28. Vacation Rehab

Who do you become out of your home?

Hi! At the end of this month I’m going on a cross country road trip to transport myself and my things to my new home in California. I’ll send out daily essayettes along the way—we’ll call them Notes from the Road—and these will be for paying subscribers only. If you’d like to follow along, consider upgrading to a paid subscription for $5/month.

Growing up, when my family traveled, it was to visit other family. Our relatives were scattered around the country—California, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Florida, while we were stationed in Massachusetts, and later, Indiana. 

Any one of these trips felt like an ordeal, my parents waking us early and wrangling two sleepy children into the car or plane. (It was right before a cross country flight from Hartford to San Jose that I decided, at 20 months, that I no longer wanted to wear a diaper and was ready for “big girl underwear.” My mother allowed it, and through sheer force of will I made it the 3,000 miles to California without an accident. We were a pair of tiny cotton undies away from a catastrophic flight.)

Once we arrived to see our extended family, the “vacations” mostly consisted of hanging out. We didn’t structure our days around many activities; the point of the trip was the company. My sister and I were imaginative enough to create our own entertainments (we constructed fairy houses in the backyard in Sioux Falls, bathed and dressed the poodles for a beauty pageant in San Jose), and we loved our families, looked forward to seeing them. But what I wanted, what I still want, was a trip that disrupted the stasis of our lives. I wanted to travel somewhere and discover that my parents were actually adventure people—they had been the whole time! I just didn’t know it. 

Instead, we were exactly who we already were on these trips. Sometimes, we weren’t even our best selves. The visits drained my parents of their inner resources to execute any additional travel. In time, I noticed that when my friends took trips, their destinations were not the homes of their extended families. They went to beaches. Hiked trails. Posed by landmarks, buildings, ruins of another era. Hearing about these vacations, and later seeing them as I came of age alongside social media, I began to understand that the vacation I craved happened in the open air.

Camping wasn’t an option for my family; my parents each had their own health problems that made it impossible. I learned to camp instead with my Girl Scout troop in Lincoln State Park, near the Ohio River that snakes between Indiana and Kentucky. My troop leader, previously my sixth grade teacher, Miss Cerwinske, taught me how to pitch a tent, make a cake over a flame, and smoke a tick out of my armpit with just a match. I’d never viewed her as an adventure person, but here she was, exchanging her classroom heels for hiking boots and selling me on the entire experience of camping and who it might turn me into. 

After my short stint as a Girl Scout, I spent a week each summer in high school camping with my cross country team in the Indiana Dunes. We’d run in the morning, spend the day lazing on the shores of Lake Michigan, then traipse back to the campground for an evening run. Our coaches wouldn’t pay for showers, so after dinner we’d sneak off in pairs to the RV campground and stand in line to rinse off the day’s sweat, bug spray, and sunscreen. At the end of the week, a yellow school bus drove us back to Bloomington, where my parents picked me up, exhausted and bronzed from a week of sun, my legs covered in open, weeping mosquito bites. It was everything I wanted: a vacation that calcified my character as adventurous and able, stoic and strong. 

I wanted that experience for my entire family. I wanted them to want it too, for us to be a group of four operating as one wilderness unit: backpacking gear and fire starting skills and know-how and efficiency. I held some resentment that this wasn’t us, but the fact that my parents couldn’t camp complicated my feelings: my family wasn’t intentionally withholding this outdoor adventure from me, it just wasn’t possible. 

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A few weeks ago, when my sister Anna and I found ourselves with a rare, lazy slice of summer between obligations, we leapt at the opportunity to go to Maine’s Acadia National Park. It felt like the perfect vacation, the natural world’s antidote to the State of Things: off the grid and unpoisoned, one breathtaking view after another restoring in us the belief in beauty and good. 

Anna had never been camping before, and I wanted the whole experience to feel different from how our family trips often felt. I wanted decisiveness and activity. I wanted direction dammit! We pointed the nose of the car northeast and drove up the coast of Maine toward Acadia, leaving the family trips of our youth in the rearview mirror. 

We arrived at our campground and set up tent, then headed off on our first hike. Within our first few steps, Anna joked, “Let the rehabilitation vacation commence!” Over three days, we walked along craggy ocean cliffs, scrambled up rocky mountain faces, pissed on the side of the trail, drove up switchbacks to watch the sunset from the highest point in the park, and sank our teeth into endless PB&Js. 

We were obligationless. Weightless. We owed nothing to the world.

Despite my utopian intentions, familial dysfunction crept in. On the first night, we got in the car to leave the summit of Cadillac Mountain (the highest peak in the park) before the sun fully set, my sister and I both saying to each other that we didn’t need to see the sunset, that it was fine! We were fine! Then, sheepish, we admitted we really did want to watch it, and got back out of the car to witness the sun sinking into a molten crack in the horizon. On the second day, the skies opened in the afternoon, and we squabbled over what to do with our lost time in the rain, directing damp frustration at each other. On our last day, we couldn’t make up our minds about what hike to do, whether to attempt the challenging Precipice Trail (what I wanted but wouldn’t articulate) or embark on a more approachable climb without the exposed cliff faces with iron handholds drilled into sheer granite walls (what I thought my sister wanted). I refused to express my opinion but felt annoyed at the thought of compromising on my dream, until I finally admitted what I wanted, and we drove to the Precipice trailhead, only to discover that the hike was closed for falcon nesting. Regrouping, we climbed to the top of Pemetic Mountain and looked out over a brilliant panoramic view of the Park. 

I had high (yet undefined) expectations going into the test of our mettle. I wanted the vacation to show me who I was, to show me that I was not my parents. I’d already seen that camping could unlock dimensions of someone’s personality: Persnickety Miss Cerwinske turned into an adventure person before my eyes. I’d seen myself gain more independence through exposure to nature and its shifting requirements. I felt capable in the dirt, resourceful outside the land of convenience. But this trip was less about proving myself as an outdoorswoman and more about drawing on my inner resources. And it wasn’t about differentiating myself from my parents so much as modeling their ability to make any situation work, to occupy myself no matter the environment I found myself in. It was not a vacation to rehabilitate myself from the vacations of my youth but to rehabilitate how I understood myself.

I have spent so much time deferring and waiting. For the National Parks trips that won’t happen. For the invitation from someone more organized and more experienced. For my hopes to be realized without my having to ask. But now I am asking. My sister and I made this trip happen. We knew what we wanted and we stopped waiting. We pulled ourselves up by iron rungs drilled into slippery pink granite, held our breath along the sheer cliff faces, and then turned around to look over Mount Desert Island, its magnificent landscape of volcanic ash rising up from the sea floor. 

Fortnightly Faves

1. This Gawker article “Do We Really Want Cis Men to Speak Up About Abortion?” that illustrates the problems with expecting activism to be performed on the internet.

2. This comic by Shing Yin Khor for Catapult.

3. This punchy, thought-provoking essay by Brock Colyar on pronouns for The Cut.

4. This read on the death of the smart city and what an alternative urban Eden could look like.

5. A Vermont Maple Creemee. Dessert of the summer. Wish we had ‘em in Boston.