An eye exam, a three-day rental car, and the mildly inconvenient discovery that getting away actually works.

This is not, strictly speaking, how most vacations begin. There was no carefully assembled itinerary, no spreadsheet, no restaurant reservations made three weeks in advance. I had an appointment at Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids, a car that had lately begun inspiring theological questions, and an employee discount on rental cars.

So I rented one for three days.

The official purpose was vision care.

Everything after that was administrative drift.

Traverse City is roughly three hours from where I was living, which is just far enough to require commitment but not quite far enough to justify dramatic language about “getting away.” My original plan was to finish the eye exam in Grand Rapids and continue north at a responsible pace.

Then Frederick Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park appeared on the map.

I went.

This turned out to be the best decision of the trip.

The first thing I photographed was an airplane that appeared to be vomiting objects from the sky. The sculpture was actually called Delivery and represented emergency supplies being dropped during the Second World War, which is a considerably more dignified interpretation than mine.

Nearby, there was an artwork involving insects in what looked like a beer glass.

I took a picture of it.

I do not generally photograph insects voluntarily, so this felt like evidence that the place had already altered my judgment.

It had rained that day, which made the outdoor gardens smell aggressively green. The deeper I walked into them, the less the place resembled a museum and the more it felt like one of those fictional gardens in which a child disappears behind a hedge and returns twenty years later with magical powers.

There were tropical plants, desert plants, manicured trees, sculptures, paths, carefully arranged lines, and enough visual order to make me think, somewhat unfairly, of Meijer grocery stores.

They, too, are very organized.

Apparently this was becoming a theory.

What impressed me most was not any single plant or sculpture but the sheer scale of the place. There are places so beautiful that you immediately start photographing everything, and places so beautiful that you forget to photograph anything.

This was the second kind.

At some point I saw a wedding area and thought, with complete sincerity, that I could understand getting married simply to have a reason to get married there.

This is not a sound basis for matrimony, but it is an excellent review of a garden.

Eventually, I remembered that Traverse City still existed.

I got back in the car and drove for another two and a half hours, listening to music and singing loudly enough that I arrived with a slightly damaged voice.

I checked into the Airbnb.

Then, because apparently being on vacation means developing an allergy to furniture, I immediately left again.

The first evening stop was Silver Spruce Brewing Company.

I ordered a beer flight, arranged the glasses in front of me, and wrote a gratitude journal.

This is the sort of behavior that becomes acceptable when travelling alone.

At home, four beers and a notebook might suggest a problem. On vacation, it becomes reflection.

It had just rained, and while I was sitting there, a rainbow appeared outside the window.

At some point a group of cyclists rode past and waved.

There are days when very ordinary things begin arriving with suspiciously good timing—a garden, a beer, a rainbow, strangers saying hello—and one starts to wonder whether the universe has briefly confused you with someone who has excellent karma.

I sat there for a while, looking outside, feeling absurdly lucky.

Then I went to Lake Michigan.

Of course I did.

By that point, water had become my preferred form of emotional maintenance.

I drove toward a campground near a lighthouse and sat by the shore in the evening. Lake Michigan is strange that way: every viewpoint looks recognizably like Lake Michigan and yet somehow not quite like the last one.

During the day, it is broad and bright and almost aggressively refreshing.

At night, it becomes quieter. The lighthouse throws light across the water, and everything feels temporarily arranged into the correct proportions.

I have spent a great deal of time near water since moving to Michigan.

I am still not tired of it.

There are worse coping mechanisms.

Eventually, I returned to the Airbnb and fell asleep with the suddenness of someone who had been struck gently on the back of the head with cookware.

The next morning began, as many good mornings do, with an urgent need for caffeine.

I found something called the Warehouse Market while searching for coffee and discovered that it was considerably more interesting than the beverage emergency that had led me there.

There were handmade objects, pottery, tiny recycled-metal cars, stickers, strange decorative things, and the sort of merchandise that causes the adult brain to alternate rapidly between I need this and Under no circumstances do I need this.

I considered making pottery.

The pottery area was closed.

This was probably financially beneficial.

I found small objects that I immediately imagined converting into keyboard keycaps, because by then I had developed the unfortunate ability to look at unrelated objects and ask whether they could somehow become part of a mechanical keyboard.

I saw astrology merchandise identifying Libras, which led to some private reflection on being a Libra and therefore, according to whatever I had just read, apparently committed to beauty and ease.

An excellent philosophy when other people are paying.

There were also flyers with enough visual personality to make me briefly imagine recreating some forgotten Detroit rock-and-roll scene from the nineteen-nineties.

