The Comfort Food of Travel

by

Sheila Curran

Have you ever noticed that at certain upscale dinner parties, the word travel is uttered reverently, with italics? As with anything quasi-spiritual, degree of difficulty matters. Places like Rome and Paris are so last decade. Now, any explorer worth her salt will wax nostalgic about the monkeys in Bali, the markets in Quito, or the variety in the Amazon Rain Forest.

In such circles, daring to admit you don’t love to travel is like confessing you enjoy macaroni and cheese from the box. Such declarations have a way of implicating not only the hosts’ cuisine, but also her guests’ joie di vivre, their intellectual tenor, and their general willingness to navigate cross-cultural waters.

It’s one thing to ruin a perfectly good candlelit dinner with such pronouncements; another entirely to unpack one’s aversions in the privacy of the printed page. When all is said and done, the point is this. Travel is most enriching when it provides you a taste of what you miss most in your daily life. For some, this might be adventure. For others, ahem, what we miss most might be the very opposite of that.

I can see the allure of exotic locales when your life is so predictable it makes your head hurt. Quite a different cup of chai for those of us unsure where our next consulting gig will land us. Nowadays, we juggle two-career marriages, hideously elastic deadlines with inscrutable expectations, children we wish were predictable, and a nostalgic yearning for the comfort of our own bed linens.

Beyond the uncertainty of postmodern economics, there’s the fact that for many of us, the sight of a moving truck can trigger Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Take it from someone who’s had fifteen home towns: the trouble with moving is not the difficulty of making new friends; it’s the resigned sadness of leaving the old.

A Refuge for the Overly Mobile Soul

For people like myself, who’ve been stretched enough, thank you very much, I recommend the comfort food of travel, otherwise known as reconnecting with family and friends in a place one knows and adores. For my extended family, it’s the beach. For others it may be a mountain cabin, dude ranch, lake house, or even an urban timeshare. What’s important to this tonic is its familiarity, its absence of difficulty, yes, even its exceptional sameness, year after year.

Accidental Tourists: Accidental Traditions

Twenty years ago, my siblings and I stumbled on a tradition we’ve carried on since. Though we didn’t know it at the time, our journey to a North Carolina beach hamlet would have an immeasurable impact on our futures, forming a solidifying and

soothing framework, a knitting of souls we’ve found increasingly indispensible.

You see, my brothers and sisters and I were canaries in the mines of the uber-itinerant. As Air Force Brats and then Academic ones, we experienced exceptional mobility early on, envying contemporaries who’d lived in the same town their entire lives. We’d not even spent an entire decade in the same tectonic plate, much less the proverbial cul-de-sac of detached bungalows, mothers ringing dinner bells at seven.

By the time we had reached our child-bearing years, we were spread out across the east coast from Sarasota to the south and New Hampshire to the north. This mini-diaspora, for a tribe which had held tight through the trauma of all those first-days-of-school in all those distinctly unfamiliar places, was harder for us, I think, than for most families. Not only had we moved a lot, but we’d moved together. Having cohabited with nine siblings, we were singularly unequipped for the pleasures of solitude. (Indeed, to this day, when two of us convene, we spend far too much time missing the eight who didn’t come along.)

In 1985, the year we started vacationing together, I felt the separation deeply. I’d recently followed my husband to Charlottesville, Virginia, which, central though it was in my constellation of kin, was too far from anyone else to hop in the car and drive over for a weekend.

Driven by a loneliness of the sort that is enhanced by white wine, I was on the phone with my sister in New Hampshire, bemoaning this fact. Quick to spot a silver lining, she reminded me that I now lived in the South. She and my brothers, on the other hand, were stuck in the Granite State. Did she need to remind me what month it was?

March in New Hampshire – my father is fond of saying -- is what God invented to make sure teetotalers would know how a hangover feels.

One plaint led to another and before we knew it, we’d arrived at a solution to both of our problems. A road trip. She’d bring her boyfriend, her daughter, my brother John. They’d collect my husband and me in Virginia and we’d journey further south. Our destination was the beach, which none of us had seen enough since falling in love with Daytona’s waves during our last Air Force posting, nearly two decades before.

Because we yearned for warmth, we chose the area near Cape Fear, North Carolina, steered there by friends who owned a house in Holden Beach. The way it jutted out on the edge of the state, it caught the jet stream. Better yet, it formed the hypontenuse between Charlottesville and Atlanta, where our younger siblings had recently moved.

Last-minute plans cooked up over late night wine have a way of falling apart. This time -- driven by what I’ve come to see as kismet -- we followed through.

That April, two sisters, two husbands, three brothers and one niece formed our first annual beach pilgrimage. By the time we organized for the next summer, we would include everyone else, our parents, siblings, spouses, children.

From that original troupe of eight, our number has blossomed to forty-five. We all gather now, each June, sharing three adjacent houses in Holden Beach, North Carolina.

Several things make the vacation easy.First, it’s no one’s turf, which is part of its charm. Second, there are no decisions to make about what we do each day. Get up, apply sunblock, swimsuit and shades in that order. Proceed down porch steps to ocean, drape your bones on a sand-chair and enjoy. Third, all the cooking, shopping and cleaning are done by teams of three or four, who gladly trade one day’s catering for six of being waited on. Expeditions depart periodically for golf or tennis or even amusement parks, though there’s no pressure to join in. Indeed, some of us take pride in not stepping foot in a car the whole time we’re there.

At seven, cocktails begin on the back porch, and dinner is served buffet style sooner or later thereafter. Some nights we play charades, others we drift into smaller groups to take walks on the beach, argue politics or read the rest ofour books.

The year my brother Tom was diagnosed with cancer, we threw ourselves into a fierce surf at midnight, pushing back at the nature we felt had betrayed us. Those waves carry so many memories now, from that frenzied night swimming to a sunny morning of Tom’s final year. My brother’s feet were tender from chemo but he took my four-year-old by the hand and led him into the water without a second thought, showing his nephew to trust the waves and all they carried.

Our children, some thirty plus now, have spent every summer here with their cousins. For one week, they are all siblings sharing the same space, forming bonds that – unlike siblings – appear unclouded by rivalry. The eldest of this group, my nephew Kevin, returned last summer with his wife and baby, Erin, the first of her (4^th) generation to swing from the same Johnny Jump-Up as so many before her. At the other end of the spectrum is my father’s cousin three months his senior, Aunt Gigi, who began spending summers with him eighty-three years ago, when they were children, and hasn’t missed a year at the beach since 1990.

Indeed, our return rate is astonishing. For most of us, it’s the one week we wouldn’t trade for the world. We treasure the beach as a place to come back to and reconnect. My father, 86 now, still bodysurfs with the rest of us, forming a string of bathers in the sea who cannot believe their good luck, so many loved ones, all together, connected by the fierce, gentle current. For the homesick members of a spread-out tribe, the solace we have gained from returning to a place we do not own cannot be calculated, not in all the grains of sand, nor ocean drops so deep.

And thus, I find, after all is said and done, I have turned into one of those annoying guests whose voice drops an octave, whose hushed deference is just slightly too much, when I wax nostalgic about travel. After all, it’s made my family who we were, and allowed us, too, to become one.

Sheila Curran’s novel, Diana Lively is Falling Down, will be published by Penguin in July, 2005, just in time to take to the beach.