The Raging Elitist

The butterflies started in my stomach about 15 miles before we reached the hotel. Danyelle and I were driving south through the lowland forest of Retirement-Land, South Carolina bound for a resort outside Beaufort. A weekend away from the kids awaited, and for some reason, I dreaded getting there. “I’m nervous,” I confessed.

I recognized the feeling from prior escapes. We’d ditched the kids for a getaway as husband and wife three other times in our seven-and-a-half years as parents, and on each of those occasions, the sense of urgency that “this is our chance to rest and reenergize” mixed with the instinct to run back to our children and hold them in our arms, creating a strange emotional mélange and a vague sense of unreality. I didn’t quite know it yet driving across the Broad River on Hwy 170, but Montage Palmetto Bluff was the perfect place to accentuate that feeling.

Retirement-Land, SC is an area south of Hwy 17 that includes Seabrook, Beaufort, Bluffton, and Hilton Head. Driving south from Charleston, the ramshackle homes and sporadic roadside inns and seafood restaurants that dot the route through the Ace Basin give way to neat structures with green roofs and quaint signs that look like they belong to the recreation department or a golf course. Grand oaks with Spanish moss, deep water access everywhere; it all screams, “Quick! We need more condos and golf courses! And pavement for God’s sake! We gotta get these old people in here before it’s too late!” Deep within this territory, Palmetto Bluff is a mecca for status-seeking retirees and vacationers alike, a place to “be in nature,” a place to “experience the magic of the lowcountry in its ultimate form,” a place with an inn that sold my sister a $1,000 gift certificate.

My fears about where Danyelle and I were headed were validated as soon as we got to the gate that guards the four-mile stretch of road leading to the inn. I awkwardly told the attendant that we were “staying here the next couple nights,” and she asked, “at the inn?” Uh, yeah, I didn’t know we could stay anywhere else. That’s because I’m an idiot. I thought we were going to a hotel property. Wrong. This place is a 20,000-acre development that includes 4,000 homes with combined sales totaling $2.5 billion, and Kristin guards it all from her post at the booth. “Have you stayed with us before?” she asked. Obviously not, lady.

Kristin set the tone for the sorts of interactions we were to enjoy for the rest of our visit. Being guests at the inn meant that we were entitled to a certain degree of humiliating butt licking from the servant class. One way this manifested itself was that everyone really wanted to know if we’d stayed at the inn before. After Kristin, we met Kevin, the guy who ushered us toward the front desk while some other staff members kidnapped our car and luggage. Kevin explained that we could get our vehicle and bags back in exchange for ransom money, addressing us by a jumbled version of our last name, and getting really excited when I appeared to understand what was happening, stopping in the middle of his spiel to turn and ask me for the second time, with sudden urgency in his voice, “Have you stayed with us before?” No, dude, but I do know I booked one of the cottages, and I really just want this part to be over.

By the time we met Andrew, who blushed at us from behind the front desk and spoke in the sort of slightly high-pitched, exaggeratedly non-threatening voice some people use with small children, I finally broke down and laughed. “Have you stayed with us before?” I did him the courtesy of looking down as the chuckle escaped me. Then, the horrible thought crossed my mind as I pulled myself together: “Do I like this?”

I’m disgusted by pampering. I don’t see how people can enjoy things like pedicures and massages. I’ve never had a professional massage in my life. The idea of it is gross. Something about paying someone to rub you while you lie there and groan is demeaning to everyone involved. One person becomes a purely pleasure-driven object, and the other indulges their self-degradation in exchange for money. It’s sort of like reverse prostitution. The rub-ee says, “Here’s my body. Fuck me, and I’ll give you money. You are my tool.” and the rub-er, says, “Gladly. You just do nothing. You are a docile cow, and I’m going to milk you.” This is the subtext that caused Andrew to blush and me to laugh as the two of us stood on either side of the front desk, and it permeates all of human existence at Palmetto Bluff.

