The Best American Travel Writing 2016

by Bill Bryson

  The laminated instructions left by the faceless Airbnb host/management company included strong admonishments to keep quiet and not talk to anybody else I might encounter. My checkout instructions included taking my printed map and itinerary with me when I left. “Why?” the instructions read. “Because we really don’t like people we don’t know finding directions to our apartment in the trash.”

  But the odd thing was I never saw anyone coming or going from the building, anyway—not once in four days, not another soul. Was anyone even there? I hoped so. It would be too lonely, otherwise. I could assume only that the building was populated with people who, like me, were for some reason nervous and dislocated, and therefore quiet—unsure whether they belonged. Maybe the place was full of migrant workers or runaways who’d turned to prostitution. Or could it be that behind each door was a traveler who’d rented an apartment that had looked tidy and appealing on the Airbnb website and was now just politely trying to stay hidden? I didn’t know; I’d never know. In the half-conscious fog of my jet lag, the building felt to me like a giant ghost ship moving through the night, and I imagined us—whoever we were—on a dark ocean, drifting away from whatever land we understood.

  DAVE EGGERS

  The Actual Hollister

  FROM The New Yorker

  The year I turned 43, I woke up one morning and thought it would be a good day to go to Hollister. I’d been seeing those hoodies around, and the place had been on my mind. So I found an old atlas in my garage, checked the map of California to make sure I remembered how to get there, and left. No one was expecting me and I wasn’t expecting anything. It was the kind of trip a middle-aged man takes when his children are at a trampoline birthday party.

  The drive took two hours from the San Francisco Bay Area, south on 280 to 85 to 101 to 25. Along 280, there are tens of thousands of acres of heavily wooded hills surrounding the Crystal Springs Reservoir. It is incalculably valuable land, all of it protected. Eventually it flattens out a bit, and the climate gets drier as you drop into the Central Valley. The hills go from green to gold, but are no less beautiful. Soon, there are farms on either side of the highway, and pumpkin sellers and stables and dust. It feels very Old West, and you’re only an hour or so from San Francisco.

  Hollister emerges in no particular hurry. Tidy rows of onions, cherry trees, and bell peppers give way to a small factory or two—a group of women in hairnets were taking a break in front of Marich Confectionery as I passed—and then there are diners and gas stations and, finally, a downtown that seems timeless without being in any way quaint. There is a beautiful red brick church, Hollister United Methodist, and, within walking distance, an array of well-kept Victorian homes, but there are empty storefronts and vacant offices, too. On the town’s main thoroughfare, San Benito Street, I drove past an office building with a sign in the window:

  THIS BUILDING IS NOT EMPTY IT IS FULL OF POTENTIAL

  Nearby, a pair of women were standing on a corner holding signs that said PRAY TO END ABORTION. Behind them was a pawnshop, and down the way Hazel’s Thrift Shop and a motel called Cinderella—not to be confused with the nearby quinceañera and bridal shop, which offers clothing for “both novias and princesas.” The town bleeds into agriculture on all sides, and beyond the farms are the hills, largely unmarred by any construction.

  It is a strangely complete town, like something out of a Richard Scarry book. There are factories, farms, schools, railroads, horses, sheep, goats, and barns. There are men wearing cowboy hats and driving pickup trucks. There is a baseball-card shop. A sign for the high-school homecoming dance advertises its theme: A DISNEY BALL.

  I’d been to Hollister twice since I moved to the West Coast from Illinois, 23 years ago. Each time, I made a point of first visiting the old Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital. On this visit, I remembered it being close to the town center, and, sure enough, I found it easily. But something seemed different. A sign out front read PRAYER IS THE BEST WAY TO GET TO HEAVEN—BUT TRESPASSING IS FASTER. Then, on the corner of Hawkins and Monterey, I saw a large sign that said FOR LEASE. This was new to me—what was once a town centerpiece, a delicate Spanish colonial with Italianate flourishes, had apparently been carved up into small offices. I parked and looked more closely.

