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The Great American Spa Boom
 Sometimes when I spend time at a spa, I worry that my stress isn't interesting enough. I was at Canyon Ranch in Arizona recently, and at dinner on the first night I was seated next to a woman who use d to be the manager of the Rolling Stones and now is Keith Richards's manager-now that would be a job with interesting stress. The woman's name was Jane, and we were seated at the table that Canyon Ranch sets aside for solo guests who want company. Four other people were at the table.Everyone began conversation by describing how unusually stressful their lives were, as if they felt guilty about indulging themselves at a spa and felt compelled to justify it. There was a lawyer who said he had just finished a huge and very stressful deal, and a fashion designer who was stressed out because back home in New York it was so cold, and an accountant from Chicago who was anticipating the stress of another tax season, and a real estate broker from Minneapolis named Pamela who said that she was so overstressed by life itself that as soon as she stepped on Canyon Ranch soil she had begun to cry. Pamela seemed unaccountably cheerful, considering. She chattered a mile a minute about the mad demands of her life and then suddenly took a deep breath and declared, "Hey-I guess I really am over the top!" The next day I went on one of the spa's morning hikes and started talking to a man who was just ahead of me on the trail. He told me that he had just finished working Clinton's campaign manager and had come to Canyon Ranch to relax after the election. I said that he deserved a month at the spa, since I could not imagine a more exceptional kind of stress than what he had just gone through.
"Oh, that's not really the case," he said. "It would have been a lot more stressful if we hadn't won." Canyon Ranch is on the edge of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. It can be transcendental, but it is also a very go-go place.
Everyone there seemed out of their minds with the pressures of life. Some relaxed more readily than others. I happened to fly to Arizona with two couples who were also going to the spa. In the van from the airport, one of the men made about a dozen calls from his cellular phone. Most of the calls ended with him hollering, "Okay, pal, I think we should push ahead with the Williams deal!" At last his wife scolded him weakly. "Honey, that's rude," she said, and waved a Canyon Ranch brochure at him and told him to decide what workshops he wanted to take.
He paid approximately zero attention to her. Finally he turned off his phone and pointed at the brochure and said, "Okay, sign me up for this one, whatever it is." "Honey," his wife said, "that is a workshop about menopausal hormones. You can't take it. You're a man."
Anyway, that's why all of us end up at spas to take leave of our usual lives, to escape our stress, whether it is interesting or not. The great American journey used to be the tour of Europe or the expedition to Asia or the African safari, to expand one's sense of the world. Now, for more and more people, the great journey is the retreat to a spa so that, for a week or so, they can shrink the world to the size of a whirlpool. Travel used to be a foray into challenge. Now there is galloping growth in American travel to spas. Evidently we want our trips to lead us away from everyday challenges, like work and domestic chores, and instead of mastering some new culture or language, we want someone else to take over and take good care of us-we want to go to a spa. Some people go so they can't spend their days languidly, getting soaked and massaged. The rest go to a spa so they don't have to sit still. At Canyon Ranch, a lot of people get up at dawn and go for long hikes in the Arizona mountains. The first hike I took followed a narrow trail that zigzagged through a range of rough hills south of Tucson, past the splayed arms of saguaro cactus and the overhangs of monumental orange boulders. A few of the hikers in the group had taken off at a gallop and a few were lagging way behind, limping and moaning and blaming their slowness on complicated and probably stress-related hip and knee ailments. The group strung out along the trail for a quarter mile and doubled back on itself so we could wave to each other on the switchbacks. After an hour or so, everyone bunched up and we agreed to take a break. We stopped on a skinny rim of rock and the world fell away from us in all directions. Because of the flare of the morning sun, we all faced north toward Tucson and looked out over a valley lined with rows of orderly Arizona subdivisions and a layer of melon-colored smog that gave the curvy streets and the shoebox-shaped houses a lovely glow. It was almost shocking to see the skyline of Tucson. Usually when you go to a spa, you completely lose track of the outside world. Your points of reference are whittled down to your bed, your massage therapist, and the steam room. Your wardrobe shrinks down to a bathrobe. Your concerns are limited to whether you should get a seaweed wrap or a body polish. As travel goes, a spa is antiexciting, but antiexcitement is the point.
Going to a spa is the inverse of travel. You don't take things in, the way you would on an ordinary trip. You have things taken out, such as the kinks in your muscles and the toxins in your body and the thoughts in your head. At a spa you hope to be under stimulated, except as part of a beauty treatment. It sounds boring. Sometimes it is boring. The first spa I ever went to was a sort of fat farm in England, and I got so restless and claustrophobic that one day I deserted during the morning ramble and walked to the nearest village and spent the rest of the day shopping for antiques. A few weeks after I went to Canyon Ranch, I spent a week at the Aveda Spa & Retreat, which is about an hour from Minneapolis. The spa is in a great turn-of-the-century mansion called Boulder Wall that is on the banks of the St. Croix River and is surrounded by acres of true chilly emptiness. Inside the mansion, there is a hypnotic aroma and the flickers of an enormous fireplace and dozens of little candles. There is no television, no radio, no telephones in the rooms, no newspapers. The quiet drapes over you like a wet cloth. The seclusion is nearly absolute. If you get really panicky and start to wonder whether the world blew up while you were having a seaweed wrap, someone on the staff will drive to a near by gas station and buy you your choice of local papers, all of which are sliver-thin and narrow-focused. During my stay I begged for the paper every day. The only story it covered aggressively was the arrest of a few local mothers who had gotten into a fistfight at a toy store over a Tickle Me Elmo.
I had been especially excited to go to Aveda, because I love Aveda shampoo and I'd heard that Cindy Crawford had gotten married at the spa. The driver who picked me up at the Minneapolis airport told me that his favorite job was driving people from Aveda back to the airport because they always smelled so good. The people working at the spa were all glowy and whifty, and in fact they did smell very good. I had brought some work with me, so when I checked in I asked if there was a fax machine I could use. The young woman who was showing me around looked at me with genuine compassion. When she to Id me about the television- and radio- and telephone- and newspaperlessness, I thought I might commit suicide. The next day I had a full schedule of spa treatments, but I sneaked out during lunch and walked to the little town of Osceola, nearby. The spa is plush and beautiful. The town is charming and a little tumbledown. I walked down a street of square-shouldered wood-frame houses, some with checkerboard gardens that were idled by winter, one with a big old car in the front yard that had painted on it El Cado from hell. In town I wandered into a bookstore and asked the storekeeper if she had out-of-town newspapers. "Where are you coming from, dear?" she asked. "I mean, right now. Where are you staying?" I told her I was at the spa, and she smiled indulgently, as if I had said I was on leave from an insane asylum. I bought a book of photographs of old John Deere tractors, and then she offered me some cookies and a ride back to the spa. For the rest of the week at Aveda I still slept with my Walkman, but I also started to enjoy the surreal feeling of having departed the world. The rhythm was narcotic-long breakfast, long massage, a linger in front of the fire, a whirlpool, a steam bath, dinner, and bed. It was jarring to finally go home.
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