbeknownst to me, was at the sick bay, paying a call on the ship’s doctor. Dr. Craig, an Australian, told Em that he was badly congested and put him on a respirator (ventilator? vaporizor?) for an hour. Em followed this up with a steambath, or “shvitz,” as he calls it, after which he was very tired and said he would just have a hamburger in our stateroom, but not so tired that he did not have another tiny tantrum because he had requested an extra dill pickle and the kitchen forgot to send it. I pointed out that by the time Diosdado returned with the pickle, the burger and fries would be cold. This prediction proved to be accurate, but Em was not gracious in defeat.
While I was happily re-reading Matthew Kneale's splendid novel English Passengers, Em, unbeknownst to me, was at the sick bay, paying a call on the ship’s doctor. Dr. Craig, an Australian, told Em that he was badly congested and put him on a respirator (ventilator? vaporizor?) for an hour. Em followed this up with a steambath, or “shvitz,” as he calls it, after which he was very tired and said he would just have a hamburger in our stateroom, but not so tired that he did not have another tiny tantrum because he had requested an extra dill pickle and the kitchen forgot to send it. I pointed out that by the time Diosdado returned with the pickle, the burger and fries would be cold. This prediction proved to be accurate, but Em was not gracious in defeat.
Wednesday, 22 Nov – “Formal Night!”
The treatment has helped; Em had a better night and his lungs were not so crackly. I too was feeling more rested and bounded off to the gym for a session with a personal trainer, who, to my surprise, turned out to be... Yogi Derek!
A master multi-tasker, or should I say multi-tasking master, The Teacher believes that The Seeker (moi) should not be tethered, as it were, to machines, but should embrace a range of protean props consisting of balls, free weights, skip ropes, and giant elastic bands while at the same time performing squats, twists, headstands and lunges punctuated with hip-hop and zumba. What with the see-sawing horizon and the perennially pitching deck, it was all I could do to keep my balance or collar my wandering drishti. More than once I proved that I don't know squat about squats and suffered humiliating pratfalls from a ball or beaucu, to the snickering amusement -- or am I merely paranoid? -- of the twenty-somethings cantering away on their treadmills.
A master multi-tasker, or should I say multi-tasking master, The Teacher believes that The Seeker (moi) should not be tethered, as it were, to machines, but should embrace a range of protean props consisting of balls, free weights, skip ropes, and giant elastic bands while at the same time performing squats, twists, headstands and lunges punctuated with hip-hop and zumba. What with the see-sawing horizon and the perennially pitching deck, it was all I could do to keep my balance or collar my wandering drishti. More than once I proved that I don't know squat about squats and suffered humiliating pratfalls from a ball or beaucu, to the snickering amusement -- or am I merely paranoid? -- of the twenty-somethings cantering away on their treadmills.
“It’s all in your mind,” Teacher Derek informed me as I sprawled on the deck. "Find your drishti!" But I could not find it, no matter how hard I looked.
When at last I returned to the stateroom I wanted only to lie down – forever -- but Em said he wanted a “proper” breakfast, which, as I envisioned the possibilities, made me wince with apprehension. We went down at 0930 and took our assigned seats at one of the round tables, which, fortunately, was empty. From my admittedly cursory observation, most of the passengers dine at the first seating in the evening, retire at eight (after a bit of bingo), rise at 0500 and by 0600 are waiting pathetically for their porridge in the breakfast queue.
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| "Please, sir, may I have some more?" |
Thanks to our steward, Manley, word has swept like wildfire through the lower decks that I am a fluent Tagalog speaker and the Filipino waiters and busboys greeted me with a cheery chorus of “Maganda umaga po!” (Good morning!) which – gigantic sham though I am -- I actually managed to return. There is a distinct caste system among the employees aboard these ships. The Captain, (Brahmin) is Italian, as are most of the ship’s officers (warrior class); the non-commissioned personnel—beauticians, shopkeepers -- are English (Liverpudlian or cockney) or Australian; and everyone else is Filipino.
I had my hair shampooed – a huge mistake, as every female aboard, and not a few men, were having their hair done in honor of the Captain’s “Formal Night.” I had not seen so many lacquered curls and Cattleya corsages since my Senior prom.
Thursday, 23 November
At Sea
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| Wild Turkey |
Why turkey? I ask. And why twice? So excessive. So redundant. Roughly 100 million turkeys are executed each year for Thanksgiving and Christmas meals at which people eat tasteless, hormonal mutants that no one would dream of ordering in a restaurant (when did anyone last see turkey on a dinner menu?) and whose brief lives (six months) of hideous captivity are an unimaginable nightmare. Half of all those birds are brutally mutilated and then killed by a company called Butterball, LLC.
