Down the Rhine with Viking

©2018 John P Hewitt

All the leaves were brown, and the sky was grey, but we weren’t California dreamin’ as our plane descended toward Basel, Switzerland. The late August leaves should have been green, but the trees looked dead. The rain that began to fall as we landed would give scant help to a river that had been starved for rain for months, and it was far too late for the withered crops in the fields.

I had harbored more than a few doubts about our planned cruise on the Rhine River from Basel to Amsterdam. Usually I’m eager to fly to Europe, and I like being on ships, where people are (under)paid to prepare my meals, make my bed, and treat me with enough deference to make me feel cared-for, but not enough to make me feel guilty. But Europe was beset by an extended heat wave and a deep drought. Rhine water levels had dropped so far that the many freighters that ply the river had to reduce their loads, and river cruise ships were having difficulty navigating the most scenic stretches of the river. I had previously visited several of the places we would dock – been there, done that, got the t-shirt. And the Viking brochures featured only tables for six and eight. “You’re free to choose with whom you dine,” they crowed. That was enough to stimulate my social anxieties and evoke long-suppressed childhood memories of being chosen last for volleyball games in gym class.

There was also the matter of age. This would be our first river cruise, and we had been warned that river cruises are favored by the elderly and their parents. Like many other “elderly” people I don’t feel my age, I possibly don’t look my age, and I certainly don’t act my age. I suppose it can be reassuring to spend time with others who have had similar generational experiences and share one’s perspectives on life, but very often they haven’t, or they don’t. The old man my age wearing a MAGA hat may possibly be a fine fellow with whom I’d enjoy spending some time, but I’m not going to bet on it.

Nevertheless, I persisted. We deplaned and headed for the Swiss side of the terminal and the bus that Viking provided to take us to our ship, the Tialfi. Once seated we watched as others straggled and struggled toward the bus with their luggage. All those grey heads we had seen on the flight from Amsterdam were indeed headed our way. When we arrived at the dock theTialfi was tied up alongside another ship. To get to our ship we had to board the other one, clamber up wet stairs to its top deck, thread our way past lounge chairs and a miniature golf course, cross a gangplank to the top deck of our ship, and then descend to the lobby level. Not a big deal, of course, but with brown leaves, cloudy skies, grey heads, a shrinking river, and massive jet lag, I wasn’t feeling my best. After a cheerful greeting from the staff, we crashed on comfortable chairs in the lounge and waited for lunch to be served and our rooms to be available.

The restaurant opened, we ate a good lunch – I don’t remember what or with whom – and our cabin soon became available. We did what we have done on nearly all of our twenty-six trips to Europe: we unpacked, and then took a two-hour nap to recover from our sleepless overnight flight in cattle class. The alarm on our watches chimed and we hit the deck running, ready to pretend we had already adjusted to European time. More precisely, we walked the decks on an inspection tour, visited the lounge for a cocktail, and then stayed for the regular briefing by the Captain and Cruise Director, followed by a walk downstairs to the restaurant for dinner. As for that timey-wimey problem, we would awaken at 1 or 2 AM and be reminded we still had some adjusting to do.

Dinner. Naturally, reader, you are interested in our dining experience that first night. Alas, I don’t remember the food we ate or the wine we chose, and nor with whom we sat. It is an empty spot in my memory, for at 2AM body time (8 PM European time) jet lag trumps everything, including social anxiety. I remember there was food of some kind, and I’m pretty sure there was a table and a chair, but beyond that the record is blank.

I do remember where we sat and with whom and how I felt about it on the second night of the cruise. After the daily briefing in the lounge, we followed the crowd to the restaurant and disinfected our hands at the disinfectant spritz. (Disinfecting is de rigueur on cruise ships, although some people prefer to play norovirus roulette by skipping the process.) We proceeded inside to find a table; jet lag mostly gone, social anxiety reared its head. Some tables were fully occupied, others had a seat or two remaining, others had just a couple of occupied seats. We chose a table with just one couple. They were younger than us – at least a couple of decades younger – and seemed polite and friendly. Their speech hinted they hailed from somewhere north of the border, and indeed Hannah and Michael (not their real names) turned out to be from Nova Scotia. Being Canadians, they were friendly and polite, eh? Our table was soon approached – I thought perhaps a bit tentatively – by a couple who were also a fair bit younger than Myrna and I. “May we join you?” one of them asked, and Jack and Myrna and Hannah and Michael made welcoming gestures. Chloe smiled and moved toward a chair; I thought Dave might have been considering their other options, but he followed her lead, and they sat down. Chloe and Dave (again, not their real names) turned out to be Californians, so we became a three-nation table – Canadian, Californian, and Ohioan. And I was relieved to have escaped the clutches of people as old as me.

