…Most of the Day as Well
(Around the World in 80 Days 1980—continued)
Our second day on open sea dawned, and I was already acquiring my sea legs, noticing the constant rolling of the ship only when I stopped to think about it. I was apparently acquiring my sea stomach, too—based on how much I go on and on in my journal about what foods I was eating onboard!
That day began with a three-hour all-student meeting in the student union, probably the largest single gathering space onboard the Universe. Each teacher spoke about the class they were offering to help students decide which courses they wanted to sign up for.
It was easy to tell the teachers were every bit as excited as the student body to be part of this newly formed community of world travelers. Each had applied and competed to be onboard, just like us students, many using their sabbatical time to join the voyage.
I remember thinking how cool it would be to return one day and sail as a teacher, and now that I have finally earned my MFA and have teaching credentials, I’ve been thinking how cool it would be all over again!
We were introduced to Captain Woo and some of the crew and given safety lectures about our new life onboard a ship. After that, the lecture turned more serious.
We were warned in no uncertain terms about the strictness of laws in most of the countries we’d be visiting, specifically with regard to the University’s inability to come to a student’s rescue should they be stupid enough to break local law—especially ones about drug possession.
That part of the lecture came complete with a few first-hand horror stories to illustrate it and drive home the point.
After lunch it was another meeting for us work-study students, one where my willingness to take the early shift won me a valuable dispensation: my mandatory work hours were cut in half! That meant I’d be on duty in the library from 7:30 to 9:30 each morning that the ship was at sea.
A quick calculation told me that also meant I’d be earning the equivalent of $30 an hour (based on the fact work-study / scholarship students participated in the Semester-at-Sea Program for half price).
For the first time in my life I was feeling my contribution toward something was considered valuable by others—$30 in 1980, adjusted for inflation, is $112.98 today!
THIS IS ONLY A DRILL
Midafternoon brought our first lifeboat drill.
Five blasts of the horn meant we all had to retrieve our lifejackets from our cabins and report to our assigned stations on Prom Deck. There we lined up three-deep in orderly rows. The Prom Deck doors, opened wide, exposed us all to the circular horizon as lifeboats were lowered in front of each station from the Boat Deck above, where they normally hung.
It felt dramatic, and I soberly thought of all the times across history fellow humans had faced similar moments that weren’t just drills.
Lifeboat drills would continue on a bi-weekly basis throughout the voyage, we were told. We were also told each lifeboat held 100 students—though it certainly didn’t look like it from where we stood.
Captain Woo conducted an inspection, then more horn blasts dismissed the crew, students, and staff.
I spent some time writing letters and napping after that, awaking in time for our inaugural Sea meeting at 7:30. Seas were the designation of student groups by ship sector, and just like any dorm floor in any land-based college, each Sea had an RD (resident director) assigned to it.
Students voted on names for their Seas after being instructed to vie for creativity while ensuring the word Sea was part of the name. Some groups—a significant proportion of whom were apparently drinkers—ended up calling themselves things like “Seagrams & Seven” and “Sea, Sea, & Water,” names intended as an homage to their favorite cocktails at the time.
Not being part of the collective collegiate drinking scene myself, I wasn’t familiar with the names of popular cocktails and knew little about them. In all fairness, however, I should probably confess that I would eventually go on to try making homemade wine in my dorm room closet at my all-woman Catholic college. It was a fun experiment till it exploded—dousing all my clothes—so that I and the entire contents of my room smelled like some cheap-ass honkytonk in the worst part of town.
Try hiding that from your resident director (read: nun), folks!
But back to our story. Other ideas for student groups might have been: I Sea What You Did There; Our Season in the Sun; Desperately Seaking Susan—things like that.
So for fun, maybe you can imagine yourself with me back then and tell me in comments below what you’d have suggested our Sea be named. Brownie points (or maybe a plate of brownies!) for whoever comes up with the best idea!
My journal doesn’t appear to mention any of the actual Seas on the Universe that semester—at least not in the entry for that day, February 4th 1980. I didn’t even say what we named our group, which was comprised of all the work-study / scholarship students. It was probably something like:
Sea Jane. Sea Jane Run. Sea Jane Run Out of Funds (though that woulda been a bit long).
REPORTER RILEY
After that came more meetings. There were apparently a lot of meetings. I went to one for forming the shipboard newspaper, which we named Shipmates.
My first assignment was to find out and report back on the history of the ship. I probably volunteered for that one believing The Atlantic had been a gunner boat (which the guard on the LA pier had told me—see part 5) and thought it would make a great story (The Atlantic is what The Universe was previously named).
I also probably liked the idea of that particular assignment knowing it meant a chat with the Dean Tymitz (a man I harbored a crush on the entire voyage—see part 4). I did snag time with Tymitz only to be told the ship had never been a gunner boat. In one fell swoop he demolished all my enthusiasm over the connections I’d built up in my mind with the likes of PT 109 and PT 73.
I closed that day’s journal entry by mentioning two things.
First, Jo—the librarian I was a work-study student under—had entrusted me with the ONLY key to the shipboard library since I opened it up every morning; I lamented my likelihood of dropping it overboard.
Second, my next-door cabin neighbor, a laddie named Adam, was apparently someone I had the college hots for, even though from this distant vantage point I haven’t the slightest first-hand recollection of him. I guess he made less of an impression than my journal entry let on.
And judging from the next day’s entry, I had a lot of other things on my mind, anyway.
The next day was my first solo stint in the library, then classes began. I had five to study for—each one an hour’s length, running from noon till five. After that there was yoga before dinner.
Between work and classes I visited the book store, choking a bit on the cost: 12 text books for $84. Imagine!
