The Best American Travel Writing 2013

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  He laughs because he knows I deserved it, but I imagine he wants to clear the air in case I end up with a gore hole.

  I wrote my mom an e-mail last night saying I was scared and I loved my family. I lay awake all night wondering if this was my last night of sleep—turns out that question made it impossible to sleep at all. I wondered if I would be injured to the point I wouldn’t be able to have children. I thought about everything being different after today—different in a very bad way. But here I am. I know I’m being selfish. I know people are worried about me, and that comforts me, and that is selfish, too.

  “I think,” I say, “it’s less about what I would do differently than what I want to do differently when this is over.”

  “How so?” Dan says.

  “You know—living like this,” I say, my hands open to my sangria-soaked shirt, and that’s when it all comes out: “It has to end at some point. I want to try harder after this. Chill the fuck out some when we get home. I’m tired. I have been for a while. Maybe try to have a girlfriend again. Find a new job. You know—we’ve talked about this so many times and we just never do it.”

  “Yeah,” he starts. “I realized that about my job when we were walking around Madrid the other day. I’m just not sure what to change that would change anything significantly. You have your writing, your book. You have something you’re enthusiastic about. Me? I’m not sure.”

  A man comes by handing out newsletter-sized papers. From what I can make out, it is a benediction to the city’s patron saint, Fermín. Fermín is the star of this show.

  “See you in the stadium hopefully,” I say.

  “See you in the stadium,” Dan says.

  We smile and hug, pat each other on the back. We have done this man-hug thing a number of times in the last few years on a number of adventures, but never with such a feeling of potential harm.

  The man finishes handing out the papers. People roll them up, raise them above their heads, and chant, Spanish followed by Basque:

  A San Fermín pedimos, por ser nuestro patrón, nos guíe en el encierro dándonos su bendición.

  Entzun arren San Fermín zu zaitugu patroi, zuzendu gure oinak entzierro hontan otoi.

  VIVA SAN FERMÍN

  GORA SAN FERMÍN

  “There’s no shame in pissing yourself in the next five minutes,” a British man says behind me.

  I laugh and turn.

  “I was just thinking the exact same thing.”

  “Good luck, man,” he says.

  “Good—”

  The rocket fires and the crowd erupts with the sound of carnage you’d expect when enemy sides charge each other, but only one of them carries weapons.

  Everyone’s first move is forward and two guys go down. No one knows what to do but nearly everyone is looking over their inside shoulder, shuffling their feet with uncertainty. A few people start to climb. A few others try to move forward and jam themselves under the wood fences that separate intelligence from stupidity.

  People book it forward. Dan passes a few guys and I don’t bother to follow him directly. A guy to my left goes down and I don’t bother to look back over my outside shoulder to see if he is okay. There is no going back at any time.

  I look over my inside shoulder to make sure the bulls aren’t yet coming, and then look forward to get my sense of direction on the course figured out. I stop moving forward so quickly because I don’t want to get to the next turn in the position I currently have in the crowd—I know I need to move right before the road goes right—always be on the inside. The bulls come with such force, I’ve been told, that they cannot turn the corners on the unforgiving cobblestone and often slip up. You do not want to be between a sliding bull and a brick wall. But I am afraid to run across the middle of the street. It is only a 10-foot space, but it is a 10-foot space that will soon be occupied by the first pack of bulls.

  I keep running forward—fuck—and I’m still on the left side when the turn approaches.

  Fuck I need to fucking get across.

  I’m on the outside.

  I look over my right shoulder, don’t see any bulls but the volume is rising, and I sprint across, dodging people coming up the middle, to the right where people are jammed along the wall. I start to run past the crowd, then fight the first instinct to keep passing them and jam myself into them. I throw myself into the wall of other runners—five feet deep against the wall, moving forward slowly, but I don’t get in. I think I am far enough over, but I do not have anyone protecting me.

