Sick on Vacation

It’s almost a form of shorthand for the worst luck that can happen: being sick on vacation.

My wife Barbara, our seven-year-old daughter Maddy and I flew down from frigid Vermont to Culebra, in the Spanish Virgin Islands, hoping that the warm Caribbean February would thaw us out, and not only would I write my assigned travel article but the trip would be a kind of health-spa visit, only with spicier food.

No such luck. On our second day Maddy threw up from before dawn until late afternoon, spending the day curled up in my lap, staring over the crook of my elbow at the bay with the sailboats and the lights coming on across the water as the sun died in the short Caribbean evening.

As I say, people talk about being sick on vacation as the cruelest irony, the worst abuse of one’s time and money. Yet as soon as I heard her pathetic little heaves, everything became clear and simple. I knew exactly what to do, in a way that I rarely do in life as a whole. I knelt beside her, wiped her mouth with tissue and encouraged her to do what her body was demanding, giving her a sip of water to rinse and spit, carrying her back to bed.

I propped her upright and explained that now her stomach had done its job but it was probably still tender, that it knew what it needed and all she had to do was listen to it as it went through the miraculous process of making her better.

She lay limply, her head on my shoulder. Without my glasses on, the view from the sliding doors across the deck was perfect: blue above and turquoise below, sky and bay, the green of the promontory, vaguely, the sawtooth shape of palm trees. Mourning doves hooted softly; the breeze blew the blinds against the windowsill with a gentle clank.

I drifted through the free package tour of my mind, slipping back and forth across the border between memory and imagination as if I were hitch-hiking again. I told her the story of how my family, on a walking holiday on the Welsh border forty years ago, stumbled through a pitch-dark mile-long abandoned railway tunnel with my brother and I saying “Shhh! I think I heard a train!” until we finally saw the light at the end and emerged into the town with the strangest name in the world: Symonds Yat.

Whenever Maddy is sick or has a nightmare she asks for a story of when I was a little boy, not knowing that these half-remembered, half-invented pieces heal me as much as they heal her.

I held her, in all, for maybe five hours that day; and if a vacation is when you do what you most enjoy, I had been on vacation.

Sunday Weekend Edition, 2003