Vacation From

We are home from a weekend of camping.  We left around noon on Friday and returned home around 6pm on Sunday.  Not a very long vacation by most standards, but it felt like we had been gone for a long, long time.  I was the first one into the house, and stepping into the laundry/mud room, usually a cramped place that torments me with its constant dirt and piles of shoes, I felt like I was stepping into the height of sterility and extravagance.  After dinner, I was so very excited to take a shower (!!) and to sleep on a bed with cotton sheets in a temperature-controlled room.  The sign of a good vacation, I thought: it makes you feel better about being home.   Deep, grateful sigh.

And then I paused.  Because it occurred to me that there is another kind of vacation:  in this world of well-off suburbia there is vacation from and vacation to.  There are people who vacation to all-inclusive resorts, where you pay for someone else to do the cooking and cleaning, where the towels are washed every day for you, where there are vast pools or hot tubs, even next to the ocean.  Where there is a menu selection for every meal that isn’t an all-you-can-eat buffet.  Where Disney characters entertain your children while you sip an adult beverage.  Where the women are evenly tanned and wear mascara and expensively casual sandals.  Where you lie around all day and drink all night.  Or so I’ve heard.  There are probably more luxuries associated with those sorts of vacations that I haven’t heard about.  I have no first-hand experience. 

Suddenly, it struck me as strange that I have no first-hand experience with such a vacation.  I strained my memory to come up with something that might qualify as staying in the lap of luxury, and I couldn’t come up with anything.  As a child, vacation almost always consisted of a trip to a cabin in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.  The cabin had a small kitchen with antiquated and only questionably functional appliances: the toaster, for example, was a metal pyramid you could lean bread against and set over the burner on the stove.  And no, I am not 95 years old.  There was a similarly perfunctory bathroom with a mostly-functioning toilet and small shower.  There was one bedroom large enough for two double beds, one sleeping space short of what was needed for the five of us, so one lucky person got to sleep on the sofa in the kitchen.  We fought over that privilege because it meant not sleeping within feet of both parents, one that snores, and in the same bed with a sister.  The floor was always rather dingy and gritty with sand; the bathroom floor was always wet.  And there you have it: vacation.  We were near a lake, so we considered ourselves lucky. 

We did take a couple of trips to Ocean City during my teen years.  We did not stay in one of the fancy high-rise hotels with complimentary towels and beach umbrellas and drink services (and, strangely enough, pools.)  We rented a little condo a block or two from the ocean and used the public beach.  We packed sandwiches for lunch and hauled everything down to the beach for the day.  We sometimes went out for dinner.  We’d walk along the shore at dusk or go for ice cream.  It was, in my mind, all-out heaven.

Since then, my tastes for vacation have become increasingly more far-flung and adventurous: scuba diving in the Florida Keys, kayaking and hiking in national parks in Oregon and Washington and Colorado and Maine. The Galapagos Islands. Montreal and Quebec.  Death Valley.  Never once, even on our honeymoon, did we stay in a fancy-schmancy hotel.  We’ve stayed in some lovely places, clean and in great locations.  In particular, I love a hotel near a hot-spring, even if it’s so unmodern as not to have telephones or televisions or internet hook-up.  We have stayed in hotels we never saw in daylight, so the existence of pools and tennis courts and movie channels was not only unknown but irrelevant.

Since having children, our destinations have been closer to home, usually a rented condo or small cabin near a big lake.  And since having a child with multiple food allergies, our vacations have not even included much dining out.  Since last year’s job loss and ensuing examination of expenses, our vacations have been further reduced to $15 per night campsites in state parks.  And so….

