Vacation
Is the notion of a vacation irrelevant if you are retired and every day is a holiday from work? I retired from medicine after 45 years and a lifetime of meeting schedules. But now the publisher’s deadline for this weekly column is my only mandatory task for the week. I still have other meetings, including two weekly Bible studies, a book club and church on Sunday. So, you might say I’m really not retired since I have events that anchor the days of my week. So, I have no excuse for occasionally being flummoxed about what day it is. I’m not concerned because my iPhone always knows the date, and my cohort also reports being occasionally day challenged.
Last week, I wondered if I was truly on vacation. Since I am a stickler for definitions, I turned to Mr. Webster, who defines a vacation as “a scheduled period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation.” I traveled extensively all my life, but I have discovered that I no longer have anywhere I want to go because I’m already there. East Tennessee is God’s country!
Last week was unusual for the Fergusons. I’m trying to finish the third novel in my Stellar Trilogy and decided to get away and write. I thought about naming this column “Sabbatical,” until Mr. Webster explained to me that a sabbatical is “a period of time during which a person does not work at their regular job.”
I don’t have a regular job, unless you call this column a job. But since I write because I want to, not because I have to, perhaps this column doesn’t qualify as a job. I may not technically be on vacation or on professorial sabbatical, but I have retreated to our mountain cabin above the Townsend Valley to hopefully finish the first draft of “Qubits” (my novel’s title).
The only distraction above the Townsend Valley is the beauty of the Smoky Mountains. However, we were also distracted by a bear that walked through our side yard. This is the second bear I’ve encountered in the last month or so. The first bear sighting was at my home in the UT Hospital area and was more unusual than the second bear sighting here on the mountain.
What’s going on? Am I attracting bears? This does not seem to be a problem for others. When I used to trout fish in the Smokies, I was taught to be alert for bears, and you could often smell them. Either that was an old fisherman’s tale or I’ve gotten older and my sense of smell has waned because I caught no pungent whiff with either of my bear encounters.
City folks like me forget the background noise of civilization until it’s no longer there. Becky and I live about a mile from Alcoa Highway, and the hum of the highway is ever-present. Civilization’s hum is absent here in the mountains.
Years ago, we were at Olympia National Park in Washington state. I vividly remember taking a hike to Hurricane Ridge, and when we stopped, the forest’s utter silence was almost felt. I challenge you to get away in the woods to just listen and feel the silence. I preach to my grans to be alert, and they “might see something.” And you might hear something unusual, like the sound of a cuckoo, I once heard while traipsing in a Vienna forest.
It felt like vacation when we went down to town for provisions. I like grocery stores. In my foreign travels, I enjoyed surveying grocery markets and found it a good marker of a people’s affluence or their lack thereof. I’ve observed that different cultures stock shelves with things Americans might find unusual. I remember a market in Spain selling dried animal limbs for, perhaps, soup? I didn’t ask. In rural Guatemala, there was nothing Americans would recognize as a market. Again, I observed that the poverty of an area could be judged by the paucity of farm animals or the absence of cats. In Guatemala, I coined the term “ribs on a pig” as a marker of poverty. I’ve never seen a skinny pig in America. I told my medical mission teams that when you see skinny pigs, it’s a tell.
Becky took a break from cabin cleaning, and I left my prose to walk in the woods along the Middle Prong in Tremont. It is one of our favorite places, though it is not a quiet walk. Deep water runs silent, but a babbling brook, the Middle Prong, does not. Nonetheless, we enjoyed the power of water tumbling down over rocks sculpted over the ages. Geologists say that the Smoky Mountains were once higher and undoubtedly more majestic than the Rocky Mountains. The force of water is irresistible and has made our mountains round and curvaceous.
Becky and I have been a team for 50 years this September, and we’re traveling to Oregon to celebrate with family and to return to Crater Lake, which is on my top ten list of wondrous vistas. But the view from our cabin is unparalleled. And you might anticipate some reflections of the West. Stay tuned…
