The Best American Travel Writing 2017

by Lauren Collins

  All of this sheds some light on why Zarif Khan ended up in Sheridan. No one there seemed to know about the Afghan tamale trade, but some people recalled hearing that Khan had been treated poorly by other South Asians when he first came to America, and headed for the hinterlands in search of a place with fewer immigrants—a report that comports with the climate in Seattle when Khan arrived. If you were him—new to the country, new to the tamale trade, by all accounts private and peaceable—you, too, might have gravitated toward small-town Wyoming.

  Contrary to family legend, however, Khan did not show up in Sheridan alone with his yoke and pails and introduce the town to tamales. He had a predecessor: one Azed Khan, born in 1871 in the Afghan village of Behbudi. Azed was the town’s first tamale vendor; when Zarif first appears in the Sheridan business directory, it is as his assistant. Over the next ten years, three more tamale salesmen and one chili peddler set up shop in Sheridan. All were named Khan, all lived in the same modest house on North Scott Street, and by 1923 all but Zarif were gone. By that time, tamales themselves were also on the way out. Between 1900 and 1916, sales fell from 4 million per year to just 40,000, and the once omnipresent tamale vendor began vanishing from city streets.

  Among those who left the trade during this decline was a German-born Wyoming man named Louis Menge. In 1910, Menge placed an ad in the Sheridan Daily Enterprise: “Wanted: some one to learn hot tamale business.” After finding a successor, he moved with his wife and child to Montana to try his hand at farming. Two years later, a return visit to Wyoming found him in dismal straits: the work was brutal, good help was scarce, and drought was destroying his crops. The Sheridan Post, which reported the visit, reminded readers that they had known the struggling farmer in better days: “Mr. Menge is more familiarly known to Sheridan people as Hot Tamale Louie.”

  These days, Mr. Menge is known to almost no one. His farm failed, his wife and child predeceased him, and he died alone at the Yellowstone County Poor Farm. Hot Tamale Louie, however, lived on. In time, the first man to hold that title was forgotten, along with all the other Khans who had come through Sheridan and the entire nationwide tamale craze. Soon enough, only Zarif Khan was remembered, because only Zarif Khan remained. As many immigrants can tell you, sometimes a story about leaving turns into a story about staying.

  By the time Zarif Khan applied to become a United States citizen for the second time, he had been living in Wyoming for nearly half a century. He was in his late sixties. On the naturalization petition, his official hair color had turned from brown to gray. His skin color remained unchanged but no longer constituted a barrier to citizenship. On May 4, 1954, the federal government conferred upon Khan the privileges and duties it had once forever enjoined him from claiming.

  Meanwhile, Khan’s life had changed in another momentous way. The year before, he had traveled to Pakistan and returned home a married man. The marriage was an arranged one; the bride, Bibi Fatima Khan (no relation), was fifteen years old. People in town talked, of course, but the tone was less judgmental than jokey—along the lines of “I wouldn’t have thought he had it in him.”

  He did, apparently; in the course of the next eleven years, the couple had six children. Khan, a doting father, could be seen around Sheridan hoisting his firstborn, Roenna, on his hip, while pushing his infant son Zarif in a carriage. When they got older, they recalled for me, he took them to the restaurant, set them at the counter, emptied the till, and used the money to teach them how to count. Meanwhile, more children kept coming: Fatima, named for her mother, then Zarina, then a second boy, Nazir, and, finally, Merriam. After each birth, Khan flew the whole family back to Pakistan to introduce his relatives there to the new arrival.

  In 1963, not long after Merriam was born, the family once again returned to Bara. This time, though, in addition to showing off his baby, Khan had business to conduct. Like many immigrants, he had spent much of his working life funneling money back home: paying to build wells and mosques in areas where travelers would otherwise have no water to drink and nowhere to pray, buying land for his relatives to farm and houses for them to live in. Now he began giving all of that away, distributing deeds to those who were living in his properties and money to nearly everyone.

