On Saugatuck, tulip fatigue, fried chicken, minor existential crises, and the surprisingly restorative effects of going somewhere else for a few hours.

By the beginning of May, I had developed a fairly reliable weekend strategy: spend five days accumulating stress, then drive somewhere with water.

This was not an especially sophisticated system, but it was effective.

Work had been unusually exhausting, Holland was entering full Tulip Time chaos, and I had reached the point where sitting quietly at home seemed less restful than mildly dangerous. So, on the weekend of Cinco de Mayo, I decided to go to Saugatuck.

Normally, getting there required taking my increasingly untrustworthy car onto the highway, which introduced an additional layer of spiritual testing to an outing supposedly intended for relaxation. This time I ignored the navigation system, found a slower route through local roads, and arrived without either mechanical catastrophe or personal enlightenment.

Holland, meanwhile, was overflowing with festival traffic. Every route on Google Maps had turned red. Police officers were directing cars through intersections. Sidewalks appeared to have reached legal capacity.

I felt quietly pleased with myself for having seen the tulips the previous weekend, before the entire town collectively arrived to do the same thing.

Saugatuck, by comparison, was busy without being suffocating.

Before leaving Holland, however, Cinco de Mayo required acknowledgment in the form of Mexican food.

I went to On the Border and ordered enchiladas and something called an Ocean Spray Rita, which arrived with a small floating duck and therefore possessed considerably more visual charm than culinary restraint. The drink was stronger than expected, the enchiladas were aggressively salty, and the tortilla chips were, somewhat tragically, less enjoyable than the bagged On the Border chips sold at Meijer.

There is something destabilizing about discovering that the supermarket version of a restaurant’s product is superior to the one served at the restaurant.

Still, the staffs were nice.

Three stars, with one of them awarded for kindness.

Then: Saugatuck.

The first place I wandered into was a small shop with a garden outside. I never learned its name, which is perhaps appropriate for the sort of shop one encounters while walking without a plan. Tulip season was beginning to fade, and the flowers had started surrendering their theatrical dominance to ordinary green things.

This was not entirely bad.

After several weeks of tulips announcing themselves from every sidewalk, planter, farm, storefront, and municipal surface in Holland, grass had begun to seem almost avant-garde.

There was also a duck.

The duck was extremely popular.

Saugatuck sits along the water, and the waterfront is the part of town that makes the rest of the day feel justified. The boardwalk runs past docks and boats, and on warm afternoons there are people sitting aboard them drinking wine, reading books, and appearing to possess no urgent responsibilities.

I find these people fascinating.

They always seem to have correctly understood something about adulthood that I have not.

When I first visited Saugatuck, it reminded me a little of Edgewater, New Jersey: waterfront streets, polished restaurants, tidy storefronts, the general sense that someone had given aesthetic consideration to the neighborhood. But after spending more time there, the resemblance disappeared. Saugatuck has its own rhythm—smaller, stranger, more relaxed, and much more committed to decorative objects.

There was, for instance, a shop full of cookbooks from around the world.

At some point, cookbooks stopped being purely instructional objects and became a form of furniture. A well-designed cookbook now performs several jobs simultaneously: it contains recipes, it provides photographs, it signals taste, and, if placed strategically on a kitchen counter, it suggests that the owner may someday cook something more elaborate than eggs.

I nearly bought an American-themed tumbler nearby, then correctly predicted that I would become bored with it within approximately two weeks.

Progress.

At a bookstore, I found the selection for an upcoming local book club and briefly entertained the idea of reading it and attending.

My plan was simple: read enough of the book to form several defensible opinions, then compensate for any linguistic deficiencies through enthusiasm and hand gestures.

This has carried me surprisingly far in life.

The children’s section contained a tiny reading room that looked almost like a miniature dressing room. Children gathered there for story time, which made the bookstore feel less like a retail operation and more like a small civic institution.

That afternoon I kept thinking about whether places like bookstores, cookware shops, and little independent stores were still economically necessary.

It is an easy question to ask while standing outside them.

Inside, it becomes harder.

You talk to the owner. Someone recommends a book. Another person laughs at something near the register. People walk out carrying an object they did not technically need and looking very pleased about it.

Efficiency suddenly seems like an incomplete metric.

