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MEN ALONE

Another selling point for the kind of vacation I’m talking about is that—equal rights be dammed—there are times when men need the company of male friends. There’s some kind of primitive magic in returning  to the circle of your own kind, and there’s no need to feel guilty about that, either. Up in Minnesota, the big attraction of ice fishing is basically that guy can go out there and sit in a hut, drink beer and get away from women for a while. The fact that we seem to have lost sight of this shows just how alienated from ourselves we really are.
But, hey, I’m not here to pick a fight. I’m here to get you to go with me.
Core Sound was mostly sandy-bottomed and shallow, dotted with little grassy islands riotous with birds. Jim rowed, I fished. In the still, dark water among the islands, I hooked three little ones with a golden spoon, then released them. Across the water, on Shackleford Banks, wild ponies romped along the beach, filthy and ragged and free. Around us, ominous-looking weather cells swirled and eddied darkly. Occasionally the darkness unleashed rain, then it would slow to a patter and stop. If a squall blew up, we could beach the boat on one of the islands, we figured. But for the hour and a half it took to cross, the storm gave us a break. At twilight, we beached the boat on the lee side of Cape Lookout and made camp back among the pines.
Dragging our gear up out of the boat, I sloshed through the outgoing tide, clear and warm as bathwater. If it didn’t rain, we’d get a fire going up above the tide mark. Already my skin was beginning to feel briny and coarse from sun and wind and spray. In the pent-up, citified muscles of my back and shoulders, snaps and buckles and hooks seemed to be coming undone. I took a deep, deep breath, as if I were about to take a long, cool drink of water.
I’d come back to the well.

Posted 01 September 2009 † admin § Seperate Vacation ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

YOU KNOW WHEN YOUR HEART HAS ARRIVED

The real goal of a vacation is to get that feeling of actually having been somewhere, of having temporarily taken leave of your everyday life. But that sensation is an interior experience, a matter of the heart, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with pending lots of money or even physically going someplace. You can spend a week in Cancun but somehow never get away. “Getting away” has more to do with getting away from yourself, or at least from your obligations, and neither of those things has anything to do with geography.
Which is why occasionally taking a vacation free of wife and family is almost automatically magic. You’re stripping away all your ordinary, task-specific selves—father, husband, lover, slave of children—as if you were shedding a series of overcoats. You’re breaking free of the thousand daily reminders that keep all those selves intact and just walking away from the whole thing. That’s when the trip begins.
When you take your family along, though, it’s almost like loading your whole house on your back. You’re taking the thousand daily reminders right along with you. (A friend of mine rented a villa in Italy and took his entire family there for the summer but came back in a few weeks because the whole experience was just like home, only immeasurably more difficult.)

Posted 31 August 2009 † admin § Seperate Vacation ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

THE THRILL OF THE UNEXPECTED

For Jim and me, though, the whole point was not to know exactly what was coming next. We didn’t dread the unexpected; we welcomed it. We worked it right into the agenda, by sketching out a basic scheme (head down to Cape Lookout with tents, fishing gear and boat) but making sure to keep all the details as vague as possible. That way, something surprising was bound to happen. The Plan was so broadly—might I say brilliantly—conceived that anything that happened was a part of it. No matter what came nest, The Plan was running like a fine watch, and everything was right on schedule. When The Plan went plunging wildly off the tracks, well, that’s exactly what we hoped would happen.
In this case, the unexpected took the form of weather. For about a week before we left Virginia, the weather reports from the Carolina coast were a trifle on the damp side: A huge low pressure system was stalled in the area, producing heavy rain, localized squalls and thundershowers. The morning before we were supposed to leave, we decided to postpone the trip. It was only prudent, we figured. It took us about three hours to recognize the utter foolishness of prudence. Life is short and uncertain, and if we didn’t go now, we might never go. We’d both be 65 before we knew it. Besides, we just felt like it.
It was warm and sunny when we left home, but by the time we reached the coast, it was apparent that every once in a while the weatherman gets it right. We were driving directly into a vast and majestic electrical storm. Immense panoramas of evil darkness, roiling with menace. Then, quite mysteriously, we drove right out of it. By the time we reached the water , it was no longer raining.
We off-loaded the boat and settled her in the water. The vessel was a 12-foot  flat-bottomed dory that Jim and his brother had built by hand in Oregon. She had a sail that could be unfurled in event of wind, but everything was dead calm now, eerily calm, and it looked as if we’d have to row the four miles across the sound to Cape Lookout.
“You gon’ drown, boys!” an old guy bawled, sitting in a nearby pickup wasting his life. “It’s gon’ squall, ain’t you heard?” We pushed off anyway, hoping the storm would hold its breath till we got across.

