The Best American Travel Writing 2017

by Lauren Collins

  “Let’s talk about seeds,” Mike, the emcee, says when we reconvene after lunch. “What’s the best way to store them?”

  “Prescription bottle!” the audience answers.

  “Yes, we have a lot of those around, don’t we?”

  I notice a few other attendees like me—people not in the PSA, interlopers, curious neophytes who have never grown from seed, who have no business even dreaming about discovering new cultivars. On Saturday, one woman interrupts a discussion about propagation methods and says, “Hey, sorry, newbie here. What do you mean by inflo?” The audience collectively gasps.

  “It’s short for inflorescence,” Mike clarifies. “It’s the flowering part of the plant. Where you get the flower clusters.”

  The IPC is divided into five or six lectures a day covering topics such as industry trends (dwarf hybrids and grafted plants are hot), plumeria DNA and biology, and how to register a new cultivar with the PSA. There are lei-making workshops and grafting demos—in which rootstock and scions are stitched together with sewing pins, rubber bands, and tape, like some sort of voodoo doll.

  It’s all a bit exhausting, and some topics verge on the depressing: One lecturer admits to having killed hundreds of cuttings in his quest to grow tropical plants in Kansas. An owner of Jungle Jack’s, regarded as the most successful commercial nursery in America, recounts the time the USDA destroyed 17,000 cuttings he’d shipped in from Thailand. Turns out this beautiful, buoyant flower can hit the lows too. In the essay “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19' N., 157° 52' W.,” Joan Didion writes of a visit to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific: “One afternoon a couple came and left three plumeria leis on the grave of a California boy who had been killed, at nineteen, in 1945. The leis were already wilting by the time the woman finally placed them on the grave, because for a long time she only stood there and twisted them in her hands.”

  The IPC luau on the final evening perks me up. We are all adorned in our finest flip-flops and aloha shirts. We wear our Celadine leis. We eat from a buffet and drink from an overpriced cash bar. There is pineapple upside-down cake, another raffle, and an auction. A blackish red flower from Thailand pulls in $250. A new rainbow bloom, Hypnotic, goes for $275. A table over, I hear the Jungle Jack’s guy declare, “Orchids are over. Orchids are done.” He says plumeria could be the next bromeliad, which had a moment in the 1980s, much like Wham! enjoyed. Plumeria is already big in Japan, and the Dutch are catching on.

  When it’s dark out, we’re ushered outside onto the lawn for a performance, but the hula dancers have trouble with the PA. The women are invited to hula, then the men. “You can’t dance in cowboy boots,” Terry grumbles, though I think he’s actually excited. He heads toward the back and makes a big giggly ordeal of learning the dance. I have Virginia sign my IPC schedule like it’s a yearbook. Terry gives me a cutting of Miami Rose, a leathery pink bloom that smells remarkably similar to suntan lotion. I can’t promise that I will or won’t kill it, but I take it with me and resolve to do my best.

  There are some things a plumeria conference can’t cover. The scent of San Germain wafting from your front porch on a summer night. The gunk of a rotted cutting between your fingers, that black mushy death. The heartache when a small plant comes crashing off your stoop in a heavy rain. The terror of a landlord with a hose. The joy of an inflo bursting up like a solid fist. The pleasure in learning that the plumeria, like the plumeria addict, should be left to her own devices.

  DAVID KUSHNER

  Land of the Lost

  FROM Outside

  Before Noel Santillan became famous for getting lost, he was just another guy from New Jersey looking for adventure. It was last February, and the then-twenty-eight-year-old Sam’s Club marketing manager was heading from Iceland’s Keflavík International Airport to the capital city of Reykjavík with the modern traveler’s two essentials: a dream and, most important, a GPS unit. What could go wrong?

  The dream had been with him since April 14, 2010, when he watched TV news coverage of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption. Dark-haired, clean-cut, with a youthful face and thick eyebrows, he had never traveled beyond the United States and his native Mexico. But something about the fiery gray clouds of tephra and ash captured his imagination. I want to see this through my own eyes, he thought as he sat on his couch watching the ash spread.

