The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  “Have you two ever thought about going away?” I ask.

  “Of course. Lots of our friends have left. They live in Wales or in Sweden now. They have more money, they have a better life, but the Greeks there aren’t happy. We have friends who went to Sweden. Financially they’re doing well, but they tell us: ‘The Swedes are as cold as the weather. If you laugh out loud on the street in Sweden, they think you’re out of your mind.’”

  Dora is quiet for a moment. She seems to be thinking about Sweden, where she doesn’t want to live.

  “I know a lot of Greeks,” she says, “who drive to Bulgaria to go to the dentist. The dentist in Bulgaria is five times cheaper than in Greece. Coca-Cola just closed down a big plant here and is going to open a new one in Bulgaria. Bulgaria is going to be the new Greece.”

  “But don’t you think Bulgaria will learn from the recent history of Greece?” I ask cautiously.

  “No one learns from history. We don’t even learn from our own history. Before the war there were almost fifty thousand Jews living here. Who remembers that these days? The university is built on the old Jewish cemetery. You can still see the gravestones in some of the walls, because the marble was recycled.”

  IV. George

  At nine o’clock the next morning I find George Kastanis waiting in front of my hotel. George is a young, energetic man with a quiet voice. We stop in at a nearby café to pick up his girlfriend, another Dora. She is wearing a gray wool cap and matching scarf. We go to an old military base, about half an hour’s drive from the hotel. This is where the PERKA project is being carried out. PERKA stands for “Peri-Urban Cultivation Team,” a gardeners’ collective. Where soldiers once marched, PERKA now plants vegetable gardens.

  “We started in January 2011 with forty people,” George says. “Now there are one hundred and fifty people active in the collective. This is what we call ‘suburban farming.’ You don’t pay for it. You cultivate your own garden.”

  We walk past the gardens. Some plots are neater than others.

  “There’s no electricity here,” George says, “and no fences. We accept the fact that some people in the neighborhood come and steal our vegetables. The only fence you see here is to keep the dogs out. In fact, the army wants to build here. But now we’re working on a proposal to preserve this place as a park, maybe as a campground, too. We’re going to present the plan to the mayor. You’ve probably noticed that there aren’t any parks in Thessaloniki. Experts say that if this green lung disappears, the temperature in Thessaloniki in the summer will go up a few degrees. Along with another army base a little farther up that way, the ground here is worth one billion euros. So, as you can imagine, there are big interests at stake.”

  We walk on.

  “I’d like to show you the room we made from one of the soldiers’ dormitories—that’s where we hold our meetings now,” George says.

  Everywhere around the green lung there are dormitories, more or less in ruins.

  “I’m thirty-two,” George says when we stop at a spot with a view of this part of the city. “Dora is twenty-nine. I’m unemployed, but the important thing is not to leave solidarity to the fascists. The extreme right-wing parties go into the working-class neighborhoods and hand out food. You can’t combat fascism with weapons, only with education, but the schools in Greece produce people with no political awareness. That’s why you have to be self-taught. Anarchism is creativity; anarchism is democracy in the true sense of the word. At PERKA, we don’t vote; we reach a consensus. There are days when we’re not ready to reach a consensus. But another day always comes along.”

  “Things weren’t any better before,” Dora says. “But now people are less motivated, because they have so many problems. They’re depressed. But there is a small, dynamic minority that really does do something. We meet two times a month.”

  “And what about the EU?” I ask.

  “Being in the EU or not being in the EU is actually not the real issue,” George says. “The issue is: IMF or no IMF. We want to keep this spot green. We want to protect our seeds. Everything we grow here is organic and for our own use. It’s a struggle for freedom, and for the country.”

  The man with the key shows up. They show me around the renovated dormitory.

  “We built a kitchen over here,” Dora says.

  The kitchen is simple, almost Spartan, but they are proud of it.

  As we head for the door, Dora says: “The people in northern Europe who say we’re lazy don’t realize that one day people will say that they’re lazy, too.”

