Story: Ocean Crossings, Fast and Slow

Ocean Crossings, Fast and Slow

Hilary Lambert

Now

Not having crossed an ocean for many years, I anticipated with concern my February flight to Barcelona. Would it be strange and terrifying to be seven or eight miles above the Earth’s surface and beyond reach of land for five hours, as we traversed the North Atlantic?

I found, onboard at 40 thousand feet with an outside temperature of 50+ degrees Fº below zero, a cozy living-room atmosphere dependent on denial of the world outside our flying metal sliver. Served alcohol, meals and snacks and bombarded by bad movies, we were given blankets and pillows and urged to close window shades and sleep. The result for me was a stuporous inertia and raging thirst. I was trapped in a window seat next to a sleeper, so I could not get up and roam the aisles.

The video screens occasionally displayed an updated cartoon Geographic Positioning System image of our travel route, and I watched excitedly. A white plane moved along a dotted red line across a map of the US eastern seaboard and the arcing line of the Canadian Maritimes, with a leap across open ocean to the westernmost point of northern Spain. I matched up the image with the view out my window: the final farewell of twinkling coastal lights in the night and landfall with the dawn. I was filled with a sense of excitement and awe and love of Earth.

Covering up the window with a blanket to screen out the cabin lights, I could see the masses of stars parading past in the cold, cold night. It is difficult to get an unimpeded view of the night sky these days. The glory of it, and us so near to outer space, was a high point of my journey.

Returning during daytime, I wondered if those white specks were icebergs or massive wave formations, far below on the icily blue ocean, beneath the clouds. I stared in great concentration, and thought about how far down I was looking. Catching a vertiginous whiff of enormous height, I retreated into the groggy fug of the cabin where hundreds snoozed in a cocoon of safety and stability.

On this trip I realized that for most people, travel today is about the destination, not the journey, no matter what the sages may say. Cheap flights have obliterated the trip. Instead we slump for six to ten hours in a haze of carbohydrates, drugs and subdued lighting, impervious to the lands and seas we are passing over.

Out my window, I saw a ship far below cutting a white line through the waves, and I remembered.

Then

I have been told that we took the train to New York City from Ithaca, though that is not something I recall from 1958, when I was six and my sister was three. Our parents and we were headed for a year of sabbatical leave for my dad at the University of Oslo, in Norway. On professor salaries of that era, our family did not even consider flying. We booked tourist class berths on an ocean liner, Norwegian-America Line’s Bergensfjord. That is how the middle class got across the ocean back then. The trip took from five to ten luscious, indolent days.

Brand-new in 1956, the Bergensfjord was 578 feet long and carried almost 900 passengers. At that time she was plying a regular North Atlantic route back and forth between New York, Southampton England, and southern Scandinavia, as her predecessor had done since 1913. From the end of World War II until air travel gained ascendance in the late 1960s, a number of passenger liners provided this regular service. By the early 1970s these beautiful ships were dispersed into the cruise industry, sent to warmer climates and leisure travel in place of trans-Atlantic passenger service.

My memories, of that first voyage and the others that followed, illuminate the joy of having all that time on our hands. How was it spent? As a six-year-old I ran around the parade deck several times a day, my parents letting me and my sister wear ourselves out. Dinner was a fancy business, with good clothes and a seat in the big room with gleaming murals and strange foods to sample (there were always dinner rolls to fall back on). We snuggled into our cozy bunks at night, falling asleep to the rumble of engines and lulled by the swing of the ship up, over, across and down each deep-ocean wave. Sometimes we’d smack into a big one and the ship would stagger a bit, then continue implacably forward.

Our mom and dad would tuck us in and go off to dance to the small live band, drink in the tourist class bar and hang out on deck, the waves crashing alongside or hissing smoothly on calm evenings. It was fun to compel our parents to return, for any small complaint. We would call the steward on the intercom, and he would fetch them for our pleasure: “Mom, we’re thirsty.”

In 1958 Norway, a long way from its present-day prosperity, was still digging out after World War II. The Bergensfjord, continuing a maritime tradition that went back to the Vikings, put on a splendid show – centered on food. The smorgasbord is a high point of Scandinavian cuisine, with its dozens of herring dishes, shrimp, eggs and meats and butter curls, coffee, juices, cheeses, flatbread, milk, cream, jams, and puddings. And that was just breakfast. The elegantly printed full-color menus, with illustrations of traditional Norway, are treasured family mementos of an era when travel, even for the middle-class traveling on business, meant taking your time and enjoying yourself.

