White-Washed – Glacier Bay – [07/17/2015]

Posted on July 23, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy

winter_somewhere_by_elenadudina-d6inp58Mother Nature can sometimes play us all for fools; reminding us that she’s in charge no matter what.

This morning when I wrapped my chilly fingers around my daily cup of hot chocolate I looked out the office window to see chilly, wet, white cloud; fog engulfing the ship like a blanket, hiding everything from view except a few feet of water and a vague outline of a distant horizon.

On Glacier Bay day this isn’t the best thing, the glaciers are the biggest draw for this cruise, they’re what everyone comes to see – and right now? We’re fogged in. Hopefully it will clear by the time we actually arrive, but as I said, Mother Nature can play us all for fools. The crew doesn’t particularly worry about such things as far as our own photo ops go – we’ll be back here in a few days after all, but I do worry for the sake of the passengers, some of them have saved for years to be able to come on this cruise and – much as they do sometimes get on my nerves – I hate to see people disappointed.

It would be like going to Disneyland and finding the best ride in the park shut down…

Not fair…

Eventually, thankfully, the fog did lift – just enough for the mountains to loom out of the white, towering above us as if they stretched even beyond the sky; giving the illusion that we had suddenly tumbled into the kingdom of the giants. Eerie, and silent.

With the glacier behind us and open water ahead of us again the fog dropped down and tucked us in once more; I know there’s land out there somewhere, I just can’t see it…

 

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Happiness Is – Juneau, Alaska – [07/15/2015]

Posted on July 19, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy
Woman walking on train rails

Woman walking on train rails

You are a true wizard now as you always wished. Does it make you happy?

Well, men don’t always know when they’re happy but…I think so

~ The Last Unicorn

There was a time that I didn’t think I would ever really know what happiness was. Not real happiness, the happiness that comes with being basically fully accepted by the world – or rather, figuring out that the world is never going to fully accept you, and that you have to stop caring whether or not it does. You have to be comfortable in your own skin.

The kind of happiness that lets you dance in the rain while you’re waiting for the train to arrive. It comes on you unexpectedly, like that long awaited tropical rainstorm after a drought. Suddenly there is light where there were shadows, and you realize that your life has hit balance; and you’re okay with that, and whatever changes the future may bring – because the future always brings changes – you’re pretty sure you’re going to be okay with that too; because you’re tired of living in fear that something is going to come along and take away what you’ve earned, tired of believing that you’re not worth contentment, tired of worrying that everything is too good to be true. Because for the first time in your life, the ever-shifting ground actually feels solid under your feet.

Happiness for me in the past has been a pie-crust promise, easily made easily broken, a fleeting temperamental thing that has too often proved impossible to catch and properly hold on to, but now…now I’m learning different.

Happiness isn’t the big things. It’s not the perfect job or the perfect partner or the perfect salary. Most people realize far too late that there is no such thing as perfection.

Happiness is the smallest things; it’s having someone that knows you well enough to know what to order you for supper after a long day, who knows how you take your coffee in the mornings and when you need it, it’s having a boss who trusts you enough to let you do your job without riding you, it’s making the time to flip through a few pages of a good book. It’s silly things like an extra toothbrush. It’s being able to look in the mirror and realize that ‘yes, this is my life, and it’s a really good life’. That is the fairy tale, that is the happy ending…even though in reality, there is nothing in life but beginnings.

I laid the train tracks to my own personal Vienna long before there was a train in sight that could make the trip; and I more often than not have stumbled my way along them rather than walked, I’ve felt the metaphorical iron callousing the soles of my feet; but I had a train to catch, so I kept walking; holding my arms out like a tightrope walker, or a child walking on the lip of the sidewalk…

And you know something? It was worth it…

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A Perfect Surprise – At Sea – [07/13/2015]

Posted on July 19, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy

c2b771cc9df36839943ac05f14a1e70eJudy and Johnny just walked through the door
Like a queen with her king
Oh what a perfect surprise
Judy’s wearin’ his ring

It’s a silly thing really, and yet, it’s somehow not. We do the 50s prom night every northbound cruise, but this is the first time in a while we’ve been able to run it with the band (The absence of a guitar player last cruise made such a thing impossible); and 50s night is something of Amras’ pride and joy.

