When I first heard that Royal Caribbean was planning to dock its cruise ship off Haiti, as scheduled, mere days after one of the most deadly natural disasters in this hemisphere, like many I pursed my lips and shook my head. How could it be that a cruise ship could roll in to Haitian waters for fun in the sun, while hundreds of thousands are dead, dying or grievously injured?

The question occurred to people on the ship too, according to this oft-quoted Guardian article :

The decision to go ahead with the visit has divided passengers. The ships carry some food aid, and the cruise line has pledged to donate all proceeds from the visit to help stricken Haitians. But many passengers will stay aboard when they dock; one said he was “sickened”.

“I just can’t see myself sunning on the beach, playing in the water, eating a barbecue, and enjoying a cocktail while [in Port-au-Prince] there are tens of thousands of dead people being piled up on the streets, with the survivors stunned and looking for food and water,” one passenger wrote on the Cruise Critic internet forum.

“It was hard enough to sit and eat a picnic lunch at Labadee before the quake, knowing how many Haitians were starving,” said another. “I can’t imagine having to choke down a burger there now.”

Certainly, there’s visceral level of queasiness that results from juxtaposing the images of cavorting cruising tourists with the images of wholesale death and destruction in Haiti. It seems like a “let them eat cake” level of callousness.  But I would argue that refusing to go ashore, especially when Royal Caribbean pledges all its net profits from the visit to disaster relief, is making a choice on the basis of appearances rather than logic. It’s a choice that allows travelers on the ship to feel better about themselves and their position in the world, rather than doing any actual good at all. It’s a panacea.

Yes. It hardly seems fair that while some people are dying and starving and thirsty, others are living it up, with not only plenty of food and water, but with extras like booze and ziplines and hammocks. Inequality is a serious problem in this world, and it’s one that any traveler who ventures past the boundaries of wealthy nations must grapple with if they’re paying even the slightest bit of attention. Check out the UN Human Development Index, which is a composite index which takes into account life expectancy, access to knowledge and standard of living – more than half the world places in the medium to low development categories. (And Haiti placed in the “medium” development category, for what it’s worth.)

While I understand that it feels unseemly to be eating, drinking and enjoying while others suffer, and especially in the face of such extreme suffering, the fact is, even without a natural disaster, this is happening every single day. The inequities of the world don’t disappear simply because you opt to take your entertainment inside a cruise ship, rather than disembarking in Labedee, or choosing a ship with an itinerary that goes to different port, or even if you’re traveling somewhere else entirely.  It is a moral problem to be a person of privilege in a world where the majority of people are not.

There are many ways in which you can choose to deal with this moral problem, but the economic impact of travel is indisputable. International tourism generates over one trillion dollars a year, more than $3 billion dollars a day. These dollars generate jobs, income, access to health care, education, mobility. (In some cases it even protects natural resources, since it’s often natural resources that attract tourists in the first place.) No, I’m not saying tourism is a perfect solution to the world’s woes, or that its receipts are equally distributed or even fairly distributed –  but countries that cannot attract their share of tourist dollars have a hard time digging themselves out of the hole.   Look at the 24 countries that qualify as “Low Human Development” according to the UN.  Most are an in Africa, a few are in outright civil war, but none of them are major international tourist destinations at this point.

The port in Labadee is unsuitable for cargo ships, it can’t be used in the relief effort.  It is suitable for cruise ships.  There are two hundred people that are employed in this area, and they are doubtlessly experiencing a huge strain on their own personal resources as their country lies in shambles around them. How would losing their jobs, even temporarily, help these people?  If you’re planning to travel, and want to help, booking a trip on this ship isn’t all that different that doing something that you’d normally do, like dining out, or purchasing a product on Etsy, or the like. (Giving directly is better, of course.)

I also recognize that there are arguments to be made about what Royal Caribbean can and should be doing. I’m generally persuaded by attorney Jim Walker’s argument that Royal Caribbean could and probably should be doing more in Haiti. But when I asked Walker for a clarification on Twitter today, he said “I’m not proposing leaving Labadee, rather paying Haiti fairly – $100 per psngr = $600,000 rather than $36,000 per week.”