It is obvious what we “lacked” on these trips: no televisions or radios or newspaper headlines – not to mention the absence of today’s techno-gizmos, so essential to staying current. We were cut off from the world, from our obligations and worries. Many of the adults were traveling toward work, certainly, but not yet, not for a few more days.

My most essential memories of these trips – five, between 1958 and 1969 – are of being awakened each morning by a silver-toned gong rung by the steward as he walked down our sleeping passageways. As consciousness dawned, the odors of breakfast and coffee, combined with salty sea air, crept into our brains and roused us rapidly.

On subsequent trips when I was older and trusted to not fall overboard, the very best thing to do was to go to the back of the ship – you know, the stern – and stand there staring off into the churn of our thousands-mile wake, as the ship slowly rose and fell beneath me. We loved to wrap up in blankets and stretch out on deck chairs, reading or (if that tempted sea-sickness) snoozing and staring out across the “battleship grey” North Atlantic.

Today, compatible airplane seatmates exchange email addresses and cell numbers, and magazine columns abound with the wonderful networking contacts made this way. On board, we had a week or more in which these situations could develop and move forward – or not. On our 1966 crossing to New York aboard Holland America Line’s Maasdam, the ship was overwhelmed with fellow teenagers – Baby Boomers in their young heyday. I got to know a cool girl from Long Island, a group of private school bad boys from Albany – and met my future (ex) husband.

Our family had a portable record player that I had dragged from campground to campground across Europe all summer long, and twenty essential 1966 LPs, long-playing vinyl. (Sure, that was a crazy thing to do. I was fourteen!) That record player transformed the ocean voyage into a wonderful struggle of “young people” trying to find a place to hang out and listen to the Beatles and Rolling Stones, while driving the other passengers and ship personnel crazy. Many of us corresponded for years afterwards.

With days of unfettered time to spend, people sat in the library to write long letters on ship letterhead and get caught up on their reading. We had the time to think about where we were from, where we were headed, and why. There was also a large amount of ocean-watching. In August, our usual crossing time, the weather was stable. Through the years our ships encountered a few storms that, for a couple of days, would send the susceptible to their bunks to groan and suffer. We hardier types were triumphant, lording it over the empty dining-rooms and lounges. If possible we were out on deck, running and staggering, catching the spray and the blast of the cold waves. If told to stay indoors we pressed our faces against the windows as the heavy waves cascaded onboard.

Of course it was boring. The view was of blue and grey waves and an unchanging flat horizon line, day after day! All those miles – traversed one wave at a time. All those hours – wasted. Wasted? No: only painstaking, step-by-step travel enables you to grasp the true size and complexity of the glorious Earth we are fortunate to inhabit. No matter how many “places” you go, the planetary context is lost if your method of travel is sitting in a flying living room with your eyes closed for six hours.

Today we “click to add” a car rental to our online trip itinerary. Back then we took our car along, or brought a new one back with us. Our parents’ first new car, a Fiat totally unfit for upstate New York winters, came to America in the Bergensfjord’s hold in 1959. A family home movie from 1965 shows our station wagon in a sling, slowly lifted by a crane off the mid-Manhattan dock and lowered gently into the gaping darkness of the cargo hold. That tolerant “small” station wagon spent a long winter with us in Stockholm and the next summer took us along narrow roads across Europe. It endured an afternoon in a Glasgow repair shop while we watched “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” at a nearby cinema, and returned to the USA with us that August. After a three-month break-in period camping across Europe, a new VW bus returned home with us on our final ocean voyage in 1969.

Acceleration

On that final trans-Atlantic trip, mimeographed newspapers were distributed every afternoon. We would excitedly read brief summaries of what was happening beyond our reach and control. It was August, and as the Bergensfjord (on one of its final trans-Atlantic runs) traveled toward New York City from Southampton England, I knew that a music festival was taking shape near Woodstock, New York. Every day I would grab a copy of the ship’s newspaper to read a brief single paragraph about how the roads had been closed due to the immense crowds, and that the show was going on despite heavy rain. I was desperate to be there, not onboard this slow-moving ship. I was 17, and the times were catching us up, throwing us forward.

After the 1969 voyage, my family returned to Europe several times, by air. Schedules tightened up; the old sense of leisure was replaced by making the most of every hour. Today most of us travel in that flying living room with the shades down, shutting out the sea below and the world outside. Next time you fly, spare a few minutes to think about what you are flying over. Even if it scares you a little bit.