Freighters / cruisers
A long time ago, I took a freighter from Honolulu to Yokohama. As I remember, it took 10 days and there were about that many passengers. I shared a port-holeless, bunk-bed cabin with the other two women on the ship. One of them regularly stumbled back to the room in the early morning after sampling various men on board. But she never let them “put it in,” she told us, because she wanted to be a virgin when she got married. Wonder if she ended up as one of those women Bill Clinton “never had sex with.”
As a 22 year old, I reveled in the romantic adventure of traveling on a freighter, but never craved a cruise, in large part because, what Jaws did for ocean swimming, and Psycho did for showering, David Foster Wallace did for cruises in his exquisitely funny and painful essay, “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise.”
I am struck and wondering why the link between your cabin mate and Bill Clinton. It is obvious you judge the promisquity with disdain and the judge not lest ye comes to mind..it is obvious too the woman was deluding herself regarding the patricharcal construct of virgnity but what connected those two for you? And glad you had the means in which to wander the world. That is what my highschool asperiation was to have a conversation with everyone in the world and to capture moments on film that would have otherwise been lost to time Thank you for sharing.
Both photos are amazing by themselves but even more so together.
What an amazing trip that must have been.