Still, common sense says that something is better than nothing. So if you’re on board the ship — or a have already booked your itinerary through Haiti, or are contemplating a cruise holiday, I urge you to go ashore, spend some money, spend a little extra, even. In any event, don’t discount Haiti out of hand. Yes, if you go elsewhere, you’ll likely avoid this particularly uncomfortable confrontation of your own luck and fortune stacked up against the misery of many others. That’s not for everyone. But remember, the choice to go elsewhere — and certainly to stay aboard the ship — won’t make anything easier for anyone but yourself.

Like snow and rain, winds have developed their own vocabularies. Their personalities evolve in the geography that nurtures them: the damp Chinook that signals the end of a Rocky Mountain winter, the soft zephyrs that cool a hot beach, the bone-gnawing barbers of a Saskatchewan January, and the Harmattan desert breezes that scrape sand over every particle of exposed skin.

And then there is the wind that lingers after a New England Nor’easter, the kind of wind that rips your hair right out of your head, the nameless wind that feels like a beating, and all you want to do is curl up in a corner and wait for it to pass.

This wind attached itself to the three-hour whale-watching catamaran out of Boston Harbor when my in-laws were visiting from England. It bore down upon us with the force of an iron door being slammed until Liz, my mother-in-law, shrank to about half her size. But I couldn’t shrink, much less curl up in a corner. I was crouched on the bucking deck, pissed off and terrified, trying to hang onto a leaking sick bag that flapped over the side of the boat.

“Don’t litter,” they’d told us as the boat moved out of the dock near the New England Aquarium. Don’t throw anything over the side; don’t leave things on the deck to be picked up by the breeze. “It’ll be a little rough today,” they added as an afterthought. I fiddled nervously with a thumb. My earliest memory is of a canoeing accident when I was two that nearly drowned my family. I ignored Liz’s mention of her tendency to seasickness, and thought instead about the water phobia that grabs my ankles on occasion. Before I could suggest sitting inside—where the water couldn’t threaten me—the crew powered up the jet cat and smashed their way to the whales, plunging up and down the leftover waves of yesterday’s storm.

That was when Liz went very, very silent. “Don’t talk to me,” she said to our husbands, her clipped British accent still unfailingly polite, her uncreased linen clothes rippling in the wind. She turned pale and gripped an empty Starbucks bag whose contents were soon returned to it. Boston Harbor whizzed by.

I eyed each wave as if it held the grinding teeth of a sea monster. I think I whimpered. Above us, someone narrated the passing of islands and lighthouses. Liz did not turn to look at them, but kept her eyes fixed on a horizon that the bow, most unfortunately, interrupted every few seconds. I tried to ask my husband Ian why on earth he’d sat up front, but the wind forced the words right back down my throat.

The little paper Starbucks bag was insufficient. Ian staggered inside for a stock of plastic-lined sick bags. We huddled in our seats as Liz, and then her husband Tony, filled one, two, three, four of them. I pressed my fingers around the tops to keep the bags from being whipped to sea. Didn’t want to mess up lunch for the fish.

Some time later, Ian lifted his head, sniffing, then mouthed something at me as his mother retched into a fresh bag. I shook my head, wanting only for the boat to stop, not caring about the prospect of seeing whales, definitely not caring to hear a witty comment from him about the healthfulness of fresh air. He brought his mouth to my ear and bellowed into it.

“The bags. Are leaking.” A forefinger pointed to the trail of puke glistening its way across the deck.

Well, damn. I thought about racing at a crawl back to the trash bags inside. I thought many unkind things about the teenaged crew members who’d sold Liz the acupressure motion sickness bracelets when we boarded. “Yes, they really work,” the girl had told me. A wave lifted me from my seat, scattering more drops of vomit around, and I thought nastily about bringing the bracelets back inside, dripping bags in tow, to ask for a refund.

