Taylor - Rockin In The Free World

NNHS Spooktacular

JV Squad

Hershey Park Nationals 2006

If the video does not display properly
click here to upgrade to Flash 8

Boston Cheer Meet April 2006

If the video does not display properly
click here to upgrade to Flash 8

Cruise Notes by Lew McCreary

Garbage in, Garbage out:

My original writing intentions in coming on this cruise were to chronicle cruise security for a feature article to run in CSO Magazine. But since I lost my raison d’etre for that assignment, I decided to go broader, as these notes will eventually make clear. However, I do want to dwell on one aspect of cruise security that first impressed me, then dismayed me and, finally, was simply weird and amusing—and perhaps invites a snarky evaluation of a lack of executional rigor in Italian operations (reinforced at the end of the trip by the Three Stooges-level anarchy at Genoa’s so-called airport).

Upon checking in for the cruise at the terminal in Genoa—at which point we had mostly been awake for more than 24 hours—the smartly uniformed gentleman behind the counter was unable to locate our names on the ship’s manifest. This was troubling, but I figured they’d sort it out. Had I known then what I know now, I would have been much more assertive in figuring out where the guy was going wrong. It seems he had observed on Marcy’s passport her surname from her first marriage; but he’d failed to see the official amendment noting a name change. So he spent quite a while searching fruitlessly for reservations in the name of Dill. Slowly things untangled. Others came to help him. No mention was made of his original error. Time elasticized as I put as much of my weight as possible on the check-in counter.

Finally, he had us pose serially for little webcam shots of the kind taken at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. And—voila!—we had our cruise identity cards, which are the key for getting on and off the ship, access into rooms and (as I would come to learn is tutti di tutti importante!) buying stuff.

Once we were officially accepted onto the cruise and had made our way to the waiting area for boarding, I observed a LOT of security people with little security-guy earpieces. They looked suave and were uniformed in non-maritime garb that still had a corpslike feel to it: cream-colored blazers, charcoal slacks, shiny black shoes, cool shades, lapel pins. Nice, nice get-up. Everything seemed righteously tight, and the card system had the promise of being tight as well.

But it wasn’t. As we finally boarded the MSC Sinfonia—all the MSC ships have musical names, such as Melody, Armonia, Opera, etc., and decks named for composers (we were in Cabin 1226 on Bizet)—we discovered that my ID card, when scanned, produced the webcam picture of my daughter Hannah and identified me as “Mr. Hannah McCreary.” Hannah’s card pulled up my picture and identified her as “Ms. Lewis McCreary.”

Bizarre.

We said nothing about this gaffe since no one ever seemed to object. On none of our many departures from and arrivals onto the ship did anyone manning the card scanner even appear to notice that there was a flagrant visual mismatch between the photo and identity information and the bearer of the card. No one even did a double take. In the early days of the cruise, when I imagined that security ought to be extra competent on a ship sailing to countries in North Africa, including Libya, I was slightly alarmed. Later, I think, I adopted the same slack expectations as seemed to govern performance on the Sinfonia.

The passengers:
Two-thirds of the manifest consist of eclipse chasers and their families & friends. At our table Linda and John are eclipse chasers, and Irene (voluble and amused) and Frank (quiet but amiable) are along for the cruise. These two couples have done much traveling together, but this is Irene and Frank’s first eclipse (it will be John and Linda’s seventh, an impressive enough number).

For the rest, if they are representative of the astronomy-wonk world, the men wear lots of t-shirts, sport more beards and long hair than humanity at large, and have a slightly Berkeley free-speech movement cast, perhaps including a history of having once been known, in their Big Sur commune days, as Moondog or Quicksilver. One man I saw at breakfast yesterday wore a t-shirt that read “Got Skeptic?” In an age in which skepticism is wielded largely in behalf of things that can’t be proven against things that already have been, that’s a really good question.

There is lots of paraphernalia. Marcy is off at a planning meeting this morning for our assault on Libya on March 29. Among the questions to be resolved is in what order 1000 people should be loaded onto buses to go out to the Sahara Desert to view the eclipse. Quite sensibly, it is proposed that those with the most gear to set up should go first. So, descending order of gear may rule. There were people on the pool deck yesterday afternoon checking out their solar scopes, which are specialized telescopes for looking at the sun.

The last, and only, total eclipse I saw was in 1970. I was living in S. Glastonbury, Conn., in my junior year at Wesleyan University, and there was lots of responsibly scary mainstream journalism at the time about how to look at an eclipse without frying your retinas. I was unwilling to go to the trouble of smoking a piece of glass with a layer of protective soot—or whatever it was—so I followed the backup recommendation to regard the pre-totality sun by looking askance at its reflection in a puddle of water. It was not entirely satisfying.

These people are way beyond that. The gear they carry is serious astrophotography and solar-viewing equipment. And each passenger’s kit includes a pair of flat foldable cardboard viewing glasses, not unlike the 3D glasses they used to hand out at movie theaters. Hannah noted that “you can’t see anything through them.” That’s apparently the idea, though I suppose we’ll be able to see well enough when looking up at the sun as the moon begins its transit across.

There are four official contacts: first, second, third and fourth. First is where the moon begins its intersection of the sun; second is the onset of totality; third is the end of totality; and fourth is when the moon kisses the sun goodbye. During the four minutes of totality, the event can be viewed with the naked eye. John told me that he’s become so preoccupied with recording past eclipses that he neglected to enjoy the event as it happened. And this can be a hazard of having the gear. This time, he says, he’s just going to watch.

The Astronomy Gestalt:
The mixture of learnedness and awe is interesting to observe in astronomy enthusiasts—or in anyone. One expects that the more people learn about some subject, the less likely they are to retain their early excitement and passion about it. But that seems not to be true of amateur astronomers, and perhaps it’s not true of any enthusiast genre. My shipmates seem widely imbued with wonder and proudly wear t-shirts celebrating earlier eclipses they have witnessed. Editor in Chief Rick Fienberg, of tour cosponsor Sky & Telescope magazine, played video of an eclipse where the soundtrack of elation fell well within norms people commonly associate with a whopping orgasm. (We’ll see in a few days whether that is a singular or a typical response.)