Vacation, now, so far from the luxury hotel with impressive pool, involves multiple days in a row of sweating and getting muddy and bug spray and no showers.  The food is what we can make over a wood fire.  If a piece of it falls into the dirt, we consider for a moment whether or not we should eat it.  (We almost never do.  I am still me, after all.)  We use one small towel for all four us, shaking out the bugs and tree pollen between uses.  Gretchen’s hair did not get brushed between the time I put it in ponytails Friday morning and the time I took it out of the ponytails for her bath Sunday night.  Adam asked if he could wear the same shirt to bed he had worn all day and then wear it again the following day.  I considered for a moment and declared that if he really wanted to, why not?  I have been known to do that while camping.  We spend all day every day outside, and our schedule is reduced to one or two activities per day: a hike, a canoe ride, an hour or two of fishing. 

Considering this and contrasting it in my mind with what I imagine other family vacation are probably like, for a moment I was jealous.  I will admit that I thought I wouldn’t mind a bit of luxury.  But then I really tried to imagine myself lying beside a pool all day, caring that my bathing suit is faded and was purchased at Dick’s Sporting Goods some years ago, going to a fancy dinner and being late because I have to tame my hair.  And you know?  I can’t imagine that I would be any happier doing that.  At least, not after a day or two.  Because what I really love about camping is the shift that happens in myself and in my family.

When we are camping, I think we revert back to our best selves.  At home, I am furious that I have to spend my time cleaning up after other people, scrubbing mildew out of showers and trying to keep the house in a state that I imagine a house like mine ought to be kept.  My day is a series of interruptions.  I forget how to have fun, and I get bogged down with all of the stuff that hasn’t gotten done and never will get done.  I’ll confess that sometimes I run just to get away from the person I am when I’m not running.  When we are camping, though, I don’t worry if my hair is messy or my clothes are dirty or sweaty, and I really don’t worry that my shoes are unfashionable.  Nothing I do is weird.  In a campground, anything goes.  When there is a moment of downtime, I pick up my book.   While a child is napping and the other is playing a card game with my husband, I have nothing to do but read, and I do so without guilt, feeling, even as I get pelted with acorns from squirrels in the trees above, even as I swat away flies, even as I keep moving my collapsible chair to stay in the shade, that I am living a life of decadence and luxury.  Heaven.  We take walks to the toilet, and, if we are in a really deluxe campground, longer walks to the sinks and showers.  While we are camping, my husband is in charge, and when a plate of hot food is set before me (yes, I will admit that one of the perks of being vegetarian is that my tolerance is nevermore tested by choking down semi-thawed naked chicken nuggets,) I am truly grateful and appreciative.  When we roast s’mores, I don’t keep count of how many I’ve had.   Instead of trying to be in control of what everyone eats, how they are spending their time, and how much food has been dropped on the newly cleaned floor during the course of a meal, I deal with the genuine crises (bugs on dinner plates, scraped knees, bathroom emergencies, sudden rainstorms) and let the rest of what happens just happen.   The closer I am to the dirt, the less I worry about the dirt.  The scruffier we look, the less I care about appearances.  The less there is, the less I need.   When there is no schedule, interruptions never bother me.   While camping, life slows down and distills to its basic elements: eating, trips to the toilet, avoiding poison ivy, being still, being out in the real world: the heat, the rain, the bugs, the darkness.

I’m not saying that if someone offered me the chance to try out some luxury, I would turn it down.  But I don’t believe it’s a thing I will ever prioritize.  Even offered free luxury, I can’t envision myself enjoying it much more than a day or two.  I hope to camp in increasingly more interesting places: places out west, places up north, places with mountains and geysers and canyons.  I am yearning to travel and see the world that is out there and not visible from my Midwestern suburb.  I want to hike up to the top of creation and back.  I want to bump into elk and sea lions.  But given that neither free time nor money is abundant enough to squander, I don’t foresee myself ever valuing the accommodations over the nature.  I want to vacation to more places than I can possibly get to in a lifetime, but more importantly, I want to vacation from the person I sometimes become living in the midst of a shiny, clean, and well-decorated suburb.  Let’s be honest: it’s not really vacation if you have to worry about your hair.