Vacation Hangover (the good kind)

If there's a good kind of hangover, this is it. The dreamy, all's right with the world sort of hangover that comes from a great vacation, not too much work, and living in a place where anything seems possible.

I haven't had too much work since I got back from my break, and that has been the greatest contributor to my unusually positive outlook on life these past few weeks. (Well, that, plus going for a run a couple times a week, probably. Exercise: It Works!)

Tonight I walked home from work at around 9 pm, and saw people spilling out of bars, sitting outside restaurants, and I felt that sense of romance about New York -- about life, really -- that I felt when I was younger and greener and less bitter. That boy with the English accent sitting on that bar stool, laughing with that black woman in athletic gear; that French restaurant full of patrons drinking and eating; that tall, thin man in the apartment directly across the street from me, taking out his garbage; that woman walking with a slice of pizza on a paper plate; that doorman staring out into the street -- I wonder about each of them: Who are you? What brought you here? How do you feel and how do you live? What dreams do you have, and will they come true? Will they break? Have they already been broken? Have you?

Romance! It's so much more than love between two people. So much more than flowers, or wining and dining, or the multi-thousand dollar platinum and diamond engagement ring that a co-worker of mine just bought for his soon-to-be fiancée. It's that feeling that everything and everyone is a story full of joy, tragedy, rapture, suffering, heroism, adventure, each waiting to be discovered and treasured.

Yesterday, man plummeted past Camp Bella’s window and met his death 9 stories below, just a few hours before I came over to see the newest addition to Camp Bella, little 9-month-old Bellito. He had almost undoubtedly jumped, since the windows in Camp Bella’s building are next to impossible to fall out of. Mr. Bella heard a wail after the body hit the ground, a wail that rendered the silence and then stopped. What unbearable anguish was extinguished by that fall? And what terrible, silent anguish began with it?

After meeting Bellito, I went on to see another newborn, the first son of another college friend, and after paying the usual kind of homage that an infant and its parents require, I walked through Central Park, that Vaux and Olmstead marvel. The Central Park Dance Skaters Association was having a fundraiser, selling CDs and t-shirts as association members, most sporting four-wheeled rollerskates rather than the more modern in-line version, skated and danced around skate-less dozens boogying to the club music pumping out of the middle of a fenced off area. A man dressed in a Batman costume did the white guy shuffle. Men, women, black, white, gay, straight, skated round and round -- in pairs, in fours, while balancing a water bottle on the head, spinning, executing crossovers, graceful and not so graceful, being watched by at least a hundred non-skating passers-by.

Half an hour later, I moved on and found myself walking down the Mall, the grand promenade in the heart of Central Park, the location of hundreds of movie scenes. Shielded from the sun by the elm trees bordering each side, a young woman in a pastel dress sat alone on one of the benches along the path, concentrating on her flashcards. In front of a statue of the now-obscure poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, a curly-haired young man plucked the strings of his bass while a black man in a shabby brown suit quavered through an equally shabby sax rendition of the Miles classic So What. Sir Walter Scott looked down sadly as his dog tried to solace him. A young boy beat three bongos frenetically as his father (?) played guitar behind him.

Faint with hunger, I moved on and out of the Park, but not before passing by the Dairy, originally intended to sell milk at reasonable prices to children, and the Lake, and the carousel, in operation since 1871.

Life! Death! Possibilities! History fore and aft, directing all activity and being created by it at the same time. This is the New York one dreams of living in, the city where everyone and everything has a story pulsing just below the surface.

There and back again

The first day, I thought I'd made a mistake. I had expected to hurt in a lot of places. But my arches? My flipping arches? Somewhere in the early afternoon, in the 6th hour of hauling 42 pounds on my back up and down dusty mountain trails, I thought, "Oh god. Is it going to be like this every day?"

But by the third day, the pack was a little lighter. My quads were steelier. I figured out that on the trail, food wasn't food, it was fuel, and that I needed it about every 2 hours. I stopped thinking I should check my Blackberry when I woke up and when we stopped for breaks on the trail. In fact, I stopped thinking about anything that wasn't before me, and began to think like this: "Now I'm breaking camp. Now I'm eating food. Now I'm putting on my pack. Now I'm walking. And walking. And walking. Now I'm drinking water. Now I'm setting up the tent." Very zen.

And the scenery got lovelier and lovelier. We would start hiking around 8 each morning, get to our next camp by early afternoon, which always involved an alpine lake. Almost everyone went swimming (even me!) in the afternoon after we made camp. Then the kitchen crew would set up for dinner, and after the meal, we'd watch the sun set from some perch above camp.

The thought of being disconnected from all media and forms of communications had made me somewhat anxious in the week before I left for vacation, but after a few days, I didn't give it a second thought. When Double M and I were driving back, I felt like we had stepped outside of time. We could have been gone a day or a year, there was no way to tell. It was the most refreshing thing EVER. I felt totally at peace. Things -- heck, life! -- were going to work out. Whatever came up, I would handle when it came. And I would be able to handle it just fine.

The zen feeling lasted a few days, until the second day I was back at work. Then it went away.

Well, at least I have some pretty pictures to look at. And the next vacation to look forward to.

Buck Lake, where we stayed the second night on the trail:


Emigrant Lake, where we stayed for two nights. I believe this is the scene from my preferred cathole location at that campsite. Catholes were the topic of more than one conversation on the trip, it being a leave-no-trace kinda deal. There was a 15-year-old boy on the trip, and one of the few times he voluntarily and animatedly spoke was when he described his fantastic cathole, which he had dug in a place where he apparently had a magnificent view. It wouldn't occur to me to aim for that, but having accidentally done just that, I could sort of see why.

The REI Calendar shot: Double M looking at the sunset over Emigrant Lake:


Another REI calendar shot: me climbing up a rock face on our day hike to Frazier Lakes, which most of the participants went on during our layover day.


Hikers! The day trippers look over the incredible view of Shallow Lakes:


A lady lawyer (not me), considers Shallow Lakes:


The clean, clear waters of Frazier Lakes:


An arty shot of two dead trees:


The sunset on our last night. The little people below are the members of a lovely Swiss-German family living in Tennessee whom I wanted to marry. All five of them. The kids were the smartest, politest, non-complaining-est, cutest, funniest kids I've ever met. I want them to adopt me.
Cowbells rang faintly in the valley below, which we walked through the next day. The cows were less than happy to see us. But the Swiss-German-Tennessean family's Swiss friend, Regi, went into raptures. Turns out that when she was 20, she lived on the farm of a cousin in France and took care of about 50 cows, whom she grew to love. There's something charmingly surreal about walking through a lush green valley by a herd of cows, with a Swiss ice climber rhapsodizing about cows she has known.
The valley at sunset seemed like the kind of place you would expect to find elves and unicorns. It was sublime. Talk about being disconnected! This is the only reality worth being connected to.
(308/730)