The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (3 page)

For the most part, I was completely surprised and delighted to find out who had written these pieces (though in some cases I was not surprised at all; you don’t really need a byline that says “by David Sedaris” to know that something was written by David Sedaris). For the longest time, I could not figure out why I loved so much the little essay called “A Farewell to Yarns,” until it was revealed that, of course, the great Ian Frazier had written it. That would explain how a piece of writing could be so simple and yet so simply wonderful—because it was in the hands of a storyteller who, after so many years at his craft, really knows his business.

There are some stories in this anthology that I felt just needed to be next to each other—the way total strangers meet on a train and somehow make each other’s journeys more interesting. “The Pippiest Place on Earth” is, in its own right, a fantastic exploration of a Charles Dickens theme park, but it takes on a far deeper meaning after you’ve read “Dreaming of El Dorado”—which is
truly
Dickensian. I put “Bombing Sarajevo” right next to “Vietnam’s Bowl of Secrets” because both of them are incredibly heartening stories about places that were, not very long ago, the very worst places in the world. Yet the cheerful “Vietnam’s Bowl of Secrets” then bizarrely runs right into the disturbing “Babu on the Bad Road,” but only because of this one strange link: Both stories are about the fetishistic search for a magical and mysterious fluid.

Other stories in here are, by necessity, solitary travelers. “The Wild Dogs of Istanbul” is like nothing else in this assemblage—written in such a strange and dreamy voice that it felt to me like an Italo Calvino short story, curiously translated from some lost, obscure language. I was also charmed by Peter Jon Lindberg’s essay about the pleasures of routine family holidays;
its sense of quiet satisfaction is a small island of serenity in this collection of far rougher and hungrier tales. “Caliph of the Tricksters” stands alone in my mind, too; it is the only story I have ever read that features a man whose job is to lick clean the bloody eyeballs of wounded roosters during illegal Afghani cockfights. I did not know that this was a profession. I feel that my world is richer now that I do. I also feel like this piece of information spares me a trip to Afghanistan to find out about blood-licking cockers for myself.

I elected to close this collection with Rich Cohen’s grand “Pirate City”—a story that I stumbled upon last summer in the
Paris Review
, and which so seduced me that I completely lost track of myself, and of time, while I was reading it. It is not merely a carefully researched history of the origins of New Orleans; it is also a wild tale about pirates and prostitutes and duplicity and British men-of-war and alligators and escaped slaves and Spanish conquistadors. Why, there is so much true-life action-adventure in this narrative, you’d almost think the story could have written itself!

But I know better.

Nothing in here wrote itself. Nothing ever can.

I salute, therefore, all the writers who made these wide and disparate acts of transportation and transformation come to life for our shock, amusement, and betterment. I salute the editors who made the writers work harder than they probably wanted to. I salute the world that keeps proving, year after year, that there is always more to be discovered—one secret noodle at a time, one benevolent kidnapper at a time, one rooster’s bloody eyeball at a time.

Enjoy this journey. I promise you will not be bored.

E
LIZABETH
G
ILBERT

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

FROM
The New York Times Magazine

O
N THE PLANE
, something odd but also vaguely magical-seeming happened: namely, nobody knew what time it was. Right before we landed, the flight attendant made an announcement, in English and Spanish, that although daylight-saving time recently went into effect in the States, the island didn’t observe that custom. As a result, we had caught up—our time had passed into sync with Cuban time. You will not need to change your watches. Then, moments later, she came on again and apologized. She had been wrong, she said. The time in Cuba was different. She didn’t specify how many hours ahead. At that point, people around us looked at one another. How could the airline not know what time it is where we’re going? Another flight attendant, hurrying down the aisle, said loudly, “I just talked to some actual Cubans, in the back, and they say it’ll be the same time.” That settled it: we would be landing in ignorance. We knew our phones weren’t going to work because they were tied to a U.S. company that didn’t operate on the island.

The six-year-old sat between us, looking back and forth at our faces. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No,” my wife, Mariana, said, “just funny.” But to me she did the eyebrows up and down.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said, “just—into the zone.”

