A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

4 January 1998 - Travel Mishegass

Yes! I've been to Antarctica! And it was absolutely splendid! Everything I had hoped for. I got back safely on New Year's Day. It took me until Saturday afternoon to get my trip report done. The version that's up now is preliminary but I wanted to get something up soon. If I waited till I had pictures developed and scanned and I'd figured out all the links I want to throw in, it would probably never get done.

Anyway, one thing I did want to write about here (and not on my travel page which always feels more public for some reason, perhaps because I really do advertise that page and not the journal) is some of the personal craziness that trips like this stir up for me.

One aspect of that is my reactions to other people. I had some very strong reactions to people on the cruise, both positive and negative, and what really intrigues me is how much stronger my feelings seem when I'm traveling in close quarters with other people than they do in my "normal" life. In some ways I am less quick to judge - for example, age seems less significant when traveling than it does usually. Among the people who I really liked a lot on the trip were two older couples. I'm not sure how old Cecile and Gary are but they're both retired. She was a professor of medicine (pediatric cardiology) and he was a tree farmer. Now they're both in school (in Portland, Oregon), studying French and history, respectively, and they spend their spare time rock climbing. I'm reasonably sure they're at least well into their 60's and I look at them and I look at my mother whose life seems to have deteriorated into talking to her cat and watching TV, and I know who I'd rather be at that age. Even without going to such extremes, there was a 77 year old man named Helmut and his wife, Gerda (probably close in age) who spend several weeks a year traveling and, while not quite as active physically, still did pretty well and certainly retain an active interest in life.

And I had lots to talk about with the nerd crowd - a bunch of guys who had graduated from M.I.T. in 1994 and were delighted to find I was a fellow Course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) grad and surprised I was class of 1980. I even liked the 11 year old boy who was traveling with his father, though I have to admit that I can't imagine what it's like to go on such a trip at that young age. Does everything else seem anticlimactic afterwards?

There were a few people who annoyed me on the trip. One couple was attacked by "mustard artists" (thieves who spray mustard on their victims and go through their pockets while pretending to help them clean it off) in Buenos Aires and proceeded to blame the cruise company the entire rest of the trip even though they didn't lose anything. Okay, maybe we could have been warned more directly, but does signing up for an organized trip absolve you of the responsibility to do your homework? If they'd read one sentence of a guidebook, they'd have known that this was a common scam.

Then there was a woman I nicknamed Irma La Kvetch. She had this strange idea that an adventure cruise was a luxury hotel and complained about everything. She was one of the ones who whined when the agent in Ushaia wouldn't take traveler's checks for our departure taxes - despite the clear wording in the pre-trip literature that said "cash only." I almost hoped she had been injured when she fell during the incident when the table top broke on the Drake Passage coming back.

Finally, there was the question of my roommate. Maxine talked constantly and hummed cheerfully at every hour. She also had the bad taste to sleep well through everything. I can't say that we got along badly - we tolerated one another just fine - but I can't say that I have any burning desire to stay in touch with her either. What really irritated me was that the last day in Buenos Aires, when I had a cold, she went to the buffet table at breakfast and pointedly got me another glass of orange juice and said "here, you need this." She also kept telling me that I needed more sleep (this, throughout the cruise) and so on. I have a perfectly good mother of my own, thank you, and I have a pretty good grasp of what my body wants and needs.

There! Now I've done all the bitching I didn't want to do to people's faces!

The other aspect of travel mishegass (Yiddish for craziness) is really one of what I perceive as my own inadequacies. For the first couple of days, I whipped myself into a state of anxiety about looking like an idiot on the zodiac landings. Getting in and out of the zodiacs actually was quite easy and nothing to worry about - I was just convinced I'd be a horrible klutz at it because I'd never done it before. Some of this was worse when I fell on the muddy path in Tierra del Fuego and even there, I'm not being fair to myself - I was wearing walking shoes but not hiking boots, it was rainy and very muddy and slippery, and I didn't think to sidestep down the slope. I got down with helping hands from two people, who I then wanted to avoid the rest of the trip because I was embarassed at needing help. I had the same problem about help with the path on Petermann Island, where I nearly had a panic attack going over the rocks. I don't like heights and was absolutely terrified I was going to fall, but what was worst was that I was sure Jon thought I was some sort of psycho. It's his job to help people but I had horrible nightmares about what the staff say to one another in their own quarters.

This whole issue of needing help is really the heart of all of the craziness I feel at times, of course. I think it's common to women who work in male-dominated fields (and, of course, men are very prone to it) but it really isn't very useful a defense mechanism. I can be invulnerable and make things hard for myself or get help and risk showing that I'm not Superwoman. What a choice! Oddly, I remember wrestling with this when I was an undergrad and finally persuading myself that I was paying oodles of money for my education and it was only right that professors help me. Somehow, without that consumerist side to it, I still feel deep down that I'm supposed to be able to do everything myself. Well, I guess that's as good a theme for working on this year as anything else, particularly given that several months of what could be rough travel is not the time to struggle along out of misplaced pride.

So there you have it - a new year's resolution after I was planning not to make any.

I wrote the above early in the day (unusual for me, but my schedule does tend to get thrown off by post-vacation things. And then I reread my comments about Maxine and I realized that the issue is really one of choosing to ask for help. I feel insulted by offers of help that I don't think I need. No, let me rephrase that - it isn't the offer, it's the insistence that I do need what the person is giving, the idea that I'm not capable of making up my own mind. One of the rules for our landings in Antarctica was "nobody refuses help" but the help offered was in the form of a hand being outstretched, which doesn't entirely force you to take it. Am I being way too confused about all of this?

The other side of this is offering help and how do I do that in the best way. I had to offer support in a family matter earlier this evening - Ramona has asked Elliot for a divorce. It's easy for me in this case because from what he said, I think she's in the wrong. But I was trying to be careful not to force my opinions on him. I like Ramona and I was surprised by some of this, but it's not my place to judge it. All I can do is tell Elliot if he needs to talk, feel free to cry on his kid sister's shoulder.

Rephrasing the resolution - May 1998 be a year in which I ask for the help I need, accept appropriate help when it's offered sincerely, and strive to be a person who others can find support from in the ways they need it.