By Mark Azzara
My Dear Friend,
The best vacation advice I can give you can be summed up in two words: Say hello. That’s all it takes to make new friends.
I recently returned from a one-week vacation on a remote coastline with only a few villages here and there. I took the time to listen to the waves, to hear as well as feel the breeze (which at times was so strong it almost knocked me over) and to talk to God and those around me.
I said hello to Charlie while he prepared the garden of his home, which abuts a downtown parking lot in the largest of the towns I visited (population 2,231 according to the latest census).
First we talked about good places to eat. The next thing I knew we were talking about why he had moved to that small town just upriver from the sea. Charlie had relocated often during his career, his loyal wife tagging along. When it was time to retire he told her, “You’ve gone with me all my life. Now it’s my turn. Pick wherever you want for us to retire.” They shopped around for five years before settling on that town and they’ve never regretted it.
There are no chain motels or hotels (the closest was a Hampton Inn about 80 miles away) and only a few independent motels are open year-round. I arrived at my first motel destination not long after it opened for the season, the week before Memorial Day.
Say hello to a motel owner and you can learn a lot about an area. One owner said his “real job” was getting up at 3 a.m. every day to head for the nearest big city, about a two-hour drive, to pick up a load of mail and haul it back, then wait while local post workers load their mail onto his truck for the return trip. Once home he tends to motel maintenance. “It makes for a long day” in the months when the motel is open, he said. I’ll bet. But he’s lucky. He has a year-round job.
These motel owners know each other and consider themselves friends rather than competitors. And they’re willing to help in ways you’d never get at a chain. For example, I was so smitten by the area that I confessed I was thinking of renting a place for a month, maybe more, on my next visit, hopefully in late summer. Rather than be insulted that I wouldn’t be staying at his place, a motel owner referred me to a real estate agent he’d worked with. And another offered advice on where to find cheap rents.
Sometimes you don’t have to talk to anyone to say hello. All you have to do is pay attention and the places you visit will speak to you without words.
For example, a secondary state highway runs past a university’s hilltop branch campus, and from that hilltop you have a great view of Charlie’s “downtown” just across the river. From afar it looks idyllic — two gleaming white church spires, one next door to Charlie’s house, colorfully painted clapboard buildings, and the promise of bustling economic life just the other side of the river.
It doesn’t take long, however, for reality to set in. Wander around campus and you’ll see a flier heralding a needle-exchange program for the area. And when you descend into the valley and cross the bridge you see poverty that cannot be disguised. Many homes and other buildings badly need a paint job or major repairs. There are only eight storefronts on the river side of Main Street – four of which are vacant and/or for sale.
Poverty is a constant companion all along the coast. Driving down a major residential road in the town that’s at land’s end I saw a nice home here and there, often followed by a beat-up trailer (“mobile home” is too nice a phrase) or a seedy shack surrounded by junk.
The town on the point has plenty of restaurants that Trip Advisor ranks highly. I ate at one and it was darned good. I was one of a handful of diners that night but I knew that this fishing village would soon begin filling with tourists, breathing life into local businesses — but only until Labor Day.
Three days into my vacation I had a ridiculous idea: I could rejuvenate Charlie’s downtown or pump up the tourism in that land’s-end village — if only I had a few million bucks. I had this foolish notion that I knew what these towns needed. But I heard these towns say to me, silently, “Don’t tell us what we need. You’re not our savior.”
These towns don’t need outsiders’ lectures or solutions. They need compassion, patience, joy and hope. And not just for a day but for a lifetime. They need their own versions of Mother Teresa, who died where she lived, in the midst of the people she served. I think Mother Teresa was given to us by Jesus as an example of how we could live if we really heard and obeyed him.
I shot a lot of video, and while I look forward to viewing it as soon as I get the chance, my main focus now that I’m home is on the gift God gave me. I went on vacation in search of quiet and came home with it — an inner quiet where I’m free to ask in a deeper way what I’m supposed to do and where I’m meant to do it. In that peaceful inner place I’m saying hello again to God and asking him, “Who am I? And who am I meant to be?”
All God’s blessings – Mark
