The Boomer Files: Meaningful Pursuits

It started with a honeymoon in 1979: Michele Gran and Bud Philbrook, two young baby boomers soaked in the idealism of their age, decided to forgo a romantic Caribbean cruise and spend their time instead writing grant proposals for community-development projects in a poor mountain village in Guatemala. (They also stopped off in Orlando, Fla., to tour the theme parks there, but that's not part of this story.) A few years later, living in St. Paul, Minn., they jointly founded Global Volunteers, which has been filling the needs of affluent Americans for spiritually fulfilling, intellectually stimulating and incidentally tax-deductible vacations for more than two decades. Just this year, Janet Prince, a college administrator from New Castle, N.H., spent six days—along with her husband, Peter Bergh, and their 16-year-old daughter, Hadley—volunteering at a child-care cooperative outside Quito, Ecuador. Prince and her daughter took care of the young children whose mothers were tending stalls at the local mercado, and Bergh helped gather and prepare food. How cool is that—compared, say, with skiing in Aspen? Volunteer vacations are "all about multitasking," explains Doug Cutchins, author of a guidebook for would-be do-gooders. "Everybody is busy. Everybody wants to create meaning in their lives. They want to do good in the world, to teach their kids values, to use their skills—and they want to go on vacation."

Prince's Ecuador trip was a model of vacation productivity. In 13 days, including travel time, she improved the lives of the villagers and exposed her daughter to a different culture and a society on the other side of the worldwide gap in wealth. Bergh got a cardiovascular workout walking to the fields to harvest corn, they all saw a new part of the world—including the Galápagos Islands, where they spent five days at a luxury eco-resort—and Hadley fulfilled her high-school community-service requirement in a way that will look great on her college applications. "I enjoy an occasional day at the beach, but this is so much more rewarding," Prince says. "I just turned 50. People ask, 'What do you want for your birthday?' I don't want more stuff. I want experiences. I travel, I eat, I explore, I read."

Now again, as in their 20s, aging baby boomers have taken up the quest for meaning, as their three-decade infatuation with accumulating "stuff" wanes in the face of mortality, or just the realization that there's not that much more left to buy. If they no longer seek to transform the world by revolution, they strive at least to improve a small part of it, or perhaps themselves, through adventure, experience and self-actualization.

This week, NEWSWEEK continues its portrait of the leading edge of the boomer generation, now in the shadow of 60, with a look at some of the ways in which they pursue transcendence through leisure. Some are taking volunteer-service trips to aid the impoverished inhabitants of the more colorful and exotic parts of the world. Others are exploring organic, gourmet, locally sourced cuisine that minimizes the carbon footprint of their dinners. They are settling in "spa lifestyle" developments combining the twin obsessions of aging boomers: real-estate and aerobic conditioning. And they are boarding flights for "heritage tours" that connect them to the ancestors whose foresight in migrating to America was richly vindicated by the eventual birth of baby boomers themselves.

"A good zucchini has sweetness and a little bit of a vegetal quality," says Adam Kaye, squeezing a handful of shredded produce until liquid streams from between his fingers, and a dozen heads bob in appreciation of this gem of wisdom from the chef and kitchen director of the three-star Blue Hill at Stone Barns. They have made the trip to the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York's Hudson Valley, a temple of the burgeoning "farm to table" movement. Boomers, the first generation raised on the dreary monoculture of suburban lawns, whose earliest awareness of horticulture may have involved a comparison of strains of pot, have improbably developed a swoony passion for the soil that would embarrass a Provençal peasant. At Kaye's Saturday-morning classes, lawyers and social workers tramp deliriously through the sun-dappled fields, yanking carrots and turnips from the earth, carrying their bounty back to be turned into lunch under Kaye's tutelage. "I look forward to this all week," exclaims Susan Ledley, 60, a retired teacher and caterer from Chappaqua, N.Y., "to sit at that table, so close to Adam, with such beautiful ingredients."

On the West Coast, people pay upwards of $100 a head to eat a dinner in the very field in which the ingredients were grown, at chef Jim Denevan's Outstanding in the Field program in Santa Cruz, Calif., or the Plate and Pitchfork dinners run by Erika Polmar and Emily Berreth in Portland, Ore. "It was a harvest-moon setting—" gushes Melissa Coe Grewenow, 55, a Portland interior designer, "—and the breezes picked up, and you could smell the thyme and marjoram and the things you stepped on when you got in from the field." The magic of the evening was only enhanced, presumably, by short lectures between each course from the various purveyors on the provenance of every cheese and the lineage and life history of every vegetable served. The audience consists of "people who threw themselves into the workplace and didn't have time [for anything else]," says Susan Sokol Blossom, a certified-organic Oregon wine maker who has served her products at many Plate and Pitchfork dinners. "Now their lives are slowing down just a little, and they're able to re-immerse themselves in the finer things in life." "Finer" in this context is not just a euphemism for "expensive" but conveys the essential boomer quality of reverence for one's own digestive system and metabolism. The generation that laughed at the right-wing general in "Dr. Strangelove" for his obsession with "precious bodily fluids" have pretty much come around to his point of view, although they're more concerned about trans fats now than fluoridated drinking water. "This isn't about going out and driving a BMW," Sokol Blossom maintains. "It's about celebrating what you put in your body."