My fellow passengers call themselves eclipse chasers—almost as though it’s a sporting activity. With eclipses, though, there are relatively few calls to action, as they don’t occur very often; but they do occur predictably and can be planned for. I note that our fellow passengers, John and Linda, are already looking ahead to events in 2008, 2009 and 2010. Shanghai and Siberia are places where some future eclipses can be seen, and one can organize one’s travel, in retirement, around celestial events. There do seem to be quite a few retirement age folks on board.

There is something else about them that emerges over the days. Many astronomy wonks are fussy, demanding, unlikely to go with the flow, determined to have things their way and more or less perfect. When one of the onboard astronomy lecturers weighed into a discussion of the modern scourge of light pollution, an irritated member of the audience shouted out that he wanted the house lights turned down. Eventually, they were. The lecturer, Paul Knappenberger, head of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, continued, “Well, yes. As I was saying… Besides in this theater, light pollution is also a problem in the world at large.”

Later on, after the eclipse had come and gone, there was a stirring show-and-tell session devoted to a photographic record assembled from people’s contributed eclipse shots, including some video. So excited were some in the audience by the images that they even tried to take flash pictures of the screen on which the pictures were showcased. Rick Fienberg politely requested that they cease and desist, pointing out that the use of a flash would eradicate the image in any case. But the shooting went on nonetheless. And it was indeed a distraction.

Right-thinking members of the audience grew restive and began to loudly scold those who continued taking pictures of the pictures on the screen. A woman seated a couple of rows behind us was especially enforcement-minded. Pointing her finger at one miscreant on the far side of the auditorium, she shouted, “There’s one! I can see his red light! SOMEBODY GET HIM!”

I whispered to Molly, “Boy, I wouldn’t want some of these people mad at me.”

Marcy encounters the crankiness daily, as she is badgered to either resolve or adequately explain problems that other populations might simply accept as being beyond her (or anyone’s) span of control, or else not really problems at all. It is unclear to us whether this fussiness is a cruiser trait or an astronomer trait. It may relate to a looming anxiety, however, that might naturally reside in people who have paid a princely sum of money to come see an utterly inflexible celestial event whose magnificence can be completely undermined by, of all things, the weather.

The Ship:
It is a floating Catskills resort. Paolo the cruise director is the smartly uniformed equivalent of my father-in-law, Larry Strickler. Described in the ship’s literature as “energetic, charismatic,” Paolo Freitas speaks about 17 languages fluently. During the first-day lifeboat drill, Paolo repeated all of the instructions five times and managed to convey the personality of each tongue with its native qualities. It’s shocking the difference between, say, German and Italian to the ear, and what a non-native listener can infer, from the sounds alone, about those respective nations.

Chiefly, the life of the ship involves trying to sell passengers goods and services not included in the package price. The conventionally understood life of the ship is, of course, eating and drinking, but the selling piece is the strong undercurrent that touches all other activities. There are photographers and videographers at every cruise event, on or off the ship. They get you used to their mission from the get-go, popping up along your brief passage between the terminal and the gangway onto the Sinfonia to take a group shot of your party, artlessly posed behind a ship’s wheel and brutally exhausted after 24 hours of travel (now I know how Jack Bauer feels during those penultimate episodes). Thereafter, they are like speed traps along the Jersey Turnpike. Turn a corner in Pompeii, and there they are: “I take your picture!” It is a command, not a suggestion. Sometimes they dress as clowns and prowl the dining room.

Their output is displayed in a daily-expanding gallery of every single onboard face. The small shots go for E6.95. This appears to be the Russian (or at least Eastern European) concession. They are aggressive sellers, much like the people who run the cheesy kiosks in the main thoroughfares of some malls—where, just to be able to continue on to Banana Republic, you can be worn down by artful badgering and shaming into taking the 3-for-2 deal on rhinestone hair clips. As I was in purchasing three admittedly quite nice portrait shots (E16.95 apiece) of my daughter Hannah. (“Hard to think you dun wan them all!”) In some ways, I wanted to liberate the photographs from the ineffably hostile-disguised-as-unctuous custody of the photography team—though of course they have the negatives, which just seems wrong.

There are a lot of Balinese employed on the Sinfonia. In large numbers they staff the dining facilities as well as the health spa, where they give massages and other spa treatments. They are apparently not as aggressive at selling as the Russian/E.European contingent, so there’s an E. European closer at the spa. (I watched her trail a plausibly lascivious open palm along my wife’s backside as we were given a tour of the facilities our first night onboard; I did a double take.) It was Marcy’s birthday, so I bought her two massages and one each for daughters Molly and Hannah. The housekeeping staff also seem to be of some Pacific Rim island nationality—possibly Balinese. You would not want the E. European staff cleaning your rooms, I guarantee it. And it occurs to me that it may be by design that the Balinese provide services but do not sell, since trust is easily compromised by selling.

After a while, a certain cravenness has to be acknowledged. Each day “at sea” (meaning time spent traveling between ports), a bazaar is held on the pool deck. There, stuff can be purchased at a parsimonious discount off of whatever it would cost you in the stores six decks below. Paolo announces the bazaar interludes elegantly in five languages: Italian, English, German, Spanish, French. (All mentions of the French seem to include compulsory eye-rolling; they seem as widely reviled as Americans would be if there were not so many of us on board.)

There is an emphasis on making sure everyone is having “fun.” This is an aspect of cruise protocol (one that David Foster Wallace goes into wonderfully in his hilarious essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) whereby you will be dragged kicking and screaming into the fun of the moment. The cruise cognoscenti judge that the Sinfonia is refreshingly easy on the fun fascism. Which is good, because, for me, fun consists of sitting by myself in a quiet place and writing things like the sentence before this one.

