Conestoga Dreams

OK. I admit it. I can't stop thinking about that television ad where the guy (I assume it's a guy-you never actually see the person.) is sitting on the beach in a lawn chair, trying to thump lime slices through two beer bottle uprights. You've probably seen it. First he misses a couple of times and finally he succeeds, kicking the lime "football" straight through the "goalposts". He has accomplished nothing in the grand scheme of things, but he knows that, and he apparently doesn't care. The sun is beating down on him, the sea is a beautiful turquoise color, and life couldn't be better. The perfect vacation: lots of rest, nothing to show for it.

So, if it's so great, why don't more Americans take those kinds of vacations, the ones where we're gauging the wind velocity and launching lime footballs all day to perfect our technique? Instead we take the other kinds, the ones that make us more weary than before we left.

You're probably familiar with the "Let's Cram All the Kids in the Car and Scream Cross-Country Vacation". A beautiful time for the family to spend quality time together bonding, driving and hollering "sit down!!!" "no, we can't stop again"; and the second most-told lie of the summer, "yes, we're almost there" (the first is "yes, dear. That bikini looks just fine on you"). The Mothers on these arduous journeys spend more time turned around in their seats than they do facing forward. After a couple of thousand miles of that, moms have to be unscrewed from their passenger seats. It's not pretty.

Here, I would like to interject an important lesson in vacation history. A little known factoid (not from an actual historian- but from my friend Johnny Woodmansee, who told me this in the 5th grade. Johnny Woodmansee never lied): Most American settlers emigrated, not to populate the great American west, but rather because they were fed up with the whole colonial rat race and wanted to take an extended vacation. Most of them actually planned on returning to their homes once they felt they were sufficiently rested. Some changed their minds and stayed once they got there. That's how California got started. Johnny told me that one, too.

I have heard rumors from a highly placed, reliable source (not Johnny) that historians have recently found Conestoga wagons, frozen in place with the mother turned toward the children, mouth wide open forming the word "no", father staring oblivious at the road, the children looking bleak and bored. Even back then, I'm sure there were teenagers who laid in the back of the family wagon and told tales of woe about how they were really going to miss their friends, how positively droll the whole idea of westward expansion was, how sure they were that the new world was going to be archaic and backward ("What? No telegraph lines? How am I ever going to get a date?"). I would guess that there were a few dads who just gave up after a few weeks on the road and headed back home. They probably carefully weighed their options: "Hmm, let's see. The possibility of gold by the wheel barrowful, and all the land I could ever want or…6 more months of fast food joints, cheap hotels, and endless grumbling." Somehow the pioneering spirit pales under such duress. Many settlers turned around in Montana (mainly because there were no speed limits even back then, so one could make excellent time) and headed back to the East.

Weary and worn, they went back to their desk jobs and told tales of how they spent their summer vacation that barely resembled what really went on. But the next year, I'm fairly certain that they drove their wagons due south to a little beach on the Gulf of Mexico, where the water was warm and blue and the sky was not cloudy all day.

Really.

by Dennis Welch