There was no way to make it to a trash can without leaving evidence of that morning’s breakfast all over the boat. I couldn’t even stand up without falling over, and the wind, egalitarian in its direction, made sure anything in remotely liquid form got everywhere.

I slunk from the seat to the starboard rail, where I hung on, petrified, as the bags leaked their contents into the sea. I hung on tighter, gulping back tears of anger at the weather and the stench, and at uncontrollable terror of the dark water. My fingers grew numb around the bags. The wind fingered the holes (all along the seams—who makes these things?), widened them, and gleefully ripped the bags to shreds.

At times like this, exposed to Mother Nature and helpless before her, some people like to think that they are getting back to their roots as human beings, planting themselves in the earth from which cities and air conditioning so often separate us. Full engagement of life, rather than fear of death, becomes their focus. It’s a nice thought, one I’ve indulged in on occasion. But this time, faced with a deep-water phobia and the demon wind drilling into my eardrums, I found myself commiserating more with merchant sailors and fishermen who have fought with nature over the millennia: dropping my litter into the sea, I cursed the nameless wind.

After two hours the invisible navigator enthusiastically announced that whales had been spotted and we raced to the site. When the boat halted a young woman came up from the back of the boat to view the three humpbacks. Her flat, bright green shoes reflected sunlight off their suede and gold embroidery.

“You might want,” I coughed, waggling my fingers at her feet, “you might want to move back. The sick bags leaked.” She looked down at her jeans dragging above the film of sludge, and jumped.

“Oh!” She ran back to the cabin, pausing only to flick a glare at us.

Even the most brutal wind cannot erase the reek of bile. My in-laws’ misery ensured we had the entire front deck to ourselves. Liz and Tony trembled their way to the railing. Three humpback whales cavorted in the sea.

“Oh,” whispered Liz in an entirely different tone of voice from the young woman, “oh, it’s wonderful. Fantastic!” she said a little louder as two whales exposed their tails in a dive. Inhaling stench along with the fierce fresh air, I looked at her, standing there in her now-creased linen, her face pale, thinking what a wimp I was compared to my determined, delighted mother-in-law. She wiped her watering eyes to peer through the sparkling waves at the whales, and laughed as another tail splashed down.

“Worth it, mum?” Ian asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said, blinking. “Look at ‘im!” A flipper flapped the water. The boat rocked gently. Liz handed her camera to Tony. “I think I’ll sit down now, luv.” Tony handed the camera to Ian.

“I think I’ll sit down, too.” They shuddered against each other on a bench in the sunshine. Ian took pictures and I double-bagged several sick bags for the trip back. The wind, in one last slap, stole one out of my pocket and littered it into the sea.

Some days later, while researching ancient mythologies, I decided on a name for this malicious wind: I call it the Tiamat, named for a Babylonian goddess whose province included war, despair, and destruction. It couldn’t be coincidence that she was also the goddess of salt water.

In one of the better interviews I’ve heard with him, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger (known as the Hero of the Hudson for his split-second reactions that landed a plane hit by a flock of geese safely on the Hudson River outside of New York City) discusses not only his new book and the experience of the 208 seconds in which he saved dozens of lives, but also the future of airline safety.

The interview tags well with his testimony before the US Congress, in which he said:

If we do not sufficiently value the airline piloting profession and future pilots are less experienced and less skilled, it logically follows that we will see negative consequences to the flying public – and to our country.

Sullenberger used his fame as a sudden national hero to speak in front of the US Congress about the future of aviation, and how its dangers will come not from the dangers of the planes themselves, but more from the lack of training and experience in the crew. Sullenberger points to his own life, in which he has taken a 40% pay cut since 2002, and has to work another job in addition to being a pilot in order to make ends meet.

Flight crews of US-based airlines, if not airlines worldwide, have been stricken with deep cuts in pay since September 11th, 2001. They have also seen serious cutbacks in regulations regarding how long their shifts can be and how much sleep they’re required to have before flying. As with the medical profession (in which 40-hour shifts during residencies can be routine), it has been shown repeatedly that seriously sleep-deprived people make more mistakes.

