It's the Love Boat for policy wonks

I'm dancing on the top deck with a 71-year-old feminist and psychotherapist whom I've come to think of as the Twirler.

We've spent two days attending seminars on The Nation magazine's Alaska cruise; we've talked about the Bush presidency and prison reform and single-payer health care. Now, at almost midnight, my fiercely intelligent and opinionated new friend Charlotte is putting all the heady political talk behind her by bodily twirling.

"If I start to get dizzy, then I twirl in the opposite direction," she tells me as the live band revs up its throbbing Motown beat. I tell Charlotte I admire her mastery of centrifugal force, and she assures me, "I won't fall."

"Good, please don't," I say. "And plus, we need you to be fresh for the Supreme Court seminar tomorrow."

When 460 of the more ardent readers of a 142-year-old leftist weekly get together on a cruise ship, things can be a little topsy-turvy.

"It's like an SDS reunion on the Love Boat," said a guest speaker, Mary Mapes, the former CBS News producer who helped break the Abu Ghraib story among others, before being fired over her involvement in a "60 Minutes" piece on George W. Bush's military record.

During a weeklong cruise from Seattle up the Alaskan coast last summer, Mapes and 11 other speakers — mostly Nation contributors and journalists, but also Ralph Nader, Richard Dreyfuss and Rocky Anderson, then the mayor of Salt Lake City — tackled the Big Topics, all within the confines of the Holland America Line's amenities-drenched Oosterdam. (This year, The Nation's cruise is in December in the Caribbean).

Cultural dissonance was much in evidence — picture a self-described "atheist socialist Quaker" marveling at an ice-carving demonstration; picture Birkenstocks in the piano lounge. ("Do you think we'll ever see Ralph Nader in the hot tub?" I asked a fellow cruiser at one point. "I don't think so," he told me. "Every time I've seen him he's disinfecting himself at the Purell hand-sanitizer station.")

The 460 of us — about a fourth of the ship's passengers — were welcomed at a cocktail party held poolside on the Lido Deck.

Two things quickly became clear here. First, the diversity and intellectual accomplishments of the 460 were fairly staggering — included among the Nation readers who paid $1,991 to $8,657 for the cruise were many academics, several judges, a founder of The Chronicle of Higher Education, a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, a retired Army major, a steel-company vice president, a former drug trafficker, four granddaughters ages 15 to 22, Illinois state Rep. Mike Boland, the public-health expert Dr. Quentin Young and the feminist author Marilyn French.

Second, many of the so-called cruisers were unhappy that the 2000 election spoiler Nader was on board.

"If he's assigned to my table at dinner," a pixielike retired Californian in her 60s told me as she downed her third cocktail, "I'm going to switch tables."

Talking at sea

The next day the ship was at sea, giving way to three Nation seminars — one on the 2008 election, one on the new "American internationalism," and one on religion and politics — all held in an 867-seat auditorium called the Vista Lounge.

The Lounge, accessible from the ship's casino, is all swoopy and dull orange, with lots of recessed lighting and reflective surfaces: Imagine a Broadway musical set inside a slightly wanton pumpkin.

The five hours of discussion provided ample opportunity to see some of the cruise's speakers in action; by day's end it was clear that the encyclopedic and oratorically gifted Nader was gradually winning people over, and that most of the cruisers thought the Nation publisher and editor-in-chief Katrina vanden Heuvel was, as one gentleman put it to me, "a total fox."

At one point, the director of the Nation cruise addressed the audience and told us that the cruise sponsored by the conservative National Review was one day behind us. Warning us about being prompt when reboarding the ship at each port, he said: "If you miss the ship, you're going to be with National Review tomorrow. That's your penalty — you'll have to spend time with John Bolton."

