The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10

by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)

  It starts in the hills where women pluck the emergent green tips. Yesterday I accompanied a few of these ladies as they harvested the fresh first flush leaves and buds. Baskets on their backs, strapped around their foreheads, both hands engaged in this rapid but specific plucking, many of these women exceeded—some by a couple of decades—my forty-two years. Carrying nothing but a small camera, I tripped and floundered behind them, scraping my legs against the firm branches of the tea bushes. I felt like a harbor seal hiking with mountain goats.

  This place, the hills of Darjeeling, is like none I’ve witnessed. Each time I step outside, I’m struck by it. “Hold on,” I’ll say. “Let me take a picture.” I say this because I keep thinking that somehow, this time, I’ll be able to capture the magnificence of it, because, this time, the light is different. The light is often different: there’s sunrise and sunset and there’s mist. Sometimes the mist is so strong you can see only a few feet away, and like thick San Francisco fog it rolls over the place, a black-and-white filter stripping color out of the little that remains visible. Mostly it’s the rolling blankets of clouds that amaze, flowing into the nooks of these recklessly steep hills, sometimes swallowing the entire town of Kurseong in its perch at the peak of the next hill. I’ll muse as I sweat in the hot sun, that the people in town—less than two miles away—are cold and wet in that midday black-and-white fade. Sometimes the clouds are above me, but below the surrounding hilltops, transforming the landscape into an animated Japanese scroll painting.

  A week and a half ago—the first Wednesday of April—I arrived in New Delhi en route to where I am now. The Wednesday before that was the middle of my final week at work, the last of some 750 Wednesdays I’d made my way into my office. Now on a tea estate on the other side of the world from my former job, my family and my girlfriend, I watched these durable, weathered women busily pluck tips from the bushes only days after the fresh leaves and buds had emerged. These first leaves of spring, the first flush, represent some of the finest tea and will command high prices for their delicate flavor.

  There’s a later “second flush,” May harvest that is considered just as good by many. In fact, its richer “muscatel” character has always been my choice for a fine cup. This is a relief, too, because I fear I missed my own first flush and began to wilt on the branch a bit. A bright green leaf of potential, I believe I remained too long, especially in my job.

  THE BRANCHES

  It was confusing to find myself in a career, reasonably well paid, working for a company of good people driven to do good in the world, yet to be disenchanted. It was only my second company in two decades of nonstop forty-five-hour work weeks, commutes, cubicles, and eventually my own office. I ran the eco-friendly products division of the company, selling goods to consumers who wanted to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. This was not blood money, it was an honest, right livelihood. Almost.

  There was compromise in every direction. The product could reduce energy consumption, for instance, but may itself be manufactured of nonsustainable materials and shipped half way around the world. The consumer culture could be affected, inspiring people to live more simply or closer to the land—and likely was—but increasingly the job became one of failing budgets and discussions of profitability. My primary focus had shifted from eco-green to financial green and my interest faded.

  I wilted. My potentiality began to droop. Not so much directly from the work, but indirectly from the stagnation that results by not finding passion in what I was doing. And the fear that kept me where I was, afraid to risk my employment, to jump ship, to reach out and find a better expression of myself. This fear deflated my spirit, and that rippled out into other areas of my life, other relationships. Like romance and family.

  If the quality of output (my sons) is any testimony, my parenting is commendable. But exhausted and stagnating, I am often less present than I’d like to be, less attentive to their needs, less patient. Less aware in general, really, but nothing is more important to me than my sons: Henry as he forges his way, in the second half of his second decade, into a sense of self-reliance, yet still craving—in subtle ways—the parental boundaries of childhood. Simon, having just entered his teen years, asserting his own style despite the strong pull of his brother’s character. Both of them unfailingly impressive in their brilliance and competence—in everything they attempted—yet too often disenchanted and discouraged—with school, with friends. With me.

