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The family vacation and the idea of the family vacation have always held considerable interest for me, a fascination that has to do, I suppose, with an abiding curiosity about families in general, how they form and disband, how they communicate or don’t, how they operate or don’t. I’ve written about family from the day I started writing and will continue to do so, I’m sure, until I lay that pen down, and you can’t think about the family without thinking about the family vacation; I can’t, at any rate. Families are obviously infinitely and uniquely complex, which means their vacations are likely to be the same.
I’m fortunate enough to recall the family vacations of my childhood with actual fondness, and although these memories are no doubt rimed with nostalgia (as every happy childhood is), there was an objective love and goodwill at the core of my upbringing. Which is why this book will perhaps not resonate with those who grew up in less-than-nurturing environments (although I hope it does) and who were forced to go on trips with people they felt no affection towards. Happy families are not the most fertile writerly soil, for as Tolstoy so famously wrote in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But if I can be so presumptuous as to reframe Tolstoy’s words, I would say that every happy family will vacation in its own unique way (ready as they are to share any and all experiences together), whereas unhappy families are all alike on vacation (turned inward and anxious to be elsewhere). At the risk of sounding naive, I happen to think that families are not always or necessarily the seething angst-ridden prisons of alienation that art and the therapy industry typically make them out to be, but that sometimes they are both a stimulus and framing device for understanding and intimacy and unity . . . sometimes even on vacation.
The family vacation as I have experienced it, and as I view it symbolically and metaphorically, makes me smile. Am I lucky? Yes. Am I deluded? Possibly. For this, I can only blame my parents, who raised six children in a spirit of love and patience, even if they spanked us, grounded us, and failed to push me hard enough as a child to become the professional soccer player I know I could have become with even just the occasional dose of belligerent sports-parent hectoring. I grew up in a small house jammed to the rafters with human beings, not just because we were a family of eight, but because our parents were well-liked by our friends, which meant there were always an extra couple of bodies hanging around at any given moment. Ours was a disorganized, fun, energetic household, and as you’d guess, our vacations were about the same. The further my wife, Cathy, and I advance into raising our two daughters, the more astonished I am by what my parents achieved: the raising of six children, all of whom still like one another, none of whom have ever been in jail, and all of whom are, if not well-adjusted, at least not misanthropically maladjusted. I once told a poet friend of mine that my mother used to read to us at the dinner table after supper on many nights. Sometimes it was The Hobbit. A couple times she might have even read Shakespeare; I know my dad liked Shakespeare, even though he didn’t finish high school (my dad, not Shakespeare). My poet friend has never let this family detail go, and to this day shakes his beard and goes on about how my family was, in fact, the most distorted of all because we got along and exited our childhoods with minimal emotional scar tissue.
Growing up, I had garden-variety teenage concerns—girls fascinated and terrified me, I didn’t have my own bedroom or privacy of any sort, I was short and pudgy, my roster of friends was not that long or reliable, school sucked. But my family life, far from exacerbating these problems or alienating me further, in fact saved me from getting swallowed up by whatever troubles I had. And whenever we went on vacation, I can truly report that I went with a spirit of excitement and anticipation (which would usually prove to be warranted), not dread or opposition. That’s not to say that every vacation was a peak experience or one fantastic and warm family outing after another. Hardly. I was often underwhelmed with our destination. I was frequently driven to violence by the immature antics of my siblings in the car (which I obviously never instigated). I was frequently carsick. We spent a lot of our vacation capital visiting relatives. But despite all this, going on holidays with my family was never something I rebelled against. It was, most of the time, a hell of a lot of fun.
When you stop to think about it, though (which I often have, sometimes in the middle of a family vacation moment going pear-shaped all around us), going on vacation with your entire family is hardly the way to guarantee that you will have, in the first place, a good vacation, or, in the second, a happy—or even a monosyllabically communicative—family upon your return. In fact, I’m sure we can all recall examples of family vacations that seemed to conclude not just as periods away from home but as harbingers that the family itself was aboard the Titanic and all that was left to do was to get pickled and wait for the iceberg.
This, luckily, was a rare experience for me, because I have always believed the family vacation was about so much more than the activity or destination. Certainly, the family vacations we took in my childhood were enjoyable for the most part, even usually great fun and adventure, but they have also been central to my ability to recollect memories of growing up, of what it was like to be part of my family, and to form conclusions and understandings about the nature of the family structure. They also helped me, and still help me, understand who I am. Memory is the wheel on which we are forever turning the raw material of our experience, and the family vacation supplies a great deal of that raw material. From that memory wheel comes insight. And because these times in our lives are so amplified—these family vacations when we are separated from the structure and distraction of daily life—they bear great meaning and influence.
The family vacation is a deep well; it’s one of the best tools we have to interpret our past and present, and peek into our future. The kids, a tent and sleeping bags, some sunscreen, the open road—just another road trip, you say? Hardly. The meaning of our memories can and will shift, alter, and morph, but memory will always be an instrument we use to define our families, ourselves, our relationships. There are many situations and moments we use to create the movie in our heads of what our family is, of what “family” is, but the clearest often come from the family vacation. It’s specific in its time frame and is often conducted in sharp contrast with our daily lives, which means our senses and attention are heightened. The family vacation is a way to bank family memories, to colour in what might otherwise be broad outlines. As Julia Harrison writes in her book, Being a Tourist: Finding Meaning in Pleasure Travel, “All those who travel for pleasure, no matter what name they apply to themselves . . . unfailingly want to gather valuable and enduring memories.”
Furthermore, the family vacation is a highly fluid socio-cultural institution. As the culture in which families exist has changed, so the vacation has adapted to fit or reflect that culture. The family vacation, in both structure and meaning, has evolved as society has evolved, although one or two seismic shifts in the nature of the family vacation have, I think it’s fair to say, moved the needle on the broader culture. How families choose to vacation is a clear expression of who we are, and the nature of the family vacation tends to reflect, and sometimes even predict, societal change.
The family vacation, then, is central to how individuals and families define themselves, how families form, and most particularly how these intensified periods in the life of a family continue through the years to replenish our individual and shared memory pools. “Family memories offer us a way to make sense of our family history,” writes Susan Sessions Rugh in her book Are We There Yet? Vacations are significant events in the lives of adults and children: we remember them keenly for good reason—because they help tell us who we are and how we fit into our family. The vacations I went on with my family when I was growing up may have been fun, but they were also much more than fun; the nuance and richness of what it all meant has only gradually been revealed through adulthood and the raising of children. I understand much better now that the manner and quality of vacation a family experiences together are a symbol for many things besides a trip’s stated raison d’être (which is frequently interesting enough in and of itself, of course). It can also be viewed theoretically, moving into the philosophical sandbox of thinkers like the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his ideas