Midsummer

Every year when I'm in Colorado, I have to remind myself: It's like this because you're on vacation.

It wouldn't be like this every day if you lived here, I tell myself. You wouldn't spend hours sitting on the patio admiring the flower beds that the condo's groundskeeper plants and tends, and you wouldn't spend hours more hiking or biking or walking along the walking trails. You're doing that because you're on vacation. If you lived here, you'd do laundry and shop for groceries and plan meals and return emails and go to the dry cleaner (where is the dry cleaner in this town, anyway? I don't think I know. In 40 years of vacationing here, I've never taken anything to be dry-cleaned. That's because I don't wear anything when I'm here that requires dry-cleaning). You'd undergo dental procedures and host family events and volunteer to be a room parent in the kids' classrooms.

The fact that I do none of that in Colorado is, of course, what makes it vacation. Which is why it's so hard to leave once our two-week stay is up.

But this time, before leaving, I resolved to take a little bit of vacation home with me. Not just a sprig of fragrant sagebrush from the side of the jogging path, or a t-shirt with a witty message about life in the mountains, or the less welcome pile of credit card receipts from our various dinners out, since a big part of us being on vacation is me declaring a sabbatical from my usual daily meal-planning responsibilities.

This time, I'm taking vacation mindset home with me.

In part, this is due to the calendar dates. We often travel toward the end of the summer. By the time we get home most years, the date on the calendar dictates that it's time for me to start thinking about school supply lists and room parent responsibilites for the upcoming year. And in general, I like finishing our summer travels and knowing it's time to get back to real life with the looming approach of my favorite season, fall.

This year, circumstances were such that we vacationed at the beginning of the summer, less than a week after school ended for the kids. It felt wonderful to wrap up my graduation-planning responsibilities, wash out the kids' lunchboxes for the last time, and start packing.....but it also meant that we returned with the whole rest of the summer looming before us, and no more travel plans at all.

Which is what motivated me to be proactive about continuing to make it a vacation. I thought about all that I liked best about being in Colorado for the past two weeks. The family time. The abundant time outdoors. The fact that I was more lenient with my diet and never stepped on the scale. Getting to sleep beyond my usual weekday 5:10 a.m. alarm. Devoting much more time to reading than I normally do. 

I can do that, I told myself. Those are all things I can take home with me, just as easily as sagebrush or t-shirts.

So now I'm home but determined to keep making summer a vacation. Yes, I'm back at work, with piles of deadlines looming, interviews to conduct, research to implement. But it's also mid-July. So I'm being lenient with my diet. And taking walks after dinner. And reading novels instead of the New York Times. And reverting to last summer's standard of cutting back to one blog entry a week instead of my usual two.

It was a great trip, but there are still nearly two months left before the kids go back to school, and I'm determined to make the most of it. We may be far from the Rockies, but we're in New England, with beaches to visit, ponds to swim in, and smaller mountains to climb. I'll work around my deadlines and refuse to lose sight of the fact that summer continues even if I have no more airline tickets to redeem. 

And I'll even avoid wearing clothes that need to be dry-cleaned. Because if I've gone forty years without needing a dry cleaner in Aspen, I can surely go seven more weeks without one at home.

Cabinet contents

I write a lot about running, parenting, farm life, my community, and writing itself. You could say those are my leitmotifs. In fact, I’m pretty sure the bio on my website does say those are my leitmotifs.

What I don’t think I’ve ever written about is medicine cabinets. But there’s a first time for everything.

I’m not interested in medicine cabinets in the aggregate; just one specific medicine cabinet. My family doesn’t really understand this particular hang-up of mine, but the one medicine cabinet that occupies far too much of my attention is the one in the guest bathroom at my parents’ vacation home.

You see, once a year I clean it out. No one else in my family understands why I consider this such an important job. It’s not that they don’t appreciate my work; they just really don’t see why I make such a big deal out of it.

But the reason is this: I’m the only family member who ever looks in that medicine cabinet, and every time I do, I experience a wave of frustration.

When each adult couple in our family – my parents, my older sister and her husband; my younger sister and her husband; or my husband and me – stay in the vacation house, we use the master bedroom, because it never happens that more than one of those couples is vacationing at the same time. (This isn’t so much a coincidence as by decree of one of the aforementioned family member, but that’s another story.) We don’t use the guest bedroom and bath; our occasional guests do. So it’s one of the only places in the house that we never have any reason to inspect.

