The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (3 page)

Kimberly Meyer's prior residence in Oklahoma eventually led her to the Holy City of the Wichitas, which she describes at greater length and with less cynical bemusement than Curtis does Tijuana. “We do use a donkey and a live baby Jesus,” explains an exponent of the passion play. “We've never had to use a doll.” What the reader makes of this is up to him. Perhaps the bell tower in Tijuana will come to mind. Or perhaps it will ring significant as an emblem of strict and praiseworthy sincerity. Meyer makes her own point of view gently clear, without telling us what to think.

Dimiter Kenarov's beautifully written essay about Bulgaria's street necrologues (which likewise decorate the street walls and lampposts of Serbia) pays respect to such absurdities as this farewell to the renowned Georgi Dimitrov: “We promise to guard like the pupils of our eyes our maritime border for the successful building of socialism in our beloved Motherland.” Here we could almost be in Tijuana's fake bell tower. Kenarov remarks that “the eternal border between the upper world and the underworld, the city and the cemetery, has disappeared in Bulgaria. No one is truly dead without a necrologue, and yet necrologues are meant to keep the dead alive.” So it is with Burton and Emerson, Dark Continents and Chernobyl. (As Pink Floyd said: “Matter of fact, it's all dark.”) This ambiguity, or whatever you want to call it, shines out at us in Pico Iyer's account of Varanasi, where Shiva met Vishnu—what could be more emblematic than that? Hence the Ganges with its thirty sewers: “Bathe yourself in its filthy waters . . . and you purify yourself for life.” Wandering among sadhus who “want to live in a world of ash,” Iyer concludes: “Spirituality in Varanasi lies precisely in the poverty and sickness and death that it weaves into its unending tapestry; a place of holiness, it says, is . . . a place where purity and filth, anarchy and ritual, unquenchable vitality and the constant imminence of death all flow together.” Here too he experiences a turning-backward epiphany not unlike that of Gorra in the Parisian repertory theater: Varanasi comes to remind him of his twisting-laned birthplace, Oxford.

Lynn Freed's mini-memoir of the approaching end of apartheid in South Africa is of the highest order, not only for its style but also for its very profound meditation on fear in relation to political change. In his essay, Kenarov references the Bulgarian sociologist Emiliya Karaboeva, who seeks to classify what most recurs in necrologues. She concludes: “The key words are love, pain, and sorrow, but the most important one is love.” In Freed's brief vignette the love of what is endangered is implicit: this family, this home which may someday be invaded by killers, this life.

In every anthology of travel writing there should always be a hot-and-miserable piece bookended by a cold-and-miserable one. This year the first is furnished by Luke Dittrich, who shares with us the first installment of his walk along the Mexican-American border. Like many wise journalists, he has provisioned himself with a stroller full of water. Although the voracious mouthparts of copy editors have gnawed random holes in his narrative in obedience to their commercial instincts (I know this area somewhat, and was saddened by the deletion of localities that I know that Dittrich must have passed through), what remains is a pleasing read. His encounters with smiling or poker-faced Border Patrol agents are always an entertainment.

So much for hot. For cold, I give you Mark Jenkins's skiing trek with his brother through Norway's Hardangervidda National Park. Roald Amundsen, who as you probably know led the first successful expedition to the South Pole, tried twice to cross Hardangervidda. Each try almost killed him. Just as Amundsen's own organizational excellence and modest understatement damaged him in comparison to the dead hero Scott, so Jenkins's account (which also shows certain signs of editorial damage) first struck me as less impressive than his accomplishment. But as I thought over that chilly escapade, I grew increasingly glad not to have accompanied the cheerful Jenkins brothers. Although they had the benefit of those newfangled trekking huts, the headwinds and whiteouts described in this story could easily have been fatal. The Jenkins brothers are obviously fine orienteers and in excellent shape. I salute them.