  It took a brutal week in October 2015 to finally get him to go for it—Tuesday a taxi hit his Mazda; Wednesday a tree nearly fell on the car; Thursday, when he went to his girlfriend for comfort, she dumped him. “I was heartbroken and just wanted to get away,” he recalls feeling at the time. Scrolling through his Facebook news feed, he came across a friend’s photo of Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon spa. “So Iceland comes back into my head,” he says.

  Four months later, on a frigid, pitch-black winter morning, he was driving away from Keflavík airport in a rented Nissan Versa hatchback toward a hotel in Reykjavík, excited that his one-week journey was beginning but groggy from the five-hour red-eye flight. As a pink sun rose over the ocean and illuminated the snow-covered lava rocks along the shore, Santillan dutifully followed the commands of the GPS that came with the car, a calm female voice directing him to an address on Laugarvegur Road—a left here, a right there.

  But after stopping on a desolate gravel road next to a sign for a gas station, Santillan got the feeling that the voice might be steering him wrong. He’d already been driving for nearly an hour, yet the ETA on the GPS put his arrival time at around 5:20 p.m., eight hours later. He reentered his destination and got the same result. Though he sensed that something was off, he made a conscious choice to trust the machine. He had come here for an adventure, after all, and maybe it knew where he was really supposed to go.

  The farther he drove, the fewer cars he saw. The roads became icier. Sleeplessness fogged his brain, and his empty stomach churned. The only stations he could find on the radio were airing strange talk shows in Icelandic. He hadn’t set up his phone for international use, so that was no help. At around 2:00 p.m., as his tires skidded along a narrow mountain road that skirted a steep cliff, he knew that the device had failed him.

  He was lost.

  Getting lost is a fading phenomenon of a distant past—like pay phones or being unable to call up the lyrics of the Welcome Back, Kotter theme song in a heartbeat (“. . . your dreams were your ticket out”). Today, more than fifty years since the Navy built the first suborbital navigation system, our cars, phones, and watches can track our every move using signals from the seventy-plus satellites circling the earth twice a day.

  Most people would agree that this is a good thing. It’s comforting to know where you are, to see yourself distilled into a steady blue icon gliding smoothly along a screen. With a finger tap or a short request to Siri or Google Now—which, like other smartphone tools, rely heavily on data from cell towers and Wi-Fi hot spots as well as satellites—a wonderful little trail appears on your device, beckoning you to follow. Tap the icon of a house and you’re guided home from wherever you are. By knowing the most direct route—even one that changes on the fly with traffic conditions—we save time and fuel and avoid hours of frustration. The mass adoption of GPS technology among wilderness users has, it seems, helped make backcountry travel safer. According to the National Park Service, search-and-rescue missions have been dropping, from 3,216 in 2004 to 2,568 in 2014.

  The convenience comes at a price, however. There’s the creepy Orwellian fact of Them always knowing where We are (or We always knowing where They are). More concerning are the navigation-fail horror stories that have become legend. Last March, a sixty-four-year-old man is believed to have followed his GPS off a demolished bridge in East Chicago, Indiana, killing his wife. After Nicaraguan troops mistakenly crossed the Costa Rican border in 2010, to stake their nation’s flag on rebel turf they thought was in their country, they blamed the snafu on Google Maps. Enough people have been led astray by their GPS in Death Valley that the area’s former wild
erness coordinator called the phenomenon “death by GPS.” The source of the problem there, as in most places, is that apps don’t always have accurate data on closed or hazardous roads. What looks like a bright and shiny path on your phone can in fact be a highway to hell.