So I straightened my dress ponytails, and knocked on his door

Do I pass inspection…

I’ll say…you’re like a combo 40s/50s girl…but with a dragon.

I shrugged, and played with the dragon necklace that is basically permanently fastened around my throat.

Well, I don’t have a class ring to replace him with…I didn’t pack mine, or my Dad’s…that’s usually the one I wear….

And he gets this crazy impish smirk

Would you like one?

You seriously…you didn’t pack your class ring?

I did, sometimes I wear it…

Would you really…trust me with that?

‘Course I would.

Eeee!! I’ve been pinned!!

So I went up to sock-hop night with a class ring on a chain around my neck. This pleased me an unexpected amount for more than one reason, but a big factor being because well if I’m going to do a theme night, I may as well do it all the way!

The Hop went well, as it always does – it basically a guaranteed crowdpleaser, and Amras knows how to chart it so that it runs well no matter who actually ends up hosting it. There is, however, one thing in Alaska that no music – no matter how well played – can compete against. Only two songs into the night; black against the vivid Alaskan sunset, the whales started to play. If there is one thing that will distract any crowd from anything, it’s standing at a window and crying “WHALE!”…some things, you’re just never going to win against…

Though having whales as your competition? That is one of the things that is pretty unique to this job!

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Snookered – Haines, Alaska – [07/07/2015]

Posted on July 19, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy

91eb120e0a9b9a9efd41c94d9650096aIt has been a very long time since I played pool; not since the bar I used to frequent at home closed at least a year ago. I’ve certainly never been a pool shark; although I remember my dad lifting me up to play at our family pool table when I was small enough to walk right underneath it. I had a pool cue that was child size as I recall, though I’ve no idea where they got such a thing, or if that was even it’s original purpose.

Anyway, I am not a pool shark, but I do like the game, and, given the right circumstances, I can be half decent at it. Okay, less than half decent, but I can have fun being totally lousy.

So, when Amras and I found ourselves at a local bar that offered pool at 50 cents a game, especially since the place was half empty; it was easy enough to pick up a pool cue again.

The first game went to him, partially because I managed to sink one of his when I was aiming for one of mine. Typical me. So he won that one. Several hours later, I leaned on the edge of the table and watched him attempt a nearly impossible split-shot which – if it had worked, would have guided his ball away from the precariously balanced eightball on the edge of the corner pocket…a calculated risk, which would have made him look like a shark if it had played out. But…instead I watched the 8 ball drop and that game went to me.

So next Haines there will be a tie-breaker…and since we are both very competitive people (even with, or perhaps especially with, each other) – I am rather curious to see how this will work out…

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Two Worlds, One Girl – At Sea – [07/06/2015]

Posted on July 19, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy

gfI can get dressed up go out and swing till three am and then
Lie down at five, jump up at six
And start all over again…

Although granted, I can’t do that as often as I used to. There are times the job does remind me that much as I may wish otherwise – I’m not 22 anymore…but, as Silv reminds me fairly consistently, I’m also not dead…so I’m basically able to keep up with myself.

Which is a good thing, because otherwise embark days would probably kill me. Especially on this run, as they are the day before a sea day…and a sea day is 10 hours. Embark day may start late, but it runs long, and it doesn’t really stop…

Of course, I have the option of not playing ‘Kitten to the ‘Cats…I could not go to the welcome aboard set…but this is the first time in a week we’ve actually had a full band (for the last little while we’ve been working without a guitar player, which is tough, because the ‘Cats are a guitar driven band); and I wasn’t going to miss the first time my boys got to play with a full sound. Fortunately for us the new guitar player is awesome. Amras walked off stage last night with a grin on his face for the first time in days…

And for the first time in a while I was simply able to plug into the energy in the room and feel my shoulders shift into being relaxed. Not that I’m tense these days, quite the opposite – being back on the regular rotation is a breath of fresh air after the stress of the flagship, eating three meals a day (and ravenous much of the time), and sleeping like a baby straight through the night – tense is not really a word in my vocabulary right now. But none the less, it’s nice to get the little extra energy boost.