  In the course of doing so, his children told me, he got into a dispute with a ne’er-do-well grandnephew by the name of Sultan Khan. When Sultan was a kid, just sixteen or so, he had been involved in a violent crime; rich Uncle Zarif in America had helped bail him out and got him into private school, but the kid had not shown signs of reforming. Now Sultan was thirty years old, and rich Uncle Zarif was no longer inclined to be generous. Sultan screamed and threatened; Khan held his ground.

  The next day, Khan and a different grandnephew left Bara early in the morning to run an errand in a neighboring town. In keeping with Khan’s lifelong habit, they went by foot. Partway along the route, Sultan was waiting with a knife. It was June 23, 1964. Khan was roughly eighty—one of the few eighty-year-olds of whom it could be said that he still had most of his life ahead of him. In a picture taken earlier that year, he is holding the toddler Nazir on his lap, surrounded by his wife and other children. The oldest is barely ten, the next one eight, the next one seven. The others are too young to have begun salting away memories of their father, and they would never get to make new ones. Sultan Khan killed his cousin, then stabbed his uncle seven times. Zarif Khan died in the dirt in a place as important to his life as any other: the road out of town.

  The shock of Khan’s death was followed by the surprise of his will. Other than his accountant and his lawyer, no one, not even his wife, had known that he was rich. When the will was probated, his estate was worth around half a million dollars—almost $4 million in today’s money. Supposedly, he had an equivalent amount back in Pakistan. Apparently worried that someone would marry his wife for her money, he had placed most of the estate in separate trusts for the children, leaving Bibi Fatima just $10,000 plus a monthly allowance. Under Wyoming law, she was entitled to more, and, with the guidance of a lawyer, she sued for it. Eventually she was awarded half the estate.

  Thus began the afterlife of the Wyoming Khans. At the time of Louie’s death, Fatima was twenty-six years old, responsible for six children under the age of ten, uneducated, illiterate, unaccustomed to so much as leaving the house on her own. She brought a brother and a nephew over from Pakistan to help, and then, in an act of self-creation that rivaled Khan’s, set about figuring out how to thrive in Sheridan under radically changed circumstances. She hired an English tutor, learned to read and write, and joined the PTA. She got her driver’s license the same day as her oldest daughter. In 1970, she became an American citizen. Two years later, she bought the J. E. Motel and Café in Sheridan. Ever since then, the Khan family has been in the hospitality business—which, in a sense, Zarif was too.

  In time, the relatives whom Fatima brought over to help with her children married and had children of their own. Some of them brought over other relatives, who also married and had kids. Many of those kids now have children as well. As the family multiplied, it also dispersed. In 2003, the brother Fatima brought to Sheridan moved to Gillette to open a hotel; these days, his branch of the Khans owns eleven hotels in the area, and his grown children have young kids of their own. In total, there are now some 150 or 200 Khans, mostly in Wyoming, though also in South Dakota, Colorado, and beyond. As with most families, there have been fallings-out, about the kinds of things families fall out over: who got more money, who got more affection, who slighted so-and-so at such-and-such a time. Still, most of them get along, and they try to get together—at Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, at births and weddings and funerals.

  Many of the Khans contributed money to fund the mosque in Gillette, and the threats against it came as a shock to them all; none had ever personally experienced such vitriol in Wyoming. Zarif Khan’s children, in particular, seem to have been shielded from whatever racism and xenophobia they might have otherwise encountered in nearly al
l-white Sheridan by their father’s standing. “Growing up here, it was great,” Zarina, who now owns Sheridan’s Holiday Lodge, said. “We had friends. No one asked about our skin. No one asked about our religion. No one would say, ‘Where are you from?’” Instead, the community recognized the Khans as its own; immediately after 9/11, Zarif told me, his Jewish pediatrician showed up to make sure the family was all right. Even in those tense times, Zarina said, “we had no troubles, no friction, no fight.”

  The fight, when it arrived, came in the form of Bret Colvin, the founder of Stop Islam in Gillette. Colvin, who is forty-nine, grew up on a Wyoming ranch, left after high school, and spent the next decade in the Marines. Later, he worked in private security, in crab fishing, and in the oil and methane fields of the West. But these days oil is down, Gillette’s economy is suffering, and employment is hard to find. “You can’t even get a fast-food job in this town,” Colvin said; to get by, he’d been doing some computer and cell-phone repair.