Fight of the Century
When we lived on a 17th century farm in the semi-rural environs of Newport, Rhode Island, we were visited not only by ghosts of lovers past, but many other visitors as well: migratory Canada geese dropped in for a few weeks of R and R; ducks and sea birds swam upstream from the sound to the pond; and homeless or wounded exotics – escaped parrots, confused flamingos, crippled raptors – were brought in by the Mabel Norman Bird Sanctuary to convalesce in tranquility. The peace of one such convalescent, a Butterball who had escaped from a maximum security factory farm, which is like escaping from death row at Sing Sing, was severely disrupted when a wild turkey with a broken wing was admitted to the farm and foolishly put in the same pen. The Butterball, who looked like a feather pouf or a snowfall on stilts, was so grotesquely top-heavy that he could scarcely stand. The wild turkey, hors de combat, but trim and fit nonetheless, danced into the ring like Mohamed Ali, bouncing on his six toes and swinging. One push and the poor poufster was down, his life saved only by the intercession of one of the sanctuary staff, who then, sadly, took the Butterball home and ate him. It was, as it happened, Thanksgiving Day.
Em, taking the long view, said the fight reminded him of the historic 1934 match between Max Baer and Primo Carnera.
Em, taking the long view, said the fight reminded him of the historic 1934 match between Max Baer and Primo Carnera.
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| Carnera and Baer -- pre-fight weigh-in |
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| "Fight of the Century" 1934 -- Carnera down in Round One |
Friday
At sea
Crippled from workouts and v. sore throat; cancel all exercise. Em on penicillin.
Saturday
Kailua/Kona
Em and I having recovered somewhat, we determined to carry on with our original plan to visit the grave of my great-grandfather, an English doctor employed in the 1800’s by a sugar plantation on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island. As the sole physician in the northeast, his clientele soon expanded to include virtually everyone in the vicinity and he traveled the fifty-mile stretch of vertiginous coastline on horseback each week from farm to farm, from Honaka'a west to Honomaka'u and southeast to Hilo, often staying overnight and being paid in produce. My cousin Gillian has recently organized a replacement of the old headstone, which had suffered the depredations of time, and we decided to visit the gravesite, which she described as spectacularly beautiful.
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We took the tender in to shore and sat under the great banyan tree in the port, waiting for a van to take us out to the airport to pick up our rental car. The wait was not unpleasant; Kailua is a pretty town and although it bustles with tourists and tee-shirt shops, it is enhanced by blossoms everywhere -- bougainvillea, hibiscus, poincianas and frangipani growing rampant amidst a number of old buildings – the stone white-steepled missionary church, the small seaside Hulihee palace of the Hawaiian monarchy, the Kona Inn -- all low-key and lovely, like the setting itself. The trade winds blow the pandanus and coco palms on the palace lawn and along the old sea wall and they sway and lean out as though reaching for the surf.
It was past one when we drove north to Waimea, the cowboy town that grew up around the Parker Ranch, and continued on to the storefront village of Honaka'a. A mile or two out of town as one heads down the coast towards Hilo, we turned left onto a dirt road through some fields and emerged onto a grassy slope overlooking the sea and the north coast. There were only a dozen or so graves, among them a sturdy white marble cross with the name Charles Bailey Greenfield inscribed and his dates: 1847 - 1909. Dr. Greenfield was outlived by his widow Caroline, ”that Scottish martinet,” as Mummy described her, by some 25 years, living with her youngest son Bill on the north coast of Oahu until at last she died of old age and was buried, all 98 pounds of her, in Nu'uanu Cemetery in Honolulu, where numerous other Greenfields are also interred.
The sun was setting, the sea steel grey and choppy as we caught the last tender out to the ship. Em was exhausted and I felt a familiar sense of guilt (my too-faithful companion) for having coerced him into going with me on my pilgrimage. Had I in fact “coerced” him? I don’t know; it seems too strong a verb, and yet I feel that I did. Whatever the cause, the effects were terrible. All night he fought for breath, his lungs straining and creaking like a pair of old bellows, chest heaving and stridorous, wracked with rattles and gurgles and gasps. I piled up the pillows, plied him with Mucinex, pumped inhalants into him, and implored him to let me call Dr. Craig. But he refused, saying he was too tired. He was so ill that I was certain he would not last the night. I wept and begged him not to die.
At one point, he looked up at me and smiled. “Do you love me so much, then?”
