Vacation closed

It is almost a relief that my mother takes the blame for selecting these cabins. I gave this as an option, mainly because only a few listings met the qualifications for our rental. She needed her dogs with her, or she could not go on vacation, as had happened with Portland years before (though that house was chosen for its pet-friendliness; she didn't feel up for the long trip with them). It narrowed our options considerably to the degree that only three or four possibilities existed. I do not know what resulted in these cabins winning out, but I cannot fathom that most others would have been worse.

My tendency in general, but specifically on vacation, is to fall into the Rescuer role in the Reenactment Triangle, even when no one asks to be rescued. It is the bane of being the middle child, the designated peacekeeper, the former gifted kid who is still programmed for the approval of adults.

I want to fix this week, but there is no way to do this, even by taking the blame for the misfortune outside our control. Absent the storm, I do not find the cabins that bad. I wouldn't want to stay in them more than a few days, but they are close to a pretty river--though I might lean more on the justification of the bucolic river outside the presence of more comfortable entertainment. Though it is cramped and we cannot lock the door while we sleep--which is a significant security flaw given that I have never truly disabused myself of the idea this is the setting of a horror movie--I appreciate having the Playhouse a space with just Amber. I would not enjoy sleeping in that room with Bryan. Nowhere else was possible in the big cabin. The accommodations are, to put it mildly, imperfect. Still, if we could shower, these might have been a series of minor complaints.

Her fault

I do not blame my mother, though. She could not, with hours to throw out worst-case scenarios, have anticipated it would turn out like this. If she is not to blame, how could I have wanted to martyr myself, and what honest good would that have done?

A week before or a week after, and this would only be the setting for memories, which would be retrospectively pleasant if rocky in the moment. We could have dealt with the piles of mouse feces in the corners. These are cabins in the woods, and the vermin were here first--though I am not quite so forgiving about the housekeepers leaving it there between guests and (I'm guessing) seasons. My parents felt that we always vacationed too late in the summer, at which point it felt that they only had a few weeks before autumn. Without shifting our schedule, we would have had a vacation closer to what we desired and perhaps deserved.

I regret that my mother is going through such travails as her brother's faltering convalescence on this beyond-lackluster vacation. She doesn't seem to have the coping mechanisms to handle them all—and who does? They fall like snow onto her shoulders, and I hold my breath to see which will precipitate the avalanche.

It makes a good backdrop

If put to a vote, a controlling majority of my immediate family would affirm we should have all gone to therapy earlier, and possibly together, if just to learn the strategies and perspectives that would better have allowed us to navigate life--or even a vacation so far from our expectations. We would be happier now, no question. My mother was in therapy for a little while when I was in my early teens. She ended it when Bryan needed to see someone, told her therapist this, and the therapist suggested the possibility of medication without having met him. At the time, I doubt I considered this firing entirely reasonable. In retrospect, considering a low dose of medication as a prerequisite to opening up in therapy would have done him wonders. My mother has said she wished Bryan and I had done heavy drugs as teenagers so we wouldn't need prescribed medication now. Dan, with whom she has a perpetually unsteady relationship, did a fair amount of drugs in his teens and, her implication goes, is mentally better off. After all, he has a massive house and family without a college degree. He certainly has more hair than Bryan or I do, though it is not a clear indication there is a correlation. Years of depression and anxiety may not have improved my follicular robustness.

When we drive to Great Escape Wednesday morning, it is past signs declaring that the road is closed. We do not get far taking a right, the direct path, as dozens of thick, old trees have fallen across the road. The other, longer way is clear enough, but still not without hazards and a need to drive carefully around boughs broken against the road.

Well, an escape, at least

I worry that getting back will be difficult or prevented, but I wonder if this might not be better.

My mother stays at the rental with the dogs. She has never been one for theme parks, much less so now that she is not shepherding her children or grandchildren. What would be the use of buying her a ticket?

Though I am rarely its biggest cheerleader, getting away from the cabins to Great Escape, a place with such rampantly running water that there is a lazy river and wave pool, sounds like a reprieve.

Despite this, but predictably, the rides exhaust me within half an hour. I might have an inner ear condition that does not allow me to enjoy most rides. I'm not scared in the least. I just don't want the nausea that will accompany me if I make the mistake of taking the wrong one. However, I'm satisfied watching from the ground loved ones enjoying them.

I am not an overly proud man, rarely standing on ceremony. When I peek into a shower stall in a bathroom near the water park portion and see a sliver of Ivory soap, I am not pleased that it looks like an opportunity. In any other circumstance, this saponaceous knowledge would make no impression. However, it has been days since I have showered, and I could do with removing the mostly psychological filth better than lingering in the lazy river for three rotations.

We visit the wave pool until they close it so the lifeguards can check for bodies, and then I move us back to the bathroom with that precious soap.

