rickshangle.com

Our honeymoon in Alaska, Segment II: Plane to bus…

Riding on the bus from Seattle/Tacoma airport to Dock 66 downtown, where our mighty cruiser, the Eurasian Cruise Lines’ flagship Mercury–class motor vessel, the M/V Gigantic, builds steam to strain the anchors. The flight in from Washington DC was uneventful [1], with Kelley even allowing me to convince her to leave home for the flight three hours early in order to keep both the rheumatiz and potential rushing-related panic attacks in check. She’s a good woman.

The good luck experienced in-flight did not hold. But a brief rewind - time trap!

About six weeks prior to this day, Kelley and I are sitting in the apartment with the travel agent who sold us our cruise tickets. At this time the question “did we really need a travel agent to buy cruise tickets?” is on my mind. I wouldn’t say it’s weighing heavily, but it’s there, like my wedding band[2]. Regarding some things I’m a quick study, and in the prior two weeks (the length of time Kelley and I have been blissfully married) I’ve learned this particular question can be tagged and categorized as One that Can Potentially Be Asked Before the Fact, but Never After the Fact.

Insta-Breakdown
Question: Do we need a travel agent to buy cruise tickets?
The Fact: Time of purchase of cruise tickets through travel agent.
Where are we relative to the Fact: After
Potential answers were question asked before the Fact: I don’t know; no; we’ll find out; it turns out, yes!
Potential answer if question is asked now: What difference does it make now?
Decision: Stay the course; the question is irrelevant

Knowledge of categorization and tagging of questions, and the Learning that every question that enters one’s head doesn’t need to be queried aloud, was probably not something I learned in two short weeks. Odds are I was gaining this secret wisdom via decades of observing my parents, anecdotes from (divorced or soon-to-be-divorced) friends and the Simpsons. I think the joyous wedding day basically just allowed me to unlock the capability, kind of like some (good) pieces of software ship with all the components pre-installed, and then just unlocked with a license key as add-on functionalities are needed.

The motivation behind the potential-but-snubbed question about needing the agent (rhetorical) was said agent’s (actual; horrible) behavior in our home, which called in question his legitimacy, and the method by which we knew him (via our wedding planner, P–, a conduit I know in hindsight to be highly alarming). But more pressing was the conversation at hand, which was in preparation of our cruise and not going well. I’ll paraphrase:
[image source]

>travel agent: Sorry I’m [fifteen minutes] late. Boy, it’s hard to find this place!
>rds: Not really. Well, we only have about fifteen minutes before I need to leave for work, so let’s… do this.
>ta: Oh, I see. Fifteen minutes, eh? Well, that’s not much time…
>rds: And getting less by the second. We did start out with 30, though. Please have a seat. Don’t mind the cat hair.
>ta: Oh, eh. (wheeze) Well, I have your tickets right here.
>kla: Good! [taking ticket book and hiding them from this person] Thanks!
>ta: Now, those have your tickets in there!
>kla: Great! We won’t lose this. And we’ll read it all, I’m sure there’s some important info in here.
>ta: And your luggage tags!
>kla: Excellent.
>ta: Now, when you put your tags on the luggage, and you drop them off at the airport here in Washington DC, the next time you’ll see them is on the boat, in your stateroom. You will not pick them up in baggage Seattle [,our point of cruise departure].
>rds: Good. That’s handy.
>ta: Yes. They take those directly to the boat, so you don’t have to worry about that.
>kla: Super.
>ta: So, ah. Yeah, that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. Anyway, those are your tickets, and they have the luggage tags in them. Any other questions?
>Crickets: cheep cheep.
>rds: Yes, I have five, but I think they’re short.
>ta: Oh… ok!
>rds: Do we need our passports?
>ta: Ah, well, need… um. Well, it may be a good idea.[4]
>kla: We just didn’t know if we were technically leaving the country, or what.
>ta: Yeah, um, I don’t know. It wouldn’t hurt.
>rds: We’ll bring them. Two, can I get insurance for myself and my wife related to this trip. As you just heard, the Coast Guard just called off that search for that guy who fell off the boat, and you know, we just got married…
>ta: Uh, insurance. Um, well, I can find out and forward you whatever I…
>rds: That won’t be necessary. I’ll call American Express. Thirdly…
>ta: -coughing and lip-smacking-
>rds: … anything else, honey?

Now, in almost current-time, my love and I are standing at SEATAC airport luggage carousel 13 waiting for our bags, which are not being picked up by Eurasian Cruises and taken to the boat/our stateroom, but are slowly moving through SEATAC’s bowels from our plane to our present location. Extended reading of the ticket-book revealed that, contrary to travel agent’s strongly held belief, we needed to not only get our bags but also meet up with some sort of cruise line rep here to auto-herald our arrival and receive important instructions. I wasn’t so much mad about having to deal with the luggage as about having what I felt the only good news travel agent told us be not only completely wrong, but adamantly presented with a flourish prior to the complete wrongness. But I was getting over it.