Twice in recent years, though, I’ve ended up staying in the guest room: once because I was vacationing all alone and it felt weird to use the master bedroom by myself, and then last week because my mother and I went on vacation together. And that’s why this topic is my pet peeve and no one else’s.

My mother and I have discussed more than once the proper way to furnish a guest bathroom. I believe it’s appropriate to have a supply of shampoo and conditioner (a very all-purpose kind: no highlight-preserving, gray-reducing, fine-hair-amplifying or curl-relaxing) along with a fresh bar of soap. My mother, who is in every way an exceedingly generous person and an unfailingly gracious hostess, agrees about the soap but maintains that everyone has an individual hair care preference (along the lines of the options mentioned above) and therefore likely travels with their own products.

Either way, what frustrates me is the accumulation of health and beauty products that guests leave behind. These same guests wouldn't think of leaving a full wastebasket or a dirty tub; they do this presumably in the belief that they are being generous to the next visitor. Well, I want to say as I grind my teeth, you’re wrong. Take your toiletries with you, please. No one wants to use someone else’s organic lipstick, toddler vitamins, menthol shaving gel, herbal sleeping remedies, peach pit facial masque, all-natural baby shampoo, or cuticle strengthener, to name just a few of the items I’ve disposed of in the cleaning blitzes I regularly make on that cabinet. Hostess gifts? Great idea. Half-used allergy remedies? Thanks anyway.

I’ve just vacated the premises, so the cabinet is once again down to its bare essentials. I apologize if any future guests arrive hoping against hope that they’ll find a nail extension or two waiting for them in the bathroom. But as far as I’m concerned, guest bathrooms are like camping areas: If you bring it in when you arrive, take it out when you leave.

Of course, not everyone is going to follow this rule, so maybe the truth is that I need to chill a little bit and not make such a big deal of it. Happily, some previous guest left a bottle of organic stress-relieving drops in the cabinet. Before I throw it away, I’ll give it a try.

Returning home

I left Aspen at 9 a.m. yesterday morning and didn’t arrive home until well after midnight – this is because it takes about five hours to travel from Aspen to Denver using ground transportation, and the ground shuttles run only three times a day, so I had a long wait before my flight in Denver – but it was a good way to wrap up the trip. Flight days always make me think about what lies ahead and I find myself setting goals and contemplating decisions almost as if it’s a variation on New Year’s Day.

Sometimes this makes sense based on the calendar – today, for example, is the last day of school for the kids, so it’s somewhat logical to be thinking about what I want to have happen during the upcoming ten weeks of vacation – but even when there isn’t a particularly good reason to feel like I’m making a new beginning of sorts, that’s how traveling home usually feels to me, because being away from home is always a little bit like hitting the “reset” button. It’s a chance to take a break from ingrained habits and get out of ruts and think about what to do differently.

In this case, my week in Colorado was so restorative that it’s also a chance to figure out just what about it was so meaningful to me. Mostly, it was a week of immersion in two of my favorite things: literary pursuits and outdoor exercise. I spent just about every morning hiking, biking or walking the trails in and around Aspen, and just about every afternoon listening to authors and other literary professionals discuss the business of writing. I did a lot of my own writing as well, and one of the industry experts I met with even suggested a direction for my work that I hadn’t previously considered.

So I’m returning home with new inspiration for writing, thanks to all the time I spent at conference events, and with a really bad sunburn, thanks to all the time I spent on the hiking and biking trails and the fact that on one crucial day, I didn’t use quite enough sunscreen in quite the right places.

What I accomplished during the week is easier to identify that what I’d like to make happen when I get home, though. So I tried to use my travel day to think about what my hopes were for the long summer that lies ahead.

I’d love to maintain the fitness level that I established during my Colorado week, but that’s hard with the kids and their interests. They don’t like long hikes and bike rides, but I can at least try to get them out for some kind of outdoor exercise every day, or if not every day then at least most days. I’m also trying to rethink some of the commitments that I took on too easily last year and make better decisions about what work assignments and what volunteer roles are right for me, rather than saying yes to everything. Having a weeklong break from housework helped me to renew my commitment to taking good care of our home this summer, and having the same break from cooking gave me new energy to contemplate healthy summer meals for my family.