These stalls are for people to come into or out of the water park--we have discourteously not opted for the former, but we are not that grimy--and so my deviance of washing myself with what I am taking to be someone's unwitting kindness is not utterly perverse--I do thoroughly wash the soap before I use it to wash any other part of my body as that seemed to notionally matter. I lather myself and clean as much as I can. It is the most naked I ever imagined being in what feels like a decidedly public place. I come out sopping wet in my swimming clothes but assuaged.

My hair is oddly soft. I wouldn't want to use this soap every day, but it is not the worst shampooing I've ever had.

When I tell my mother of this indignity later, she is jealous that I have managed to get a shower. I do not think she would accept the terms by which this happened. She does not like Great Escape, and the thought of a shower would not have persuaded her otherwise, so it's almost a moot point.

When I take my phone out of power saver mode to check the weather, supposedly looming, an article appears about CrowdStrike, a name I had heard before but which barely registered enough in my mind to justify the alert. I click it and see that computers have been blue-screened, planes are grounded, and the world is otherwise in chaos. At Great Escape, this seems remote, but I feel the strangeness of the world outside this already peculiar trip. The most direct importance right now is whether it will interfere with our getting electricity. I do not have to fly anywhere, so it will not interrupt much. I cannot check the balance on my debit card, but it still spends fine.

I do not love global technology breaking down so soon after an assassination attempt. These are unrelated, but try convincing your uncle of that over Thanksgiving.

My mother expected us back after lunch, and the forecasted rain became too much, or we would have had enough of the park.

Especially absent electricity, we could stand a lot. My mother had no reception--why would she in this horror?--so she had no way to indicate her blistering frustration at being left there alone. Amber suggested when we were at the park that I should have offered to let my mother take my car into town. It was too late to convey this to her--though the keys were just inside our cabin door, it would not be in my mother's nature to presume to take my car.

When we got home, her annoyance was palpable, nearly visible in waves. Technically, we had done nothing wrong, but staying so long at the park nevertheless felt like a betrayal to her.

That would have been forgivable if we had returned to the electricity restored, to my mother playing on her phone or watching television. She is not one for such solitude, for sitting beside the river and considering the pastoral nature of this misfortune. She is a woman in her late sixties who would like sustained comfort on her one annual family vacation.

We seek dinner almost immediately to try to appease how stir-crazy she is. We find restaurant after restaurant beyond capacity because of the widespread blackouts persisting from the storms--we are not rare in our misery, though perhaps in its severity. My family falls to choice paralysis, an "I don't know, whatever you want to do is fine, no, not that, but whatever. Let's drive somewhere else that will be overfilled because of the declared state of emergency." I become sullen and keep trying to make decisions--my habit now whenever I feel indecisiveness is keeping me from something I want, even if it is an unclear something--which helps nothing.

Through sheer dumb luck, we end up in a restaurant in Bolton Landing we have never visited. A cheery waitress seats us by the lake next to a table of boys who are cartoonishly excited by sports of all kinds. The food is some of the best we have had on vacation, though frustration and hunger make fine sauces. My sandwich, a chicken and ham concoction, is amazing. My mother buys one to give to her favorite of the three dogs.

Most of vacationing for my family is finding places to eat, which is never my favorite part of the experience. I like a good meal, don't get me wrong, but I don't want to have my day be searching and planning for that. My family and Amber have grander ambitions than my "Can you give me something that is chicken or fish (not shellfish), and might it not include French fries?" I try to be a bit more diverse, especially on someone else's dime, but my core needs are simple things. When dining with others, the company matters more to me than the dishes, though I am not above irritation when the latter are notably substandard.

My mother wants me to make the week as uncomfortable for the property manager and VRBO as we are. I do not see how it will do any good. The property manager isn't going to do anything for us, something she has made abundantly clear in the few texts I can pull out of her. The property manager states that none of this is her fault or her problem. To admit culpability--which would be simply "sorry you had a bad experience" and not "I am the vacationing-ruining storm sorceress"--would be to give some level of refund. It wouldn't have taken much to appease my mother, but the property manager is pissed off that we would be upset our vacation was harmed. After all, people's houses are damaged. It is the same logic as "You don't like your dinner? There are starving children in Africa/Asia/Appalachia!" To her, we are on our own. Thank you for the thousands of dollars.

As we have stayed in the rental all this time, VRBO isn't going to give us anything back. I feel someone should provide us with something for our suffering, yes, but there is no one on whom I can apply effective pressure. We stayed, expecting we could still have the vacation we hoped for, the one we dreamed about all year. To do otherwise would be to give up.

Still, I call VRBO customer service and explain the situation. They put me on hold for fifteen minutes, then hang up. I plan to revisit this when I return from my anniversary trip.