Still, we have had some line dancing (the Margarena), and some in my party have resisted exhortations to join a game calling for people to stand in a circle and toss tennis balls into a cowboy hat. It’s safe to say that the present passenger list mainly includes people who are here for the celestial event, to which the maritime one takes second place. For many of these folks, fun is checking out their solar viewing gear to make sure it’s in good working order.

Excursions:

On an excursion, you are neither here nor there. You’re not at home (home being the ship), and you’re also not exactly amidst the attractions you visit. You are in a pod of self-referential containment identified by a number: 11, in our case at Pompeii; 5 for the pyramids at Giza; and 9 for both Leptis Magna and a tour of Malta. The number corresponds to the number of the bus that takes you there—wherever there might be.

As Hany, pronounced “honey” (“You call me Honey, I call you darling”), our guide to the pyramids and to The Egyptian Museum at Cairo, put it so bluntly, “All the other groups, they are the enemy! We hate them and we want to beat them! So… Tell Honey… What do you want?”

“To beat them!” we cried.

“Do you wish to have victory?”

“Yes, yes!”

The groups, then, are like mainly white middle-aged packs of co-ed Jets and Sharks, competing for possession of territory near the points of highest interest. As these large forces wage their turf war, it is clear that individuals, couples and families unaffiliated with a gang stand no chance at all (the essential truth that has always explained the appeal of gangs). So it must be dispiriting to the unconfederated to see 20-30 buses roll up outside a museum they’ve traveled far to see. It is not too strong a word to say that we “infested” the Egyptian Museum yesterday afternoon.

Each guide carries a paddle to which the group’s number is affixed; it sails like a pennant before us. Honey is a stern master of group behavior: “If you don’t move faster, I can’t show you as much! Tell Honey… Do you want to see more?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Then you have to keep up.”

This chastens the halt, lame and distracted into a hurried pace they may remember from long-ago gym classes.

Honey is a splendid guide when judged against all metrics. He has been doing this for 18 years, he says. His knowledge seems deep and sincerely cherished. And because he’s got the material down cold, he’s refined his presentation of it to feel like fine, lively storytelling. When he’s not being erudite, he’s funny, acid and antic. At various points he appropriates members of the group to be “actors” in some of the dramas he relates. (Molly and Hannah became the brides of, respectively, Tutankhamen’s father and Tutankhamen himself; Tut was played by a boy several rows ahead of them.)

Sometimes Honey’s so-called actors are really more like props. He used an amazingly good sport named Jerry to illustrate the mummification process. Honey is tall, and Jerry is short. So Honey got Jerry from behind, pulled his shirt up to chest level, undid his pants and proceeded to show where incisions would be made to remove which organs. He pulled Jerry’s head back by the hair to show how the brain would be removed (sucked out through the nasal cavities). He pushed Jerry’s pants down into the danger zone and inscribed a three-inch lateral cut to show how the other internal organs would be pulled out. Jerry endured this spotlight indignity with a smile.

Better Jerry than me.

On our journey with Honey we are accompanied by Mohammed, a young dark-suited armed security guard. Honey explains that by law a security guard must be present on every bus. This is because some years ago a bus of tourists was attacked. Many casualties and much disruption of tourism. And so now protection is routinely provided. Guards like Mohammed, Honey explains, “always sit just behind the driver. You will notice that the two front seats on the right side are left unoccupied. ‘Why is that, Honey?’ you will ask. That is because statistics show that this is where most attacks are directed and where most of the people killed have been sitting. So we have learned from this that no one must sit there.

“We are grateful for Mohammed being with us, but we must not bother him. Because, as I explained, he is armed.”

On the nearly-three-hour bus ride from Alexandria, where we are docked, to the Giza Plateau, Honey lectures more or less non-stop. It is possible to feel we are all being played for the eventual tip, but it seems nonetheless pleasurable because of the very high quality of play. Honey is a genuine pro.

What seasoned travelers must quickly learn is that excursions like these have an appended sales agenda. There are several such agendas that emerge in our daylong excursion, and they reveal themselves gradually over the course of the journey.

For example, Honey broaches the topic of hieroglyphs. He asks if anyone can tell him what the Rosetta Stone is. A Salvadoran physician named Roberto (now a U.S. citizen living in Colorado Springs) raises his hand. Honey invites Roberto to the front of the bus to take the mike and tell the story of the Rosetta Stone. Roberto’s impressively complete and “mostly accurate” recounting of the discovery of the stone, what was on it and why it was important as a key to translating hieroglyphics so delights Honey that he makes “Dr. Roberto” the day’s hero.

It developed from the Rosetta Stone that every glyphic mention of Egyptian royalty is contained within a “cartouche”—a reverential enclosure that sets the names off from the riffraff of other words. “Would you like to see an example of a cartouche?”

Silence.

“When Honey asks you a question, he wants you to answer him! Tell Honey… Would you like to see a cartouche?”

“Yes!”

Honey happens to wear a double-sided one around his neck, in 18k gold, bearing his name and that of his wife Norma rendered in glyphs. “I bought it twelve and a half years ago when we were married,” he says. He passes it down one side of the bus and up the other so we can all see a cartouche. Finally, inevitably, someone in the group does a little of the heavy sales lifting for Honey.

“How can I get a cartouche?” she asks.

“Mmmmm,” says Honey. “It is possible, if you like.” And soon brochures are making their way up and down the rows, and Honey is taking orders to be fulfilled by mid-afternoon, nicely coinciding with our post-prandial shopping stop!

Once the ordering of cartouches is done with, Honey moves on to t-shirts bearing printed representations of cartouche hieroglyphics. Then the subject changes to the Egyptian invention of papyrus. He explains what it is, how it is made, its quality and durability, its perfect suitability as an investment that will last and grow in value for thousands of years.

This time no one asks Honey whether it will be possible to purchase papyrus art. By now we know. “Tell Honey… Will you be able to buy papyrus?”

“Yes, Honey, yes!”

Later, Marcy does. She buys a colorful line drawing of three beautiful Egyptian women, representing, she says, herself and her two sisters. The naked one, she decides, is Karyn, her twin. There is a subtle inference of some history of exhibitionism on Karyn’s part.