Until I noticed a number of Asian children, all no older than ten or eleven and between four foot even and four foot three, stumbling around as if (as if!) high on glue, each holding up some sort of placard. If the placard was to be read by a traveller, perhaps it would be held up on a plane perpendicular to the plane of the floor, slowly moved about the room so the throng could read it and gain some meaning from the thing, as opposed to sort of held in front by the starving child, at a plane about fifteen degrees off the plane of the floor (i.e. facing it), and shaken about in a manner that would give the Flash a headache. I began to understand I needed to interact with one of these urchins, and this was not good news, because the greater good of society would suggest that I take the nearest gutterpunk, grab the sign firmly, and prop it (and the child) up straight (one hand on the sign, the other hand on the child’s wrist, so I could squeeze it and… maybe… even… sort of squeeze it as I enunciated each syllable: “Is… this… what… you’re supposed… to… be… doing?”)

Forgetting about society’s good, instead focusing on my own (and my own awareness that I was not sure of the precise borderline between “annoyance” and “assault”) and that of my wife and holding onto hope of any participation in cruising the Alaskian wildes, I instead followed the nearest child around, twisting my upper body and head down towards the ground but then back up at the floor in a very Vincent d’Onofrio-in-Law-and-Order-Criminal-Intent sort of move that said, “You know, I’m trying to make eye contact with you, and I’m willing to sort of look like a jerk doing it. But then again, you father never gave you much attention, did he? Hm? And his attention was really all you ever wanted, right? The basketball team, the football team, scholarships, you did it all for him, and he wouldn’t even look at you. Am I right?” After five minutes of such badgering one orphan, particularly small and noisome, with a goggly eye, got the message, but she was unfortunately on the other side of the giant luggage carousel room watching me do this to one of her cohorts who was not getting it. Finally googleye finished up with whoever she was doing, came over, relieved her clearly-in-training colleague, and told us to grab our bags and exit via Door 0 aaaaaaallllllllllllllll the way down at the other end of the building. There would be signs for Eurasian Cruises and busses and more instructions and it would all be completely obvious. [image source]

On the death march to Door 0 we passed car rental stands and exits into the misty Seattle morning air and also a man sitting at what appeared to be some sort of legitimate airport pamphlet/materials kiosk that he had erected a large !!!IMPEACH CHENEY!!! sign atop. The woman and I passed and we were asked, “Excuse me, but are you interested,” and I was only slightly upset with myself that I allowed him to get that far before muttering “f**k off” his way. Kelley knew where we were going, because Door 0 was the exact same door she had taken a week or two earlier to engage a charter bus she’d arranged for a work trip out here. Her confidence bolstered mine, as otherwise I would be convinced that Door 0 was some real-world manifestation of a portal from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, a one-dimensional gateway that had one side here in SEATAC airport, the other on a beach covered with lobstrosities, or a wood filled with warewolves, or the hard granite at the middle of some Mid-World mountain (had the door been already wound down). We found Door 0 and went through it, and what awaited us was only 20-30% copied from the diary of a madman. [image source]

First, we were now outside, walking along a curb that ran for perhaps the length of a football field, with a sporadic bus or two to the left, and many airline check-in-ish counters to the right. There must have been some relationship between the busses and the counters, but it was not apparent at a glance, and it wasn’t exactly clear what we should do, anyway, leading to: Second, there were more Les Miserables “working” for the cruise industry, squalid and having received few dental checkups recently, except now numbered in what seemed like dozens, in waves, holding up signs indicating what outside. I had to assume they had been kidnapped from all over the world and impressed into indentured servitude doing… whatever they were supposed to be doing. I’m reluctant to be too hard on these child-slaves, since they were, I’m sure, in fact slaves, which means their wages were draconian, the levels of training they received were undoubtedly sub-standard, and were malnourished to boot. It could be the only explanation why here, as inside, many of them seemed to be propping themselves up by the signs they should have been holding high for all to see, acting as rallying points and offering guidance to weary and confused travelers. The whole system would have worked better if the kids had been outfitted with sandwich boards, so that way they could just sort of set down and take a nap whenever and wherever they wanted, and some sort of internal sandwich board-to-slave kid cantilevered harness would support their weight, but at least the go***mn board would still be propped upright, supporting itself, and nominally functioning. Best of all, perhaps make robots to do this job, and grind up the kids for robot fuel.