  The days or nights with them that were defined by my impatience and short temper are tragic moments in my parenting memory, burned in my mind. Thich Nhat Hanh says it’s possible, firmly grounded in the present, to transform the past. He says, “the traces of a bad drought can only be erased by a bountiful rainfall, and rain can only fall in the present moment.” I love and need this. But presence, a simple word and a simple act (or non-act), is so difficult to achieve—all the more so when palpably dissatisfied and restless.

  Romance, too. Such a conflicted dance this has been for the last decade. Divorce, adolescent emergence (yes, at thirty-five), a constant dizzying centrifugal spin engaging woman after woman, and the breakaway and recoil that inevitably followed. And recent history, sharing this dance with just one beautiful and patient woman. Pulling, pushing; wanting in, wanting to escape. Desiring her in one moment and desperately needing aloneness and quiet in the next.

  Six weeks before I left on this trip, Melissa and I went on a painfully ironic Valentine’s Day walk. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon, and we were walking along a winding path between square, ordered backyards and rolling, golden open space. “Do you think we need to break up?” she’d asked in the office, prompting the walk.

  Melissa is a beautiful woman, no less so that afternoon, and we are capable of coasting blissfully together. But not always. Too often the familiar tentacles of anxiety constrict in my upper chest when I’m faced with the pressure of our relationship. On the walk I explained to her that without knowing why, I felt an ill ease too much of the time. “I beat myself up trying to understand it, to find the reason. But really, the why of it isn’t as important as the fact of it.”

  She stopped and looked at me, her blue eyes the color of a bottomless well of generosity, and asked, “What do you want to do?”

  “I think we need to end it,” I said, feeling a great conviction to keep away for the next several weeks leading up to my trip, and to go to India unencumbered by a relationship that competes for limited space in my limited heart. “To spare each other.”

  I don’t know if I thought then of the half-dozen other breakups I’d engineered in the last few years, and the greater number of fade outs from undefined relationships. If so, I may have noticed the glaring common denominator. A few days later I would admit to myself a hope to take time away and to finally find the ability, some months down the road, to be in a relationship, and to find Melissa still willing to be in one with me. But if I had this awareness that Valentine’s Day, I withheld my confusion. We both needed my decisiveness. “Yes. I do think we should break up.”

  “O.K.,” she said. I watched her lips—heart-pink against winter white skin—the symmetry of which had magnetized me for two on-and-off years. “I love you,” she added. Then flatly, without venom, “Good luck, you sad and foolish man.”

  We kissed. I smiled, gently despite a torrent of conflicting emotion. My head smugly received the drama of the event and the clarity of the decision with a misbegotten satisfaction, while my heart raisined one more dark, retreating step down into my gut.

  Wilting on the branch, indeed.

  We continued to see each another almost daily at work, and the attraction prevailed as it had before. We got back together—albeit somewhat tentatively—at the end of February, perhaps stronger (us), definitely still confused (me). And now, 8,000 miles away, I feel closer to her than ever.

  STORM CLOUDS

  After the first flush harvest there is a nonproductive period of four to five weeks, called Banji.
In his book, The Rajah of Darjeeling Organic Tea: Makaibari, Banerjee describes the climate during this period: “Fast moving rain-bearing clouds sweep up from the Bay of Bengal, and on collision with the Himalayan foothills, inundate the Darjeeling district with short but fierce bursts of precipitation.” Ah, yes. I’ve stumbled back from Kurseong twice in these storms. He continues, “These are the awe-inspiring Norwesters. In a flash, dark clouds appear out of clear blue skies. The lashing is intense, with copious rain accompanied by streaks of lightning and deafening thunderbolts. God help those who do not unhook their electronics, as they blow up instantly. Within an hour, it is all over and the sun appears with clear skies. This is a magical moment. Overnight, the region is a riot of green and is abuzz with the emergence of all life forms.”

  This is when the emergent second flush shoots signal readiness to harvest a tea darker in liquor and fuller in flavor, the rich Muscatel Second Flush.

