Step 1: This is not a bachelor party. It’s more worthwhile than that.
The emails (subject: Ski Trip!!!) begin arriving just after Labor Day. They are sent by Dan to the five of us, who go skiing together at a different resort each winter. We’ve been doing this for five years. Dan will relentlessly keep the chain alive, pestering us until dates, flights, lift tickets, and accommodations are firmly locked down. My job is to hold Dan off as long as possible, for two reasons: because it’s best to wait until December to see where snowfall is ideal, but also because each day we delay booking pisses Dan off exponentially, and it’s fun to see our email chain devolve into the same insults we’ve flung at one another since our school days.
On its surface, our trip is about skiing and blowing off steam. But skiing is just an excuse for something deeper. We may not notice it, or even admit it, because guys tend to be less evolved than females when it comes to understanding the importance of friendships, but a trip with your pals is an essential component of being a well-rounded male.
As men age, our opportunities for bonding with other guys diminish, even as they become crucial to our survival. Studies have shown the detrimental effects of loneliness, but men are less likely to speak about the emotional stuff with the friends they do have, which means we can feel alone even in a room full of people. This loneliness, which the previous surgeon general termed an “epidemic” in America, can be devastating to men’s physical and mental health. We need other men to talk to about what is happening in our increasingly complicated lives . . . people who aren’t romantic partners or family or some random dad you’re chatting with in a suspiciously warm wading pool. Unfortunately, forging new friendships becomes more difficult as you age, and maintaining old ones is often just as hard. Even though the guys on my trip live just a few miles from me, I rarely see them more than a few times a year.
Each one of us has a career, a mortgage, scattered interests and worries. Our lives are ordered by the same dizzying rhythms of adult life: wake, eat, clean, rush, work, rush, eat, clean, Netflix, read, sleep . . . repeat. With kids, it’s even more of a black hole of time.
We don’t just want to ski. We need to!
If male bonding evokes images of your grandfather wearing weird hats in fraternal lodges, you are forgiven. Repackaged to us by beer ads, Hooters, and Judd Apatow movies, male bonding has been distilled down to ridiculous extremes. On the one hand, you have the bachelor party, which tantalizes with the promise of your youth but often exposes the reality of your body’s age—guess what: You can’t eat a rib eye with seven martinis anymore. On the other hand, you have self-help retreats that offer “male bonding” as a service, complete with primal-scream therapy to reclaim your inner caveman. (“Gentlemen, I wanna hear your best Arrrggghhh before we break for lunch!”)
This trip with friends is not about feeling single again or more youthful. It is about connecting deeply with other males in a way you cannot easily do back home (even if your partner is another man). In fact, vacation might not even be the right way to describe it, because the best kind of bonding, in my experience, happens when everyone is just uncomfortable enough—bunk beds, or at least shared rooms, aren’t a bad idea.
What you are buying when you pay for these trips isn’t airfare and four nights in a condo with a questionable number of bearskin rugs. It is space. Space to cultivate small moments of excitement, followed by hours of boredom in which true male bonding flourishes (like war, but kinder). Space where no topic is off-limits: divorce, disease, death, and every type of failure? Sure. Anxieties over race, religion, and sex? What else are we going to do on the chairlift? Fears about fatherhood, and what it takes to exist as a man today? Step into the sauna. At the end of five days away, we come home with the same rewards: photos, aching muscles, and inside jokes that we will beat to death over the next fifty-one weeks. But crucially, we return with a deepening sense of friendship and the comfort of knowing that we have other men we can talk to when necessary.
On the last day of our trip to Utah last year, I ended up on a chairlift with a gentleman in his fifties who was on an annual ski trip of his own.
“We’re on our twenty-fifth year,” he said, detailing how his group had grown from five guys to more than thirty men now. They rented a string of chalets but cooked all their meals together in one kitchen. The trip had become its own community, and their year revolved around planning it.
“That’s incredible,” I told him. “I hope we’ll keep our trip going that long.”
“You should,” the man said. “Remember that you guys need each other.” —David Sax
Pro Tip: Pick a Goal
You need a united purpose. It is easier to build a trip by first finding something you love to do and inviting others who share that interest than by selecting a group of friends and then trying to figure out what you all want to do together.
Step 2: A few rules
A great trip requires more than a bunch of Y chromosomes and carry-on bags. To achieve the deep male bonding that makes us better humans, prepare accordingly.
1. Start small: Three to five friends is the ideal number for your first trip. Any larger and you not only run into logistical problems with cars and accommodations but the intimacy required for bonding is diminished as the group swells. If the trip grows organically over time, so be it, but try to keep the numbers tight and the faces consistent for the first few years.
2. Choose and move: The endless email chain about your trip is a necessary evil, so just embrace it. Fight for where you want to go, but once you’ve settled on a destination, assign tasks for who will research and book hotels, meals, and so on.
3. No benders: If you spend the entire trip hitting on strippers, doing shots, and regretting your decisions each morning, you have failed. The point is cultivating quiet moments of conversation, which tend to happen when one is reasonably sober. By all means, have a drink, but please remember, you are an adult.
