They’re fading already—don’t you feel it? Those pricey memories from this summer’s vacation are fuzzing out and soon they will be almost entirely gone. The minute you pay the credit card bill, the brain lobe that remembers pleasure turns its attention elsewhere, and the whole adventure, whatever it was, starts draining of color like a drawer full of snapshots. But that’s okay—vacation is such an embarrassment anyway. What’s tourism but an invitation to wallow in the shallow of another place and time?
And by shallow I mean really shallow. My, the king had fancy armor, and what fun these accents are! How pretty their money is! Why can’t our money look like their money? I wonder what McDonald’s smells like in this foreign country? (Answer: almost exactly like McDonald’s back home. Go figure.) Here’s my theory, then: Vacation is a posh kind of semi-consciousness; it’s a swoon that you put on your credit card.
And the travel books and tourist videos give lessons in how to do it right. They offer systems to organize the experience, whole levels of shallowness. Got an entire day at your destination, the book might ask? Brilliant—you can see any four items on the big list, if you keep moving. Just an afternoon, then? Try a traditional meal at a landmark pub and a short riverboat ride. Two hours? Stroll through the ancient cemetery and check out the gift shop. Only an hour, poor dears? Run in and see the stained glass and the ancient manuscript.
I would turn the page, expecting even shallower suggestions: Got 30 minutes? Listen to a busker strum a few classic pop songs on guitar near a monument of enduring beauty. As little as 10 minutes, is it? Smoke a cigarette beneath the famous rose window and have a passerby snap your picture. Look, we went to England!
And yet, and yet. Vacation starts out as wrong as a rock-hard supermarket peach, but later might offer something hand-picked at the moment of ripeness, if we’re lucky. It depends on whether we notice the clues—and that is all they ever amount to—that accumulate in the best moments of a trip. You sense a way of life, the extremes people have gone to, their skills and their desires. But these are just hints, because their stories have worn away over time like the center of their old stone steps. They dissolve over centuries.
I found a clue at the end of a stone corridor deep in the wings of a great medieval cathedral. There was a stout wooden door, and just a few inches beyond, another heavy door just like it, both ready to seal up the last stretch of corridor. This dead-end room was where the gold and the jewels were kept. Three guards would spend the night in this crypt. They’d lock the inner door to keep robbers out, and the king or his lackey would lock the outer door to keep the guards honest. The nobles trusted their soldiers only so much, and the soldiers prayed that there would be no fire. And this was the clue. They were clever, our ancestors, and suspicious, and grasping, to build that strongbox of a room, to lock men inside it, there in the shadow of the justly famous, the miraculous, the extravagant cathedral. In other words, they were like us. They worked and played hard, they suffered and loved, they lived to us strange yet very recognizable lives. Our ancestors, it turns out, were so human.