I have nothing against children. I think the little germ factories should be aggressively protected, like polar bears, wolves, and fruit bats. This does not mean I want to spend a lot of time around them.

In cruise culture, Disney has catered to the young for years. If you don’t cotton to bigger-than-life rodents in human clothes, you book elsewhere, and go during the school year when those people are occupied. This works unless you’re cruising south of the equator where seasons are reversed: what you think of as the beginning of winter is actually spring break.

We stood back as 385 shrieking children boarded our ship. Cruise personnel may know how to fend off real pirates with fire hoses, but parents get fussy about that when it comes to their kids. So the cruise line surrendered the ship.

Let me divide children into two arbitrary age groups. There are the recently hatched, say under six. They run in front of old knees, finger all the rolls before choosing the one they want, and shriek out of context. But they are still at the Age of Cuteness, and the cruise staff can keep them more or less under control (probably by duct taping them to table legs when parents turn their backs).

Then there are the older kids, let’s say up to fourteen. They are too old for coloring books and too young for mango tangos. Their nature says be sweet, but their hormones say raise hell. Lord of the Flies is an earlier account of unsupervised seafaring youth. I will be generous here and say maybe the cruise parents have not yet noticed that little Johnny is becoming a thug.

Being less generous, I think Mom and Dad have figured out that if the beastie doesn’t actually fall off the boat, he isn’t likely to drown. So they’ve cut him loose. Why ruin their own vacation?

One evening, following a food fight in the buffet and a full day of elevator button Punch ‘n Run, a gang of these kids took all the printer paper in the internet room, made paper airplanes and launched an airstrike of trash around the ship. They ran through the halls startling oldsters napping after a hard morning of bingo. They shuffled the pitchers of cream, skim, and whole milk and really, nobody should screw with my coffee.

But here’s the thing. I’d really like to have that much fun again. The wild bunch was so rich with their own futures, so ripe with promise, so beautiful with youth, every last one of them. And I see nothing ahead for them but a distraught country, whiplashed with hate.

Now that we have decided No Child Left Behind was a bad idea, I hope we don’t replace it with All Children Left Behind. Except, of course, when it comes to cruising.

Linda B. Myers is a founding member of Olympic Peninsula Authors and author of the PI Bear Jacobs mystery series. Her newest novel, Secrets of the Big Island, is available at www.amazon.com. Contact her at myerslindab@gmail.com or Facebook.com/lindabmyers.author.