The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (12 page)

There’s a place, a kind of vortex at the Friday
souq
, where six different mud paths intersect. Bird vendors meet jean sellers meet spice men meet fish delivery boys meet two blond imposters under
niqab
, who sooner or later, like it or not, must enter the vortex. It’s impossible to know how trafficked the vortex is until you’re down in it—yes, “down,” for the vortex is a dip. We—all of us—converge with the push of gravity. A Tweety Bird blanket hangs high over the fray, too high for anyone to grab. Right when my foot has found the outer banks of the dip and I am climbing out, a hand finds my ass and squeezes hard. I wriggle, shove ahead, and nearly take Tori down.

It’s the first time anyone’s groped me in Cairo. Kate was right. Men don’t need a figure or face to treat a woman like meat. Someone with imagination pushed right through the
niqab
. We exploit our anonymity at this
souq
, and so does some guy’s hand.

Back on level ground, it becomes clear that someone’s following us. Tori veers us down an alley toward the cemetery, hoping to lose the stubble-cheeked man, but he keeps up, asking in Arabic, over and over, “What are you doing here?” In a whisper that she hopes hides her accent, Tori says, “Leave us alone.” I don’t speak Arabic. I just sweat. My
niqab
is gaining sweat weight. Tori leads us deeper into the City of the Dead, a maze of mausoleums, until finally the accuser falls away. Again: Kate was right. There were reasons not to do this. The man was ready to yank Tori’s
niqab
right off.

Nothing, though, can spoil this
souq
for me. Not the sweaty fabric, not my fury at men, not my indignation on behalf of women, not a veil slipping, not an ass grabbed, not even a stranger who wants us shamed. There are places that feel like the answer to the question of why we travel in the first place, why we bother to trespass, crossing the lines that look like fences. This place is one of my few.

We’re leaving, reaching the homestretch. We see Mahmoud looking straight at us, bless him, as if he’s been scanning the edge of the market for twin black blobs ever since he lost sight of Tori and me hours ago. Still, Tori can’t wait to reach the finish line to say aloud what she enjoyed most about wearing the
niqab
. I think of the other American women who wear blinders, who beige out, who stare at a random point 100 yards away. I’m sure they would all nod, as I do, when Tori says the best part was looking strangers square in the eye.

We collapse into the back seat of Mahmoud’s car with a tremendous ruckus. We phew and sigh and breathe air like people who just crawled out of graves. We yank down veils and suck down water, making the transformation back to Westerner, back to blond and green-eyed, with a quick yank.

I watch Mahmoud watch Tori become Tori in the mirror; I catch him smile as he sees for the first time the dimpled cheeks that match the little voice. Tori later tells me how strange this was—not because she caught our babysitter peeping but because she wanted to introduce herself all over again,
“Esmee Tori.”

Mahmoud is ready to drive off, but I can’t yet. I cannot leave without taking pictures. Tori, knowing I need a companion, offers to come. And so we head back into the
souq
without coverage, straight into what, at our approach, now sounds like a motel room full of male athletes who’ve just located the porn channel. I take Tori’s hand. It’s perfectly normal for people of the same gender to hold hands in Egypt, and I appreciate that fact in this moment because I need this hand. I need this hand like I might someday need a cane. Cairo is excellent at reminding me I cannot make it alone, and never more so than now: in the bright light and open air with my friend, who looks as bare as I feel, with the shadows of men like a forest just ahead.

My fingers interlock with Tori’s; our knuckles can’t get any closer. Many things are yelled at us. “Big dick” is yelled at us. “Sex” is yelled at us. And so is a question: “Are you lovers?” Which I find interesting. Someone in this jungle of hecklers has noticed how tightly we’re holding hands. He sees something in those interlocked fingers, and rightly so. If there’s a place with the power to change my sexual orientation, would it not look like this? If there were a moment when I swore off men and partnered instead with my own kind, wouldn’t it be now, as I walk back naked into the Friday
souq
?

