The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (8 page)

I move out of the pack and sprint for a few seconds, judging by the relative calm that I have a short period of time to cover ground before the next group comes, but I have no idea how long. I sprint—I fucking sprint like you can only sprint when you are sprinting from danger. I sprint with fucking
urgency
, and then move back to the right. I am in good position along a wall and am still moving. I feel safer than I have since I entered the road almost an hour ago, but the panic rushes right back in again when the volume climbs and I see three bulls over my left shoulder on the inside of the road.

Someone steps on my right heel. My shoe starts to come off. I grasp at it with my toes without diverting my attention and hobble forward in the crowd, keeping my weight right so no one can push me into the path of the bulls, my hands on the person in front of me. I hobble, shoe dangling, and watch the bulls pass—just don’t gore me, I can handle the rest—I reach down and try to fix the shoe with my right hand, balance with my left—just fucking do it! I do it without falling.

I don’t know if I will make it into the stadium at this pace. There is one more set of bulls behind us—I don’t know how many—and I have no idea how far I’ve gone. Some people are yelling like all the danger has passed, but I think there are more. People will try to close the stadium gate when the third group is through. I have to make a move.

I look over my inside shoulder and go.

I fucking go and see the long stretch of fence ahead of me on the right that tells me we are close. I fucking go GO GO. I can see it, I can see the stadium. I look over my shoulder and start turning left with the road. I’m on the outside, but I know I’m okay because the crowd is behind me. Then the volume rises and the middle of the road clears. I go right naturally, I think I’m okay. I’m past the turn and look over my left—it comes alone.

If you see one alone, escape.

I jump smack into the fence like Griffey and grab but don’t go over. I’m ready to climb in case it comes at me in this crowd—so sparse compared to before—

I’m not going over.

If you see one alone, escape.

I’m going into that fucking stadium.

If you see one alone, escape.

I don’t go over, I cringe, and it goes by.

It passes me and runs toward the stadium door and I don’t know if I should follow it but I do, I fucking sprint, I’m making it into that stadium, that stadium is fucking mine. I pump my arms and my legs, I pass people and pass people, I am making it into that stadium—that fucking stadium is mine. I see one of the huge red doors start to close and I sprint toward it. The gap of light inside is closing, but the closer I get, the higher up in the stands I can see oh my god a sea of white noise. I see people on the sides as the bull passes through and is guided out the other end. There is a jam of people at the closing door and I run right up to them. I keep pushing forward and squeeze through the door and fucking sprint into the tunnel. I gain speed and the stadium reveals itself—full of screaming fans—everyone in white with their red neckerchiefs. I feel the dirt below my feet so soft and forgiving and I am displacing it all and I am in the Plaza de Toros, the motherfucking Plaza de Toros de Pamplona. I start yelling as I run—I fucking scream and let it out. I let it all out and it flows out of me like a release of pressure that shouldn’t build in a person. I scream and in the very middle of the circle—I’m in a fucking bullfighting ring—I’m in the Plaza de Toros de Pamplona on July 7 and people are screaming for me and I am letting it all out, it’s flowing from me. I stop in the middle and start jumping with the others. I jump and I scream and we chant and I jump, I fucking jump higher and higher and release it all. I know Dan is here with me. I can’t see him but I know it. I raise my hands above my head and jump so I am facing different directions—all these people—all these people in white standing, waiting for me to get here, all these people—20,000, 25,000, a million—cheering me on.

I look up at them, they look down at me, and we let it out and release it—and it all makes sense—

This is why—

This is who I am, maybe it will change, maybe it—

Maybe there is a moderate amount of self-preservation revealed through a self-destructive—shut the fuck up and
jump!

I’m connected to people I don’t know. I jump I fucking jump. A part of a culture so foreign—immersion I’ve never known. Acceptance and capability—fucking whatever just jump! And I don’t feel proud, I don’t feel brave, and I don’t feel manly or deserving or fortunate—just yell and jump and turn in the air and see the white, the cylindrical wall of white bodies enclosing me, centering me, thousands of white bodies building up and out above me in this stadium, this bullring—hear the volume and jump and yell and it flows back and forth, me to them and back again, and I feel—

I just feel—oh my oh my do I feel.

