The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (2 page)

We sat at a stone table with her father and some family friends, few of whom spoke English. Maria spoke English pretty well and translated, but occasionally we got bogged down by a phrase or a concept.

For instance, they talked for ten minutes about “AYN-stain,” and I failed to realize that they meant Albert Einstein until someone typed his name into the translator app on my iPad. At one point we got stuck on the word
musa.
Maria is charming and attractive in a Dionysian earth-goddess sort of way, and someone at the table was suggesting that she was a
musa
to wine writers. Jibbigo clarified that they were suggesting that Maria was a muse.

Maria pointed to a review of her wine in an American wine magazine. After using all the usual descriptors of fruits and aromas and mouthfeel, the critic had referred to her wine as “classy.”

“Classy?” she asked. “Tell me what this word means, classy.”

Wine is nearly impossible to explain in your native tongue, let alone one you're not proficient in. “Well,” I said, fumbling around in my native language, “
classy
is kind of a difficult word to translate. There are several different meanings. You sort of have to know who's using it.”

Classy
is slightly old-fashioned, and these days can be literal or ironic and mean anything from “elegant” or “stylish” to Ron Burgundy's sign-off in
Anchorman
(“Stay classy, San Diego”) to the kind of snarky thing you say to a friend who, say, takes a swig straight from the wine bottle. Wine critics aren't generally known as ironists, but they still are fairly precise in their adjectives—so the choice of
classy
instead of
elegant
or
stylish
meant something.

As I tried to explain the nuance to Maria, one of the friends, slightly impatient, said, “
Elegante.
It means
elegante.
”

“Well, sort of,” I said.

“Try your iPad,” Maria said.

“Classy,” I said into Jibbigo.

“Elegante,”
said Sultry Voice.

Everyone had a nice laugh at the silly American journalist with the iPad who was trying to complicate everything. Which was a good thing. After all, it was good to be reminded that some ideas, some concepts will never be easily translatable. Sure, people are always inventing new gadgets to make travel easier. And every day it gets easier to reach out and to connect with people of different cultures. But even with the advent of new technologies, it's important to remember that it's still possible to miscommunicate, to get confused, and to become lost. That's the thing about travel—perhaps the essential thing, the thing that teaches us the most—that never changes. And that thing is what this anthology delivers once again this year.

 

The stories included here are, as always, selected from among hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications—from mainstream and specialty magazines to newspaper travel sections to literary journals to travel websites. I've done my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion the best travel stories from 2011 were forwarded to William Vollmann, who made our final selections.

I now begin anew by reading the hundreds of stories published in 2012. I am once again asking editors and writers to submit the best of whatever it is they define as travel writing. These submissions must be nonfiction, published in the United States during the 2012 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author's name, date of publication, and publication name, and must be tear sheets, the complete publication, or a clear photocopy of the piece as it originally appeared. I must receive all submissions by January 1, 2013, in order to ensure full consideration for the next collection.

Further, publications that want to make certain their contributions will be considered for the next edition should make sure to include this anthology on their subscription list. Submissions or subscriptions should be sent to Jason Wilson, Drexel University, 3210 Cherry Street, 2nd floor, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

It was a thrill and an honor to work on this edition with William Vollmann, whose adventurous work I've always admired. I am also grateful to Nicole Angeloro and Jesse Smith for their help on this, our thirteenth edition of
The Best American Travel Writing.

 

J
ASON
W
ILSON

“O
F THE GLADDEST MOMENTS
in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands.” Thus Sir Richard Burton, who knew whereof he spoke. I myself have always been a partisan of that point of view, although Emerson's “travel is a fool's paradise” gratifies me just as much. To set out for someplace far away or strange is to take an active part in that baffling journey of ours through life into death; to stay home and improve one's self-knowledge (perhaps through armchair traveling) is to do the same; both men were right.

