An Atlantic Crossing

The passengers on this voyage know that it, like all voyages, will come to an end. As it nears the finish, we will see more freighters around us, gray bumps on the horizon, and know they prelude our return to land.

Two nights before arrival, the ship staff will throw a farewell ball, a formal occasion at which the captain will give out mileage awards to those who have traveled 50,000, 100,000 and 250,000 miles.

I will take a last walk through the Queens Lounge, with a line of windows 10 feet over the churning Atlantic, and take a last look into a room set up with tables and flags of many nations. A string quartet consisting of two violins, a cello and a guitar will play “Falling Leaves.” I will walk through the smoking room, admiring the colorful carpet, noticing that the cushioned love seats by the windows have been turned to look out over the water. I will be seated in the Lido letting David, a young Javanese, explain that “salamat,” Indonesian for “good” or “God bless,” can be used with “Jalan,” which means “road” or “journey.” He will be wearing a deep blue uniform shirt with red trim. “Salamat Jalan,” he will explain, is also a way to say goodbye.

And then, on the final day, we will rise at 5 a.m., go outdoors, and crowd toward the bow. Many more freighters will be around us. We will pass large lighted buoys, then a signal boat. A light will appear above the water in the distance, and then become a pair of lights. Dr. Ens and her boyfriend, several of the musicians and dancers, will stand with me on the sky deck, watching the pair of lights become the top of the World Trade Center, the lower lights become the Verrazano-Narrows bridge. We will wear overcoats and feel the shore wind in our hair. I will hear Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” in my mind. We will be home.

Yet the idea of death is hard to escape in a little bobbing tub poised on the lips of the infinite void. Two nights out of Portugal, a friend and I walked out along the stern rail and saw that we were flying along, throwing up huge spumes of spray and leaving a wake like a comet trail across the Atlantic.

“Do you realize we are surrounded by oblivion?” he said. “Do you realize that, one step, one little railing, one little whim, over you go and disappear in a space so vast that your presence magnified even 1,000 times would still be insignificant?” That was it. Before us lay several thousand miles of open water. In the heyday of steam ships, these liners pared the crossing time to a fat seven days. And you can see why they’d want to. Around us, the blackness of the sky sat on the blackness of the water without so much as a blinking light to distinguish the sea from outer space: two vastnesses not materially different in their emptiness, their despair and austerity.

I think of the toy ocean liner I took to the public swimming pool as a kid, how I would set that little boat on the choppy pool surface, near-fatal swells to my little ship and push it out in the direction of the far wall. Calculated to scale, the far wall of this swimming pool would be nearly five miles off. Five miles of creeping along in the bob and flounce and dip and roll of the open pool. Somewhere in this passage, with the far horizon uninterrupted to your eye, and everywhere blackness enhanced by blackness, you realize it’s death you’re crossing. Climb up the railing and over the other side and you’re gone. You’d be almost a mile astern in two minutes, falling back and away faster than a tin can over a spillway. Many people choose this method of ending themselves, though ship staffs never call them suicides. Rather they say these people disappeared during the voyage. Details of their disappearance, such as the knowledge when, or why, or even precisely how they vanished, are rarely known.

And yet, aboard, all is coziness and twinkly lights. And it hits you that this is why they do things so regularly here. You eat by a gong, dress nicely on specified days, appear on deck for drills, while your days away with bridge and shuffleboard to distract you from the central fact: You are poised over the abyss. You are dangling in the jaws of the great, gargling black. And you return to your cabin to find the sheets turned back and a little chocolate on your pillow.

The End