JUDY COPELAND

FROM
Legal Studies Forum

A
LONE ON THE
grassy airstrip, I empty my backpack and kneel to sort my supplies for the climb up the mountain wall. I’ve landed in a tight little valley called Tekin, in Sandaun Province, whose massive ranges straddle Papua New Guinea’s border with Indonesia. The plane, still droning faintly somewhere above the fog, will soon be gone. The grass is wet and cold under my knees.

As I sort, a crowd of men gather to watch me, murmuring in Pidgin, “Very fat woman!” and “Em fall down, true!” They are all very short, less than five feet tall, thin and wiry, wearing baseball caps and ragged T-shirts and scowling the same fierce scowls that startled me two weeks ago when I boarded the flight from Manila to Port Moresby and looked into the faces of the flight attendants. I’ve noticed that the expression doesn’t necessarily signify anger. Some New Guineans continue to knit their brows even when they smile.

Luckily, some of the men speak English. When I ask them about the last backpacker to leave from Tekin, they aren’t sure when he disappeared.

“A month ago,” one says.

“No, a year,” another shouts.

They talk about the ongoing police inquest, and debate what has become of him. Since people disappear all the time in the bush and there are lots of possible explanations, I don’t really expect an answer. On one thing, however, the men agree: the backpacker was last seen quarreling with his guides over their pay; afterward, the guides returned to Tekin without him.

As I listen to the story, I wish I didn’t have to hire a guide.

I’ve been a solo hiker for almost 40 years, ever since I was two. As an American missionary kid in Japan, I used to run away from home every few days just for the thrill of it. By the time I was three, my parents had grown used to policemen finding me and bringing me back. I remember clambering over our bamboo fence and whizzing through the college campus where my parents taught, heedless of which way I ran, nearly colliding with students with shaved heads and black uniforms, reaching the tall department stores of the business district 10 blocks away, then ducking into the mysterious maze of alleys behind them.

After we moved to the States when I was nine, I felt so frightened by all the warnings about kidnappers and child molesters that I stopped running away. It wasn’t until I grew up and began backpacking alone in the North American wilderness that I reclaimed some of that old joy of running loose. Yet, two months ago, still haunted by a vague yearning for something lost, something missing from my life as an American lawyer, I quit my job and began island-hopping through Southeast Asia, an adventure that has brought me to Sandaun Province.

What I haven’t reckoned on is the terrain. This morning, sitting next to an Australian missionary pilot in a little six-seater Cessna, I looked down and saw the Highland trails meander through wide valleys and over rolling hills until they vanished in the needle-sharp peaks that form the long spine of Papua New Guinea. We climbed up into the clouds, then swooped below them again, through passes so narrow I could almost reach out and graze my fingers along fern-covered mountainsides. From a small plane, you can see every thatched hut, every outhouse, every pathway leading to it. Here and there, peering into gaps too tight even for the Cessna, I glimpsed a deep, sunless valley. At the bottom a dim clump of little huts lay trapped, like children who’d fallen down an abandoned well.

I shouted to the pilot, Nigel, “Do the people in those valleys ever get over to the next valley to visit their neighbors?”

“No,” he yelled above the roar of the engine, “they live and die on that spot.”

Unlike other expatriates I’d met, Nigel didn’t question my plans, just my choice of the word
walk
to describe them. “Have a look down there! Do you see anywhere to walk? Do you see any trails? You don’t
walk
in Sandaun. You skid on your butt. You throw up. It takes hours to slog up one little hill, and the slogging makes you sick to your stomach. Not to mention the sinkholes. Some mountains are so close that the bush on either side grows together and hides the gaps between them. People have stepped into those sinkholes and disappeared without a trace.”

Then the nose of the Cessna dropped abruptly, zeroing in on Tekin, and we dived into the fog. Amazed he could land blind in such a narrow valley, I said it just didn’t seem possible.

“True,” Nigel mused as we tilted into a curve, “according to the laws of science, it
isn’t
possible. An airplane isn’t supposed to be able to do this.” He turned to beam at me: “If it weren’t for the Lord, we’d probably crash.”

