Overboard

Suddenly, after more than a year or so, I have begun to write entries for this blog again, starting with this one.  Especially due to my resigning from my position at Curtis School, several people have told me that they wished I had a blog, and since I already had one, the solution was to go back to writing in it, and I have accepted that that is a good idea!   I am thankful and pleased that they would like to keep in touch, as I would them, and in a way, this might be keeping in touch in a deeper way than the stolen moments of camaraderie made during normal working days.

As I have been saying goodbye, I have had the feeling that I may actually be seeing some people more, now (meaning, that moving away from a frequent connection with people you know from your workplace and instead coming closer to them in an outside setting, it is like "travel"), similar to how in your normal routine of living in a city (because you feel you can do this at any time), you never get around to enjoying some of the aspects of your own city, such as going to the museums, or, in my case here in Los Angeles, going to the beach.  And isn't going to the beach one of the reasons we live here (along with the weather, and the high-paying job possibilities)?  I don't think I have been to the beach here for about five years!  My "beaching" has been in Maui, the Exuma Keys of the Bahamas, the Amalfi Coast in Italy and several amazingly gorgeous beaches in Sardinia, some hidden beaches in the island mazes of Palau, and most exposed to water on both sides, my vacation by the lagoon of Fakarava, a coral atoll in the Tuamotos of French Polynesia.  In fact the only recent time I have been in the ocean "here" was in the water at one of the Channel Islands across from Ventura, which required taking a boat to get over there.  As far as beaches go, I may as well be living in Kansas if all the beaches I go to I travel to!

Peculiarly, though, on this last trip that I took, a week-long Caribbean Cruise out of Miami to Nassau, Puerto Rico, and St. Maartin, I didn't actually get into the water at any beach on an excursion (I opted for city tours, instead), but I did swim in each of the three swimming pools that were on board the ship.  My favorite of the ship's three pools (there was a fourth one I didn't count that was off-limits except for extremely VIP passengers) was the adults only pool.  I didn't decide it was the best pool because it didn't have children; happy children enjoying a pool is an enhancement for me.  For example, when I was in Exuma several years ago and swimming in the hotel's swimming pool, there were always in the water a young brother and sister and their older sister (who, with all her maturity, could have been their mother, but she actually was in high school).  All three of them were extremely appealing, personality wise, and sort of artsy/genius in their demeanor.

Even though it was daytime, the swimming pool light was on all the time and the little boy, who wore a snorkeling mask whenever he would get into the pool, liked to dip under water and look at the lighted pool light and then rise up to announce what color he had seen, as the colors were changeable.  The younger of his sisters informed me that there was a rotation of three colors.  So the boy would slip under water, look at the light, and then pop back up to announce that it was red.  Then he would slide under again, inspect the light and then pop back up to let us know that it was now blue.  Then he went back to red, and then back to blue in his announcements.

After several rounds of this, I said to his little sister, "I thought you said there were three colors, but he only tells us about two."  The girl looked at her brother, who had a marvelous name, but I have now forgotten it, darn it, something like "Mergatroyd", I kid you not, and she said, "Mergatroyd,  tell him what the third color is."

He looked at her for a moment, as if to say, "Are you sure?", as if there were some reason that he should not tell me what the color was, and she nodded that he was to tell me, and then he looked at me and studied my face for a rather long moment as if he were attempting to divine whether or not he could actually reveal to me this precious piece of information.   After a while, he said, "bumble bee."

"Bumble bee?", I responded, "that is the third color, bumble bee, or are you saying that there is a bee under there?"  The boy nodded in affirmation, that's the color, and then sank down under the water to look at the light again, waited long enough for the colors to go through their rotations, and then popped back up and announced, "Yep, it is bumble bee."

The big sister said to me, "Mergatroyd has his own color scheme.  He observes the world with unwavering  accuracy; is completely honest and not given to a need to simplify his observations to conform with the expectations of others."

