Of course, I've wondered all those things. I wonder about them for all the usual reasons, and I wonder if I would have ever had the courage to attempt such a thing because water terrifies me. Crossing the American continent with a handcart sounds easier to me than sailing off across the sea.
As my family spent two weeks on a transatlantic ship recently, I told my son that I hoped that I'd gain a tiny bit of insight into what it had been like for travelers and explorers of centuries past.
His reply was succinct and characteristic. "Yeah, Mom. With the buffet and the pool, now you really understand Columbus."
Smart aleck.
On the one hand, he's completely right. We took our trip for entertainment. We knew exactly where we were going, and kept a schedule. Our ship bears little resemblance to most ships of years past, especially wooden sailing ships. We were well fed, comfortably housed, clean and climate controlled. Still, the most important consideration for me was not the vessel, the destination or the schedule; it was putting my life in the hands of the open ocean. It has swallowed so many of our ancestors, and so many ships - how could I trust it not to swallow ours? Even if it kept us alive, what guarantee did I have that it wouldn't keep us sick and/or terrified, the entire way?
I like guarantees. I will never, ever be a gambler.
The hardest part of the entire trip, for me, was making up my mind to go. It took me months to get to the point that I was OK with going - because, if I went, I had to be prepared for the worst case scenario. I had to have an actual, concrete plan for what I would do, and how I would feel, if I drowned in a shipwreck, or if it was nothing but storms all the way across. I have to be prepared.
I'm actually very good in a crisis - I become very calm, very efficient and very articulate - but I hate having things sprung on me with no warning, even good things. I must prepare.
How did people do it in years past, I wondered. How did they face the uncertainty? I have the luxury of living in a day when losses at sea are rare, and nowhere on the planet is uncharted. How did anyone ever look out at the ocean and say, "I'm not sure what's out there, but I'm going to go find out"? How did anyone decide to make any sea voyage when "lost at sea" was a common cause of death, and architectural features were named things like "widow's walk," because so many were used by actual widows? I don't think I could do it.
Even when I was on the other side of the ocean, standing at Europa Point, having had a safe crossing, I looked back out to the Atlantic and wondered how they did it. It seemed too scary.
Even men who loved the sea knew that she can turn on you in an instant, that she's merciless when angry. Then there were the maps marked, "Here, there be monsters." Forget about the water itself; underneath it were creatures who could, and did, swallow humans without blinking an eye.
As much as I'm a lifelong Star Trek fan, I used to think the same thing while watching the TV show - how did they head out INTO SPACE, knowing that they were surrounded by something that would kill them in an instant? Icy cold, zero atmosphere space is more frightening, and more deadly, than water. Much as I wanted to be a crew member on the Starship Enterprise, I wasn't sure that I could do it.
So, before we left for our 14 days at sea, I spent time imagining; how would it look, sound and feel to be caught in a storm? To have to board the lifeboats? I planned what I would say and do. People who don't prepare, I think, are the ones who degenerate into a**es and begin shoving and screaming. I got to the point that I could say, "Well, if we go down, it's been a good life, and the last thing I did was let my kid choose the graduation gift that he wanted." You have no idea how difficult it was to make peace with the idea of drowning.
Ironically, thinking about airplanes and spaceships made me feel better. I'm not afraid of air travel, and I thought about how hard it is to keep a plane in the air, relative to keeping a ship (or anything else) afloat. The Titanic had gone down "quickly," in "only" 2 1/2 hours; no airplane could fall for 2 1/2 hours. A small, slow water leak would give us days of safety, but any breach in the hull of an airplane at cruising altitude can be catastrophic. I thought about all those battle sequences in every Star Trek episode and movie - the ship herself, and most of her crew, survived. Even when things were bad, you just had to live through the moment, then the next and the next. Bite sized goals are good.
Sometimes, my family made it more difficult to be calm. My husband read, OUT LOUD, a review that someone had written about their voyage from Florida to Ireland. "We encountered 29 foot waves that lasted for days. The captain ordered us all to stay indoors and off the decks."
"Why would you read something like that to me? Do you want me to stay home? Because I will! Just say the word!" He could not understand why I was so shrill. I wonder sometimes if my loved ones have actually met me.
I hardly slept the night before we left. I nearly flew home halfway to our embarkation point. I walked onto the ship in tears. Sailing out of Galveston and away from land was tough - I watched the land get farther and farther away and thought, "Well, here we go. Too late to back out now."
As the sun went down that first night, all I could hear in my head was the voice of the elderly Rose in the movie "Titanic" saying, "That was the last time the Titanic ever saw daylight."