Sunday
Hilo
We docked at 0800. Em was sleeping at last, though his breathing was still labored. I let him sleep and went down to the dining saloon for breakfast. I was too weary to eat much, but I had some tea and papaya. Then I sought out Dr. Craig. He was in his office in the sickbay, a neat little two-bed hospital. I asked him pointblank what the cruise company does when someone dies aboard ship. He looked at me in surprise. “If you’re talking about burial-at-sea and all that, forget it. No one does that anymore.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Have you considered the effect on the passengers? Not to mention the median age? They’re supposed to be frisking on the dance floor and dropping their pensions in the casino, not brooding about being trussed up like an egg-roll in a bit of sail cloth and getting deep-sixed off the quarterdeck while a Filipino band stands on the poop, playing ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.”
I had seen a burial-at-sea once, and of course it was not at all like that. It was April 1945; the war in the Pacific was still on and we were travelling in convoy from Manila to Los Angeles aboard a troop transport. Nearing the coast of Hawaii, a little girl my age, a friend, died during the night of spinal meningitis. The ship, which had been scheduled to make a stopover in Honolulu, was now forbidden to enter port, and so the child had to be buried at sea. In the early morning, we gathered on deck and all the ships in the convoy slowed their engines and then stopped. Due to the presence of Japanese submarines in the area, the ceremony was, of necessity, brief. The chaplain spoke a few words, the bugle sounded its lament, and the small body, wrapped in sail cloth, was tipped toward the sea and, sliding out from under the flag, slipped beneath the waves. Standing on deck next to my father, I began to cry. My father took my hand in his. "Helen hates the water," I said. "She can't swim." My father looked away. "She'll float," he said. "To shore?" He nodded. Looking out, I saw nothing but clouds on the horizon. Still, I thought, she might make it. I would have felt less reassured had I known that two cannon balls were sewn into the shroud and that the only way she would float was down.
The ceremony had lasted no more than ten minutes. As soon as it ended, the ships started their engines and the convoy turned north, heading into port, while we steamed on alone.
I had seen a burial-at-sea once, and of course it was not at all like that. It was April 1945; the war in the Pacific was still on and we were travelling in convoy from Manila to Los Angeles aboard a troop transport. Nearing the coast of Hawaii, a little girl my age, a friend, died during the night of spinal meningitis. The ship, which had been scheduled to make a stopover in Honolulu, was now forbidden to enter port, and so the child had to be buried at sea. In the early morning, we gathered on deck and all the ships in the convoy slowed their engines and then stopped. Due to the presence of Japanese submarines in the area, the ceremony was, of necessity, brief. The chaplain spoke a few words, the bugle sounded its lament, and the small body, wrapped in sail cloth, was tipped toward the sea and, sliding out from under the flag, slipped beneath the waves. Standing on deck next to my father, I began to cry. My father took my hand in his. "Helen hates the water," I said. "She can't swim." My father looked away. "She'll float," he said. "To shore?" He nodded. Looking out, I saw nothing but clouds on the horizon. Still, I thought, she might make it. I would have felt less reassured had I known that two cannon balls were sewn into the shroud and that the only way she would float was down.
The ceremony had lasted no more than ten minutes. As soon as it ended, the ships started their engines and the convoy turned north, heading into port, while we steamed on alone.
“So," I pressed Dr. Craig, "what do you do?”
“With the stiffs, you mean?”
I found it unsettling in the circumstances to be talked to in this offhand way, and at the same time I couldn’t help but be amused.
“Yes. Surely you’ve had one or two over the years?”
“We stow them in the meat locker, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“Oh.”
“And then we take them back to their home port, which on this trip happens to be Los Angeles. After all, they’ve paid for a return ticket.”
Well, really, I thought, that’s a bit much.
Craig was silent a moment. “You’re not by any chance talking about your husband, are you?”
“Yes, I am. He’s extremely ill, Doctor. “ I filled him in on the night before. “I think he has pneumonia and that he should be taken off the ship in Honolulu, because he’s going to die if he stays aboard this ship. Nothing personal.”
“And then what? He can’t fly in his condition.”
“But I could put him in the hospital there. The medical care is said to be very good.”
“What does he want? Does he want to move ashore?”
“No. He wants to stay aboard ship. But that’s mainly because he feels too tired and sick to move.”
“Well, he’s right. It would be exhausting for him to have to move now. Moreover, in my opinion, you ought to honor his wishes. “
I sighed, trying to decide what to do and feeling myself weakening under pressure from both men.
