Weekend Special: Escape From Thanksgiving
A few will admire me, but more will detest my behavior, either because they actually love the holiday, or are too chickenshit to do what I did.
This year, after decades of suffering dry-breasted turkeys, inane "catch-up" conversations with people I barely know, and hours of waiting for totally predictable and mainly mediocre food, I decided to remove myself from the Thanksgiving pool, and get as far away from the holiday as possible.
But where to go? Clearly, the most effective remedy was to leave the country entirely, but I didn't want to be gone for days, and I certainly didn't want to go near an airport around Thanksgiving time. I didn't want to pay inflated prices for a rental car, only to find myself trapped in an endless traffic jam. Accordingly, I whipped out my regional map and scanned it for remote but spectacular areas I could reach by public transportation.
My eye lit on Montauk, which I knew to be at the rocky, dune-y, and scrub-infested end of the earth. I'd never been there before, and this was the extreme off-season. I also knew lots of fish mongers from the farmers market lived in Montauk, which suggested it might not be as snobby and high-end as the stuffed-shirt Hamptons. In fact, I expected some slums.
Going to the end of the earth, at least metaphorically, would make my friend and I feel like 16th-century explorers, and I knew there was a spectacular lighthouse on a rocky promontory at New York's easternmost point.
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