Ah, The People We Met

And he was easily riled and likely to shout
Frequently wrong but never in doubt

Cheryl Wheeler, Frequently Wrong but Never in Doubt

I finished the thing; but I think I sprained my soul.

Katherine Ann Porter on her novel Ship of Fools (1962) in McCall’s magazine (August 1965)

We recently returned from sailing by river from Amsterdam to Constanta, Romania.  Our ultimate goal, Bucharest, was achieved by a bus ride through lands that were reminiscent of where I grew up in eastern Washington.  We visited 7 countries in the process: The Netherlands; Germany; Austria; Hungary; Croatia; Bulgaria: and Romania.  We are tired from our travels and still processing the memories and information received, but one thing stands out – the wealth and variety of the people we met and of the lives they lead.

The most intense relationships you can form in 30 days of sailing European rivers are with the crew of your ship and your fellow passengers.  Life aboard a cruise ship holding 153 passengers and some 40 crew members is intimate of necessity.  The cabins are small but big enough to move around in, and the public spaces are just large enough to find some measure of privacy if privacy can ever be truly achieved in full view of others.  In such an environment, privacy becomes a combination of a state of mind and the willingness of others to respect the space you inhabit and not to enter without consent.

This was a situation ripe for sharing.  Occasionally such sharing occurred by voluntary act.  All too often it occurred by involuntary means, by means of the habits and idiosyncrasies displayed by those aboard.  Sometimes the sharing was joyful and intense; all too often it was more of an imposition than a desired goal.

Our fellow passengers ran the gamut of personalities, but all were American.  While the passengers came from the four corners of our country and were unalike in accents, customs and outlook, they were all familiar because of a shared national culture.  Far too many of the Americans seemed to look down upon the residents of the countries through which we passed, a viewpoint that seemed to become increasingly common the further south we sailed and the poorer the countries became, especially those which so recently suffered decades of communism.  Since we had a plethora of retired teachers aboard, this all too frequently shared outlook on other cultures was, to say the least, not conducive to believing that American school systems are well equipped to encourage tolerance and understanding of foreign cultures.

There was a curious arrogance among many of the teachers.  We taught,” they seemed to say, “and since we were teachers, we know far more than you and always understand people and their motives better than you are capable of doing.”  One former community college professor shocked me by analyzing a friend of mine he’d never met according to observations gained in 1980 and 1990s classroom experiences about something that occurred in the late 1960s when education was a far different experience than it is today.  He was dead wrong in his analysis, but certain of his conclusions.  He and the others like him – of which there were far too many for comfort – are creatures of my generation that have spent their lives teaching the next.  This doesn’t augur well for young Americans learning their place in a world where borders are increasingly irrelevant.

Of course, not all Americans are ugly and not all foreigners are charming.  We met some lovely passengers on board and enjoyed wide-ranging conversations with them.  While I might not have agreed with all of their opinions, these were open-minded people who wanted to enjoy the give and take, to accept opinions, to argue with conclusions, but who were always prepared to change their minds if they thought you might have a valid point.  I can only hope that we fit into the same category, for I have always found life to possess few universal, unvarying truths.

The crew is universally a hard-working lot.  They work 12 to 14 hours per day, seven days per week, for months at a time.  They are well-schooled by their cruise line never to talk politics with the passengers, a prohibition that only makes sense from the standpoint of keeping passengers happy and maximizing profits, but which makes no sense whatsoever in light of the cruise line’s stated goal to expose passengers to foreign cultures.  Being of the sort that questions such spurious authority, we found ways to have political discussions with certain of the crew.  If one listens carefully for nuance and nods his or her head at just the right moment, it is amazing the amount of information that others will trust you with.

It was from the crew that we learned to admire the cultures through which we traveled.  We learned of the nature of respect from our first captain, who was a Slovakian unafraid to get his hands dirty by helping his crew do their work whenever an extra hand was called for and who exercised authority gently and with grace.  He, too, was a listener and a doer, nodding his thanks to me after an overheard conversation between me and an assistant purser who wasn’t about to get his hands dirty placing something over the deep puddle at the end of our gangway in Wertheim where the rain fell in droves.  As I was walking back through the reception area several minutes after the discussion with the assistant purser, I noticed that a rubber mat had been placed across the puddle and pointed it out to Helen.  It was then that the captain, standing at the purser’s desk, turned and nodded his thanks to me as I passed by.  No slouch, he.