So I woke this morning at home, grateful for safe travels and a wonderful vacation, and somewhat hesitantly ready to see this time period as a new chapter. An arrival home means a chance to establish new habits, and I think I’m ready to try to make the most of it.

Learned at a writers' conference

Spending five days at a writers’ conference is an irreproducible experience. This was my third visit to the Aspen Summer Words conference, and every year I gain more from the opportunity. Being around hundreds of other writers for hours on end provides insight into the writing process on so many levels. We learn from the professionals about how they reached their current level of success. But from the beginners, we learn anew what it’s like to have endless possibilities ahead. We learn from those writing about everyday life that every experience bears fruit from an artistic perspective, and we learn from those writing about international conflict and political upheaval how much power words can have, when insightfully expressed and disseminated to the right audience.

Last time, I came to this conference with a work in progress and devoted most of my time here to improving that manuscript. This time was different: I don’t have a specific project under way, but in some regards I learned more this time than last because I didn’t have the same laser focus on one piece of work. Instead, I talked about journalism and journaling, about blogging and Tweeting and reading.

I ran into friends from other conferences, and I met people for the first time. Some have accomplished far more than I have as a writer; others were barely ready to put pen to paper. I came away from every informal discussion and panel session feeling like I’d learned something.

As I said at the outset, attending a conference like this is an irreproducible experience. Spending time with other writers is different from gathering in any other group, and that’s not always a good thing. Some writers, in my opinion, spend far too much time discussing the craft and would be better off powering up their laptop and doing some writing. But spending this much time together, regardless of the content covered, affirms our validity. We are writers. Published many times over or never yet in print, confident in our abilities or barely able to read a sentence we’ve written aloud, we’re here because we care so much about self-expression and the written word. And that in itself makes gathering together a wonderful experience.

Kaleidoscope writing

Among the most interesting observations I’ve heard this week at the Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference is this one, from National Book Award winning novelist Colum McCann: “There are no new stories to tell. As writers, we must be kaleidoscopic.”

What a fitting image for the way we writers tell stories, I thought to myself. Kaleidoscopic. You look through a cylinder at a specific object, and you see its colors and approximate form – but it is variegated strangely, and if you turn the cylinder, the colors will change as the shapes will shift. That’s exactly what we do when we tell stories, especially if we are in the genre of day-to-day narrative nonfiction as I am. It’s fair for me to assume that nothing that I write about hasn’t been written about before. Right now there are millions of women writing books, drafting essays and blogging about the same topics I cover: daily life, child-rearing, writing, running, friendships, life lessons. In none of those spheres are my experiences unique, or even unusual. But we each shift the kaleidoscope and watch the pieces break into different shapes, colored in different hues: we each tell the same story a little bit differently.

Sometimes the same story can be told differently even when being told by the same person. When I was growing up, my father told us lots and lots of funny stories about pranks that he and his friends played when they were kids in school, or at camp, or at home. In one of his stories about junior high, a science teacher left the room briefly and all the kids put their heads down on their desks and closed their eyes. When the teacher returned, he thought the students had all passed out, and in his flustered confusion, he flung a chair through a window. I’m quite certain that the way my father told this story amused us when we were young. But years later, I heard him tell the same story with different nuances; in this one he included the detail that the science teacher was a World War II vet, and in this telling it became a disturbing story about a prank gone wrong as the teacher apparently had a post-traumatic stress disorder flashback and thought some kind of chemical had been released into the room and knocked all the kids unconscious, breaking a window out of panic.

The memory has stuck with me for just the reason Colum McCann identified: its shape-shifting, color-changing qualities. Sometimes the same thing happens to me when I remember stories from my own past: something that seemed funny or entertaining at the time becomes unnerving or alarming in retrospect. Lots of my favorite and funniest childhood memories involve glitches in household operations that as a parent myself I now realize were probably sources of frustration rather than amusement to my parents (the way that the Blizzard of ’78 knocked out our electricity for five days, for example).

