The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (2 page)

The stories included here are, as always, selected from among hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications—from mainstream and specialty magazines to Sunday 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 2012 were forwarded to guest editor Elizabeth Gilbert, who made our final selections.

I now begin anew by reading the hundreds of stories published in 2013. As I have for 14 years, I am 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 2013 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 they 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, 2014, 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.

Working with Elizabeth Gilbert has been something I’ve been hoping to do for many, many years. I believe we approached Liz at least five years in a row, but her busy writing and travel schedule never managed to mesh with the anthology’s until now. It was well worth the wait. What makes this collection special is that Liz was committed to reading the slush pile without bylines. The direct result is the inclusion of wonderful pieces from several smaller journals—such as
Gulf Coast
,
Creative Nonfiction
, and
Legal Studies Forum
—that have never before appeared in the anthology, alongside the usual suspects. This year’s is an outstanding collection, and I hope you enjoy it.

Finally, I am grateful to Nicole Angeloro, Timothy Mudie, and Mary Sydnor for their help on this, our 14th edition of
The Best American Travel Writing
.

J
ASON
W
ILSON

H
ERE ARE TWO
facts I learned long ago about travel writing:

1. There is no story in the world so marvelous that it cannot be told boringly.
   
2. There is no story in the world so boring that it cannot be told marvelously.
   

To prove the first point, I will provide you with an example from my own personal and painful experience. Long ago, back when Bill Clinton was president and the earth was new, I worked as a writer at
GQ
magazine. It was a great job. This was still in the days before the Internet undid the magazine business—back when editors of the big glossies could still afford to send writers on long, expensive trips in order to write long, expensive stories about long, expensive subjects. Thus, my editors very expensively sent me a long way off to New Zealand to write about an obsessed scientist who was hunting for the fabled giant squid in the very deepest and most unexplored trenches of the Pacific Ocean. (This was way before there was any video footage of the giant squid to be found on the Internet, such as one can easily find today. Back then, nobody had ever yet seen one of these magnificent creatures alive.)

I was in my 20s and had a tendency toward lazy shortcuts, and probably this is why I decided—in advance of even boarding the plane to New Zealand—that this story was basically going to write itself. Really, all I had to do was sort of show up, and everything would clearly fall into place, right? Because look at the elements: Mysterious sea creature! Obsessed scientist! Unexplored crevices in the deepest trenches of the ocean! I wouldn’t even have to phone this one in; I could just sort of
mumble
it in, without even bothering to pick up the phone. So I went to New Zealand, and I had a great time. I drank a lot of beer and hung out with sailors and took a day off to go snorkeling with dolphins just for my own pleasure. Then I came home and wrote the story of the giant squid in about two days—
BAM
, done. Nailed it! Easy peasy. What’s next? Where’s my next plane ticket?

But my editor (the indomitable Ilena Silverman, who now presides over writers at the
New York Times Magazine
) didn’t love the story. She found the story to be, as they maddeningly and constantly say in the magazine business, “not yet there.” She gave me some thoughtful and careful advice for how to get the piece there, and I dutifully plugged in her ideas and returned the story to her a few days later. She still didn’t like it. She asked me to rewrite it again. I rewrote it. I took two weeks this time. But she still didn’t like it. She didn’t like my next rewrite either. Nor the next. Nor the next.

Now, Ilena Silverman is not an editor who wastes people’s time, so I knew she wasn’t messing with me on this. She was earnestly searching for ways to help me make this story come alive, but even she seemed uncertain as to precisely what magic was missing from my prose. By now, even I could not deny that my story was leaden, and only getting heavier with each pass. Ilena was confounded by it; I was confounded by it. We trudged ahead, though it felt like we were trudging backward.

I wrote 11 painfully executed drafts of that goddamn giant squid story—which was supposed to be the easiest thing I’d ever written—and I still wasn’t getting any closer to it. Finally, after the 11th draft, my intelligent and gracious editor, who had always delivered her criticisms in the most articulate and gentle manner imaginable, became exasperated. She cracked. I had broken her spirit. She called me up one day and said simply, “Why don’t you try writing this story once more, Liz. Only this time, why don’t you see if you can figure out a way to make it . . .
not so boring
.”

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.