  That left him with a lot of time to stare at the Internet, which is how he learned about the mosque. Colvin was the one who organized the protests against it, and, according to the Khans, threatened to train a scope on it as well. He also menaced the town’s Muslims more generally; when he heard about a public lecture on Islam being held in Gillette, he used a podcast he produces to announce his plans to attend and “fuck some shit up,” and urged his listeners to come help him “run the ragheads out of town.” At some point, the threats grew sufficiently serious that the FBI got involved.

  Like the Khans, Colvin’s family has been in the West for a long time, though it represents a very different strain of the American character. “There’s been Colvins in Wyoming since the wagon-train days,” he told me. “My great-grandfather used to shoot Indians for the cavalry for five dollars a head.” That conduct—the effort by a group of newcomers to subdue or eradicate their predecessors through violence—is precisely what Colvin fears from Muslims. He believes that they are planning a violent invasion of America, and considers himself personally responsible for trying to stop it. That is why, he told me, he went to investigate the mosque after it opened. “I’m one of those people that just does stuff, okay?” he said. “I went down there and beat on the door and asked them who the hell they were and where they came from and what they were doing. They said, ‘We’re the Khan family.’ I said, ‘Well, that doesn’t mean anything to me.’”

  Who the Khans are and where they came from and what they’re doing here is a long story, and a quintessentially American one. The history of immigrants is, to a huge extent, the history of this nation, though so is the pernicious practice of determining that some among us do not deserve full humanity, and full citizenship. Zarif Khan was deemed insufficiently American on the basis of skin color; ninety years later, when the presence of Muslims among us had come to seem like a crisis, his descendants were deemed insufficiently American on the basis of faith.

  Over and over, we forget what being American means. The radical premise of our nation is that one people can be made from many, yet in each new generation we find reasons to limit who those “many” can be—to wall off access to America, literally or figuratively. That impulse usually finds its roots in claims about who we used to be, but nativist nostalgia is a fantasy. We have always been a pluralist nation, with a past far richer and stranger than we choose to recall. Back when the streets of Sheridan were still dirt and Zarif Khan was still young, the Muslim who made his living selling Mexican food in the Wild West would put up a tamale for stakes and race local cowboys barefoot down Main Street. History does not record who won.

  WELLS TOWER

  No Amount of Traffic or Instagrammers or Drunks Can Take the Magic Out of (Semi-) Wilderness

  FROM Outside

  The welcome sign is not entirely legible, because a large tourist stands in front of it with her selfie stick. The real tip-off is the river of brake lights past her shoulder. We have entered Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

  Park rangers meander through the traffic jam. To what purpose? To exact a foliage-season surcharge? To search the block-long motor homes for undocumented domestics? In fact, they are here to warn us that elk are visible in the field to our right. To prevent astounded drivers from crashing, the rangers have set up a pull-off area, where motorists are discovering what distant ruminants look like on a smartphone screen.

  The local elk count is lower than the minivan count, slightly higher than the roof-mounted-GoPro count, and, if the quantity of Florida license plates means anything, far short of the south-migrating-snowbird count. Though perhaps the plates mean nothing: we three are North Carolinians, from four hours east of here. I had reserved a Jeep for the trip, but the car-rental clerk had his own feelings about what is proper for a weekend in the Smoky Mountains and instead assigned us a Chrysler Town and Country minivan with Florida tags.

  But to visit Great Smoky and complain that it’s choked with out-of-staters and Winnebagoists is like going to the Grand Canyon and complaining that it’s a large hole. Great Smoky is America’s most heavily trafficked (if not necessarily trodden) national park. Close to 11 million people come here annually—nearly twice the Grand Canyon’s tourist haul—and all the houseguests are taking their toll. The park’s fog-cloaked valleys resound with Harley pipes. Smog has cropped the ridgetop views. Acid rain has killed off brook trout in some high-elevation streams and is threatening red spruce. Thanks to industrial, vehicular, and coal-power emissions, air quality in Great Smoky has been among the worst in the eastern United States, though, fortunately, ground-level ozone has decreased in the past fifteen years due to tighter air-quality regulations. For these reasons, although I’ve spent most of my life within a half-day’s drive of the park, I’ve never once been tempted to make the trip.

