The Best Travel Writing 2011

by James O'Reilly

  Before making love, my wife and I made fun of the bulbous TV-salesmen and their blustery fraus, my wife braying, “Cooked snails! Cooked snails!” and me wheezing, “Shut up and fill your purse!” Then, after we made love, feeling close enough to her to take a chance, I said, “In a weird way, I like them.”

  “That would be weird,” she said.

  “Maybe that’ll be us in thirty years.”

  “God forbid,” she said, coughing up Drambuie.

  “You know, giving advice to newlyweds, pictures of kids—”

  “Synchronized belching.”

  I realized I had made a mistake. “O.K., I get it.” We were quiet for a minute, and then I rolled onto her. “And now maybe I want to get it again.”

  But something bothered her. She draped her arm around me and let me nibble her neck, then sighed and went limp. We had been up early that morning for muster drill. We were both tired, and I felt a little rejected. So I just sighed and also went limp.

  In the earliest days, photographers had to load their film into reusable cassettes and, at least for some cameras, cut the film leader. But in 1934 there was a huge breakthrough. Eastman Kodak introduced 35mm-wide, daylight-loading, single-use, cartridge film, principally for use in its new “Retina” camera—but, of course, adopted by competitors. In 1935 Kodak launched its 35mm Kodachrome color film. Because of its ease of use and stunning transparencies, this slide film quickly grew in popularity, becoming, by the late 1960s, the most popular photographic format. (Its lexicon remains, even if the film does not: the term slide show on our computer photo programs was derived from Kodak’s innovation.)

  Our first slide camera was a Kodak Automatic 35R4, which I bought for my wife as a wedding present, in honor of our many future trips together. I didn’t have much money; this sturdy little slide-taker cost under a hundred bucks. What’s more, unlike expensive Leicas and Nikons, our honeymoon Kodak was very simple to use. When it comes to photography, I’m kind of stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I never did understand, nor had the patience to learn, the meaning of f-stops or shutter speed or focal lengths or ISO numbers or aperture settings or the dozen various dials and buttons that were the hallmark of upper-bracket cameras.

  I don’t recall if on our honeymoon cruise I told my wife how lucky I felt every time we sat on the Lido deck in the moonlight or walked together down one island Front Street or another. I wish I had told her more.

  As the years rolled along, we traveled a lot. We took a lot of pictures. We would carefully pack our film in lead-lined travel bags, so it wouldn’t be corrupted by airport X-ray scanners, and once home we raced to the camera store to get it developed. Ten days was a long time, but that’s how long it took. Ten days seemed long. We had an agreement. If we didn’t pick up the slides together, we wouldn’t peek at them until they were in the projector, so we could view them at the same time. We would cuddle on the couch with a tub of popcorn and relive our recent experiences. I knew she cheated. It wasn’t in her not to sneak a look at the pictures before she got home. Sometimes I would notice a number out of order or a slide upside down coming out of the package, or if she had loaded the tray, a slide would appear on the screen upside down or backwards, and I knew she had broken her promise. But I never said anything about it.

  In his final years, George Eastman was plagued by a degenerative disorder of his spine. He had trouble standing, and his walking became a slow shuffle. In intense pain and frustrated at his inability to maintain an active life, on March 14, 1932, when he was seventy-seven, he shot himself in his heart.

  Sometimes I will be sleeping, other times I will be lying awake in the dark, watching imaginary bursts of light, listening to the click-clack of a nonexistent slide projector. Click-clack. Here is a picture I took while kneeling on the deck of a chartered sailboat, my wife, wearing a scarlet two-piece, smiling against a backdrop of billowing sails and lapis sky. She is very happy. The breeze washes wisps of her silky blond hair across her smile. The warm, clear sea is in her azure eyes, a morning beach in her high, smooth cheeks. She is very happy. In the slide’s outsize projection, colors are so vibrant—reds bursting, magentas pulsing—the images are almost living, breathing beings—three-dimensional creatures hovering long into the night.