I searched his face to see if he was joking, but he wasn’t. I stared at Nigel, at the neatly ironed pilot’s shirt-and-shorts with matching khaki knee-highs, at the ears jutting out at right angles from his head, and the long-toothed Bobby Kennedy grin. To look at him, I would have taken him for a scientist of some sort—a surveyor, perhaps, sent to ink in the last blank valleys on a map hanging on the solid wall of a cartographic institute—an avatar of rationality, anything but a loony who thought the Lord could hold an airplane in the sky. I knew his words were meant to cheer me, but for the first time since coming to New Guinea, I felt a shiver of real fear.

Once on the ground, I sort my supplies into two piles: things to haul up the mountainside and things to leave behind. Other than a short, unpaved motor road leading to the village of Kweptana, there’s nowhere to walk out of Tekin but straight up, nothing but steep mountain walls on all sides. Nevertheless, considering that I could as easily die from flying as from climbing, I choose the mode of travel less dependent on the Lord. My climbing supplies, at least, are under my control.

My gear in tow, I wave goodbye to the men at the airstrip and head up the dirt road. Nigel suggested a climb he’d done himself—over a mountain to a village called Bimin—and he said I would need a guide for the steepest part. At least I can walk alone as far as Kweptana, and en route, I can overnight at a vacant mission house, to which Nigel has lent me a key.

The road meanders upward through well-kept gardens, high-canopied forests, and swirling mists. When occasionally I meet people walking toward Tekin, they shake my hand warmly and advise me I’m too fat to make it to Bimin, which I find oddly reassuring. Since nobody expects me to reach Bimin anyway, I reason, there’ll be no shame in turning around if I lose my nerve. I smile and thank the people and walk on.

After several hours, I spot the mission house, its corrugated-iron roof shimmering like a silver spider web in the last rays of the sun. It’s a steep climb down from the road, a scramble over several fences of sharp stakes built to keep pigs out of people’s sweet potatoes. You can’t walk anywhere in Papua New Guinea without risking impalement.

A few paces short of the padlocked door, darkness falls. Fumbling through all eight pockets of my safari suit, I chide myself for forgetting that there is no dusk on the equator—no grace period with kindly librarians announcing, “We will close in fifteen minutes,” while you gather up your scattered papers. Here the lights get cut off without warning, and you’d better know where you put your flashlight and your key.

Once inside, I flick around the weak beam of my flashlight to reveal a woodstove, a rough-hewn table, cabinets, six drawers. I set about ransacking the drawers for a candle.

There’s a knock at the door, and I hope it will be the caretaker, come to help me find things. Instead, it’s an old peddler. Eyeing me from beneath the visor of his baseball cap, he holds out a peculiar object: a yard-long stick with a sharp-edged stone disk fastened to one end. When I ask what it is, he says in Pidgin, “An instrument for killing people.” I tell him I don’t think I’ll be needing one.

The weapon doesn’t surprise me. Until their conversion to Christianity about 10 years ago, some of the peoples of Sandaun practiced warfare and some were cannibals, so it stands to reason that they might have old weapons they want to sell. Still, after the peddler leaves and I crawl into my sleeping bag, I can’t help wondering what a bumble-footed woman like me, a woman terrified of heights, is doing here. I can’t help wondering if I’ve come to the wrong place. If I’ve once more lost the red line.

I left America, odd as it may seem, because of something I saw in a dream—a map of the world with a red line, like the ones in-flight magazines use to indicate air routes, advancing slowly across the Pacific Ocean toward Asia. After I woke up, too soon to see where the line would stop, I started the journey, flying from country to country—Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, now Papua New Guinea—but no place so far has felt quite right. I’ve always tried to follow my dreams, ever since age nine, when I had nobody to help me through the grief of leaving behind my first language and first culture, my first self, and changing from a Japanese into an American. My parents, American to start with, didn’t notice my sadness, so I learned to rely on myself, on the banished, secret self who speaks to me through dreams.

Now I tighten the drawstring of my sleeping bag, breathing the thin cold air in the mission house, and dream in Japanese. I’m driving a jeep up a dusty mountain. It’s a child-sized, toy jeep, and my two baby sisters bounce on the seat beside me. After circling round and round the mountain, we come to a high stone wall with a carved, medieval-looking gate. The air is very still. Not even a fly buzzes. Suddenly the gate swings open, revealing a jumble of square, flat buildings piled one on top of the other, staircases running from roof to roof. Then we see them. Up and down the narrow streets the elephants walk, slowly, quietly, with great dignity, careful where they plant their enormous feet.