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Observations on Humanity While Cruising to Alaska

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Observations from my first cruise:

Going on a cruise is like being in an airport where everyone is going to the same place, so the entire airport’s ticketing desks and security lines are aimed at one single door.

When you get on the ship you have entered a floating airport stacked on top of itself like layers of a wedding cake. Swarovski crystal and duty free shops dominate the lower flowers. There are people everywhere. Most of these people are reallllllly excited to be in this floating airport—which is so big it kinda doesn’t feel like it’s floating. You can’t tell at first, and then you realize, every once in a while, that you are lurching toward a wall for no reason.

Many excited children (350, we would learn later) are in the floating airport. The airport is stacked, not flat, and the things the children want to do are at the top and bottom of the airport. You are going to get a LOT of experience over the coming week at dodging children on the stairs dressed in swimsuits, decked out as fairies and tigers complete with face paint, occasionally appearing in wolf and bear hats once people have visited ports and tourism shops. You will become accustomed to this changing wardrobe and also an expert at dodging the small human bullets of enthusiasm. But be wary: the enthusiastic little critters are followed by large exhausted critters, always holding an open canister of either hot coffee or sticky cocktails with fruit. Do not run into them; they will become angry if the liquid spills, and they are not looking at you; they are looking at the small human bullets ricocheting off the stairs.

The staff on the cruise ship are there to make you happy. This can become frightening. Of the just-under-6K people on the ship, 1,500 of them are staff. They are watching you. They will approach and open or shut windows so you can see better. They wipe wet seats, fogged viewing areas, and their own facial expressions when people start getting grumpy on day three. YOU are the target of their compensated kindness, and they want to make you new drinks, great food, and happy. If you are not happy, more of them will appear. Fake a smile if necessary, and they will dissipate.

If you take an Alaskan cruise going north in September/October, you are basically swimming upstream against every whale in the Pacific. The first day someone sees a whale spout, everyone on the boat will rush to that side of it jockeying for position at the railing.

By day three, someone will glance up from reading their book in a deck chair, yawn, and say “there’s another one.”

All bets are off if it turns out to be an orca. We only saw one of those, as opposed to about a thousand whales, and several groups of dolphins–or maybe porpoises. We weren’t close enough to be introduced properly.

When you pull into a harbor, everything swarms the ship. The seagulls and scua take up residency atop the lifeboats and wait for you to toss them pieces of muffin and toast from your balcony. This is forbidden, but the seagulls know human nature.

The seals and dolphins swim alongside the ship, doing cute things and picking up pieces of muffin and toast from people who overestimate compensating for wind in their trajectory. The people selling tours swarm the dock shouting interesting things you can do. Because the people who have never been on cruises before didn’t know they were supposed to pre-book excursions, they kinda wander ashore looking befuddled and are quickly eaten by the independent tour guides.

Next week we can talk about scenery and stuff.

A True Friend — Lindsay Porteous!

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Jack was going to do a different guest post, but news intervened – – –

One of the founding members of my old Scottish folk band ‘Heritage’ was Lindsay Porteous. Like most of us, he didn’t read music – he played by ear. But he heard things differently from the rest of us. When he played what would traditionally be considered rhythmic instruments, he would play melody on them—on jaw harps, for instance. His main instruments were the jaw harp, the mouth bow and various whistles and drums. With these he added a very particular dimension to our overall sound.

I often described him as the only true ‘folk musician’ in the band. If he had been a painter, he would have been called a ‘naïve artist.’

Lindsay lived in the Tron House in Culross, Fife, and he built an amazing collection of musical instruments, old medicine bottles, and all sorts of other things. His house featured in many TV series and movies, including Outlander and any others that required a 17th century setting.

He was friendly with, and appreciated by, many of the most revered Scottish folk musicians and became a close associate of the wonderful storyteller and singer Duncan Williamson. His jaw harp prowess resulted in an all-expenses paid trip to judge the jaw harp competition at Grandfather Mountain highland games in North Carolina some years ago, when he was able to visit his own mouth bow hero, Jimmy Driftwood.

He also traveled all over Europe with ‘Heritage,’ and there are many stories of his adventures in Italy, France, Germany, and Switzerland. One of our favorites is when his mother* packed him tuna sandwiches for a trip that provided us food money, so he didn’t eat them for five days. When he started to open the Tupperware (in our close and crowded van), we shrieked, “No Lindsay! It’s too late!”

He smiled and pointed to the words on the edge of the plastic box. “It’s okay, lads. This says it keeps food fresh for up to six days.” We cursed Lindsay and the smell all the way to our next gig.

It was Lindsay who introduced ‘Heritage’ to Ian Green of Greentrax Records which, in a convoluted way, eventually led to our final album on Robin Morton’s Temple label. Robin knew Lindsay from his time as a member of the ‘Boys of the Lough,’ when they almost included him on their first album playing jaw harp.

I stayed in touch with Lindsay until recently, and he frequently sent me CDs of his favorite music. But the most anticipated posts were his Christmas letters. Where others glorified their stories, Lindsay reveled in doom and gloom newsletters relating the various disasters of his year. Our favorite quote, one Wendy and I often said to each other in moments of peril or uncertainty, was “My sister’s house is sinking down a mine shaft. The council don’t think they can save it.”

I can only imagine what his newsletter would have said this year – – –

Probably he would be describing his arrival at the ceilidh in heaven with Mike Mustard, Jimmy Dunn, Mike Ward, Davy Lockhart, Alan MacDonald, and Dominique LaLaurie. Dominique was the French lassie who played bagpipes with Heritage whenever we went to France, and we were all in love with her, Lindsay most of all. Now he can twang along again in the heavenly choir.

*Lindsay’s mother Nora deserves her own blog post, which I will get to in coming months. A fabulous lady, she studied at the prestigious Slade School of Art in London and lived a life worthy of its own book—not to mention looking after Lindsay, who was autistic.