Help me, help me.....

It’s been a long week at sea.
We began with the Neptune Ceremony—a bit of silliness only loosely associated with our crossing the equator. The ceremony began on our first day at sea after Ghana, at 9 a.m. (more than fourteen hours before we actually entered the Southern Hemisphere). King Neptune, it was alleged, was furious that so many of us were still “polliwogs”—naïfs who had never been across the equator by sea and who had failed to pay tribute to his majesty. Neptune, of course, was Captain Jeremy Kingston, naked to the waist and ridiculously slathered in green. (I passed him in his resplendent semi-nakedness in the hall outside my room, where he looked suitably grim. I assume playing this role was part of his contract, an unfortunate consequence of his duties.) The ceremony itself was fairly simple, although time-consuming. Those who were to become “shellbacks” had to have a luminescent goo (green or shocking pink) poured over their heads, dunk themselves in the swimming pool, and then stand dripping in line to kiss a fish, held out by one of several “goddesses.” (Mine was held by anthropology professor Wenda Trevathan.) After this, you were knighted by “Dean Bob” (Chapel), whose role as royal chamberlain was marked by a silly straw hat. I put it off for a while—many of the faculty, clearly not playing the game, were standing to the side—but finally decided I’d better get it over with. The pool water by this time was a murky pastel sludge. I didn’t go on with the final phase: the seriously hardcore had their heads shaved. By my age, I reasoned, simply having hair was something not to be messed with. A small percentage of students (and a few adults—including one of the elderly Lifelong Learner women) went through with it, making certain portions of the lunchroom at times look like the Cancer Ward.

A few days later, the water turned wild. We had enjoyed remarkably calm weather up to this point, all across the Atlantic and around the bulge of West Africa; but somewhere south of the Congo our usual side-to-side rocking was irregularly joined with deep, unpredictable bulges. One day at lunch I was on the floor, talking to Celia, who was inconveniently telling me she needed her diaper changed. I looked up and saw my plate slide to the end of the table. It fell off, splattering my dessert and glass of iced tea. Gasps from nearby diners. As I got up to deal with the mess, a countering wave made my wife’s plate slide off the other side. It wasn’t always that bad, but it often was, and you never knew when it was coming. You could see the waves on the deck, but few people were out there—the weather had turned grey and windy. Inside, it was random and disorienting. And it stayed that way for several days.

I was impervious to all this. I had grown accustomed to the side-to-side rocking after the first day at sea, and took even this unpredictable movement in stride. That is, until Wednesday morning. The night before, we had been invited to “dinner with the captain.” About two dozen of us were dressed to the nines, drinking wine in the staffulty lounge before retiring to the Deck Five dining hall for our sumptuous meal. The food was good, and the wine kept coming. I joked with our Staff Captain, Mats Nelson, about his homeland (southern Sweden, which as we both knew was originally Denmark) and felt pretty pleasant staggering across the ship to my room, knowing that with the unstable ship, no one could identify me as drunk from my movements. But the next morning I became sick. I thought it was an aftermath of my inebriation. But in fact, I was sober then. I managed to empty my stomach (pretty thoroughly) over the morning and taught class at noon, much against my will. Perhaps that’s it, I thought. I made myself eat some toast and soup for supper and went to bed.

Over the next day I felt myself recovering, gradually increasing my appetite. But on Friday, I simply didn’t feel like eating. I wasn’t throwing up any more, but everything disgusted me. Once again I taught my Global Music class (this time, forcing myself into a decent presentation of the politics of South African music, relying on Paul Simon’s videotaped 1987 concert). I tried to eat lunch, but found that eating toast and soup just worsened my distaste. It was not just appetite: the whole ship turned foul before my eyes. I spent the afternoon watching “A Dry, White Season,” a well-acted but predictable melodrama about apartheid in South Africa, and by the time I was finished, I was looking at everybody as if they were villains in a drama. The ship’s clinic was closed all day: I had to wait until 4:30 to finally see a doctor. Her diagnosis was disappointing mild: yes, I’d had a virus, but I probably still felt lousy because my electrolytes were down. She prescribed some electrolyte pills ($1 each) and suggested I drink Gatorade. Damn. I thought I had something particularly vile. So I gradually resuscitated myself and felt my stomach slide into place.

Still, my mood has been foul. Part of it is my sentence of “dock time,” which I’m still serving in Cape Town. The weather is sunny and warm, the view of Table Mountain outside the ship is glorious—a huge, greenish monster off the port side—but I still have my three hours to serve. I know I’ll feel better once I get off the boat (when I’m finally in a place where I can call the M.V. Explorer a “boat” if I like), but until then, I’m stuck. I can hardly wait to get into South Africa to find out what it’s like to be on land south of the equator. I’ll report back as soon as I can.