The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (2 page)

Furthermore, I assumed that Westchester dully pulsated with this blandness for everyone, visitor or native. Then one day during high school an old camp friend from New Zealand paid me a visit. She pointed to the perfectly boring tree under which I had just parked my car, alongside our perfectly boring driveway, and screamed at the top of her lungs, "Oh my God, what is that
thing?
"

Surely, I remember thinking, they have trees in New Zealand.

"
That!
" She pushed her finger harder into the air.

There was a squirrel pinned, mid-chase with another squirrel, to the side of an oak tree. Its squirrel talons clung to the bark, its black tail fluffed up and protruded at a right angle toward the two of us. The thing of it is, she actually
was
witnessing something rare: black squirrels exist in limited pockets in the Northeast and Midwest. My parents' front yard happens to be located in one of those pockets. But it was this whole new animal that awed her. She had never seen anything like it, and yet it certainly wasn't on her list of "things to explore in America." She stealthily exited the car and began taking pictures.

This is why we travel. Oh yes, that's right: to see rats with fluffy tails. We travel to discover what we don't know, to get away from what we know too well. We seek out the unexpected. That's the deal we made when we asked our neighbors to take in the mail and headed for the airport. These days we also travel with the hope of leaving our phones unanswered and our e-mail logged out of. With so much thorough planning, so many suggested trip highlights and firsthand accounts available at our fingertips, the unexpected is of greater value than ever. It's a pure shot of experience.

As we grow up, most real experience is increasingly hindered by two factors. One is the infamous prism of our own perspective (the real terrain of exploration is seldom external). I would argue that the second, equally intuitive but less discussed obstacle has to do with a kind of virginity of the mind. We can only learn something—I mean really be introduced to it—once. Hence the incredible shrinking airplanes and the black squirrels. Hence the explorers and the travel guides and the carefully allotted weeks of vacations to places we've never been and likely will never go again. I will say now that I have been to Puerto Rico three times in my life and won't be returning. Because Puerto Rico is a terrible place? Well, it ain't Bali, but no, that's not why. It's because of the other 30 percent of the planet Earth covered in landmass. I have the one life and the one brain to match it, and I'd rather not waste either on knowing a foreign locale like the back of my hand unless the front of my hand is signing a lease there.

Perhaps this seems fickle or limiting or just rings false. If we were discussing people instead of places, no one in their right mind would suggest that a series of casual friendships are more ideal than a handful of deep relationships. To get the most out of any relationship, I have to take off my coat and stay a while. But travel is different. I have seen other humans before. I get the general idea of what one might look like. But I have never spent a year at sea like Christopher Buckley (coat required, a warm one) or journeyed to the wild and endangered terrain of Australia's "Top End" like Verlyn Klinkenborg. And I have
really
never gone on a bowhead whale hunt in Quebec with Justin Nobel. That I think I would have remembered.

In reading the nearly one hundred essays narrowed from the numerous excellent pieces of travel writing published last year, I found myself most drawn to those whose authors, simply put, went because I couldn't. This is not a prerequisite for the foreign or the expensive—I suppose if I really wanted to visit Bristol Motor Speedway and try to explore the decline of NASCAR like Ben Austen in "Southern Culture on the Skids," I could give it a shot. But there's no way I'd make it around the track with the same brand of skillful insight unique to Austen. So there I sat in my armchair (no, really, it's blue and has a throw pillow), where I relied on him and seventeen other literary witnesses to be my eyes and ears. The tales of their experiences were so intoxicating because I felt as if I were
with
them, along for the ride as they employed a combination of cultural absorption and opinion. They opened up new means of thinking in their own brains and dragged me through the portal with them. There is much to be said for staking out a foreign spot as your own, but like I said: the nature of the world is that it will provide that valuable introductory course only once. Each of these essays reads like a remarkably successful social experiment, an answer to the question of what happens when you take a handful of the country's most talented writers and show them something they don't know.