  Then there’s the bigger question that’s raised when we hear about people like Santillan who, in their total dependence on technology to find their way, venture absurdly off course. What, we wonder, is our now habitual use of navigation tools doing to our minds? An emerging body of research suggests some unsettling possibilities. By allowing devices to take total control of navigation while we ignore the real-world cues that humans have always used to deduce their place in the world, we are letting our natural wayfinding abilities languish. Compulsive use of mapping technology may even put us at greater risk for memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease. By turning on a GPS every time we head somewhere new, we’re also cutting something fundamental out of the experience of traveling: the adventures and surprises that come with finding—and losing—our way.

  By the time Santillan white-knuckled down the mountain in northern Iceland, he figured that despite the insistence of his GPS, he wasn’t anywhere near his hotel. There was no one else on the road, but at that point there wasn’t much else to do but follow the line on the screen to its mysterious end. “I knew I was going to get somewhere,” he says. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  The directions ended at a small blue house in a tiny town. He parked his car out front and slipped his hotel-reservation printout into his jacket as he headed toward the door. A pretty blue-eyed blond woman answered after the second ring. She smiled as he stammered about his hotel and handed her his reservation.

  No, she told him in accented English with a laugh, this wasn’t his hotel, and he wasn’t in Reykjavík. That city was 380 kilometers south. He was in Siglufjördhur, a fishing village of 1,300 people on the northern coast. The woman, whose name happened to be Sirry, pronounced just like the Apple bot, offered to phone the hotel for him. She quickly figured out what had happened: the address on Expedia (and his reservation printout) was wrong. The hotel was on Laugavegur Road, but Expedia had accidentally spelled it with an extra r—Laugarvegur.

  Santillan checked into a local hotel to get a good night’s sleep, with the plan of driving to Reykjavík the next day. When he told his story to the woman at the front desk, she chuckled. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh at this,” she said, “but it’s funny.”

  “It’s funny to me also,” Santillan replied.

  And when she told him that her name was also Sirry, Santillan felt like he was part of some grand cosmic joke. The next morning, when he went to check out, the joke became even grander. “Some reporters want to talk with you,” said Sirry.

  The first Sirry had posted his absurd story on her Facebook page the previous day, Santillan soon learned, and it had quickly been shared around. Something about the tale struck a nerve. Here was a sympathetic character who personified a defining aspect of the modern human condition—and hilariously so. A Facebook friend of Sirry’s who’s the editor of an Icelandic travel site wrote a blog post on the “extraordinary and funny incident.” Soon the misadventure attracted the interest of TV and radio journalists.

  They weren’t the only ones who wanted to talk with him. “Everybody in the town knew about me,” he says. Some of the locals of Siglufjördhur came to the hotel to welcome him and take pictures. One offered him a tour of their local pride and joy, the Icelandic Herring Era Museum, a small red building devoted to the town’s biggest industry that plays films on the salting process and has an exhibit of a brakki, a dorm for the so-called herring girls who worked the docks. The chef at Santillan’s hotel prepared the local beef stew for him, on the house.

  Enjoying all the hospitality, Santillan decided to spend an extra night. The following day he went on TV, explaining to a reporter that he’d always found GPS to be so reliable in the past. By the time he made it to Reykjavík that evening, he had become a full-blown sensation in the national media, which dubbed him the Lost Tourist. DV, an Icelandic tabloid, marveled that despite all the warning signs, the American had “decided to trust the [GPS].” Santillan sat down for a radio interview on a popular show. “World famous here man!” one Icelandic fan posted on Santillan’s Facebook page soon after. “Like your style. Enjoy our beautyful country.” Before long, his experience made international news, with reports in the Daily Mail, on the BBC, and in the New York Times, which headlined its story “GPS Mix-Up Brings Wrong Turn, and Celebrity, to an American in Iceland.”

  The manager of the hotel in Reykjavík had seen reports on Santillan’s odyssey and, to make up for the traveler’s hard time, offered him a free stay and a meal at the fish restaurant next door. Out in the streets, which were full of revelers celebrating the annual Winter Lights Festival, Icelanders corralled the Lost Tourist for selfies and plied him with shots of the local poison, Brennivin, an unsweetened schnapps. As a band played a rock song outside, Santillan kept hearing people shouting his name. Some guys dragged him up a stairway to a strip club, where one of the dancers also knew his name. The whole thing seemed surreal. “I just felt like, This isn’t happening to me,” he says.