Then, on behalf of the bus driver, Honey tells us how thirsty we must be and invites us to buy bottles of water from driver Mahmoud. “Two bottles, one Euro! In Egypt, everything is cheap, but of very high quality and value!”

He eventually sells postcards as well, and offers to purchase stamps and mail them home to the purchasers in America or wherever else they hail from. Honey is the best salesman I have ever witnessed at work. He wraps the closer’s pill in a confection of Honey—a great seamless narrative whose mercantile intentions are veiled, unrecognizable except when peeled apart by cruel cynics, in seemingly neutral information of high interest and specificity.

By the end of the day we have all come to love Honey. We tip him lavishly. It is interesting to speculate what his day’s haul must be. There are sure to be kickbacks from the cartouche/t-shirt/papyrus/postcard concessions. Then the tips, which may alone top $400 for the trip. It must be that the economics of guiding are built mainly on the kickbacks and tips, and that a guide stands or falls on his ability to sell himself and sell the cartouches and other items. For if the fees paid to guides by the cruise lines and tour operators were too high, the imperative to sell would be undermined and the potential economic benefit of a busload of tourists squandered.

Tourist Season:

On the bus Honey has told us, “Today, I promise it, you will have one of your lifelong dreams come true. You will see the pyramids of Giza. And this is something you have dreamed of all your lives. I know it is. And today it will come true, I promise it!”

What Honey doesn’t tell us about is the little looming nightmare subtext: that the site of the mystical pyramids, one of the original seven wonders of the ancient world, and the only one still extant, is overrun by cheesy tip-grubbing hustlers who would not be out of place in Times Square and who wait for busloads of tourists with the same inborn hemotropic zeal as mosquitoes await a blood meal.

A seasoned traveler will know to keep his head down and remain in constant motion. I am not a seasoned traveler, and so kept finding smiling mosquitoes in my face offering to take my picture, offering scarab trinkets, offering Arab headgear—all for “no money, no money.” Yeah, right. Some of these entrepreneurs are in uniform and are in fact employees of the Egyptian tourism infrastructure. To these, a uniform-respecting American such as myself is particularly vulnerable. They are like pilot fish for the more-plentiful others not in uniform who, when they see someone like me responding to the con, begin to assemble nearby and wait their turn.

“You give me tip?” the uniformed guard requests after having posed me and Marcy in some silly posture that creates the illusion that we are resting our joined hands on top of the Great Pyramid. We fumble and reward the guard, who acts as though it is way too little. Others descend.

“No money, no money!” one cries, thrusting trinkets at us. We begin to be taught by the experience to do what the seasoned traveler does: Move through space without responding, as though in a bubble of disconnection from the world in which the mosquitoes move.

It is like this at each stop we make in the area of the pyramids. Our visit to Giza becomes an exercise in trying to see and appreciate the attraction itself while at the same time remaining alert for approaching pests. At the Sphinx, an elderly man blocks my path, asking to see my ticket. “I am watchman,” he says. I show him my ticket. He then says that he will take me to “best place to make pictures.” He tugs me leftward, flashing his official watchman ID. I now feel I am tumbling into a familiar hole. Marcy, Molly and Hannah watch this unfold from some few steps behind me. He begins thrusting turquoise scarabs into my palm.

“You give me tip?” he then says.

“No, I give you these…” I thrust the scarabs back at him and flee with Marcy and the girls to a point at the far right periphery of mosquitodom—where, I am pleased to discover, the photographic prospect is superior.

Days later—Eclipse Day in the desert southwest of Tobruk—we will discover a more innocent variant of the tourist tropism, one that with growing exposure to Western incursions could perhaps ripen into the grubby Egyptian strain.

Exotica:

In Terrence Malick’s lyric film, “The New World,” the first Europeans landing in America are greeted by the indigenous natives as exotic curiosities. The boldest of the natives approach and examine them closely, putting their faces right up to the Europeans and touching their clothing, their beards, their hats, their weapons. The Europeans are careful not to react too strongly or negatively. In fact, they suffer the curiosity with some relief that it is somewhat welcoming and not hostile.

The port of Tobruk, Libya, at the far Eastern edge of Libya near the Egyptian border, has seen few Western cruise ships land. MSC Cruises had hitherto not visited Tobruk before we landed on March 28. (It has landed numerous times in Tripoli, to which we sail today, March 30.) So there was some uncertainty as to how we would be received there. Tobruk is known to be more conservatively Muslim than Tripoli, and less sophisticated in understanding tourism.

Stern cautionary memos were distributed to the cabins concerning dress code while ashore: Women were to wear head/hair coverings (mainly scarves), long pants or ankle-length skirts, and shirts or blouses with long sleeves and high necklines—in other words, nothing immodest. Men were encouraged to wear long sleeves as well and no shorts.

Then there is the matter of alcoholic beverages. From the time we enter Libyan waters until leaving four days hence, all liquor on board the MSC Sinfonia in the restaurants and bars is to be locked away. The cabin minibars are likewise locked. Passengers are enjoined from drinking from private stashes in their cabins (though that is certainly occurring). Our Scottish tablemates find this all quite laughable. John, who has a fondness for Glenfiddich, avers that if this were an American ship it would have absolutely refused to comply with the prohibition.

“They would have told the Libyans to sod off—pardon my language, gerrels” (this last directed to Molly and Hannah).

While the ship was docking, Molly and I stood on the balcony just off my room and waved at the Libyan tug operators, who seemed enthusiastic enough to have us in port and who snapped pictures of each other with the Sinfonia in the background. We snapped pictures of them and their tug as well, and of the small oil terminal on the eastern shore of the harbor. And of the Zodiac military craft that zoomed around the Sinfonia and the escorting tug.

It was unclear when anyone would be allowed off the ship. It depended on the consent of Libyan officials and the swiftness with which they processed our passports. We docked around four o’clock. Word spread that during the evening it would be possible to go into Tobruk, and that shuttle buses would be available for that purpose. We, however, had chosen the early dinner seating, so we stayed on the ship.