A simpler way of saying it is just that most of the stories we know vary with perspective. The parable most often used to illustrate this concept is the one in which several blind people describe an elephant, each feeling a different part of the animal. I like McCann’s invocation of the kaleidoscope image, though. I’m exploring the same stories as millions of other writers: stories about children, households, community life, marriage. Shift the kaleidoscope and it’s a little different for each of us, and from there comes the art of narrative.

Biking before writing

I didn’t intend to set a precedent on Monday, but the combination of robust physical exercise in the morning and then attending sessions of the Aspen Writers’ Conference all afternoon worked so well that I did the same thing on Tuesday. Only this time, instead of hiking, I biked through Aspen’s West End onto the bike path and from there out to the Maroon Creek Road. Most bicyclists hit that road with the intention of pedaling all the way to Maroon Lake and the base of the Maroon Bells; I knew I didn’t have the stamina for that entire ride, but I decided to just start riding and see how far I could get given the time, and the strength, that I had.

In that respect, it was similar to Monday’s endeavor. I wasn’t under a tight time crunch, which is a rare situation for me when I’m at home, but that’s typical of being away: the restrictions we put on ourselves when home, and particularly the tight scheduling that tends to lay claim to every minute of the day, doesn’t take hold in quite the same way. I wanted to attend a writers’ panel at 2:30, but I set out on the bike four hours before that, so I knew I’d have time to do all the riding I wanted.

The ride was physically similar to hiking as well: a steady uphill climb, and I took it slow. It was terrain I’d covered many times before, but only by car or bus. Being so exposed, and moving along so slowly as I rode, gave me a close-up view of the river, the meadows, the wildflowers, the rocky red-dirt facades. It’s a restricted access road; the few cars and tour buses that passed me were minutes apart. Plenty of cyclists passed me; they were all on racing bikes with slender tires, pedaling hard and flying along even though they too were heading uphill. I was on a mountain bike not intended for that kind of ride even for someone with more pedaling strength than I have, but it didn’t bother me that other riders flew by. I was happy just to be out biking.

Eventually I looked up the road and saw still more uphill and decided I’d covered enough ground. An hour and a quarter had passed since I’d left town, and I had no particular goal in mind as an endpoint, given that I knew I wasn’t going to reach Maroon Lake. So when it felt like I’d worked as hard as I needed to, I turned around and coasted the same distance, all downhill. That part was easy and gave me even more time to admire the scenery, and also mull over a lot of memories of that valley.

For many decades, my grandparents owned a cabin just uphill from where I’d turned around; when I was growing up we’d have family picnics and occasional sleepovers in the cabin. When we reached our teenage years, sometimes our cousins had parties there and invited us, which was charitable of them: we were from out of town and not of much interest to anyone else attending. One of my cousins was married there, though I realized as I rode that my only memory of his wedding ceremony was having to drive back to the cabin from town with the brother of the groom after it ended because the father of the bride had not shown up at the reception and it was feared he had somehow keeled over while still at the cabin and needed help. (None of this was the case, but the drive with my cousin was an adventure in itself.)

Our family doesn’t own the cabin anymore, but that’s all right; like everyone else who visits this part of Colorado, the whole valley is ours to enjoy as hikers, bicyclists or bus tour riders. My ride back to town was fast and easy, and I arrived in time for a quick dessert stop at the Paradise Bakery before I went to the condo to change clothes and head to the conference center for the afternoon events.

When I sent my husband a photo I’d taken of myself on the bike ride, snow-frosted Maroon Bells in the background, he texted back, “Aren’t you supposed to be studying, not biking?” Not to worry, I told him, the afternoon would be full of educational content. And yet as I thought back on the bike ride with all its similarities to the hike on the previous day, and how I’d pedaled slowly, concentrating only on moving forward and not on how far I would get, absorbing the sounds and sights and smells that surrounded me, welcoming the memories they brought, and letting my own pace rather than external instructions be my guide as far as when to turn back, it occurred to me that maybe the morning had in fact been just as educational as the afternoon.

Hiking before writing

I spent the first four hours or so of the Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference hiking.

I know that seems like a strange way to kick off an intensive week of literary conversations and practice, but somehow it felt exactly right. The schedule of the conference is such this year that the events I want to attend are in the afternoon and evening; my mornings are free. And I should be using those free mornings to work on my own writing. After all, that’s why I’m here.

