The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (21 page)

I sighed and focused on a nearby pilgrim who was leaning down from his boat, throwing water over his head and repeating, “Shiva, Mother Ganges.”

We bumped up to the riverbank, and Nehna pulled in the oars. I'd been looking across to this side of the Ganges, and its emptiness, ever since I arrived. This side of the river is completely uninhabited, with absolutely no signs of human handiwork—Varanasi's antipode, a barren yin landscape to Varanasi's baroque yang. It makes the habitable side of the river, the one crammed with crumbling palaces and crawling with living beings, feel like the beginning of the world, the place where civilization starts, the spot that, five days earlier, I was told is the epicenter of creation. Or, depending on how you look at it, the place where civilization ends, and thus begins all over again. Which was suddenly all starting to make sense, since a sadhu or a pilgrim or even an auto-rickshaw driver will remind you, as they did me, that in Varanasi there are no beginnings and endings, only passages and transformations.

Here I was, being rowed across the Ganges by the Dom Raja himself. It almost felt like I was physically making the postcremation journey to
moksha
. Perhaps I was nearing
ananda
, just as Seatia Nararyna, the 85-year-old man I met at Moksha Bhavan on my first day in town, had advised me: bliss through nothingness, the kind of state a Hindu (or a Buddhist) tries to attain during meditation. Symbolically, the far side of the Ganges is devoid of desire and ego and grasping, because, well, there's
really
nothing there.

I'm a long way from the bliss that Mr. Nararyna charged me to go and seek. But this I learned in Varanasi: I had walked through the fire during those unlit days a couple of years ago. I did it just after stepping away from that ledge. But it took coming here, talking to the
doms
and the mourners about death, feeling the vast blankness across the most holy river in Hinduism, to see that I only needed to let go, to realize that in nothingness is clarity and in clarity is peace. For nothingness isn't empty; it is the beginning of a hitherto unknown spirit we have the ability to tap into.

If we just choose to.

Once we rowed back to the habitable side of the river and got off the boat, the Dom Raja invited me over to his house for dinner that night. I said thank you, but no. I think, until my own time comes, I'm done with death for a while. I shook his hand and walked away, ready to make my exit, fully alive, from Varanasi.

LAUREN GROFF

FROM
Oxford American

A
FEW MILES
southwest of Gainesville, the arching oaks of central Florida loosen into long fields full of beef steer. They tighten up again into the Goethe State Forest (pronounced, hereabouts, as
Go-thee
), and finally peter out into US 19, a soulless and endless miracle mile of corporate chains from Applebee's to Zaxby's, hitting nearly every letter in between. In the town of Homosassa, I saw a smiling gray manatee the size of a VW van on the side of the road, surrounded by a sea of yard-sign valentines that someone had left to fade in the March sun. Homosassa is famous for being one of the best places in Florida to view West Indian manatees, those gentle thousand-pound sea cows that are routinely torn up by Jet Skis and motorboats. Skeptics believe that sailors mistook sea mammals like manatees and dugongs for women, giving rise to the myth of the mermaid. After a few months at sea, one starts to see what one expects to see, and long ago, sirens were a matter of fact, not myth. Henry Hudson reported a sighting of a mermaid, and Christopher Columbus saw a manatee surfacing somewhere near the Dominican Republic on January 9, 1493, and noted in his diary that mermaids were not nearly as beautiful as they were painted. True. Manatees are pewter-colored and have faintly hound-doggish heads and platters for fins; they don't look much like Daryl Hannah. Still, the word
manatee
comes from the Taíno word for “breast,” and a manatee on her back, with her forefins folded on her chest, can appear to have a goodly bosom. It's not hard to see how, after months of male company, the sight of one rising from the waves like a massive and fleshy woman could evoke intense erotic yearnings.

