Come hell on high water

by Gregory Jaynes

After twenty years as a national correspondent, a foreign correspondent, and a columnist for Time, Life, and The New York Times, Gregory Jaynes is burned out. He is worried that the creak he hears underfoot is not necessarily the stair. He has certain "snarly things" in his head that he is afraid portend analysis. Faced with these mounting concerns, Jaynes asks himself: "Pay ten grand to a shrink or haul ass to Tahiti?". He soon sets sail out of Liverpool on a cargo ship bound for the South Pacific. Unknowingly, he has booked passage on a Russian icebreaker, crewed by a surly bunch, and his fellow passengers turn out to be "a furlong closer to heaven" than his own generation. There is Toxic June, an English gerontocrat who terrifies ship's officers half her age; Ernie from Tennessee, stuck in a time of war when the sky rained kamikazes; Agatha of the Lakes, retired nurse, new bride, French-kissing flirt; Leicester of Devon, arch-foe of Toxic June; Tuber the Root Crop Tsar, the Russian