One book for my woman studies class with professor Tracy Ehlers (Sex Roles and Stratification) turned out to be a novel that influenced me in many ways. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, especially if you like sci-fi: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin.
It was my introduction to LeGuin and key to my developing into a sci-fi writer, myself.
I also purchased Laura Ingalls Wilder’s By the Banks of Plum Creek, though I doubt that one was for a class. I probably just wanted to read it and never had—I hadn’t started the Little House series of books till after I’d started college, and they heavily influenced me, too—which I can say for a fact, now that I’m a middle grade author myself!
After buying books I sat on deck by the pool and read till class time.
Now, with most folks, when they think about a pool on a cruise ship, they’re gonna picture luxury, right? Well, our pool was more of an amusement park ride—or a deathtrap. Take your pick. It certainly wasn’t for the meek of heart.
I’m not even sure how they kept the darned thing filled hour to hour.
The rocking of the ship kept the entire contents of the pool sloshing so violently from one side of it to the other, that one moment you were in sea foam knee deep, and the next you were finning for the surface, wondering which way was up, feeling lucky if you escaped without a concussion.
That little pool certainly made my misadventures in taking a shower at sea seem tame by comparison (see part 5)—and certainly less of a blood sport.
And that day I wasn’t even in the pool, just trying to study poolside. Mistake! I wound up every inch as soaked in seawater as the kids who were in the pool, so I had to hurry off to shower and change before my first class: Geology with Dr. Novotny.
After that would be Psychology with Professor Diamond, World Music with Professor Rekkord (I tell no lie), Sex Roles and Stratification with Dr. Ehlers, and Theatres of Asia with Professor Wilcox. Each of them, apparently, ended up impressing me, save the last. Of Dr. Ehlers I wrote in my journal she was “interesting” and “thought-warping.”
CLASS ACT
That second day at sea ended with the Captain’s Welcome Dinner, a dress-up affair with tablecloths, candlelight, and music. The staff looked dapper in their dress whites, and all the students and teachers looked amazing.
We’d been told to bring formal wear, which for me meant my oldest sister’s hand-me-down prom gown from 1968. It seemed to have been patterned after its designer’s memories of his sister’s bedroom wallpaper back when they were kids: a field of large flowers in baby blues and pinks.
The cuisine that night was all Chinese and delicious, and I met and made friends with Jau, from Taipei, one of the kitchen staff/servers, who’d been with the ship for seven years. I made friends with several of the crew members, one with whom I corresponded for awhile after the voyage ended.
After the dinner our first shipwide Community Forum was held, during which Dean Tymitz further informed us (though quite entertainingly) about shipboard life. Then Lucy and I completed our day with a trip to the exercise room to lift weights and ride stationary bikes to burn off some of the food we over-indulged in.
Because I kept a journal, I also know that night I read Genesis 41 (Pharaoh’s dreams), which was interesting to me since I’d learned earlier that day that we’d be required to keep a dream journal for Psych class. I was working my way through the bible back in those days—not my first time—and I’d apparently brought my copy along so it too could see the world.
TOSSING AND TURNING
The following day I wrote of how the ocean had become a deeper and deeper blue the further west we sailed, and how the sky, too, was richly blue—“crystal clear” and cloudless, I wrote; it was like floating inside a big blue marble—
—till it wasn’t.
“The pitching was violent all day and renewed sicknesses were recurring all over the ship,” I wrote in my journal. Recounting my morning hours in the library (situated on the very top of the ship), I added, “At one point the bookcart up and wheeled down the hall and the card catalog drawers clapped in and out.”
That was also the day we had to line up to pay for any side trips we wanted (side trips were not included in the tuition) and I went, hoping to snag a spot to one in Sri Lanka that sounded like it would be terrific. I also hoped to squeeze in on a popular one to Jerusalem.
Because of my last minute Pell Grant windfall (see part 4) I actually had the funds to get in on it if it wasn’t filled by the time I reached the front of the line.
Problem was, staying afoot to GET to the front of that line was a circus—let alone staying in any given line—as students cartwheeled and side-stepped to the violent lurching of the ship that day.
Somehow that crazy day we also managed to have our introduction to playing the Angklung, a Balinese instrument reminiscent of a bamboo xylophone (click the link to listen). Mr. Rekkord had brought enough along that some of us could form a Angklung band. It was great, but how we actually practiced at all that topsy-turvy day I sure can’t recall now.
It had been a crazy long day, just like the ones before it—only with the added exhaustion of trying to keep one’s balance the entire time—so I was in my bunk by 6:30 (it was probably safest there). I tried my best to study and write letters for three hours before turning in. Lucy had taken to her bunk, too, feeling sick.
OOPS
I see this issue had gotten a bit long, and for the last three weeks I’ve teased you along with promises of Hawaii, our first port of call. This week I think I can honestly say that next week on Monday Morning Literary Bric-a-Brac we’ll finally get there!
Meanwhile, thanks so much for coming along for the ride. I hope you’ll read some back issues, add comments, then like, share, and subscribe. It will help my readership grow and I appreciate it!
Also, don’t forget to check out my book (Shay the Brave) #giveaways currently running, explained in this previous post, and don’t forget I’ll be at Winchester Book Gallery for my very first book signing on April 27th!
I hope you’ll click in and “attend” my virtual version of that signing right now so I can have enough attendees (20) for my first #giveaway associated with that event (your choice of a Shay the Brave coffee mug or travel mug)!
Finally, if you’re a writer or know writers, please share my fall Writers’ Retreat in the Appalachian region of southcentral PA. You can register today!