Vacationland

by John Hodgman

  She taught me that the world would continue without me. And eventually I learned that lesson. It took some time. It’s a tough one for an only child to absorb.

  Everything is cliché. Her death taught me that life is short.

  When I kissed her head and smelled her scalp one time, near the end of spring and the beginning of summer, she was delusional. She comforted me. “Thank you for visiting me,” she said. “Lie down. Get some rest. This is your vacation.”

  A Little Beyond the Limits of Safe Travel

  If you have not driven with a small boat trailer attached to your Jeep, this is what it is like. It is easy when you are driving forward. You get used to the extra weight quickly, and you just drive along. The only problem is that it is easy to forget what you are doing. Then you take a turn and you can see in your side-view mirror that you are being followed by some kind of ghost boat that is floating above the road, and you shriek.

  Driving backward with the trailer is not easy. Steering in reverse is already an unnatural act requiring years of brain-scarring experience to feel anything close to instinctive and unterrifying. But now you are also pushing a long aluminum trailer full of peapod behind you, and it is doing the exact opposite of everything you have learned. If you steer right, it goes left. If you line it up perfectly with where you are trying to push it—say the gravelly slope of the landing at the boatyard—and you begin backing up, it veers off to the right due either to tiny micro-angles between the trailer and your hitch or the fact that trailers are inherently assholes. If you attempt to recorrect your course, the laws of physics change. This actually happens: all of natural law reverses and suddenly your peapod is beside you, jackknifed in the boatyard parking lot.

  In this scenario, the boatyard is closed for the day, so the parking lot is empty. But there are two men standing at the edge of the parking area, at the foot of the long dock that leads out to the harbor beyond. You don’t know this yet—you have never spoken to either of them—but one of them is the owner of the boatyard. He is the son of the famous boat designer who started the boatyard. He is also the grandson of the famous writer. The other is his coworker.

  They had been watching ominous clouds over the harbor at the end of the day. But now they are watching you try to do something that not only have you never done before, but you have never really seen done. Your best guess is that you are supposed to line up this trailer with the landing, and push the trailer and the boat tied onto it deep into high tide, where your wife waits now to receive it. You have to get the whole trailer into the ocean without also getting your car in the ocean. You have to do this while being watched by two men who make boats and launch boats of every kind and size and have done so probably for one thousand years, because they are immortal maritime gods, and you are a dumb Icarus whose wax wings are melting under their gaze in their parking lot. Even without the context of this specific scenario, backing a trailer with a small boat on it into the water feels like this.

  The owner of the boatyard and his coworker watched placidly as I jackknifed the trailer a second time, and then a third. Their faces showed neither alarm, nor derision, nor care. They didn’t offer to help me. They would never help me. My failure in front of their stone faces would be my punishment for being from away. I despaired. But then I remembered the lesson of the cairns and did something very unusual for me. I stopped steering, rolled down my window, and said out loud, “I do not know what I’m doing.”

  Their faces immediately broke. I would not say they broke into smiles, but into a kind of neutral living warmth they could deploy or reserve at will, like androids coming out of sleep mode. “We’ll help,” they said.

  I had misunderstood them completely. They weren’t punishing me by not helping, they were respecting my privacy by letting me fuck up on my own. But now that I asked for help, the maritime gods came to my aid.

  The coworker didn’t take over for me, but showed me how to adjust the wheel properly. The owner of the boatyard monitored my descent to the sea, calling out course corrections, guiding me to my wife, who was waiting like a siren in the tide. But at the end of the maneuver, perhaps sensing the erotic metaphoric charge for which the sea is known, they left us to each other.

  As I backed into the landing, I felt my back and neck press into the seat, as gravity shifted, as the sky filled up my windshield. Behind me, unseen, my wife released the boat from the trailer as I mashed the clutch and brake flat to the floor in prayerful neutral. Then she said, “OK,” and I eased up on the clutch and released the emergency brake while gassing it gently into first to begin the climb back to land. I don’t know how to launch a boat, but I will brag forever about my skill with a manual transmission. I towed the wet skeleton of the unburdened trailer off to a remote corner of the parking area and kicked it.

  My wife had rowed the peapod to the dock. When I joined her, her eyes blazed with thrill. She told me that while she was tying up the peapod in the dinghy pen, the owner of the boatyard came by and showed her a new way to tie a bowline knot. I did not know what any of this meant.

  “Don’t you know how to tie a, uh . . . that knot?” I asked.

  “Not well enough!” she said.

  It is hard to overstate the disbelief and embarrassment but redeeming excitement my wife felt about this. Imagine meeting the most famous movie star you can think of. Now imagine having dinner with that person. Now imagine that person telling you about the time he went to a Scientology party. Imagine that person explaining he saw a Scientologist attempt to cure another partygoer’s injured knee with a “touch assist.” And when you are confused about what that means, imagine that person demonstrating a Scientology touch assist on your wife. Imagine that person touching your wife’s shoulder and saying, “Can you feel this?” and your wife saying, “Yes,” and that person saying, “Thank you.” Then that person is touching your wife’s arm and saying, “Can you feel this?” and your wife is saying, “Yes,” and the most famous movie star says, “Thank you.”