  I figured that given the building’s origin as a hospital, and its status as one of the town’s oldest buildings, the occupants would be of the nonprofit sort—Junior League, Historical Society, Ladies Auxiliary. So I walked up the left-leaning white steps, noting that the sculpted cherubs on the front portico had been repainted without great care. To the right of the front door, a sign in the bay window announced, FREE FIRST MONTH RENT. GREAT DEALS. Through the window, I could see a desk, and on it an early-1990s computer in the beginning stages of decomposition. The contrast between the building’s rococo exterior and its garage-sale interior was startling.

  In the lobby, on a low table, there was a tidy array of brochures and business cards for taxi operators, churches, faith healers, and purveyors of bail bonds. To the left was the New Light Embassy, which billed itself as a “Whole Brain Learning & Hypnotherapy Center . . . Enriching, Developing, and Empowering, the Human Potential.” Occupying much of the right wing of the building was the NewLife Worship Center.

  But there was no one inside. No one in the New Light Embassy, no one in the NewLife Worship Center. “Did you know Jesus attended church?” a green leaflet asked. “This is something we do not hear about often, but it is true.” Then, in the sad silence of the dormant building, there was a sound. A thumping. I followed it down the hallway to a door. A floor mat in front said ELI’S CHOP SHOP, alongside a tricolored barber pole. Voices could be heard amid the hip-hop, and for a second I was so happy to know that there was someone in this building that I thought about going inside. But instead I left.

  On the front lawn, under an old willow, I stood with no clear idea of what to do. I watched a man across the street cutting his grass and I cycled through a series of conclusions and emotions. I was saddened by the state of the building. The interior was gloomy, and the tenants seemed temporary and uncommitted to the upkeep of the building. And I cared about this why?

  Fifteen years ago, the word “Hollister” meant little to anyone. Now it’s hard to walk around any city, from Melbourne to Montreal to Mumbai, without seeing it stitched on someone’s shirt or hoodie. Abercrombie & Fitch, which launched Hollister in 2000, has done an extraordinary job with brand penetration: in 2013 there were 587 Hollister stores around the world, and the brand netted more than $2 billion in sales.

  The clothes themselves rarely depart from the realm of sweatshirts and sweatpants—they’re eerily similar to the comfort-wear you can buy at Target or Walmart. But a Hanes hoodie at Target is $13, while a Hollister hoodie is $44.95. This implies that “Hollister” itself means something and is worth something.

  For years, employees of Hollister stores, during orientation, were given the story, and it goes something like this: John M. Hollister was born at the end of the 19th century and spent his summers in Maine as a youth. He was an adventurous boy who loved to swim in the clear and cold waters there. He graduated from Yale in 1915 and, eschewing the cushy Manhattan life suggested for him, set sail for the Dutch East Indies, where he purchased a rubber plantation in 1917. He fell in love with a woman named Meta and bought a 50-foot schooner. He and Meta sailed around the South Pacific, treasuring “the works of the artisans that lived there,” and eventually settled in Los Angeles, in 1919. They had a child, John Jr., and opened a shop in Laguna Beach that sold goods from the South Pacific—furniture, jewelry, linens, and artifacts. When John Jr. came of age and took over the business, he included surf clothing and gear. (He was an exceptional surfer himself.) His surf shop, which bore his name, grew in popularity until it became a globally recognized brand. The Hollister story is one of “passion, youth and love of the sea,” evoking “the harmony of romance, beauty, adventure.”

  None of this is true. Most of Abercrombie
& Fitch’s brands—including the now-defunct Gilly Hicks and Ruehl No. 925—have had fictional backstories, conceived by Mike Jeffries, the company’s former CEO. Abercrombie & Fitch told the Los Angeles Times that the company pulled the name Hollister out of thin air, so any connection between the brand and the town is coincidental. Even so, the company’s relationship with Hollister, California, population 36,000, has not exactly been one of benevolent indifference.

