First We Quit Our Jobs Read online

  As the weekend at Keuka Lake drew to a close, we watched fireworks over the water from the campground. Bruce and Gail had already gone home for the evening. We toasted marshmallows over the fire and made s’mores by squishing them between graham crackers and chocolate slices. Dick and Ellen drove back to Rochester to prepare for work the next day. Sandy and I cuddled up under our quilt for a cold night at the campground. This year, we would recapture summer.

  * * *

  In Michigan we stopped in to visit Helen Martha MacGregor, my sister-in-law. Once upon a time in this country, Helen must have been a very popular name. Especially in Dearborn. Sandy’s aunt, his mother’s sister, was named Helen, and his sister was also Helen, as were Dick’s sister and mother down the block. In order to differentiate among them, Sandy’s sister was known as Helen Martha, Dick’s as Henno, and Katie’s sister was Aunt Helen. That was fine until Sandy’s kids started calling their aunt Aunt Helen, and it got confusing again. Now we refer to her as sister Helen. (My friend Marianne had an aunt Helen who was really Sister Helen, Mother Superior, but that’s another story.)

  Our sister Helen was something else: a ball of fire, a whirling dervish, an elementary school principal who ran those kids into the ground each day. And they adored her. She attended all their sports competitions and baked cupcakes for birthdays. Not your ordinary principal. Never one to let the grass grow, she was mowing it as she waited for us to arrive at her home outside Detroit. Never mind that we had driven four hundred miles that day, there were plans to keep, things to see, places we were expected. We parked the Sue at the curb and brought a few things inside. It already felt odd not to be sleeping in our own bed, but Helen insisted it would be weird to sleep in the street. She probably had a point, we thought, and in any case, I wasn’t about to argue with the principal.

  She had the next few days and nights planned with activities. On a break we accompanied her as she did some errands. As we strolled the aisles of a megastore with her, it occurred to both Sandy and me that we needed absolutely nothing. We had more than enough clothing, plenty of food and books. There was no room for a twelve pack of paper towels, and we had no use for mulch. What would we do with the large (17.5-pound) box of detergent that did 120 loads? There was a peculiar sense of freedom and relief as we sat outside on a bench in the sun while Helen lined up at the cashier.

  When we got back to the house, we took the opportunity to plug into Helen’s phone line and pick up our e-mail. As it turned out, the chain of events required to actually do this cellularly, while we were mobile, was something akin to having the planets all line up to form a figure eight on Thursday at noon. In fact, we hadn’t been able to make it work yet, though our phone bills would prove we’d tried. We were happy to take advantage of an old-fashioned phone jack. Getting mail from home, even though we’d been gone less than a week, was a thrill.

  * * *

  Just as I found it hard to picture Sandy as a little boy, it was difficult to see the face of a young woman in that of Mrs. Sherman. Round-faced, wrinkled with laughter, and squinting to see anything at all, Mrs. Sherman, Sandy’s father’s partner’s widow, was the last one left of a foursome. The men, who had been roommates in college, became partners in a small architecture firm. The women became best friends. The couples played bridge and vacationed together, gathered at one home or the other for birthdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The Shermans, who had no children, became as close as family to the MacGregors and their children. Mac and Katie MacGregor died in the 1980s, Phil Sherman passed away the year before. Mrs. Sherman wanted to take “the kids” (that’s us, at ages forty-five, fifty-three, and fifty-seven) out to dinner at the nearby Botsford Inn. It was the one place around older than she was, she joked. She felt comfortable in the low-ceilinged dark Revolutionary War-era pub room. She enthused about our trip. We ordered dinner and drinks, Mrs. S. having her daily Manhattan. While we ate, she told us of the time she and Phil went to Alaska in the 1960s, shortly after the Alcan Highway opened to the public. Our trip there would be quite an adventure, she assured us. I marveled at this seventy-odd-year friendship as it enveloped us, the next generation.