We got close enough to some of the desks to see that none of them were affiliated with Eurasian Cruise Lines, and my love (she’s the rational one; at this point I was just sitting on my two-wheel draggy suitcase screaming “What the hell is going on?!?!”) directed us on down the line of them until we found ours. We checked in, and a sort of faun-like youth took our bags and indicated we would next see them in our stateroom (at last! service!). We were given two bus passes that indicated we were on “bus 4″ headed for “pier 66″ and our ship “Gigantic”, but little indication was offered where bus 4 was. We only knew it would depart from somewhere in this general vicinity in 45 minutes, and we should be on it. Kelley acquired these details, as I was off looking for the goat boy, who had split before I could press three crumpled dollar bills into his hand. I’d been told that everyone gets tipped in the cruise industry. No reason to start on the wrong foot / claw / hoof.

After a brief respite back by Door 0, where there were chairs to sit on instead of curbs and the edges of planters, we moved back out around launch-time to find “bus 4″. It’s hopefully not too late to point out that the mean age of the non-identured labor portion of the crowd (our fellow guests) is somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand years old. This is not a surprise to people who have cruised, I’m sure; nor should be a surprise to anyone vaguely familiar with the concept of “cruise”. The problem was that it was a group of people that had no idea what the hell was going on around them, and seemed (perhaps due to their advanced age, and a certain sort of jadedness that descends later on in life) largely unconcerned, at that moment, with the location of bus 4. Maybe they figured that whenever a bus pulled up, they would swarm on it like fireants screaming BUS 4! BUS 4? MAAAAT-LOOOCCK!, until they seized their bloody satisfaction. Many of their ranks would be crushed in the process, but they were legion. Ultimately, I realized, everything must be put in its proper perspective: most of these passengers had probably survived cancer(s), or the loss of their spouse or everyone else around them, or lost all their retirement savings in the DotCom crash or Enron, or were beaten by their children/nurses/postmen, so practically speaking not knowing precisely where bus 4 was, or would be when it got here, was not a high priority issue. It would more than likely take care of itself.

The swarming and the attack on the busses is precisely what did happen when the next few arrived. A petite apple-facedmummywoman working for the cruiseline attacked the first busdriver[3], grabbing the driver’s wheel and hauling him over into a spot, and announced “this is bus 1, 2 and 3″ triumphantly. We knew we were getting somewhere, and just had to wait it out. We took a few moments to look around and get a more detailed look at the crowd: they weren’t all octogenarians, but there really weren’t any people like us either. Thirtyish, indie-rock listening, pissed-off look on face-wearing. But that was ok; we had in part signed up for this cruise to meet people. Just kidding.

When the next bus pulled up, the apple-mummy was not there to intercept and engage it; she was still busy with bus 1-2-3. The kindly busdriver man, even he was seventy-ish, waddled down the steps, and I tried my luck. “Are you, uh, bus 4? To pier 66?” “I don’t know. I’m whatever bus the line tells me.” Several others right next to me by the bus door tried the exact same set of passwords (bus. 4. 66.) and were similarly denied access. Looking at apple-woman, doing a little jump like a kid who needs to pee. Eventually she senses it and comes over, declaring the bus “4″. One little victory. Kelley and I are the first on, pushing aside several oldies to secure access. We could finally sit, and relax, escape velocity from airport at last achieved. It’s a shame I wasn’t there to free indentured children-guide slaves that day, because I suspect (and I know this is crazy) that I am in some ways the savior they imagine in their stories told around the fires in the airport parking lot at night when they settle in. They will be set free… on the great day that a page is added to our cruise tour book describing, in few words, to get one’s baggage at the carousel, go to Door 0, walk down the line until you see your cruise desk, check in, give them your bags, and get a ticket to wait for the bus. Damn straight. [image source]

continues…

[1] Read: spent asleep and drooling, ending by being jarred awake still on-board to find my forehead drenched with the cool, slick and noxious sweat that always accumulates on my forehead while riding on planes. I always awake on a plane feeling like I’ve been slimed.

[2] The first few days post-wedding I wondered (in one case aloud) how on Earth I was going to wear this thing, which seemed to be sanding its way into my flesh and was apparent to all other fingers on my hand, not just the pinkie and middle finger flanking it. Within a week, though, my hand had acclimated and I don’t even notice it. I’m sure the next step is reaching the point of being able to say “I feel naked without it”, but I can’t test our status on that one because, in a perhaps rare move, I’ve actually gained weight since our wedding (we both figured there was no point in starting our unhealthy American crash diets/workout systems pre-cruise/massive and secret eating), and my finger has bloated to the point that I really can’t get the ring off at all, which should probably trouble me.

[3] Actually jumping onto the moving bus and getting inside like something from Speed.

[4] Foresight can also be 20/20. We found having passports was more than a good idea when it came to clearing customs and immigration in Seattle upon our return. I told you it all had a happy ending… but I get ahead.