And yet yesterday, even after an early-morning four-mile run through Aspen’s beautiful North Star Preserve, and after savoring a bagel and coffee while I read both of Aspen’s two daily newspapers, what I really felt like doing was hiking.

That’s not really a way to improve your writing skills or network with other writers, I told myself. It’s not even a way to get any writing done at all. You’re really planning to kick off the annual writers’ conference by hiking?

Well, yes. And it turned out to be a magnificent plan. Indeed, it did not result in my getting any writing done. In fact, quite the opposite. It cleared my mind in a way nothing else does. I don’t get to hike nearly enough, especially on challenging Alpine trails, but whenever I do, I notice this same effect: it seems like when I’m hiking I can’t think about anything else except the climb. I don’t find this with walking or running. As exhilarating as those activities are, they tend to expand my thinking so that I can focus on whatever writing project I’m in the midst of or generate ideas for future projects.

But hiking is different. I find myself concentrating only on putting one foot in front of the other, while I absorb the sensory input of the smells and sounds around me without my making a concerted effort to do so. The dirt, the sagebrush, the birdcalls, the rustling in the brush alongside the hiking trail: all register with my senses even as I don’t focus on them. And my mind seems to empty itself out, almost like a suitcase magically unpacking itself.

In a way, it might have been more productive if I’d been actually writing or doing something that facilitated thoughts about writing, but what this did instead was similar to stretching out before a hard workout. I felt like the strenuousness of the climb and the attention I was devoting to nothing but the trail under my hiking boots was giving me a clean slate with which to start a week of intensive writing.

I stayed on the mountain for four hours, and when I reached the beginning of the trail again, I felt ready to think about writing. So it was a useful discovery: sometimes the best way to commence an activity is with the opposite of that activity. The afternoon featured two interesting panel discussions by various writers, and the evening included a social gathering with other participants at the conference. With my mind cleared, I was ready to start thinking about writing and talking about writing. And, best of all, to start writing, with a level of attention that had missing until the hike was complete.

Aspen Summer Words: Registration submitted, ready to go

This wasn’t my usual type of procrastination. The usual type runs along the lines of “I should do that but I don’t want to do it yet but I ought to just get it done but I’ll get to it soon but just not right now.” This time, it was procrastination more along the lines of putting a Hershey’s chocolate kiss on the kitchen table and telling yourself you won’t eat it quite yet. Not really procrastination at all as much as holding off on a reward until you really feel like you’ve earned it.

I hadn’t earned this one at all, just been lucky enough to stumble into it, but after holding off with my mouth watering, in a figurative manner, for weeks, I finally took a few moments yesterday to submit my registration for the Aspen Summer Words conference.

And in fact, receiving the confirmation was no less pleasurable than the anticipation of looking ahead to registering had been. Assuming all goes as planned and I depart in six weeks for the Aspen Writers Festival summer event, it will be my third time there. And I can’t wait. It’s always an amazing opportunity; I’m still a little bit astounded to think I’m going to experience it yet again.

In general, I’m not a big proponent of writers’ conferences. I get my best writing done sitting at my kitchen table or at the library. When I gave a talk on writing a couple of months ago, one thing I said to the audience was “Don’t tell yourself you’ll write the book once you finally have the chance to spend a month in complete solitude in a windswept cottage on the coast of Maine. Most likely that will never happen, and even if it did, you don’t really need that. Writing at its best should be a regular part of daily life, not something you have to move heaven and hell in order to be able to get done.”

All true, which is why I myself don’t dream of weeks of solitude for writing. But the Aspen conference never lets me down. It’s a full week of conferences, workshops, panels, lectures, and discussions; even better, it’s a week surrounded by other people who love writing. They are writers at all levels: hugely successful novelists, freelancers like me who get paid to write but still believe they have yet to hit their stride, and some who are newcomers to the dream of writing, taking part in the conference as a way to get their very first poems or stories out of their heads and onto paper.

Both times I’ve gone before, I’ve met such a wide variety of people and had so many interesting discussions with them. I’ve learned a lot, too. For me, the best way to hone my writing is to work at it, but I learn other things, separate from the craft of writing, at the conference. I learn about the industry, and new directions in publication. I find out about up-and-coming authors. I hear poetry read aloud. I find out what kinds of experiences other writers have had with first-time publication.

