"I loved it," he recalls. "We were attacked by parrots. Keas, they're called, birds about the size of a small hawk; cheeky things. They went after my shoes in the dark. I thought they were rats at first, but they were just keas, trying to remove my shoelaces. Nothing seems to frighten them. They'll eat the spaghetti off your plate, take the stitching out of your knapsack, steal your hat." For O'Connell, Eden was simple enough: a place where even the animals are unafraid.
Resorts of the mind. What's refreshing about a vacation, it is often said, is the change of scene -- as though consciousness were a stage, and mood a matter of switching sets. The trouble is, changing the scenery alone rarely has a major effect on the play itself, which runs along pretty much as the characters are written.
Some people, however, manage to take vacations where the change is so radical, or the endeavor so special, that the experience forces doors in the vacationers' minds that they never knew were there. Psychologists at Boston College, for example, are curious about whether Dodge Morgan will return from his solo voyage around the world in the same psychological shape he was in when he left. The solitary long-distance sailor solaces his loneliness and sleeplessness with hallucinations, imaginary shipmates who speak to him, sometimes rationally, sometimes not. The psychologists want to find out about these conversations and other matters, and Morgan has agreed to record them for science.
There are, to be sure, less harrowing ways of exploring the mind's potential. One of the most common is through art or literature. Peter Karoff, president of The March Co., a real estate investment firm in Boston, has been "fussing with poetry," as he puts it, since he was in college 27 years ago. Until last summer, though, he had written for his own pleasure, wondering only idly whether his work seemed any good to anyone else. Then he went for two weeks to the Bennington (College) Writing Workshop.
"You know the old joke," Karoff explains, "you go to a writers' workshop for sex, drinking, and meetings with publishers, not necessarily in that order. Well, Bennington isn't like that. Bennington is for writing. You spend two or three hours a day going over one another's stuff in workshops, and there are evening readings by people like John Updike, Peter Davison, and Maxine Kumin. But the rest of the time you're on your own, in your dormitory, writing."
Karoff remembers the workshop as one of the best vacations he has ever had. "It wasn't particularly relaxing, not in the usual sense," he says. "Not like lying on the beach or sailing. But I loved it. There's a real intellectual immersion of a kind you rarely get as an adult. I also learned I could be published if I wished, that what I'd been writing was good enough. And that was really nice to learn."
The mind leads in all sorts of directions, more than appear on most maps, and Lee Pulos has been exploring a number of them on vacations he has been taking since 1973. In that year The Old Spaghetti Factory, a chain of restaurants Pulos founded with his two brothers, was to open a new outlet in Australia. Pulos, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, decided to stop over in the Philippines on his way and investigate some reports he had read about psychic surgery -- opening the body, in some psychological or metaphysical sense, without breaking the skin.
He came, of course, to debunk it. "It had to be impossible at best," he recalls thinking, "unscientific at worst." He stayed to believe.
"Once I'd witnessed what I saw, my world shattered," says Pulos. "There's an apparent brehanded opening of the body, but really, at some much more fundamental level, there's a movement from one dimension to another."
That was the beginning of Pulos's odyssey in search of "paranormal," "paraconceptual," "traditional" -- the vocabulary for these phenonomena hasn't settled down yet -- healing practices all over the globe. He has seen, he says, some 8,000 psychic interventions like the one in the Philippines. He cites one physical operation in Brazil "where the opening was performed with dull scissors, with no antisepsis. All during the procedure the patient was talking and laughing with the healer, who closed the wound with no sutures."
Pulos and his brothers sold The Old Spaghetti Factory chain to Keg Restaurants in Canada in 1980, for more than $8 million. Since then, he has been with Omega Seminars, a 28-year-old training organization, with major corporate clients like General Motors Corp. and McDonald's Corp., which specializes in three- and four-day seminars based on "self-image psychology." Pulos, who is 58, has also found time in his career to teach (at the University of British Columbia), to write (a new book, Miracles and Other Realities, will appear midyear), and to serve on Team Canada during the Olympics as a sports psychologist. His vacations, however, are devoted to the avocation he discovered in 1973, being what he calls "a cultural broker between traditional healing and Western medicine." This month he is in West Africa, investigating shamanic healing.
Families. "The best vacation I ever took," says business-owner John Doaks (anonymous at his request because he's not sure he should be boasting about this), "came as a present from my wife. She spacked up the kids, and herself, and went down to Florida to stay with her folks. For two weeks, she left me all alone in my own house. God, it was wonderful." John is ambivalent about his wonderful holiday because, like many Type-A people, he believes he ought to be spending more time with his family, not less. This idea is relatively new: male entrepreneurs of a century ago might have wanted to spend more time with their families, but they no more felt they ought to than would a professional soldier in wartime. Today, under the pressure of rising divorce rates and two-career couples, there's a real urgency to the moral claims of home and family. Out of this urgency has come some imaginative thinking about vacations.