  V. Yiannis

  You can walk right into Thessaloniki’s city hall; there’s no security at the door. One of the mayor’s assistants, whom I’ve contacted by e-mail, says the mayor is running a little late because of a wedding.

  I take a seat. The people walking around, all of whom work for the mayor, are young and hip. The atmosphere seems more like that of an Internet start-up than a city hall.

  The mayor makes me wait for an hour and a half. He has the air of a rock star, and for a rock star an hour and a half is nothing.

  In One Step Ahead, Dimitris Athyridis’s documentary on the 2010 municipal elections in Thessaloniki, the then mayoral candidate, Yiannis Boutaris, talks frankly about his alcohol dependency, his marital problems, and his conflict with Anthimos, the archbishop of the city, whom he accuses of hatemongering because of Anthimos’s outspokenly nationalistic speeches. It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Boutaris after watching the documentary, even though it’s clear that the mayor, after the electoral close call, has not been able to solve all the problems before him. Garbage continues to pile up on street corners.

  The mayor is not a career politician; he’s a vintner. He got his first diploma in chemistry in 1965 from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and another—in oenology—in 1969 from the Athens Wine Institute. I recognize the tattoos on his fingers from other articles I’ve read about him.

  Boutaris is now 71, his voice smoky.

  “We were opposed to this building,” Boutaris begins. “But we weren’t able to keep them from building it. This used to be a military base. The law specified that a new city hall had to be built here. There’s going to be a square built outside, and all the roads you see will be going underground.”

  “But that’s a long-term project,” adds his assistant, who is sitting beside us, taking notes.

  “I’m afraid that maybe it’s not a very original question,” I say, “but why did you wait so long to go into politics?”

  “I’m a political animal. I have political convictions. I have ideals. I’m a social democrat, even though I don’t know exactly what that means anymore in this day and age: neoliberal, social democrat—what does that mean? But anyway. When I was chairman of the vintners’ association, I said: ‘It’s not about wangling a little market share away from each other; it’s about boosting the total market for Greek wine; we have to do this together.’ Besides, I have three children: one daughter and two sons. If we all went into the wine business, there would be too many of us. So I went into politics.”

  Boutaris laughs self-deprecatingly.

  I ask him: “Were you prepared for this office? Is being a political animal enough of a preparation?”

  “You can’t live without politics. Well, not unless you’re very egotistical or very blasé. That’s why I told the citizens of Thessaloniki: ‘Whatever we do about the garbage problem, if you don’t help, it’s not going to go away. If you don’t help out, the city will stay dirty; if you throw garbage all over the place, there’s not much I can do.’ We’re not going through an economic crisis; we’re going through a social crisis. The economic crisis will be over in five years, but the social crisis won’t just go away, and it’s been going on for a lot longer. To find the beginning you have to go back to ’seventy-four, to the end of the dictatorship.

  “In actual practice, there is no law. That’s the problem. The people relate to the law in the sense that they place themsel
ves above it. That starts with the politicians. We’re supposed to implement the law. I get attacked because I implement the law. I’ve had to call the police in order to enforce the law, even right here in this building. The Greeks’ relationship with the state is problematic—maybe there’s also a historical reason for that. We had the German occupation, the civil war. We haven’t learned to respect the decisions made by a majority. There is no natural relationship between the Greek citizen and the Greek state. The most natural relationship that exists is the Greek citizens’ suspicion that the state is lying. But we’ve become arrogant. We do everything we can to not pay taxes, but at the same time we want social facilities, good roads, good schools. We have no respect for wealth.

  “The Stavros Niarchos Foundation was set up by a rich Greek; it has given more than five hundred million euros to good causes. But people despise it because they say that Niarchos lived from the lifeblood of workers. Don’t forget that as recently as 1952 there was a political execution in Greece.” (In 1952, the Greek government executed Nikos Beloyannis, a communist leader and resistance fighter in World War II, after accusing him of spying for the Soviet Union.)

  “What people praise you for most often,” I point out, “is having promoted tourism.”