Mermaids—which I'm using here as shorthand for uncanny female water spirits—are common wherever human beings rub up against bodies of water. In Japan, there are
ningyo
, strange woman-faced semi-immortal fish figures; in ancient Syria, the goddess Derceto was described by Diodorus Siculus in his
Bibliotheca historica
as having a fish tail. There are
margyr
in Scandinavia and
sabawaelnu
in the Mi'kmaq culture of North America. There are Celtic
morgens
, aboriginal Australian
yawkyawks
, Russian
rusalki
. The Greeks had whole taxonomies of water spirits, from the Oceanids of the salt water and the Nereids of the Mediterranean to the Naiads, the spirits of fresh water. The most famous mermaids in myth—Odysseus's singing sirens, whom he resisted by stoppering his sailors' ears with wax and tying himself to the mast—were not mermaids at all but immortal bird-women, with wings, who once sang against the Muses in a competition (they lost and in punishment were plucked). That these creatures have slid from avian to piscine over the years speaks to the sexual appeal of mermaids. The sirens call men with their voices and bodies, water is voluptuous, and there's nothing sexy about a woman with a chicken's netherparts.

I think the widespread ubiquity of these dangerous, capricious female figures has less to do with lust and mistaken sea creatures than with a stunning human capacity for metaphor. Water is necessary, urgent, everywhere; it gives rise to life. It is also perilous, subject to its own laws, and contains dark and hidden depths. The makers of myths are the victors, the ones allowed the leisure and education to write (men, in other words, for most of human history). The myth of mermaids both explains and distances woman, that great and confounding mystery. And the appeal isn't just for men; girls are drawn to mermaids' wildness and beauty and power. After all, the sea creatures are the ones who get to decide if people who fall overboard will swim or sink.

I grew up as a very serious competitive swimmer on a boys' swim team and dreamed at night of being a mermaid, of flying in water and breathing as if it were air, and of luxuriating among the sea grasses and seeing the boats pass overhead like clouds over the sun. There was something about mermaids' ferocity, their danger, their uncompromising strangeness and power, that spoke to a truth deep in me. Every once in a while, even decades later, I still hear an echo of their song and feel compelled to listen.

During my drive to Weeki Wachee, I held the Starbucks siren hot in my hand. The coffee company's logo is a smirker. (I'll cop to my dislike.) She's bicaudal and holds her split tail beside her head with both fists in a frankly pornographic manner, teasing us with the answer to the age-old mystery of how all those seamen and fish-bottomed women were physiologically able to get it on.

No matter; I was on the hunt for far better mermaids, for high-grade Americana. Weeki Wachee is one of many natural springs that run through the state of Florida. They are its best-kept secret: people think of swampland when they think of Florida, or oranges or theme parks or skittery dance music in some Miami nightclub, not cold, clear rivers on which you can float for miles and never come across a single alligator. From underwater, Weeki Wachee appears to be a cragged mountainside, astonishingly steep. Once the site of Timucua, or aboriginal, burial grounds, it served as a swimming and laundry pool for locals in the 1930s and early 1940s as well as their trash heap.

Walton Hall Smith was a writer (coauthoring a book titled
Liquor, Servant of Man
) and founder of the Syfo beverage company, and he had long dreamed of developing Weeki Wachee into an underground theater. In June 1946, he paired up with Newt Perry, who was famous for wrestling alligators at Silver Springs, training Navy SEALs, and pioneering the underwater film industry in Florida; Grantland Rice called him “The Human Fish.” With a group of investors, they purchased the site from the city of St. Petersburg and began constructing the theater sunk deep into the side of the springs.

The park was first opened to the public on October 12, 1947. The theater was a low building with twinned ramps that led underground, where a curved auditorium looked out into the springs from 16 feet below the surface, so that one could see much of the chasm and all attendant wildlife: turtles, ducks, alligators, and sometimes even a stray manatee. By the time of the opening, Perry had come up with the idea of bringing in young women in bathing suits to do an underwater ballet for the tourists. In the beginning, the Weeki Wachee mermaids were local teenagers, paid in hot dogs and hamburgers and bathing suits. There were so few cars on Route 19 that every time they heard one coming, the mermaids scampered to the side of the road to lure the drivers in for a show. How startling it must have been to be driving along the scrubby brown fields in the bright and sleepy sunlight, and then, out of nowhere, a line of young beauties in bathing suits. I wonder if anyone resisted them.

