Two summers ago, while vacationing in Cape Cod, my family went on a whale-watching trip on a windy day – and about 80 people out of the 100 or so on the boat got seasick.

It started about 30 minutes out of Provincetown Harbor, after we’d rounded the tip of the Cape and chugged through the chop, pitching and rolling, out into the Atlantic Ocean. The first few people leaned their heads into trash buckets and vomited there.

There were not nearly enough trash buckets.

Soon there were a lot of people vomiting into their hands, and so then a lot of vomit on the seats and tables and floor of the boat (which was not a huge boat – the cabin was about the size of a high-school classroom) and it started to smell very badly of vomit, which led to more and more vomiting. A woman I didn’t know handed me her vomiting baby because she herself needed to vomit. When the captain turned the boat around and headed back to port early, no one complained. It was not a very fun whale watch.

Of course, it could have been worse.

Imagine being one of the 5,593 people aboard the Carnival Magic cruise ship on your way back to Galveston, Texas after being denied permission to dock in Cozumel, Mexico on Friday due to the presence of a passenger who is being monitored for Ebola. At the behest of the Centers for Disease Control, that person had quarantined herself in a sealed cabin, because she works as a lab technician at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital and “may have” handled fluid samples from Thomas Eric Duncan (the Ebola patient who died there more than a week ago). Fully 19 days after her possible exposure, she was not displaying any symptoms. Two more days and she’d be deemed clear. You’d probably be counting the minutes along with her, for selfish reasons as well as sympathetic ones.

I’m a little surprised anyone got on that cruise ship in the first place. I have never gone on a cruise, and I don’t think I want to go on one.

But when I was a kid, I did: I grew up watching The Love Boat and, like many of my preteen peers in the early 80s, dreamt of stepping off the elevator onto the lido deck with Julie, Gopher, Isaac, Captain Stubing and everyone else, and playing shuffleboard with Charo and the rest of the week’s randy guest stars.

I was on board a cruise ship once, accompanying my mother in delivering her mother to a cabin before disembarking to wave from the docks as she and her octogenarian companions set sail for wherever they were destined that trip. It was exciting. She sent us postcards from cities all over the world: she loved it.

Still today, I have friends who enjoying cruising very much – old people and young – who tell me that there’s nothing more relaxing than a week on the seas in a building-size pleasure craft, lounging all day with an umbrella drink in your hand, compelled by physical, geographical realities to let your workaday cares drift away, watching the sunset over an endless horizon.

But ever since reading David Foster Wallace’s 1996 Harper’s essay republished in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again in which he details the existential despair he fell into during the week he spent on a Caribbean cruise – the experience has not seemed like it would be even supposedly fun.

Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescence and death: it’s a game played on the skin of a void, and the rasp of the sliding puck is the sound of that skin getting abraded away bit by bit.

“The skin of a void”. I love that.

And then the disease. For years now, we’ve been reading reports of mass gastrointestinal illnesses brought about by outbreaks of Norovirus or Rotovirus, or the severe pneumonia of Legionnaire’s Disease – the attendant risks of putting oneself on a giant “floating petri dish” for a week with thousands of questionably hygienic strangers. In February 2013, the Carnival Line cruise ship called Triumph was redubbed as the much-less-victorious-sounding “Poop Cruise” when a generator fire disabled the power system, stranding passengers for five days of baking in the sun with no air-conditioning and backed-up toilets.

On the other hand, in light of our current predicament, maybe a cruise is not such a bad idea after all. It’s tricky, exercising appropriate caution around something invisible and potentially lethal without succumbing to hysteria. We all saw the pictures of the person sitting in the airport wearing the homemade hazmat suit. No one wants to be that person.

In Colson Whitehead’s wonderful, funny, all-too-relevant 2011 zombie apocalypse book Zone One, Gary dreams of escaping the ruined, zombie-infested world by catching a ride on a sub to a far-away Island. The narrator, Marc Spitz (who can not swim) sees it like this:

It was hard to argue with the logic of the Island die-hards and their sundrenched dreams of carefree living once every meter of the beach line had been swept. The ocean was a beautiful wall, that most majestic barricade.

Hell, as long as it’s a nice calm day – little wind, low chop – sign me up.