  “Here they are!” someone yells from behind, and the faces I see across the street look like faces I imagine in combat without any cover. I don’t see the bulls, but I know those guys do and I know they are fucking close. I keep my back to the wall so if one comes at me I can react as quickly as possible. But there is nowhere to go. It is a mass of people within a mass of people within the mass of people flooding this city. If a bull comes at me it will do what it wants to me. I keep pushing myself on a diagonal—right and forward—and hope the bulls take a wide turn and no one pushes me out.

  And then bulls are coming behind me, I push, I fucking push three bulls across the front, I actually don’t know how many total.

  They look loud but the human noise overtakes theirs.

  More bulls—fucking huge animals—in the back.

  Everyone yells, people scream, duck their heads into their arms, people dive out of the middle, people dive to my feet and scurry forward, people dive right in front of the fucking bulls—they are here, huge, huge bulls charging, here they are, just don’t gore me—throw me, break my arm, knock me down, just don’t gore me.

  The bulls come next to me, not at me, and their momentum carries them left, and they are the biggest mass of living matter I have ever seen, some black, some lighter brown. If they get scared, if something sets one of them off, it will try to kill me. There is nowhere to go. If one of them decides to charge this crowd, it could gore many. It could turn our white clothes much redder than the sangria. The horns look like they could go through me and whoever is behind me and maybe a third. Two feet to my side, a bull passes. I cringe and lock my legs. I could reach out—and it could reach in—

  But it doesn’t.

  The bulls pass and people yell—people yell with a new sense of confidence and charge forward.

  “Let’s go!” someone yells.

  Someone steps on my heel and my shoe nearly comes off, but I am able to reach down and fix it in stride.

  We run with new hope, and I wonder if they know more will be coming. At first I was told there was one group of six, but yesterday I was told there would likely be three groups of several.

  I move out of the pack and sprint for a few seconds, judging by the relative calm that I have a short period of time to cover ground before the next group comes, but I have no idea how long. I sprint—I fucking sprint like you can only sprint when you are sprinting from danger. I sprint with fucking urgency, and then move back to the right. I am in good position along a wall and am still moving. I feel safer than I have since I entered the road almost an hour ago, but the panic rushes right back in again when the volume climbs and I see three bulls over my left shoulder on the inside of the road.

  Someone steps on my right heel. My shoe starts to come off. I grasp at it with my toes without diverting my attention and hobble forward in the crowd, keeping my weight right so no one can push me into the path of the bulls, my hands on the person in front of me. I hobble, shoe dangling, and watch the bulls pass—just don’t gore me, I can handle the rest—I reach down and try to fix the shoe with my right hand, balance with my left—just fucking do it! I do it without falling.

  I don’t know if I will make it into the stadium at this pace. There is one more set of bulls behind us—I don’t know how many—and I have no idea how far I’ve gone. Some people are yelling like all the danger has passed, but I think there are more. People will try to close the stadium gate when the third group is through. I have to make
a move.

  I look over my inside shoulder and go.

  I fucking go and see the long stretch of fence ahead of me on the right that tells me we are close. I fucking go GO GO. I can see it, I can see the stadium. I look over my shoulder and start turning left with the road. I’m on the outside, but I know I’m okay because the crowd is behind me. Then the volume rises and the middle of the road clears. I go right naturally, I think I’m okay. I’m past the turn and look over my left—it comes alone.

  If you see one alone, escape.

  I jump smack into the fence like Griffey and grab but don’t go over. I’m ready to climb in case it comes at me in this crowd—so sparse compared to before—

  I’m not going over.

  If you see one alone, escape.

  I’m going into that fucking stadium.

  If you see one alone, escape.

  I don’t go over, I cringe, and it goes by.