When passengers arrived back from Tobruk during the evening, they told fantastic tales of the Libyan greeting, being showered with welcome, with invitations to dinner, with counter-intuitive acts of astonishing kindness and generosity. This is counterpoised against a set of expectations conditioned by the terrorist state of the Lockerbie bombers and a strutting General Khadafy, of whom despite his recent tilt to the West much lingering fear remains.

As the tales of warm local reception made the rounds, the Libyan security contingent on board became uneasy over the potential for some sort of an incident to arise—perhaps owing to a too-easy fraternization, a pent-up local wish to meet, touch, get to know the Americans and Europeans whom they had never before encountered. There were rumors that further free-range visits into Tobruk might be curtailed.

The next day, at the astronomical version of Woodstock that would unfold in the ecliptic desert, we would all experience firsthand the hunger for goodwill and acceptance that powers the Libyan embrace of greater openness to the outside world.

The Eclipse:

March 29 dawned clear and sunny over Tobruk harbor. But once the convoy of buses had left the dock and the city limits, fog set in and lasted for nearly 90 minutes of the ride south into the desert. Our driver—of a raspberry-colored bus that Marcy warned would be skanky and was—had to slow down sharply at times because of the thickness of the fog. Fog is not the astronomer’s friend; you could feel anxieties rising: Would the fog lift in time? Once it lifted, would it stay that way? Or might it not lift at all? Years on Nantucket have taught me that fog is unpredictable; even when it teases you with lifting, it can thicken and remain all day. Or it can seem to be socked in for the duration and then suddenly disappear. But who knows anything about desert fog?

This fog was of the fast-disappearing variety. All of a sudden it was simply gone. Mild applause broke out on the bus (those on some other buses reported wilder displays of jubilation). We were by then very close to the site selected for viewing the eclipse, just east of the road. I learned on the drive into the desert that astronomers are an exceptionally precise lot—a gent a couple of rows behind me, equipped with a GPS receiver, observed that we were going farther east than some original set of coordinates and that the four times of contact would thus be off “by a matter of seconds.”

As the buses proceeded farther into the desert—not the sand-dune variety but something much firmer and more hardscrabble—we saw more and more evidence of police and military, many of whose contingents ride in small Toyota pickup trucks. At no time did their presence feel obtrusive or menacing. They were not even especially officious but seemed to be smiling ambassadors of good will, happy enough to have us in their country.

Once at the site, we saw that a shade tent and various other temporary facilities had been set up. There were vast stacks of plastic patio chairs of the kind Americans stock up on every spring at Wal-mart; people were taking these and establishing small chair encampments.

There was also a long Woodstockian line trailing eastward from five lone latrines, expected to serve thousands (fortunately, we were all massively dehydrated or else the latrine situation might have gotten dire).

Marcy queued up immediately. Molly, Hannah and I took our seats. It seemed weirdly important to me that we be in a certain “good” place or be faced in a certain direction—though of course that was silly, since the day’s performance was to occur above us. But there was a Saturday beachgoing ethos in force, affirming an axiom that the vast majority of people crave proximity to other people. So that some reliably large percentage of any crowd—say 80%—will cluster on only a tiny fraction of the available space (limitless in a desert). The maverick 20% will go farther afield.

Had Marcy not spent the first hour of our time in the desert waiting in line to pee, I might have tried to move us out to the hinter desert where the committed anchorites were establishing Ponderosa-sized spreads. These tended to be the astronomers with the most—and most sophisticated—gear. (Though a subset of the lavishly equipped liked being in the densely populated area, where perhaps more envious admiration of their rigs could be harvested.)

One reason to flee the populous center was the sudden arrival of a very loud sound truck run by a (the?) Libyan broadcast system. This, too, lent a Saturday beachgoing feel. People with cameras and microphones began roving here and there soliciting from the Western eclipse chasers the most glowing encomiums to Libyan hospitality. “Hi, we’re Lois and Dave Kravits, with our kids Melanie and Jeff, from Ox Jaw, Montana, and we’re all just completely overwhelmed by the lovely welcome of the Libyan people, and we’re so happy to be in your beautiful country to see this amazing eclipse!” (I am always both impressed by and a little bit frightened of people who can say stuff like that without having to first script it out. When someone sticks a mike in my face I just want to run away.)

When the interviews weren’t happening, loud Libyan rock was played. Now knowing of this trait of esthetic viewing rigor on the part of the dominant astronomy culture (dominant at least in these local tens of acres), I worried that the sound truck’s raucousness might persist into the astronomical event itself and cause an international incident—or at least test the diplomatic chops of the observing classes.

A more interesting phenomenon involved the arrival of what seemed like hundreds of Libyan boy scouts. They wore the typical merit-badged uniforms common to scouting, and they set up in a circle and were led in some rousing singing and dancing by elder councilor types. The music was stirring and rhythmic, and it seemed altogether more suited to the eclipse occasion than anything the sound truck was producing. The Libyan scouts were on hand as ambassadors of good will, a duty that came to be fulfilled largely by taking each other’s pictures with various Americans. Many of those pictures were taken with Molly and Hannah, who proved to be immensely popular (and obliging) photo subjects. As the event wore on, more and more scouts and other Libyans found their way to our small patch of desert. M&H both claimed to have been pleased by the attention. Molly said it sharpened her appreciation of what celebrities must feel like, and her ambition to become either a celebrity or “a good friend of a celebrity”—which she noted is “less work.”

In addition—I was dismayed to note—the ship’s own nettlesome photographers and videographers also made the scene. But they behaved with more decorum (meaning less predation) than when chronicling other excursions from the ship.

Perhaps cued by the fact that the astronomers had come from far far away to see the eclipse, everyone else—eclipse novices like me, for example—seemed to absorb the appropriate sense of its wondrousness. These are events that in ancient times caused people to go mad with worry that our shared history was coming to an end in the whimper of the inexplicably dying light. Animals freaked out, too. In this particular location, however, the only animals likely to react with any vividness were we humans. Lizards and scorpions were about all the desert had to offer, and we saw none of these in evidence where we decamped.