  In 2006 a Hollister merchant put RAG CITY BLUES: HOLLISTER on vintage blue jeans and decided to file a federal trademark application for her label. She subsequently received threats from attorneys representing Abercrombie & Fitch. She was baffled; the lawyers had told her, in essence, that putting her town’s name on the clothing would provoke a lawsuit—that the trademark attached to its brand superseded the rights of the town. (The company sees its legal opposition to the merchant as strictly a trademark issue, which has nothing to do with the merchant’s being from Hollister.) According to the L.A. Times, students at a local high school worried that their sports uniforms would engender more legal letters. In an effort to smooth things over, town leaders suggested to Abercrombie that the company open an outlet in Hollister. It seemed to make sense—a Hollister store in the town of Hollister—but they were told that the company’s aspirational brand would not find the right audience in Hollister. (The company does not have any recollection of this request.)

  The town has no mall and few boutiques or cafés. It is not a tourist destination, like nearby Salinas, the home of John Steinbeck, or Gilroy, known as “the garlic capital of the world.” Many of its older residents are Caucasian, but Hollister’s demographics have been changing for the past 50 years, and today 67 percent of residents identify as Latino. Most of them work on the surrounding farms or in the few nearby factories. Hollister is an unglamorous town, but its name is now associated with some degree of taste and status all over the world. Which is odd, because the town benefits in almost no way from this success.

  The rise of the Hollister brand has been especially strange to me, because it was my great-great-grandfather T. S. Hawkins who helped found the town of Hollister. Growing up, I was confronted daily by his white-bearded face, in an old photograph that hung in our living room in Illinois. A few feet away, his rifle, which he carried from Missouri to California, rested over our mantel.

  The real story of Hollister begins in Marion County, Missouri, 20 miles from Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, in 1836. This is when T. S. Hawkins was born, the eldest of nine children, his parents farmers, their people having traveled from Ireland and England and Scotland to the early Virginia settlements.

  The Hawkins family lived in two adjoining log cabins with one roof covering both. The boys of the family slept in the attic, near the clapboard roof, and listened to the tapping of the rain in the summer. “The boards made a good roof to turn off the rain,” Hawkins wrote in his autobiography, Some Recollections of a Busy Life, self-published in 1913.

  But in the winter when the wind blew the fine snow would drift through the interstices between the boards of the roof. It was glorious up in the old-fashioned feather bed, with the blankets pulled up to one’s ears, listening to the roar of the wind, the pelting of the hail and snow and the war of the elements, until one fell asleep.

  In the morning, we would awake to find the bedding and the floor covered an inch or more in drifted snow . . . It seems at this distance a rough life; but I do not remember that we ever considered it so, and it certainly served to make one hardy and self-reliant.

  They hunted squirrels and quail and the occasional possum, and they ate their own pigs, in bacon and ham form, three times a day, for months on end. They made wool clothing for special occasions, but for everyday clothes they used bark—bark of “various trees,” Hawkins notes, though it’s hard to picture the clothing. You have to assume it was a fabric that breathed.

  Hawkins attended the customary one-room schoolhouse, a few months a year, until he was 16. At that point, with his younger brothers able to take on his duties at the farm, Hawkins was freed to pursue his education. He made out for Kentucky, to live with his grandfather, a journey of 500 miles, which for a “diffident, awkward, backwoods boy” felt “like going out of the world.”

  He tried his hand at teaching, and then medicine, before returning home with $300.

  I was content to remain idle for a short time, spending my days floating down the Meramec in my canoe or resting under the shade of the trees. But this could not last long, and soon I commenced to look around for something to do. From our home the nearest village was twenty miles. Scattered here and there was a country store. There was none nearer than seven or eight miles from our place, and I conceived the idea that I could establish myself in the business . . .

