To Cruise or Not to Cruise, That is the Question

Everyone has that one favorite vacation. The memorable honeymoon in beautiful, green Ireland. The trans-Canadian rail trip. The ski excursion to Vail, Colorado. The pilgrimage to Pigeon Forge to eat cheap fudge inside tacky wax museums while Dolly Parton is piped in over the intercom.  (That last one was a joke.)

My favorite vacation was the month our family spent in a cottage at Stone Harbor on the Jersey Shore. I was only eight. I remember sprinting into the frothy ocean surf the moment we arrived. Flying kites on the beach as the sun dipped into the west. Catching crabs on the docks with my dad. Going to the theatre in town with my brothers and cousin to watch “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.” I still recall chewing on chocolate saltwater taffy as Don Knotts’s eyes bulged from the screen.

Other than almost drowning the day I was caught by an undertow, it was an idyllic summer that I’ll never forget.

These days a lot of folks like to “cruise” for their vacation. Lynn and I have gotten some good deals and enjoyed two Caribbean cruises, and we’re planning a third. Actually, she’s planning. I’m nodding my head and mumbling.

Ocean cruises have become very popular today. The cruise industry is expected to reel in profits of 37 billion dollars by the end of 2014. The number of passengers on cruise ships is expected to exceed 24 million by 2018.

So, despite disasters like the Costa Concordia and frequent, well-publicized outbreaks of noroviruses, cruising is as popular as ever.

But even though I had a wonderful time on our two cruises, I can’t help feeling a trifle guilty. Let me explain:

Great food, great service

First, there’s the eating part. On a cruise, they give you as much food as you want. Some people spend two hours gorging on breakfast, take an hour break for sunshine, then dive back into the cafeteria for another couple hours binge eating their lunch. And, judging by the two Royal Caribbean cruises that we’ve done, the food is very, very good. The evening meals and service are 5-star quality (at least to my pedestrian tastes). Lobster bisque, Dungeness crab, smoked salmon for appetizers. Veal chops, filet mignon, seared diver scallops with chorizo sausage and parsnip purée or caramelized orange drizzle for entrées. Crème brûlée, coconut and lychee gâteau, and other dishes with words with letters that have accents for dessert.

Of course, if you’re restrained enough, you don’t have to eat like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. But for me that’s very difficult. And the overeating – aka gluttony – induces guilt.

Secondly, I always have a nagging sense that I’m being indolent. On a cruise, other than dressing and undressing yourself, there’s absolutely no work. Minimal walking, and no cooking, cleaning, planning, driving, gassing. This is really tough for an impatient neurotic like myself. Running 30 loops around the rubberized track on deck while dodging tipsy tourists helps a little, but not much. My trail friend, Paul, deliberately avoids cruises due to their hedonistic aspect. He believes a vacation should be earned, that one should work for one’s leisure.

“Well, we worked our regular jobs all year for this vacation,” I explained to him. “So didn’t we earn it?”

“No, I mean you should have to work during your vacation as well. Like run a marathon, or spend a week volunteering on the bike trail.”

Then again, Paul is a self-admitted anal retentive proctoid, so maybe his opinion doesn’t count.

Promenade on ship

Thirdly, there’s the problem of the ship itself. These things are like miniature cities. They’re behemoths. And they get bigger and bigger. The largest passenger ship in the world used to be Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas, built in 2006. This ship featured several pools, a basketball court, miniature golf course, boxing ring, FlowRider surfing simulator, rock-climbing wall, ICE SKATING RINK, indoor mall, and dozens of lounges, eateries, and shops.

In 2009, the Freedom of the Seas was surpassed by the record-setting, 225,000-ton Oasis of the Seas. This ship has everything the Freedom has and more: a teen spa, science lab, carousel, tattoo parlor, indoor AquaTheatre, two surf simulators, and the piéce de résistance: a Central Park-styled indoor park that includes (mixed in with the boutiques and bars) 12,000 plants and 56 trees.

Central Park at sea

Actually, this park idea should be viewed as good news. With dozens of plant and animal species going extinct worldwide every day, bottling up a few of them on the ocean for the enjoyment of sunburnt tourists with perpetual indigestion is probably a good thing.

Of course, with size also comes environmental concerns. Royal Caribbean has a fairly good green initiative compared to most cruise ships (although, let’s be honest, how green can a floating city be). But they still have a ways to go. At a talk given by the Environmental Officer on our last cruise, I asked about several rubber balls flying over the edge of the vessel during the dodge ball tournament. She told me they plan to build a higher restraining net. Also, that each time a ball goes overboard, the ship sends out a report.

Now, really. Am I supposed to believe that RC sends out little PT boats to round up these floating balls? With all the worldwide cruise ship lines, their ships, their excursions, and their dodge ball tournaments, all I can say is: we must have a helluva rubber and plastic lining on our Earth’s ocean floor.

***

So, even though, like most people, I love to eat and relax and be pampered, there’s always that nagging guilt. It’s probably why, periodically, I plunge into the woods to sleep in a moldy tent and eat processed cardboard. This way I get a little balance. My friend Paul would be proud: I actually earn my vacation.

I also get to gaze on some plants and trees in their native habitat. Without burping.

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Forever Green: Voices for the Wilderness Act

Fifty years ago Wednesday the Wilderness Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. The act gave a legal definition to the term “wilderness:”

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

Nine million acres of public land were initially designated as wilderness. The act is one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation in American history, because it concerns land and water already designated as national park, forest, or wildlife refuge, and forever protects these wild areas from damage due to logging, grazing, mineral extraction, road-building, construction – or any human manipulation, good or bad. The act essentially says “Enjoy these places and life forms, but don’t alter them.”  Keep Them Wild.

Last spring I touched on this anniversary in a couple blog posts (The Rain, the Trees, and Other Things and Edward Abbey: An Anarchist Who Fought the Good Fight). Not everybody is as ardent about conservation as I am. I’ll just offer some pertinent quotes from a few friends of American wilderness. Voices, more impassioned and eloquent than mine, that helped bring the Wilderness Act to fruition and are intent on making it work. Like Ed Abbey says, we need more voices like them.

 

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

– Gary Snyder

 

“We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

– Wallace Stegner

 

“Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred and vitalized by regular contact with outdoor growths — animals, trees, sun warmth and free skies — or it will dwindle and pale.”

– Walt Whitman

 

“The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts.”

– John Muir

 

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

– Ansel Adams

 

“Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – man – acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.”

– Rachel Carson

 

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.”

– Bill McKibben

 

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

– Aldo Leopold

 

“Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise, what is there to defend?”

– Robert Redford

 

“We humans are a funny species. We can’t look death in the eye, yet we accept the environmental degradation and poisoning that breeds cancer… Something isn’t working.”

– Walkin’ Jim Stoltz

 

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.”

– Edward Abbey

 

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

– Wendell Berry

 

 

“There is just one hope for repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every inch on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom and preservation of the wilderness.”

– Bob Marshall

 

“Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are, in fact, plans to protect man.”

– Stewart Udall

 

“All good things are wild and free.”

– Henry David Thoreau

 

“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.”

– Lyndon Johnson

 

HAPPY 50^th ANNIVERSARY TO THE WILDERNESS ACT!