The combination of low pay, long hours, and sleep deprivation can be, and probably will be, a lethal one if something is not done. Although Sullenberger uses more tame language, the implication of his evidence is self-evident. People don’t do a bad job because they get paid poorly; but professions that don’t pay enough to live on do not attract the highest quality people. Not to mention the long shifts and lack of sleep.

Sullenberger is soft-spoken, obviously intelligent, and earnest. He doesn’t rant, but he is clear and to the point. He spreads credit for his heroic acts to the rest of his crew and to flight controllers on the ground. This is a man who inspires trust, whether he’s ever done anything “heroic,” or not.

While the interview concentrates more on the now-famous 208 seconds and Sullenberger’s new book, Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters, interested readers can learn even more about his airline safety activism by reading a transcript of his testimony before Congress on Aircrew Buzz.

Imagine, if you will, a competition for speed among all the world’s major powers. Imagine a race that required the latest of technology, the best navigational know-how, and men who were willing to risk it all in the name of glory.  Imagine, now, that that this race involved the lives of thousands of people who were simply trying to get from point A to point B, and who may or may not have been aware of their part in the drama that was called The Blue Riband.

The Blue Riband was an ongoing race that lasted throughout the age of the great ocean liners. It unofficially began in 1838, when the era of steam-powered ships began, and became more formalized throughout the decades, ending more than a hundred years later when the age of air transit began.  The goal: to cross the Atlantic the fastest.  The winner would fly  a blue pennant whose length was determined by the average speed in knots maintained during the crossing, but more importantly, the bragging rights would bestow a key marketing advantage in the competition for passengers.  Bookings would soar until another ocean liner took the title, which could happen at any moment.

To win the Blue Riband, captains would take risks in what could be an incredibly dangerous journey — icebergs, ocean storms, trecherous coast lines and crowded waters led to many tragedies.  In 1854,  the American ship the Arctic collided with another boat off the coast of Newfoundland and sunk, killing 300 –  including the wife and two children of the owner of the shipping company, which subsquently went bankrupt. In 1873, the French Ville du Havre struck another ship and sunk, killing over 200.  The British White Star line’s Atlantic struck submerged rocks and sunk, killing half of the thousand aboard.

It was only then that safety rules were contemplated, and proposed –  although they were frequently ignored. Not even the worst peacetime ocean disaster, the sinking of the Titanic in 1914, changed the behavior of those in pursuit of this prize.  In 1933, the Italian liner Rex was making record-setting time, but hit pea soup fog approaching the American coast. Rather than lose the prize, the captain was said to have shouted “Avanti a tutta forza!”  (Full speed ahead) and ploughed on at top speed.  It kept the record until 1935.  The last Blue Riband holder was the American ship the United States, which set the still unbroken record of three days, ten hours and forty minutes for a Le Havre-Southampton crossing.

I read about the Blue Riband in  First Class: Legendary Ocean Liner Voyages Around the World, Gérard Piouffre’s fascinating new book, which is packed with historic photos, drawings and ephemera from the age when great boats were synonymous with international travel. (Nota bene: fabulous holiday gift idea.)  It’s hard to believe that passengers would simply be along for a potentially deadly ride on this contest, which was at times quite literally sickening.  And since Piouffre writes that it was steerage passengers that made up the bulk of a crossing’s profits, I’m sure many were not fully aware of the risk they were taking for the sake of someone else’s profit and glory.