  Certainly I’ve ridden out my own Banji. A general climate of complacency hit with occasional storms of doubt, fear, and even misplaced anger when I’m stretched to my limit.

  A bitterness sets in at these times, but maybe also a richness. Self-plucked late in the season, I now find myself halfway around the world, unemployed and alone, and ready to refine my character.

  WITHERING HEIGHTS

  The refining process isn’t immediate, of course. The first and longest step is “withering.” The leaves are laid out to dry under a mild air flow for about fourteen hours where they shrivel and lose about 70 percent of their moisture. They are beginning to decompose, to rot. At just the right time the following morning, the men overseeing this drying and oxidizing process drop the still-damp leaves through a hatch in the floor to the rolling machines below.

  In this room, to the vibrating groan of monstrous machines, the leaves are churned together under moderate pressure. The mechanized rolling process hastens a more aggressive breaking down—the controlled death of the leaves—and is the height of the fermenting process, imparting the flavor style and caffeine. “This process of death,” says Banerjee in his book, “releases the enzymes that are so essential for developing the aroma and infusion of the tea.” Timing is critical to ensure that just the right amount of fermentation takes place.

  What exits here is a shadow of its former self. Yet without the decomposition, the ultimate potential of that once bursting green leaf cannot be harnessed. For Darjeeling tea, the withering and rolling process takes less than one day. For me?

  My last few weeks at home were hell. I’d given two-month’s notice at work that was followed, not by the great liberation I’d imagined, nor a dark apprehension about my unemployment, but by a holding pattern. My life was a movie playing in slow motion, punctuated with dramatic scenes of worry as I wrestled the practicalities of the trip into place.

  I’d given myself, on the other hand, only three days between my last day at the office and my flight. This proved insufficient for any physical response—call it let down—to my life’s upheaval. My body, more aware of the situation than my brain, addressed the oversight with a profoundly inconvenient sickness (sinus infection, deep body aches, extreme exhaustion) for my last two weeks at home. Even as I readied myself and attended going away parties in my honor, I’d withdrawn. I began to emerge only somewhere between Newark and New Delhi airports.

  Worry tackled me again in Makaibari by way of ATM failure. Days of marching up to the town of Kurseong to release my card into a machine and breathlessly await the bad news: “INCORRECT PIN,” written in aggravatingly plain English across the screens of all four machines in the small town. Each time followed by a deflating sense of hopelessness combined with the familiar upper chest choke of my anxiety.

  And then my homesickness. Part three, perhaps, of my decomposition.

  My first Wednesday in the village I awoke from a long deep slumber, and after a moment of orientation, I lay in bed and cried. Tears running into my ears as I stared at the ceiling, or alternately as I stared with closed eyes into the beautiful smiling faces of Henry and Simon; and as I reached over, imagining the warm and comforting snuggle of Melissa’s body. It’d only been a week, but add to that the vast distance, both geographical and cultural, and the fact that there were nine more weeks in my journey, and the whole recipe became a bit more than I could imagine.

  Why am I doing this? Why am I so far away from those I love? I wondered. Somehow I’d imagined I could book a trip like this, like a twenty-year-old, and become that twenty-year-old. But that is a time all about outward growth, expression, and expansion. A time when we are immortal and eager to run from home and establish ourselves as adults, as independent in the world. A time to push away from those we love and go explore.

  I’m not twenty. And while I certainly wanted to shake things up and push away from the constructs and confines of how I’d been defined, I did not want to push away from Henry and Simon and Melissa. My money situation had drained my inner reserves, and I was destined to settle into weariness.

  Later that morning I headed off for my first volunteer teaching stint in the village school, a modest single-story building housing four small classrooms. Availing themselves of my assistance, the school director and two teachers retired to a small office and heated their early lunch on a tiny, shoddy stove.