The next time I was in the pool, I brought along my scuba mask, which had lenses made in my glasses prescription.   The day before, I really couldn't have looked at the pool light myself because without my glasses, things are a blur and would especially be under the water.  I went straight for that underwater light and as I held by breath under water, I saw the red color, that completely turned every facet of the light's lenses into a brilliant and beautiful red.  The entire affect at the moment was one total redness.  Then the light clicked into blue, and it was similar to the red, only this time, every facet of the light's lenses burned a powerful blue light.  Then the color clicked again, but this time, only half of the lenses, every other one, were bathed in a brilliant yellow.  All the other, unlighted ones, seemed to shine out a diamond-like glistening and in the core of the those lenses was a metallic blackness that must have been the electronic components that plugged each facet into the fixture as a whole, which view was overpowered when the lenses were red or blue.

So there as plain as my eyes could make it, was an alteration of yellow and black, interspersed with a gossamer flicker of bumble-bee like wings; there could not possibly have been a different name for that "color" than the name Mergatroyd and given it, "bumble-bee"!  Oh how spectacular, oh Mergatroyd, how I salute you!

On the heels of this discovery of mine, the three children then happened to come out for their swim and the big sister took up her usual tanning spot on the chaise lounge near the water's edge, while the two younger kids slipped into the water.  I showed the big sister my goggles that I was now holding in my hand and said, "I saw the third color, and it was for sure bumble bee!" and she said, "Told ya."  As for Mergatroyd, his having fully gotten the pool light's number, was now deeper under water with his goggles, exploring whatever there was that was going on with the pool drain.

So children can add the spice that enhances the experience for me, but for the parents of children, it would be the adults only pool where finally they can rest, relax, and talk with me if they want, so I found I liked the adult pool the best, not because I wanted "no children", but because parents could enjoy the relief of not having to worry about their children and they were free to socialize with other adults.  So I made several friends in that pool.  The little kids had their own "Jungle" area on an upper deck which was replete with various slides, fountains, showers, and water canons that they could squirt each other with, all under professional shipboard staff supervision.

The problem with the biggest pool of the ship was that the crowd of people would take up nearly every chaise lounge.  I'd always easily find a vacant lounge at the adult's only pool.

There was a third pool, on yet another deck, one that could be indoors if the ceiling over it was closed, or half open, the way they had it when I tried it out.  Since I had gotten a second degree blistering sunburn on my face during the two hours in Miami that I had ridden on the upper deck of the "Big Bus" tour bus without a hat or any kind of sunblock (who knew I needed that, the day was overcast and almost no one else was wearing any kind of protection), I figured I would only use the pool that had a roof over it so that I could avoid even more sun.  But yikes, something about the water in that devil of a pool was like pouring acid into my eyeballs!  I guess maybe they had put in way too much chlorine, or something; whatever it was, I jumped back out of there and immediately went to one of the numerous fresh-water showers dotted all around and soaked my eyeballs better than if I were using an eyewash in a chemistry lab.  Never again did I use that pool, and saw to it that instead I wore my wide-brimmed hat that I bought in Nassau for when I was out in the sun anywhere on that cruise.

But the water that this blog entry is meant to be about is the Caribbean ocean that I would see, and enjoy from the various vantages of the ship.  Gloriously, I had a balcony cabin, the first time I have had that (instead of an "ocean view" cabin).

Speaking of water, I had made the mistake of buying a sparkling water drink package.  I had been avoiding for quite a while prior to the cruise (and still, today) plastic food and drink containers and will no longer drink out of a plastic water bottle unless there is absolutely no other choice. At home I got rid of all my plastic water bottles, using glass only, and for the office, I had only metallic water bottles.  What I am avoiding is the plastic that mimics estrogen and I have read several articles that said all plastic packaging will deposit much unwanted estrogen-mimmics into the bodies of men, and it is even dangerous to women who want estrogen in their bodies, but not too much.

The regular drink packages on this cruise ship were ridiculously expensive.  I'm too lazy at the moment to look up what the actual cost was, but for the unlimited drink package to be a good deal for me, I would have to drink something like 13 alcoholic drinks every single day.  Since I expected to drink maybe no more than two drinks a day, the cheapest option was to just pay full price for the drinks.  What ended up being my normal alcohol consumption was about two and a half drinks per day, which means two drinks one day and three drinks another day. But prior to seeing what my actual drinking quantity was, I figured that I mostly would be drinking water, and in order to avoid getting the plastic, I figured I would drink San Pellegrino, which I had only seen in glass bottles.

