Voyage on the Queen Mary 2

After three days in Boston—two and three quarters of which we spent without luggage— we left our hotel in Boston amidst the throngs of people heading to the July 4th celebrations on the Charles River. We’d been told it would be nearly impossible to get a cab on the 4th, so we left for the cruise terminal several hours earlier than necessary. Far from finding ourselves in the Queen’s lap of luxury, we found ourselves in a vast warehouse: steel walls and girders, no amenities, no food or drink, and only a few metal fold-up chairs for the dozen or so elderly passengers who were milling about waiting for clearance to board the ship. The Queen Mary 2 only docks at Boston once a year, so she berths at a commercial wharf and pier that is not equipped to handle anything that hasn’t arrived in a steel cargo box. Still, we had a pleasant nap in a little park on the shore with our luggage while watching the Boston harbor police conduct drills. They’re small, these police, all of them under 5’6” and all of them rotund. I expect that if you’re in the Boston police service and you fail your physical, you end up on a boat. I guess they figure the longest you have to run as a harbor officer is the distance from bow to stern of an average ship, which isn’t much even on a mammoth boat like ours.

There is only one question that matters when it comes to a big ocean liner like the Queen Mary 2: just how big is this thing when you park it next to various well known landmarks? It’s an obsession with Cunard, the owner of the ship, and you see images everywhere of this mega-boat and its predecessors balanced upright on their rudders next to the Empire States Building, or sitting aslant on the Great Pyramids at Giza, or parked on 59th avenue at the bottom of Central Park in New York. And yes, they really are huge. They’re immense. We get it, you have a really, really big ship, Mr. Cunard. In a fight between the Queen Mary and the Sears Roebuck building, I’m backing the Queen, no doubt .

The Queen Mary 2 is the grandest of all ocean liners; which is to say, she’s the biggest one they’ve ever made. Really, though, it’s not quite right to call her grand: all around us are references to the really grand ships, the pioneers that set the standards for elegance and style in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The QM2, though technologically unrivalled, is a pastiche of these older, more revered ancestors, long since sunk or salvaged. The Queen is grand in the way a really nice convention center is grand. Still, it’s really nice. There are 1300 people working on the boat to satisfy the needs of 2400 passengers, and satisfy them they do.



We’ve seen a lot of pictures of the Cunard ships and their occupants of the last two centuries. The passengers are almost invariably the picture of Victorian vigor and youth: hale young men manfully posing around the freezing pool or grappling with Jules Verne exercise machines, elegant young ladies hosting equally elegant, and always chaperoned, young suitors in fire-lit staterooms. Perhaps crossing the Atlantic a century ago was a more formidable business, suitable only for the young and the trim. But now, it attracts an older and decidedly sleepier crowd. The majority of the passengers on this ship don’t so much attend shows as find different venues to sleep in throughout the day. The phrase “exit strategy” has an entirely new meaning aboard the Queen referring mostly to how aging men with aging prostates will situate themselves in the theatres.