[Photo courtesy of Vendome Press]

The question surrounding Into the Wild is always “why?” Or perhaps “how?” Jon Krakauer poses the same questions in yet another mind-blowing work of nonfiction: Why did smart, relatively privileged, seemingly stable Chris McCandless walk off into the Alaskan bush with little preparation and even less in the way of supplies? When he turned up dead of starvation and Outside magazine assigned Krakauer to write an article about the boy and his journey, the replies, from many Alaskans, at least, seemed pretty uniform. If you walk into the wilderness expecting to live off the land, without preparing yourself for its realities, then you really have no respect for Mother Nature in the first place. Nobody says outright that a young man like that deserves what he gets, but …

Into the Wild is an incredible piece of work, patching together a young man’s life and what drove him, and setting it against a long history of young men drawn by the Siren of wilderness, of living without possessions, by one’s own wits. It is a story of throwing one’s body headlong against Nature, determined to feel alive in a way that a humdrum daily existence can never promise. As with Chris McCandless, there are inevitably heartfelt underlinings in books by Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Jack London, and Leo Tolstoy. To live simply, to renounce wealth, to feel, to strip off all trappings, even the most basic physical comfort — only then is one truly alive. It is only when something goes horribly wrong, as it did with McCandless, that we ask why.

For all the exquisite details and honest, heartfelt descriptions in Krakauer’s book, I walked away with a different question. A practical one. I am a mother, and a mother of a (so far) smart, fiercely independent boy. How on earth do I raise him with enough common sense and a deep enough respect for nature that this will not happen to him? How does a parent instill a love of wilderness and the outdoors without inspiring a false romance of the freedom wilderness can promise?

For any mother, reading McCandless’s story is terrifying. He did not come from an abusive family, did not turn to drugs or friends of bad influence. He was talented and intelligent, rebellious and independent. He loved being on the road. He went hiking with his father from a young age. They seemed to do everything right, and perhaps if their son hadn’t eaten the wrong sorts of seeds (or roots, or seeds with mold on them — nobody is certain what caused the young man to become too weak to search for food or to walk far enough to get help) he would have come back after his long journey dipping from South Dakota to Nevada to Mexico and finally shooting up to Alaska. He would have come back, perhaps, to his family, after much soul-searching and self-finding, a bit more at peace with himself.

When I was in 7th grade, about 12 years old, we started getting don’t-be-an-idiot-in-the-wilderness lessons in science class. These were both more interesting and more useful than sex education. We learned about a family who’d tried hiking to a mountain with only a bottle of sunscreen, a magazine, and a single container of water. They were caught in a snowstorm and all died, except the dog. We learned of two boys who’d driven out into the desert and died of thirst after their car overheated and they lost sense of direction. We learned of hypothermia and frostbite and wild animals.

All these lessons ended with detailed videos of survival preparations: what to carry when hiking in the mountains, how to use a map and compass, how to catch condensed water in the desert, what to do if you’re at risk of hypothermia. The upshot was quite the opposite of giving me confidence enough to brave the backcountry on my own. It gave me a healthy mistrust of my own survival skills, even if I did know how to build a fire and find the right sorts of berries.

But not everyone’s built the same way. For some, the lessons would give a thrill. I knew plenty of people who trained in serious wilderness survival, and were good at it. I know plenty of people now who would be entranced by the idea, and are only saved from venturing out into the wild by the saving sense that tells them they’d have no idea how to survive. And I also know, as I’m sure everyone does, those for whom the romance of the risk is stronger than they can handle.

Every moment of reading Krakauer’s book I was feeling the pain of McCandless’s mother, what she still must be feeling. I look at my own son and wonder. I know the strong call of Thoreau and Muir, of the high ideals of those who want to cast off all civilization and truly feel alive. In raising a child with a love of wandering, and love for the outdoor life, how do you make sure they also have the common sense enough to know that teasing death is no way to live? I don’t know the answer. Maybe common sense isn’t it. Maybe all the critics have it right and it’s simply teaching a true respect for Nature, one that acknowledges the truth that she cares nothing for your individual survival — that it’s up to you to learn her ways, and to read her riddles. And maybe it’s teaching nothing more than respect for yourself, this soft animal flesh that is so very fragile.

And maybe, though I would hate to admit the possibility, it’s up to the mothers to simply let go, to let their children walk their own wild way, and hope they are still there to hold at the end of it.