Where are you summering?
There are lots of wrong answers
Listen instead of reading in case your adderall is wearing off:
“Where are you summering?” I ask her, knowing that this question will position me higher in the rigid social registry that is her mind.
“Well, Pantelaria is dead,” declares Manuela de Medici de Rothschild Debuono, delicately but deliberately pressing back her very expensive black sunglasses against her very expensive face with her pinky, which is adorned with a very expensive ring, presumably bearing her family’s coat of arms. “So, I’m not sure yet.”
“Why? I’ve heard Pantelaria is lovely,” I respond.
“Exactly,” she sighs, looking away at nothing in particular, which seems to me a very aristocratic Italian thing to do. “You know about it, and you’re -“ she waves a few fingers at me “-a middle class American.” I bristle almost as much at her assumption that I’m mee-del clahz as I do having my citizenship hurled at me as a pejorative. Most people think I have far more money than I do, and I’d like to think I exude a mid-Atlantic vibe. “I was there for a few days in June after spending the month at my family’s home on La Madalena, and I saw an American.”
“An American, not several?” I ask.
“I saw only one, but you know what they say – where there’s one, there are many,” she says, presumably looking right at me, but her sunglasses were too dark to discern even the outline of her eyes. Since I’d rather stare at flesh than polarized plastic, I fixate with impunity on her lips, which have just enough filler in them to be discernably done but not enough to be overdone. I tell her that I have to get back to work, which, while patently false, is a plausible excuse to end our first and only date — a typical, ill-fated time-suck birthed on Raya — given that it is a Wednesday afternoon, and I am, after all, a middle class American.
The month of May is when people who lack purpose begin to panic about where to spend the even more purposeless stretch of time that is summer. The kind of people who don’t work, never have and never will have turned two seasons that most people believe to be nouns – winter and summer – into verbs. Wintering is obvious. One goes to very expensive places to ski (in America, Aspen if you’re basic nouveau riche, Yellowstone Club if you’re basic with generational wealth, Jackson Hole if you’re fringe-basic and any kind of rich but vote Republican, and in Europe Val-d’Isère, Lech, Courchevel and St Moritz; note that Gstaad was ruined by Gstaad Guy) or to St Barths—but not during New Years, when it is polluted by splurging tourists and the evasive remnants of Russian wealth.
Summering is far more complex than wintering.
For those of you who are third-generation or newer Americans without family foundations or Europeans and Brits (the real tragedy of Brexit is having to distinguish between Brits and Europeans, which is cluttersome) born outside of the aristocracy, you cannot authentically summer.
Digital Nomads do summering cosplay, sort of like toddlers hosting tea parties.
So your friend, who grew up in Westchester and went to Vassar, matriculated to New York or San Francisco and did the finance thing, and then the tech thing, and then the crypto thing, and then the crypto fintech thing, all the while growing his hair longer and longer and showering less frequently, might have had an exit (or just had his trust fund kick in at 35) and decides to host a fuck-off caliber destination party in mid-July at the villa he rented on Ibiza for the summer. You get a Paperless Post invite, designed by his assistant that looks like a mashup of a Coachella poster and an inspirational Hindu quote on Instagram posted by people who try to appear chill but are actually very tense, announcing private sets by the DJs he fell in love with on mushrooms during deep playa sunrise sets. The week will be catered by a mildly hot woman in her late 30s with a website plastered in sun-drenched, eyes-closed gently Photoshopped portraits of herself, taken by her uncredited ex-boyfriend, paired with a bio longer than Henry Kissinger’s, who also calls herself a holistic health counsellor, intuitive healer, natural foods chef, solar nutrition specialist and women's transformation coach but ironically hooks up with her clients’ boyfriends on the downlow. Half the guests - the ones who have jobs and pride - will stay for the prescribed week, but the other half will linger in the villa for another week or two, or three, lolling about in the pool on microdoses of acid and macrodoses of hedonism and entitlement. And then suddenly it’s Fall, and it feels like the florescent lights have flipped on in the bar at 4am, and the designer drug high gives way to a jolt of cortisol.
Summering just doesn’t look good on digital nomads.
There are three components of the true definition of to summer, which I will explain to you.
1. Location. This may seem intuitive, but it’s nuanced.
A proper destination for summering must of course be very beautiful and on a large body of water, preferably the sea (never, ever say “beach” – only middle class Americans and people from Essex, UK go to “the beach”), but that’s just table stakes. The right locations to summer most also be expensive and difficult to get to, ideally requiring a private plane, a private boat, or a private seaplane. Summering destinations must also have only two classes of people: happy, rustic locals, who fish, farm, slaughter and cook food for summer residents, and the spectacularly but subtly wealthy upper class who fund their contented toil and try to forget the colonialism of their ancestors. The last requirement of a locale for summering is the most elusive. It must be a secret. The moment a celebrity, a newly minted tech billionaire or a Kardashian finds out about it, it is forever tainted, and everything in or on the place must be burned to ashes right where it stands. Or, in other words, left to splurging, middle class Americans and Brits from Essex.