So I consider myself extremely lucky to be planning a return trip this summer. Clicking on the “register” button yesterday filled me with a sense of joyful anticipation. Most of the year, I write in relative solitude; not on a windswept island but at my desk or kitchen table. Once a year, it’s wonderful to spend five days surrounded by colleagues, and so once again, I’m counting down the days ‘til departure.

It's tradition -- or not

Last week, Holly and I went to Staples in Bedford and plowed our way through both kids’ school-supply lists. (Tim wasn’t interested in coming with us.) This afternoon, on our way up to Maine for the weekend, we plan to make a quick stop at Old Navy to buy her a few new school outfits and try to pick out something for Tim as well. (He’ll be with us but says he plans to read in the car. A shopper he’s not.)

This is not how we usually buy our school supplies and fall clothes. Ever since they reached school age, I’ve taken the kids individually for a special late-summer evening excursion. I planned it all out the first time the week before Tim started kindergarten, and we’ve done it that way ever since: we pick a weeknight the week before Labor Day to leave in the early evening for the mall a half-hour a way, buy school supplies, go out for dinner together at Friendly’s, and then continue through the mall to buy some clothes.

It was a tradition. And those have always been sacred words for me.

But as the kids get older, and as I get older, I am beginning to concede that not every tradition has to be carved in stone. This is not an easy admission for me to make. I have often said that I am unusually attracted to traditions, rituals and routines; I like being able to rely on certain habits and events to recur year after year. I love the children’s book Over and Over, in which the little girl goes through a year’s worth of holidays and then at the end says to her mother, “What’s next now?” and her mother says “Now it all starts over again.” That book comforted me when I was a young child looking at the pictures; it comforted me all over again as a parent, when I would read that book to my children and feel reassured that I was creating certain traditions for them as well, including the one related to back-to-school-shopping.

It’s just that at a certain point, I had to admit that tradition wasn’t all that much fun. We always got too late a start at the end of the day and ended up still at the mall at 9 p.m., which I wasn’t happy about. And the mall itself was overwhelming to me. There were office supply stores just as close to home, so I wasn’t sure why it was so important that we go to one a half-hour away. And dinner always took too long compared to the errands we needed to accomplish. Plus, you know…Friendly’s?

So this year we decided to do it differently, breaking the shopping into two separate trips, staying closer to home, going in the afternoon instead of the evening, skipping the dinner part.

Maybe this tradition will turn out even better. There’s something rather romantic about stopping for back-to-school clothes on our way to the coast for Labor Day weekend, after all; much more so than just heading to the department store and then turning around and going home afterwards. And I certainly won’t miss the tuna melt and French fries at Friendly’s.

On the second day of our trip to Colorado last month, we bought tickets to the gondola that ascends Aspen Mountain, just as we do on our second day of our Colorado vacation every year, and once we’d reached the top, the kids stood in line for their turn at bungee jumping, just like they do every year. As always, I enjoyed watching them tumble against the bright blue sky, and they thanked us for the excursion, but none of us got much of a thrill out of it. It just felt like something they’d outgrown.

The next day, we went whitewater rafting. Rick and I had been before, but the kids never had, and initially the plan was for just Rick and Tim to go. We thought Holly was too young and would be scared in the raft. But she watched a video of rafting at the outfitters’ shop and assured us she wanted to do it, so we went. We had an amazing time. Before it was over, the kids announced they absolutely wanted to go rafting next time we’re in Colorado – and do a more challenging course next time.

“Sounds good,” Rick and I told them. “Next time, less gondola; more rafting.”

And I admitted to myself that I’d be fine with skipping the gondola next time. It was great for a few years; now it doesn’t matter to us so much anymore. And the same is true with the back-to-school tradition.

So this afternoon we’ll make a quick stop to pick out some school clothes and then we’ll head to the beach if the weather clears up. Maybe we’ll do that again next year at this time; maybe we’ll do something else. Traditions are wonderful, but so is being able to recognize when it’s time to end an old one and start a new one. Or even try something just once and try something else the next time. Judicious decision-making can be a tradition in its own right. It’s taken me a long time to be comfortable with that idea, but I think I finally get it.

