AT SEA : Adventures in the Caribbean.

Rand Richards Cooper, known as "Cooper" to his friends, is best known to Commonweal readers as this magazine's loquacious film critic. However, since Commonweal cannot afford to pay its contributors much, Cooper must lead several other lives, including that of travel and food writer. In that guise he writes for such glossy publications as Islands magazine and Bon Appetit, which send him to places like the Greek islands to sip the ouzo and Berlin to sample the bratwurst. Tough assignments. I've warned him that living on a generous expense account will clog his arteries and endanger his immortal soul. He says I'm jealous.

He's right.

Last month Cooper got a sudden commission to go on a ten-day Caribbean cruise. Since his free cabin could accommodate two, he asked if I'd like to go along. Impossible, I thought. After all, I had a magazine to put out. Besides, how could I leave my wife alone with three kids? When I tentatively broached the subject my wife's response was curiously enthusiastic. "Can't he make it twenty days?" she asked with seeming glee. My boss had a suspiciously similar response. "How about thirty days?" she said. I guess it was time for me to take a vacation.

We flew to Fort Lauderdale, where we were picked up and taken to nearby Port Everglades, a veritable Home Depot of cruise ships. Our ship, the Zaandam, is part of the Holland America line. The captain and most of the officers were Dutch and much of the crew Indonesian. Colonialism's legacy seemed very much alive.

Like most cruise ships, the Zaandam is big: at least ten stories high, 780 feet long, 63,000 tons, and replete with everything from two swimming pools to a casino and a movie theater. It also had three banks of elevators, 1,500 passengers, 700 crew, and a labyrinthine kitchen twisting through its innards like the tunnels and burial chambers in an Egyptian pyramid. Alas, the food was nothing to e-mail home about, but the "Parade of the Baked Alaska" through the darkened dining room on the last night, to Straussian martial music and illuminated by sparklers, was a moment of transcendent kitsch.

"Cruising," as we learned to call it, attracts a mature clientele. Neither Cooper nor I is exactly youthful, but on the Zaandam we qualified as teenagers. Waiting two hours to board, we had an opportunity to compile a profile of our fellow passengers. "This looks like the departure for that final cruise," Cooper whispered apprehensively as we cast an eye over our nodding shipmates. As the saying goes, cruise ships are filled with the "newly wed, overfed, and nearly dead." It promised to be a very calm voyage.

As it turned out, the schedule of shipboard "activities," both social and recreational, was rather daunting. Happily, our four nightly dinner companions, a retired couple from Long Island and a mother and her adult daughter from Tucson, proved exceedingly friendly and enthusiastic. We formed a convivial little platoon. Like most people on the ship, they were veteran "cruisers" who knew their way around. (We encountered one retired couple who had just completed a 111-day round-the-world cruise. Gluttons for leisure, I suppose.)

As we came to know our dinner partners, I was struck by how familiar the ship's combination of community and anonymity was. The situation seemed to reproduce the way many Americans interact with their neighbors at home. Bonds are easily formed but not intrusive, a positive spirit is encouraged, and the sense that everyone is likely to move on helps ease whatever tensions may arise. By design, it all had the feel of home.

I loved being out on the "ocean," and spent many hours sitting on the Promenade Deck "reading," which means dozing. Our itinerary took us to Curacao, Venezuela, Trinidad, Martinique, Saint Thomas, and a small island in the Bahamas owned by the cruise line. While Cooper busied himself taking notes and interviewing people, I was free to putter about and watch in amazement as the "nearly dead" scurried energetically from bingo game to bridge tournament to ice sculpting demonstration and more. My octogenarian shipmates set an intimidating pace. Almost every night a professional troupe of singers, dancers, comedians, and even a magician, put on a well-attended show. Our cruise director, "Frankie," unremittingly spurred on laggards. Oddly, there was also an art gallery on board as well as a saxophone autographed by Bill Clinton on display in a glass case. I ventured into the casino a few times but was driven out by the cigarette smoke and bad luck. Again, my more senior companions outlasted me at every turn.

Our brief stops on Caribbean islands were designed for only the most fleeting encounters with the local populace. Shopping was the real tourist attraction. I took a number of "cultural" tours that didn't amount to much beyond a peek at a cricket star's mansion or a visit to some municipal offices. Unforgettably, in Trinidad the Muzak consisted of Christmas songs set to a calypso beat, a dance performance gave new meaning to the phrase "cultural treasures," and a champion "steel pan" player offered us his rendition of Frank Sinatra's "My Way." Much, I was reminded, is lost in translation.

If not rested, I have returned from the Caribbean with a renewed respect for the energy and seaworthiness of America's senior citizens. Perhaps one day I will actually meet some people on Trinidad or Martinique, but not while cruising.