  When we got back to her apartment, Mrs. Laurellen Sherman wondered what she should do with all her old travel photographs. We had no answer for her. I wondered about ours, those taken and put carefully in binders, and those to come. I guess we did these things for ourselves, for in the end no one would care. That should be enough. Still, I felt terribly sad. We took each other’s picture together with Mrs. Sherman and knew she would live on through at least one more generation of trip albums. She hugged and kissed us good-bye and wished she could come along.

  * * *

  We headed north through Michigan. On the way we stopped at Higgins Lake to visit with Dick’s parents. At ninety-two, Doc and Helen Arnold still spent summers at the lake house that Sandy’s father had designed for them thirty-five years earlier. The house had often accommodated their own family of six, the MacGregor four, and various other kids. Everyone learned to sail, some took up racing, others were designated cheerleaders. There were always wet kids and dogs around. Their eleven grandchildren were already busy creating plenty of great-grandchildren to spend summers to come at Higgins. The night we visited, Mrs. Arnold cooked us a delicious hearty high-cholesterol dinner and offered up eggs for breakfast. We scratched our heads in wonder at their contrarian health plan and declined in favor of black coffee. Being with them reminded me of the sense of community that their generation had had and that ours seemed to have missed out on or let go of in favor of job offers or other opportunities elsewhere. These families had been friends for more than sixty years. My husband’s face was in their family albums, his antics recorded on their old eight-millimeter films. I had never known my in-laws, but the past few days brought me very close to being with them.

  Superior

  T hree months to the day after I resigned my job, I awoke in my own bed in my traveling castle on the Canadian shore of Lake Superior, the original Gitche Gumee. I lifted my eyes to see my wonderful smiling husband, one of those gifted friendly-in-the-morning types, as he handed me a freshly brewed cup of coffee. We spent lots of time loving each other, holding each other, playing adult bunk games, and reveling in our good fortune. The ability to have time, energy, and desire on days that were not weekends or national holidays was thrilling. We had time to be childlike, to play, to wonder at nature and at our good fortune at being in a place this beautiful. All things considered, I’d rather be here than at, say, a marketing meeting.

  We were on our own. Visits were now a thing of the past. No more friends or family would dot the way ahead for many months. Before we left home, we had wondered about, and worried about, what kinds of people we would find out in the bush. If we were paranoid about the unknown, our friend Joe had been positive about the unknown: He was certain we should be armed and gave us a 30/30 rifle, along with nine bullets. As it turned out, the people we met at campgrounds were friendly but never intrusive. When we did get to chatting, I noticed it was always one of us who asked, “And what do you do?” That was our tried-and-true-Manhattan-cocktail-party-chitchat line. What else would I have asked? “Who are you?” That seemed a little heavy for a campground icebreaker. Plus, I was really nosy, because knowing what people did, I thought, would help me place them in some kind of hierarchy in my mind. Perhaps I would also get an idea or two for our own future. Gradually I cared less about what they did and more about where they had been and what they had seen. When we were asked how long we had been on the road, the discussion inevitably turned to our having quit our jobs. The reaction was universal: Faces lit up, smiles appeared, we were congratulated for our bravery. Everyone wanted to know how we had reached the decision, how we had known it was time to quit.

  As people asked, I began to realize that I’d left more from the impetus of a sensation, a feeling, a need, than because of any nicely formulated intellectual reasoning. I’d known it was time; now I tried to fi
gure out how I’d known. It was the hardest decision I’d ever made, because I had loved what I did. Bringing ideas and their creators to market was an incredibly energizing job. For a long time I learned new things every day. I thrived on the variety of information I had to grasp and on the challenge of making it fly with the public. How had I known it was time to quit? It was time to quit when … I think it was when I realized I had already left. Often, especially toward the end, when I was at the office, my mind would drift away from the work at hand. I would be somewhere else, anywhere else. If it was raw outside (and I was lucky enough to be near a window), I would think about being in the country stirring up a big pot of soup. On nice days I’d pack a picnic and go to the beach. True confession time: I was a zombie executive. Just like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I could not be differentiated from “regular” executives (if there were any) under most circumstances. But during those major gaps, if anyone astute enough was watching, they could have seen me stirring that pot of soup, sunning on the beach, or—another favorite—sliding over a reef in scuba gear.

