There's been a delay in the planned blog revamp here (our IT man, my fellow central Pennsylvanian Tino, is out sick), so I'll just get back to posting for the time being. Here's a little vacation review, and I'll put up something on L.A. (remember that?) in a couple hours.
Do summer vacations mean something a little different to people who live in New York? They’re more eye-opening—and potentially traumatic. First, we see things that we never see, shocking things. Hedges, for example. Telephone poles. Bird-feeders. Stars. Grass. Teenagers. Second, we get into cars.
Last week I ventured out of the urban jungle in something called a Dodge Caliber. What caliber wasn’t stated, but I’m guessing that the consensus among enlightened drivers would be low. It was a light-blue oval hatchback with its fair share of blind spots and dubious acceleration. But you’re talking to someone who drives less than five times a year and who was blown away by the Ford Focus three years ago. This time, when the guy at the local rental agency described the Caliber as “something like a Ford Focus,” I cut him off and said, “Yeah, perfect.”
You get the picture—to get behind the wheel of a car, any car, is a luxury. This wasn’t always the case. I once owned a car in the city. There were a few high points to the experience that you couldn’t get many other places. One was driving across the Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge, after hours of soul-crushing Clear Channel pop radio, and tuning in Columbia University’s jazz station at the end of the dial. The city made more sense with its mysterious, propulsive native music squalling around me. On one of these drives, Bobby Humphrey’s rare-groove classic “Harlem River Drive” began just as I was turning onto, yes, the Harlem River Drive. How many other places can you hear a song about the road that you happen to be driving on at that moment? Still, the highlights of Big Apple auto culture are few and far between—mostly it consists of moving your car back and forth across the street twice a week to avoid parking tickets.
So having a car for a week seems like the right amount of time. I drove it on Long Island, to a shoreside hamlet near the dreaded Hamptons. This is obviously known as a glamorous destination, but what you end up actually confronting when you’re there is almost exclusively blue collar: landscapers in the back of pick-ups, kids scrubbing at the car wash, vans with the phone number of the local plumber written on the side. Mansions pop up now and then in the distance, like monstrous, isolated barns built for humans instead of cows. Again, the highlight of the drive was the chance to play music. Something about hurtling yourself forward in a small, enclosed space makes listening to anything a more intense experience. Last week that experience came courtesy of a Guided by Voices mix I hadn’t dug up in years. Their catchy, beery, midwestern, basement-pop masterpieces took me back to a 1990s indie-rock heyday I had no idea I missed. By the end of the CD I decided that while some people may choose to go to famous cities or deluxe resorts for a vacation, I couldn’t imagine anything better than heading down the Long Island Expressway in a light-blue Dodge Caliber at 67 m.p.h (in a 65 zone) and blaring GBV’s nonsensical, immortal “Hardcore UFOs.”
After that, my purpose was straightforward: to sit in a chair on the beach. I planned to obtain the ultimate leisure symbol: tan feet. (5 nights at an inn: $600; rental car: $300; tan feet: priceless). The one flaw in this plan, of course, is that it’s contingent on the sun not going behind a cloud. This happened for approximately half my trip. Total contentment or soul-searching boredom, the sky held my fate in its random hands for a week. But who expects a vacation to be relaxing?
When I left the beach, I was struck by the small-town atmosphere this semi-resort town has maintained, even as its home prices head into the multi-millions. Every bartender knew every customer, and quickly found out where “everyone” was going that night. For a person like myself who left the community of a small town for the anonymous ambition of a big city, this is like a life left behind, a road not chosen—and usually it strikes me as the better, more enjoyable road. As I drove out of town on my last evening, I passed a softball field where a game was being played under the lights. At the side of the field was a good-looking black-haired young woman laughing at something or someone I couldn’t see. A nice small-town image to go home with, right? Except that, as I looked at her and the scene in the rear-view mirror, a wave of terrible frustration came over me. Is there ever a time when a man doesn’t want, irrationally, to meet every pretty girl he sees? Is there ever a time when we stop wishing that we could have lived more than one life, in more than one place?
Ah well, it was just a summer vacation, when we get to leave our chosen lives behind for a week. Too bad we can't leave ourselves behind as well.