2. Timeframe. It isn’t as obvious as you’d think.
It is commonly understood that the Summer season begins on or about June 21 and ends on September 23, and Hamptons house rental periods run from Memorial Day to Labor Day, but these are the arbitrary constraints of commoners. One can start summering whenever the ski season is over — perhaps after a few weeks at home to shop and admire the Spring bloom — and one can continue to summer until it becomes rather dull. New York and the major European cities are great fun in the Fall, whomever you’ve chosen to summer with will have become a bore by October, and having staff fly in prescription and recreational drugs once the summer stash runs dry can be stressful.
3. Personage. Not just anyone can summer.
Who can summer is more easily defined by case studies that also include examples of the where and when.
Case Study #1:
An American healthcare investment banker called Jim McGovern, born of a college professor and an accountant in Richmond, VA, descended from third-generation German and Irish immigrants, who attended the University of Virginia on scholarship and then Harvard Business School after two years of management consulting at Deloitte, decides to take the summer off after clocking twelve very long years at Goldman Sachs and pocketing his fourth MD bonus prior to joining the private equity firm General Atlantic as a partner in September. Giving in to nostalgia and the burning desire to announce his nouveau wealth to the rubes who were his childhood peers, he buys a vintage resto-mod Bronco and rents an enormous house in Duck on the Outer Banks of North Carolina from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
If you answered yes, stop reading, and just book a week in Panteleria. Let’s dissect why this does not qualify as summering.
First, he is an American. Very few Americans can summer. These are the three criteria for viable American summer stock:
1. Born and raised in New York City and descended from families who set foot on New World soil off the first two boats from England
2. Of the kind of wealth that endures over a century of regulation and taxation and the irresponsible spending of newer generations, who do not work
3. Very attractive, especially in tattered linen
As if it warrants further explanation, Jim needed a scholarship (which would have required an unbecoming degree of intellect, focus and hard work) to attend a university not covered in ivy, Deloitte isn’t real management consulting (McKinsey, Bain and maybe Booz Allen are proper management consultancies), and being an investment banker is a very sweaty way to attain wealth that is rarely generational. Anyone who works hard at any point in their lives are disqualified in perpetuity from summering. Only after the stench of work has been washed away by three full generations can one ease into summering. Also, Jim’s first name is rather dull, and his last name cannot be traced back to a family that did anything remotely interesting in the past century or morally reprehensible but highly remunerative in the centuries before that. One must be a very particular kind of wealthy and special type of unemployed in order to summer.
The location is all wrong, too. The Outer Banks or, OBX, which is intrinsically a lovely strip of seaside land, is littered with confederate flags hanging from vinyl-sided houses on stilts packed far too close to one another, and it’s perpetually clogged with raised pickup trucks, sunburnt college children from state schools, and overweight adults who don’t have passports. The OBX is also far too accessible, easily reached via direct commercial flights that land at a dated airport (Norfolk “International”, which doesn’t even fly to Canada) followed by a 3-hour drive on roads that are flat and dry enough for a rented, domestic sedan. Adding injury to insult, the OBX has a namesake television show on Netflix, which for three insipid seasons advertised its existence to the opposite of the kind of people who summer. If you plucked King Charles out of his Balmoral Wellingtons and dropped him into Tommy Bahama board shorts and installed him in even the nicest beachfront rental on the Outer Banks for an amorphous period of time during warm weather months, it still wouldn’t be summering, because the location is ghastly. A helpful rule of thumb: if the number of hot dog stands is greater than the number of dusty convertible Mercedes G-wagons, and if there is even one store that sells fireworks, it is not a suitable location to summer.
Case Study #2
Johannes Peter-Alexander Rothschild von und zu Hannover’s nobility, while no longer federally conferred due to the annoying Weimar Constitution, dates back to the 1300s. He plays pickle ball with Prince William, did his first line of coke in the late 90s at age thirteen off the regal ass of Alexandra Stefania Rothschild-Mountbatten Alcmaeonid (who’s family’s Greek nobility can be traced back to the 5th century B.C. and was moneyed-up by a four-century monopoly on shipping, feta cheese, and shipping feta cheese), recorded for posterity by her sister on the first camera owned by Orson Wells perched on the grand terrace of the St Barths villa built by Benjamin de Rothschild back when St Barths was still chic, and attended St. Andrews, from which he didn’t quite graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in Countryside Management. By all accounts, Johannes is the quintessential type of non-person who summers.
But let’s say that Jo, as he is called only by other aristos, decides to rent a house on the beach in Montauk from Memorial Day to Labor Day so that he can slay New York City fashion publicists away from the watchful eyes of the security team his parents hired to parent him. Despite his heredity, this folly does not count as summering, and in fact would very likely irreparably damage his reputation and ability to marry into a lower-status but far wealthier aristocratic family in order to maintain his lifestyle. You see, where and when one summers is every bit as important as the age of one’s wealth and length of one’s name. The alchemy of summering is in the combination of these three components. If the wrong kind of person turns up in a suitable summering destination, it isn’t summering – it’s trespassing. If the right kind of person turns up in the wrong type of place for the wrong period of time, it’s kidnapping.
