After the mayhem of Christmas morning, after I had consumed my fifteenth cinnamon roll, after the kids had shot each other with lime-green Nerf weapons, after my wife had recycled 4,000 reams of wrapping paper, my wife’s father said those words every Christmas-loving child of what- ever age hopes to hear: “Are you sure you opened all the gifts?”
He pointed to a creamy envelope stashed deep inside the Christmas tree. It had our names on it. The kids were intrigued but fidgety; they were about to learn a Significant Truth of Christmas: Envelopes in the tree are always good.
Inside, we found an ink-jet printout of thatched-roof bungalows over a turquoise lagoon. Our son Henry read to us from the second page. One year from now, it said, his grandparents were going to Bora Bora to celebrate their seventy-fifth birthdays.
And we were going with them.
Our son Owen collapsed to the ground in a kind of swoon. Only a month before, he and I had used Google Earth to zoom over Mount Otemanu, the jagged volcano remnant that crowns the island. When Henry said the hotel was “someplace called ‘The Four Seasons,’ ” the whole family started dancing.
Three days later, I bought a little countdown clock meant for soon-to-retire cubicle workers and wrote countdown to bora bora on it. Three hundred and sixty days. In the months to come we cut out magazine photos; we tested snorkels in the bathtub; we rented surfing movies that contained scenes in French Polynesia and paused them anytime we glimpsed Bora Bora in the background. We scoured YouTube for footage of the Four Seasons; we practiced the exchange rate; we said things like, “The water in Bora Bora is going to be way warmer than this,” and “This pineapple isn’t very good, but the pineapples in Bora Bora will be incredible,” and “Sure, you’re sad now, but in Bora Bora there is no sickness and no discouragement.”
On day 100, we shot off fireworks in the backyard. If ever there was a vacation that was overhyped, this was it.
When day zero finally arrived, with all of us—miraculously—still ambulatory, the kids sprang out of bed as if electrified and we drove to the airport and flew to Los Angeles and played in a hotel swimming pool for a few hours, then boarded a red-eye to Tahiti, and boarded a third plane in the dark, and descended at dawn through impossible towers of pink cumulus clouds to the Bora Bora airport. When Owen stepped onto the tarmac he inhaled, squeezed my hand, and said, “Can you smell it?”
I could. It smelled like vanilla and frangipani and the flower necklace some beautiful woman with a Four Seasons name tag was lowering over my head.
Otemanu loomed like some green-clad god. The breeze was a silk jacket. The sea looked as if a travel magazine were vigorously Photoshopping it every few seconds.
What followed was the most extraordinary vacation our family has ever taken. For seven days we grinned like drunken fools, swam with sharks, hand-fed stingrays, found a cone snail as big as a motorcycle helmet, tore open coconuts with our teeth, and waited in line for grilled prawns behind Lionel Ritchie.
For me it was the colors of the place: My eyes feasted on them. To go from the monochromatic slush of an Idaho December to the emeralds, jades, and sapphires of French Polynesia was like falling overnight into a color-saturated dream. The viridescence of the palms, the sun-bleached teak of the walkways, the white sand that in places was as fine as cake flour—they were nutrients for the soul. The clouds kept up a blessed, ever-changing march; at dusk, golden and pink rays of sunlight shot through gaps in the shoulders of Otemanu and set its flanks on fire.
Years Ago in Rome, in the winding halls of the Vatican Museums, I spent a half hour in front of a 500-year- old Raphael fresco called Disputation of the Holy Sacrament. In the painting’s lower half, church officials were arguing. But in the upper half, winged babies held up a bank of clouds upon which lounged a muscled Moses, Adam, John the Baptist, etc. A blond Jesus was kicking back on a cloud-throne; behind the throne stood God-the-Father Himself, bearded, robed, drenched in rays of celestial light, holding what might be the earth, or perhaps a bowling ball, with one hand.
Paradise, in the painting, was a promise, an overarching realm of peace, eternal compensation for the trials of mortal life, and a frank contrast to earthly squabbles. In heaven, Raphael suggests, everyone will be fit and holy and clement forever. Just hang in there. But as I studied the fresco, while rain ticked down outside and my feet ached in my shoes, I began to wonder. Would it really be so wonderful to lounge in heaven forever? Wouldn’t the gratification of being sinewy and gorgeous and carefree lose its intensity after, say, 42,000 years? Wouldn’t gorging yourself at consequence-free breakfast buffets (in my case, smoked swordfish, French bread, and grapefruit juice) eventually get tiresome?
In this life, anyway, I tend to throw my hat in with Proust, who wrote that “the true paradises are the paradises that one has lost.” What fragile toehold we manage in any utopia soon crumbles. Spend five weeks in a place like Bora Bora and maybe the heat will start to get to you, or the slowness of the clocks, or the fact that you hemorrhage money every time you turn around. The fairy tale will wither.
One week, though? One week is the perfect length for a vacation like this one. On day one you’re jet-lagged and dazzled. On day two you scamper here and there, uncovering new corners of the resort every hour; you wade 50 yards out into the lagoon and whisper, “This place is unreal,” to each other.
On day three you start to figure out how the juicer at breakfast works and which beach loungers get the most breeze, and by day four you’re sleeping nine hours a night; you’re saying hello and thank-you in Tahitian; you’re walking more slowly than you’ve ever walked in your life; your skin glows; you know which bar makes the best old-fashioned. You know by now to slip into the workout room every time you pass for those little chilled and rolled-up washcloths scented with gardenia.
You find yourself on day five so relaxed that you spend five minutes watching the drops of condensation on your beer bottle capture the sunset. Lionel Ritchie says hi to you when you pass him on your way to the sunset bar, and it takes you a full second to say hi back.
But by day six you start, despite your best efforts, to see the few chinks in the resort’s glorious armor. You paddleboard too close to the loading docks and catch a whiff of the water treatment plant. You give a pump to the SPF 40 dispenser at the pool and realize—quelle horreur!— that it has not been refilled.
Swimming that evening, I thought I saw a piece of pink trash floating along. I then thought: Ah, well, Paradise Lost.
But I swam closer; it was only a hibiscus flower blown out to sea. That night, after dinner, Owen, his skin nut-brown by now, his nose peeling, burst into tears. When we finally got him to tell us what was wrong, he whimpered, “I don’t want to leave.”
We hugged him; we tucked him in. He had looked forward to this trip for a full eighth of his life. His mother talked to him about things he loves at home: his friends, the dogs, snow forts. By the time I remembered the right lines from Emily Dickinson—“That it will never come again / Is what makes life so sweet”—Owen was asleep.
On day seven, our last day, with a redeye back to L.A. facing us that night, I woke before dawn, before the kids were up, before, really, anyone at the whole resort was awake, and I hiked out to the barrier beach and walked along the big gray spine of old coral as the sun was coming up, the huge, open, blue Pacific breaking off to my right, the great sparkling reach of the barrier reef ahead.
In places, little yard-long pockets of beach hid amid the coral. Each wet handful of sand contained hundreds of tiny seashells, none of them larger than a sesame seed. I collected a dozen and studied their pastel colors, their exquisite polish. I tried to be thankful for the miracles of the world, for the blessings of being here, healthy, in this moment, in this place—for the fact that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.
Paradise, perhaps, is not so much a destination as an attitude. We were certain—all of us—that Bora Bora was going to be extraordinary, and so for that one week it was. We got to enter the gardens of Elysium, where all needs are met, where all whims are honored, where the sublime is the standard. Then, as happens with all mortals, we were expelled.