The end of summer can be tough. The year’s weekend has ended. The sun abandons us in the west, packs up his rays and goes on a six-month hiatus to Australia. Those days of swimming, and slow, easier afternoons in a beer garden are over. The bathing suit and the sunscreen are loaded into a box labelled ‘please God no’ and stuck up on a shelf until next June.

In the meantime, semesters start, managers awake out of a glazed torpor to order you around, and companies make a sudden drive towards the end of the year. Reality comes pouring in with September. And since September hath thirty days, we are right smack dab in the middle of that reality sandwich.

What to do?  

We lie to ourselves. OK, delude. OK, lie.

The autumnal equinox isn’t until September 23^rd, which means we still have eight days to lie to ourselves without being called into a room and ambushed by friends and family as they read letters to us. It is within this mood of summer ‘escapism’ that we look to America’s brief love affair with Tiki culture.

The West’s obsession with Polynesia dates back to the 1700s and starts in England. James Cook went off to the Pacific and came back with vibrant descriptions of exotic islands like Tahiti and Hawaii. Artists who had been along for the trip, like William Hodges and John Webber, provided Europeans with colorful proof of the explorer’s tales. Their depictions of brown people living in lush greenery under blue skies spurred the imagination of white people living in dank cities under gray skies. They saw the Garden of Eden. And bosoms.  

In the 1800s, the Brits are living to work. They’re toiling for little money, which is then being pilfered from them by any number of collectors: bill, rent, tax. There are prisons specifically for people in debt. And along come writers like Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stephenson who spin tales of adventure in exotic locales. Factories and industrialization had done their damage, leaving a British society obsessed with money and property. And here are people living in the islands under a permanent sun. They live simply, in peace, they don’t worry about money, don’t own things, and don’t mind showing off their bathing-suit bits. And the West was suddenly teeming with romantic, misplaced, simplistic fantasies of adventure, pleasure, and unencumbered sex amongst native peoples who didn’t know what toilets or money were.

The problem is, it’s not at all true. In the first place, treating Polynesia as one society is like thinking everyone in Europe speaks one language. It’s the sort of stupid assumption one might make by an American elected president in 2024. Polynesia isn’t governed by one chilled-out guy who smokes a lot of hash and eats Cheetos. The islands are made up of complex people living in complex societies; their social mores – sexual and all – are based on a number of careful and complex factors. The west had made a fantasy out of various Polynesian cultures.

Nevertheless, the pareo—wearing-genie was out of the bottle. Wrong or not, people in the West become hooked on the idea of the islands. They represented a place far away from the problems they faced in the west. There, you didn’t have to wake up for work, or drive to work, or work. You just chilled.

But it’s another South Pacific traveller who brings Polynesia to America. Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt (heretofore Donn Beach) spent his college money traveling around the world, finding a special affinity for the island cultures in the South Pacific and the Caribbean. He returned to Los Angeles in the early 1930s to find work and did so making movie sets. It’s with the discarded junk and hodge podge of back room refuse that he opened Don the Beachcomber in Los Angeles.

But Donn Beach is more than a bar hack. He understands that the country has just come through Prohibition and it now in the Depression. So he doesn’t just open a bar, he creates a bamboo-gated haven decorated with tropical plants, fake palm trees, and big masks.

Never mind the fact that he wasn’t really attempting to reproduce an authentic Tahitian bar. Or the fact that the Tahitians didn’t really drink. Or the fact that all of the things that he dug out of dusty prop rooms had nothing to do with any of the cultures in the Pacific. He knew that the things he chose would be those things Americans already associated with the exotic tropics and the imaginary South Seas universe. Grass skirts, long-chinned masks with round eyes, coconut bras for men or women (in Tiki, who cares?!)

His faux-Polynesian village becomes the haven of the famous, the busy, the worried. Just like the artists and writers of 19^th century England, he creates an escape from the rough and tough real world. But he has something Herman Melville didn’t: fancy, colorful, fruit-filled cocktails made with enough rum to bring down a herd of Ernest Hemingways.  

I’ve been living overseas (Prague) for more than twenty years. Each year, I visit home in the summer, and, occasionally, at Christmas. As time has worn down and travel takes its toll on me more and more (i.e. makes me her sleepless and confused and jetlagged bitch), Christmas trips have fallen by the wayside and my visits have been relegated to summer.

This is fine. Yes, I miss my family. But the video-calling these days is so accessible and free that I might be more in touch with them here than if I lived in Pittsburgh, for example. For the visits themselves, I usually make a somewhat famous-amongst-my-friends laundry list of things I’m going to do when I get home.