  Well, I don’t have to imagine this scenario because IT HAPPENED TO ME. My friend Sarah invited us to a play featuring one of Sarah’s friends, who happens to be one of the most famous movie stars, and afterward we all went out to dinner, and then the star of many of my favorite movies SCIENTOLOGY-TOUCHED MY WIFE ALL OVER AS I WATCHED, AND IT WAS AMAZING. That is how surreal it was for my wife to get an impromptu knots course from the owner of the boatyard, the son of a famous boat designer, and the grandson of her favorite writer.

  We could not go far in the peapod. It wasn’t designed for distance, but it didn’t matter. Things were different on the water. Where Massachusetts had been my land and Maine, at least the land part, had been hers, the ocean and the little shelter islands that we could reach as our rowing arms grew stronger were new and neutral territory. I would stand up in the boat—because you really could do that . . . you really could break that rule, because the peapod would not tip or fail you—and I would scan the shore. Maine may be full of ambiguities, and its sky full of shades of gray. But it can also be blunt, and sometimes its metaphors can be a little on the nose. So I regret that I must write: I literally had a new point of view.

  A typical outing would be to a little island, only a few oar strokes from shore. We would beach the peapod for a moment so that our children could get out. They would go off exploring on their own. You could walk the whole perimeter of the island in an hour, just strolling. But even when your children are older and have demonstrated common sense and physical and emotional resiliency due to your really incredible, award-worthy parenting, you still feel a pang of panic when they leave your sight. I would watch them disappear behind the trees as the shoreline curved off to the right, where they would scamper on slick wet rocks or fall or drown or meet an ill-intentioned stranger or whatever their fate might be.

  And then my wife would also leave me, taking the peapod out on a solo row, following her deep, genetic Maine blood–c
alling to the ocean and misanthropy. I would watch her then disappear as the island curved around to my left, rowing her boat, utterly alone, the happiest I’ve ever seen her.

  They would leave me on the beach, an only child once more, and I would take off my shirt and go swimming. By the end of that summer I had started swimming pretty frequently in the waters of Maine. I would not say that I learned to enjoy it. Even in August, when the water is at its warmest, it is still cold. But I did enjoy learning to endure it.

  There are transitions in life whether we want them or not. You get older. You lose jobs and loves and people. The story of your life may change dramatically, tragically, or so quietly you don’t even notice. It’s never any fun, but it can’t be avoided. Sometimes you just have to walk into the cold dark water of the unfamiliar and suffer for a while. You have to go slow, breathe, don’t stop, get your head under, and then wait. And soon you get used to it. Soon the pain is gone and you have forgotten it because you are swimming, way out here where it’s hard and where you were scared to go, swimming sleekly through the new. That’s the gift of a Maine vacation: you survive it.

  And in that sense, Maine itself is a metaphor. This is great news for me, because it means that I am technically not a Maine humorist after all. I am a metaphor humorist. And this is also great news for you, because if you get everything you need to from the metaphor, you don’t actually have to go to Maine. And this is finally great news for me again, because I don’t want to see you there. The spirit of Maine has infected me. I gave you your goddamned wood. Now get the fuck out of here.

  The End

  ~

  Yippee

  The first winter I spent in Maine, I was attacked by a barn door. There is a reason people write horror stories set in Maine where bad things happen quickly and sentient barn doors thirst for your blood. It is not full of vampires like I thought (an original idea that only I have ever had), but it is still dangerous and haunted and empty. I have been as far north as Calais, but that is still on the coast. There is a world of dark inland forest beyond that, what one of our year-round neighbors has explored and named a “great disappearing emptiness.” And in the winter even the coast feels underpopulated, a dark dream version of what you remember from the summer. The creepiness comes from that quiet, from the gray pall of the sky, from the fog called sea smoke, clinging to the surface of the reach on winter mornings, from the sad stories that sneak out from the shadows.

  It was last Christmas, the second year we owned the house. We decided to brave December there and we had conned Jonathan and Christine and their family into visiting us. When they arrived, snow had fallen fast and thick and our driveway was now an ice bowl. I was shoveling out a path across it, from our house to the garage.

  I told you that our house was built to look like it was two hundred years old by a carpenter with missing fingers on his right hand. He also built the garage. Upstairs in the garage was the tidy, modern mother-in-law apartment where the carpenter and his wife had lived when they were building the house, and where we now installed Jonathan and his family. Downstairs was once his workshop. The abandoned outlets and ventilation tubes still stick out of the concrete floor where they once connected to the saws he used to mill the lumber to build the house with his own one-and-a-half hands. True to his fake antique vision the garage was built to look like an old barn, with a great swinging barn door. It latched on the outside with a thick wrought-iron hook that curled to a sharp black point.

  I also told you that the carpenter and his wife built this house to grow old in, and I told you that they changed their mind. I didn’t tell you why, but it wasn’t a secret. When we walked through the house with him after the closing, the carpenter told the story with the sort of calm of someone who has processed deep loss. He explained that their daughter’s fiancé had died while visiting them in Maine a couple of years before.