  I can’t recall now if this was one of our actual pictures or just in my head. I don’t remember.

  Clack-click. The slide projector sounds like a semi-automatic weapon. You load a tray like a clip, insert it into its receiver with a sturdy, satisfying clack; you press a button, and, click, a “shell” drops into place and explodes onto the screen. The original Kodak projector trays were rectangular and held only forty rounds. But the projector my wife and I owned, we didn’t have to reload as often. The trays were circular, similar to that of a World War I machine gun’s bullet magazine, and they held 160 pictures.

  In the bursts of color and dust-swirling blasts from the projector’s muzzle, there is something else about slides different from ordinary pictures. If they, with their bigger-than-life, dazzling images that, as in Proust’s childhood bedroom, block out the familiar world and blur the distinction between imaginary and real, they might well render the image more real than the original, the actual events inferior to the memory. Slides, then, may create a world where false memory—the illusion of an idealized past—replaces the true experience they represent. A frozen smile, a colonial facade glinting in the sunlight, expensive jewelry, the happy glow of sand-smooth cheeks, become billowing sails of illusion.

  Clack-click. Here is a picture of my wife, hair and halter top drenched, leaning against the owner of the plantation inn where we often stayed in St. Thomas. They are standing under an eave of the great house, rain bullets slicing behind them. They are holding onto each other, half-mugging, half-in-earnest, as Hurricane Lenny mows down the Eastern Caribbean. In my wife’s eyes you can see the strain we all felt, holed up for four days, watching our roofs billow, listening all night to their timbers’ ghostly wails, wincing from the far-off surf crashing thunder-like against the town. In the horizontal rain, denuded palm trees bend like jackknifed legs, their nesting birds long dead. A torrent of brown runoff roils down the stairs and mountainside, down, down. For once the Kodachrome is lusterless, soaked gray, as if the developing process had broken down. But the soddenness is not the film. It is in the deluged earth. In the slide’s absence of color you can feel the utter wetness, the oxygen-starved, muted red of my wife’s bathing suit, the winter brown of her hair, the cistern gray of the owner’s shirt and beard. He hugs her shoulder, my wisp of a wife, preventing her from being sucked into the storm. He smiles, she frowns. She wants to go home. We have run out of food. There has been no electricity for three days. The only drinking water is what guests collect from the great-house roof. In front of my wife and the owner sits a large cooking vat, which they had just filled with rainwater, each holding a handle, before I told them to turn and face the camera. I do not like this picture. There is something primordially evil about hurricanes, something that suggests original sin. When we found ourselves trapped on island, I thought it might be an interesting experience, something to tell our (future) children. But it did not work out that way. Now I remember something else. When I shouted above the wind for the owner and my wife to put down the vat and turn around, when I snapped that picture, how hard it was to breathe.

  Because digital photography is the new technology, it is virtually impossible to get 35mm slide film anymore. The truth is, for all of its magic, Kodachrome was doomed. It was a difficult film to manufacture and even more complex to process. There is only one remaining photofinishing lab in the world processing Kodachrome: Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas. And that will last only until either Dwayne’s chemicals run out or he does.

  I haven’t bought a digital camera yet, but one day I might. In the meantime, my original Kodak 35R4 sits on my closet shelf, collecting dust. I thought I might one day show it to my kids, just as those Nebraskan partiers must now be showing th
eir grandkids pictures of that long-ago cruise. That’s what I thought. But it’s just in the closet. It may still have a partially exposed roll of film in it. Maybe someday I’ll throw it away.

  Gary Buslik writes essays, short stories, and novels. He teaches literature, creative writing, and travel writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work appears often in Travelers’ Tales anthologies. You can visit his latest book, A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean, at www.arottenperson.com.

  BILL FINK

  All in the Same House

  Saints come in all kinds of strange disguises.