“I tell you what,” Dr. Craig said. “I’ll go along and check on him now. Unfortunately, the x-ray is too damn small to tell much, but we’ll try it again. I’ll give him another breathing treatment and put him on another antibiotic. Meanwhile, you should go off on one of these shore excursions and think about something else.”
“I don’t think I should leave him now.”
“I promise you he isn’t going to die – not today, anyway.”
I went back to our cabin to alert Em to Craig’s visit. I told him not to walk back from the infirmary by himself and not to go to the dining saloon for lunch. “Get room service,” I said. He groaned, but agreed.
He seemed glad enough to be shot of me for a couple of hours.
“Sure you don’t mind?’ I said.
“No, no,” he croaked. “Go ahead.
“One more thing,” I said. “Promise me you won’t die. Not on this bucket.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said.
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| Kileuea, one of Earth's hottest volcanoes |
The tour bus was jammed with passengers, so many in fact that half of them had to stand in the aisle, blocking the view and causing a number of people to grumble. But we hadn’t gone a half-mile before we stopped at a huge "Big-box" store, where, to my surprise, we disgorged three-quarters of the passengers, who went skipping off in their white running shoes. The alacrity with which they charged into the store was not unlike that of parched men in the desert discovering a waterhole. I was astonished. Had these people spent $4000 and two weeks at sea to go to Walmart?
Kilauea, like many volcanoes, creates its own micro-climate and we had not gone more than a few feet past the entrance to the park before it began to rain. It was gloomy and dank and I thought of my grandparents who, in 1907, had spent part of their honeymoon here at the Volcano House, a small wood frame, six-room inn not much bigger than a cottage. This damp rusticity was not an auspicious beginning, (though it was good enough for Teddy Roosevelt), but my grandfather Edgar made it up to his bride by taking her off to Japan where they spent two weeks hiking the slopes of Mt Fuji (whence came this penchant for volcanoes?) and resting up at the luxurious Fujiya Hotel. Both hotels still stand, but the old Volcano House is now a gallery, well known for its handsome works of Hawaiian art and handicrafts. I asked the tour guide if we could stop there, but he said we could not because if we did we would have to forego the souvenir store.
We approached Kilauea’s summit caldera by way of the 100-year-old Volcano Observatory and Jaggar Museum, which stand on the rim, filled with old seismographs and other scientific equipment, as well as spectacular photographs and films of recent and past eruptions. The rain had stopped while we were inside and we walked out of the museum and down a path through a scorched field overlooking the Halema'uma'u crater, pocked with bubbling fumaroles and vents erupting like sores, spewing yellow-ochre fumes, over which rose a great volcanic plume of smoke, the magma-borne gases of sulphur dioxide and CO2 enveloping us in smelly images of hellfire and brimstone.
I had been hoping no one would sit next to me, but when we got back onto the bus a tall, gangly man angled himself into the seat next to mine and as the night follows the day, commenced to reveal far more about himself than I cared to know, to wit, his name: Gerald; nationality: Canadian; profession: accountant (retired); residence:Victoria; marital status: widower. Uh-oh, I thought, steeling myself for an account of the sad demise of his wife. But to my surprise, it was quite the contrary; the poor woman was scarcely accorded a passing mention in Gerald’s Saga. The person who figured prominently in Gerald’s Saga was … Gerald! And what a dour saga it was! Rife with resentment, self pity and complaints at having been cast-off by former “friends” and colleagues, he whinged on – a bitter litany of ostracism from weekly golf games, bridge foursomes, tennis tournaments and dinner parties --until, after an apparent eternity, we arrived at the souvenir store where the bus ground to its obligatory halt.
Warned that we were “running late,” we hurried up and down the aisles, quickly scanning chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, canvas sacks of Kona coffee, shell bracelets and other nacreous gewgaws, not to mention the ubiquitous hula girls on velvet. I managed to resist these objects with relative ease, but one item caught my fancy: a wind chime with bamboo pipes suspended from a coconut with thatched fringe whose resemblance to a shrunken head was striking.
Back aboard ship, I rushed to the stateroom to see Em, but found him, to my surprise, having tea in the lounge. I showed him my prize. "Looks remarkably like your first husband," he said.
Postscript
The wind chime hangs today outside my kitchen window and when the scorching, grit-laden wind howls up out of the Sonoran desert, hissing like a simoum through the dusty palo verdes and bowling the tumbleweed along the heat-hazed highways, the bamboo pipes clack and the shrunken head swirls, and I like to close my eyes and imagine it is the trade winds bending the palms and poincianas as they reach for the surf in the warm sea-blue air.
END Part III