  But then one day, life finds you with a three-month-old son who, so far, has practiced his enthrallment with trees mostly through windowpanes. Curating a child’s preferences is, of course, a doomed endeavor. Still, we’d like Jed to be fond of wood smoke and galaxies, to grow into a knowledge of books but also splitting mauls, the bowline, the taut-line hitch. Yet winter is on its way. Wait until spring to take him camping and he may already have become a version of his dad, a sluggish, indoorsy type who stores against his own father memories of Chef Boyardee warmed over Sternos and interstate-side KOAs, where firelit drunks at the next site over cast frightening shadows on the walls of the tent.

  Now is the time to get him out-of-doors. But where? Somewhere lovely but close. (At about the four-hour mark in his car seat, our boy gets purple and loud.) Somewhere not too far from a 110-volt outlet to keep our breast pump humming. Somewhere with trees, mountains, online campsite booking, and enough human clamor to keep the bears at bay. No use resisting: Great Smoky is the place. You hate to add your family to the burdens of America’s most put-upon national park, but then it may be wise to let the boy tick Great Smoky off his list while there’s still park left to enjoy.

  A mile into the park, the traffic thins. The dusk is upon us. The roadside is astrobe with foliage the color of goldfish, carrots, and scab. Our home for the next two days is Smokemont Campground (and RV dump site), near the park’s southern access at Cherokee, North Carolina. Yes, our campsite is smaller than our old New York City apartment and surrounded by about as many people, a proportion of whom are not our sort of folks. Two of our neighbors’ pickup trucks fly Confederate flags. Another bears a decal of an AR-15 under the antibiotic slogan ASSAULT LIFE. But it is a handsome campground, in the deep shade of sycamores and tulip poplar fed stout by a chuckling brook. If there are toxins in the air, they are undetectable beneath the scent of damp earth and ferns.

  My goal for our weekend is modest: to provide Jed with a camping experience less grubby and miscarried than those my old man arranged for me. Breakfast with him was peanut butter sucked off a spoon, dinner cold spaghetti between two slices of Roman Meal. His tent was a frail, magical device whose special power was to summon storm
s so that it could collapse beneath them. I remember few nights that did not end with a sudden flight to the station wagon, where mosquitoes expected us, whetting their swords.

  Seeking to avoid my father’s organizational shortfalls, I have packed the Town and Country to the rafters with gear. Courtesy of corporate donors, we have: a Coleman tent that sleeps six, four different models of infant tents and sleeping pens from KidCo, a wearable sleeping bag from Selk’bag, another wearable sleeping bag from Poler, two camp chairs, and a compact wood-burning camp stove from Biolite that can cook food and charge an iPhone if not download kindling from the World Wide Web.

  It falls to me to set up camp while Erin feeds the baby. Unpacking our tent and other equipment is a swift return to childhood. But the Christmas-morning ecstasy of uncrating new toys disintegrates under the problem of their assembly. In my defense, the tent is barn-size and best raised with a team of Amish powerlifters. For more than an hour, I bash stakes into a graveled earth whose revulsion for aluminum is vehement. At last I build something resembling two fat men in a nylon donkey suit. Then there is the rain fly to deal with. The problem of draping it does not drive me to tears—just wrathful, high-pitched squeals and a glossolalia of curse words. The tent keeps slipping the shroud. It’s like putting silk pajamas on a bull.

  After a time, I repair to the Town and Country, panting and fuming. I venture the sullen claim that the tent is unusable due to factory defects and suggest we all sleep in the minivan. Erin, now soothing two babies at once, reaches out and wipes my brow. “It’s strange,” she says. “Generally, I feel like you handle stress really well, and then some little thing comes up and you just snap and can’t handle . . . dick.”