The Turk Who Loved Apples (30 page)

But there on the ground, it was hard to see that. Instead, all I could see was failure—a lazy, cheating hipster doing what he always did in Paris.

It shouldn't be this way, I kept thinking. And on other “Getting Lost” trips, it wasn't. In Las Vegas earlier that year, the adventure had unfolded so smoothly. I'd landed at the airport, picked up my rental car, and proceeded to find, by accident, with almost no conscious effort, exactly what I'd hoped to find: an old-school Mexican restaurant frequented by eye-patch-wearing locals; a revitalizing downtown with lively bars and coffee shops; the Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Hawaiian restaurants of Spring Mountain Road; and crazy-friendly people, like the brilliantly named Krissee Danger, who directed me to odd institutions like the Pinball Hall of Fame. One afternoon, I randomly bumped into James Oseland, the editor of
Saveur
magazine, in the lobby of the Comopolitan Hotel; we went hiking together in Red Rock Canyon the next day. And one night, Krissee and I wound up in a cocktail bar with Tony Hsieh, the founder of
Zappos.com
, who bought our round of drinks.

That summer, too, I'd undertaken a remarkable odyssey across the Mediterranean. Make that Odyssey, for I was retracing the voyage
of Odysseus, whose epic tale of getting lost is the foundation of Western literature. Having flown into Istanbul, I made my way by bus down to the ruins of Troy, from which, emulating the great hero, I would proceed to the island of Ithaca, on the far side of the Greek mainland. Our routes, I knew, would not be identical. Odysseus had gone north from Troy, then been blown off course somewhere near Kythira, winding up in absolutely imaginary lands. (No matter what the literalists believe, those lands are mythical.) I, however, went west and south, taking ferry after ferry across the islands of the Aegean—but without knowing either the precise geography of the archipelago or the web of ferry connections among the islands. Who knew if a ferry onward would leave the next day—or the next week? Or where I could get to two or three hops down the line? Certainly not the Greeks themselves, who had only rough ideas of which islands were reachable from their own. Each step forward, then, could have led to a dead end, forcing me to backtrack, as Odysseus had through the twin horrors of Scylla and Charybdis.

Every day I boarded a new boat and landed at a new port, usually with enough free time to rent a car, drive up into the switchbacked hills, find a taverna, and sip sour wine along with a dish of braised lamb and a cucumber-tomato salad. I hiked through Cretan gorges and discussed with a Greek named Little Jim the deaths of his father (at the hands of the Nazis) and his mother (decades later, at the age of one hundred), and stayed at a whitewashed boutique hotel for a mere €40, and met a young hipster with a penny-farthing, and drank Belgian beer while watching clouds rise over a ridge on the island of Kythira, where Odysseus had lost his way.

“That one looks like a man,” said a bartender.

His boss agreed: “Like the god Hermes.”

My Odyssey was a fraught one, in which I alternated between a wanderer's ebullience and a writer's deadline anxiety. There was so much to discover on each overlooked island—cafés next to earthquake-ravaged churches, Greeks who'd returned from overseas
to restore their grandparents' houses, tantalizing hints of the historical Homer, the looming political and economic chaos in Athens. Each hospitable Greek who offered me friendship or a free espresso was a Calypso, bent on trapping me here in these edens of olives and ouzo. And yet I had to go, to stumble forward and trust that Tyche, the Greek goddess of luck, would be with me at the port and on the seas. Nothing would be certain until I set foot once more upon a new shore.

And despite certain last-minute delays (no bus out of Neapoli after 5 p.m.!?!) and expenses (€30 for a taxi across Kefalonia!?!), I made it at last, after ten days of unsure island-hopping, to Ithaca, Odysseus's home, a camel-humped green island wreathed in morning mist, where I did nothing but rest and stroll and, for a handful of hours, attempt to process my adventures.

I could not. I never could—not there in the moment. I needed time, and distance, and a blank computer screen to make sense of what I'd gone through. That was where the epiphanies exploded, in the act not of traveling but of writing. But no, I can say now, as I write this, they happen in both places at once—the former may uncover the latter, but the latter was always there, hidden, lost. With perspective, the revelations begin to flow. I can see now, for instance, the difference between getting lost in Vegas and Greece versus elsewhere. On those trips, I'd forgotten to care about geography. Vegas was so flat and obvious I never considered the possibility of losing myself in its grid, while my odyssey was so fast-paced I could look only forward—onward! And by setting aside the prosaic practicalities of getting lost, I opened myself up to the far more important act of getting lucky.

I was, although I didn't know it until now, really traveling like an amateur again, trusting that the world would reveal its secrets to me if only I went looking for them. Though I'd honed my navigational skills over decades, it was luck that had always guided me—luck and the courage to accept its sometimes ambiguous consequences.