Wrong!  All the San Pellegrino they had on this ship was in plastic bottles, the very thing I wanted to avoid.  And as it all evolved, I found myself getting wine at dinner, instead of drinking the San Pellegrino.  And that damned sparkling water drinks package involved about 15 large size San Pellegrino bottles, so that meant two full bottles of sparkling water every day.  I figured I would be drinking water by the gallon like I do at home ("still" water that I purify and store in glass bottles), but somehow on the ship one bottle of sparkling water did for about two days for me, kept cool in the cabin refrigerator.

My table's waiter in the dining room had a remarkable memory, such as he always remembered that the woman sitting at our table wanted to order from the gluten-free menu, so every night he blessedly brought her the gluten free menu.  Me, he remembered as the man who drank the San Pellegrino, so the minute I sat down at the table, he would be over there with a big smile and a fresh new bottle of San Pellegrino, that he insisted on opening for me and then pouring with a flourish as if it were the finest wine, and he also had this little device that would process and then void the San Pellegrino bottle ticket from the drinks ticket booklet.

But then around the third or fourth day on the cruise, our table was given free champagne for each one of us and that did it, from then on, I had a taste for some kind of wine (or champagne) each dinner, which meant that I no longer really needed the San Pellegrino (that I had already paid for) as my dinner beverage.  The next day after the free champagne (clever trick, wasn't it--whetting our addiction like that!), the waiter brought my bottle of San Pellegrino (and his hand was out for the little ticket to void in his device), when I said, "No, I will have some wine tonight, instead, so no thank you for the bottled water this time."  Well, his understanding of English was not up to the standard of his memory...he thoroughly new me as the San Pellegrino man, and my saying, "No thank you, I don't want it tonight, you can take it away," or any other variation on that theme did not stop the opening of the bottle with a flourish and then his elegantly pouring it into my glass.  Okay, so the San Pellegrino is clearly an unchangeable "definite" and "always" in this waiter's routine with me.  And I swear, that MSC Cruise Ship (and truly I did and do very much LOVE it, so I am not really complaining) could have suddenly turned into a Disney Cruise Ship as far as I was concerned, and my waiter could have put on a Mickey Mouse robe with stars and galaxies emblazoned on it and donned the Sorceror's black and white pointed hat and commanded a platoon of enchanted broomsticks, because it got so that he was like "da dum dumpiti dumpti dumb de dumb dumpiti dumb de dumb" with that San Pellegrino water and soon enough the whole large dining room seemed to be awash with sparkling water and we all were floating away in a tsunami of relentless San Pellegrino!  I took to screwing the cap back onto the bottle and taking it to have during the big show later, but I still had so much of it left that I would sit outside on my balcony and watch the sea as I drank it, unless I went to a dance or a party or to a movie on the deck or to my favorite of all the lounges to hear the Bossa Nova music or to drink a martini, or, heaven forbid, go to the chocolate place and...but we won't talk about THE CHOCOLATE PLACE where I surely did very much sin, Father....

I alluded to this already.  From every vantage point, the ocean water was enchanting. Walking up on one of the high decks, the water below was entrancing.  And so it also was walking on the various glass walkways that curved off and out beyond the actual decks of the sides of the ship so that you were walking on glass directly over the water, the water below was mesmerizing, as was going to the very rear of the ship and up to the highest deck where they also had a clear glass curving walkway out and over the stern and walking over the water below, a feature they called "The Bridge of Sighs", which I think they figured most passengers would interpret romantically, such as the sighs of lovers and their mutual contentment, but I have been to Venice and I know that the Bridge of Sighs crosses over a quiet canal from the Doges's palace to a terrible dungeon and so the actual "sighs" of that bridge are the sighs of the prisoner who realizes that his one quick glance out the window on that bridge is the very last time he will see the outdoors for the rest of his life.  I marvel over the concept of designers who know the reality but purposely give a name to a feature that truly means nothing that applies to what they are trying to imply.  Still, in a actual use, the water below those over-water walkways was entrancing.

But even with all this, no view of the water was quite as alluring as the water you could see while sitting on your own private balcony with a bottle of San Pellegrino (or some other beverage) in your hand and a cool breeze gently blowing your hair as you watched the blue water swash by and periodically there would be little currents of white caps and other intricate pasterns that were like a siren's song, luring you into the cool embrace of the delicious and wonderful water below.  I literally would feel its pull, like it was calling "why don't you just jump right in, this water will feel so fantastic, it would be ecstasy to experience this floating embrace, just try it, you wouldn't regret it for the rest of your life...."