When Kevin shuttled us over to our lodging, I was disappointed to discover that a “forest view cottage” is actually a “neighbor view duplex,” a hotel room with a big bathroom, a porch looking at a drainage area, and a bad mattress. Kevin mirrored my disappointment when I handed him a crisp twenty, and after he left, I lamented to Danyelle that I had brought her to a dystopian human dairy farm for the rich and braindead. This was our one chance at extended time alone together, and I had ruined it! She encouraged me to calm down, but both of us agreed on a couple of major points – we missed the kids, and this place was weird.

I had booked the trip on the heels of a rough weekend, sleep-deprived from stress, struggling to tolerate the boys’ energy. I was so tired that it seemed like a good idea to listen to my mother, who had a very clear ulterior motive (she wanted to have the boys to herself), and my sister, who frequently gets massages. Of course, when the time to actually take the trip arrived, we’d settled into a nice family groove, one that I hated to interrupt. Now that Danyelle and I were safely through the initial gauntlet of would-be human milkers, I couldn’t stand the thought that we were going to miss Cartter and Scotty the next two nights, and the fact that we were in this PG version of Sodom and Gomorrah heightened the creeping threat of regret.

According to Danyelle, though, having a good time was indeed possible, so instead of paying the car ransom and running away like the last survivors in a horror movie, we set out for dinner. I was glad when she wanted to walk as opposed to hopping on the turquoise beach cruisers parked outside our door. I was already becoming aware of Palmetto Bluff’s rigid class structure, and I wanted to exist outside of it. The bikes were clear markers of one’s station as a “guest.” On the bluff guests comprise the most pathetic caste, cruising around on identical turquoise bikes looking for photo ops. They exist beneath the more elite caste known as “members,” who enjoy access to the golf course, restaurants, and various other amenities. At the bottom are the servants, who blush and speak effeminately while they conceal their contempt, and at the top of the heap are the residents, who are largely absent in February, their empty homes lending an eerie feeling to the village surrounding the hotel property, giving it the appearance of a perfectly manicured ghost town. Wandering through the residents’ abandoned bourgeois paradise at night, one wonders, “What’s the point of the gas streetlamps if they don’t cast any light? That gas smell is kind of unpleasant, isn’t it? What if the servants are actually the owners, and they’re trying to keep everyone drunk and slightly gassed so that they can more easily sneak into the guests’ rooms at night and cannibalize them?” Danyelle and I discussed all this as we walked back to our neighbor view duplex in the dark after dinner.

We made it through the night without anyone breaking in and trying to harvest our organs, but we didn’t sleep well either. Wandering around the property the next morning, realizing with every step that Palmetto Bluff is a lot more about development than it is “experiencing the magic of the lowcountry in its ultimate form,” our conversation continued to bounce back and forth between the strangeness of our surroundings and the fact that we’d left the kids for this. It wasn’t until after lunch when we retired to our neighbor view duplex to rest before dinner that I finally felt a wave of relief wash over me. I was with my wife in a severely overpriced hotel room, alone; we were going to have dinner together; and then in the morning we were going to get in the car and go be with our kids again. 24 hours removed from our arrival and less than that until our departure, I was free to enjoy myself. The best part of the trip ended up being our successful completion of the Sunday crossword puzzle the next morning and the Jersey Mike’s sandwiches in a strip mall parking lot on the way out of Retirement-Land.

At the end of it, I think it’s safe to say that I’d rather grind at parenting than go on vacation. People say you have to get away sometimes. I’m not so sure. I think Danyelle and I could have just got a babysitter, gone out to dinner, and had nearly the same sense of relief without all the angst. We didn’t have kids so that we could get away from them, and we definitely didn’t have kids so that we could be pampered. We had kids, because we were driven by desire. The notion that we need to get away from the kids runs counter to our best instincts, and it leads us to places like Montage Palmetto Bluff and fills us with disgust. Then again, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe everyone already knows it, and I’m just figuring it out that vacationing from parenthood is all about being disgusted with yourself so that you appreciate your regular life with the kids more. If that’s the case, mission accomplished. Hopefully, I’ve learned my lesson for good, and when I’m driven to the brink by the kids raising hell here in my home, I’ll look back on my time at Montage Palmetto Bluff and remember what it feels like to be away.