Aboard Texas Clipper
Some hunch over thick volumes of English lit; some listen attentively to a bearded professor's lecture; still others slump back in their seats and doze.
And some -- at least those lucky enough to be sitting near a south-facing window -- gaze across the scrub and silt of the Pelican Island campus toward a maroon-and-white steamship moored in the Galveston Channel.
Slowly, like a distant radio signal being overcome by a stronger one, the words of the professor's lecture fade out and are replaced by the enthusiastic, if somewhat off-key, notes of a Mexican Naval Academy band marching along the Malecon at Veracruz.
There are not many colleges where summer school is the stuff of daydreams. But there are not many summer schools that cruise the Caribbean and Atlantic, either.
At the little college on Pelican Island, where students can graduate with a third mate's license in the Merchant Marine, summer school means 10 weeks at sea on the training ship Texas Clipper.
Aside from giving the future mariners hands-on experience in shiphandling, the cruise allows them to accumulate the time at sea required before they can sit for their Coast Guard license exams.
The work is demanding -- four-hour stints in the 140-degree engine room, standing in free moments under a blower to keep cool, as though it were a cold shower. Or long, monotonous watches on the bridge -- often at hours when the rest of the world is asleep, since someone has to keep the ship on course, even at 4 a.m.
Then there are the hours spent studying and memorizing the buoys, lights, whistle signals and other Rules of the Road. Practicing Celestial Navigation, where the cadet briefly cuts a fine nautical figure, poised on the bridge wing, peering through a sextant, before retiring to the chart room and the maze of calculations needed to establish the ship's location. Tying and untying and re-tying sheet bends, bowlines, and plain old square knots to get past Basic Seamanship.
And then there's the drudgery of maintaining the old Clipper. She's a classic from the Great Age of Steam, that era betweeh the end of World War II and the ascendancy of air travel that gave us such graceful ladies as the United States and the lovely, lamented Andrea Doria.
But she's getting on, and she demands constant attention: painting, scraping, varnishing, polishing -- which doesn't count a whit toward a license, but is nevertheless essential work, and it goes on constantly. Everything that doesn't raise an active objection gets painted, scraped down, and painted, again and again -- including shipmates who stand still for too long.
The ship is a world unto itself, entirely cut off, as one who joins the cruise late finds out.
A visitor find himself immediately surrounded by students and crew, wanting news. Any news. In August of 1983, it was "What's this about a fleet being sent to the Caribbean?" "What sex tapes?" "Debate-gate? What's that?"; asked eagerly, weeks after those items had begun to dominate the headlines. A party on the "Steel Beach" the last night out grinds to a halt when a pilot boat pulls up and a crewman hurls a cylindrical object toward the crowded afterdeck.
"A newspaper!" someone shouts, and a near-riot ensues as everyone tries to grab a section of the latest Houston Post.
Without the constant distractions of modern urban society, the Texas Clipper's voyagers begin to find satisfaction in simple amusements. Young energy is expended in a fast-paced game of stickball -- where the bat is a broomstick and the ball is a hard-wound wad of masking tape -- played in the cavernous for'ard hold. Others amuse themselves with guitar, voice and songbook, or a good novel.
Every evening there is a pinochle game in the main mess and a movie on the afterdeck. And there is usually someone standing at the rail, staring pensively into the cobalt depths and listening to the suck-slap of sea against hull as those on land might attend a crackling fireplace.
These distractions, though, are not enough to keep boredom from setting in. The days grow longer and longer as the ship steams toward the endless watery horizon.
But just as the bats begin stirring in the proverbial belfry; when the young crew is one paintbrush away from insanity, the Texas Clipper docks -- and another tropic port is invaded by a boatload of Aggies.
At each stop -- from rowdy New Orleans, to staid Boston, and noisy Veracruz -- the students (as well as the crew, officers, and faculty; they're all in the same boat, so to speak) boil off the ship in search of non-nautical sights and sounds, or more potent refreshment that that available on the teetotaling Clipper.
They load up with the local trinkets, sample the local delicacies, and often suffer the local turista. It's an even trade-off, a bout of the trots in exchange for an adventuresome escape from the day-in, day-out shipboard fare.
There's a group, there, in the Veracruz mercado. They aren't hard to spot; they're gathered like Christmas carolers around the one with a Spanish phrase book.
Quanto cuesto? he is asking the leather-faced basket salesman. Quanto cuesto? How much? -- perhaps the most useful phrase in the book.
Quanto cuesto? for this beautiful pineapple, that glorious mango, such a refreshing break from scrambled eggs at breakfast tomorrow. Quanto cuesto? for this fat avocado, that onion, that juicy, tropic-sun-ripened, volcanic-soil-grown tomato, which will make such a nice guacamole for the pinochle game tonight!
Others are buying vanilla extract -- the real thing, not cut with alcohol, a whole whiskey bottle full of it -- because it's only a dollar, for what the word passes quickly would cost fifty in the U.S.
Some pick over the silver at the Pineda de Taxco silver shop; others order a cold cerveza at one of the sidewalk cafes on the main square and watch the endless parade of lottery ticket sellers, helado wagons and tamale carts.
Mariachi music and unmuffled buses clash in an aural collision. Likewise, the aroma of frying onions and the funk of rotten vegetables assail the nostrils. It's a crash course in social studies, Spanish and international finance: "Quanto cuesto? 1,500 pesos? Lessee -- that's about $10, right?") all rolled into 48 colorful, noisy hours.
The students on the summer cruise learn far more, though, than how to change dollars to pesos or the intricacies of the American Practical Navigator -- more, even, than they would in a conventional summer school.
Because when the entire universe is only 473 feet long, even the routines of daily life provide new lessons -- on getting along with those who share this cramped, isolated world; on how one person's negligence can harm everyone; on how to keep boredom at bay when the nearest video game is 2,000 miles awa