I crossed several rainbow-painted crosswalks—Saugatuck appears to have a generous supply—and eventually arrived at Uncommon Coffee, which I love despite the coffee itself being, if we are being strict about nomenclature, not especially uncommon.

This does not reduce my affection for it.

In fact, much of my wandering around Saugatuck could reasonably be described as an elaborate method of eventually arriving at Uncommon Coffee.

On another street I passed Ada Red’s Cottage. I did not eat there, but I saw an elderly chef with white hair guiding guests through the backyard garden, explaining individual trees, flowers, and structures.

He was taking his time.

The guests were listening.

Nobody appeared to be in a hurry.

I decided that if I ever had an occasion requiring the phrase “special occasion,” I wanted to come back and have this man explain the garden to me.

By the end of the day, I returned to Holland for a manicure and later sat around a backyard fire with other people.

Then, almost immediately after the fire ended, rain came down violently.

Perfect timing.

There are few experiences more satisfying than arriving indoors approximately thirty seconds before weather becomes someone else’s problem.

That week at work had been the sort that activates every internal alarm at once. I had been angry enough to carry the feeling physically, and the simple act of walking beside the water had helped reset something.

Not solve it.

Reset it.

This distinction became important.

I was still a salaried adult with responsibilities, bills, and no immediate access to the economic freedom required to spend weekday afternoons reading wine-adjacent literature on a boat.

In other words, I remained employed.

But it helped to remember that there was an attractive little town nearby where I could temporarily stop thinking in work-shaped rectangles.

---

A couple of weekends later, the pressure was still there and it had become harder to ignore.

Since joining a project the previous summer and moving to a new place, I had accumulated more stress than I had realized. My routines had slipped. I was exercising less. I was walking less. The habits that normally kept me functional had become things I was apparently supposed to remember while already tired.

There is a specific kind of panic that comes from realizing not that your life is collapsing, exactly, but that too many small things have quietly stopped working.

So I went to Lake Macatawa.

Again: water.

Lake Macatawa connects to Lake Michigan and sits close enough to Holland that it had become one of my emergency reset locations. The neighborhood around it is clean and quiet, and I had started going there every couple of weeks to sit near the water and let my brain become less dramatic.

By mid-May the weather was warm enough to put my feet in the lake.

I tried water walking for the first time.

This was less impressive than it sounds.

Still, standing in cool water while the weather warmed around me felt like a useful reminder that seasons change whether or not one has personally organized one’s life.

Tulip Time was over by then. Most of the tulips had collapsed into the slightly tragic post-festival phase of their existence, so I went to the Dutch village instead.

It was extremely cute.

There were miniature buildings, wooden shoes, traditional demonstrations, Dutch sweets, and enough cultural interpretation to make the place feel more informative than the festival itself.

The wooden shoes remained one of my favorite objects. They are bulky, impractical, and somehow adorable. I wanted to put them on children and make the children perform tap dancing against their will.

I did not.

I also tried Dutch candy that stuck aggressively to my teeth but tasted good enough to justify the inconvenience, particularly with hot coffee.

The most memorable moment had nothing to do with tulips or wooden shoes.

A group of older women who had been performing traditional Dutch dances later began racing around on carts.

They were delighted.

Not politely happy. Delighted.

They looked like children who had discovered that adulthood did not, in fact, require permanent seriousness.

I watched them for longer than necessary.

At the time, I felt like my own life was still full of provisional arrangements—career, money, location, the usual adult scaffolding that never quite seems finished. Their happiness looked almost luxurious by comparison.

I left with a new long-term objective:

Grow old.

Remain healthy.

Become unserious again.

Preferably with friends.

That evening I returned to one of the first restaurants I had tried when I moved to Holland and ordered the same curry tonkatsu I had ordered then. Afterward I walked around town alone.

The air was warm. The streets were quiet. The town felt safe.

And for a moment I thought: I may not live here forever, but I have been extremely lucky to live here at all.

The next morning, I drove to Zeeland for cold brew because apparently rest requires logistics.

The coffee was unusually chaotic—bitter, acidic, nutty, all happening at once—and therefore interesting. I then went elsewhere for a bagel because one establishment apparently could not be entrusted with the entire breakfast.

The cream cheese portion was enormous.