  We were passing from the master bedroom to the upstairs bathroom. It was March, but we could still see snow on the ground through the window on the landing. My wife and I passed a moment of silent, wide-eyed marital telepathy. Did the fiancé die in the house? It was ghoulish to ask, and we don’t believe in ghosts. But how could we live here without knowing?

  But sensing our worry the carpenter reassured us that in fact it all happened far away from here. He explained that his daughter’s fiancé drowned on a camping trip. He didn’t go into the details. Life did not just end for the fiancé; it was transformed for all of them, from happy vacation to unbearable sadness in one queasy, sad second. We understood.

  After that, he explained, their daughter didn’t want to come to Maine anymore. She couldn’t. So they were going to start over again, in a new old house—this one actually old, in another state in New England. After we completed the final walk-through we said good-bye in the kitchen. The carpenter handed us the keys. “We were hoping you would be the ones who bought our house,” they said. “You were meant for it.” They were very sweet, but it still sounded like a horror movie to me.

  Of course the house was not haunted. But as soon as we bought it, the barn-garage seemed to hunger for me. I had already had bad collisions with the electrical outlets in the old workshop. They grow out of the floor, metal boxes blooming on tubular stems, at odd angles. My ankles would keep catching the corners of them. One bit a crescent gash into me that didn’t bleed, but also never quite seemed to heal, leaving a scar that looks like a purple, crooked smile. I dodged them again now as I put the snow shovel away and walked back outside. I was tired out and sweating beneath my winter jacket, but the path back to the house was straight and clean, and I felt good about it. I was just about to close the barn door, but the wind did it for me. It whistle-shrieked in the woods across the road, and I turned to listen to it, and then the door blew hard against me, impaling the wrought-iron hook into my forearm, just below the elbow. It went straight through my jacket.

  You know when an injury is serious the second it happens. Like when you are stabbed in the arm while standing alone in cold air that carries the happy sounds of your family and friends across the frozen driveway to you. And you know you cannot get to them until you unattach yourself from this barn door. But even then you also pretend that it’s fine. You don’t want to admit that it’s serious. You don’t want to admit that the next step is to pull the meat of your body off this iron hook, because who knows what will happen after that?

  I did it. The hook made a slight sucking sound as I lifted my arm off it. I felt a warm oozing wetness begin to blossom down my arm. I casually fast-walked along the path, into the house, past my family and the warm fire and into the bathroom where I could take off my jacket in private and see what I had done to myself. Surprisingly my arm was not gushing blood. It was another of the barn-garage’s uncanny mystery wounds: a deep, fingerprint-sized hole burrowed into my flesh; I could see muscle and fat where the skin pulled back. But out of it emerged just a slow ooze of reddish lymph. I poured hydrogen peroxide on it and applied pressure until it seemed to slow and added several Band-Aids.

  “It’s funny,” I said when I emerged. “The barn door attacked me with its iron hook! But it’s not serious! Ha ha, Happy New Year, I’m fine!” I thought I was.

  Jonathan said, “I have my SUV. I bet I could drive you to the doctor.”

  I said that would not be necessary. “But,” I said, “don’t we need gin and milk? Let’s go to the supermarket!” My brain must have really thought that I was fine and that driving through snowy roads in the increasing dark was really NO BIG DEAL, because we let my daughter come with us.

  It is normally a twenty-five-minute drive to the supermarket. Jonathan was driving half speed as new snow began to fall. Finally, my brain gave up its plan to convince my body that everything was fine. I said quietly to Jonathan, “You know what? My sleeve is now full of pus. Would you mind taking me to the hospital?”

  “I thought so,” said Jonathan.

  He
dropped me off at the ER of the local hospital. It’s a good one, small but modern, with a water view. In his later years, the famous writer would sometimes check himself in there for a little rest and attention. And he died there. I insisted that Jonathan not wait for me but instead backtrack to the supermarket. “Get the milk!” I commanded. “Get the gin!”

  The ER waiting room was empty. I could not find anyone to see me. Finally a man swam forward from behind a glass panel and took down my name and insurance information. He told me I was lucky: they weren’t very busy that night. In fact, as far as I could tell, I was the evening’s only patient. He pointed to the hallway and suggested I walk down it. I did so. I went through one set of doors to another waiting room. Nobody. I was not sure what to do. It was scary. Were there rusty wheelchairs tipped over at the end of the hall? Bedpans full of blood on empty stretchers? Did the fluorescent lights hum and flicker ominously? No. It’s a very well-maintained little hospital. But wandering around an abandoned hospital in the middle of a snowstorm while pressing your palm onto your oozing arm-hole was enough to set the horror-movie mood. It felt like I was the last person on Earth. Finally, I thought to myself.

  But then they collected me: the nurses and physicians’ assistants who probably had given up on the night. They emerged from various swinging doors and smiled when they saw that I was not some child with cancer or a man who had opened his face on the kick of his chain saw. This middle-aged dumb dad with a puncture would just be a welcome distraction on a winter night. Not something that would keep them awake for the rest of their lives.

  A female nurse in scrubs beamed at me as she inspected my arm-hole. “Yep!” she said. “That’s a pretty good laceration!” She seemed excited about it.