  THE RAIN PELTING THE GLASS WALLS OF MY PHONE booth woke me at dawn, still a hundred miles from Hiroshima. I was sitting on my backpack, legs cramped against my chest, head cushioned against the glass by a dirty t-shirt. Overnight while sleeping in the booth, my body had curled into the shape of Japanese Kanji character, I thought perhaps the symbol for “back pain.”

  I had been searching for a home, both figurative and literal, for some time in Japan. For six months as an exchange student, I studied the language and culture in an effort to fit into this very foreign land. But it was difficult to feel like I belonged. Even a simple question about my birthday could create trouble. Whenever I told older Japanese my birth date of August 15, they would suck in their breath, hiss it out between clenched teeth, and tell me it was “Haisen no Hi” (“day of defeat,”) the date in 1945 when the Japanese surrendered to the U.S. to end World War II after the atomic bomb attacks.

  While on break from my studies, I had decided to hit the road, hitchhiking solo across the country to mix with the Japanese. But it was slow going, as rides were scarce, some cars stopping only to take pictures of the funny foreigner on the highway.

  The prior night, I hitchhiked as far as the Okayama train station, hoping to sleep in the terminal to stay out of the rain. But an insular gang of homeless Japanese men kicked me from my space next to the pornography vending machine. The only other dry, unoccupied spot I could find was a phone booth.

  I worried about my reception in Hiroshima. I planned to visit the ruins of the nuclear blast, to experience how the city had been reborn in the generations after the war. But I wasn’t sure if the natives were friendly. I hoped my pathos would be my protection. Perhaps a skinny, soggy, solo nineteen-year-old would pose no lingering threat to the locals.

  After a full day waiting by the roadside, I met a trucker who drove me the rest of the way to Hiroshima station. I exited the truck into growing darkness. The neon signs above dingy alleyway storefronts gave the derelicts and street vendors an ominous red glow. They alternately stared at me and ignored my presence. It was time to look for lodging, and I knew the station held no hope for me.

  My guidebook mentioned a youth hostel in the hills above town. I cut through alleyways, empty noodle stalls, and gravel parks, but the twisting dead ending, unsigned roads kept bringing me back to the station. Already 10 P.M., with no sign of the hostel, my back twinged at the thought of another night in a phone booth. I shivered in my still damp clothes, scanning trees for rain cover.

  I stopped in a convenience store to buy a candy bar for dinner and vainly asked for directions. Exiting the shop, I nearly collided with a thick elderly woman carrying a heavy sack. She turned her head up to stare directly into my face, her punch-permed hair jiggling as she looked me up and down. With her large cloth bag, flowered smock, and solid posture, she looked like the Japanese wife of Santa Claus.

  “You!” she barked in English, “You! Where you go?” She leaned forward, head practically touching my chest, eyes squinting, lips pursed.

  “I go Youth Hostel. Yoooos Hostelu,” I added, trying the Japanese pronunciation of the English word.

  “No Yoos Hostelu. No!” She crossed her arms to make an “X” shape, like a basketball referee signaling a flagrant foul.

  I wasn’t sure if this meant I shouldn’t go there, or I couldn’t go there. Did it exist at all, or was I just hopelessly lost?

  “Yoos Hostel full! All full! No room!” She took a step back and put her hands on her hips, daring me to contradict her. My face must have dropped, realizing my plight.

  “You stay my house! House!” She shouted, laughing and slapping her thigh at this apparent witticism. “You! Wait! Here!” She pointed at a spot underneath a street light. “Car come. You wait.” She picked up her sack and walked away, looking back once to make sure I had obeyed orders.

  About ten minutes later, a rusting brown Toyota compact car rolled to a stop in front of me. The head of a wizened old man barely poked above the dashboard. When he saw me, he smiled and began nodding vigorously, waving his bony hand downwards to indicate I should come.

  “House?” he asked me.

  “Um, yes, house.”

  He cackled with glee, repeating “house,” his head bowing so deep with laughter that I could no longer see it through the window. He popped up to say, “Yes, yes, you come house. Very good. We are friends. Friends!” He thrust his thin hand toward me, causing me to self-consciously flinch, imagining a karate attack from an ancient master. I sheepishly shook his offered hand, and hopped in the car.

