Occam's Razor

Aboard the M.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, off Haiti, March 9, 2020

Markets are plunging and authorities are pleading for people not to get on cruise ships. So of course we are on a cruise ship. We merrily set sail on Saturday along with close to a dozen other cruise ships out of Fort Lauderdale. We’re on a Holland America ship again, but the difference this time is that rather than being one of the youngest passengers on the ship we are now one of the oldest.

Holland America passengers skews toward 60+, but it’s really more 70+, which is why we felt so young on our last cruise. The difference in this cruise is that it’s a themed cruise, a JoCo cruise to be specific. Having invested over $6000 in this cruise, we weren’t going to be deterred by the threat of coronavirus. We might have had we not paid all this money into it and had some way of getting it back. So armed with plenty of saniwipes in our carry on, we took our chances and boarded a JetBlue flight last Friday from Hartford to Fort Lauderdale.

There are hundreds of cruises still going on across the globe and last I checked only two had cases of coronavirus, both of the Princess Cruise Line brand. There were two Princess cruises going out of Fort Lauderdale with us. The two thousand or so of us passenger onboard the Nieuw Amsterdam may look odd. My wife is hardly the only woman around here with purple hair. In fact, it’s more normal to see oddly colored hair on this cruise than not.

This cruise is full of weird people and oddballs, the sorts of whom we used to meet at science fiction conventions thirty years ago when that was still a thing. Now there is plenty of evidence that the remainders of this tribe take this annual JoCo cruise instead. It’s aligned around a programmer turned nerdy song writer Jonathan Colton. There are plenty of polyamorous people on this ship, along with all sorts of other other odd people, but I’m betting they are much more a safe sex type than the general population at large. They are at least 90% white, average age probably somewhere around 35, the sorts that like to dress in costumes, decorate their cabin doors with quirky stuff, play endless role playing games mostly in the upper dining room, sleep little and frequently queue into long lines at the food court on the Lido Deck.

Time will tell if we suffer the fate of the two Princess cruise ships, but most likely we’ll be fine. Even before all this coronavirus started, sanitation has always been a high priority on cruise ships. Purell stations are everywhere and people are mostly refraining from touching each other and washing their hands thoroughly after bathroom stops or when leaving or returning to their rooms.

We’ve rented the whole ship so it’s been largely transformed for us. Generally, this is good. There is no annoying art auction and the shops and casino look eerily empty. Also largely empty is the promenade (Deck 3) which is usually full of walkers and joggers. I saw one lone jogger and a few others in deck chairs. It was the quietest place on this noisy ship.

Should I take it as an omen that we didn’t berth at our first port of call? It’s Half Moon Cay, Holland America’s private island in the Bahamas, and pretty much always the first port of call on one of their ships out of Fort Lauderdale. We weren’t spurned due to coronavirus fears, but because seas were choppy due to a strong low pressure system north of our ship. That’s why the captain changed course and this morning we found ourselves south of Hispanola where the seas are finally calmer.

Tomorrow we are expected to berth at Santo Domingo where we’ll have an outdoor concert. Last I heard, the Dominican Republic hadn’t refused our entry. That’s because no one was let on the ship sick. They took our temperature prior to boarding, and we had to assert we hadn’t recently traveled through suspect Asian airports.

Still, you never know. We don’t get much news on this cruise ship. Internet is prohibitively expensive, but we do get satellite TV and Holland America doesn’t block the New York Times site, in fact it subscribes to it for us. For the most part the passengers seem vigilant about hygiene but won’t let it affect their valuable social interactions. This cruise is a place to be your inner oddball, so it’s quite okay to be Corporal Klinger in high heels and hose around here. You are probably one of a dozen passengers with a similar theme. Klinger though was just vying for a Section 8. There are plenty of real trans people on this cruise. If you can’t figure it out from their somewhat manly appearance and breasts, their name tag suggests you use “they” as their personal pronoun. They look happy and liberated. For a week they can be accepted and be themselves. It’s going home to a much colder world that is the hard part for them.

If anything, I am the oddball around here. I’m dressed American-ish, my personal pronoun is He, and I’m not polyamorous, in costume, have a stuffed dragon on my shoulder or am particularly into the odd stuff most of these people are into. My wife is quite into this culture. I just kind of observe it all from the sidelines. I’m no redneck and believe in live and let live. In my sixty plus years, I simply don’t care what your color, age, body shape or your sexual orientation is. We all are here and should just get along. The only thing that gives me some heartache are self-identified Republicans and conservatives. I just don’t understand them.

And until Saturday when we return and are hopefully let off the ship, I don’t have to. We are living in a kind of private space on this cruise, mostly insulated from the real world which will probably come crashing back to us on Saturday. Any coronavirus is likely on shore, not here on the ship. There are board games and weird seminars and exclusive shows on the Main Stage every evening. It may be that for us the safest and friendliest place in the world, at least for the moment, is right on this ship with the coast of Haiti off the port side.