  “That’s right,” Boutaris says. “I’ve brought Turks and Israelis to Thessaloniki. Because of our history. For five hundred years, this was part of the Ottoman Empire. Before the war, Thessaloniki had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. The Jews from Spain fled to Thessaloniki. We’re working on a subway system, and during the excavations we keep finding things from the Roman and Byzantine Empires. Coexistence is a part of Thessaloniki’s identity. The Ottomans were clever enough to invite the Jews driven out of Spain to settle here. After the city was liberated, in 1912, it was no longer an Ottoman town. There were three or four Jewish newspapers here at the time, four Turkish newspapers, two or three Greek newspapers, an English paper, a French one, and a German paper. That was Thessaloniki.

  “In the 1920s, the Turks disappeared.” (Both the Greeks and the Turks at that time carried out pogroms and programs of ethnic cleansing.) “The Nazis exterminated the Jews. And that’s how Thessaloniki lost its identity. Not so long ago there were three hundred thousand people living here. Now there are a million. I want to remind the people of Thessaloniki of their history.”

  “What can a mayor like you do during a crisis,” I ask, “when the Greek presence in the EU, and certainly in the Eurozone, no longer seems like something we can take for granted?”

  “One of the pillars of the EU is solidarity; you can’t have an EU without solidarity. What’s more, it would be wrong to pretend that the German and Dutch companies were not overjoyed to sell Greece military equipment and consumer goods. Some German politicians have made it sound as though they are prepared to start the Third World War. Now Merkel has adopted a different attitude toward Greece, but in principle nothing has changed. I’m in direct contact with my fellow mayors in Germany. In that modest way, I try to influence national politics there.”

  I ask: “And what exactly does that mean for Thessaloniki?”

  “All over Greece there has been a huge trek from the countryside to the city. Except for South Korea, in Seoul, there is no other place where a country’s population is so proportionally concentrated as it is in Athens. But the people haven’t become urbanites. A rural mentality still prevails. That’s why I want to point out the city’s history to the inhabitants of Thessaloniki. The big question is whether we can become a central European city again. The question is whether we can take the farmer out of the city dweller. That’s my job.”

  As I get up to leave, I ask Boutaris whether he will run again, in 2014. For the first time, a huge smile appears on his face. “Oh sure,” he says. “This is lots of fun.”

  HARRISON SCOTT KEY

  Fifty Shades of Greyhound

  FROM Oxford American

  ON FRIDAY, MAY 12, 1995, I stepped onto a bus in Jackson, Mississippi, bound for West Yellowstone, Montana. The journey would take four days, with no stops for anything but gas and cigarettes and the occasional disemboweling of one passenger by another. When I said goodbye, my father, who only embraces things when he is trying to kill them, hugged me. It was his way of saying: Your mother thinks you might die.

  When I tell this story, sometimes people ask why, given my general state of mental health and fiscal stability, I would choose to ride to the other side of the North American landmass in the world’s fastest portable toilet, passing through a gauntlet of unholy downtowns where I would likely be accosted by psychotic barnacles who desired to rape and eat my carcass behind an Americas Best Value Inn.

  The answer is simple: I wanted to see a mountain, a topological feature I had often read about in books. In Rankin County, Mississippi, we had many books, but no mountains. When it was all over, when I peeled myself from the back seat of the bus two months and 4,200 miles later, carrying a box of Hostess Chocodiles that had constituted my only foodstuffs in three days, having lost all of my underwear and much of my mind, I found my mother waiting for me at the bottom of the steps, weeping.

  “Promise you won’t do this again,” she said.

  I promised.

  And 18 years later, I broke that promise. Because I wanted to see another mountain.

  One of the most surprising qualities of the Greyhound station in Savannah is its lack of parking. How did they expect people to get to the station? Given the clientele I noted in the predawn darkness, the answer appeared to be: on crutches.

  I was excited to meet them. Bus People are nothing like Airplane People, who are boring and have “luggage” and enjoy “skiing.” Bus People, on the other hand, enjoy “talking about grenades” and “screaming.” In ’95, I met a woman in Wichita Falls who said she was the first person to taste Dr Pepper, when she was five, which would have made her 115 years old, which made her a liar. In Billings, I met a Crow Indian who wore a stovepipe hat and either wanted to hug or stab me, it was unclear. Would such people be on my bus in Savannah? And was it wrong to want them to be?

