Five Things I Love (& 5 I Can Do Without)

Beach not Mountains

Five Things I Love (the end)

When I met my husband, he told me he liked beaches, and I declared I liked mountains. Why did I say that? I suppose because, though I grew up an hour from the sugar white beaches of the Gulf Coast, my parents always hauled us to Tennessee for vacation. We’d drive for hours along the winding, high curves of the Smoky Mountains. The drives always made me nauseous. I hated the cold. I hated the hairpin curves. “But you love the mountains!” my mother said, whenever I complained, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Later, after college, I lived in Knoxville and used to go hiking alone in the mountains. I liked hiking alone but I feared grizzly bears. Once I met a boy in a laundromat. I liked the way he looked, sitting there with his styrofoam cup of coffee, getting his laundry done. I said, “Do you want to go hiking with me?” I thought he would be a good companion, and if a grizzly showed up, we could fight it off together. So we took our not-quite-dry clothes out of our separate dryers, left his car at the laundromat, and drove outside of town in my car. We hiked up the mountain and found a swimming hole. I stripped down and went swimming. He came in after me. We made out. It began to thunder. We got dressed and scrambled down the muddy hiking trail as lightning flashed overhead. We went to his apartment to dry off. He was sweet. We dated a little after that, but not much, because every time he came to visit me at CeeBee’s Rock n’ Roll Cafe, where I worked as a server until it became impossible to work there, he would buy a beer and not tip the bartender, and not tipping is a dealbreaker.

Anyway, when I met my husband, I was still under the impression that I liked mountains better than beaches. When I took him home to Alabama to meet my parents, we spent a few days at Gulf Shores, lying under the sun in the hot sand. When we were living in New York City, he surprised me with a trip to Puerto Rico, where we swam in the bioluminescent bay. Later, we went to Molokai, where we hiked to the leper colony one day but mostly just hung out on the beach. After we had our son, we started going to Hawaii during the off-season in early December, because it’s just a five-hour flight from the West Coast. As it turned out, I vastly prefer the beach to the mountains. Every few years, we’ll drive North a few hours to ski, and every time this happens, as we’re driving slowly over some terrifying mountain road, gears grinding, I say, “What were we thinking? Next time let’s go to the beach.”

Here’s the thing about beach vacations: you can pack one carry-on. You don’t have to rent skis. You don’t have to put snow chains on the car. You don’t have to layer. You don’t need the right socks, the right shoes, or the right thermals. I love simplification, and the beach is simple. Even our notoriously frigid Bay Area beaches just require a 15-minute drive over Highway 92 and a sturdy trench coat. Mountains, on the other hand, are complicated.

Also, I don’t like skiing. I don’t like going downhill fast. I don’t like getting stuck in the traffic to Tahoe. I don’t even like the cold, although we’ve spent a lot of time traveling to the far northern reaches in January. A crackling fire is nice but not nice enough to justify the rest of it.

“But it’s fun to drink hot chocolate when it’s snowing outside,” my husband said once, as our tires slid over the ice at Donner Pass (we hadn’t yet found a spot to stop and put on the chains). At which point I reminded him that, not only can he drink hot chocolate anywhere, he does drink hot chocolate anywhere. Or, more accurately, everywhere. All over Paris, in the years we were living there, amused waiters would shout out in mocking delight for the entire restaurant to hear, after he had convinced them that yes, he really did want chocolat chuad, “Mais monsiuer! C’est pour les enfants!”

“Peut-être je suis un enfant,” he would reply. Eventually they would bring the chocolat chaud, and sometimes they’d bring along a waiter friend to gawk at the full grown American man who ordered hot chocolate, which, as everyone knows, is pour les infants. (One day I’ll tell you what happened when DGSE discovered my husband had been putting Benko in his milk for two years. Suffice it to say that, although the French intelligence services are not known for their sense of humor, great hilarity ensued.)

I digress. On those rare occasions when we have made the mistake of heading for the mountains instead of the coast, he agrees: of course, next time we should go to the beach. Next time, we will.

So if I ever stop you and ask you for directions to Tahoe, please gently remind me I’m going the wrong direction. Be kind and point me West. But first tell me where to find a good cup of coffee, a family-sized jar of Jif, and a very short book.

So that’s it! Five Things I Love, and five I can do without. Next time your writing is stuck, I encourage you to try a Five Things post. You’ll find more of my Five Things here.

Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author eight books of fiction, including the Silicon Valley thriller THE WONDER TEST and THE MARRIAGE PACT, which has been published in 30 languages.