The Smoking and the Happiness

I hate tourists. Not so much foreign tourists. The worst tourists are the ones from right here in the good ol' US of A. In Seattle you can find them on the waterfront, gleefully feeding the seagulls outside of Ivar’s in their San Diego Zoo t-shirts and matching fanny packs. Ever time I see them with French fries in their outstretched hands, I can’t help but fantasize that a huge pterodactyl/seagull hybrid will come and pluck one away, the tourist shrieking as his/her camera wielding, slightly obese buddies look on in terror.

There is something about American tourists that prompt them to put on every piece of tacky garb they’ve ever acquired before embarking on any new voyage. I imagine them standing in their room the night before. “Hmmmm, think I’ll just put on this Disneyland sweatshirt…maybe my neck fanny pack, too…oops, don’t want to forget the SeaWorld hat I got last summer….perfect.” And then they leave the house, with the singular task of finding at least one piece of tacky garb to bring home and add to the collection.

I took the clipper last week to visit my girlfriend in Victoria. The clipper is a great place for tourist watching. As soon as I got in line to check in a man wearing a Texas Longhorns hat sidled up behind me. He had the sort of bug-eyed stare that suggested a dim countenance and possibly too much time spent working on a Holstein farm. He held his son by the hand who was wearing a New York Yankees hat, and I couldn’t help thinking, “Man, Texans are the worst.”
In an extremely close second, however, are tourists from the Deep South. While boarding I overheard a woman behind say to her friend, "I got enuff big in here if yew wanna store it in mah purse." It took her about 15 seconds to get the sentence out, and she actually used the phrase, "enough big" to denote that she had enough room. I briefly wondered what planet I was on.
Past the final ticket-takers, I made my way to the boat, which sat in the calm waters of Elliott Bay, sitting very still and looking very elegant, and just when I thought all matter of inane comments had been expelled, the man in front of me stopped to ask an attendant a question.

"Is it a non-stop sailing to Victoria?"

The woman looked at him as if he had just stepped on a puppy.
Non-stop. Non stop? To Victoria? Where would we possibly stop? It's all water. "It's a good thing you asked, sir," I imagined her saying, "because we'll actually be making a brief pit-stop at a floating island fortress not unlike the set of Kevin Costner's Waterworld to drop off some dry land and barter for exotic plants. However, only those with gills surgically implanted behind their ears will be let off the boat. Enjoy the sailing!"

Qualms with fellow man aside, the clipper is an amazing experience. It is a fast and efficient. A trip that would take me seven hours by bus and ferry via Tsawwassen and Swartz Bay on the clipper takes just a scant three.

Once onboard, it is easy to appreciate the things that make riding the clipper much different than riding the bigger, cruise vessel-like Washington State ferries. The clippers small size makes you feel like you're actually on a boat. It is actually affected by waves and swells and actually bobs and rolls as a result of them. The other thing that separates it from the Washington State ferries is that it moves really, really fast. The thing absolutely hauls. I don't know how fast it actually goes, but on the water anything faster than 20 knots feels like 70. After we got going I went up to the sun deck, where it is impossible to hear anything but the roar of the engines, and impossible not to marvel at the two magnificent rooster tails they send spraying far back into the wake.

Upon descending from the sun deck I was accosted by a wild-eyed man wearing a flannel shirt who asked, "How do you get out?" His exasperated tone suggested a fairly recent relationship with a pair of handcuffs, and I quickly motioned toward the stairs. "Upstairs? Upstairs is the smoking?" but before I could nod he had bolted past me. As I walked back to my seat I chuckled at how he had said, "the smoking" as if it were some sort of destination, like a theme park or a baseball stadium. What other words could I use like that? "I'm sorry, Mark can't come to the phone right now, he's in the pooping. May I take a message?"

It has been my experience aboard any type of conveyance that carries more than five passengers that at some point, a wailing infant will be situated within at least one row of me. This is a law as immutable as gravity, and I can now add "ferry" to the list. As we entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I had finally begun to secure a few moments of deep, blissful sleep, most likely inhabited by a horde of nubile, scantily-clad girls, when I was awakened by the a shrill scream coming from the seat in front of me. I jolted upright at the noise, which sounded something like a mix between a troop of mating chimpanzees and a recently-pulled fire alarm. The woman in front of me held a baby in her arms and cooed and rocked, but to no avail. Something had made this baby angry, and he was going to tell the entire boat about it.

The most disconcerting thing about the baby, though, was not that it was crying. I expect babies to cry, and would almost be wary if I were to take a trip without one crying, as if God might be playing some sort of strange trick on me, and as soon as I stepped off the bus, plane, or ferry, a thousand strollers might suddenly appear on the horizon and chase me down the street. The most disconcerting thing about this baby is where it had come from. Up until this point I had been monitoring the couple in front of me with casual interest and had never once noticed anything that might have indicated the presence of a human under the age of thirty. And then, as if out of thin air, the woman had a baby in her hands that was screaming as if trying to wake the dead. Where did this baby come from? I wondered. It was as if she had pulled it out of her purse, in which case I wondered why she didn't just put it back, so that at least there would be a thin layer of suede to muffle the noise.

Just as the babies screams began burrowing into my inner ear the ferry was met by a set of swells making their way in from the Pacific Ocean, and after about two minutes I was hopelessly seasick. Seasickness, if you've never experienced it, is a wretched feeling, not unlike getting punched in the lower abdomen after eating a hearty dinner. I probably wouldn't have felt seasick, but I was writing, and like reading in a car, writing makes it worse. However, I wanted to keep writing, and forced myself to do so, just so that when I later copied down the words, "I feel like I'm going to vomit right now," I wouldn't really be lying about the "right now" part.

The good news about the heinous rocking and listing of the boat is that it seemed to lull the baby in front of me to sleep, a small but welcome consolation considering I could've described how I was feeling at the moment using the words, "mind-bending nausea." I had foolishly passed up taking the Dramamine that was offered for sail at the beginning of the trip and now wished in vain that I had. The feelings of malaise brought to mind a similar, albeit much longer ordeal last year when I sailed with ten other wayward backpackers from Panama to Colombia on a 38-foot metal boat piloted by a man missing the ends of several fingers who kept a spider monkey as a pet. That trip was over 40 hours and I felt sick on land for several days after, so this I could handle, I told myself.

Finally, the swells subsided and we made our turn into the inner harbor. Victoria is an indescribably beautiful city. While only three hours from Seattle and an hour and a half from Port Angeles, it feels like a different world: cosmopolitan, colonial, European. After clearing Canadian customs I made my way into the bright sunlit and jumped into the air, clicking the heels of my pink and yellow Creative Recreation shoes together to demonstrate my joy at having arrived and finally being able to distance myself from the yahoos with whom I had shared the boat. I made my way to Beacon Hill Park and Cook Street Village, and suddenly there wasn't a tourist in sight. Just a quiet green soccer field flanked by two rows of towering Japanese maples. I thought back again to the guy wanting to get to the sun deck to and laughed. How could I describe my new surroundings using ex-con speak?

"Excuse me, Mark can't come to the phone right now. He's in the happiness. Can I take a message?"