Some men stare; others hiss. Gangly boys trail us and bleat the word
sex
. But because none of that happened, just moments ago, because the contrast is so stark, so ludicrous, I want to taunt back: “We were just here, fools!” If there were a way to gloat, how I’d gloat. I’d yank a veil out of my pocket, wave it overhead like a crazy lady, and let every ogler know, “You just looked right through me.”

But it’s my turn to look right through people. I pretend I see no ruckus, no fury, no storm. I scan the fields of junk and, before anyone can chase us away, shoot, shoot, shoot. A half-hour into this reverie, the reverie of looking through not veil but lens, I realize I have no idea whether the boys trailing Tori and me, flinging dirty words and sticking their fingers into my photos, are the same boys who began doing so 30 minutes back. That’s when I realize I’ve beiged back out.

I once read that camels have an extra eyelid. It’s a translucent cap that keeps out grains of sand. There are many reasons camels survive in the desert. They have special pads on their feet and humps of sustenance to go days without food. The way they weather sandstorms, though, moving through the desert at its most furious, is this secret lid that slides right down over the open eye.

DANIEL TYX

FROM
Gulf Coast

T
HE YEAR I
didn’t walk 1,900 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, I purchased a detail map of the border states and northern Mexico at the Circle K in McAllen. In my mind’s eye, the Pacific Ocean glistened crystalline blue when I finally arrived in Tijuana along Monument Road, sun-cracked and solitude-wizened.

I debated whether to travel with a dog or a donkey. I liked the image of the latter better, for the sake of the book jacket, but there were logistical problems. How does one transport a pack animal across a transnational frontier?

I quit my job at the International Museum of Art and Science (slogan:
At IMAS, hay más
), an eclectic amalgamation of amateurish rock and insect collections and Mexican folk art bequeathed by civic-minded Oaxacan tourists. Like me, the museum couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be about, or perhaps was convinced that it could be more than one thing at a time.

Two camps: those who thought I was crazy, and those who wanted to know the details of my route, which I preferred to leave to chance or my imagination. In either case, everyone wanted to know: why was I walking?

The year I didn’t walk 1,900 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, the truth was that everyone seemed to be doing something with their year, then writing about it. There was the man who lived without electricity in Brooklyn, the woman who didn’t take out the trash, the two separate guys—one a believer and one an agnostic—who lived like Jesus would.

The truth was that I dreamed of writing a travelogue that would forever alter the dynamic of the American conversation about immigration and the border. I wanted a conversation piece for life, something to bust out at parties when, as usual, I couldn’t for the life of me think of something halfway intelligent to say. More than that, I wanted a story to tell myself about my life, one with a page-turning plot and a clear beginning, middle, and end.

The truth was, why not? I was already there, my girlfriend, Laura, and I having been deployed at the same time as the U.S. National Guard as part of a teaching corps that, ironically, favored a military lexicon. She had quickly become a star educator; I had even more quickly become a devastated dropout with halfhearted suicidal impulses and a dead-end job at a dead-end museum. Her previous boyfriend had moved on from her to Harvard, and the recurring thought haunted me: Was I her rebound? His unaccomplished, ham-fisted doppelganger?

The truth was that I’d thought up the idea and told the first person I saw, in the hopes that my public declaration of intent would shame me into doing something significant with my life. That person happened to be Laura, who’d recently hazarded to mention that she was thinking about marriage. Things snowballed from there.

The year I didn’t walk 1,900 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, I bought a new pair of hiking boots and stomped around the neighborhood with my ’70s-era external frame Kelty backpack, wearing two pairs of socks. I carried plenty of water and tried to avoid the roving packs of Chihuahuas that bared their teeth like four-legged piranhas.

I went to the library at the University of Texas–Pan American and checked out a stack of books on the border that I found, for reasons not well understood, totally unreadable. I left them splayed open around my bedroom floor, and my cat, Che, who bit my girlfriend’s toes at night out of either jealousy or boredom, slept on the pages.

Laura offered to take care of the cat while I was gone. She asked me not to leave, but said she understood if I did. Both gestures struck me as pure demonstrations of true love, though I doubted if she understood an impulse that I myself did not truly comprehend.