4. Real face-time: The enemy of the crucial conversations at the core of male bonding is that glowing screen in your hand, beckoning your gaze like the precious ring of Gollum. Put it away. You have just invested thousands of dollars in treasure, and favors from family and work, to be here with these friends. Use it well.
5. Bring cards: It’s amazing how effective a simple deck of playing cards is as a social lubricant. Great for after dinner, in airports, or when everyone is reaching for their phones.
6. Designate a moneyman: Fact: Some friends have more money than others. Gauge what people are willing to spend and aim for a middle ground in terms of price. Appoint the person who is best at math as your treasurer and have him track expenses. Divide it all up at the end, and make sure no one is chasing down funds.
7. Don’t overplan: Arrange the core activities, then keep things loose to see how each day evolves. The last thing anyone wants to do is end a fun and relaxing moment for some overpriced steakhouse you booked months ago. —D.S.
Adam Farnum
Pro Tip: Always ask, "Dude, what time do you go to bed?"
It seemed like a good idea at the time: two old friends cutting loose in Copenhagen, a city of natural wine, fastidious design, and beautiful people on bicycles. Jason and I would share an Airbnb, and we’d bond during a stress-free summer week in the coolest city in Europe. Then came the conundrum of the key. The Airbnb was equipped with only one door key, which meant that Jason’s Andrew W. K.-ish aptitude for partying till dawn collided with my Andrew Weil-ish need for a good night’s sleep. I would return to the place at 10:00 p.m. He would return at 4:00 a.m. Which meant he’d have to wake me up to get back in. Our morning routines clashed, too. For me, coffee and milk. For him, coffee and techno music jacked to a decibel level that could trigger a seizure. Oh, and then he decided to store thousands of his photos on my laptop and I accidentally deleted them.
Our midlife micro-Wanderjahr ended just in time. One more day and we might’ve killed each other. Somehow Jason and I remain close friends a year later, but our freak-and-geek disaster in Denmark taught me a crucial life lesson: Before you and a friend decide to go off somewhere and have “fun,” make sure you ask the guy to define the term. —Jeff Gordinier
Step 3: Become a Master of Disaster
The key to getting close to your buds is a little shared suffering.
For eons, men forged unbreakable bonds by going through rough, harrowing, and flat-out dangerous shit. It was a matter of life and death. We had to put our superior caveman brains together, devising ingenious ways to track and kill a herd of mastodon, or else the rest of the tribe would freeze, starve, and die. Today, hunting down a meal means ordering takeout on your smartphone, and building friendships for a lot of guys has been reduced to griping about a tyrannical boss over cocktails. But me? I like to take vacations with my buddies with built-in drama.
I’m not talking about self-sabotaging a journey by flushing passports down some foreign toilet. The best trips I’ve ever been on all had a specter of disaster looming in the distance. There was the time I had to pitch a tent in a blinding desert dust storm using nothing but an iPhone flashlight and a rusty hammer. The guys I was with—casual acquaintances at the time—have since become tight comrades. When one of my closest amigos was jettisoned from an intense four-year relationship, I reflexively took him to Las Vegas. We had been there together a half dozen times prior to that, each instance a forgettable blur of excess. But helping my bud work through a shattered heart in Sin City? He managed to pull out of an emotional nosedive while we galvanized our friendship.
When you’re traveling, a trillion things are out of your control: Ankles get twisted, tropical storms hit beaches. My advice? When the crap-o-meter rises, just look at it as a fun challenge. After all, we’re the descendants of the smartest hunter-gatherers—creative problem solving is built into our DNA, and a little shared adversity has a tendency to turn good friends great. —Daniel Dumas
Four Places to Hit the Great Outdoors in (Relative) Luxury
Everyone wants to get a whiff of real pine trees. But do you really want to carry your own toilet paper on vacation? These places will have you embracing nature while coming home to a hot shower and a fireplace.
Scribner's Catskill Lodge
This 1960s Catskills motor lodge in Hunter, New York, has the kind of custom-made furniture that may prompt you to ask, “How much?” When you’re ready to hit the trails, the lodge’s mountain concierge can help, or even guide your group.
Timber Cove
This stylish, newly renovated 1960s A-frame resort sits on a cliff in the town of Jenner in Sonoma County, overlooking the Pacific. It has a light-filled bar you could drink entirely too much California wine at. After the buzz, head to Gerstle Cove and hike up Stump Beach along the rocky coastline.
Anvil Hotel
Yes, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is synonymous with insane powder dumps, but in warmer months you can hike the preposterously beautiful Grand Teton National Park (shown above). Rooms have rain showers and come stocked with a hot-toddy kit and elk jerky.
AutoCamp
Stay deep in the Redwood forests without having to hike in. AutoCamp, in Guerneville, California, offers your choice of luxe Airstreams or sturdy tents, all with firepits. Canoeing on the Russian River and hiking at Armstrong Redwoods state park are both close by.
Step 4: Consider the Road Trip
You learn a lot about a friend by sharing a confined space with him at 75 miles per hour for a few days.