  It passes me and runs toward the stadium door and I don’t know if I should follow it but I do, I fucking sprint, I’m making it into that stadium, that stadium is fucking mine. I pump my arms and my legs, I pass people and pass people, I am making it into that stadium—that fucking stadium is mine. I see one of the huge red doors start to close and I sprint toward it. The gap of light inside is closing, but the closer I get, the higher up in the stands I can see oh my god a sea of white noise. I see people on the sides as the bull passes through and is guided out the other end. There is a jam of people at the closing door and I run right up to them. I keep pushing forward and squeeze through the door and fucking sprint into the tunnel. I gain speed and the stadium reveals itself—full of screaming fans—everyone in white with their red neckerchiefs. I feel the dirt below my feet so soft and forgiving and I am displacing it all and I am in the Plaza de Toros, the motherfucking Plaza de Toros de Pamplona. I start yelling as I run—I fucking scream and let it out. I let it all out and it flows out of me like a release of pressure that shouldn’t build in a person. I scream and in the very middle of the circle—I’m in a fucking bullfighting ring—I’m in the Plaza de Toros de Pamplona on July 7 and people are screaming for me and I am letting it all out, it’s flowing from me. I stop in the middle and start jumping with the others. I jump and I scream and we chant and I jump, I fucking jump higher and higher and release it all. I know Dan is here with me. I can’t see him but I know it. I raise my hands above my head and jump so I am facing different directions—all these people—all these people in white standing, waiting for me to get here, all these people—20,000, 25,000, a million—cheering me on.

  I look up at them, they look down at me, and we let it out and release it—and it all makes sense—

  This is why—

  This is who I am, maybe it will change, maybe it—

  Maybe there is a moderate amount of self-preservation revealed through a self-destructive—shut the fuck up and jump!

  I’m connected to people I don’t know. I jump I fucking jump. A part of a culture so foreign—immersion I’ve never known. Acceptance and capability—fucking whatever just jump! And I don’t feel proud, I don’t feel brave, and I don’t feel manly or deserving or fortunate—just yell and jump and turn in the air and see the white, the cylindrical wall of white bodies enclosing me, centering me, thousands of white bodies building up and out above me in this stadium, this bullring—hear the volume and jump and yell and it flows back and forth, me to them and back again, and I feel—

  I just feel—oh my oh my do I feel.

  JUDY COPELAND

  The Way I’ve Come

  FROM Legal Studies Forum

  ALONE ON THE grassy airstrip, I empty my backpack and kneel to sort my supplies for the climb up the mountain wall. I’ve landed in a tight little valley called Tekin, in Sandaun Province, whose massive ranges straddle Papua New Guinea’s border with Indonesia. The plane, still droning faintly somewhere above the fog, will soon be gone. The grass is wet and cold under my knees.

  As I sort, a crowd of men gather to watch me, murmuring in Pidgin, “Very fat woman!” and “Em fall down, true!” They are all very short, less than five feet tall, thin and wiry, wearing baseball caps and ragged T-shirts and scowling the same fierce scowls that startled me two weeks ago when I boarded the flight from Manila to Port Moresby and looked into the faces of the flight attendants. I’ve noticed that the expression doesn’t necessarily signify anger. Some New Guineans continue to knit their brows even when they smile.

  Luckily, some of the men speak English. When I ask them about the last backpacker to leave from Tekin, they aren’t sure when he disappeared.

  “A month ago,” one says.

  “No, a year,” another shouts.

  They talk about the ongoing police inquest, and debate what has become of him. Since people disappear all the time in the bush and there are lots of possible explanations, I don’t really expect an answer. On one thing, however, the men agree: the backpacker was last seen quarreling with his guides over their pay; afterward, the guides returned to Tekin without him.

  As I listen to the story, I wish I didn’t have to hire a guide.

  I’ve been a solo hiker for almost 40 years, ever since I was two. As an American missionary kid in Japan, I used to run away from home every few days just for the thrill of it. By the time I was three, my parents had grown used to policemen finding me and bringing me back. I remember clambering over our bamboo fence and whizzing through the college campus where my parents taught, heedless of which way I ran, nearly colliding with students with shaved heads and black uniforms, reaching the tall department stores of the business district 10 blocks away, then ducking into the mysterious maze of alleys behind them.

