LETTERS FROM HOME: HEEDING THE TEACHINGS OF SPRING BREAK

Feb. 22, 2001

Dear Pat,

When we were college students, our thoughts this time of year were on the glacial approach of a rite and right that belongs solely to people blessed to worry about grades instead of bills.

Most of my spring breaks were spent frivolously and predictably in Daytona Beach or Padre Island. On the way down to Florida, teen-aged boys and girls slept in the back of a van under a communal blanket anticipating wildness on the beach. It rained all week in Daytona Beach and my friends and I, ignorant of the spring break requirement for having fun motel rooms were camping in tents. We didn't know what to do.

For some reason, the trip with girlfriends to Padre Island doesn't hold many memories other than being strip searched returning from Mexico. Another trip with only my friends Kent and Steve summons images of literally getting blistered by the tropical sun and a hippie girl giving us soothing tea, and of walking down a street in Matamoros, Mexico, after a few cervezas and margaritas and laughing helplessly as a man emerged from a night club walking hand-in-hand with a monkey. We not only weren't in Missouri anymore, we were in a place where anything might be possible.

Spring break can teach you what college never will.

My friend Chips invited me to drive to California to visit his father in Carmel one year. I was broke but begged my parents for money to go. They probably couldn't afford it either but perhaps could see how much the trip meant to a son who had spent much of his formative college years in the student union listening to Jose Feliciano California dreamin' on the jukebox.

We headed north from Columbia first, through the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota to the mountain top carved in the shape of ex-presidents' heads. One drove while the other slept in the passenger seat of Chips' pickup. We pushed west across great prairies I'd only seen pictures of, drove into vistas where Big Sky finally meant something, lost the clutch in Chips' truck somewhere in Montana, walked around in the eerily mournful valley of the Little Big Horn River where Custer last stood, then turned left at Seattle. We were in Oregon before we ever stopped for a motel.

I remember thinking, Why didn't anybody tell me all this was out here?

In Northern California we wove toward the coast in blackness, me unaware that towering redwoods were blocking out the light. In the morning, the boats at Sausalito and the grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco skyline stopped my jaw from working.

Chips' father and stepmother ran a game store in Carmel and entertained friends at lively parties where everyone drank bloody Marys or gin and tonics and looked smashing. Chips' mother served me my first chile relleno. I awoke in the middle of the night with a severe pain that felt like a heart attack. The ER doctor said it must have been something I ate.

At Big Sur we stopped at Nepenthe, the Greek word for "paradise," one of the most spectacular spots I've ever been. Wine and cheese boards are served on a sunny veranda high above the Pacific Ocean. The Earth seems to breathe with the rhythm of the waves. Everyone just sits back and lets it all be.

We cruised through Los Angeles to San Diego, where old friends of Chips' lived in a condo on a cliff over the beach and had his and her Mercedes. At Black's Beach, my first nude beach, we were too embarrassed by our whiteness and muscle-free bodies to undress. Instead of excited I felt like a voyeur.

The rest of the trip is blurry, perhaps because we were racing to get home in time to return to our other lives.

But I returned to California many times, went to nude beaches and took off my clothes, returned to actually see the redwoods and live among them, lived in Big Sur and danced at Nepenthe's monthly "sign" parties -- the next one is March 15 for Pisces -- and lived in the shadow of the Golden Gate. Spring break taught me that anything might be possible.

Love, Sam