Bidding Adieu to a Blissful Summer Recess

Washington is one of those places where you can actually hear the summer--the chicka-chicka-chicka of the cicadas in the trees, the crack and boom of an afternoon thundershower. But perhaps no seasonal sound pleases so many as the pitter-patter of lawmakers’ feet leaving town.

The August recess, which this year extends gloriously until Monday, is the annual ritual where Congress adjourns and everybody blows town. The President heads off to Martha’s Vineyard. The politicians go back to their districts. The literati retreat to the Hamptons.

For transplanted Southern Californians, it is quite a bizarre ritual to observe. The city that makes heroes of people who work themselves into a tizzy suddenly comes to a grinding halt. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said Mary Hinds, press secretary to Rep. Steve Horn (R-Long Beach), herself a Long Beach native.

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During these times, the gridlocked Beltway (yes, the Beltway is actually a highway around the city)--dissolves into open road. You can get a parking space almost anywhere. You can get a table in a nice restaurant, a seat on the Metro--all virtually overnight.

As Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbach recently observed: “No other city this side of Berlin vacates so faithfully. . . . To be a fully credentialed, seriously regarded member of the political/legal/media machine in this town, you have to be absent in some block of time between early August and Labor Day.”

Perhaps the only thing Washington takes as seriously as working is not working. Los Angeles can only dream about one month of desertion, when you can walk into Campanile without a reservation, when the Harbor Freeway flows like water.

It can be argued that Southern Californians are sort of on vacation all the time, little trips to Big Sur, a day at the beach. But only here is vacationing such an all-consuming experience. It may be the one time of year when West Coast die-hards secretly envy the East.

There is a law that says Congress has to adjourn sometime in early August or pass a resolution giving itself permission to keep working. To be caught in town for any extended period of time is a kind of social suicide; one may as well walk around in a big old pair of white bucks after Labor Day.

Even average Joes have summer homes. And if they don’t, their parents do--a cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a house on the Vineyard, a spread avec tennis court in Pennsylvania. People here don’t go to the beach, they go “to the shore.” So devastatingly serious is all this that they made summer a verb.

“Where do you summer?”

“He summers on Nantucket.”

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Sophisticates might say this is because Washington--designed by Frenchman Pierre L’Enfant--is so much like Paris--that, of course, being the other city that shuts down in August. But the realists know that this summer exodus thing happens because Washington is a swamp. The weather is awful, so humid that a depressing haze hangs over the whole place.

“It’s hot and miserable and anyway, all the lobbyists go away and that’s the only way anything gets done,” said syndicated columnist Art Buchwald, just back from Martha’s Vineyard.

Of course, there are no vacations for those fighting for their electoral lives. There’s a reason for a recess this time of year, and senators such as Dianne Feinstein are home not to summer, but to stump.

But for those left behind in the federal city--particularly this year when Congress fenced over the crime bill then threatened to cancel the recess altogether to work on health care--vacation dawned with an abruptness that made the senses tingle, not unlike running naked from the snowbank to the sauna.

Hinds, for example, worked 12 days straight before they finally adjourned. It took four days for her migraine to go away. Suddenly, the scales fell from her eyes. In a button-down town where “I’ve never worn pantyhose so much in my life,” the halls of Congress were populated with aides in jeans and sneakers and “little baseball caps worn backward.”

You need merely walk inside the Capitol and you know: Elvis has left the building. Staffers play softball in the halls. “Hall parties”--complete with pizza, nachos, beer and a stereo blaring Pearl Jam--spontaneously generate in one stately House office building,

Pure bliss. Too bad it all ends today. On Monday, they’re baaaaaacccccckkkkkk.

No more glimpsing the shore for another year. No more lounging over cappuccino at some sidewalk cafe. No more spending a long lunch turning your face to the sun. You want that the other 11 months of the year, move to L.A.