It is to the original assigning editors' credit that many of these explorers were perfectly matched to their destinations from the start. Many of the accounts featured here are less unknown chemistry experiments and more cases of hydrogen + fire = explosion.
Harper's Magazine
is no dummy. It knew what it was doing when it sent William T. Vollmann to Kurdistan, just as
Vanity Fair
knew what it was doing when it sent Maureen Dowd to Saudi Arabia, just as
Travel
+
Leisure
knew what it was doing when it sent the instinctively funny Gary Shteyngart to eat and drink his way through a Russian neighborhood in Tel Aviv. The results are predictably, transportingly phenomenal. In Vollmann's case, they are eye-opening as well. In "A Head for the Emir," a title that becomes quickly and disturbingly relevant in Vollmann's narrative of traveling across checkpoints within Kurdistan, the "air smelled of manure from the cattle that came grazing there, human urine, and sweat: of the many people all around, the closest man, in sandals and striped shirt, squatting."

Other selections are no less rewarding—some might say even more so—for the gamble their publications took on an unknown kid. Emily Witt's account of two very neon years in Miami, chronicling her struggle between gluttony witness and gluttony participant for
N
+
1
, is so artfully crafted one wonders how anyone else could dare to write about the city after she's through with it.

There seems to be a stylistic choice among travel writers: Do they become the doctors making their rounds or the patients being experimented on? The point of travel writing is not always to exhaust a subject, to record everything so that the next person won't have to. The writer runs the risk of sucking the life out of a place. But it's a risk that pays off wonderfully for Witt, and she is actually part of a two-woman cleanup crew. I assume she won't mind terribly if I suggest that she has a kindred spirit here in Annie Proulx. "A Year of Birds," about Proulx's summer spent meticulously documenting Wyoming eagle nests, is a rare bird itself. True, it's hard
not
to include an essay on bald eagles in a book with
American
printed on the cover. But you really have to be as grossly talented as Annie Proulx to write thirteen thousand words on birds—and birds only. It's like saying, "I'm going to do this and you're going to sit there and enjoy it because it's just that good." And of course she's right. I imagine that reading her piece is not unlike being an actual bald eagle, dipping up and down and playing in the wind. Behold: "Days of flailing west wind, strong enough to push its snout under the crust of the fallen snow wherever hares or I had left footprints, strong enough to then flip up big pancakes of crust and send them cartwheeling east until they disintegrated in puffs. Eagles love strong wind. It is impossible to miss the joy they take in exhibition flying. The bald pair were out playing in the gusts, mounting higher and higher until they were specks, then splitting apart. After a few minutes of empty sky the unknown big dark bird flapped briefly into view before disappearing in a snow squall."

Proulx also quotes from Aldo Leopold's
Sand County Almanac
, which points out that "books on nature seldom mention wind; they are written behind stoves." Leopold makes a solid point: 2010 was not without its dramas, but the more perennial unsung adventures of travel rarely get, well, sung. There is so much world to see, why dwell on the minutiae of how we get from point A to point B? After all, the play's the thing. Not the drive to the theater. Which is precisely why, in our GPS-reliant reality, Jessica McCaughey's "Aligning the Internal Compass" is of note. In what sounds like a personal nightmare for most travelers, McCaughey intentionally engages in the lesser-known sport of "orienteering." See also: getting lost in the woods on purpose. With unexpected twists and turns, literal and metaphorical alike, it's an endearing but never precious exploration of an otherwise unglamorous subject—getting there. When one is publishing one's travel writing in a periodical, there is an unspoken competition for relevancy. The essay that opens with the traveler being catapulted into a secret bay by a lost tribe of Mongolian shamans wins, right? An essay such as McCaughey's is not flashy. It may not be a frontrunner for Most Newsworthy Travel, but it has a happy home in the Most Eternal Travel category.