During this same year, Mark Jenkins (are there two of him, or is he just busy?) also managed to spelunk through the beautiful world of Vietnam's Hang Son Doong, which by one measure may be the largest cave in the world. This is travel adventure in Burtonian style, for parts of this place, Jenkins informs us, have not been previously explored. Simple human daring ought to weigh large in an anthology like this. I wish I had been there to see the giant cave pearls—water-formed balls of calcite.

Finally, Aaron Dactyl hops freight trains, without even a donkey, a baby Jesus, or a bell tower among his props. In his way he has gone as far as Richard Burton. I have excerpted a few pages from his Xeroxed magazine
Railroad Semantics.

 

W
ILLIAM
T. V
OLLMANN

FROM
The Believer

 

I
N ZANZIBAR, LATE
in 1856, Richard F. Burton and a caravan of porters prepared to venture into the heart of Africa's interior to search for the source of the Nile River. A ropy knot of scar tissue shined on Burton's cheek—a souvenir from his most recent expedition, upon which he caught a spear to the face during an ambush by Somali tribesmen.

An English diplomat on the island tried to warn Burton against pressing his luck a second time. The diplomat told Burton that a wandering French naval officer recently had been taken prisoner by tribal warriors. The natives had tied the luckless pilgrim to a tree and lopped off his limbs, one by one. The warriors, after dramatically pausing to sharpen their knives, relieved the Frenchman of his misery by slicing off his head. A true story, the diplomat insisted.

Burton wasn't fazed. Severed limbs, rolling heads—even the grisliest of portents couldn't deflate his spirit, not before a journey into uncharted territory. He'd spent his life cultivating a world-worn persona that confronted anything resembling naïveté with open hostility, but a blank space on a map could reduce him to giddiness: “Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands,” he wrote in his journal before that trip inland. “The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood.”

Africa, as it turned out, would wring much of that blood out of him. In the months ahead he would suffer partial blindness, partial paralysis, sizzling fevers. Hallucinations crowded his brain with ghosts. A swollen tongue got in the way of eating. But the bottom line: he would survive to explore again. And years later, flipping through that worn journal from 1856, he would pass retrospective judgment on his pre-expedition enthusiasm: “Somewhat boisterous,” he concluded, “but true.”

This kind of aimless gusto for all things unexplored defined the golden age of inland travel, which roughly coincided with Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901) in England. It's no coincidence that these were the same years when steamships and telegraphs began to shrink the globe. Industrialization transformed urban landscapes and fueled the expansion of colonial empires. Railroads standardized the world's clocks, and a new strain of hurried angst—what poet Matthew Arnold labeled “this strange disease of modern life”—began to devour souls by the millions.

Enter a new breed of adventurous explorer, which Burton perfectly exemplified. These men filled the membership rolls of the “geographical societies” that started to pop up in London, New York, Paris, Berlin, and most other capitals of the industrialized world. Geographical expeditions became the antidote to an increasingly ordered, regulated, and unmysterious way of life.

But what purpose would be served if the person who finally entered terra incognita couldn't handle its unpredictable challenges? What was the point of travel if the person who finally laid eyes on the previously unseen didn't really know how to look at it?

It quickly became clear that far-flung voyagers, even those as hearty as Burton, needed focus when confronting the riddles of undiscovered worlds. They needed guiding hands. They needed how-to manuals.

 

Victorian adventurers rarely took a step into the wild without hauling a small library of how-to-explore books with them. Among the volumes Burton carried into East Africa was a heavily annotated copy of Francis Galton's
The Art of Travel: or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries.
Originally conceived as a handbook for explorers, and sponsored by England's Royal Geographical Society, the book was required reading for any self-respecting Victorian traveler. Before rolling up his sleeves and getting down to the hard business of exploring, he could turn to page 134 to learn the best way to do exactly that:

 

When you have occasion to tuck up your shirt-sleeves, recollect that the way of doing so is, not to begin by turning the cuffs inside-out, but outside-in—the sleeves must be rolled up inwards, towards the arm, and not the reverse way. In the one case, the sleeves will remain tucked up for hours without being touched; in the other, they become loose every five minutes.