  The more I tried to sort it out, the more I recognized I’d resented what felt to me like the misuse of time. In a well-intentioned effort to communicate, to keep as many people in the loop as possible, we became slaves to meetings. We had departmental meetings and planning meetings and pre-sales meetings and sales meetings (three times a year in a dark conference room in some great city or island we never got to see much of) and post-sales meetings. Everyone complained we had too many meetings. Suggestions for improving how we did things were welcomed. As a result, we had meetings to talk about the meetings.

  At the first of those meeting meetings, someone suggested bringing in food to make it a little more pleasant and to allow people to load up on sugar and caffeine. It was great. Menus evolved from the mundane coffee/doughnut routine to more elaborate pastries, fruits, and a wide variety of bottled waters. When we convened in the afternoon, there was salsa, guacamole, and chips. The next meeting meeting provided the intelligence that we should cancel the food because people had begun thinking of the meetings as all-day grazing grounds, something not to get out of in this lifetime. We could not, it seemed, live without all those meetings that were killing us.

  The coup de grâce to all of us poor souls who spent so many of our waking hours in meetings was that the primary conference room was windowless, airless, and fluorescently lit. At the end of some of the longer sessions, we felt dead, we looked dead, and we all pretty much smelled dead. Some of our ideas were none too fresh either. Meetings sucked up time like black holes. Anyhow, into my tenth or so hour in any given week in the condolence room, as I came to think of it, my mind would drift to one of my favorite scenes—perhaps an underwater moment with some electric blue or yellow fish and a tangle of sea grass wafting around me and the crunch of shrimp having lunch instead of being lunch. A little smile would cross my lips, I’d breathe a little deeper, and then I’d rejoin the crowd. But then I’d think: Where the hell are the rest of these guys when I’m at sixty feet? One’s probably in France, one’s between his wife’s legs, one’s on a job interview. Who knew. I was sure of one thing: At any given moment when that many people got together in a nasty room for that much time, only half of them were really there—the rest were out of our minds and somewhere else. Finally, I simply recognized it was time for me to actually be somewhere else.

  * * *

  Sandy and I adjourned our kind of morning meeting and got up. The weather was turning cooler, it looked like rain, and we wanted to get some exercise in before the storm. We decided to bike along the lake to the town of Rossport, Ontario, eight kilometers west. Kilometers were great, we discovered. They gave us the illusion we had come much farther, much faster. The only problem was the word. Too long and clunky. Years ago, on another trip, we had shortened it to clicks. As we rode the eight clicks, a headwind picked up, making the way tougher. These huge inland lakes were like seas: When it was calm, they seemed harmless, but in bad weather they were fierce killers. It suddenly seemed more like November than July as I buttoned my summer shirt up to my neck and wished that it had sleeves. At the far end of town, we saw what looked to be a cozy inn, a neat Tudor building with geraniumfilled window boxes. What an oasis for the chilly, hungry traveler.

  Leaving our bikes on the lawn, we raced inside to the welcoming lobby, where we met the American owner. We asked if lunch was available, and he showed us to a table by an open window overlooking the lake. We promptly closed it and asked for hot coffee. The warmth of the place and the brew were perfect. We ordered the specialty of the day: house-caught-and-cured lake trout. While we thawed out, the wind gusted back and forth across the water, leaving herringbone ripples and whitecaps behind. It was a lovely day to be inside. Platters of cold smoky fish arrived, garnished with chunks of sharp cheddar cheese, crunchy vegetables, slices of hearty brown bread, and various condiments. We attacked our meal, making sure to sample every combination of tastes. By the time we finished, we were delightfully snug and full. Now we had to contemplate the unpleasant notion of biking back.