Especially if it’s midnight and 7am comes awfully early.

And in the morning you shift from cheering section to hair-pinned-back-pencil-behind-the-ear tech girl…I sometimes wonder how I manage to keep my worlds relatively separate (emphasis on the relatively, complete separation is just impossible out here).

Buuut…it’s worth it. After all, you do only live once (well…maybe), and all that…

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Fire 451 – At Sea – [07/06/2015]

Posted on July 7, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy

book-burningThe temperature at which book-paper burns…

I have read many many unsettling books in my time. Most of the classics are – in their own way – unsettling. Even Peter Pan in its original form is terribly bittersweet and sad; the list of amazingly unsettling books is long in my mind Animal Farm (“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” ) 1984 (she betrayed him of course, she had to…it was inevitable), Brave New World (“Can you imagine anything as disgusting as the idea of a ‘parent’), Lord of the Flies (Piggy…glasses…some things even I block out), and of course pretty much anything by Stienbeck…

I’ve even slogged my way through the original Malleus Malificarum…the ‘hammer of the witches’ that brought so many women to their deaths. That one hit the bedroom wall a few times before I finally managed to finish it.

But I’ve never read a book as frightening as Fahrenheit 451…

Because of all those dystopian futures, this one could happen. Even more so than 1984 (which I could never actually get through), with its mind control and its big brother…this could happen, because of political correctness, and our hyper-sensitivity and our constant gnawing need for instant and constant contentment…the terrifying thing about the world Bradbury portrays – is that it was brought about through the sheer laziness and undying selfishness of humanity, not because anyone was forced to, but because no one stood up to say ‘NO!’ for fear of ‘offending’ someone else…

And ‘intellectual’ became the swearword it always deserved to be.

We can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy. Isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? that’s all we live for right? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of those.

Coloured people don’t like ‘Little Black Sambo’. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity. Peace. Take your fight outside, or better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minute after death a man is a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

Terrifying. Terrifying and so perilously close to being true. You don’t like something? Kill it, forbid it, get rid of it. In our desire to make everyone equal, might we not just as easily skew the other way? When everyone is special, no one is.

The firemen are rarely necessary anymore, the public stopped reading of its own accord. No one wants to be rebels anymore

The thought makes me ill, and I tell myself it’s not possible, it’s fiction, that’s all, just fiction. But then I think of e-readers, and internet and computers and people being so constantly plugged in, I think of hi-def TV, and Bluetooth and holographic concerts, earbuds and smartglasses and movies that don’t even have real actors in them anymore…

And I turn the page, and think please …please just save my libraries…or let me become one of those people that hordes forbidden books in her attic, and strikes the first match that she may die with the parchment when the fireman comes…

 

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Slow Coast – Glacier Bay – [07/03/2015]

Posted on July 7, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy

selkies-choice-jennifer-hickeyJuly? How is it July already? Time flies and all that…

It feels like ages since I’ve been back to Alaska, and yet at the same time it feels as though I never left it. The world shifts and changes all the time, but somehow Alaska remains the same – and I don’t mean than in a boring way. I adore Alaska, despite the sometimes bumpy relationship I have had with it in the past. I’m still not sure what’s waiting for me at the edge of the ice this time…but we’ll see.