 

The amiably neurotic Galton left nothing to chance. His index is studded with gems like “bones as fuel” and “savages, management of.” If Burton couldn't find the advice he was looking for in Galton, he could always consult one of the other books in his trunk that were written with explorers in mind. The stated aim of Randolph Barnes Marcy's
The Prairie Traveler: The 1859 Handbook for Westbound Pioneers,
which Burton himself edited in later editions, read like a manifesto for every handbook of this kind: “With such a book in his hand,” Marcy writes, “[the explorer] will feel himself a master spirit in the wilderness he traverses, and not the victim of every
new
combination of circumstances which nature affords or fate allots, as if to try his skill and prowess.”

All of the books advertised practical intentions: if adventurers are compelled to wander the globe, why not teach them how to take note of details—be they geographical, anthropological, or whatever—that might prove useful to science, industry, or empire?

I stumbled upon
The Art of Travel
while researching a book about African exploration, and continued on to the other titles, all of which are available for free on the Internet. After reading them, I can confidently report that the scientific, industrial, and political developments of the intervening century have thoroughly undermined the original intentions of most of their authors. These titles won't help powerful nations lay claim to new territories and exploitable populations. As literary genres go, this one is about as dead as they get.

But it deserves a resurrection.

It's true that the authors are generally eccentric, habitually obsessive, and at times comically misguided. A modern reader will find plenty of hopelessly dated assumptions to indulge a sense of cultural superiority. You might chuckle when someone writes about the best place to buy a pith helmet in London. But that stuff has little to do with these books' contemporary relevance, which goes beyond entertainment value.

While no one was looking, this neglected genre transcended its crudely utilitarian origins to occupy a higher sphere: the books are instruction manuals for the senses, lovingly compiled tip sheets on the acquired art of paying attention.

 

They're not quick and easy reads. Arcane language and compulsive punctuation force the reader to decelerate. But that is exactly what many of the explorers of the period identified as the most important first step of any successful expedition.

“While traveling in a strange country [I] should always prefer making my observations at a rate not quicker than five or six miles an hour,” wrote Richard Owen, the superintendent of the British Museum's natural history departments and a scientific patron for many of the period's most far-reaching expeditions. History has judged him harshly for opposing Darwin's ideas, but when it came to the subject of travel, his philosophy represented the vanguard of his generation's views.

The crux of that philosophy—“Slow down; it's the journey, not the destination,” etc.—has ripened into soft travel-guide cliché. Modern writers tend to sound like humorless scolds when they preach about this stuff, but the Victorians avoided the trap of bland sanctimony because they were never content to stop at generalized advice. They always pushed it further. After advising travelers to reduce their speed, they offered hyper-specific instructions about exactly what travelers should observe, and how they should observe it.

The obvious titles illustrating this tendency are Harriet Martineau's
How to Observe: Morals and Manners,
published in 1838, and
What to Observe: The Traveller's Remembrancer,
written by Colonel Julian R. Jackson three years later. Jackson, a secretary at the Royal Geographical Society, explains in his preface that he has “endeavored to excite a desire for useful knowledge by awakening curiosity. The intending traveller, it is hoped, will, from a perusal of the present work see what an immense field of physical and moral research lies open to his investigation . . .”

Everything that meets the eye tells a story, but if viewed skillfully, it also can crack open a Russian-doll wonderland of stories within stories. When looking at a mountain peak, for example, Jackson emphasizes that care must be taken to determine if it's a “saddle-back” or a “hog's back” or a “sugar-loaf”—because the structure might reveal the landscape's geological composition, which in turn can explain its vegetative potential, which can in turn . . . and so on.

Jackson spends thirty pages advising travelers how to look at a river (Is the surface of the water flat, or does it actually appear slightly convex? What sort of debris does it carry?). There is no such thing as an insignificant detail. After reading a few dozen pages of this stuff, his book works like a mind-altering drug. You look up from the page and notice that the world around you is popping into new dimensions. Suddenly the tree outside your window is demanding attention. You start to notice the subtle temperature differences between the air circulating around your head and the soil beneath your feet. If you're not careful, you can get lost on runaway trains of thought.