My friend Steve Jones, with whom I hop freight trains now and then, eagerly reads this anthology every year. I asked him what he likes best about it, and he said: “I like the variety of the places the writers are going and how odd those places can be, and also the writing style. I like the fact that some pieces are somber and some are just quirky and there are usually a couple of hilarious ones thrown in.” During my selection of essays (from sixty-odd finalists, among whom I discovered both the editor of this series and myself; these of course were rejected immediately to avoid any conflict of interest), I tried to consider what might please Steve, in hopes of pleasing you.

Monte Reel's “How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer,” which I have chosen to open this volume, introduces us to the Victorian-era travel guides, which he calls “lovingly compiled tip sheets on the acquired art of paying attention.” The epigram from Burton appears in his essay. Emerson also gets his due here, because Reel applies the Victorians to that peculiarly unknown land, the local Sprawlsville. “Instead of being a vacuous purgatory that deserved pity, the mall grew in complexity with each stride. The point that the how-to-explore books collectively hammered home is this: if you sincerely investigate it, every detail hides reason, and any environment is far more sophisticated than our senses appreciate.”

Sincere investigation demands an exposition without constraints. When someone asks an author how long his work in progress will run, the best answer is “As long as it takes to say what I need to say, and no longer or shorter.” Victorian adventurers, of course, most often traveled on their own capital. What Marx called “the cash nexus” now taints the production of most “professional travelers.” Essays in mainstream periodicals are vulnerable to several types of commercial damage. First of all, the editorial department, not the writer, sets the word count, which relates to the subject and the writer's nature only accidentally. Second, the draft received passes through any number of hands, whose cuttings and pastings need not be in concert. It is not only a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, but also of nobody knowing who has added how much salt. Third, the number of advertisements slated for a given issue goes far in determining how fat it can be. Thus after an essay has been hacked down to meet a given word count, it may be mutilated again, or even expanded. I have occasionally had something excised from an article of mine, only to be asked at the very end, by someone who never saw the original, to add just that, but in a different part of the essay, since the place where it once lived is long gone. These bemusing vicissitudes of the freelancer's circumstances render the treasures brought home from the voyage—that is, the details, and their causes and meanings—subject to vandalism. Hence “the acquired art of paying attention” is best served outside the marketplace—either by travelers of independent means, such as Richard Burton, or by travelers who control their own means of production, such as the daring train-hopper Aaron Dactyl, a portion of whose self-published magazine appears last in this book. Most of us do sell ourselves, and our work as published by the magazines shows the consequences. My feelings about this are well described by one of Timbuktu's historians: “In my worst dreams, I see a rare text that I haven't read being slowly eaten.” He, of course, is referring to bugs, not editors. You will meet him in Peter Gwin's “The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu,” which is perhaps the most traditionally Victorian of this year's travel essays: carefully drawn, rich in anecdotes and observations, complete with romance (of a sad sort) and danger, and set in a locale that we might now call Orthodox Exotic.

To the Victorians, Africa was still the Dark Continent and much of the planet remained unmapped. Nowadays we have gained the semblance of an acquaintance with most of it (excluding the oceans). But insightful travelers perpetually discover the gloriously and ominously unknown darkness of everywhere. When Henry Shukman visits the forbidden country around Chernobyl, he finds an astonishingly rapid alteration into something resembling the Zone in that Tarkovsky movie
Stalker.
Gray wolves and wild boar now roam “a place where the animals are mostly undisturbed, living amid a preindustrial number of humans and a post-apocalyptic amount of radioactive strontium and cesium.” Here too are albino birds, red-needled pine trees, and field mice that might be growing resistant to radiation. What if someday the science required to save us from our inevitable new atomic errors comes out of this place? Or what if Chernobyl proves that “moderate” nuclear accidents are worse than we can imagine?