Then I would suddenly shudder and think, what are talking about, what are you thinking, this isn't like standing on the sandy ocean's edge in Maui where you can walk into knee deep refreshing water and feel the gentle surge and pull of the waves and then settle down in the incoming surf and ride the water movements back and forth like a baby swinging in a bathinette.  This beautiful water that you are looking at, splashing and sparkling so seductively, is fathoms deep and who knows what sea creatures with merciless jaws might be right under there, ready to chew you down in three razor-sharp bites.  That is HELL down there, especially at this hour when most people on this ship are partying somewhere not in their cabin until much later tonight and as you with panic realize what you had done, it would be way too late, nothing to grab onto as this immense ship, like an entire New York skyscraper lying down on its side on the water, plummets relentlessly forward with over 5,000 passengers, not one of them seeing you desperately treading water in this surging ocean next to the only chance you have at saving your life, with rapid knots speeding away from you, leaving you in an immense merciless sea, alone.

Shudder shudder shudder, I actually did have thoughst like that, like how there really was a siren call tempting me into a fantasy that at least I wasn't mentally ill enough to give into, but even the mere thought of such a thing calling like that made me make a pact with myself, promise me you don't do something foolish!  Well of course I wouldn't do it, I wouldn't climb overboard or take one fantastical leap without a thought of what would happen in two minutes after I finally came to my senses, too late, or too too too, oh God, what I am going to DO, too late?  This whole fantasy stream had one purpose, to warn me, to put me into alert so that nothing like that would ever happen.

I had even experienced that one time walking across the Golden Gate Bridge and stopping halfway to look over across the golden bay at the sparkling fairyland of San Francisco off in the near distance. Until I had stopped right there on the sidewalk of the very bridge where so many people actually do kill themeless by jumping off, I used to think the whole concept of it was horrifying, but being there on site, I could see that it doesn't seen horrifying at all.  The entire view is so glorious and wondrous.  the expected danger of the bay below instead looks benign, even friendly, gently inviting you to a fantastic angelic leap into space and then the cushioning softness of the water waiting below.  I had to literally push myself way away from the barricade, not that I was afraid that I would actually leap off the bridge, but that I could see how beautiful it seemed in contrast to the fear I would have imagined, and the awareness that it wasn't a suicide's misery at life so great that no potential or perceived danger was too horrible to trade for a final exit out of this life, but instead it could look so good to someone whose life is so bad that they couldn't contemplate another day of it.  If a person is in such a state, how can they fight it if they actually get up here to this spot?  It was that that scared me so.

There is a man I like to watch regularly on YouTube, Don, of Don's Family Vacations.  He specialty is cruises, what to do, what not to do, which cruise lines are better than others for the particular things you want to do, he is quirky and nice and I like him.  Well, tonight he talked about a woman who supposedly had "accidentally fallen" off the rear of a Norwegian Cruisline ship in the Mediterranean.  She did not have a life preserver of any kind, just her regular clothes, and she was out there for ten lone hours, treading water, without any reasonable hope of getting rescued.  How could somebody stand to be in a situation like that?

But she was ultimately rescued and claimed to be extremely thankful for that rescue.  But Don, telling this story, said it seemed to him that there have been more "accidentally falling overboard" on cruise ships than he had remembered happening before. He asked his audience if they felt that there were more overboard fallings than usual, and did his readers think people really were actually falling overboard, or were they really attempting suicide, but then regretted it as they struggled out there in the vast ocean, treading water, and therefore became grateful if they were rescued, never revealing that it was they, themselves, who had put themselves in that a situation.

Well, I don't know, of course, but the concept of the whole thing petrified me, because I think of the impossible to bear fear and misery you would feel if you did put yourself out there and then changed your mind once you had done it, with nothing to face, now, but the horrors of the vast, cruel ocean, no genuine hope of rescue, and no ability to stop the struggle to keep yourself alive, as exhausted and panicked as you now would be.