One last Colorado post: Thinking more clearly west of the Continental Divide

One more vacation post before the week ends. (Yes, our vacation was last week, but rather than announce through an open-access blog that my whole family was out of town, I’m posting about it on a one-week delay.) So, one more Aspen post before I return to the realities of Carlisle…a place that at times is also nearly as bucolic as a vacation. But not quite, because home never is.

Aspen, on the other hand, always feels exotic to me, even though I’ve been spending a week or more there almost every summer since I was born. My family vacationed there when I was growing up; now I vacation there with my children. It’s a longstanding tradition.

I still remember how when I was barely older than Holly, I was aware that I felt different there. Specifically, I felt more creative, though I couldn’t have articulated it that way at the age of eight. I remember countless projects undertaken there as I was growing up that I never would have taken on at home. I read epic novels. I wrote dozens of letters to my friends back home, and to just about anyone else I could think of. I wrote poems and plays.

And it wasn’t just me. My mother would do amazing handiwork projects out there: knitting or needlepoint. My elder sister would take on complicated academic challenges like learning an entire year’s worth of AP bio. One summer when I was a teenager, I devoted most of my time to photography and even taught myself darkroom skills using Aspen’s community college facilities.

Once I was old enough to be aware of this phenomenon, it didn’t seem remarkable to me. We spent four weeks at a stretch in Colorado each summer, and I didn’t have any friends or scheduled activities out there. It made plenty of sense to me that I was more focused on creative projects than at home.

But later, in adulthood, when my vacation allotment shrank to only a week at a time, I was surprised to note I still felt more creative when I was there. I still accomplished more writing and reading, and came up with more ideas in general.

To some extent, this happens to almost everyone when leisure travel takes them away from home. In fact, I read an article recently about the appeal of SkyMall, the in-flight shopping catalog that you find on planes, and the article said that one reason those catalogs succeed is that they carry a range of self-help products – everything from exercise equipment to foreign language tapes – and people tend to be more open to the idea of self-improvement when they are traveling. Out of our usual context, many more changes seem possible.

But in more recent years, I’ve begun to suspect there actually is something in the Colorado air that sharpens my mind a little bit. For one thing, the summer climate is drier than in New England. Humidity tends to make people sluggish, which is certainly not ideal for creativity. Just as at home I feel sharper and more productive in October than in August, the dry, sunny, often cool Colorado air makes it easier to think. And there’s a certain scent in the air: wildflowers and sage. There’s even a sound I associate specifically with Aspen nights: the clip-clop of horses, since a horse-drawn wagon passes by our condo every night ferrying tourists around town.

Besides, I know for a fact it’s not just me. Aspen hosts all kinds of creative and intellectual events. It has the yearly Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference, which I attended last year, and also the yearly Aspen Ideas Festival and the Summer Music Festival. One afternoon a couple of years ago, I was running near the conference center just after lunch during the Aspen Ideas Festival. It was apparently a time when a lot of the conference participants take a break; thanks to the oversized laminated name tags they all wear, I eventually determined that within a one-mile stretch of the running path I’d passed a Supreme Court judge, a former secretary of state, three professors who are household names, a university president, and the director of a well-known think tank. It was a cerebral place to be running.

Unlike when I was a child or a teen, I can’t exactly leverage this rich source of creativity for maximum output anymore. When I was sixteen, I could spend hours sitting on a park bench writing; now family needs take precedence, and I’m lucky if I can find an hour a day for creative pursuits. But it happened again last week. I’d brought a reasonable amount of work with me, and to my surprise I did most of it, and I enjoyed the hours I spent working.

For whatever reason, the muses still call louder than ever once I cross the Continental Divide. Maybe it’s the vacation mindset. Maybe it’s the thinner air sharpening my thought process. Maybe it’s entirely the power of suggestion. Whatever the explanation, I try hard to capture as much of the creative spirit as I can while I’m there, and bottle it the only way I know how – with notes and drafts – and bring it home. Back to my real life, it’s not always easy to maintain the creative juices. We can’t be on vacation all the time. So, just as with the other benefits of vacation – relaxation, good exercise habits, more positive personal relationships -- we take the best of what we develop while we’re away and try hard to make it work for us at home.