At last, Weeki Wachee hove up on the west side of the highway, a strange repository for such an ancient and resonant myth. Even at nine in the morning on a chilly March day, the parking lot was filled with cars and buses. The park itself was half hidden like an afterthought, low-set in the lot's northeast corner. The overall aesthetic was one of midcentury painted concrete, graced here and there with nippleless female busts. Before the entrance there's a huge fountain, and in the middle of the fountain there's an erect pillar topped by female swimmers engaged in a move I'd come to learn is called an adagio. Picture one swimmer vertical, fist extended, lifting another swimmer who is arched on her back toward the surface of the water. I was a little surprised by the statue's lack of tails. It turns out tails on the Weeki Wachee mermaids didn't appear until 1962: the earliest prototype was a very heavy rubber tail made for movie star Ann Blythe in the 1948 movie
Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid
. It wasn't practical: it cost $20,000 and was nearly impossible to squeeze into. These days, park employees or the mermaids themselves make the swimming tails out of stretchy fabric, with zippers on the side. There are also posing tails, with sequins and with zippers on the back, for verisimilitude, I suppose.

John Athanason, the park's genial, ruddy public relations manager, met me at the gate. John told me he'd been an employee at Weeki Wachee during its lowest moment, before it became a state park, when the private owners neglected the place to the point where there were serious safety issues, some involving fire exits and sewage. The mermaids had to launch a campaign, Save Our Tails, to keep the park from closing down. The small park is bare-bones, though there is evidence of recent sprucing: new plantings of sago palm and bougainvillea, new paint. We walked through a clump of high-schoolers to view the springs from above. Sapphire blue in places, the source is fairly small, the hole itself not especially impressive from our vantage and angle. It looked not unlike a pond, with a wee water park called Buccaneer Bay at its far end. John told me some fascinating information—Weeki Wachee was a first-magnitude spring directly fed from the Florida aquifer; divers know that it goes at least 413 feet deep; 117 million gallons pump out of it every day; the current in the water is 5 miles per hour, the temperature a constant 74.2 degrees—but I was also distracted by the teenage boy surreptitiously copping a feel of the tiny teenage girl on my other side. There was a man blowing leaves off the far bank. There were indolent fish.

John led me down a ramp and into the underwater theater, a large curved space with acoustic tiles and a cement floor. It was dark and empty and smelled a little of moldering eelgrass and feet. The audience sits on battered wooden benches. There is a curtain that automatically slides up to show the strange green subaqueous world where the mermaids perform, emerging from underneath shells that flip up on the large flat stage. The distant domed airlock on the far side of the chasm looks like a 1940s dream of the future. Over everything is a layer of green-brown lyngbya algae, even though, once upon a time, Weeki Wachee water was so clear people assumed a trick—that the mermaids were suspended on wires. This is Florida. People here gleefully cake their lawns and golf courses in nitrogen, then wax nostalgic for a time when the springs weren't clouded over.

In the dim blue theater with only fish and turtles sliding by, I heard the weariness in John's voice. Surely he has answered the same inane questions over and over for years, and it must be difficult to maintain a high-burn enthusiasm for a place that's equally worn down and kitschy. Still, he seemed to regard the park and the mermaids with avuncular pride. I asked if he'd ever considered inviting in a reality television show to bring some money to Weeki Wachee. He said he's had dozens of proposals, but reality television feeds on interpersonal drama, and the mermaids are employees of the State of Florida, which is not delighted about employees' interpersonal drama being sprayed about on national television. “And girls are . . . complicated,” he said knowingly. I nodded and smiled, but because I'm complicated, I winced every time John called the performers
girls
. I'm a product of the politically correct '90s. When I was a belligerent 14-year-old
actual
girl, with a copy of
The Second Sex
in hand, I was taught to insist on being called a woman. Some of the mermaids may be very young, true, but many are in their twenties. Some are teachers, some are mothers; all are women. We were rousted from the theater by a white-blond woman in a tracksuit, whom I'd later discover is a mermaid, who came into the theater and lowered the curtains over the windows to the springs. It was almost time for the first show of the day:
Hans Christian Andersen's “The Little Mermaid.”