Summer destinations are rarely static. They change with the mercurial whims of the idle rich who must perpetually outrun the working rich. Unfortunately, there is no secret publication or sacred tribunal that prescribes suitable summering destinations. It’s entirely word of mouth, breathed on ski lifts and during long-table dinners in chalets accessible only via snowcat. I decided to ask a few posh friends where they were summering. I had just seen King Charles a few weeks ago, and I figured he’d be a good start.
“Fuck if I know, old boy,” he said from underneath his marbleized upper lip. “Pantelaria is apparently ghastly now, just completely fucked - and I suppose I’ll have to do things now, so fuck if I’ll even be able to summer this year, what with the crown on my head-” my face flushes “-that is, if it ever turns up.”
“I’m sure it will,” I say. “See you at your birthday if a few weeks?”
“Mm,” he responds, cryptically.
“Your majesty,” I say, just after he hangs up. I realize the British royal family probably isn’t the best divining rod of where to summer these days anyway, so I try another friend who would be more dialed-in and have even fewer life obligations.
“Well, I obviously can’t tell you,” says Stefan-Andreas Peter de Rothschild Nestlé, heir to the processed food fortune. “You’d tell other middle class Americans, and then it’s ruined for us,” he says with a bit of a laugh to soften the truth.
“Ok, how about you tell me where you won’t be summering,” I respond. I figure if I can rule out a few spots then I can deduce the rest.
“Ooh, I like this game,” he says, taking the bait. “Even you probably know that Panteleria is fucked. Formentera was perfect up until 2015, but then Travis Kalanick turned up at Juan Y Andrea, and everyone worthwhile left it in Veuve-soaked shambles. Paros was good for July last year but awful in August, and Patlos was nice the last week of August and most of September, but supposedly Harry Styles will be in Greece this summer, and that will be a mess. I always like Lipari in the Aolians, but apparently a hedge fund manager just bought a villa there. Very sad. June and early July used to be nice in Varenna, but Vogue wrote a story in August 2019 about some Russian banker’s wedding in Como, and really anything on the lake is ghastly now except for the first week in September. I had the best time in Santa Gertrudis on Ibiza in 2020, but a bunch of digital nomad Burning Man type Americans spent the summer of 2021 in the exact same villa I rented, and I now can’t even say Ibiza without getting nauseous. And then there’s Il Pelicano in Porto Ercole. My parents used to rage there all summer in the 60s and 70s but these days it’s just American and British finance bros and their second wives. So, there you go. Everywhere is fucked.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a good spot, Sappi,” I say. “Maybe I’ll see you in Marbella in July.”
“Ah, nice try, my pleb friend,” he says, and hangs up. I try one more, convinced that I can triangulate Summer 2023 through elimination. I text Lady Olivia Constance Mary Acton, daughter of the 12th Duke of Suffolk.
“Darling, trying to avoid plebs this summer, wonder if you might tell me what’s in the exclusion zone,” I write. I see the typing indicator undulate immediately, because what else would she be doing besides staring at her phone.
“That’s a bit rich don’t you think? No pun intended lol are you forgetting yourself darling,” she responds.
“I’m not forgetting the nudes you sent last year, scroll up lol” I type. The typing indicator rolls, then stops. Rolls, then stops.
“Ur a naughty little menace aren’t you :) 😘” she responds.
“You know me,” I type. “Biblically,” I add.
“Wherever you go don’t go to Sardinia, pile of burning man americans descending early July…was talk of Djerba in Tunisia for a laugh but bit dodgy right now, chance Alicudi second wk of Aug but only on sailboat and god how I miss Vis before Yacht Week,” she types, and then, “obvs Panteleria ab so lute ly fucked”.
“What about Capri” I type, goading her.
“GROSS,” she responds.
“send more nudes,” I type.
“🖕🖕🖕xxoxoxo” she responds.
I ran through the notes I had taken and the big red Xs I had marketed onto a map. Summer 2023 was looking grim. Where will the people with a glut of time, money and incestuous desire go now that almost everyone can go anywhere, because no one really works anymore? In a burst of inspiration I turn to technology.
I ask ChatGPT the following question:
“What is an exclusive, unusual, very expensive destination only good during summer that can only be reached by boat or seaplane that does not have a lot of people and that no middle class American has ever heard of?”
ChatGPT’s algorithm thinks for an unusually long period of time.
Well, Panteleria is fucked, and Capri is GROSS, so a destination that meets your criteria would be the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI), a British Overseas Territory located in the southern Atlantic Ocean. It is an isolated and remote group of islands situated approximately 1,400 kilometers east-southeast of the Falkland Islands. The mean average of annual temperatures range from a high of 0.02°C (32.04°F) to a low of 0.02°C (32.04°F). SGSSI are known to be teeming with wildlife that are not middle class Americans or nouveau riche Brits and Europeans, including whales, penguins and toothfish. Toothfish are critical to the SGSSI economy. The peak year round population of SGSSI are 30 happy, rustic locals, who fish, farm, slaughter and cook food for themselves.
I immediately text Stefan-Andreas: “See you on SGSSI for a toothfish sandwich?”
He writes back right away: “BASTARD!!!!!”
I guess the cat is out of the Loro Piana bag for where to summer this year.