We learned of familial duty from a Serbian waiter who, in a socially incorrect speech delivered at the awkward venue of a Croatian port where Serbs, including his father, had bombed, shot and killed Croatians and devastated the town, nevertheless captured our hearts by speaking lovingly of his father, obviously unaware of the incongruity of the intersection between setting and family lore.  Part of the story he told involved a tale of rescue of Serbs by means of gunfire in the very town in which we were moored.  He could not have known his father well given his present age as his father died in an attempt to save young Serb pilots when the waiter might have been 4, but there he stood, in Vukovar, reciting learned family lore, hands steepled as if in prayer, myth after fact spilling from his tongue, his face glowing in worship of the man many residents of the town would likely have called a murderer.  We didn’t have the heart to suggest he had committed a social faux pas of the worst, most boorish sort, not when the little child inside was so prominently on display.

We learned of joy in hard work from a Bulgarian cabin attendant who has been with the ship for many years and who had previously spent time in America.  When he commented to us in a casual conference on the ship’s sundew that everyone in Bulgaria worried about money, and when yours truly made the gauche reply that everyone the world over worried about money, he corrected me by means of the merest inclination of his head as if to say “Really?  You think your worries are the same as ours?”  When I quickly understood that their worries were about the necessities of existence while mine were about luxuries far beyond the common understandings of his country and apologized for my fatuous remark, we began a serious conversation in stark violation of cruise line crew rules about freedom, cultural disparity, and human life upon a common earth, a conversation that remains with me still.  Here was an educated young man working ungodly hours as a cabin attendant aboard ship to support his family and to ensure his and their future.  When he explained that communism had destroyed the Bulgarian middle class so that only the very rich and the very poor remained and I opined that perhaps he, himself, represented the beginnings of a new Bulgarian middle class, he looked at me in surprise over the suggestion, nodded his quick acceptance, and responded: “Perhaps so, but the effort involved is very tiring.”  And then, after a short pause, he smiled his brightest smile, the same smile with which he greeted all passengers every morning, the same smile that I somehow suspect accompanies each of his journeys up and down the rivers of central Europe, the same smile that I suspect will always accompany his journey through life.  For he is an optimist and a believer in the ethos of hard work, an ethos in which Americans have traditionally taken pride but seem bent on abandoning now as a way of life.

We learned from a Serbian bartender of the strength in fatalism.  When we asked about his hours and how he endured them, he became, for us, an icon of the stark contrast between the cruise line’s expressed goal of teaching passengers to respect foreign cultures and its own misuse of the very members of those cultures.  In response to our questioning whether the ship’s rules were the norm on the rivers, the bartender noted that the cruise line adamantly refused to use Swiss employment contracts for its crew members.  Swiss regulations forbid the long hours without significant breaks that the cruise line expects of its crew members, and are fast becoming the norm on these rivers, a norm the cruise line has, so far, refused to accept.  Mind you, the bartender was not complaining, just answering my questions and merely acknowledging a fact.  After all, as he explained, he didn’t have to stay on board and could always look for work elsewhere – if only he could find another job as a citizen of one of the poorest countries in the European Union.

And we learned from those ashore as well.  We learned that many spoke English while we speak nothing else.  We learned of pride in creation when buying beautiful lace table pieces from a Hungarian shop owner in a small riverside enclave, who proudly explained in earnest, but poor, halting, English that two women had worked five months to create the work of art which we were purchasing – his smile lighting up the small open-walled shop when he realized we had understood him correctly.  We learned graciousness  from the tired coat room attendant in a Budapest museum who took our sopping hats and coats from us after our walk through the rain to get to the museum, holding them at arm’s length with just two fingers, and then carefully hanging them on separate hooks to drip and to dry so that they might be worn again with comfort on our subsequent walk back to the ship.

And as I previously noted, not all Europeans are creatures of charm.  The Hungarian ‘pianist’ on board ship was a sullen man, not given to trying hard, not given to putting his soul into his playing, only given to going through the motions demanded of him by contract each night.  HeÂplayed “My Way” each night always as a funeral dirge, and we could well imagine Frank Sinatra spinning in his grave at its all too frequent repetitions.  If Paul Anka, the song’s composer, ever hears Istvan play it, he might well sue him for abuse of the child he so lovingly created as Frank’s anthem.

And by journey’s end we realized that people are the same the world over: some work hard, determined to get ahead, and some slide through life giving of the least possible effort; some are intelligent and willing to enter into meaningful discussions with the goal of sharing and learning, while some would rather look at the world through their own dark lens, always imposing their viewpoint on all that they see, never listening and never hearing; some are gracious and interested in cultural differences, full of empathy and understanding for those of differing cultures, eager to learn why those differences exist, and some are relentlessly negative, never finding anything good in something different and unknown and never wondering why certain behavior is the norm in a part of the world they dismiss out of hand; some are fellow passengers in life’s journey, good Samaritans who are always giving of themselves to help others, and some are always first in line with their hands out intending to partake to the detriment of others; some are good to have as friends, and some aren’t worthy of being an enemy, only worthy of casual disregard.

And we learned all of us are all of them at times, depending upon the day, depending upon the vagaries of the weather, depending upon the level of weariness experienced on any given day of travel.

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