The Best American Travel Writing 2013 Read online

  There it was, the dreadful proof: I was the journalist who had just written (11 times in a row!) a completely boring story about a mysterious sea creature, an obsessed scientist, and unexplored crevices in the deepest trenches of the ocean. And the reason my writing was boring was that I was still laboring under the grave misconception that the story itself was automatically interesting—in other words, that the story didn’t really need me.

  Wrong.

  No story is automatically interesting; only the telling makes it so. Every narrative needs a fully engaged narrator. And it was only when I charged myself at last with my proper mandate as a writer (to make things interesting) that my giant squid article at last drew sputtering breath and came to life. For my kind editors had not sent me to the other side of the planet to drink beer and hang out with sailors; they had sent me there to infuse marvel into a potentially fascinating tale that only I would be lucky enough to witness with my own eyes. And once I regained hold of that sense of astonishment—once I inhabited that rightful feeling of You aren’t going to believe what I just saw!—everything lit up at last.

  Which brings me to my second point—that there is no story so boring that it cannot, over time, with the right amount of love and passion and work, be told marvelously.

  The travel stories I’ve selected for this anthology are the ones that I believe were told the most marvelously in 2012—by which I mean, quite literally, told with the biggest sense of marvel by writers who took the most personal responsibility for infusing wonderment into their tales. Some of these stories find their authors flinging themselves into mad acts of danger and some do not, but every piece contains awe in strong enough doses to render the reader enchanted, delighted, compelled, or forever unsettled.

  I read a lot of travel stories in order to select these 19. I sat on a beach under an umbrella during a long and quiet vacation of my own, with stacks of magazine articles in a big brown shopping bag next to me. I pulled the stories out of the bag randomly, one after another, like an endless succession of salty or sweet snacks. I had a vague idea of what I was looking for (to be transported), but I had no way of anticipating what would transport me. I was pretty sure I didn’t want any service articles (“How to Do Barcelona in Three Days!”), nor was I looking for any ideas for my own future trips. I don’t read great travel writing to say, at the conclusion, “I want to go there!” I read great travel writing to feel, at the conclusion, I have now been there.

  I wanted, by the end of my reading, to know all these places deep in my own bones.

  Among the articles that I rejected were tales of extraordinary daring, gorgeous adventure, exotic locations, and impossible situations—but boring. Sometimes I was surprised by how boring the writing about such interesting places could be. I wondered, Do these people not have editors who make them write a dozen drafts so that they get it done properly?

  What surprised me more, though, was when I found fascination in subjects that I might otherwise have thought to be dull, or even spent. To my mind, one of the most remarkable pieces in here is Daniel Tyx’s story about not traveling—a faithful recounting of the year in which he didn’t walk the U.S.-Mexico border, as he had once quite seriously planned to do. (This was during a time in American literary history when, as Tyx says, “everyone seemed to be doing something with their year, then writing about it”—a tactic with which I am somewhat familiar.) Tyx writes about the epiphanies he didn’t have because of not taking that long trip (the loneliness he didn’t conquer; the landscapes he didn’t witness; the cultural exchanges he didn’t enjoy). He ponders with real feeling and seriousness the question of what we become when we let such a journey pass us by. What happens when we choose, instead, to live a quieter year, with more domestic revelations, full of “the satisfactions and preoccupations of daily life”? This psychologically honest account was somehow heaps more interesting and suspenseful to me than a macho article about the most dangerous ski trail in the world, or whatever. I would not have imagined that this could be true—that the act of not traveling could make for such a good travelogue—but Daniel Tyx did it.

  In fact, it was humbling for me to read many of these pieces, because they kept messing with my assumptions about what constitutes an interesting story and what does not. There are magnificent articles in this collection that I would never have assigned if I were a magazine editor. If, for instance, John Jeremiah Sullivan had come to me and said, “I want to write a long feature article about my trip to Cuba to visit my wife’s family,” I would have said, “Dude, nice try, but there’s no way I’m paying for your trip to Cuba to visit your wife’s family!” Because nobody needs to read another article about an American visiting Cuba! Seriously! I would probably have told Sullivan to go write about the most dangerous ski trail in the world instead. And I would have been dead wrong, because everyone needs to read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s story about his trip to Cuba to visit his wife’s family. It is so good, so trenchant, so quivering with human life and love and the real familial consequences of insane political theatrics that I placed it very first in this collection—right at the front of the book—just to make sure nobody skips it.

  Here’s another story that would never have existed if I were a magazine editor: Kevin Chroust’s recounting of the time he ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Here’s what I would have said if I were his writing boss: “Kevin, does the world really need to be subjected to another story about reckless young men running with those tiresome bulls in Pamplona? In fact, do we really need another story at all involving bulls and Spain and manhood in any manner whatsoever? No, Kevin. No, we do not.”

  Well, as it turns out, Yes, Kevin. Yes, we do. But we only need this story when it’s told with such bare, vibrating honesty. There is not a trace of machismo in this piece, only a near-tearful longing for the most intense possible act of self-revolution. Until reading Chroust’s story, I never really understood why a young man might need to run with the bulls in Pamplona (honestly, I’ve never even really understood why people need to ride motorcycles or get on roller coasters), but now—thanks to this vivid explosion of writing—I get it. I get why there are times in life when people need to put themselves “in arbitrary danger” in order to burst through to the other side, to some white-hot experience of purification more radiant than anything that mere safety could ever provide.

  Still, though, I think the most dangerous story in this collection is Colleen Kinder’s essay “Blot Out”—about her experiences walking through the streets of Cairo as a woman, both covered and uncovered. The risks that she took on the day she describes here are staggering in their audacity. An older woman—knowing more of men’s potential savagery and infused with a more ingrained sense of self-protection—probably would not have done what she did. I myself would rather run with the bulls every afternoon for a month than expose myself to the potential of such true and vicious physical violence. And yet the ending is so victorious! A victory over violation! A victory over the absurd and the oppressive, both!

  Speaking of which, I put some absurd stuff in here, too, just for fun. Travel should be just as much about light delights as about dark daring, and I’ve included some simple and charming tales, perfectly told. Lynn Yaeger’s account of how much she packs when she travels—and why—is a messy, crazed amuse-bouche in the midst of these heavier meals.

  I also want to stress that I read all these articles without their bylines attached. I know a lot of writers personally, and I didn’t want to be swayed in my decision making by either my affinity or my distaste for anybody. (I was more afraid of committing an act of revenge than an act of nepotism.) My curiosity over authorship drove me nuts during the process, but in the end I was glad that I read everything blind, for it turns out that I am now madly in love with some writers I’d never heard of before—like the brave and stalwart Judy Copeland, who strikes me as the most sensible person you could ever meet, but who also took herself all the way to Papua New Guinea because of a dream she had
about a red line appearing on a map of the world.

  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.

  ELIZABETH GILBERT

  JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

  A Prison, a Paradise

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  ON 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.