Later that day I tried a hibachi restaurant, having incorrectly assumed that hibachi meant fire would be thrown theatrically into the air.

But, no fire – just a minor betrayal.

---

By Memorial Day weekend, I had returned to Saugatuck again.

At this point, I had to accept that I was no longer “exploring” Saugatuck.

I was simply going there.

The weather was warm, and the town had become a default setting.

I began with a trail.

The woods were dense and bright green, the leaves still young enough to make everything look newly assembled.

Then I encountered a sign.

The sign contained arrows.

I followed one.

This was a mistake.

I had interpreted the arrow as meaning: Follow this trail and eventually reach a scenic viewpoint.

What it actually meant was closer to: Continue walking until you begin questioning your literacy.

After roughly forty minutes of unnecessary effort, I discovered that the route led not to some majestic overlook but toward another parking area.

The true meaning of the trail marker appeared to be:

Look up.

The sky is technically visible.

This improved the hike enormously.

Eventually, after enough sweating, wandering, and private criticism of recreational signage, I reached the water.

The view was worth it.

This is how nature maintains its reputation.

I left a small “Christine was here” trace, took pictures, and headed downtown with one objective:

pizza.

The hiking had never really been about cardiovascular health.

The hiking had been a pre-payment.

I already knew exactly which pizza restaurant I wanted! So no need to hesitate.

Scooter’s Café & Pizzeria has the kind of entrance that looks almost garden-like, and the taco pizza was absurdly good: crisp crust, soft dough, toppings, crushed tortilla chips, multiple textures occurring with admirable coordination.

Afterward, I considered ice cream.

Then I remembered I was an adult and ordered a cocktail instead.

The drink was called Winnie and tasted almost nothing like alcohol, which is exactly what makes such drinks dangerous. It was fruity, not excessively sweet, and disappeared with suspicious ease.

The following day, I went back to Saugatuck.

Again.

The weather was cloudy, which meant fried food was necessary.

This is not science, but I stand by it.

I went to The Southerner, partly because I had seen a review from someone who presented himself as effectively born holding a chicken wing and raised in Kentucky.

This seemed like a useful credential.

I ordered habanero-level chicken.

The server looked concerned.

“It’s kind of spicy. Are you sure?”

I was briefly offended on behalf of the Korean tongue.

Kind of spicy?

I finished half a chicken without water.

This accomplished nothing socially, medically, or historically.

But internally, a point had been made.

The food was excellent—not just the chicken, but the sides, the plating, all of it. It tasted less like restaurant food and more like someone had made an unreasonable effort in a kitchen.

I sat between couples at a narrow table, ate fried chicken alone, and felt perfectly fine.

Perhaps better than fine.

---

By the end of May, I had spent an irresponsible amount of time driving between Holland, Saugatuck, Zeeland, lakes, trails, coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, and places that sold objects I did not need.

I had also become interested in mechanical keyboards, which introduced a separate financial problem.

My cash flow was developing circulatory issues.

But something else had changed.

When work becomes consuming, it shrinks the field of vision. Everything begins to appear through the same narrow frame: deadlines, responsibilities, irritations, things that have gone wrong, things that might go wrong next.

Leaving town for several hours did not fix any of that.

It simply made the frame larger.

I walked through unfamiliar neighborhoods. I talked to shopkeepers. I ate things I could not have predicted. I got lost because of a stupid sign. I watched old women race carts. I sat beside water until my mind stopped rehearsing arguments.

And I began to think that perhaps this is one of the quieter advantages of living somewhere unlike the place where you grew up.

You become slightly less certain that your way of doing things is the obvious one.

Had I remained only in places culturally familiar to me—Korea, New York, New Jersey—I would have missed many of these small, ridiculous, useful encounters.

Some of them were uncomfortable.

Some of them made me feel like a worm sprayed with vinegar.

But in retrospect, even those experiences became material.

Memory.

Perspective.

Assets of a sort.

There is always more work to do.

There is always another thing one should be preparing for.

There is always some reason to remain indoors and behave responsibly.

But May reminded me that a life made entirely of preparation becomes strangely difficult to remember.

So I kept leaving the house.

Sometimes for a lake.

Sometimes for coffee.

Sometimes for fried chicken.

Often for no particularly defensible reason at all.

And, at least for that month, it worked.