Burn it down

Amber builds a fire that night with the branches the storms have freed from the trees, which they have collected whenever they take a break from their book. We are all exhausted and barely speak as we watch their task. In other circumstances, I would be at their side, trying to make the fire go, but that's not what Amber wants. They need the experience of making a fire. I take pictures of katydids and Amber building the fire. I don't have much of a role here otherwise.

The fire is Amber's meditation. We sit in silence, watching them flow, sacrificing pine cones for tinder. We are present, but we are not here, distant in our exhausted thoughts that would be perked up at once with a half-hour scrolling social media for the latest hot takes about the world falling apart.

Photogenic

The fire is no glorious thing, no signal to the heavens to affirm that we still exist despite what we have endured (an inability to shower and charge our phones). The fire does all right for roasting s'mores, a delicacy of which I indulge only sparingly as I like the idea more than the execution.

Around the fire, I am filled with the malaise that we have spent our only family vacation with such privation at a luxury rate. There's always that gulf between the expectation and the realization, but this sucks.

Zippy!

Amber urges me from the Playhouse early so we could go to an adventure course, a series of ropes, logs, and ziplines in the woods through which one can gambol. It is the sort of activity I might say I wanted to do but without vigor enough to pursue it. From the road on other trips, I had seen people leaping in the air, but we did not slow to get a better look.

We could have driven to the course in minutes. We found our way blocked at the last two-tenths of a mile, which remained uncleared of trees. It is close enough that I can see the highway we would need, a demeaning distance. I crane my neck around a branch, not leaving my car, to see if I could illicitly navigate between the fallen trees. A firetruck comes behind me, sees the impediments, and spends several minutes turning around. They are not law enforcement and might not care if I attempted it at my own risk, but I opt to spend the next half hour retracing my steps and taking side roads to go what would otherwise be two miles.

After a brief orientation, I am impressed with how quickly I take to the course. It helps that the harnesses never let one be unclipped from a safety line. However, I am not motivated to discover how much more powerful one safety cord is than two. As the guides begged us to hold onto the cords overhead rather than more naturally gripping the harness to which we are attached, it is nothing on which I would care to focus. Amber and I weigh a combined 265 pounds, which is still less than the upper limit for one person. We could manage safely with unwaxed dental floss.

For three courses, I feel I could have a second career skipping between trees seventy feet in the air, assuming someone is hiring for the position. It is so simple and fun, I don't know why it isn't a more popular means of entertainment.

We have access to four courses, however. Though I start decently, my overconfidence misleads me. Amber doesn't suffer much from the increased challenge, which I will chalk up to their being smaller. Surely, this allows them to navigate around impediments better, which is why squirrels have a better time in trees than raccoons.

It only takes slipping from one obstacle, the entirety of my weight in the harness somehow landing on my testicles, before some of the excitement leaves me. However, one cannot allow so minor a setback to sour one entirely. I brave more of the course and recover before a rope hits my face, almost knocking my glasses from my face, which would have meant I had to either whine for a guide to rescue me--nothing I could stomach with a pack of teenage boys impatiently snickering behind us for their turn--or complete the course with blurry vision.

I begin to say as much to the boys as an excuse for slowing their progress, and then another rope hits my face, knocking my glasses through the thick leaves of a tree below me.

Amber asks if I want to give up. I assure them I will manage by looking at their back until we finish.

Shortly after, I slip, my crotch taking the majority of the force again, stealing the breath from my lungs.

A little further on, likely because my body is actively questioning why I put it through this, I do not understand why Amber is saying to choose a side for the swinging logs. My safety cords get wrapped around one. In trying to double back to untangle myself, I fall. A log clubs me in the back of the head. Through vague, throbbing vision, I see one of those model-perfect teenage girls looking at me with the pity I might gift to a nonagenarian hobbling up a staircase.

I crawl to a platform to allow her and her (if I had to hazard a guess) lacrosse team dates to go ahead.

We get to another obstacle, Amber ziplining far ahead. The etiquette is to shout, "All clear!" when one is hooked onto the next safety line and can no longer catch the feet of the next adventurer in the stomach.

Amber stands there, giving some gesture.

I turn to Blonde Model and say, "My glasses fell off some minutes ago. Are they giving me a thumbs up?"

"Yeah," she said with no lack of sympathy.

"Use your words!" I shout across the chasm.

I get to the end feeling more beaten up than I have from any exercise and more grateful to be on solid ground than from any plane landing. I walk to the welcome center and ask the woman behind the counter if there is any way she could help me find my glasses, mentioning that driving will be a trial without them.

She begins to radio asking this, then smiles sweetly and says, "Sure, why not?" She directs me to the small roped-off entrance, where a guide meets us and helps us to where I lost them.

"I already looked," she says, "but you can try."

