A long version of this column appeared in Alaska magazine in two parts, and later in a shorter version in MWA’s The Third Degree.
I’ve never wanted to go on a cruise. I’ve stayed in enough hotels that I have no ambition to stay in one that floats, too, and I lived on a fish tender for five years off and on when I was a kid, so the romance of the sea is lost on me. Neither do I have enough formal wear to see me through two weeks’ worth of fancy dress dinners, and I refuse to get into pantyhose more than once a year anyway.
So when World Explorer Cruises had the brilliant idea of having an Alaska mystery writers’ cruise on board the SS Universe Explorer with me, John Straley, Sue Henry and Father Brad Reynolds as guest writers, my first reaction was not only no, but hell no. Adrift for two interminable weeks with 750 total strangers who keep asking me where I get all my ideas? What fresh hell was this?
However, this cruise would go up Alaska’s Inside Passage, stopping in Ketchikan, Sitka, Skagway, Hubbard Glacier, Valdez, Seward, Juneau, and Wrangell. I’d never been up the Inside Passage.
And the cruise line would pay all our expenses, and give us a $500 shipboard allowance besides.
“Do I have to dress up?” I said.
“No.”
“OK,” I said, “I’m in.”
We boarded the ship in Vancouver and almost immediately found ourselves perched on stools at the Harbor Bar on the aft deck, where we discovered that the 617-foot ship in her other incarnation hosted Semester at Sea, which explained the full-service library instead of a casino forward of the Mid-Ocean Lounge. Margaritas all around.
First stop Ketchican, and then back on board the mystery cruise began in earnest in a packed and attentive Mid-Ocean Lounge where Brad, Sue, John and I talked about the writers who influenced us, including Josephine Tey, Ernest Hemingway, John D. MacDonald and Theodore Roethke. We were nothing if not eclectic, and if there was snoring it wasn’t audible. After the panel discussion I teach a First Lines workshop to an SRO Aloha Theater, in which people actually participate, shouting out answers you could hear on the bridge.
(We did three other panel discussions spread out over the rest of the cruise, “Sex and the Single Sleuth,” which afforded the Jesuit priest among us multiple zinger opportunities, a third on humor in the detective novel during which people actually laughed out loud, which as anyone knows who has ever attended a Bouchercon never happens during the humor panel, and the fourth on “Finding the Perfect Corpse,” where we explained who we kill and why, but not how. We figured the passengers could buy the books if they really wanted to know. Did I mention they had them all for sale in the ship’s gift shop?)
Over the next few days it continued to fail to rain, the crew barbecued on deck when they weren’t making pasta quatro fromaggi in the dining room, and our books sprouted in passengers’ hands practically as we walked by. We arrived in Skagway on a day of glory, clear blue skies and a temperature in the eighties. The next morning registered Force 0 on the Beaufort Scale (according to the poster in the Navigator’s Lounge: “wind speed less than 1 knot . . . sea like a mirror”) as we sailed into Disenchantment Bay, a misnomer if there ever was one, navigating our way carefully at minimum speed through the ice clustering thickly on the surface, freshly calved from the blue-white vertical massif of Hubbard Glacier. Harbor seals played peekaboo between the icebergs and a soft breeze had everyone’s coat off.
The crew broke out the grill on the aft deck for hamburgers and hot dogs, but the slavedrivers whipped us away from these enticing odors to work. At 11 a.m. class was again in session in the theatre, with John Straley teaching his journal workshop to yet another sold-out crowd. John writes a daily haiku, a seventeen-syllable image to begin his journal entry and to summon the day back when needed, and our assignment was to write our own. I called mine “Hubbard Glacier”:
Broken cliffs of ice
Warm williwaw wind, lounge chairs,
And margaritas.
I tried to work the word “surreal” into it but it wouldn’t scan.
Seward, Juneau, Wrangell, one more day at sea, a day in Victoria, all reached on a preternaturally calm Gulf of Alaska, and then I had to go home, where I had to relearn how to cook, clean and make my bed. Not to mention walk, because I’d developed a distinctly nautical roll to my stride when on shore. I wondered if they need a full-time writer on board. I wondered if Glenford, my room steward, would move in with me if I asked him to.
Well, what can I say. Two almost unendurable weeks of sunshine, non-stop scenery and wildlife, continuous SRO crowds at events both on board and on shore coordinated by someone who knew how to organize an event, people buying our books right, left and center, and then actually having the gall to read them right in front of us. It was just sheer, unadulterated hell.
No. I’m afraid the cruise ship life is not for me.
Sounds absolutely heavenl… ooops, I mean hellish!