  We drove to a trash-strewn gravel parking lot behind a two-story concrete bunker of an apartment complex. It looked like a parking garage invaded by squatters. We walked up a back stairway, the old man surprisingly spritely on the dark steps.

  He reached for the door handle, and stopped. He turned to me, trying to suppress the grin on his face, like a little kid trying to hide a whoopee cushion. He turned the handle slowly, then flung open the door, shouting “HOUSE! HOUSE!”

  Mrs. Japanese Claus sat tucked under a low table in the middle of a cluttered room. She shrieked with laughter as a terrified terrier dog dove into a box in the corner, causing the couple to laugh even harder. I remained in the doorway ready to flee this crazy scene.

  “That, the dog house,” the woman said, pointing to the box. She stood to lift the trembling dog, and we had formal introductions. They were the Yamadas, and the dog’s name, amazingly enough, was Santa. Now soothed, Santa trotted to the table, looking for scraps of food.

  “HOUSE!” She shouted again at Santa, who tore the tatami mat with his claws in an effort to speed back to his “house,” the dog box.

  “Santa speak English. Bilingual dog, yo,” said the proud teacher, arms folded across her chest.

  “Our house, your house,” said Mr. Yamada, gesturing around the small one bedroom apartment, “You stay, you eat!”

  I joined them for an extended meal of soups, fried noodles, and fish. I learned that Mr. Yamada worked long hours as a street sweeper, his wife in a laundry. The economic miracle of Japan had somehow left them behind. Yet they provided me food and shelter as if they were mayors of the city. He spread a futon for me in the corner of the room, and rushed to the end of the hallway to prepare my bath.

  We shared a jolly chat in broken English about the weather, about my studies in Japan, my skills with chopsticks, everything except the obvious. Perhaps sixty or seventy years old, my hosts may have been teenagers during WWII. Most older Japanese tend to remain in the same area they were raised. Thus, they were most likely in the vicinity when a pilot from my country dropped the bomb that killed over one hundred thousand of their neighbors.

  When I did bring up the war, after many shared cups of sake, they both nodded and were quiet a moment. Mrs. Yamada said the city was “like this,” she waved up to the cloud of smoke in the room, but “it blow away, long ago. We together now. All in same house.”

  The next morning they sent me on my way with coins for the subway, and directions on how to visit Peace Park, the cherry blossom-covered site of Hiroshima’s ground zero. I promised to write the couple, send them pictures of my journey, to share anything I could with my two new friends.

  But the rigors of the road caused me to lose many of my belongings, including my address book. I could never thank them fully, could never find them again among the mazes of that city. S
o I write this story as my delayed thank you, to honor their spirit of forgiveness, and to spread their message that even after the most bitter of battles, different people can share their lives in an open house.

  Bill Fink is a freelance travel writer based in California. He writes about his adventures around the world for the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Sun Times, Islands Magazine, and a host of other assorted magazines, guidebooks, websites, and newspapers. He also appeared in The Best Travel Writing 2006. You can check out more of his stories at www.billfinktravels.com.

  MIEKE EERKENS

  Femme in the Vosges

  This is how place can put a key in your hand.

  I HAVE COME AS A WOMAN TO THE LORRAINE REGION OF France, to the Vosges department more specifically. This is no Provence. There are no lavender fields and sunny squares, no late-afternoon pastis and Brie next to a babbling fountain of frolicking cherubs. This is the Vosges. There are gray, moss-covered churches and gray, moss-covered cemeteries, and gray, moss-covered monuments bearing the names of villagers lost to World War I.

  What kind of woman am I, who comes to this ominous, dark landscape, this agrarian and watery culture which is on the verge of total abandonment, half of its homes now vacant and crumbling? I am beginning to question. Americans do not come here. Even the French do not come here. They leave here. It is a ghostly and forgotten place, notwithstanding the quiche. And you don’t travel halfway across the world for some quiche. Do you?