In fact, spending time with the celebrated is, for some passengers, chief among the perquisites of the Nation cruise. While our four stops in ports — Juneau, Sitka and Ketchikan, and Victoria, B.C. — would give us the chance to participate, at extra cost, in Holland America-organized activities like salmon fishing ($389) and glacier climbing ($354 to $499), it cost nothing to sidle up to Rocky Anderson midship and gush that you really, really love what he's doing in Salt Lake City with carbon offsets.

The Nation guarantees that you'll be seated with one of the guest speakers at dinner one night during the cruise. Moreover, after dinner each night, various of the speakers could be found drinking and relaxing up in the Crow's Nest — an immense, airy cocktail lounge on top of the ship, surrounded on three sides by windows.

Alaska sights

I took a lovely and invigorating walk around our first port town, tourist-clogged Juneau, and was surprised to stumble across four bookstores in the course of 15 minutes. Outside the unprepossessing state capital, a street vendor sold me a delicious, fresh burrito filled with cabbage and stewed pork; though the food on the ship was copious and diverse, it was often saddled with descriptions like, "A rainbow of a medley of fruits," and so this ad hoc alfresco snacking seemed especially piquant.

I reached my own emotional peak back on the ship the next day when confronted with the staggering beauty of the Hubbard Glacier.

Pulling on my sweater and an anorak after lunch, I rushed up to the top deck and beheld the intricate, honeycomblike stolidity of the 70-by-8-mile chunk of ice. (The ship didn't dock here; rather, it revolved slowly in front of the glacier for optimum viewing.)

To watch one of Alaska's most active glaciers "calve," or shed parts of itself, is to encounter nature at its most awesome. I'd hear a thunderous rumbling and then try to guess which section of the mountain before me was going to break off; the magisterial breaking off and resultant splashing seemed to happen in slow motion

The ship arrived at Sitka the next morning. No seminars were being held, only "breakout sessions" — smaller presentations and discussion groups, usually led by Nation cruisers — so I signed up to go kayaking in our country's largest national forest, the Tongass.

The silken waters of the bay directly in front of Sitka afforded good views of Sitka's volcano, Mount Edgecumbe; it's said that from Edgecumbe's summit, you can see the curvature of the earth.

After a couple of hours of strenuous kayaking I walked around tiny, charming Sitka for a couple of hours, taking in the city's beloved Russian Orthodox church, St. Michael's — a mid-19th-century structure rebuilt after a fire destroyed much of it in 1966.

I bought a reindeer hot dog from a street vendor and ate it rapidly; however, my anxiety about biting into Donner or Blitzen showed that when heavily applied with mustard, tastes like mustard.

Feeling I hadn't quite given reindeer hot dogs the benefit of the doubt, I then decided, on entering the Sitka Fur Gallery, to force myself to touch the jockstraps made of rabbit or curly lamb ($19.99); I thought of some of the animal-rights advocates on the cruise and realized this item would offend them on at least two levels.

I didn't see a whale on the trip, but the next day, in Ketchikan, the former Canned Salmon Capital of the World, I counted 14 salmon jumping out of the water. It was like the dancing waters of the Bellagio in Vegas.

Subsequently, walking around the strangely narrow town — Ketchikan hugs the bluffs and is so thin that the airport had to be built on another island — I realized I could actually "hear" salmon swimming up the stream that runs through town. When, an hour later, I looked up at a tree in response to a rustling noise, I half-expected to see salmon plummeting from the sky.

Our last port before returning to Seattle was Victoria. While some of my Nation friends headed off to the grand Empress Hotel for tea or the Indian-style buffet at the Bengal Lounge, I decided to avoid the crowds by going to the museum of miniatures.

The museum was dimly lighted and wonderfully quiet, a perfect antidote to the pressure cooker of the Nation seminars.

Nevertheless, on looking at a diorama called "The Buffalo Jump," whose placard read, "The Indians stampede the herd over the cliff to their death," I couldn't help but get all over-analytic and Nation-y by thinking, "Even out on the prairie and operating under his own terms, man oppresses whatever he sees fit to oppress." My days aboard the cruise ship were starting to pay off.