Posted 30 August 2009 † admin § Seperate Vacation ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

CHEAP FUN

One thing all these trips had in common (besides water) is that they didn’t cost much. The last time out, we spent all of  $250 (gas, food, bait, rum) in four days, setting us each back around $30 a day. We squeezed a phenomenal amount of pleasure out of every penny. When we got back home, I was left with a feeling of physical exhaustion and spiritual rehabilitation that was better than a visit to Lourdes.
The experience of that trip was summed up and symbolized by a hat. I’d felt in serious need of a good hat for this trip, the sort of hat you couldn’t buy but could only be given. On the drive down, Jim obliged by handing me a truly excellent bit of headgear he’d gotten off a roadie in George Thorogood’s R&B band. It was one of those adjustable ball caps, all black except for the white outline of and electric guitar and the word Destroyers. Except to sleep and swim, I don’t think I took that hat off once in four days. It came to represent anew, changed self, a vacation self. Wearing it gave me the feeling that I’d actually gone somewhere. When I got home, I took the hat off and hung it on a chair. It’ll stay there until that old vacation self comes back.
The thing is this:  When you take your whole family along, it makes it all the more difficult to open yourself up to the unexpected, to take risks, to hang one over the edge. A typical family vacation is usually just a matter of transporting all your old habits and attitudes (plus half your possessions) to a new location, generation huge credit-card bills and then going home. In order to escape a daily routine that’s overscheduled, stressed-out and fraught with goals and deadlines, for instance, we’ll go someplace like Disney World, which requires a 150-page guidebook. We emerge fundamentally unchanged from this experience, except for being more tired than ever—and poorer. The real agenda behind these vacations, in fact, is not about being changed at all but about avoiding change.

Posted 28 August 2009 † admin § Seperate Vacation ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

RECGARGE YOUR BATTERIES

Which brings me to my point: Every now and then, when you go on vacation, you need to leave the lady and the kids behind. You must not allow yourself to feel guilty about this, either. This is not abandonment, this is renewal. When you come back, I guarantee you’ll be the better for it, or your money back. Everybody else in your life will be the better for it, too, because they probably need to get away from you as desperately as you need to get away from them.
Several months after our family outing to Florida, I took my own good advice. My buddy Jim and I sailed out to an uninhabited barrier island off the coast of North Carolina and spent four days camping in the dunes, fishing , lolling, philosophizing and generally working hard to accomplish absolutely nothing. We got greasy and tired and sunburned and windburned. We survived a series of sea squalls that collapsed my tent in the night, caught ghost crabs and bluefish and sharks, bodysurfed in the moonlight, figured out the rhythm of the wind and the tides and sunrise and moonrise, and several times got to laughing so hard we may have come perilously close to death itself.
This trip was the fourth in a dramatic series starring Jim and me. It’s sort of a pact we’ve made, involving the two of us and water. Every summer for the past four years, we’ve gone to find some interesting body of water and get seriously involved in it for a couple of days. One summer we canoed a stretch of flat water on the weird, mystical, north-flowing New River in southern Virginia. Another time we did the northern reaches of the Susquehanna in upstate New York. And yet another time we camped and canoed among the forested river islands of the James in central Virginia, taking my boy along to celebrate his seventh birthday.

Posted 27 August 2009 † admin § Seperate Vacation ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

MEN AT EASE Go Your Own Way

Is it time for separate vacations? Family vacations are well and good, but sometimes a man’s got to get away alone.
MY WIFE, OUR TWO CHILDREN and I, all dressed in standard issue tourist clothing, are at Epcot Center, surrounded by cheerful and informative displays having something to do with The Wonderful World of Communication. As a family unit, however, we are communicating about on the level of Koko the talking ape. I’ve had it up to here with chasing my seven year-old son all over the fake-futuristic landscape. My four-year-old daughter is indignant because I will not buy her the guy who walks around dressed up as Goffy, or anything else she happens to lay eyes upon. And my wife, who has meticulously planned the trip using Stephen Birnbaum’s guidebook—which lays out the complete strategy for mastering Disney World, including the correct times of day to stand in line at various unforgettable attractions—does not feel I have taken her efforts seriously enough.
So there the two of us stand, our noses six inches apart, fighting in the AT&T Pavilion, while the kids run off to God knows where. I’m arguing that we should all just get loose and wander around. She is arguing that you can’t do Disney World that way. You’ve got to have goals, a timetable, a whole strategic plan. You need drive, focus, willpower. This is not a vacation, she seems to be saying; it’s a job.
By 8 o’clock at night, we’re both exhausted. We have to catch the picturesque monorail back to the picturesque hotel, but it’s a long walk to the station, and neither one of us is exactly sure where it is. I’ve been lugging around a cutely decorated bag full of—I don’t know, Mickey’s Whoopie Cushions-for hours, and I just want to go to bed. But we’ve got work to do, more happiness to achieve, great vistas of pleasure to stand in line for. We’ve got to make sure we get our money’s worth for our all-day passes.
I can hardly wait.
Now, I’m not suggesting that a father should not sometimes allow himself to be walked upon (metaphorically speaking) in order to acquaint his children with the world’s pleasures. I’m not suggesting that a family vacation at Disney World (or Six Flags Over Texas, or Dollywood, or Sea World,or Carburetor World, or wherever) is a complete waste of money. What I am suggesting is that, if this is the only sort of vacation you ever allow yourself, you will probably wind up committing suicide before you normally would have.

Posted 26 August 2009 † admin § Seperate Vacation ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: