The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  For a trip that Murray would have approved of, I headed to the remotest stretch of the park, along the Oswegatchie River near the Canadian border. There, I signed up with Rick Kovacs, the last guide based in the town of Wanakena. “A century ago, there were fifteen guides working this river, each one with his own fishing camp,” Kovacs told me as we paddled along the ever-narrowing Oswegatchie, whose waters were a rich brown from the tannin of decaying leaves and branches. “Now we’re barely holding on.” Like many of the 137,000 year-round residents in the Adirondack Park, he and his family company, Packbasket Adventures Lodge and Guide Service, struggle to make ends meet when the summer season ends.

  The river snaked back and forth upon itself in tighter coils, as we paddled beneath enormous half-fallen trees from recent storms. “Easy bends, slow bends, sharp bends, rapid bends, and just bends everywhere,” wrote a traveler of his 1907 trip here. Robins swung low overhead, and raccoon tracks could be seen on the banks. At one point, we pulled the canoe over a beaver dam. By late afternoon, we set up camp at the Spring Hole Lean-to. When I dove into the river to cool off, it was like swimming in iced tea.

  Not a soul passed us by, and it was easy to assume that little had changed since the 19th century. But nothing in the Adirondacks quite meets the eye.

  “It looks like pure wilderness,” said Kovacs. “But even back in Murray’s day, a lot of the forest was being logged, clear-cut, and burned. In the early nineteen hundreds, a logging railroad even went right by this river. The biggest trees would have been three hundred to four hundred years old, and grown as high as one hundred fifty feet. Even though the logging stopped a century ago, it will take a couple of hundred years more to get back to its original state”—assuming that recent weather extremes, which are affecting the forest, do not take their toll, he adds.

  To some, that history of recovery is itself a kind of triumph. “Yes, the vast majority of the Adirondacks was cutover,” says Engelhart. “But the fact that we can treat it as wilderness is itself a human creation. We’re not leaving a wild area alone—we’re re-creating a wild area by leaving it alone. To me, that’s equally, if not more, beautiful as an idea than if it had always been wild. It shows how we’ve changed as a people. We agree that wilderness is not something to be exploited, but something to be valued.”

  There are no physical memorials to Murray in the Adirondacks, so as a final pilgrimage, I sought out his favorite spot. Today, a vintage-style ferry, the W. W. Durant, plies the sparkling waters of Raquette Lake, past strings of forested islands, including one named Osprey, which has a small jetty and a residence shrouded by trees. At the height of his celebrity in the early 1870s, Murray returned to this islet for weeks every summer to pitch his tent and entertain a multitude of friends and admirers. One enthusiastic guest, sportswriter Charles Hallock, was particularly taken by the author’s “comely wife,” who could be seen around the campsite wearing a hunting cap and a “mountain suit of red and crimson plaid. How jaunty she looked!” Another described the islet as “a scene from fairy land,” with Murray “perfectly aglow with enthusiasm over the wilderness and its attendant sports.” He was also enchanted by Murray’s wife, whom he described as ‘The Lady of the Lake.’”

  William H. H. Murray’s subsequent descent into obscurity was as sudden as his rise to celebrity. Tensions with his conservative Boston church led to his resignation in 1874. (He thought more should be done for the city’s poor.) Five years later, after investing too deeply in horse breeding and spreading his assets thinly, his finances and his marriage both collapsed, and Murray left New England for the anonymity of rural Texas. He failed in several business ventures, started an oyster restaurant in Montreal, and made a cameo appearance in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. In 1886, he revived his skills as an orator, narrating for New England audiences a heartwarming series of short stories about the Adirondacks that featured a heroic trapper named John Norton. (They are little read today, since he “mired himself in a kind of nostalgia and sentimentality,” one critic notes.) He made enough to repurchase his family home in Guilford, Connecticut, where he died in 1904 at age 64.

  Murray’s writings were slowly forgotten except among specialist historians. For a few years, his beloved Osprey Island was commonly referred to as Murray’s Island, but it eventually returned to its original name. Privately owned, it remains off-limits to the public today. His best memorial is, of course, the Adirondack Park—which, with its complex system of ownership and regulation, is rather like Murray the man, eccentric and imperfect. Despite his midlife wanderings, Murray remained a tireless advocate for the park, insisting on the value of public access. In 1902, two years before he died, he wrote in the outdoor magazine Field & Stream that even New York State was only holding the wild lands of the Adirondack Park in trust for future generations. “God made them and made them to stand for what money cannot buy,” he declared.

  MATTHEW POWER

  Excuse Us While We Kiss the Sky

  FROM GQ

  AS SINGAPORE AIRLINES Flight 322 descended through the early-morning haze toward Heathrow, Bradley L. Garrett, PhD—just Brad to his research subjects—looked out over the gray sprawl of London spreading to a horizon streaked by sunrise. He was returning from a monthlong study project in Cambodia, and seeing his adopted city of London again, he thought about all the incomparably strange and wonderful things he had witnessed there over four years—all the dizzying heights and hidden depths.

  The plane touched down and taxied, its passengers cramped and bleary after the 14-hour flight. But when the aircraft reached the gate, its doors didn’t open. After several minutes, the pilot came on the intercom, and Garrett fired off a tweet: “Just landed at Heathrow and we are told the police are boarding our aircraft. Welcome home. x.”

  A group of officers from the British Transport Police (BTP) entered the plane and came down the aisle. They stopped at his seat, 42K. “Dr. Garrett?” “Yes?” “We need you to come with us.” An officer gripped each arm, and they led him down the aisle, past scores of wide-eyed passengers. In first class, former British prime minister Gordon Brown was furious over the delay.

  Garrett was handcuffed and led through passport control, where his ID was seized. Fingerprints, mug shots, and DNA swabs followed. He was eventually led to a holding cell and then an interrogation room. There he was told that he was being investigated for burglary and property destruction, among numerous other possible charges. He had been the subject of a lengthy manhunt by the BTP. His alleged crimes were a blatant affront to the image of a high-tech security state London had constructed for itself. And yet, at one point during his interrogation, Garrett said, an investigator leaned across the table and whispered: “Off the record, Bradley, I love the work that you do.”

  Despite his scholarly bona fides—his doctoral work in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, had garnered wide acclaim—Garrett scarcely looks the part of an academic, neither tweedy nor fusty. Thirty-two years old, with a trimmed goatee and a mop of straight brown hair hanging over black plastic frames, he grew up in Southern California and ran a skate shop before deciding to pursue a doctorate. His face, which is frequently lit up in mischievous, eyebrow-raised delight, still bears the pocks of over a dozen piercings he dispensed with in the interest of maintaining some veneer of academic respectability.

  But it was his doctoral research itself that was perhaps most punk rock. His dissertation in human geography, which he defended earlier in the year, was entitled “Place Hacking.” The title came from his argument that physical space is coded just like the operating system of a computer network, and it could be hacked—explored, infiltrated, recoded—in precisely the same ways. He conducted a deep ethnographic study of a small crew of self-described “urban explorers” who over several years had infiltrated an astonishing array of off-limits sites above and below London and across Europe: abandoned Tube stations, uncompleted skyscrapers, Cold War nuclear bunkers, a derelict submarine. The London crew’s
objective, as much as any of them could agree on one, was to rediscover, reappropriate, and reimagine the urban landscape in what is perhaps the most highly surveilled and tightly controlled city on earth.

  The catchall term for these space-invading activities is urbex, and in recent years it has grown as a global movement, from Melbourne to Minneapolis to Minsk. The urbex ethos is, in theory, low-impact: no vandalism, no theft, take only photographs; as one practitioner put it, “a victimless crime.” Despite some initial skepticism about the legitimacy of the topic by his university advisers, urbex proved to be a rich avenue of inquiry for Garrett—far better than his initial plan to study modern-day Druids. But in the course of his research Garrett had gone native in a big way, acting as both a scientific observer of a fractious subculture and an active participant in its explorations. And he made no excuses for that. “The whole definition of ethnography is that it’s participation,” he told me. “You go out and you interact with people, and you live with them, and you understand their lives.”

  One of the risks of going native, of course, is becoming the public face of the movement you are documenting. Earlier in the year, Garrett’s face was splashed across the British tabloid media as a de facto urbex spokesman when his crew (whom he also refers to as his “project participants” and “research subjects,” depending on the context) released an astonishing series of photos taken high atop the unfinished superstructure of London’s 1,016-foot Shard, the second-tallest building in Europe. People were amazed to see shots of black-masked explorers standing casually atop construction cranes, the city glittering below as if viewed from an airplane.

  There was some dismay that a city investing well over $1 billion on security in the run-up to the Olympics would be caught off-guard so easily. The specter of terrorism was invoked, though Garrett saw his group’s role—like that of “white hat” computer hackers—as probing security flaws to expose them and even suggested, half seriously, that he and his crew should be hired as consultants. Garrett looked at exploration more as an act of playful subversion than outright revolution. To prove it, he had invited me to come along and see this hidden world for myself.

  I arrived at Heathrow on a redeye from New York at the exact same time as Garrett was being detained. After waiting three hours for him in baggage, I took a cab to his flat in South London. There the mystery deepened. The door frame was splintered, and the shattered door was held shut by a pair of fist-size padlocks. A neighbor told me the police had smashed in the door at 6 A.M., just as Garrett was landing. Three other members of his crew—“research subjects” all—had been swept up in a series of simultaneous raids across London.

  As it turned out, the police had not come after Garrett for the notorious Shard tower climb. They were interested in another hack: Garrett’s foray into an old World War II bomb shelter. Hundreds of feet below the streets, the Clapham Common “deep shelter” had been mothballed for decades, until the government rented it out to an American secure-file storage company called Iron Mountain. Garrett had found a way in through a massive air shaft a few blocks from his house. A doorway was forced open; then he and several friends rappelled a hundred feet down into the darkness. A magnetic door alarm was disarmed with gaffer’s tape, and the group spent an evening cheerfully rummaging through box after box of bank files and legal documents. In his 359-page dissertation, Garrett described exactly how the entire operation was carried out in minute detail, and during his interrogation, the investigators flipped through the phone-book-size tome for reference. There was even a picture of him, grinning impishly, next to a stack of secure-file storage boxes.

  Garrett finally arrived at his apartment that evening, 12 hours after he’d been detained. The police had given him keys to the padlocks they’d attached, and the door swung open crookedly. “When they gave me the keys,” he said, “I told them, ‘I hope you locked my house up better than you lock up your Tube stations.’”

  Swigging from the bottle of Jim Beam Black he’d asked me to pick up at duty-free, Garrett surveyed the damage. The police had hoped to find urbex paraphernalia like manhole keys, bolt cutters, lock picks, and high-visibility fluorescent vests used to pass oneself off as a utility worker. Even the curved underwire of a brassiere, which can be used to slip a latch from the outside, would have been considered evidence. But the police had found nothing when they arrived. Garrett had hoped to rent out his small studio on Craigslist while traveling, and the place had been left as empty and spotless as a hotel room.

  In the accrued pile of mail on the floor, there was a letter from Oxford University, offering Garrett a paid research position in the coming academic year. He had only to bring his passport to fill out some forms.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, running his fingers through his hair. His passport, of course, was now in the hands of the British authorities. The Transport Police had interrogated Garrett for hours, asking dozens of questions about his activities and affiliations, all of which he answered with “No comment.”

  Garrett was understandably despondent, and given the world of shit he had just entered—arrest, police investigation, possible deportation—I assumed that he would wish to beg off on the extensive itinerary he had planned for my visit. I offered to leave him to deal with his problems.

  “No way,” he said, looking up from the wreckage around him with a grin. “I’m doubling down.”

  By midnight, five of us were cruising through the streets of South London in a cartoonishly tiny Renault Twingo dubbed the Twinkie, its GPS preprogrammed with the locations of dozens of manholes and Tube stations. I was crammed in with several visiting explorers: Luca, a 28-year-old intensive-care doctor from Italy with a penchant for subterranean exploration; a computer programmer from France named Marc who goes by the nom de urbex Explo; and Helen,1 a strawberry-blond 23-year-old photographer from northeast England whose nickname is Urban Fox. Helen loved climbing bridges more than anything: her website showed a nighttime self-portrait, taken high atop the Manhattan Bridge, posed au naturel. Given that our first adventure was subterranean, the only obvious omission was the group’s underground guru, Greg—nicknamed Otter after going headfirst into a sewer. He had been arrested in the sweep that nabbed Garrett and had a prior court order banning him from exploring in London.

  “He hasn’t been banned from exploring,” clarified Explo, whose French-and-Cockney-inflected English lent itself well to one-liners. “He’s been banned from getting caught.”

  Still, Otter had kindly traced out a route for us to cross London entirely underground, something Garrett insisted was “a first in human history.” Before we set out, Otter had asked if I had ever been in a sewer, and I admitted that I had not.

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s pleasant,” he told me. “But you will be surprised to find how not as bad as you’d think it would be it actually is.”

  Reassuring. How about safety?

  “As long as you time your route with the tides in the Thames,” said Otter, “the chance of drowning will be very low.”

  I see. And will there be rats?

  “Lots.”

  As we passed the hordes of lager louts and lasses lined up outside clubs and vomiting in garbage bins, Garrett expressed his dismay that his own activities were the ones considered inappropriate: “The primary hobby in England is getting absolutely fucked and getting into a fight.” Why should an activity as wholesome as urbex be criminalized? He was convinced the authorities found it suspect precisely because it seemed pointless to them and fit no neat theory of social order.

  Following Otter’s directions, we parked near a railway overpass and quickly suited up in waders and headlamps, trying to look as casual as possible as Garrett and Explo argued over the entry’s precise location. When they found it, Explo stage-whispered, “Action!” Garrett pulled out a T-shaped metal key and inserted it into a hatch in the sidewalk. It opened with a rusty shriek. “That’s how you pop a lid,” he said. In an instant we were piling down slippery rungs
into a dank and pitch-black hole. Garrett descended last, and I heard the manhole cover slam shut with a funereal clang.

  We walked for what seemed like hours along an eight-foot-high tunnel. The experience encompassed an almost laughable agglomeration of stock phobias—darkness, rats, germs, drowning—but Otter was right: It smelled merely musty, not toxic, like wading down an underground stream, and soon I was swept up in the general enthusiasm of the company. As we started sloshing north, the crew’s whoops of delight reverberated—sounding almost Auto-Tuned in the strange acoustics. Garrett told me he had once brought an inflatable raft down here and drifted along with London’s effluent flow.

  I began to get an inkling of the “radical freedom” Garrett had described in urbex. In his dissertation, he wrote that London’s 1,200-mile sewer system has a “noxious comfort.” (The system was engineered after the Great Stink of 1858 by Joseph Bazalgette, who might be surprised that he’s become an urbex hero, given the honorific J-Bizzle.) Garrett sees the sewers as a zone of total self-reliance and personal responsibility. It was true. In a city said to have 200,000 security cameras, we were unmonitored and completely alone. The compass app on my iPhone was utterly useless, spinning in disoriented circles.

  Otter had originally calculated that our journey beneath London, well over 15 miles, would take about 30 hours. But we missed a crucial turn somewhere in the warren of tunnels and soon reached an impasse, our way blocked by a Dantean lake of sewage. Explo wanted to backtrack, and Helen wanted to sleep in the sewer, but logic and exhaustion won out. We popped out into the middle of a quiet side street as a rosy dawn broke over London. We had, by some space-time wormhole, emerged only a few blocks from Garrett’s flat, and we stripped off our hip waders before crashing on his floor, filthy and beat, a chair wedged against the broken door.