
Voyage 6 – January 7th through January 16th
There are so many ways to count down the time here. First, I can count the days. I have sixty remaining until the last day of the last cruise, March 12. This means that as I write this I am directly at mid season - a small holiday, we have just made it over the hump. No cause for a big celebration, but enough reason to raise a scotch. I can also count the weeks. I have roughly eight left. Eight is a much smaller number than sixty, but I find it difficult to think in terms of weeks. There are no days of the week here. Monday versus Friday versus Saturday is all a formality. For example, today is Wednesday, but to me it is my last day to access the hold before we enter the Drake Passage and seas become too rough to safely go out on the bow. Other important days are BBQ Day, Farewell and Welcome Cocktail Days, Turnover Days, Sea Days, days when I make landings and days when I hibernate.
I can count the months, but I’d rather not. Two gone, two to go, but I have no real conception of it, as they pass as slowly here as they do anywhere.
My favorite way to whittle away the time is to think of it in terms of cruises. We are on cruise number six out of eleven. Each new cruise brings a new group of people, and each new group of people alters the environment of the ship in their own way. Cruises last, with a couple exceptions, nine or ten days, and the only time when I really pay attention to the date is Turnover Day. Therefore, when I count in cruises, my time moves forward like this: I leave Ushuaia, note the date is January 7. I start a new cruise, get to know a new set of people, cross the Drake, mix some drinks, visit the peninsula again, cross the Drake northbound, then we are back in Ushuaia and it is all of a sudden January 16. I will do it all again and January will almost be over, poof, just like that.
Thus, I have 60 days, eight weeks, five cruises, two months, 1,440 hours until it is time to say good-bye to Terra Incognita. If I were on Scott’s Polar Journey, we would have just made it to the Pole and now we’d be sledging back to Cape Evans.
But I’m not sledging. I’m cruising.
Why am I thinking like this? Why am I counting down the days? I’m one of the thirty thousand people on average who get the chance to come to Antarctica per year, and further, one of a much smaller number that is lucky enough to do it over and over again.
But I have indeed gotten the blues and I have to admit that there is a definitive reason why: Last cruise sucked. Actually, the cruise itself was great. The passengers had a great time. But this group, man, they worked me hard, nonstop, for almost three weeks. They partied, in rough seas or calm. I didn’t have enough glassware to accommodate for their love of margaritas. I stayed open late most nights for them. We moved my bar twice to host dance parties. We celebrated New Year’s together. They were still going at three in the morning when I finally decided to do last call. Christmas Eve, while the ship was listing thirty to forty degrees from side to side, a small group of them decided to party. I was drunkenly decreed a hero. All of this was great as far as revenue is concerned, but it was all terribly exhausting, and while in the middle of it I couldn’t figure out why I was becoming so miserable.
Don’t get me wrong – the people were, for the most part, wonderful. I forged some friendships that will outlive our time on the ship, and part of the reason they were so great was that they loved to party – a catch 22, I suppose.
This cruise I’ve been given the benefit of hindsight and it all makes sense. If I wasn’t behind my bar, chances were I was sleeping, which in turn meant that if I was awake I was probably behind my bar. I was caught in a vortex of serving and mixing and stocking. It is a vortex certain to make anyone save maybe Tom Cruise in Cocktail crazy.
It sucked, yes, but I’ve been reading a lot about this area’s early explorers and really, I don’t have it so bad. I’m not trudging through -70 F temperatures and 100 mph winds to collect an emperor penguin egg like certain people I have been reading about as of late. I still have all my fingers and toes and I have never had to fight off a leopard seal, or an Orca for that matter. Yeah, I had to work a busy bar while the ship rocked violently, but at least I didn’t have to stand up to my knees in brackish coal water bailing her out, praying she wasn’t going to sink. Nor have I ever had to stand by with my coworkers and six crying emperor penguins, watching her slowly and tortuously get crushed by ice, not knowing if I would ever to see home again.
This is the trouble I run into with reading the history of Antarctic exploration while down here; I can’t stop comparing my challenges to the he problems faced by Shackleton. If nothing else, it puts my problems into perspective. Or, more accurately, I think it might strip the perspective away completely. Some of these men really should have died doing what they did. I work in the tourism industry.
About this same time during my first tenure on the Lyubov Orlova I started to feel the blues as well. I yearned for a kitchen, some control over simple daily aspects of my life, perhaps a day off. I missed the city, my friends, streetcars, and bookstores. Then the season finally ended, a year passed by, and lo and behold, I started to miss the ship.
I remember starting my bartending job in the Yukon last summer. It was in a hotel, and strangely a similar environment to the ship in a lot of ways, except of course it didn’t sail around. When I walked down the hallways of the Westmark, I kept expecting handrails to hold onto. I kept expecting the hall to slowly start lilting back and forth. I remember feeling these momentary pangs of panic behind the bar when I saw how precariously the glassware just, well, sat there on the shelf. I felt the need to pack it all into a small space, secure it, so it wouldn’t go flying if we hit a wave. But of course we wouldn’t hit a wave, seeing as we weren’t at sea. Sure enough, I was always disappointed by this realization.
I couldn’t believe it. I actually missed the sea. Thus, I was drawn back in.
It is an addictive life out here. Of course I have shitty days. One thing I can always count on out here and that is the lack of control I have over pretty much anything. I open the fridge and pop will fly out. Drinks are constantly spilling. Storage rooms are trashed every time we cross the Drake Passage.
But then there are the days where I sit with my coworkers out on deck. We drink tea and lie in hammocks while the sun shines down and nothing but blue sea surrounds us. These are the moments will remember when time passes and I’m back on land.
I won’t remember the blues. I will remember the sea. I won’t remember the smell of rotten Sprite (identical to barf), but I will remember the humpback whales, rolling and playing around the ship at sunset off the coast of the Peninsula.
I will forget the crappy coffee, the nonstop work, the exhaustion, but I certainly will remember the elation of knowing what it is like to have no address, but not be homeless.