Dinner was filled with conversation interspersed with playful interaction with our servers, Ramoncito and Maria. We ate and talked and drank and joked and ate some more all the way through desert. At some point during the main course, I relaxed. There were hints of what Germans call Gemütlichkeitand Danes and Norwegians call hygge— feelings of mutual liking, acceptance, warmth, and connection. When I replay the evening in my mind, I think of Dorothy in the Wizard of Ozopening the door of her grandmother’s house after the storm and suddenly seeing the world in color. At some point I opened the door and began to see the color and feel the hygge. And I wasn’t dreaming.

After dinner, we reassembled in the lounge for a drink, to hear some music, and to continue our conversation. From that night forward we had dinner together – often at the same table as the first night, and with Ramoncito and Maria serving – and then moved to the lounge. On the final night of our cruise, as we sailed on a series of Dutch canals from Kinderdijk to Amsterdam, we partied late. Toward the end of the evening Chloe and Dave and Hannah and Jack were dancing disco to the music of The Village People. There is on my computer a video, which I have not yet had the courage to view in its entirety, of us doing our moves to the tune of YMCA. Myrna, who with Michael had the good sense to watch rather than dance, took the video, but has thankfully not shared it widely. Images of a 77 year-old-man spelling out "YMCA" with his arms and whose shirt is revealing too much belly, have no place on Facebook. Myrna, are you paying attention?

Taking a cruise entails interaction with the crew – with restaurant servers, cabin stewards, the Cruise Director, and the ship’s officers. In these social contacts, one person’s leisure is another’s work. Cruise companies emphasize not just the competence of their crew, but their friendliness, their dedication to the needs of their guests, and their desire to create a perfect and relaxing holiday. But the smiles, the extra effort, and the expert guidance of a possibly inexperienced guest through a day of tours or the evening’s dinner menu are work. The crew labor on behalf of the guests, and much of that labor entails creating and sustaining the latter’s emotional well-being.

Our servers were experts in emotional labor. Ramoncito was attentive and efficient in serving dinner and keeping wine glasses filled, but also personally warm and engaging, and sometimes humorous. “If you can’t remember my name,” he told us early in the cruise, “just ask for Pretty Boy.” Maria was a bit more reserved, but nonetheless warm and friendly toward the six of us, always seeming eager to serve and happy to see us. We developed warm feelings about them; we liked them; we were as happy to see them as they were to see us, it seemed.

In situations like these, genuine feelings emerge in spite of the essentially contractual character of relationships. In the emotional economy of the cruise ship dinner table, servers know what they must do to make the guests happy and guests for the most part know how to reciprocate. When they are met with appreciative smiles and hugs at the end of the voyage, the servers know that later that day they will transfer their attentions and affections to a new set of guests. They, like stage actors, know that they have created a performance on this cruise and will do so again on the next. Yet the feelings not only look genuine but in a real sense they are genuine, for the actors in this drama have been convinced by their own performance. Likewise, the guests know that it is unlikely they will ever encounter these servers again. Yet, having enacted their part in the drama, they feel an attachment to their servers in the moment, and some nostalgia for them when they return home. If I were to board a cruise ship and find Ramoncito and Maria on board, I would experience a rush of positive feeling toward them.

Naturally we saw many sights on this voyage: the trees and sweeping view of the Black Forest in Germany, the streets and alleys of Colmar and Strasbourg in France; the charms of Heidelberg (no dueling scars reported); the tourist-engorged wine town of Rüdesheim; the wonderful Rhine gorge, with its hillsides of castles and vineyards from north of Bingen to just south of Koblenz; the Köln Cathedral; the complex, flat drainage area of the Rhine in the Netherlands; the windmills of Kinderdijk; and, of course, Amsterdam. Reader, you can find better pictures and descriptions of these places on the internet than I can supply here, so fire up your Google and have at it! I have other observations to offer.

