Slaughterhouse 40

START TIME: 9:45 PM
END TIME: 10:46 PM
WORD COUNT: 818

“Write a travel essay about somewhere you haven't visited in at least ten years.”

OK, this one’s tricky. But not for the reasons you might think.

I was (and am) fortunate to have family in a very nice community just outside of Wisconsin. As a result, we didn’t travel anyplace but there for vacations when I was a kid. They had beach access to a private lake, excellent parties, rooms to read in and be quiet and giant hills to exhaust yourself on. I really could never ask for anything more as a place to go. My whole family got along a lot better when we were there and it was a terrific respite in so many ways. (Not to mention the best frozen custard on Earth was about six miles away; one night our crew had grown bored with our state so we loaded our CDs and drove for turtle sundaes for four hours, roundtrip.)

So considering it’s ten years, I have a few places I can write about. But it has to be someplace I haven’t visited in ten years – and I was very lucky to take my kids back up there about six years ago, so it doesn’t count. That leaves – where? That leaves here, where I’ve lived for the past ten years, and leaves Washington, DC, which I visited again four years ago, and…hmm.

I think I’ve got it.

Egg Harbor, WI
Last visited June 27-30, 1997

“Where are we going?”
“Don’t care. We’ll just head up there and find someplace.”
“We should bring the bicycles.”
“Definitely.”

I know those sentences were said. I haven’t the slightest idea which one of us said them.

There are preposterously cool things about falling in love. Among them is the idea that no matter what you’re doing, as long as someone you’re in love with is alongside of you, it’s going to be a good day, it’s going to be a great night, you know that you aren’t going to have any sort of lull in the conversation because even if you do, you’re just glad to be there.

We rode the brand-new bicycles she’d just bought us for my birthday for preposterous distances, something like 20 miles through the peninsula, despite my being in no shape to ride like that (little did I know this would be the same ride I would use in my first seven triathlons years later) and got to behave like city escapees.

We cooked for ourselves instead of eating out and drank champagne and ate strawberries. (The champagne was Etoile, I hadn’t learned about Veuve yet, though that would come soon.) We gave a room to the bikes and woke up when the sun beckoned and smiled at the light glowing through the maple trees when we were on the porch.

We grilled food and specialty ingredients that we found at the quaint little market across the street and enjoyed the novelty that came from being city ingénues in a rural place that wasn’t really rural, as most of the vacation enclave’s occupants weren’t (Egg Harbor is a city in Door County, WI and I was just as much of a Fucking Illinois Bastard, or FIB, as the hundreds of people in town with us).

We found the Egg Harbor Inn sometime a little bit before twilight, it being the right combination of isolated and nice, not too hotelish and not too rustic, and not about to cost us an arm and a leg. And they could accommodate the bicycles.

The next morning we started early to ride, attempting to get to a lighthouse on the northern part of the peninsula that took us all morning to find out was inaccessible by roads. We hid the bicycles in some shrubbery and watched a movie playing in a metal corrugated shed the shape of an airplane hangar. I think Julia Roberts was in it.

I remember her smile. (Not Julia’s.) I remember walking around town right around twilight, looking at all of the little shops, and getting that feeling as we compared design aesthetics of what we were looking at. The idea that you are at the very beginning of something and in the middle of it at the same time, the knowledge that you aren’t going to get your feet and legs beneath you anytime soon, and it really doesn’t matter. The feeling that what you feel isn’t just better than being alone, but it’s better than anything you could ever have hoped it would be, and with that arrived the knowledge that I’d tried to convince myself of after so many nights of being brushed off – you were right to want this. This is why.

I remember an intense sunburn, a ride that changed my mind about bicycles for the rest of my life, and being hopelessly, unrecoverably in love. Like every great vacation, I wish I could go back.