  Still, he was going to ride it out as long as he could. After the marketing manager of the country’s most famous getaway, the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, wrote him offering a free visit, Santillan headed out the next day. The address came preloaded in his rental car’s GPS, since it was the one place everyone wanted to go.

  As Santillan drove out under the winter sky, he marveled at how far he had come. Not long ago, he’d been just another working stiff on his couch in New Jersey. Now he was a rock star. He pictured himself resting in the cobalt blue waters, breathing in the steam. But half an hour later, when his GPS told him he had arrived, he got a sinking feeling. Looking out the window, he saw no signs of a geothermal spa, just a small lone building in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The Lost Tourist was lost again.

  Scientists have long sought to understand how we navigate our physical environment. A key early moment came in the 1940s, when psychologist Edward C. Tolman was studying how rats learned their way around a maze. He concluded that they were building representations of the layout in their nervous systems, “which function like cognitive maps.”

  Some thirty years later, neuroscientist John O’Keefe located cognitive maps in mammalian brains when he identified “place cells” in the hippocampus region which became active when lab rats were in specific locations. In 2005, Norwegian neuroscientists Edvard and May-Britt Moser expanded on O’Keefe’s findings, discovering that the brain also contains what they called grid cells, which, in coordination with the place cells, enable sophisticated navigation. The trio was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for uncovering what the committee called our inner GPS. Their work has profound implications—not only for our understanding of how we orient ourselves but for how our increasing reliance on technology might be undercutting the system we carry around in our heads.

  Individuals who frequently navigate complex environments the old-fashioned way, by identifying landmarks, literally grow their brains. University College London neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire has used magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of London taxi drivers, finding that their hippocampi increased in volume and developed more neuron-dense gray matter as they memorized the layout of the city. Navigate purely by GPS and you’re unlikely to receive any such benefits. In 2007, Veronique Bohbot, a neuroscientist at McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, completed a study comparing the brains of spatial navigators, who develop an understanding of the relationships between landmarks, with stimulus-response navigators, who go into a kind of autopilot mode and follow habitual routes or mechanical directions, like those coming from a GPS. Only the spatial navigators showed significant activity in their hippocampi during a navigation exercise that allowed for different orientation str
ategies. They also had more gray matter in their hippocampi than the stimulus-response navigators, who don’t build cognitive maps. “If we follow our GPS blindly,” she says, “it could have a very detrimental effect on cognition.”

  There’s no direct link between habitual use of navigational technology and memory loss, but the implications are certainly there. Bohbot cites studies showing that a smaller and weaker hippocampus makes you more vulnerable to brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, since it’s one of the first regions to be affected. “It may be the case that if you don’t use the hippocampus, it shrinks and you’re at greater risk,” she says.

  Other researchers suggest similarly foreboding possibilities. Julia Frankenstein, a psychologist at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg, has found that people are capable of orienting themselves within a city based on memories of traditional maps, which help us develop a larger perspective of an area. When you navigate by GPS, focusing only on a route without a broader spatial context, you never gain that perspective. “It is likely that the more we rely on technology, the less we build up our cognitive maps,” she says.

  New research is adding to our understanding of exactly how we create those maps. Maguire recently worked with programmers to create Fog World, a shadowy virtual-reality environment studded with alien landmarks. By scanning test subjects’ brains as they made their way around the scape, she could observe the spatial-learning process in action. In a series of tests last summer, she found that the retrosplenial cortex, located in the middle of the brain, played a key role in logging landmarks that were useful for navigation. Once enough landmarks were logged, the hippocampus would engage. These two sections of the brain, it appears, work together to form a cognitive map. Maguire’s data also suggests that some of us just have a stronger sense of direction than others. “What we found was that poor navigators had a harder time learning the landmarks,” she says. “They never did as well as the good navigators.”