Ode to Vacations

There is a great deal to be said for vacations, even when you don’t vacate the premises. In fact, I am smack in the middle of enjoying just such a vacation right now. I am away from the office for two weeks, and I am at home.

Not that I have always stayed at home. I have taken vacations with my wife and, when they were younger, with our children in a number of fine places. The mountains in Colorado. A resort in the Dominican Republic. A weeklong tour of California. All were wonderful exercises in concentrating on something other than one’s livelihood, kicking back (or forward), trying out new scenery.

But when people asked where I was going this year, I explained that, having completed no fewer than 14 business trips so far this year, I felt no impulse to go anywhere. A staycation is a chance to explore your own backyard, not necessarily taken entirely literally but including your own neighborhood, your own community, and noticing many of the things that escape your attention on a day-to-day basis.

Various writers have extolled the merits of sinking deeper roots in the places where we already live, some perhaps taking it to extremes, others simply recognizing that in a world where travel has become progressively faster and easier, we too quickly breeze by the things we ought to notice on a daily basis. Ray Bradbury once wrote of his annoyance at a Los Angeles police officer who questioned why he was taking a walk late at night. For Bradbury, such walks were a chance to observe the community and space around him. Ralph Waldo Emerson commented on how he had traveled widely, “and all of it in Concord,” the town he called home. He was plying a theme also familiar to his close friend, Henry David Thoreau. And about 20 years ago, in Staying Put, Indiana author Scott Russell Sanders described the value of learning about one’s immediate surroundings.

It is all wonderful advice, I am sure, and for two weeks I am adhering to it, somewhat. But it has also not escaped my attention that some people can be closely tied to their own neighborhood or immediate surroundings and gain no more understanding of them than if they had flown around the world. It takes a certain dedication to observing, querying, wanting to understand, to learn anew, to probe details, in order to gain the value from what Emerson, Bradbury, and Sanders are advocating, each in his own unique way. In my own hurried life of late, I cannot claim to notice nearly as much about my immediate community of interest as I might like, despite trying. But maybe that is why one more trip did not appeal to me.

Staying put has its merits. I may find out what sort of crabapple tree sits in my own front yard, so that my wife, after all these years, can turn its fruit into some sort of pie. I’ll let you know when I find out.

 

Jim Schwab

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