Mi esposa
travels to Cuba every so many years, to do movie-related research (she’s a film-studies professor) and to visit her mother’s family, a dwindling number of which, as death and emigration have surpassed the birthrate, still live in the same small inland town, a dusty, colonial-looking agricultural town, not a place anyone’s heard of. To them, even after half a century, it’s the
querencia
, an untranslatable Spanish word that means something like “the place where you are your most authentic self.” They won’t go on about Cuba around you in a magic-realist way. Nor do they dream of trying to reclaim their land when the Castros die. Destiny settled their branch of the family not in Florida, where, if you’re Cuban American, your nostalgia and anger (and sense of community) are continually stoked, but in Carolina del Norte, where nobody cares. They tend to be fairly laid-back about politics. But their memories stitch helplessly back to and through that town over generations, back to the ur-ancestors who came from a small village in the Canary Islands.

My wife’s 91-year-old Cuban grandmother, who lives with us much of the time, once drew for me on top of a white cake box a map of their hometown. It started out like something you would make to give someone directions but ended up as detailed in places as a highway atlas. More so, really, because it was personally annotated. Here is the corner where my father have the bodega. Here is the alley where the old man used to walk his grandson, in a white suit, and we always say, “Let’s go to watch it,” because he have his pocket full of stones, and when the boy runs, the old man throw and hit him in the legs. She was remembering back through Castro and Batista, back through all of that, into the time of Machado, even back through him into her parents’ time, the years of mustachioed Gómez in his black frock coat. The night I met her, 18 years ago, she cooked me Turkish-delight-level black beans with Spanish olives, and flan in a coffee can. She said: “Mira, Yon, at this time”—she meant the early ’40s—“they make a census, all the teacher go to have a census in Cuba. We see places nobody know the name. I ride a small horse. One night there is a storm—we pass the storm under a
palma
. In one house is
un enano
. You know what is? A dwarf. He say, ‘I count half!’” Her stories are like that. You actually want them to go longer. This is no small thing for me, as my life has evolved by unforeseen paths such that I see more of this
abuelita
than of any other human being. Neither of us ever leaves the house, and during the day it’s the two of us. Those could be some paw-chewingly long hours in the kitchen, if she were talking to me about religion or something. Mostly she calls people in Miami and watches Univision at the same time, waiting for my wife and daughters to get home, after which she perks up.

Because my wife and her family have living relatives in Cuba, they can get a humanitarian exception that lets you fly direct from Miami. The legal loopholes combining to make that possible must fill hard drives. But you can in fact go that way, if you obtain one of these exceptions or are immediate family with someone who does. I first tagged along 12 years ago. It’s hands down the strangest way to travel to Cuba, which you might not expect, because technically it’s the simplest. But the airport bureaucracy in Miami was so heavy, at least back then, you had to show up the night before and stay in an airport hotel so you could wake up early and spend the day in a series of bewildering lines, getting things signed or stamped. That first time, the tedium was alleviated by a little cluster of Miami relatives who followed us to and through each line, standing slightly off to the side. I spoke hardly any Spanish then. My wife told me they were giving her all sorts of warnings about Havana and messages for various people in their town. Now and then one of them would rub my arm and smile warmly at me, gestures that I took to mean, “Words aren’t necessary to express the mutual understanding of familial connection that we now possess,” but that when I think about it now, would have been identical to those signaling, “You, simpleton.”

One line was for having your luggage wrapped in plastic. A couple of muscly Latin guys in shorts were waiting there. They lifted each suitcase or bag onto a little spinning platform, turned it blazingly fast to seal it in industrial-strength shrink-wrap from a roll that looked like it held a landfill’s worth, and charged you for it. Their spinning was so energetic, it doubled as a feat of strength. Everyone watched. The reasons behind the plastic were not laid out. Later in the waiting area, a woman told us it was to discourage quick-fingered Cuban bag handlers on the other side. They took not gold and money, which few people were foolish enough to pack, but toothpaste and shampoo, necessities. This year, however, the plastic wrap was optional.