  After we moved to the States when I was nine, I felt so frightened by all the warnings about kidnappers and child molesters that I stopped running away. It wasn’t until I grew up and began backpacking alone in the North American wilderness that I reclaimed some of that old joy of running loose. Yet, two months ago, still haunted by a vague yearning for something lost, something missing from my life as an American lawyer, I quit my job and began island-hopping through Southeast Asia, an adventure that has brought me to Sandaun Province.

  What I haven’t reckoned on is the terrain. This morning, sitting next to an Australian missionary pilot in a little six-seater Cessna, I looked down and saw the Highland trails meander through wide valleys and over rolling hills until they vanished in the needle-sharp peaks that form the long spine of Papua New Guinea. We climbed up into the clouds, then swooped below them again, through passes so narrow I could almost reach out and graze my fingers along fern-covered mountainsides. From a small plane, you can see every thatched hut, every outhouse, every pathway leading to it. Here and there, peering into gaps too tight even for the Cessna, I glimpsed a deep, sunless valley. At the bottom a dim clump of little huts lay trapped, like children who’d fallen down an abandoned well.

  I shouted to the pilot, Nigel, “Do the people in those valleys ever get over to the next valley to visit their neighbors?”

  “No,” he yelled above the roar of the engine, “they live and die on that spot.”

  Unlike other expatriates I’d met, Nigel didn’t question my plans, just my choice of the word walk to describe them. “Have a look down there! Do you see anywhere to walk? Do you see any trails? You don’t walk in Sandaun. You skid on your butt. You throw up. It takes hours to slog up one little hill, and the slogging makes you sick to your stomach. Not to mention the sinkholes. Some mountains are so close that the bush on either side grows together and hides the gaps between them. People have stepped into those sinkholes and disappeared without a trace.”

  Then the nose of the Cessna dropped abruptly, zeroing in on Tekin, and we dived into the fog. Amazed he could land blind in such a narrow valley, I said it just didn’t seem possible.

  “True,” Nigel mused as we tilted into a curve, “according to the laws of science, it isn’t possible. An airplane isn’t supposed to be able to do this.” He
turned to beam at me: “If it weren’t for the Lord, we’d probably crash.”

  I searched his face to see if he was joking, but he wasn’t. I stared at Nigel, at the neatly ironed pilot’s shirt-and-shorts with matching khaki knee-highs, at the ears jutting out at right angles from his head, and the long-toothed Bobby Kennedy grin. To look at him, I would have taken him for a scientist of some sort—a surveyor, perhaps, sent to ink in the last blank valleys on a map hanging on the solid wall of a cartographic institute—an avatar of rationality, anything but a loony who thought the Lord could hold an airplane in the sky. I knew his words were meant to cheer me, but for the first time since coming to New Guinea, I felt a shiver of real fear.

  Once on the ground, I sort my supplies into two piles: things to haul up the mountainside and things to leave behind. Other than a short, unpaved motor road leading to the village of Kweptana, there’s nowhere to walk out of Tekin but straight up, nothing but steep mountain walls on all sides. Nevertheless, considering that I could as easily die from flying as from climbing, I choose the mode of travel less dependent on the Lord. My climbing supplies, at least, are under my control.

  My gear in tow, I wave goodbye to the men at the airstrip and head up the dirt road. Nigel suggested a climb he’d done himself—over a mountain to a village called Bimin—and he said I would need a guide for the steepest part. At least I can walk alone as far as Kweptana, and en route, I can overnight at a vacant mission house, to which Nigel has lent me a key.

  The road meanders upward through well-kept gardens, high-canopied forests, and swirling mists. When occasionally I meet people walking toward Tekin, they shake my hand warmly and advise me I’m too fat to make it to Bimin, which I find oddly reassuring. Since nobody expects me to reach Bimin anyway, I reason, there’ll be no shame in turning around if I lose my nerve. I smile and thank the people and walk on.

  After several hours, I spot the mission house, its corrugated-iron roof shimmering like a silver spider web in the last rays of the sun. It’s a steep climb down from the road, a scramble over several fences of sharp stakes built to keep pigs out of people’s sweet potatoes. You can’t walk anywhere in Papua New Guinea without risking impalement.