To dispel a misconception: There’s no “right way” to road-trip. I’ve done it many times, and the only universal truth (besides beef jerky, tacky souvenirs, and Queen) is that, invariably, shit happens. Tires blow out, navigation falters, wallets disappear. Calamity? Opportunity. There is much to be learned about your friend’s resolve in these instances; adversity forges strong bonds and can repair fractured ones. Plus, the stories are fantastic.
Another thing: You don’t have to talk—equally strong bonds are built in silence, especially among those with children at home—but you probably will. Maybe it’s passing through small towns after dark, the yawning suspension, the transience of the interstate. Maybe it’s just sleep deprivation. Either way, cars often take on confessional qualities. The tacit agreement, of course, is absolute confidentiality. Damon never told the world about Pythias’s bathroom struggles, even if they are hilarious.
The point here is shared experience, whatever that entails, and road trips are a great facilitator. Modern life encourages us to devalue interaction, but idle texting and Facebook banter do not a friendship make. So fuel up, grab an atlas, and go west. Or go east. Whatever. Just don’t go it alone. —Max Prince
Andrew Thomas Lee
Cynics will say that Nashville has become a lightning rod for tacky bachelorette parties. But if you know how to do Music City right, it’s also one of the most incredibly fun cities to eat and drink your way through right now.
In Germantown alone, you’ll find southern-minded wood-fire pizza (City House), brisket tacos and fresh guac that should be from Texas (Butchertown Hall), and ridiculously delicious oysters served at a fourteen-seat marble bar (Henrietta Red [drink pictured]). Know that consuming Hot Chicken will be absolutely necessary at some point, and that means taking a trip to either Prince’s or Hattie B’s. Where you drop your bags depends on your priorities. The Thompson hotel [below, bottom] just opened in the Gulch last year, right across from Biscuit Love, where, yes, hangovers go to die. (There will be a line at 8:30) There’s also the Germantown Inn, a renovated two-story home built around 1844. If you have enough guys to take it over, you’ll have a sprawling roof deck made for a Yeti cooler all to yourselves. Plus, you’re right near two of the city’s best coffee shops: Barista Parlor [below, top] and Steadfast.
Everywhere seems to be reachable by a ten-minute Uber, including Pinewood Social, which has a supper-club-for-millennials vibe. Spend at least one night at Robert’s Western World. (Come through the alley door in the back, across from the Ryman Auditorium, like so many famous country legends have.) You’re ending almost any night at Santa’s Pub—a trailer/bar that accepts cash only—where famous acts who cruise through town have been known to partake in some last-call karaoke, as should you. Thankfully, there’s plenty of liquid courage in this town to go around. —Candice Rainey
Pro Tip: Debate is Healthy
The point of the trip is to express yourself in a way you can’t with others in your life. Let your guard down, spar, listen, and be open to something more meaningful.
Step 5: Tell Your Spouse to Read This Endorsement
Every fall for the past sixteen years, my husband has embarked on what is officially christened in our household “the Camping Trip.” His friends from college, now middle-aged men spread out across three neighboring states, all tussling with their own mortgages and mortality, commune somewhere in the woods for a weekend, packing sleeping bags that probably haven’t hit dirt all year and flasks of small-batch rye. They build a fire and then . . . Christ, I have no idea. I once stupidly asked my husband, “What do you talk about for three days? What do you do?” obviously wanting to revel in some juicy details about someone combining too much weed with Adderall and confessing to his sexless marriage. Instead, grinning like a jerk, he told me “this really funny story” about how it started raining pretty hard once, so they stayed up all night building a “tarp city” and digging trenches to keep the water out. I smiled back and mentally filed under: nerd anecdotes.
The trip varies every year. Once, they drove ten hours straight—at night—to go white-water rafting in West Virginia. Another trip, they backpacked three hours into the Catskills and set up camp seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
What does remain annoyingly consistent is the ill-timed nature of the trip. Three days after 9/11, my husband left his then-girlfriend, a transplant of the rube variety who had only recently moved to New York from Utah, in a still-smoldering city for Raquette Lake, near the Adirondacks. I had assumed, since, you know, the world was trying to put itself back together, that he would reschedule, or, rather, cancel. But he didn’t.
I know it sounds like I resent the Camping Trip, but I’m actually envious. Recently, my college friends—women I shared underwear with, for God’s sake—exchanged about sixty-two texts only to come to the depressing conclusion that we couldn’t possibly make time for a reunion this year. Someone actually suggested 2019. In Tucson. None of my husband’s friends are what you would necessarily call mountain jocks (see: “tarp city”), but every year they unhesitatingly spend a weekend together without a proper shower, accomplishing a goal that requires some physicality, giving the proverbial finger to the kids, wives, and pressing careers—a combination that inexplicably speeds up the male-bonding process and keeps these otherwise fragile relationships intact, or at least from fading away completely. It’s not as if my husband comes through the door transformed from all those weepy bear hugs I imagine take place. He comes back to us in a state I can only describe as a little better. I’ll take that. —C.R.
This article appears in the October '17 issue of Esquire. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