Luck, for instance, was with me my first day in Chongqing. Luck sent me to the no. 601 bus headed downtown, past Prada billboards and cloverleaf highways and across the snarling Yangtze River. Luck delivered me a schoolboy who directed me down an alley to a good bowl of noodle soup, crimson with chili oil, fragrant with numbing, citrusy Sichuan peppercorns, studded with bits of pork and intestine. Luck led me past the contradictions of the explosive city: the defunct revolving restaurant atop a skyscraper, the historic neighborhood where trees grew from brick walls and brass plaques championed the deeds of Communist heroes, the central People's Square where retirees warbled old songs accompanied by guitar and two-stringed erhu. (It took me a few minutes to realize this show was no tourist trap but simply how Chongqing's elders amused themselves.) All I had done was walk, and ask simple questions, and walk some more, allowing myself to be overwhelmed by the physicality of a city where everything existed on a massive scale—like San Francisco with more hills, two rivers, ten times the population, and neither building codes nor centralized urban planning—and luck had done the rest.

Until, at last, luck was done with me. As the sun went down, luck deposited me at what I thought was a tidy little hotel but turned out to be seedy, run-down, filled with all-night mahjong players and their rented girlfriends. Luck lured me down to a raucous nightlife area where every bar and club was so flashily, noisily packed that I despaired of ever meeting anyone interesting, or even audible. There were fancy hotels here, and I asked their English-speaking concierges where I might find quieter, more convivial watering holes. They looked at me quizzically and directed me back to the scrum, in which I would be helplessly alone.

This shouldn't have unnerved me the way it did. I'd managed days—weeks!—alone before, in Vietnam and on small American highways, and I'd always found my way, always found a bartender happy to discuss Thelonius Monk for an hour, or a friendly bistro owner ready to offer me a few nights' stay in her guest bedroom. I'd
been other kinds of lost before, too, had been lost every which way but geographically, and I'd pushed on, ignored the language barrier, gotten lucky, survived.

But Chongqing's size and chaos were beyond me. How could I find anything human-scale and relatable in these concrete-and-steel depths? All my travel powers had fled me, it seemed, and I despaired of making any connection. By the next morning, I was ready to give up. I caught a bus back to the train station, where I'd stashed my bags, and on the way I considered fleeing not just the city but the country. Could Cathay rebook me to Hong Kong or Japan? Danielle would understand. She trusted me. This trip was an adjunct to an assignment for another magazine; it would barely cost the
Times
a thing; it would be okay. I'd written hundreds of stories already. I could live with one failure, right?

No, I couldn't. This would gnaw at me forever.

The bus rolled on. Another twenty-four hours and I'd be far away, visiting friends in Shanghai or Osaka and trying to forget this unfortunate interlude. I sweated and ground my teeth and wished I were back in Brooklyn, and I cursed these idiotic “Getting Lost” rules. Who came up with them, anyhow?

I had, I suddenly understood, and if they were my rules, and arbitrary ones at that, I could change them any time I liked. I took out my iPhone—equipped with a local 3G SIM card—and Googled “Chongqing hostel.” And there it was, Tina's Hostel, a funky little warren of cheap rooms not far from where I'd been staying, in the 18 Steps, an old, hilly neighborhood almost all of whose buildings had been painted with the character “chai,” meaning they were slated for demolition. Inside were a gaggle of young Chinese employees and travelers (it was hard to tell the difference), most of whom spoke decent English, all of whom were curious to explore Chongqing—from its funky underground bars to its far-flung art galleries—and happy to invite me out for a dinner of spicy Sichuan hotpot.

My room was small, my rules were broken, and I knew exactly where I was, but I felt free at last to make new friends, to ride buses to nowhere, to nibble rare chili peppers in hilltop gardens. And although I never admitted it to myself until just now, I'd discovered what happened when I finally got well and truly lost: I freaked out—and then moved on.

“I
scared!” screamed Sasha Raven Gross, age two years and four months, aboard Cathay Pacific flight 472, from Hong Kong to Taipei. “I scared! I scared! I scared! No no no no no no no!” As the Airbus A330 taxied toward its takeoff position, she writhed in her seat, clawing at her belt and reaching for my wife, Jean. “I scared! I scared! I scared! I scared! I scared! I scared! I scared!”

There was nothing we could do, no matter how much we wanted to free her from her seat or how many irate neighbors stared at us with what the Chinese call “stinky face.” Sasha was old enough now that she couldn't sit on our laps, the flight attendants had said, but mere size and age, we knew, were no substitute for emotional maturity. Twice, the flight attendants had come by to see if they could help, but there was nothing to be done. Sasha was scared—terrified by the sound and action, unable to process what was going on around her—and no matter how tightly we held her hands, no matter how softly we cooed that everything was going to be okay, she was going to stay scared. Worse, she knew she was scared, and had the self-consciousness to verbalize it. This was what terror felt like: “I scared!”

This had happened on the last flight, too, the fourteen-hour nonstop from New York, but in that case the departure had taken Sasha
by surprise. She'd shrieked in fear then, but soon the plane was in the air, and stable, and she'd calmed down. Now, however, she knew what was going to happen, and the horror had built up early.

As the jet reached the head of the runway, a flight attendant came over one last time—carrying a parent-child belt extension. For everyone's sake, she said, we could break the rules and belt her to our laps. Just do it quickly.

We did it quickly. Sasha calmed down, but only a little. As the jet's engines roared to life, they blotted out her wailing, and I relaxed a scant degree. In less than two hours, we'd land in Taiwan, where Jean had lived until the age of eighteen, and for the next ten days we'd have her family—her parents, her brother and his wife and their daughter, her many aunts, uncles, and cousins—to help watch and entertain our Sasha. It would all be okay.