The New Yorker:

How much spring break can anyone stand?

By Rebecca Mead
March 25, 2002

It was not an auspicious start to the day when Chip Olson awoke and realized that he was sharing his bed with someone else, and that the someone in question was Joshua Milrad. Josh is one of Chip’s best friends; but, even so, there were other people Chip would rather wake up next to. Chip rolled out of bed, wandered into the living room of his rental condo, and turned on the Weather Channel, only to discover that the forecast promised temperatures in the sixties and chilly winds from the north. This hardly seemed the kind of climate that would incline coeds to shed their bikini tops and cavort with addled frat boys, and the prospect of shedding and cavorting was what had brought Chip and Josh, in the third week of March last year, to South Padre Island, Texas, a resort not far from the Mexican border which is growing in popularity among the million or so American students who go on spring break every year.

Chip Olson is thirty-one, and over the past fourteen years he has spent a total of fifty-two weeks on spring break. He is tall and skinny, and has a long, thin face that gives him the aspect of a friendly rodent. Chip grew up in Chicago, and he had his earliest spring-break experience when he was a freshman in high school and went to Fort Lauderdale for a lacrosse camp. “I remember seeing all the chaos,” he told me. “The craziness, the sheer numbers of people. The energy and the excitement that were in the air!” In his freshman year at the University of Illinois, he became a spring breaker himself, riding down to South Padre Island on a chartered bus: thirty-two hours trapped in a moving Bierkeller occupied by sixty experimental drinkers whose enthusiasm for alcohol proved to be pungently greater than their tolerance.

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