Even here, the safety harness is necessary. We hook in, traverse a small stream, and then walk past a derelict building covered in black, spooky graffiti about a deer god. I know the setting of a horror movie when I see one. How marvelous the high-wire kills in that film would be.

Amber finds my glasses in under a minute. I put them on, then question if they are actually mine. My head may not be where it should be, which gives me pause, because how someone else could have lost my style of transition glasses with roughly my prescription in precisely the same spot this day does not make sense. Still, we pull up a selfie I had taken to be sure they match. On the way back, over the short safety wire, I fall again, landing hard in my harness. The guide looks on in consternation, but I did sign a waiver.

"Do you have a concussion?" Amber asks.

"As I have never had a concussion before, I don't think so. I doubt I'd know, though. Probably not."

On the drive back to the cabin, I am vexed but not surprised to see that the point-two miles of downed trees have not been chainsawed to dust, adding another half hour of travel where there should have been three minutes.

I cannot imagine inducing my family, particularly my parents, to attempt something like the adventure course. There might have been a time when my father would, but we are a decade removed from that. Bryan would grumble profanity the entire time, if not giving up after the first course, but he would enjoy it if he stuck it out.

Then again, my parents seem flummoxed that Amber and I will walk everywhere on vacation and once climbed Prospect Mountain before lunch. I may have some mutations in my DNA. I have a partner who considers vigorous activity recreation and may not be wrong. At this point, anything that doesn't involve remaining in the stifling cabin is a joy.

When I am in town, I crouch, knees akimbo, to look at something on a low shelf in a store. I rest my hand on my inner thigh, curious at feeling my skin. The adventure course had chewed holes in each leg of my pants, but I did not plummet to my certain death, so I can still mark that as a win.

Amber remembers Million Dollar Beach, being a public beach, has bathrooms with showers. It is an austere affair to be sure (says the person who bathed with strange soap at a theme park), but it must be better than remaining dirty. I text as much to my mother, who has resigned herself to being unhygienic for the next twenty-four hours rather than this indignity. To be fair to her, she would not consider a beach shower markedly better than days without running water.

We should have stayed there.

My parents send Bryan ahead to buy us tickets for our annual boat tour, his contribution to the vacation as tickets to Great Escape were mine. The young lady at the counter rebuffs him, claiming they are booked up for the rest of the day (dubious but possible). He points out they would not let him buy tickets over the phone--"You can only buy them in person"--so he seethes but can do nothing else.

He does not seem too sorry to have missed out on buying them for us, though he makes fifty thousand more a year than I do, lives alone, and travels extensively to geeky and suspect conventions; he would not notice the expense. With how this vacation has turned out, I can cut him slack.

I feel the sting of this. It is tradition, even if I have done it more than twenty times. The lake hasn't changed. I hazard the boat and most to the spiel are likewise fixed in time. Still, among much else in this vacation, I had been looking forward to this in a nearly juvenile way. This week has disappointed. Missing the tour doesn't rank in the top five, but it seems a further insult.

Amber and I wait at Shepherd's Park for the weekly fireworks, listening to spirited but imperfect covers from bands in the pavilion—apparently recently burned to cinders and reconstructed at a noteworthy cost. They scroll vet tech Reddit. I write a draft of this. We had exhausted our interest in the shops days ago and only reaffirmed this today. We want our vacation, but Thursday afternoon is a little late to hope for it.

Soon, we shift to the waterfront to meet my parents ahead of the display. There's a firework behind us, which seems strange. That's not where fireworks are supposed to be. We turn when we hear people issuing oohs and ahhs, realizing people have turned toward Fort William Henry, where a ship amasses in two-dimensional lights. The drones then advertise the fort--which we can already plainly see, so it seems superfluous. It proceeds this way: a ship on the lake, then an advertisement, a moose lumbering, then an advertisement, a waving flag, then an advertisement. There is something supremely American about this, possessing technology that can render beauty in the night sky and use it to tell us to go to the grocery store. The best part is when the drones retreat in a cascade of glittering candy rain and return from whence they came, I imagine into a cardboard box on the lawn.

I have seen the fireworks proper so many times. The gnome is that one cannot step into the same river twice, but you can see the same fireworks, given that building context for them feels impossible outside a degree in pyrotechnics. I do not know enough to make these more than sounds and colored lights.

Then, something explodes on one of the boats in the lake. This worries Amber terribly, not that their concern can do much for any victims. Another ship shines searchlights at the source of the fire, but it doesn't seem to be anything that will impact the show. Everyone moves on as though nothing has occurred, as is maybe the only option.

The power comes on when we are at the fireworks display. The only other time it would have been more insulting was if it had come on just as we were packing up to leave. I suspected something so narratively malignant would occur. It gives a spiteful glimpse of what this vacation might have been without two disasters.

last watched: Only Murders in the Building
reading: I Am Charlotte Simmons