Small Craft Advisory by Louis D. Rubin

Author:Louis D. Rubin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 1991-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

CARIBBEAN INTERLUDE

Do you know that land where the lemon flowers,

The golden orange glows on the dark bower,

The light wind blows from heaven’s blue sky,

The still myrtles, the laurels standing high?

—Goethe

There comes a time in life when the children have finished college and become approximately self-supporting, while the physical indignities of the so-called Golden Years have not importantly manifested themselves. For the first time ever, money is available for things hitherto only wistfully contemplated. A few years ago during the Christmas break my wife and I found ourselves sailing from New Orleans to Key West and the Yucatán aboard the Bermuda Star, a 24,000-ton liner that in an earlier incarnation had been the Holland-America Line’s Veendam.

It was something I had long wanted to do. In the 1960s I had twice journeyed to Europe aboard ocean liners to lecture, and had formed my expectations of what cruising would be like from those experiences. The cuisine was what I remembered most fondly of all. I anticipated ending dinner with a splendiferous dessert, followed by a tray of magnificent cheeses—Fontina, Bel Paese, Edam, Gouda, and the like. So when the first night out aboard the Bermuda Star I noted “assorted cheeses” on the menu, I ordered these forthwith, only to find that the cheeses offered consisted of pimento, domestic Swiss, Philadelphia Cream, and Velveeta.

The cruise itself, however, was delightful. We discovered the joys of reclining in a deck chair in midwinter, gazing idly at blue water, with the temperature well up into the eighties and nineties. At the ports where we stopped, excursions were available to view Aztec ruins, swim in tropical lagoons, and go snorkeling off reefs. My wife went on several of these trips, but I stayed aboard, chose a shady spot on the deck, and spent the time reading and observing the activities in port, the fishing boats, the workboats, the gulls and pelicans, the jade water over a sandy bottom, the towering cumulus formations of the tropics, the swiftly building mid-afternoon thunderheads that briefly poured rain and as quickly went on their way.

At Cancún I sat on the deck after dinner, and tuned in my pocket radio to try to pick up a news broadcast. Far off somewhere in the frozen North, a newscaster was describing a blizzard—deep snow accumulating, the mercury dropping into the low twenties and still falling, the traffic at a standstill, the city all but paralyzed. Was it Boston? Minneapolis? Denver? Meanwhile here I was, on a ship tied up to a wharf on the Yucatán coast, in shirt sleeves, cigar lit, feeling at one with the famed southgoers of literature: Santayana in Rome, Stendhal at Civitavecchia, the Brownings at Livorno, Hemingway at the Finca, Wallace Stevens at Key West … Do you know that land? Yes indeed.

The city suffering the ice and snow turned out to be neither Boston nor Denver nor Minneapolis, but instead Houston, Texas, for an unprecedented cold wave was moving into the Deep South, with record lows forecast. When it reached the shores of the Gulf of Mexico it kept right on coming.

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