The Summer That Never Was

By TIM KREIDERAUG. 29, 2015

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I NEVER went to Iceland. I suppose I should say I didnt go to

Iceland this summer never sounds a little melodramatic, possibly
terminal. Its not as if Ive died and all hope of ever having gone to
Iceland is obviated. But for some reason this missed opportunity is
causing me more than the usual, near-toxic level of regret. Ive had a
free apartment in Reykjavik on offer for several years, and somehow
Ive never made it there. The owner of the apartment sends me
photos of the aurora borealis that break my heart.
This was going to be the summer I finally went. Airfares were cheap.
Id just finished writing a book in May, and for the first time in three
years the awful obligation to Work on My Book was not weighing on
my soul. The summer looked as wide open and shimmering with
possibility as the summers of childhood.

But events conspired against me. I just couldnt afford the flight until
some checks I was waiting on arrived, and though all other
transactions in the 21st century are conducted electronically and
instantaneously, the process of paying writers is apparently still
carried out by scriveners and counting-houses and small boys
dispatched with shillings in their hands, so by the time I got the
money Id run out of summer.
Other unexpected complications arose, as they always do. Id also
intended to be less of a recluse this summer, to see old friends more
often, make regular trips down to Baltimore and have visitors at my
cabin every weekend. But just before the Fourth of July, a friend and
former editor of mine nearly severed her little toe falling down the
stairs at my house, and was laid up on crutches at my place for the
next few weeks. She tried to be as independent as possible, but there
are limits to what a woman can do with two surgical pins in her toe,
so my job became to make her tea, fetch things for her and
occasionally carry her from place to place like Mr. Alexanders
bodyguard in A Clockwork Orange.
Shed recovered enough to go home by the end of July, and Ive been
frantically trying to cram all the idle goofing off I didnt get to do all
summer into the last few weeks, but goofing off isnt the sort of thing
you can cram.
Every reminder of forgone pleasures the empty hammock I hardly
ever lay in, a little sugar-cube melon that went bad before Id even
cut one slice from it makes me want to cry. This end-of-summer
melancholy is a common experience, even a clich. Part of it of
course is just my dread and hatred of back-to-school time,
unchanged since childhood. The whole world of work and
productivity still seems to me like an unconscionable waste of time;
the only parts of life that really matter are the summers, the inbetween times the idle goofing off.
But theres more to it than that. I use the word never in my
Icelandic lament because there really is attached to it a sense of
desolation, as of a possibility lost forever. For me, at least, it feels less
like melancholy, which is a gentle, almost pleasant emotion, and
more like terror. Its only a superficial throb of a pain that goes much
deeper, in the same way that those few oddly cool days in August are
the first innocuous evidence of an entire planet tilting inexorably into
the shadow. Its entangled, somewhere down there, with the
existential panic of aging. Of time passing, the calendar running out,
things left undone.
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I dont think Im belaboring a metaphor here; I think thats what this
feeling is really about. Im not old but Im not young anymore, either,
and if youre a procrastinator and a ditherer like me you can manage
to sustain until well into midlife the delusion that you might yet get
around to doing all the things you meant to do; making a movie,
getting married, living in Paris. But at some point you start to
suspect that you might not end up doing that stuff after all, and have
to consider the possibility that the life you have right now might
pretty much be it.
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RECENT COMMENTS
lshape
August 30, 2015
"Im not old but Im not young anymore, either, and if youre a procrastinator and a
ditherer like me you can manage to sustain until well...

Rae
August 30, 2015
I didn't get to Iceland this summer either but I did make it to the top of a mesa in New
Mexico for a few hours of limitless horizon. You...

FG
August 30, 2015
This essay reminds me of a discussion I heard about the "meaning" of Robert Frost's
The Road Not Taken (which has generated books and...

SEE ALL COMMENTS

However, this also allows you to consider your actual life, instead of
comparing it to the imaginary one you plotted out at age 12, or back
in May. The spring romance Id hoped might turn into a lasting
relationship culminated, instead, in an awkward overnight visit. But
then I found myself involved with someone made sanguine by
tragedy, with the alien capacity to appreciate whatever happiness
comes her way without either second-guessing it to death or grasping
at it and clamoring for more. Shes a hypnotherapist, and Ive been
thinking of asking her whether itd be possible to inculcate a similar
quality in me.
Because although I didnt go to Iceland this summer, I did take care
of a friend. The time my ex-editor and I spent as invalid and

manservant was kind of like going on a cross-country road trip or to

sleep-away camp together. We ended up with a hundred in-jokes and
nicknames. Were now less like friends than siblings, meaning that
we may hate each other briefly but were doomed to love each other
forever. Once youve carried someone in your arms while shes
weeping and bleeding, youre never going to be indifferent to her
again.
I didnt go to Iceland, but I watched Zapped! and ate Taco Bell in a
hospital bed, played cornhole at a pleasure club (not what it sounds
like), spent indolent afternoons drinking wine on a back porch in
Baltimore and opened a humane mousetrap only to have the captive
mouse leap straight into my face while a friend was trying to leave an
out-of-office voice mail message, which suddenly erupted into a
chaos of little-girl screams and berserk cursing. I swam naked in the
Chesapeake Bay, made martinis at 5 every day, watched fireflies after
dark. I saw a Perseid meteor streak across the night sky and vanish
so fast it was hard to tell whether its incandescent trail was in the
atmosphere, on my retina, or only in memory.
I suspect that the way I feel now, at summers end, is about how Ill
feel at the end of my life, assuming I have time and mind enough to
reflect: bewildered by how unexpectedly everything turned out,
regretful about all the things I didnt get around to, clutching the
handful of friends and funny stories Ive amassed, and wondering
where it all went. And Ill probably still be evading the same truth Im
evading now: that the life I ended up with, much as I complain about
it, was pretty much the one I chose. And my dissatisfactions with it
are really with my own character, with my hesitation and timidity.
In a couple of weeks Ill resume teaching for the fall, and start
boarding up my psyche for another hateful winter in New York. But
the summers insatiate lust for travel still torments me. A couple of
weeks ago I went to the American Museum of Natural History with
some friends and their kids, and it occurred to me, looking at the
beautiful dioramas of Animals of North America, that I would go to
this museum to look at the dioramas even without any animals in
them. Its like a peep show of nature for New Yorkers. Those realistic
vistas of Alaskan glaciers, the Great Plains and Yosemite National
Park pull at my insides with a wanting that hurts. God, how I long to
go out West again someday to drive some blue highway in Nevada
or Utah until theres absolutely nothing around me, then stop the car,
in the middle of the road, maybe, and get out and just stand there,
where I can see the horizon in every direction, and smell the air and
feel the sun and listen to the silence of the desert. I have this idea
that if I could do this, time might hold still for a second, and I would
know, for just a moment, what it feels like to be here.

Tim Kreider is the author of We Learn Nothing, a collection of essays and cartoons.