Are We There Yet?

Are We There Yet?
Vacations, and what we make of them
© Thomas Wilson Shawcross 28 April 2005

Recently, I listened to the writer Sarah Vowell and her twin sister Amy as they described a vacation they took along the “Trail of Tears” route. In 1838-1839, some of their Cherokee ancestors had taken this forced march. (source: “Trail of Tears” 7/3/98 Episode 107 from http://www.thislife.org/). Sarah and Amy tell an interesting story, but it was a side comment of theirs, a throw away line really, that inspired me to write this story about vacations.

Sarah (or maybe Amy, they sound so much alike) remarked that there was a name for the type of vacation they were taking – it was called “Heritage Travel.” These can be long trips, such as the one they took, or maybe on the Lewis and Clark expedition route or along Civil War battlefield trails, and there can be short trips, such as taking a ferry to Alcatraz to see Al Capone’s prison cell (my son Michael and I have done that one).

But Heritage Travel is only one of the many types of vacations that people can take. There are sporting vacations (golf, tennis, etc.), spa vacations, cruise vacations, camping/hiking vacations, and I don’t know how many others. When I was a younger boy than I am now, our family vacation was either: 1. Driving to see something that was really far from St. Louis (Yellowstone National Park, Mount Rushmore, Montreal), or 2. Driving someplace really far from St. Louis to see Aunt Dorothy and her family (Corpus Christi, Mobile, Virginia Beach).

Thinking about these vacations, I began to wonder what other families did on their vacations. So, I called my brother Jim Shawcross. Jim says that his family takes “away from” and “go to” vacations. When they can no longer take the Ohio winter, they take a vacation to get “away from” it. The “away from” vacation usually means flying to Florida to play golf. In the summer, they take a “go to” vacation, in which they go to a place that interests them. This has included such “go to” places as Boston, Las Vegas, and San Diego.

There is one type of vacation that I never hear anyone mention, and it is one that I especially enjoy taking. It embodies elements of “go to” and elements of “heritage” travel, but it is too esoteric to qualify as “heritage.” I call it “Emily Carr” vacationing. I took my first one in the autumn of 1975.

In January of 1975, I had moved to the Detroit, Michigan area from Evansville, Indiana (where I had resided for two years, three months, and nine days). One of the nice things that can be said about Detroit is that it gets great reception of the Canadian television stations. Windsor, Canada is located on the opposite shore of the Detroit River. Ok, technically, it is not a river. The Detroit River is actually a strait between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. The early French settlers of the Detroit-Windsor area seem to have been aware of this, and Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac went so far as to name the settlement “Ville d’Etroit,” which is French for “City of the Strait.” But, subsequent English-speaking settlers (who will not be named here, for obvious reasons) decided to call the city Detroit, decided it was on a river, and decided to make things even with Antoine by naming a car after him.

So anyway, one evening in Detroit, I decided to take a break from my writing, engineering, and philanthropic work and watch television. I turned on a documentary about Emily Carr, the Canadian painter and writer. Since Emily had lived outside of the USA, it was the first time I had ever heard of her, of course. I was intrigued. She was an amazing person, and I liked her art. I tuned in the next night to see part two of the documentary, and the more I learned of her eccentric life style, of her dogs and monkeys, of her paintings of nearly lost Native American totem poles and of the scenery of British Columbia, and finally, of her exquisite writing, the more I wanted to know.

“Well,” (I said to myself, I can still recall my exact word) “ I have never been to the Pacific Northwest, so maybe now is the time!” Emily Carr had lived in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, and some of her paintings were there still. Others could be seen in a museum in the city of Vancouver. To prepare for my vacation, I read some Emily Carr books and looked at pictures of her paintings. I decided to spend a few days in Seattle too, since I would be flying there to start the vacation.

Oh, this turned out to be a great vacation! I saw everything I had planned to see, including the paintings Emily had made on the ceiling of her attic in Victoria, and I saw lots of things I had not even known about prior to the vacation, such as Pike Market, underground Seattle in Pioneer Square, Stanley Park, Gas Town, Butchart Gardens, and the Empress Hotel in Victoria. It was in the Empress Hotel that I saw my first Jade Tree (it was five feet tall!), and it was there that I had my first scones (while sitting on a camelback couch in the lobby and enjoying a “high tea”).

Seeing where Emily Carr had lived and worked helped me connect to her better. As an homage to Emily Carr, I am including an image of one of her paintings and an excerpt from one of her stories:



Emily Carr, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1935), oil, 112 x 68,9 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

Here is an excerpt from Klee Wyck. It is the beginning of Chapter 15:

Juice

It was unbelievably hot. We three women came out of the store each
eating a juicy pear. There was ten cents' express on every pound
of freight that came up the Cariboo road. Fruit weighs heavy.
Everything came in by mule-train.

The first bite into those Bartletts was intoxicating. The juice
met your teeth with a gush.

I was considering the most advantageous spot to set my bite next when I saw Doctor Cabbage's eye over the top of my pear, feasting on the fruit with unquenched longing.

I was on the store step, so I could look right into his eyes. They
were dry and filmed. The skin of his hands and face was shriveled,
his clothes nothing but a bunch of tatters hanging on a dry stick.
I believe the wind could have tossed him like a dead leaf, and that
nothing juicy had ever happened in Doctor Cabbage's life.

"Is it a good apple?"

After he had asked, his dry tongue made a slow trip across his lips
and went back into his mouth hotter and dryer for thinking of the
fruit.

"Would you like it?"

A gleam burst through his filmed eyes. He drew the hot air into
his throat with a gasp, held his hand out for the pear and then
took a deep greedy bite beside mine.

The juice trickled down his chin--his tongue jumped out and caught
it; he sipped the oozing juice from the holes our bites had made.
He licked the drops running down the rind, then with his eyes still
on the pear, he held it out for me to take back.

"No, it's all yours."

"Me eat him every bit?"

"Yes."

His eyes squinted at the fruit as if he could not quite believe
his ears and that all the pear in his hands belonged to him. Then
he took bite after bite, rolling each bite slowly round his mouth,
catching every drop of juice with loud suckings. He ate the core.
He ate the tail, and ticked his fingers over and over like a cat.

"Hyas Klosshe (very good)," he said, and trotted up the hill as
though his joints had been oiled.

Since taking my first “Emily Carr” vacation, I have taken many others, albeit not with Emily Carr in mind. I have been to the favorite haunts of Robert Benchley, in New York and Los Angeles. I have retraced Van Gogh’s steps in Auvers-sur-Oise. I have even traced the routes of fictional characters, such as Sam Spade. The reward is making the connection between someone or something that I have only read about and then experiencing it first-hand.

Oddly, the first time I experienced this connection was in 1969, in the borough of Manhattan. I had arrived for a job interview with Shell Oil. At one point, the taxi I was in drove past Lindy’s restaurant. I had heard of Lindy’s pastrami sandwiches and its legendary cheesecakes! And there it was! That made a huge impression on me. I guess I had never expected to see Lindy’s. I suppose I had never expected to be in New York, as my world-view then was biased heavily toward cities that had National League baseball teams. I never really expected to visit American League cities. How things were to change for me! I was later to have a pastrami sandwich and a cheesecake there. I was later to learn that there were several Lindy’s restaurant locations in NYC, and I was later to work in Manhattan many times. But it was then and there that I felt the spark that would lead to “Emily Carr” vacations.