How Someone Becomes an Astronomer:

John told a great story at dinner one night. It was recounted in the context of his recalling an eclipse in 1999 when he and Linda had been on a cruise with Sergei Khrushchev, son of the former Soviet premier, and his wife. Mrs. K. asked John how he had become interested in astronomy. He told her that he had been out walking one day in Edinburgh, as a child of six, with his mother and his Auntie Jean, an evangelical Christian of high enthusiasm. They had been taken by surprise by a total solar eclipse—or John at least had been surprised. After it was over, he demanded an explanation of the bizarre thing that had just happened. Auntie Jean piped up to explain that it was in fact “the end of the world,” arriving as the moon crashes violently into the sun, “soon to rain fire and brimstone down on all of us, as a sign of God’s judgment on our wickedness.”

“I wee-ent hoom and cree-id for two days! And afterwards, after I settled down, I resolved to learn whether Auntie Jean was right or not.”

What Happens When the Moon Crashes into the Sun:

There are many things to observe during an eclipse. But as Rick Fienberg sensibly urged the novices during one of his shipboard lectures, “Enjoy what you notice and don’t worry about what you might be missing. After this one’s over, you’re going to want to go see another one.” The suggestion being that the people who go to eclipse after eclipse are simply trying to get it right.

Some of what happens is that after the point of first contact, the sun’s light dims very slowly at first. Until the final 15 minutes or so before totality, it is almost unnoticeable that anything markedly different is occurring. But the moment arrives when you realize you no longer need to wear your sunglasses. Light flattens, shadows compress. A strange kind of twilight arrives; in our case, it was just past noon that this softening occurred. Second contact—the start of totality—arrived at 12:35 and change (“and change” is not sufficiently precise to satisfy an astronomer).

At second contact, you can take off the special solar viewing glasses that have so far been required for safe viewing.

There is a wonderful moment just at the verge of totality when the figure of a diamond ring is formed by the emergent solar corona and the last bright point of sunlight before the moon prevails. It was very vivid, both at second contact and at third.

In the minute leading up to totality, other dramatic changes occur at ground level. The temperature drops sharply after having dropped much more gently the twenty minutes previous. The daylight drops quickly, too. In fact, it virtually plummets. Rick, in his lecture, noted that we might see stars come out as totality arrived. Venus and Mercury appeared, though many said the sky was much less black than at other eclipses—likely an effect of the brightness of the desert lightening the skies above it. John said that he’s seen eclipses in forested settings where the sky gets pitch black and the stars are profuse.

Another thing that happens is a 360 degree sunset at the horizon. At the lowest edge of the darkness you can see a colorful brightening—in this case a glowering mix of blues and reds and yellows.

But in astronomy, the money shot is the corona. The measure of which is in “solar diameters”—that is, how many solar diameters does the corona extend outward from the sun’s surface. We had been cautioned earlier that the sun was in a phase of relatively low activity, in terms of sunspots and flaring, known as “solar minimum.” But solar behavior is complicated. On any given day, even during solar minimum, there can be uncharacteristically high activity—just as during intervals of solar maximum there can be a day of low activity. The Libyan eclipse produced very long dramatic flares, measured out to fifteen solar diameters, an impressive and unexpected spectacle.

A Place for God in the Desert:

At ineffable moments such as an eclipse, the religious and irreligious alike are brought face to face with either the palpable presence or else the hedged bet of the divine. I thought it was striking, when a sudden silence at the onset of totality gave way to a babel of expressed amazement, how many of us were crying out to some god. I was among those who did, and I was far from being alone. What compounded the emotion of this experience was the juxtaposition of ostensibly opposed cultures: Muslim and Christian, scientific and faithful, Libyan and American. A foot or two away from me I heard Libyan men (there were very few women in evidence) cry out in Arabic to Allah. The sentiment was animated by amazement at being dwarfed by a cosmic event. This is what even the scientists can connect with in a mystical sense, finding themselves literally awestruck in a way that overwhelms mathematics and astrophysics.

Why else would people travel so far to see such a thing? It is an emotional and esthetic experience; or for others it is a religious one, even if only for the few short seconds it takes to scream, “Oh my GOD! Oh my GOD!”

It is important to remember that while total eclipses do occur with regularity, the paths of their totality are relatively narrow. So the effect of a particular eclipse is available only to a small percentage of the planet’s population. And, of course, to eclipse chasers—astronomy’s Dead Heads—who are willing to go to the effort and expense of showing up for all or most of these otherwise rare performances.

Four Minutes Isn’t Much:

On the other hand, it’s a pretty long totality. Rick Fienberg has seen a totality longer than six minutes. Others last only a minute, some even less. So this one was actually an especially generous baptismal for those of us who hadn’t yet seen an eclipse (I’m not counting my inadequately viewed 1970 event, which was like bad first sex).

But, folks, I’m here to tell you, only the eclipse-chasing purists hang out for fourth contact—the final goodbye kiss from moon to sun. Telescope and camera setups were hurriedly broken down and stowed in instrument cases. Chairs were dragged back to Shade Tent Central and reconstituted into growing Wal-mart stacks. People found their buses and boarded them, eager to hightail it back to the ship.

We would have left sooner, but many more Libyans descended on us to spread good will and seek photo ops with Molly and Hannah. A stately, ascetic looking gentleman in a suit arrived with a small entourage and proceeded to interview me about our impressions of Libya and Libyans. He seemed like some sort of stylish journalist or governmental eminence (he kept referring to “my country” in what seemed a proprietary way but may just have been prideful). But it turned out he was actually the head engineer at a Tobruk-based oil company. He seemed delighted with my boosterish answers as I finessed the interview. I was slightly worried I might say something like, “Well, we’re very pleased that Khadafy gave up being an international outlaw and terrorist and decided to go for the gusto!” In fact, I finessed his questions with amiability, tact and the appropriate vagueness of the not-very-well informed. It must have worked because he invited us all to dinner at Chez Head Engineer.

