I have heard rumors that some people, people other than myself, can engage in a distant vacation and leave their troubles behind. Advertisements would have us believe this is a common skill. Southwest encourages us to “get away”, as though we’ll forget about our recent gaff if we could only change zip codes and pay $4 for a small bag of crushed pretzels in transit. My brother can get away in this manner. If he is on a vacation, I doubt he once thinks about his house or his job or his dog, to say nothing of forgetting the names of little Victoria and Johnny and those other two whose names likely fail him. This is enviable. For me, whether I am here or there or anywhere, I lack the ability to turn off my brain and engage in the moment without concern for the moments that lie ahead or those that are occurring at that same moment many thousands of miles away.
I have been this way forever. Like most of my annoying traits and thought patterns, I blame my father for the inherited defect. When I was a child, and vacation came not by the shore of a great sea but by the shore of a shallow northern Minnesota lake, my father was famous in his failure to leave his worries behind. This camp was a family camp with a heavy emphasis on churchy things. If you have a hard time suffering through church services on guilt driven visits during holidays, then you wouldn’t have lasted a day at this family camp. There was church in
the morning and church in the evening, and in between there were forced naps. There was a long drive to get there and a longer drive to get home, and when my father rested after lunch it was not before he made a trip to the building with a telephone.
This small A-frame building wasn’t entirely sure of its purpose, and neither were we. It was small, too small to be useful for anything but what the small sign outside the front door promised was inside. “Telephone”. This was a link to the outside world before the links were wireless, and before cellular connections enabled cost effective communications. This was also before voicemail, so each day after this morning church my father would walk to the small building on the hill and he would call home to talk with a guy who worked with him once in a while. This guy was on duty while my father was gone, and he’d relay the events of the day or the calls of the morning or perhaps just the news that our cat had died. This happened once, and many of us cried outside that smallish building with the telephone.
So when I sit on a beach on a Tuesday, I find little rest. And when I cast a beautiful brand new 9 weight Orvis Hydros, one that I bought without the knowledge of my wife, which I had to do because she wouldn’t understand how a fly rod and reel could ever cost as much as this one might have, well, when I cast that rod I do not feel relief then either. I take a vacation from a life that I love to be in another location that I love far less, while inwardly wishing I could just be at home and outwardly wishing that it would be July when I return.
I do enjoy watching people though, and Mexican beaches are delightful for this purpose. One day last week I attempted to drag a lounge chair- the plastic sort with suntan lotion stained blue fabric stretched between the white plastic legs- and was greeted with the shrill whistle of the life guard. He blew that whistle at me. That smug little lifeguard in his fancy little wooden tower with his zinc smothered nose, that guy. He blew the whistle right in my direction. Apparently beach chairs are not permitted, you know, by the beach. So I employed a little American ingenuity to the situation and dug two “chairs” into the sand. When draped with a towel they were quite suitable, and a little fluffing of the sand near the top of the headrest every now and again was enough to keep my large burned head cradled comfortably. Most European men strutted by in their underwear swimsuits, stopped for a moment to take a heavy drag on their unfiltered cigarette, and acted like they weren’t impressed. You know who was audibly impressed? The Canadians. They soon copied me and within a day there were sand chairs everywhere. You’re welcome Mexico.
But even though the water was warm, I would have much preferred this salty sea to be filled with fresh water instead. And if I only had some sort of wooden structure to lie on, perhaps to set a lounge chair on, then this too would have been better. Sand is fine, to a degree. After 100 feet or so a delightful frolic in the white, warmed sand becomes a slow, labored trudge. It is a death march of privilege and it would be kind of the resort to replace much of this sand with soft green grass. If I were to walk from my residence down a grassy lawn and finally onto a white pier, where I might avoid the sticky sand and the arduous journey through it, then Mexico would be on to something.
Perhaps this is why I find vacations a necessary evil. When there, when anywhere other than here, I compare that place to this place. I want green grass from porch door to white pier, and I want gin clear fresh water gently lapping the shore line. I want a vacation that looks like the vacation that is my eternal Lake Geneva summer. This is what an ideal vacation looks like to me, and if it only lasts for an hour on a Wednesday in August then it is infinitely better than a week spent elsewhere in December.