There were other post-Bush differences in the direct-to-Cuba zone. The lines had grown fewer and shorter. Most noticeable, the Cubans on our flight—a mixture of Cuban Americans and returning Cuban nationals who had been in Florida or D.C. on visas of their own (some people do move back and forth)—weren’t carrying as much stuff. The crowd cast a fairly normal profile. Last time, people had multiple pairs of shoes tied around their necks by the laces. Thick gorgets of reading glasses. Men wearing 10 hats, several pairs of pants, everybody’s pockets bulging. Everybody wearing fanny packs. The rule was, if you could get it onto your body, you could bring it aboard. At least five people carried giant stuffed animals and other large toys. That’s one of the things in the Cuban American community, in which going back is generally frowned upon—but if it’s to meet your
nieto
for the first time . . .

None of that, though, is what makes the Miami-to-Havana flights strange. It’s that this most obvious route, more than any of the much longer workarounds by which American citizens can get to the island, lets you feel most fully the truth of Cuba’s sheer proximity. It’s one of those flights in which, almost as soon as you reach your maximum altitude, you begin your descent, and within minutes you’re looking down on a diorama of palm trees growing incongruously in green fields, and within seconds you hit the ground and everyone bursts into applause. The country you land in is too unlike your own to have been reached that quickly, all but instantaneously, and is after all, you recall, on hostile terms with your own. As if you’ve passed through a warp. “Why are they clapping?” the six-year-old asked.

I explained that it was special, coming here. Some of these people, when they left Cuba, might have thought they would never see it again. Some had been hearing about it all their lives and were seeing it for the first time.

“Also, they like to clap and yell,” my wife said.

The six-year-old did her philosopher face, gazing out the window. She gets a little dimple on her forehead when the big thoughts are brewing. “Now I’m here,” she said.

“Yes, you are.”

“And I’m Cuban,” she said.

“You are part Cuban, that’s true.”

“You’re not any Cuban,” she said, not meanly, just sort of marveling.

She looks like me, pale with blue eyes and light brown hair and freckles. Yet she has largely been raised day to day by intense, dark-eyed Cuban American women, and their blood is in her, and the history of their family, with all of its drama and all of its issues, has exerted an incalculable influence on who and what she is. At some point in her life, she’ll have to figure out what all of that means to her; the whole story and the way she looks will be part of its strangeness. For me it was all behind glass. I felt the sudden separation between us, between the relative depths of what this trip would mean to us, many years on. One of those moments of generational wooziness that come with having kids, like realizing there’s a part of their lives you won’t see.

We landed under searingly vivid skies, something like what the blue tablet from a packet of Easter dye lets off. The land right around the airport is farmed; we saw a man plowing with oxen. The fertility of Cuba is the thing you can’t put into words. I’ve never stood on a piece of ground as throbbingly, even pornographically, generative. Throw a used battery into a divot, and it will put out shoots—that’s how it feels. You could smell it, in the smoky, slightly putrid smell of turned fields. More and more, as we drove, that odor mingled with the smell of the sea.

This was the first time I was in post-Fidel Cuba. It was funny to think that not long ago, there were smart people who doubted that such a thing could exist, i.e., who believed that with the fall of Fidel would come the fall of communism on the island. But Fidel didn’t fall. He did fall, physically—on the tape that gets shown over and over in Miami, of him coming down the ramp after giving that speech in 2004 and tumbling and breaking his knee—but his leadership didn’t. He executed one of the most brilliantly engineered successions in history, a succession that was at the same time a self-entrenchment. First, he faked his own death in a way: serious intestinal operation, he might not make it. Raul is brought in as “acting president.” A year and a half later, Castro mostly recovered. But Raul is officially named president, with Castro’s approval. It was almost as if, “Is Fidel still . . . ?” Amazing. So now they rule together, with Raul out front, but everyone understanding that Fidel retains massive authority. Not to say that Raul doesn’t wield power—he has always had plenty—but it’s a partnership of some kind. What comes after is as much of a mystery as ever.