Of all of the adventures in my life that I have not undertaken, this one was the most fully realized.

The year I didn’t walk 1,900 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, I began to question the purpose of my trip:

Why was everyone so gung-ho about doing something exotic or noteworthy with their year?

Why couldn’t they write about a year of failure, a year of discontented employment, a year of metaphysical paralysis, a year of resisting love for the sake of preserving an idealized vision of their future selves, a year of getting up every morning to feed an FIV-positive cat picked up outside Che’s Restaurant in Rio Grande City, one-eyed and hairless, who howls and howls at night because he wants to go outside but can’t because he’ll infect the neighborhood?

What were all these people trying to prove with their years of doing something? More precisely, what was I trying to prove?

Was I on a journey to discover something, or did I already know what I was going to discover?

The year I didn’t walk 1,900 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, the sun beat hot on the white sands of the Yuma Desert. Jaguarundis lapped up water from the Rio Grande, green jays flitted from branch to branch of craggy mesquites, cacti hoarded water in thick-walled cisterns, men and women left behind soda bottles and torn underwear hanging from bulrushes at the river’s edge. Trucks on longer-than-long hauls spewed thick plumes of black smoke into the cloudless sky, while children ate Whataburger hamburgers and sipped from giant vessels of Coca-Cola a hundred steps from the razor wire encasing the International Bridge. On days when the farmers burned cane, the whole world seemed as though it were on fire.

Six years later, when I heard the story on the radio about the reporter from
Esquire
who was walking 1,900 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, I was standing on a countertop in McAllen painting yellow along the kitchen ceiling. Laura was on the floor in the adjacent office, unpacking boxes and keeping an eye on the baby. We had just moved back after a three-year graduate school sojourn in Indiana. Always prone to taking metaphors too literally, I was convinced that borders were a place that both divided and unified, and that in order to be made whole again, one had to return to the place of initial rupture. Laura had her own reasons for wanting to return, but both of us had agreed that on the border, somehow everything felt more alive. I had feared that this sensation was rooted in nostalgia, but upon returning was relieved to discover that the remembered past still held true.

I wasn’t listening, but the interviewer’s question penetrated my wandering consciousness:
Why? Why walk the border?

The reporter was doing it backward, Tijuana to Brownsville, traveling with a baby stroller and an iPhone. He had GPS and a solar-powered Kindle. Though perfectly aware of the presence of envy, I found myself judging his techi-ness: no donkey, no dog.

I climbed down from the counter and crouched, froglike, next to the radio with its staticky reception. Next to me, Laura filed the documents of our life together, her legs stretched out in front of her so that her body formed a three-dimensional Y. The reporter remarked about the difficulty of sealing off such a long border in such inhospitable terrain. My son, his posture mirroring that of his mother, glanced up, then continued ripping the pile of discarded papers in front of him. The reporter described the long stretches of nothingness as “a learning experience.”

My son, past ready for his midafternoon nap, began crying. I loaded him into the stroller, and we headed out into the hundred-degree heat of late April in South Texas.

I thought of the reporter with his own modified jogging stroller, the deserts of loneliness he must be traversing—Kindle or not—that I had once coveted for myself. I thought of the circuitous path that had led me away from the border and back again, into marriage and parenthood and homeownership and the trappings of—if not the complete conviction in—a settled existence. I thought of my new job teaching community college students for whom the border was not something exotic or even particularly noteworthy, but a fact of life, its absurdities and fucked-up politics and violence and juxtapositions not so much a story to tell as a backdrop against which the satisfactions and preoccupations of daily life were set.

Arriving home again after a lap around the block, the oppressive heat having drawn my son into a gratified stupor, I thought about whether he, in his grown-up years, would take the measure of his father based on the things that I had done or the things that I hadn’t, and which was better, or worse. I scooped him up from the stroller, carried him over my shoulder up the front stairs, and crossed the creaky floorboards of the living room and the hallway until I arrived at the nursery, freshly painted treehouse green. Having reached no certain conclusions, I lifted him over the lip of the crib and laid him down, as gently and carefully as I knew how.