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Photo Credit: Kyrylo Chelnokov

By Ezra Dyer

Once upon a time, I knew how to take a vacation. Spring break, senior year of college, I was a leisure expert. For a solid week, I sat on the beach, slept ’til noon and did my part to bolster the share price of the Bacardi company. I had no schedule. I definitely had no goals. My only accomplishment: the discovery that a pair of empty Heineken mini-kegs could be strapped to my arms and used as makeshift swimmies in the pool. That was important work, but it happened by accident, like the discovery of penicillin and Kate Gosselin’s career.

My definition of a great vacation is that you’re depressed when it ends. It’s like the phenomenon of Sunday depression (which arrives on the tail end of a great weekend) but more intense. After that spring break, I was bummed out. After my honeymoon: bummed out. After my weeklong vacation on the Cape this past month: sort of relieved.

This was my first full week away in four years, so I was ready for some serious relaxation. I fit a week’s apparel in a carry-on. If I ran out of clothes, I just wouldn’t wear any. The house we rented had a hammock. I planned to get so relaxed that tree sloths would climb into the hammock and check my pulse.

Except that somewhere between college and your early 30s, the definition of a vacation seems to change. Instead of doing as little as possible, vacations turn into a contest to see how many activities can be crammed into a single day. I guess the idea is to wring as much fun as possible out of a limited amount of time, and that’s a normal impulse. But over a week on the Cape, there was only one day when I didn’t get up before dawn. And if you’re waking up to an alarm—never mind before sunrise—then you’re doing vacation wrong.

It sounds churlish to whine about golfing and fishing, but I fail to understand why these activities need to be undertaken at first light. Especially golf. At least with fishing, there’s a primitive sense of adventure when you’re heading out into shark-infested waters to do battle with the fanged monsters of the deep. There’s a purpose to that, and if you’re bad at it, you can at least blame the fish. But golf? I suppose there’s a thrill to sneaking your cooler of beer past the ranger, but you can do that in the afternoon, too. So why arrive at the unholy hour of 6:30 am?

The rationale, as I kept hearing it, was that when you get up that early, you finish early and have the whole rest of the day. The whole rest of the day to do what, is the question. And the answer is: more activities. You’re definitely not getting into that hammock.

Which is OK, actually, because I’ve come to the conclusion that hammocks are ridiculous devices. Whenever you have a hammock, chances are you’ll also have access to a bed. And if hammocks were more comfortable than beds, we’d all sleep in hammocks every night, and mattresses would be relegated to Corona commercials and beachfront resorts.

We rented a great house in Chatham, but even that aggravated me on some level. When you’re in college, you cram so many human beings into a rental that you’ve got people sleeping on the couches, on the lawn, inside the chimney—and as a consequence, everyone pays $5.64 for the week and you don’t really think about the total outlay. When you’re a grownup, you actually start doing the math and realizing what insane money the homeowners are making over the summer. Then you get resentful and jealous. At least, I do.

The healthy perspective would be to say, “Well, I’m really fortunate to be able to rent this place for a week,” but I am a shallow and covetous person. I don’t want to just visit for a week. I want to stay there all summer, complaining about the riffraff as I sip a martini on the third deck of my yacht, The Condescender.

I realize that complaining about a vacation is asinine. But I’m really just being self-critical about my own approach to leisure. When we arrived at the house, I saw that the prior tenants had left their schedule on the bulletin board. And I made fun of it not just because it was deeply hokey—stuff like, “Muffy and Wormington will give a presentation on their trip to Myrtle Beach”—but because of the very idea of making a schedule for a vacation. But on most days, their only listed activity was “happy hour.” Perhaps at some point, you need a schedule to tell you that you have no schedule.