The Discourse of Disembarkation

Dear Readers –

I am loathe to inform you that our journey is drawing to a close. It’s 1am, August 21st on the MV Explorer, and in seven hours we will be alongside in San Diego. I am blogging out of sleeplessness, rooted in the desire to make this experience last. Zoë is asleep, and a number of students are upstairs in the computer lab talking. Some have chosen to sleep on the decks outside, despite the chill and the dew.

I won’t blog about Guatemala, not because I didn’t love it, but because my mind is already elsewhere. Suffice to say that Chichicastenango continues to be one of the most captivating places I’ve ever seen, and that Tikal continues to hold all the mystery it held 13 years ago when I proposed to Zoë there.

My mind is on the end of the journey, as it has been all day. Today I finished up my grades, spoke at our graduation/end of voyage ceremony, packed, and went to a party in the faculty lounge. Spending an entire day in the faculty lounge grading was itself an experience. I had a chance to listen to some of the conversations of the "Amiable Retirees" who hang out there all day. They're with S@S through a program called the "Lifelong Learners." This particular groups is perhaps better referred to as the "Lifelong Yakkers." They yak and play cards all day. Among the conversations overheard:

• "I went to Home Depot to get a shovel. I found the shovel section, but I was overwhelmed by the selection. What kind of shovel do you have?" (30 minute conversation ensues about shovels.)
• "I couldn't change money in Puerto Quetzal. I heard so-and-so had trouble changing money Antigua. Oh, you were in Lake Atitlán? Could you change money there? I'm not sure you can change money in Guatemala …

The mood on the ship was bittersweet. A lot of us are looking forward to being home, but we’re also sad that the experience has come to an end. And what a remarkable experience it’s been. I offered the following speech at the ceremony:

They say Semester at Sea changes your way of seeing the world. I’m sure this voyage has done that for many of us, probably in different ways, so by way of bringing our voyage to a close, I would like to tell you something about how I’ve come to understand the world as a result of my own personal voyage. I offer you a brief final lecture, of sorts, about the world as it looks to me from the deck of the MV Explorer.

The world is made up of eight ports and a ship that sails among them. The ship carries a closely-knit community of professors and students, families and friends, adults and children, men and women, passengers and crew, dedicated to visiting those ports so as to study their history, their literature, their economics, their music, their society, their art, their business practices, their dominant language. These ports are arranged in a line that extends from north to south across the equator. Each of these ports has a hinterland that can be visited by various means of transportation, including airplane, taxi, train, and oxcart. Now, some among us have speculated that these hinterlands are connected among themselves into a sort of “continent” that extends continuously along our route. In fact, our library is stocked with maps that portray this hypothesis as if it were fact. But the voyages of the Explorer to date have provided no empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. I suggest to you, instead, that these hinterlands are in fact a series of islands – volcanic islands – accessible only by sea. Yes, you will hear rumors of people who have traveled by air from one island to the other. It is well known that our very own Dean David mysteriously disappeared in one of the ports, only to reappear in another with bizarre tales of travel by air to a place called “France,” a place so preposterous that we can only conclude it was the product of his own delirium. In the absence of any sort of scientific corroboration of his strange tale, I urge you to give it no more credence than you would to stories of alien abduction.

Sadly, despite the rigor of our academic program, other such rumors and unsubstantiated legends abound upon our ship, and even pass for incontrovertible fact. The most nefarious of these rumors entertain the notion that the world has not always been as I have described it, that the ship is an artefact of human manufacture, and that therefore the shipboard community has not always existed. And if one interrogates these crackpot assertions, one discovers that they are only the tip of an iceberg of lies. The rumormongers speak of a putative ninth port named “San Diego,” on the shores of a ninth island that does not appear on any map worth referring to. These people want us to believe, moreover, that the shipboard community has its origins in the prehistoric migration of its members from dozens of locations on that ninth island and even beyond. They go so far as to give these locations names – all of them obviously fictitious – like “Collaraedo,” “Charllote-is-vile” and “Pittsburgh.” They litter the ship with bogus documents meant to shore up the dubious credibility of their “theory.” As if all this weren’t enough, these false prophets speak of an impending apocalypse, an even they refer to as the “disembarkation,” the imminent undoing of the shipboard community upon its arrival at the ninth port, its inevitable dispersal through the reverse reenactment of the migration that gave it birth.

My friends, I speak as your professor and your friend to give you reason and hope in the face of these dark and unwarranted speculations, this ideologically distorted “Discourse of Disembarkation.” I bring to your attention an obvious fact: the supply of iceberg lettuce and chocolate croissants in the ship’s cafeteria has never failed us. It seems to be without end, in fact, and therefore, most likely, without beginning. I myself have eaten a chocolate croissant every single morning I have been on board, sometimes two, and have no reason to believe that this has not always been the case, nor that it will one day come to an end. This has lead me to the reassuring conclusion that we will not have to say farewell to each other anytime soon, that there is no “San Diego,” that we will keep sailing forever, that there will always be a port to look forward to, something to teach or to learn, a meal to share, a friendship to forge, announcements to ignore, synchronized swimming to perform, bad coffee to drink, and so forth and so on, forever and ever, until the world is undone, amen.