Actually, "getting there" was a general problem all over the globe in 2010. Even when a writer was already stationed at the "there" in question. To sit with Keith Gessen, sipping on overpriced coffee at a café, watching his sister sit in traffic just feet away, trapped in Moscow's infamous gridlock, is to be frustrated along with him. "Stuck" is a cultural history of Moscow via its abysmal traffic loops. Thanks to Gessen, we see a gridlock so persistent that it presents an alternate form of human contact. There's the voice, the touch, the written word, and now the hostile merging of lanes. It is a frustration known only too well in America to those who have foolishly attempted to drive from New York City to Long Island on a summer weekend. "To get to the Hamptons, just east of Manhattan," explains Ariel Levy in "Reservations," "you must sit on the Long Island Expressway—the biggest parking lot in the world, as they say—for hour upon hour of overheated immobility." But of course tourism and travel can (and probably should, if at all possible) be two different things. Levy's exploration of the Shinnecock tribe's financial and cultural survival goes deeper than the question of outsider traffic in a way that is, ironically, transporting. And who can resist its featured star, the memorable Lancelot Gumbs? He is a character reminiscent of
The Orchid Thief's
John Laroche.

The mix of exotic drama and good old-fashioned human drama is what makes many of these essays sparkle. As I read, I found that both qualities could be traced to the initial impetus for writing the essay. Having gone through the same process myself, I will cop to its being a bit formulaic. The magazine pitch goes something like this: (1) writer has the notion of a location in his or her head, (2) writer travels to said location, where upon arrival the notion is (2a) corrected or (2b) confirmed, (3) magazine, hopefully, prints piece. The result is many travel pieces that revolve around falling in love with the idea of a place prior to arrival. Thankfully, in this year's selections the ideas themselves are anything but formulaic. Sometimes the idea manifests itself literally. (See, for example, Porter Fox's essay, "The Last Stand of Free Town," about the micro-nation of Christiania, a state within a state in Copenhagen and a temporary autonomous zone built on utopian ideals.) Sometimes the idea is more of a fixation. In Tom Ireland's "Famous," the author develops an almost Capote-like obsession with the two terrorists responsible for the 2008 killing spree at Mumbai's Victoria Terminus. And sometimes it's just a beautiful thought. In André Aciman's "My Monet Moment," the author travels to Bordighera, Italy, to track down the exact spot where his favorite painting was painted.

"I like not knowing," admits Aciman. "Knowing anything about the painting would most likely undo its spell. But I can't help myself."

Though one of the lighter pieces here, Aciman's account does touch on another theme in travel writing, and that is the idea of taking our world for granted. Of recognizing common misimpressions and issuing correctives through writing. Aciman had casually ogled a print of Monet's painting for years before he decided to do something about it. It's always fascinating to watch gifted writers leave town to explore the lives they're already living. Téa Obreht's "Twilight of the Vampires" starts with the much-heeded superstitions of her native land, which did not strike her as unusual as a child. But her essay soon becomes an eerie account to end all eerie accounts when she returns to Serbia to hunt for real-life vampires.

Here is a place where people do not so much fall in love with ideas as obey their every whim. A road trip outside Belgrade drives us through a country where ritual reigns high above religion. Though it's not all menacing descriptions of open graves, 1970s horror films, and dried goat meat. Obreht's piece also contains the single most amusing image in the pages of this book: "Among numerous indignities through history, the Roma suffered the obscure nuisance of vampire watermelons."

If the superstitions of Serbia overwhelm any religion, so does Haitian folklore overwhelm any earthquake. Mischa Berlinski's love letter to a devastated country is something special indeed. In "Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead" there are enough descriptions of a Haiti you've never seen to correct the images you might have if you have been mainlining CNN only. When the January 2010 earthquake hits, Berlinski and his wife are stationed "only about 125 miles from Port-au-Prince but remote, like an island off the coast of Haiti ... There were more coffin makers in Jérémie than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the paved roads petered out at the edge of town ... In the mornings, merchants came down from the hills past our front gate with baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, and at night in bed under the mosquito net when the moon was silver and big, we heard voodoo drums and strange, spooky singing. I don't know if I've ever liked a place more in my life." It is an epic, heart-wrenching essay about hope, and these emotions are delivered in such a way that I don't feel the least bit silly in using clichéd adjectives to describe them. I became so immersed in the narrative and was so wracked with worry about the fate of Berlinski's friend Venance, I nearly forgot the title of the essay.