We travel in order to see and experience other places – states or foreign countries that are either far from our backyards or, if close-by, don’t resemble our backyards. Some kinds of travel emphasize experiences. Spend a week in Venice and you will, one hopes, venture away from St. Mark’s Square and find a little café frequented by locals where not much English is spoken but the seafood is fresh and not very costly. Spend a week in a Paris apartment and you may get to know the woman at the boulangerie who sells you a baguette or some croissants each morning. Make repeated visits to a pub, say on curry night at the Beehive in White Waltham, England, and you may earn the status of an honorary “regular.” And, of course, there are many travel experiences more strenuous and even riskier than eating and drinking with the locals. The point is that exposure to a place over a period of years, or weeks, or even days, creates an opportunity for a deeper grasp of local culture. A baguette a day won’t make you French, but it will put you in a relationship with the proprietor of the boulangerie that resembles in some form that of a French person. Repeated visits to a pub will instruct you in British culture without the inconvenience of taking our British citizenship.

Travel via ocean or river cruise puts more emphasis on sights than on immersive experiences. Cruisers get from place to place on land mainly on motor coaches. Busses. The typical motor coach tour of two or three hours follows a scenic route, stops in a few places to take pictures, shop, visit a cathedral or castle or some other important site (or sight), and is led by a tour guide who presumably speaks the language of the tour (in this case, English) and knows enough about the locale to say interesting things about it. A good bus tour has an engaging and knowledgeable guide, spends more time stopped than driving, and manages somehow to keep the infirm and the stupid from falling behind or straying too far when exploring a city.

I’m not intending to demean or disparage organized tours – often known as “port adventures.” They have their place. We learned on one of these tours that we liked the Black Forest and would like to return for a longer visit, whereas we saw about as much of Colmar as we wanted. Some of our friends left the boat at one stop in the Netherlands and bicycled through farmlands dotted with windmills to the next port. They had a great time doing this. We clambered up the steep slopes to Marksburg Castle and allowed ourselves to be led through its warren of rooms by our guide. We enjoyed the visit, but it was enough, and we have no desire to return. On the other hand, I could sail through the Rhine gorge a dozen times and enjoy each voyage. Come to think of it, we’ve done that.

There is also much to be said for the simple joys of being on boats of any kind. On the early portions of this voyage down the Rhine we awoke several times to the unsettling but fascinating sight of concrete walls outside our cabin windows. And we were sinking, sinking! We were in a lock, waiting as the water level in the lock was lowered to match that of the next segment of the river. We had a long conversation with the Captain of our ship, who explained various aspects of navigating the river and told us about his maritime career. We watched as canopies and the ship’s bridge itself were lowered to enable the ship to pass under low bridges. At one dinner, when we were docked alongside another ship in Koblenz, we watched as a passenger on the neighboring ship came out to his veranda and casually brushed his teeth, oblivious to his amused audience next door. And on this journey, the first couple of days were a bit tense because there was a chance that water levels would be too low to allow us passage through the gorge. There was a glorious cheer that went up when the Captain announced he was going to attempt to sail through.

A river cruise ship is a temporary neighborhood. You see the same people every day, frequent the same restaurants, and have shared a few experiences. Some people become your friends, and you hope to see them in the future. Others are acquaintances, people with whom you might share a meal once or twice or speak with on a tour but with whom you feel no strong connection. Still others somehow manage to elude contact with you, or you with them. And one or two you simply do not like, though of course you resist the temptation to push them overboard.

Mother Nature has restored water to the Rhine, and cruisers once again sail up and down its length without obstacles. Motorists on German highways can get their fuel, and factories their supplies, all carried on the freighters that ply the river. All of them will sail peacefully under bridges that have been destroyed and reconstructed, pass by towns that have been leveled and rebuilt, and experience a land that has been contested for centuries. The residents of Colmar had to accustom themselves to changing their nationality from French to German and back again, and then back once more. Jews, once numerous and thriving in the Rhine valley, have been expelled or murdered not only by the Nazis of the twentieth century but also by the Crusaders of the twelfth and the burghers of the sixteenth who blamed them for the plague. It is today a place with open borders through which passes a parade of ship-born tourist neighborhoods and profitable commerce. In the end, my skepticism erased, I was happy to have been a citizen of one of those neighborhoods and to have enjoyed the company of friends with whom I felt a connection and whom I hope to see again someday.

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