The One-Day Vacation

I need more silence. More time to think, swim, read, walk, breathe—all the things I do on vacation. The things that help me gather the pieces of myself that have fallen on the ground.

Europeans are laughing at this title. Italians are chuckling; Germans and Swedes are shaking their heads. The French are confused. What is a one-day vacation? What is the point? Clearly, an American idea, this one-day vacation, and if you are going on a one-day vacation, why not stay at home?

I announced to my husband in January, when I became publisher of Red Hen Press, that we would have a couple of one-day vacations this year, but no real vacation. The idea that vacations are necessary is a modern concept. The wealthy Greeks and Romans had summer homes. The wealthy Chinese had summer villas. But vacations were for the wealthy. Ordinary people worked until they died. In the 1860s, William H. Murray wrote a guidebook on the Adirondacks, and the idea was born: normal people, the working class, should go on vacation.

Many middle-class Americans idealize vacations as a way to take a break from their life, a change of pace, a time to see the world differently. In late August of 2024, I visited one of our Red Hen authors, David Mas Masumoto, at his peach farm. His book, Secret Harvests, weaves the story of his farm with the search for his lost aunt following the Japanese incarceration camps in the 1940s.

As a third-generation farmer who grows organic peaches, vacations are not something Mas gets to have a lot. During peach season, he starts work at 4:00 a.m. and works twelve-hour days for months. On a farm, the peach trees have to be harvested.

For many years, I worked in academia alongside Red Hen Press, my two work lives overlapping. Neither of them had a built-in vacation. The only academics who get sabbaticals are tenured faculty, and I gave that up when I got divorced before I could get a tenured job. There’s nothing like hoping for a tenured job sixty miles from your zip code. 

When my second husband and I finally started to go on writing vacations, we didn’t leave work behind: we would write the first half of each day, and work for Red Hen the second half. For years, we had these half-vacations and were able to get a little writing done in cheap, forgotten areas outside of big cities. 

But this year, we needed to stay and keep working—hence, the one-day vacation. On the first one-day vacation, we took a train to San Diego, went to the Zoo with the grandchild, and took the train back. I watched my email and texts all day, but we had a good time, swinging our way from polar bears to tigers to elephants. 

Our latest one-day vacation was waterfalls and Sequoias, hiking, and camping, a lot of packing and unpacking for a one-day vacation, for touching the wilderness and making sure it was still there. Because it was one day, we did a terrible job of packing. We forgot coffee and dishes. If we hadn’t been with another couple, we would have been living on marshmallows. Thankfully, our son and his wife were well prepared.  

That one-day vacation skidding in and out of the forest felt like a tiny fist full of joy, and then poof, it was gone, and I was at my desk in my red high heels, sucking down migraine medicine, working every night until one in the morning, getting up at 7:00 a.m., climbing the money ladder, trying to remember why I agreed to be CEO.  

Wasn’t this supposed to be fun? Aren’t I at the top of the ladder now? Why does it feel like I am still climbing? 

I am going to re-read our essay collection Keeping Quiet, Essays on Silence. I need more silence. More time to think, swim, read, walk, breathe—all the things I do on vacation. The things that help me gather the pieces of myself that have fallen on the ground. Especially after Bermuda fell apart.

In the silence, I can pick myself up and say, “Kate, you got this. There will be a real vacation later on. Keep walking. Keep breathing. Keep looking up at the sky.” 

Kate Gale, author of Under a Neon Sun, which she was only able to write because the pandemic gave her some time, but as Janet Fitch said, “Kudos on this first novel by publisher, poet and activist Kate Gale! Takes us right back to the pandemic years, highlighting the brutal division between privilege and economic necessity as we follow Mia, a college student living in her car and cleaning for the well-to-do, through the early days of the lockdown.”