My question is, do more people "fall" overboard than have falls within the ship?  My view is that it is extremely difficult to actually "fall" overboard.  I don't think you can do it at all as an accident, unless you're seriously drunk and do something harebrained such as attempt to sit on the railing of your cabin's balcony and then accidentally slip off (trying to take a selfie!).  But just standing there on your balcony, or sitting in a chair with a drink in your hand, you aren't going to "fall" overboard any more than you would from your bed into the ocean from inside the cabin.  And if there happens to be more overboard fallings than "regular" falls such as on the various stairways, for example, inside the ship (if anyone is keeping track of such things), then I think that such overboard "accidents" would have to be suicide attempts that failed.

And that woman that Don was talking about, where she happened to fall, as she said, was at the stern of the ship (where, by the way, the churning of the ship's wake is particularly appealing, it looks like slipping into a huge benevolent Jacuzzi).  The special appeal of somehow going over the railing at the rear of the ship is that of all the places of a ship where you might be able to jump into the water, the area where there is the least chance that somebody would see you would be there at the rear, where its not like the sides where there are hundreds of balconies, many of which would have occupants who would see a body in the water and sound an alarm, the rear is where the least amount of people would be there to see anyone, and meanwhile, the ship is rapidly getting farther and farther away from the person the water.  I say that if a person truly wants to kill themselves by jumping off of a cruise ship and didn't want to be rescued, then the rear of the ship would be the best spot for that.

I think that woman did it on purpose, and how sad is that.  But she was rescued and she claimed to be very grateful.  I hope that is the truth.

Let me end on a positive note.  I think it is true that in moments of the worst danger, being stuck in what seems to be the most impossible situation, where there can't be any hope, instead of screaming one's head open in a moment of unbearable panic, there actually is a calm that washes over one and all time compacts and awareness tightly focusses on the most immediate tasks that have to be done.

Such as a man I read about who had been the only survivor of an airplane crash somewhere in Canada's Yukon.  He had never been anything like a Boy Scout and never even camped in his own backyard.  He was anything but an outdoorsman.  Yet he survived something like half a year out in the cold frozen North until the weather got to be better and somebody searching for him finally found him.

He was asked how he possibly could have survived this.  He explained this concentration of attention, where he focussed in on just one immediate step at a time and wasn't conscious of much of anything else.  It was almost animalistic:  "Warmth, need warmth," so he reasoned that parachute material that he was able to find in the crashed airplane could became his mobile shelter.  Water he needed, well, there was snow...you don't get a lot of water out of snow (I know all about that, trying to obtain water from snow when I was stuck in a blizzard in my house in the Sierra Nevada mountains for a week without electricity, telephone or water (because the water was electronically pumped up from a well).  I did have heat due to a word burning stove and many cords of split wood.  I joked that instead of the Zen principal of "chop wood, carry water", I said for me it was "carry wood and chop water".

The next thing in front of the man surviving northern Canada was food.  He could find lichens if he dug down under the snow.  It went on like this from day to day until his ultimate rescue.

For me, suddenly alone in a truly dangerous situation scuba diving in Australia (I was halfway down on my air so had to turn to go back to the boat, but my "dive buddy" refused to came back with me because she had plenty of air, so why waste the full amount of diving time that she had paid for?  She turned around to catch up with the rest of the divers, leaving me alone with no choice but to go back by myself.  But where exactly WAS the boat?

I had to rise up the surface so that I can see where the boat was, a shockingly large distance away, and I had discovered that there was a terrible storm up there on the surface of the ocean (which could not be felt 100 feet down below).  Very very dangerous.  But I kept the screaming panic at bay and did what the man in Canada had done...just one step at a time (in my case, one stroke at a time) whatever was in front of him to do.  For me, I had to get back to that boat.  I could not go back underwater like they tell you to do, because I was afraid I would lose sight of where the boat was.  So all I did was keep on swimming forward, no matter how many waves I had to fight and no matter how far it was.  The dive master had done an inexcusable thing and that was take the divers away from the boat with the current.  You are supposed to go against the current on your way out, so that you ride with the current when you are tired and lower on air and need to get back to the boat.  Well, this was just the opposite, so beyond the storm, I also had the strong current against me.  But I didn't analyze all the pieces, I just kept pressing on forward and not stopping until I got there.

I guess that woman alone out in the ocean for ten hours did the same thing...she just kept on swimming like her life depended on it...as it did depend on it.