  These were my thoughts as I looked at the other passengers and noted a woman wearing a bologna sandwich on her head. Was there really a bologna sandwich on her head? Yes, unmistakably. Also, she wore a blue Snuggie.

  On the wall, a poster: THE BUS OF THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED.

  The Future-Bus was depicted in new colors: silver, blue, and black. The message was clear. This is not your grandmother’s Greyhound, which was silver, blue, and red. I was eager to experience this futuristic bus. Things were looking up. What I was experiencing, of course, was Greyhound Stage One: Hope.

  Early in one’s journey, one begins to appreciate the candor of the Greyhound operation. Nobody here is trying to act like this is fun. And one begins to realize: that’s okay. For example, nobody “invites” people to board. Rather, a designated staff member stands on a chair and shouts the names of nearby villages, whether or not they have any relation to actual destinations of the bus. If a PA system is available, staff members will use it both to inform and disorient passengers, eliminating every few words.

  “All passengers going to KSHHHH at this time please KSHHHH, otherwise, it’s very likely that KSHHHH until you bleed to death.”

  The terminal signage is refreshingly honest, too, eschewing the sophistry of advertising for plain American. PHONE, read one sign, hanging over a pay phone. Was this for the youth, who perhaps did not understand? DO YOU WANT TO GO HOME? read another sign, which seemed more of a threat. In the Atlanta terminal, a poster: PAY WITH CASH. For what, it didn’t say. Underneath was a picture of $20 and a hand. Was someone buying a human hand? The human hand looked pretty clean and healthy. Good deal for a hand!

  Even the overheard conversations have the ring of unvarnished truth, as in this exchange between two young women:

  “Man, if I die at a Greyhound station, nobody will know.”

  “I will know.”

 
“Yeah, but then you be dead, too.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  One thing was for sure, this Bus of the Future was equipped with Truth.

  The transition was quick to Greyhound Stage Two: Concern. “Charleston! Going to Charleston! Load it up! Argh!” Was he our driver? Possibly also a pirate? We hustled out through a tarpaulin into the dark, and boarded before sunrise. Our driver spoke in a velvety Barry White baritone that hushed us like babies, announcing stops in Charleston, Georgetown, Myrtle Beach, Florence, Camden, Fort Jackson, Columbia, Cartagena, Tierra del Fuego, Mos Eisley, Mordor, and the Spice Planet of Arrakis.

  I woke up again in Charleston, a historic city where I hoped to espy some columned portico gaily festooned for that evening’s cotillion, but was instead no less pleased to see across the street from the terminal a charming mercantile exchange called El Cheapo. My morning coffee beckoned for release, and I visited the onboard restroom. Best to do this when the bus is stopped, I deduced, for reasons that are immediately obvious to anyone who has straddled a bucket of someone else’s feces at high speeds. I entered and beheld a horror. The Bus of the Future, it seemed, was covered in the gastrointestinal ailments of the past. What toilet paper remained appeared to have been ripped from the wall and attacked by a ferret.

  One of the great things about Greyhound is that there are many toilets in which one can die. What to call this onboard bathroom? Not a restroom, for it is not restful. Not a water closet, for there is no water. Perhaps asphyxiation nook? Death slot? Concern flowers imperceptibly into Greyhound Stage Three: Fear.

  It only seemed fair to wait and investigate the terminal toilet in Myrtle Beach, which was rumored to be clean, or at least anchored to the earth. After refusing a Gideon Bible upon exiting the bus, on account of my having already read it, I stood in line for the restroom. A woman exited, and I entered, locked the door, loosened my garments, and was immediately clad in darkness. The lights went out. Having failed to wear a headlamp and now surrounded by exposed wiring and unidentified pathogens on every unseeable surface, I considered screaming for assistance. I regretted not taking one of the free Bibles, for the comfort it might provide in my final moments.