“You will be my guests tonight? Please?”

It was tempting, but the Sinfonia was due to sail at 7:00. Great lamentation ensued, but he recovered and went looking for other potential dinner guests. I formed an opinion that it was an unspoken Libyan mission du jour to press gang American guests as a matter of honor or prestige. Marcy condemned this view as incredibly cynical, and she may be right. There was nothing in the least insincere about the displays of openness and welcome the Libyan showered on we Americans and other westerners. But it was an odd sensation to feel so much on display, as though we were all a herd of precious, exotic fauna.

Before having to decline further invitations to dine in the homes of average Libyan citizens, we made our way to a bus—this time a demonstrably less skanky bus than had brought us out to the desert.

Garbage in, Garbage Out, Part 2:

Every day, information is published and distributed to passengers in their cabins. If an excursion is scheduled for the next day, there will be an informational broadsheet on the places and attractions to be visited. And every evening the following day’s “Daily Program” is delivered.

Over the course of a 12-day cruise, I learned not to trust the factual correctness of almost any important piece of information published in the Daily Program. If one were to be instructed to come to the excursions desk, beginning at 0800 hours to purchase tickets for a shuttle bus into, say, Salerno, one would be wrong to assume that that was true. Not only were these tickets free of charge; they didn’t even exist. When I showed up at the appropriate place at the appointed hour, there was no one there to tell me that shuttle tickets were not needed and, so, did not exist. Eventually, after three such visits to buy nonexistent tickets, I went to the reception desk and was told—as though such a thing was purest idiocy—that a free-of-charge shuttle bus ride of course requires no tickets.

On our arrival at Tobruk, the Daily Program included this cryptic warning: “As for all the Arab countries, we recommend you the maximum prudence in consideration of the late time of arrival.” Can someone please explain that to me? The same page gave our scheduled arrival time as “17:00 a.m. (weather permitting).” I’m no ace at military timekeeping, but it would take more than good weather to turn afternoon into morning.

Aside from the laughable profusion of incredibly dumb typos (“No shirts and t-shirts will be allowed in the dining room” should have read “No shorts and t-shirts…”), there were many more disturbing mis-instructions. The “Daily Program” of two days before debarkation (cruise’s end) promised that passports would be available for pickup the following day between 1600 and 1800 hours in one of the Sinfonia’s lounges.

Nope. Once people started showing up in large numbers to claim their passports, an urgent public-address announcement was shouted out to every cabin and public space declaring that passports would not be available for pickup until the morning of debarkation. Some sort of spat between port officials in Naples and Genoa had broken out over whether non-EU residents were entitled to the convenience of having their passports given out in advance of debarkation. But no one communicated this to the passengers until they began following the explicit instructions of the “Daily Program.”

The overall effect is unsettling when you discover that much of the information published in what, after all, is the ship’s daily newspaper is completely unreliable. Add in the gross and prolific volume of perplexing typos and inept translation and you get the sense of an operation where no one sweats the small stuff—and it turns out there’s a lot of small stuff no one sweats.

On an excursion from Tripoli to the vast and fascinating ruins at Leptis Magna, too few buses were made available for the number of people who had signed up with the cruise lines for that particular tour. At first, those people were told there would be no more buses to go to Leptis Magna. Then, once they’d made alternate plans to go on their own into Tripoli, more buses magically appeared—but too late for quite a few who’d given up and gone elsewhere. And too late as well for the intrepid many who decided, what the heck, they’d give it a whirl.

One of the late-arriving buses got lost. Two others had lethargic or callous tour guides who either left their charges on their own or ripped them off over camera fees (you have to pay to take pictures at some sites). Some busloads were taken first to the underwhelming antiquities museum (its most imposing exhibit is a multistory cutout of Khadafy that looms over an atrium space) and only later to Leptis Magna itself, where they had no useful guiding and were forced to dash through the site in less than half the necessary time.

The Importance of Earnest Guides:

As the trip wore on and we heard more complaining about the low quality of the guides provided for excursions, we came to appreciate our good fortune in having drawn no lemons. It is all a matter of luck, really, as the guides are assigned to particular buses and it’s purely arbitrary which bus you end up on. So the fact that on four total excursions (not including the eclipse, for which guides were not needed) we got four arguably stellar guides suggests we beat the odds amazingly.

Especially as we listened to our dinner tablemates, who seemed to roll nothing but snake eyes all trip long. This seemed less troubling to John and Linda, who had seen many of these places before, than to Frank and Irene, who hadn’t. They repeatedly came back grousing about ill-informed or low-energy guides.

Among the best things about our tour of Leptis Magna was Hamid, our traditionally garbed Libyan guide ( black headdress, olive robes). He was dashing and active, and he knew the history well enough to add nuanced interpretations to his spiel. For example, Hamid described Septimus Severus, the Roman emperor who was a Leptis native son (and a “Romanized black African”), as someone who is reviled in Libyan histories, if not entirely expurgated from them. Hamid said that that was truly a shame, and that even periods of history that were regrettable when viewed through a modern lens still ought to have their place as part of the complete record. Severus was noted in Roman annals as the first to professionalize the military and to have shifted the weight of Roman social order to be a predominantly militarized instrument.

He also gave due credit to the many decades’ work of Italian archaeologists required to dig the ruins of Leptis Magna out of their oceanic covering of sand, and to painstakingly reassemble the millions of puzzle pieces into a restored city of amazing magnificence. From public baths and toilets (“You see how large the hole is; their Roman asses were too big for regular toilets”) to a Christian church with its baptismal font, the ruin is a complex record of Roman life in the empire’s distant colonies. Hamid gave the impression that Leptis is a place of considerable interest to foreigners but otherwise an anomaly in Libyan culture. He seemed to think that was wrong.