I’m finding it’s also interesting to see somewhere you have seen so many times before – through the eyes of someone that’s it’s brand new to. I don’t actually get the chance to work with a lot of new hires – one of the downsides of working on the flagship all the time, they don’t send newbies there very often – but at the moment my current roommate is brand new to shipboard life. It’s a surreal thing, looking at someone and almost completely seeing who you were what seems like a very long time ago. Amras and I were sitting with her at lunch in Ketchikan the other day, and suddenly found ourselves remembering sights that we hadn’t actually been to see in ages…

Oh, are you a candy person? If you’re a candy person you have to hit Ketichi-candies, but it’s expensive…

Etc etc…

So that’s been fun. Enough so that we didn’t really mind the fact that after a half hour walk to the restaurant we wanted to go to we found it closed for the July 4th holiday…so we have to wait till next week to have pancakes.

We’ve only had one bout of rain, yesterday in Skagway, so we took shelter from the wind and wet in the tiny theatre on Skagway’s main street to watch The Days of ’98 show that’s put on every season. It’s a really cute little show, and the performers do an excellent job of it. Much to Amras’ shock I steadfastly refused to be pulled up on stage – I am not that great with being put on the spot, I become painfully ridiculously shy in such circumstances, so I stayed firmly planted in my seat; for which I apologized afterwards.

And then suddenly, after a whirlwind of unexpected and thankfully quickly (though not necessarily easily) resolved drama – we find ourselves back in Glacier Bay.

There is a lovely kind of peace to the slow ride up and down the coast…as I’ve said before, I think I’m going to like it here.

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Farewell Ladies – [06/18/2015]

Posted on July 1, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy

Walking_Away_From_Everything_by_vampire_zombieI felt it as I approached her. If we’d been at a bar, she would have turned her back on me in an elegant sulk. As it was the crisp salt air ruffled my hair as I looked up at her, the equivalent of a natural sigh. I muttered under my breath

“Don’t you think at me in that tone of voice! We talked about this you and I. We talked about this long and hard. Now stop it.”

She did. Mostly.

Not completely; but then, she wouldn’t be a lady if she had.

I walked up the gangway, felt a lurch in my stomach as I passed under the low ceiling of the break door. I should have factored this in, should have realized how strange it would feel coming back to her, but I hadn’t, and now it was just that hair too late to get all the leaf mail into place. My footsteps carried me up two levels before I was fully aware that they had done so. I felt her give a sigh of what could have been called relief, a creaking settling of slapping waves and shifting floors. I gnawed on my lower lip.

“Hush. This is temporary. I’m not back. I was good to you, but you and I both know you weren’t always good to me.”

The office looked the same, but not. The little touches were missing. She was well cared for, but not loved. The shelves were neat, but not full, the painstakingly organized back closet would later prove to be jammed full of chaos, not even attempted to be organized (“I have stuff in there, so what?” the new caretaker said carelessly to me when I winced). Little things that would once have been taken care of instantly now…just not; cared for, but not loved. Minimally cared for – perhaps “taken care of” was a better way of putting it.

I was still there though, around the edges, in those little things that couldn’t be changed or reset. I didn’t think those would ever go away, not really.

My fingers twitched, and I resisted the urge to look for keys and set things straight. This was not mine anymore. She was not mine. I had divorced her, handed her to someone else so that I could take the hand of another.

Later, standing in the department office with an awkward guide that I did not want but couldn’t shake, and therefore unable to speak freely, I found myself thinking, perhaps to her, perhaps to myself, perhaps to the person I was talking to:

“She’s not me is she? There’s only one me, and she’s not it.”

The guide I couldn’t shake spoke, and for the first time I actually heard what was being said instead of just listening, and in her words I heard the difference I had felt since I walked on board,

“It’s only a ship. Not like it’s a career or a life or anything.”

Later, when I was looking out the window watching her turn her back on me and troll her way back out of the harbor, I realized I had never told her I was sorry that I’d had to leave…I mean I had, months ago, when I thought all this was settled, but today I hadn’t…

And I should have.

Because she was a lady, and she deserved it.