When I told my son, he said, "Why would you even think that?" Well, welcome to my brain.
On the other hand, I had to practice, and I got very good at, living in the moment. I like to plan, I like to reminisce. I'm not very good at being in the moment. I had to learn to shut off the parts of my brain that wanted to play footage of sunken ships, sinking ships, trapped humans, waves, disaster... if I let it run, for even a minute, it would undermine weeks of work. So, I had to forcibly turn off the projector, as it were, every time it wanted to start up. I also had to enjoy every moment while it was happening - "Right now, I am safe. Right now, my kids are safe. Right now, we're having fun. Right now, life is pretty good."
And it was good. The sea was calm, and the ship was full of delightful things to do. I wasn't seasick at all, and I'm prone to motion sickness. My family was having a great time. I was having a great time.
I knew on the first morning aboard that I'd be OK. My son's alarm, on his phone, was set to something that sounded like an air raid siren from WW II. It was still set to go off at o'dark thirty, in another time zone, so that we could make it to the airport. It went off in the early hours of the morning, and I woke up sure that it was the ship's emergency signal. I started calmly running through the list in my head - put on warm clothes, get life vests from closet, head to Deck 4 - before he shut it off and I realized that it was the phone. It says something about how calm I was that I was able to fall immediately back to sleep.
There were still a few things that I worried about. I'd been afraid that waking up in the dark, in our inside cabin, would undo me, with the combination of dark and the feel of the waves. It didn't - it didn't bother me at all. Score one for me.
We spent three days in the Gulf of Mexico, and the water was calm. I worried about heading out into the Atlantic, though. Two places on the ship showed a "you are here" video screen, with a satellite view of our route and a little yellow arrow indicating our current position. The photo, of course, showed the different shades of water, indicating depth. After a stop in the Bahamas, we headed almost immediately over a defined line where sheltered, turquoise water turned into open, almost black water. Crossing that line made me very nervous. As we sailed away from our Bahamas stop, a storm was brewing - dark clouds rolled in, wind blew and rain began to fall.
Worse, you could sense the difference in the water almost instantly. After four days on the ship, it was now creaking. I know, of course, that the creaking is actually good; the ship had to react to water the way that buildings and bridges react to wind. There has to be give. Still, it was slightly unnerving.
The waves got bigger immediately. My husband and son seemed surprised by this. "I'm amazed. Do you know how much energy it takes to cause that? You'd think it would be flat."
No! No! I wouldn't think that it would be flat! It's the freakin' Atlantic Ocean! Had they never read any history, never seen any movies? Did they have no idea at all what the reputation of this ocean was? Did they think that it was only dangerous centuries ago, but it had somehow magically calmed down now that we technically savvy modern humans occupied the planet, that our "advances" somehow tamed the planet itself? Of course the waves were bigger! Of course it was stormy! How could they possibly have imagined that it would be otherwise? I said as much, and more; they looked at me as though I was some kind of experiment gone wrong.
That night was the hardest one so far. I knew that if I had to get into the lifeboats in that weather, especially in the dark, I would not handle it gracefully. At best, I would vomit and whimper. At worst, I would have a heart attack before I was ever loaded into the lifeboat. Still, there were no panic attacks, no tears, and I slept well. That was huge.
I'd also worried about the midpoint on the journey. Being dead center of the ocean, hours away from any help, sounded scary. The day came and went without me experiencing any anxiety at all. Wow, I thought. I got this!
Most of the time, the weather was gorgeous. Even the cruise director remarked, night after night, "Can you believe this weather? This isn't a typical Atlantic crossing." ("Your mother is so watching out for you!" my husband said. Thanks, Mom!)
We had one day of bad weather, so bad that the crew had to empty the pools, and the captain announced over the loudspeaker, "The ship is in no danger."
This is what it looked like before they drained the pools.
By then, day 10, I was rock solid. The only thing that annoyed me was the seasickness. I had to spend most of the day on deck, in the fresh air, and I felt it the exact moment the wind started to calm down. Even sliding back and forth on the bed while I was falling asleep didn't bother me.
By the time we had to leave the ship, I missed it terribly. We're already wondering when we can take another cruise. My husband keeps talking about taking another transatlantic cruise, going in the opposite direction this time, so that we gain an hour every time we cross a time zone. I do worry that, if we did it again, there would be more bad weather. I don't know how I feel about that possibility.
Do I understand those ancestors and explorers better now? Maybe a little. (Even though I had the buffet and the pool.)
I do know that I'm very proud of myself. I took on the fear, and I stared it down.
And I had a great time doing it.
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