Free The Best American Essays 2016 by Jonathan Franzen

the rain, at least not day after day. Glancing at the useless guidebook on the nightstand, the stubs of paper poking out marking what we were supposed to be doing, it felt a bit like the plot of a really depressing National Lampoon movie with only one joke in it. But my purpose here is not to complain about the rain. In fact the impetus for writing this is that, on reflection, those were our best days. Something awfully dear had been paid by pocketbook and planet to get us all the way out here just to be rained on. But now I see that the rain, while it lasted, had protected us. I was irritated but more or less sound of mind.
    On the third day my wife and I sort of decided to just carry on like it wasn’t raining. We walked from the hotel up onto a bluff. From here we could see a solitary monk seal somersaulting in a pool among the wave-lapped rocks below. We were about to head back (we were getting soaked) when we noticed a path—or more like a weblike network of paths—through the sandy pine groves that grew along the lithified cliff. We wandered through these until eventually they converged on a trail that took us through the old burial ground of the kings of the island. We got lucky and the rain lightened to a drizzle. Looking out over the ocean, the clouds were a lumpy but unpunctured, untouched low sheet below which even lower, closer clouds were marauding. Then the sheet was pulled back and the sun shone. That’s the moment when I really remember it taking over: the seemingly inexplicable anxiety about my trip. I remember that up there, with a king’s vista of the gray Pacific, something in me had turned the wrong way. I was witnessing beauty, I knew, but the beauty was just making me watch the churning clouds, worried about losing our pocket of good weather. This was the quiet beginning of my real botheredness regarding “experiences.” We walked along the cliff until it dropped down to a remote beach. Fog opened and closed the landscape to us.
    My sense is that a lot of people actually have a hard time traveling for leisure. There are some people, of course, who fail to really “get away” because they can’t leave something behind. The classic image would be the honeymooner apologizing as she ducks into a room to take another call from work. When she isn’t on the phone you can catch her staring into space.
    Solutions to being elsewhere are, it seems to me, pretty straightforward under most circumstances. Shut off the phone. Then time is on your side. My distraction, by contrast, was a bit more insidious. It seemed to feed on the objectively good experiences of the trip itself. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see my perfect macadamia-crusted mahi-mahi because my thoughts were elsewhere; to speak truthfully I could see my mahi-mahi very clearly. But it was like I aimed my fork at the fish but kept accidentally skewering something else—my future reminiscence of it. I wasn’t elsewhere, but I seemed to inhabit a time other than the present. I wanted to be, as we say, “present.” But my problem with presence seemed to be capable of feeding on my own awareness of it. “Just relax,” I would tell myself. “Well, I can’t relax when I’m anxious about relaxing,” I would (accurately) reflect, and so forth as new and seemingly more nuanced forms of self-correction recommended themselves seductively as a solution to the problem they were creating.
    The latter part of our trip contained some dry weather. On the first dry day, the sunny one, we went to the beach, and I nearly trod on the flipper of an endangered seal, as reported. On the second we went for a hike. The name of the mountain, the “Sleeping Giant,” seemed auspicious. I thought that hiking would be exhausting enough to cut off oxygen to my new second self. A walk, Thoreau says somewhere, returns us to our senses.
    The path up the Sleeping Giant had turned to black volcanic mud from the rain: wet and smooth and sticky like potter’s slip. It