On the bus trip back, he delivered what he implied was a compulsory piece of guide conduct—the propaganda messaging on Libyan life and culture. In fact, this turned out to be quite interesting. It touched on economics (70 percent Libyan home ownership); politics (the home ownership statistic a clear refutation of Khadafy’s 1980s experimentation with Cuban-style socialism, during which home ownership was frowned on—indeed, Hamid depicted the 1980s as the low point in Khadafy’s reign, now 36 years and counting); education (public and free of charge through college); agriculture (honey, olives, sheep) and industry (mainly oil).

Like Honey, Hamid was learned and sardonic. And although he was not nearly as polished a self-promoter and performer as Honey, I found I liked him better. He wasn’t driven by the mercantile agenda to sell trinkets and t-shirts. In fact, he allowed the curiosity of his charges to determine the direction and depth of the information he imparted. As a guiding strategy, it was very natural and ultimately very satisfying.

By the end of the trip, my daughter Hannah declared that she liked Libya best of all. She also said that when she grows up she would “like to live outside of the United States.” I’m not sure whether this is solely an attraction to the exotic. It might also be one very mature 14-year-old’s disaffection with American political and military behavior in the world, of which both she and Molly vehemently disapprove. But it was fun to watch—even through the heavily mediated experience of cruise excursions—to see their eyes being opened to the rest of the world.

Home Again, Home Again:

The end is always cruel, and the cruelty began on the Sinfonia, with the passport debacle. We docked in Genoa early; the captain had humped it north from Salerno at a wicked clip. If we didn’t know better, we might think they were eager to be rid of us. In fact, the Sinfonia turned itself around for its next cruise in only a few hours.

In the Daily Program we (the majority non-EU we) were instructed to report to the Sinfonia Lounge to collect our passports beginning at 8:30. Naturally, despite having arrived in port early, not a single one was handed out until at least 9:30. Nonetheless, by 8:30 a hellaciously long line began to snake from just outside the lounge, around the corner and down the stairs to the deck below, where it continued along the length of the ship.

By nine o’clock, Paolo Freitas was making a petulant sounding public-address announcement exhorting recalcitrant passengers to please come pick up their passports. Since none had yet been handed out, a spontaneous round of hissing went up from those of us cooling our heels in line. What was Paolo thinking in his 17 languages?

We had been forced to vacate our cabins by 0800, so people were sprawled everywhere around the ship. Some experienced cruisers deemed this part of the operation grossly deficient. A woman just ahead of me in line sniffed that she wished she hadn’t already filled out and handed in her cruise satisfaction survey, because she had a thing or two to add.

Passengers debarked in order of the urgency of their connections back home. Because we were forced to stay overnight in Genoa for our flights home, we were among the last to leave the ship. To get away from the growing cloud of cigarette smoke, I hung around outside at the rail and watched the luggage being offloaded and provisions for the next cruise being brought aboard. And of course, this is the steady rhythm of endings and beginnings throughout the cruise seasons. But one did get a sense, as our cruise was winding down, that we were becoming steadily less important to the MSC crew than were the legion of unknown Others making their way toward Genoa to get on the ship for its next gig. Over the 12 days, we were slowly, relentlessly debited and depreciated. By the time the Sinfonia lickety-splitted north from Salerno to Genoa, we were entirely depleted and ready to be spat out on shore to make room for the cherished Others.

But that’s okay. I was finally sick of the scarily underdone scrambled eggs that the breakfast buffet served us every morning. I was weary from the cabin mattress that was too much coil and too little cushioning. And much as I had thoroughly enjoyed the company of our Scottish tablemates, I was eager to set my own course and eat someplace else—some little hole in the wall that we could stumble on in the streets of Genoa.

Which we did for lunch (great pizza and cold draft beer) after debarking and checking into our hotel, the Jolly Marina, situated on the waterfront next to a two-masted pirate ship built by Roman Polanski for his 1986 movie “Pirates,” which starred Walter Matthau and is described on IMDB as a much underrated exemplar of the pirate genre. The ship simply looked silly as the anchor tenant in a marina otherwise filled with sleek sailboats and stinkpots.

Our call the following morning was at 0430 hours to catch a 6:45 flight from Genoa to Munich, connecting to a Lufthansa flight direct to Boston. But since the airport—for reasons known only to some sinister bureaucrat in charge of gross inefficiencies—doesn’t actually open until 5:30, our bus didn’t depart the hotel until 5:15.

By the time we collected our luggage from the bus and entered the terminal, it was an hour until our flight and there was a line of perhaps a thousand people queued up to check in at six or so counter positions. The line moved, but at an increasingly glacial pace (that’s probably an inept metaphor in these days of ever-faster glaciers). In any case, the math didn’t seem to be working in our favor. By the time we got to the Lufthansa counter, it was seven o’clock.

“They have to wait for us,” I kept saying. “They have to.” Missing the connecting flight would mean staying another day in Genoa and having to fight the same fight again tomorrow. We finally checked in. I watched the counter agent slap the baggage tags through the handles of our six suitcases in a way that suggested that even she lacked faith in the outcome.

We made the flight. In fact, we got on the plane at about 7:15 and it didn’t actually take off for another 20 minutes or so. I was sure I saw the baggage trucks come out to the plane and satisfied myself that I’d spotted Molly’s bright red bag. But by the time we landed in Boston most of our luggage—five of our six checked bags—was nowhere to be found. It took us a long time to confirm that, however, because the antique baggage-handling infrastructure at Logan kept breaking down. Marcy filed a lost-bag claim while I went in search of the driver who was supposed to be meeting us. I got to him just as he was about to give up on us.

They found the five bags still in Genoa. Why one got on and the rest didn’t remains a mystery. But my advice to the traveler would be this: stay away from the Genoa airport if you have an early morning flight.

The only other snafu on returning home was that the oil burner refused to turn on. In the uncommonly cold April weather, the house got down to 50 degrees. Throughout the night I kept waking up shivering, half expecting to hear Paolo’s cheerful voice saying something falsely reassuring about the plunging temperature in five different languages.

—Lew McCreary