  I immediately went to work with a carpenter, and by the end of July, I had a building twenty by forty feet, with shelving and counter complete. I had already gone to St. Louis to a firm who were engaged in the business of furnishing country stores, and as I was entirely ignorant of what I needed, they selected a stock invoicing about two thousand dollars, on which I paid my three hundred dollars, and the balance they carried for me.

  It’s important to note several things at this point. First, a wholesaler provided T. S. Hawkins with $2,000 worth of goods, which in today’s currency would be about $50,000. Second, although Hawkins had no experience in retail sales, the wholesaler was risking the credit, with no collateral. Third, Hawkins was all of 21 years old.

  The store was successful. Hawkins served as his own “clerk, janitor, bookkeeper and everything else.” When it got dark, he would go home for his evening meal before returning to the store, where he would “pull a cot from under the counter, make it up, and sleep until morning with a gun by my side. As a good many rough characters visited the mountains, it was not considered safe to leave the store, a half mile from the nearest house, over night.”

  The next year, he married Catherine Patton, a well-bred woman from two old southern families. Within a year, her health began to fail, and their doctor recommended that they move to a milder, drier climate. Hawkins sold up, and began preparing for a trip out West. By the time he was ready, he and Catherine had a baby, a boy named T.W., and the traveling party had grown to 20 people, including Hawkins’s father and his brother-in-law, along with 60 head of cattle, 4 wagons, 14 horses, and 17 oxen.

  This was not the great emigration of the gold rush, 10 years earlier. The Hawkinses saw other wagons only intermittently. They expected to come across ample bison to shoot and eat, but found none; during the journey, they were able to kill only two antelope. Instead, they relied on trade with Indians, with other travelers, and with settlers. There had recently been a notorious event, the Mountain Meadows massacre, in southern Utah, in which 120 men, women, and children from Arkansas were killed by Mormon militias masquerading as Native Americans, and so the Hawkins party joined forces with another wagon train heading west from Illinois. But the Mormons they encountered as they neared Salt Lake were friendly, Hawkins wrote.

  As we had been living on bacon and salt meats, with no vegetables for so long, I sought out a large house which I thought gave promise of affluence. I knocked on the front door, but received no answer, so I went to the back of the house, where under a tree sat a large, solid-looking man with a babe on each knee, while a dozen other children, from two to eight years, were playing around. Two women were washing clothes in the same tub, while a third was hanging them (the clothes, not the women) out to dry. It was my first view of polygamy. The man, as all others I met later, looked fat and happy, while all the women looked tired and careworn.

  They traveled across the Bear River, and only then did they experience the kind of hardship and tragedy that all western travelers had come to expect.

  In the Illinois company was a dare-devil of a young man, and when the cattle were well into the river he followed them on his horse. He had about reached the middle, the horse swimming gallantly, when th
e man and horse suddenly disappeared. After a time the horse came to the surface further across, but we never saw the young man again. We camped on the bank and all hands turned out to search for the body. The ferryman assured us that it was entirely useless, that Bear River never gave up its dead.

  They traversed the Sierra Nevadas. They found Angels Camp and French Camp and crossed the Livermore Valley southwest to San Francisco Bay, near Milpitas. Hawkins finally arrived in Mountain View in 1860.

  “So ended our journey across the plains,” he wrote. “I have read somewhere the saying that the ‘Good Lord takes care of children and fools.’ Looking backward, I cannot but feel that we must have belonged to one or both of those divisions of humanity.”

  The health of Catherine Hawkins initially improved, but she died less than two years after the journey. To some, this would have seemed like a cruel trick played by a malevolent god. But Hawkins decided to stay in California.

  Only those who have lost the companion of their young manhood can know the utter darkness that can come and the feeling that the bottom has dropped out of one’s hopes and aspirations, that the world has come to an end, so far as one’s own life is concerned. I realized, however, that hard work and unceasing work was the only panacea for me.