A natural companion to Shukman's essay, Elliott D. Woods's praiseworthy exposition of trash ecology—a topic that is getting ever more attention nowadays—brings us to the outskirts of Cairo, where “a haze produced by the exhalations of some 2,500 black-market recycling workshops carpets a landscape of windowless brick high-rises and unpaved alleys piled high with garbage.” The people who live and glean here are called zabaleen. It is unexpected—and heartening—to learn that “in sixty years, the zabaleen have gone from serfs to recycling entrepreneurs.” Unfortunately, they lack many rights. As a measure against swine flu, and perhaps “to appease Muslims whipped into a frenzy by the H1N1 scare,” the Egyptian government recently killed 300,000 garbage-eating pigs belonging to the zabaleen. All the same, Woods's observations give cause for thought and hope combined. It seems to me that if governments and NGOs were to take note of this essay and encourage appropriate local manifestations of the profit motive to address this problem, then perhaps our future need not involve Soylent Green.

Thomas Swick's account of the group called Addiopizzo, which encourages business establishments not to pay Mafia extortionists, is equally worth reading, because it introduces us to brave people who stand up to evil. That Addiopizzo is necessary in an EU country in this day and age is rather shocking; that it may prove effective would be a still greater surprise. I was very impressed that thirty-five hundred of Palermo's citizens summoned the courage to put themselves on public record that they gave their business to extortion-free bars, restaurants, and the like. At the site where gangsters murdered a man named Paolo Borsellino, a note quotes the victim: “The fight against the Mafia should be a cultural and moral movement that involves everyone, especially the younger generation.”

A traveler's experience is necessarily narrow, unique, suggestive at best but never definitive. It is up to us as readers to judge the situations described. What need the Mafia fills today for anyone but its own members remains unknown to us. Very likely Swick could not have interviewed Addiopizzo and the Mafia on the same ticket. His glancing illumination of this subject, like most any one person's, is necessary but not sufficient. In this anthology we are fortunate enough to have two points of view on the situation of Northern Ireland. I have paired Robin Kirk's grim snapshot of Belfast, which is well worth reading for its own close observation and analysis (“what is disturbing about segregation in Northern Ireland is not that there are tradeoffs; it's that the people entrench themselves in segregated communities, and many of their leaders help them do it”), with J. Malcolm Garcia's brave and heartrending investigation into a young man's murder in a small village in this region. In its fidelity to local speech patterns, elimination of the superfluous, and painstaking arrangement of vignettes, Garcia's piece is not only journalism but literature.

While we are on the subject of literary excellence, this seems the place to mention Paul Theroux's lovely vignette of the Maine coast, which draws no less on his historical and literary knowledge than on his accomplished eye, and Michael Gorra's letter from Paris, which rounds out this next plausible pair. The latter ends with the happy Emersonianism of the author and his daughter watching old American movies in the Rue des Écoles, “sitting at home only and precisely because we are also abroad.” Both of these offer us the appearance of an organic and intrinsic brevity. Hence they seem undamaged by copy editors' deletions. Both are a pleasure to read in and of themselves.

Another very short piece is Kenan Trebincevic's carefully understated parable of a return to Bosnia, and of an encounter with a neighbor who extorted property from his mother during the war. Anyone who has reflected at all on Yugoslavia's civil war can well imagine the horrors that Trebincevic leaves out. The story he tells is simple, affecting, hideous.

Meanwhile, Bryan Curtis's visit to the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame seized mordant hold of me: “We miss the gringos, man . . . They all left, like the Mayas did.” I never could have imagined that comparison. It is funny, eerie, and true. Curtis alludes to “the bodybuilder Beatriz de Regíl González, who in her bio is compared to a beautiful flower in Tijuana's garden,” and I longed to see her portrait, so that I would know how beautiful she was. “Eighty years ago,” writes Curtis, “Old Tijuana had a bell tower. It was built to convince Americans they were experiencing European luxury. Now we're standing in a copy of that tower—a Xerox of a dream of Europe . . . Finally, this belltower plays a fake bell.” Were I an editorial magnate, I'd invite this writer to spend a year in Tijuana and write down a million crazy details.