Take a hike

A few days ago, in the middle of our week in Colorado, the kids and I set out on a hike with my aunt Pat. Taking the kids for a hike was a big deal to me, as they would be the first to tell you. It seems since April or early May, I’ve been nagging them about it: I know you never want to do this at home, but you promise me you’ll try hiking when we’re in Colorado this summer, right? Promise? You’ll try? A short hike?

I know plenty of kids who love hiking. Mine are not among them. I don’t know why, but it’s the proverbial pulling teeth to get them to go for any kind of walk in the wilderness, and when the topic comes up at home, it almost always requires an ice cream bribe to ensure that the event actually takes place. So I didn’t have high hopes for them following through on their word.

But it mattered a lot to me to believe that they would. First of all, it’s just a great activity for kids to discover, but also, it’s one of my favorite leisure time activities, and it became symbolic to me of the idea that this vacation wasn’t going to be all about them. They’ve been to Aspen before, and they can reel off the list of their favorite Aspen options: swimming at the condo pool, playing at the enormous indoor water park in the Aspen Recreation Center, walking to the candy store, riding the gondola up to the top of the mountain for bungee jumping. And all of those options are fine with me, too. It’s not like I was afraid they’d want to watch cable TV all day. But I was apprehensive that the vacation would turn into a catalog of their favorites and none of mine. I was determined that they would give a little time and effort to a couple of things on my Top Ten list.

We set out just before noon. The hike I wanted to do was a fairly level out-and-back beginning from the East Maroon Portal. It winds through groves and meadows and doesn’t have any particular destination; when you’ve had enough, you can turn back, which I thought would give it a distinct advantage over an uphill climb to an apex. Also, the East Maroon Portal can be reached at this time of year only by public transportation, and I suspected that the cachet of taking the bus to the trailhead would please Tim and Holly as well.

We set out, Holly and me slow and falling behind, Tim and Pat faster and chatting as they strode. Within five minutes, Holly started asking when we could stop for our picnic, but this was to be expected. I’d packed a good lunch for them; I wanted them to associate hiking with being well-nourished, not with a sense of fatigue and hunger. So after just twenty minutes, we found a grove with a big flat rock on which to set up our lunch.

And then after we ate, we hiked for another hour. To my surprise, I heard no complaints at all. Nor did I hear any raves about the views of Maroon Bells or the exhilaration of being out exercising in the fresh mountain air. The kids simply walked along, each at their own pace, as if this was what they’d planned to do all along.

I didn’t mind when they asked to turn back, although I could have gone on for hours more. It’s an easy, level trail, but I was surprised by the sense of absorption it gave me. As soon as we started hiking, I felt as if I had been given a pass from everything that was preoccupying me even during this vacation week: work deadlines I’d brought along with me, a big household project awaiting us at home, health concerns within my family. Walking is usually for me a quiet, meditative time to reflect on ongoing concerns, but this wasn’t like that. It was as if walking in the mountains was job enough; no one expected me to be hiking through these meadows and also mulling over my cares and troubles. I could have walked for hours, only because it felt like such an escape. I was…untethered. Electronically, yes – no cell phone signal in the Maroon Creek Valley – but mentally as well. Pleased with how the kids threw themselves into the hike, nothing more was on my mind as we walked.

If you hiked every day, I wondered, would your worries always stay a few steps behind you? Or would you eventually learn to worry and hike at the same time? Surely there must be people who throw themselves too wholeheartedly into hiking or running or some other kind of exertion precisely because of this escape factor, believing if they can preoccupy themselves enough with the challenge of a brisk uphill high-altitude walk, they’ll be immune from ordinary cares indefinitely.

That day, I felt a little like that myself, but soon I began thinking instead of the Robert Frost lines, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.” I would have been happy to walk and walk and walk, if only to see how long it took before the mental realities of real life caught up with me.

But I couldn’t, because after an hour the kids were ready to turn back. And so we did. They didn’t rave about the experience, but they were happy to tell Rick about it when we returned to town, and they enjoyed seeing the photos of them that my aunt took along the trail. I’m hoping they liked it enough to do it again one of these days. I could use another hour or two of mental escape already myself.