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Enjoy the Ride – Ketchikan, Alaska – [06/26/2015]

Posted on July 1, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy

70a4e4bc3fd4235827487a99c7bb454f-d74llmgLife should not be a calm and quiet journey from birth to grave. Life should be a rollercoaster that slides into the end – martini in one hand, chocolate in the other screaming “MAN! What a ride!”

Sitting in the showroom this morning, with a handful of crew and a smattering of guests, there was one thought that ruffled through the air like a butterfly…though only a few of us voiced it. Very quietly, as though afraid of the implications.

It could have been us. It could have been our tour. Our plane. Our guests.

It could have been us.

So very easily it could have been us.

It wasn’t my ship that lost 8 guests yesterday afternoon; but it may as well have been. When something like this happens, it doesn’t just ripple through the fleet, it ripples – I imagine – through every fleet. A stark reminder that things can happen out here, things do happen out here, and that you simply cannot plan for something like that. You can’t turn back the clock and tell that family not to get on that plane, you can’t tell that pilot to hug his wife extra tight.

So where does that leave you? Where does that leave any of us?

It leaves us with the choice to look forward or back.

I am not a religious person in the traditional sense, but I do believe it to be true that every living being on this earth “walks in the valley of the shadow of death” every day…and that we need not be afraid. Not for any religious or spiritual reason, not because we are being watched or guided (though I don’t necessarily disbelieve that either), but because we have a choice as to whether or not we let that fact affect us. When something like this happens we can choose to close the door in the world in fear or we can grieve, and choose otherwise.

We have the chance to step onto this incredible ride, to take this amazing adventure where nothing is predictable; a ride that’s full of zigs and zags and corkscrew turns, that pulls negative G’s and turns your stomach upside down. We all have that chance, no matter what we do – whether you’re out here drifting on Mama Ocean like me, or whether you’re sitting behind double protected glass in a high rise office. We all have that choice. Make the right one. Yes, things can happen, yes things will happen, and one day – whenever that is – the other side of the veil is waiting for us all. But for so many of us, that day is not today; so cherish that.

Someday, we will all, every one of us one day, play the losing card…that’s a fact of life. Simple biology…until then? Enjoy the game.

Do all those crazy things that you never thought you had the time or the money to do, take your loved ones to dinner, bungee jump off a perfectly good building, sit by a fresh water stream and stare at the fish – whatever it is that you need to do. Yes, you could get hurt, yes, there’s always danger…but you could just as easily get hurt crossing the street as you could go up in a float plane and never come back. Tragedy should not make you want to wrap yourself in bubblewrap…it shouldn’t make you reckless either – but living life without enjoying the ride isn’t actually living…

If only because…it could have been you.

 

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On the Cusp – Seward, Alaska – [06/21/2015]

Posted on June 29, 2015 by GypsyShaughnessy

summer-solstice

Over the years I’ve spent the summer solstice many places.; but I’ve never spent it this far north. The longest day of the year, in a place where the sun seems to never go down anyway…

There’s something eerie and beautiful about that experience. About knowing that even in the middle of the night – or what we would think of as the middle of the night – it is still going to be light here.

“Born on the cusp of magic” they say of those lucky enough to have this as their name day. And yes, there is something magical about Summer Solstice. Perhaps it’s just the reminder that the world is always shifting around us, under us, and beneath us, that makes the very air seem to shimmer. The veils are thin on this day, but not the same way that they are on All Hallows. A different feeling altogether.

There’s not much to Seward, it’s just a little town huddled in the shadow of the vast Alaskan mountains – you can see the whole place in maybe twenty minutes – but in this odd perpetual pre-darkness, there is a kind of magic here. Perhaps it’s just because of those mountains…

Water-girl, hemmed in by earth.

Perhaps this is the one day of the year that it doesn’t bother me.

So, for those of you that choose to acknowledge it, wishing you a blessed solstice from the land of the midnight sun.

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