  As we dawdled over more coffee, the bill arrived. Even though lunch was delicious and we were paying Canadian dollars (which favored us by twenty-five percent or so), it irked me to have to shell out thirty bucks for lunch. For years, we had both been spoiled by large expense accounts. I thought nothing of having business lunches in midtown that ran to seventy-five or a hundred dollars for two. Now this bill seemed excessive. In part, I had to admit, it was because it was our money and we were determined to be careful with it, but in part because it was, well, just lunch. We reminded each other to eat in more often. I would, however, have killed to be able to hail a cab to take us back to camp. Instead we pedaled ourselves through a penetrating mist.

  * * *

  Our time along Superior was idyllic. We were really on our own at last—without either kind of reservations. It was incredibly easy to drive as much as we wanted, then stop when we saw a campground. Many times we had looked at the map at home and read the names of the places we would go. Batchawana Bay. Pancake Bay. They sounded so exotic, almost tropical. In fact, when the weather was good, the water of Superior was much bluer and the sand finer and whiter than I’d expected. The campsites we found were directly on the water, quiet and magnificent. The weather changed from hot and dry to cold and rainy several times, but it was all part of the show along the world’s largest lake. Finding places to stay was easier than I had hoped. At the provincial parks it was first come, first served. Wherever we wanted to stay, we’d been advised by a friend to arrive by four or so, in the event we’d have to try elsewhere. As it happened, we were never shut out. I thumbed through the tourist literature while Sandy drove. We ended up in this configuration—Sandy the pilot, me the copilot—about three-quarters of the time. It served both our purposes since he liked driving better than I did and I was a better map reader than he was. Let’s put it this way—at least reading while in motion didn’t make me throw up the way it did him. That made me the default map and guidebook reader. I didn’t mind—I found us great places.

  In Canada the provincial parks were beautifully located, clean, cheap, and well kept. Sometimes no ranger would be on duty when we arrived at a campground. A note tacked to the gatehouse told us to sign in on the honor system and drop our money in a slot. Imagine a hotel doing the same, we thought. Later in the evening a cheerful ranger would make his rounds and wish us a good night. I half-expected him to tuck us in as well.

  One night at sunset, ten o’clock or so, we took a walk and met a very nice couple from Iowa. He was a high school teacher and coach (I asked). They were off on a fishing holiday. With them was the cutest little eight-week-old yellow Lab puppy named Max. She became the talk of the town. All the campers, most of whom had kept to themselves, circled around this little thing and cooed and wooed and wowed.

  Meanwhile, across the way, Sandy observed a man in his fifties pull in on a bicycle, loaded w
ith saddlebags galore. We watched in fascination as he undid the bags, put up a two-room tent, and placed his substantial remaining gear on the picnic table, which, except for the grill, he covered with a tarp against the misty night weather. He was endlessly busy. Sandy’s curiosity was piqued. We discussed approaching him. Clearly this was supposed to be a friendly trip. Reluctantly I agreed we would make contact with our first stranger, without benefit of adorable-puppy intermediary.

  “Hi, how far did you ride today?” we inquired. Blank stare. Not friendly, not hostile. I looked for weapons.

  “Did you have a long way to pedal today?” trying again. More nothing. I didn’t like this one bit. And they said New Yorkers were cold. Ha! This talking with strangers was for the birds, I thought.

  We turned to walk away, when suddenly he sputtered to life, making little grunting noises and gesticulating. Then a flow of French spewed forth. I felt better—at least he was probably unarmed. He also spoke no English.

  Unfortunately our French was limited to words like pâté and Brie. Not useful when discussing travel stuff.

  I countered by asking whether he spoke German. Non.

  Spanish, perhaps? Non.

  Was he kidding? I wondered. Someone on the North American continent who couldn’t even say “cheeseburger”? Clearly he wasn’t trying. Annoyed, I thought I must be able to get something out of him.