This is what travel does to a person.

You encounter a piece of letter-size paper and suddenly believe you have an artistic calling.

I bought almost nothing.

This may have been the most successful part of the morning.

After a latte and a burrito, I began looking for something else to do.

There had never been a real itinerary, and by this point it seemed unreasonable to begin one.

I found discounted tickets for a boat tour.

So I boarded the Discovery.

The tour lasted about two hours.

The captain explained the shoreline, trails, local history, wineries, breweries, cherries, and other information that I listened to with varying levels of discipline.

I had wine.

I had music.

I had sunlight hitting the surface of the water so brightly that it looked as though someone had scattered diamonds across it.

The educational portion of the tour did not stand a chance.

There are moments when additional information feels almost rude.

The horizon was right there.

What more was I supposed to learn?

I sat outside on the deck, let the sun do irresponsible things to my skin, and watched the boat move through the water.

It was wonderful.

Breakfast had been heavy enough that lunch seemed unnecessary, but the weather was hot, which made ice cream a civic duty.

I drove to Moomers.

From the outside, it looked almost suspiciously ordinary: an ice-cream shop in a rural area where, judging from the number of customers, everyone else had also received confidential instructions to be there.

Then I understood.

There were many flavors.

The ice cream was handmade.

It was rich without being overwhelmingly sweet.

All of this would have been sufficient.

But behind the shop was a wide field with cows wandering through it.

I ate a banana split while looking across open farmland.

This created the kind of happiness that is embarrassingly difficult to intellectualize.

Ice cream.

Grass.

Cows.

Sometimes civilization reaches its optimal form very early in the design process.

Traverse City had been like this throughout the trip. The businesses were enjoyable on their own, but the surrounding landscape kept improving them. A brewery became better because a rainbow appeared outside. A boat became better because the horizon refused to end. Ice cream became better because cows were running around in the distance.

Nature was apparently doing the marketing.

On the drive back, I chose a different route and stopped once more near the water, at Ludington State Park.

This was unnecessary.

Which is why I did it.

The landscape there was particularly strange and beautiful: water on one side of the road, expansive sand on the other, enough dunes and open space to make the place feel less like Michigan and more like someone had accidentally installed a small desert beside a lake.

There were campgrounds nearby.

I began imagining retirement.

This happens to me with alarming speed in peaceful places.

Within minutes, I had constructed an entire future in which I lived somewhere quiet, grilled meat outside, wandered toward the water when bored, and had somehow acquired both financial security and advanced camping skills.

None of these conditions currently existed.

Still, it seemed pleasant.

Then I got back in the car and returned to real life.

It took me several days to write about the trip.

By then, the rental car had been returned, the Airbnb was somebody else’s problem, and daily life had resumed its usual attempt to occupy all available mental space.

But the strange thing was that I felt different.

Not dramatically different.

I had not returned enlightened.

I had not discovered my purpose.

I had not developed a new personality while eating ice cream near livestock.

It was smaller than that.

Before the trip, I had been tense for long enough that the tension had begun to feel normal. There were things I had been swallowing, postponing, tolerating, compressing into increasingly crowded corners of my mind.

Then, for forty-eight hours, there were huge lakes.

Sand dunes.

Forests.

Gardens.

A horizon with absolutely no interest in my problems.

And that scale did something useful.

There are landscapes that make human worries feel insignificant in an insulting way.

Michigan occasionally manages to make them feel insignificant in a comforting way.

A lake does not solve anything.

But it is difficult to maintain the exact same internal monologue while looking at water that appears to continue forever.

I had once thought of travel mostly as a form of pleasure—a temporary exit from ordinary life, enjoyable but ultimately optional. And perhaps if one lived everyday life correctly, I thought, one would not need to escape it.

I am less certain now.

A dolphin can live in water and still occasionally jump into the air.

Perhaps people need something similar.

Not a grand international vacation. Not transformation. Not even a particularly good plan.

Sometimes it may be enough to move a little farther than usual, encounter something you did not arrange in advance, and allow the mind to operate under slightly different conditions.

This trip had almost been cancelled.

I had rented the car impulsively. I had booked the Airbnb late. By the time the weekend arrived, I was tempted to stay home, and the reservation policy more or less forced me to go.

A remarkable amount of happiness resulted from being unable to obtain a refund.

The entire thing lasted one night and two days.

Yet the person who returned felt slightly less compressed than the person who left.

Perhaps that is the irritating thing about travel.

Sometimes it actually works.