This list is almost completely food- and diet-based. It’s steak and Italian restaurants, cheesesteaks, Italian hoagies, pizza, and Chinese food. It’s supermarkets and their offerings. Though I have come to love my daily gastronomy in the Czech Republic and feel that the grocery-store food here is far healthier, there is simply no comparing a Czech supermarket with an American one. If a Czech supermarket is looking at a picture of Pamela Anderson, then an American supermarket is spending the night with Pamela Anderson.

I was reminded of such greatness when my dad and I went up to our local Giant in mid-August. My sister, her kids, and my mom had all gone to the shore for the week which left my dad and I to fend for ourselves. I don’t mind this at all. My dad theoretically doesn’t mind it, until it’s dinner time and nobody has put food on a table and he’s suddenly reminded of why he puts up with a house full of people.

My dad is more or less immobile due to bad knees and old age, so while other people in the house cramp the hermetic, grouse-like, old-age style he’s been rocking the last decade or so, those people also do the shopping and cook the food and make sure the dishes are clean. When he’s left alone, he realizes those things don’t happen on their own.  

I represented two things to him that he doesn’t have and can’t understand: knees that bend and a genuine pleasure of walking around. Especially when that walk is done in an American supermarket.

We come up with a list together. That is to say, he writes a list of 10–12 junk-food items and cakes of various sizes, and I add actual food. I have to pull my punches with the ‘food’ aspect, as we are not sitting down to meals of chicken and rice. If I told my dad I’d made salmon and quinoa, he might literally disown me. But he would keep it quiet until after I had become his conduit to the bag of pretzels in the kitchen.

He waited in the car while I walked into the store, grabbing a tiny little cart of the way. I pushed through the automatic doors and was reminded of home. I haven’t had a sense of smell in about twenty years, but my brain went to work reminding me what baked kaiser buns and Danish smelled like. The multi-colored icing on the cupcakes dispatched a flood of waters to my mouth.    The TastyKakes, the deli section, the baked goods, the literal aisles solely dedicated to cereals and crackers and snacks made me dizzy.

When I got to Vaclav Havel airport one Thursday morning in early August I was probably unrecognizable. This was mostly due to the smile I was wearing. It’s very rare that I am smiling in an airport.

Oh, it’s not the fear as it once was. No. It’s seems I’ve traded in my terror of being 7 miles above earth in a flying death tube for an intense dislike of being in airports. Airports involve running, sweating, being delayed, being groped by paid agents, and being near other people. Besides a hefty enjoyment of a good grope by a strange, I hate all of those other things.

But this trip involves something I have virtually no experience with: a direct flight.

In the 22 years I’ve been getting from Prague to Philadelphia twice a year, it has always almost every single time involved two flights. This means a whole other airport. It means the possibility of a delay, which in turn means the possibility of a missed flight, which in turn means the possibility of a longer time in an airport, which in turn means being near more people.

No thank you.

But a direct flight means I get on one plane and when I get off that plane I’m where I want to be. Not Frankfurt, Paris, or London. I’m in Philadelphia. This means a whole airport full of people that can’t get to annoy the hell out of me with their whole being human thing.

I’m in row 12 on the aisle. I am sharing a very tight, three-seat row with a married couple in their 40s. I share a few, constipated words with the woman that tell me they don’t intend to be chatty. This is very fine with me. Her husband sits on the window. He’s wearing a good-natured smile and gym shorts that thirty years ago would have pegged him as a slacker but these days makes him like everyone else. We catch each other’s eye and I decide on a harmless joke about the tight seats to set the pleasant tone. This will let them know that, even though we aren’t going to be friends, they should feel free to get up and use the bathroom anytime.

“Boy, they have us in here like cattle.”

The man smiles and chuckles. “Prague is a beautiful city.”

I can’t decide if the man has misheard me dramatically or if he’s letting me know he doesn’t want to converse. Before I can mull this over and conclude, a shriek draws my attention. It’s a child shriek, so like most adults, I am slinking back into the shadows and hoping someone else will deal with whatever is going on.

The situation in a nutshell: A little boy might not be able to sit with his mom and is terrified. The mom it seems has opted to not get three seats together to ensure that she will be able to sit with her two children. Instead, she has opted to rely on the kindness of strangers – aka, the cheaper option. She now seems very distraught, but not distraught even to have considered her kid’s feelings when she was buying the ticket.

“He’s a little boy, he can’t fly alone!” intones a woman judgmentally from four rows away. It takes me a moment to realize that that woman doesn’t in any way work for the airline. She’s just a passenger with an opinion. A loud, unasked-for opinion. Something dawns on me.

“She’s a Karen!” I say to my seat companions.

The woman nods into her book.

The man smiles at me. “Our daughter studies at Villanova.”

“Huh.” Can’t figure this guy out.