  As the scent of curried potatoes and fresh flatbread roti emerged from the stench of dirty fuel, I found myself among the sweet smiling faces of a dozen uniformed children, trying to explain the math assignments in slow English. Then I sat at the desk grading their work one at a time as they yelled “finish!” and brought their workbooks to me. Exhausted by it all, I played with the globe that sat, almost cruelly, in front of me. I wanted to see if indeed Chicago was closer to New Delhi than New York is (made curious by a shorter flight time), but all I saw, little finger and thumb stretched across the top of the small globe, was that I could not, in the northern hemisphere of this massive planet, be any farther from Boulder, Colorado. My eyes filled with tears again. Not “finish!” yet.

  How much more withering will I have to endure before a good firing ends the emotional decomposition and sets me on my new course?

  FIRING AND SORTING

  For tea, the breakdown is brought to a sudden end as the leaves undergo a firing process, a tumble down five layers of a conveyer system through a large coal-fired oven at approximately 100°F. This takes just over thirty minutes, after which the tea is roughly complete and ready to brew, but needs to be sorted and graded.

  It is then wheeled into the sorting room, the most magical room in the factory. Tin-lined wood floors and large sorting machines are bathed in natural morning light from tall east-facing windows, while a dozen or more barefoot women in brightly colored saris move about carrying various baskets and tins and handmade grass whisk brooms through the sorting process. The room is filled with the vibrating hum of machines and tea dust in the air, and the choreography of the process is delightfully theatrical. Even the sunken floor adds to this sense; it’s like a black box theater—but a brightly lit set—with a thoroughly Asian performance art taking place. One of those theatrical endeavors whose brilliance titillates my senses, yet whose meaning escapes me: something about the meeting place of artisanal handiwork and larger-than-life technology, all in constant motion, a ritual dance of woman and machine alike. What flows out of this room, after hours of scooping, sifting, shaking and picking, is the beautiful finished product of some of the world’s finest tea.

  SHIPPING AND HANDLING

  This is the fantasy, of course. That by simply taking the leap, things will all be sorted out and then cleaned up the way the ladies clean up the sorting room after each batch. Will I be so deftly handled? I have nine more weeks of travel ahead of me before returning home. I await the firing that will end my deterioration, and then perhaps I will adeptly sort it all out, the next chapters of my adult life. This, I suppose, is the hope of any good pilgrimage: that we will find some clarifying truth to hang our next act
ions on.

  This first flush tea, packed into these twenty-kilo bags and ready to ship out into the global market, will be brewed—and hopefully enjoyed—by someone, somewhere; the finally released, fully realized potential of that recently plucked-from-the-branch leaf. But perhaps it’s too lofty an order. To take a wholly Indian view of it, it doesn’t ultimately matter—as long as we do our best in any present incarnation of the process—because even the finest teas become compost and piss shortly after that first satisfying sip, ready to start over again.

  What I do know is the branch has been broken, the withering is underway and what will emerge—well sorted, expertly prepared, and fully appreciated, or not—will be a version of me at least a little richer in character. And maybe that’s enough. When I set out on this journey I wanted to know, returning to Mary Oliver’s poem, “whoever I was, I was / alive / for a little while.”

  Bill Giebler lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado. His work on food, travel, and the environment has appeared in Organic Spa Magazine, Green Living Journal, Edible Front Range, and more. “The Tea in Me” won the Grand Prize Gold Award in the Eighth Annual Solas Awards.

  STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST

  Code 500

  One person’s desert wonderland is another’s grave.

  The first thing Brooks County lead investigator Danny Davila wants to know is whether I have a weak stomach. We are sitting in his cramped office at the sheriff’s department in Falfurrias, Texas, on a sweltering July afternoon. Before I can respond, he slides a three-ring binder my way. “The Dead Book,” he calls it. Inside are dozens of laminated photographs of the remains of the thirty-four undocumented immigrants who have died in the county’s scrub brush in 2012, presumably while sidestepping the nearby U.S. Customs and Border Patrol checkpoint.