My dad turned 14 a few days before the Beatles crossed the pond to play Ed Sullivan. I was at dad's house a few days ago as my vacation started coming to an end, thinking about the Beatles, the Atlantic Ocean, and the smell of water.
They say you don't realize how badly you need a vacation until you get on the road. Over a week ago I was brushing my teeth at a hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico when I noticed an acrid smell coming from the tap on the plain looking sink in our room. Perhaps all tap water smells that bad.
When we lived in Munday, Texas, our water supply came from Miller Creek. One morning I took a drink of water from the faucet and detected the unmistakable taste of dirt. Real dirt. It was only a few days later that I heard locals say a sentence we came to know all-too-well: "The lake's turning over."
Up the road a thousand miles from Miller Creek Reservoir in West Texas sits a mountain lake on the back of the Colorado state quarter. They call it "Dream Lake." If you have ever been there, you know why they gave it that name. It looks like something out of a painting you would by at the mall, an almost too perfect lake surrounded by snow year round. When we were there last week, we hiked through a foot of packed white powder to reach a body of water that smells like cold would smell if cold had a smell. Pure. Crisp. Clean.
Likewise, the rain there in Estes Park, Colorado smells like rain should smell. Imagine a mountain covered in giant pine trees isolated from pollution. Now take a deep breath. Smell it? On our vacation, after a brief summer storm, we saw a double rainbow. It was perfect. It smelled like rest.
A day later my family and I went to Great Wolf Lodge near the DFW airport. Nothing like a crowded waterpark to ease one's senses after a thirteen-and-a-half hour drive. It took me a while to find the hot tub, but alas, there it was. I eased into its comforting 101 degrees, exhaled, inhaled, and then started choking. I know, that's not what I expected either. The chlorine was so thick that it made my eyes burn. It smelled like it came straight out of Dante.
Thing is, we live most of our lives somewhere between Dream Lake and Dante's Hot Tub. The majority of the time is not pristine mountain lake, nor is it stifling chlorinated hell. It's more like the Atlantic Ocean, or in my case, the Gulf of Mexico.
It all depends on where you find yourself on a given day.
Some days the ocean can be clean, pleasant, and inviting; other days the shore is covered in mossy seaweed that smells of too much sun. You never know. But I am starting to learn that life does not have to be lived at extremes. Instead, you take each day as it comes, take in the good smells and thank God, while forgetting about the bad ones that too often demand our attention.
Vacations are a good time to reflect on seeing the world as it truly is, especially the routine world we inhabit most often. My world today, on this warm Wednesday afternoon, is not at one of the extremes. Instead, it is right here, somewhere in the middle, populated by a list of tasks to be completed, and more importantly, a number of people to greet, see, and walk alongside. And that's it. That's the way it is supposed to be.
I can smell the hot breeze coming off the bay making its way into the city. And it smells just like the day should.
