by Jason Wilson
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
MONTE REEL How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer
PETER GWIN The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu
HENRY SHUKMAN Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden
ELLIOTT D. WOODS Garbage City
THOMAS SWICK My Days with the Anti-Mafia
ROBIN KIRK City of Walls
J. MALCOLM GARCIA Now Ye Know Who the Bosses Are Here Now
PAUL THEROUX The Wicked Coast
MICHAEL GORRA Letter from Paris
KENAN TREBINCEVIC The Reckoning
BRYAN CURTIS The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame
KIMBERLY MEYER Holy City of the Wichitas
DIMITER KENAROV Memento Mori
PICO IYER Maximum India
LYNN FREED Keeping Watch
LUKE DITTRICH Walking the Border
MARK JENKINS Amundsen Schlepped Here
MARK JENKINS Conquering an Infinite Cave
AARON DACYTL Railroad Semantics
Contributors’ Notes
Notable Travel Writing of 2011
About the Editors
Copyright © 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2012 by William T. Vollmann
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ISSN 1530-1516
ISBN 978-0-547-80897-0
eISBN 978-0-547-80913-7
v1.1012
“The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame” by Bryan Curtis. First published in Grantland, September 20, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Bryan Curtis. Reprinted by permission of Bryan Curtis.
“Railroad Semantics” by Aaron Dactyl. First published in Railroad Semantics #5. Copyright © 2011 by Aaron Dactyl. Reprinted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
“Walking the Border” by Luke Dittrich. First published in Esquire, May 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Luke Dittrich. Reprinted by permission of Luke Dittrich.
“Keeping Watch” by Lynn Freed. First published in Harper’s, January 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Lynn Freed. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Endeavor.
“Now Ye Know Who the Bosses Are Here Now” by J. Malcolm Garcia. First published in McSweeney’s. Copyright © 2011 by J. Malcolm Garcia. Reprinted by permission of J. Malcolm Garcia.
“Letter from Paris” by Michael Gorra. First published in the Hudson Review, Vol. LXIV, No. 2 (Summer 2011). Copyright © 2011 by The Hudson Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the Hudson Review.
“The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu” by Peter Gwin. First published in National Geographic, January 2011. Copyright © 2011 by National Geographic Society. Reprinted by permission of National Geographic Society.
“Maximum India” by Pico Iyer. First published in Condé Nast Traveler, January 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Pico Iyer. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Amundsen Schlepped Here” by Mark Jenkins. First published in Outside, October 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Mark Jenkins. Reprinted by permission of Mark Jenkins.
“Conquering an Infinite Cave” by Mark Jenkins. First published in National Geographic, January 2011. Copyright © 2011 by National Geographic Society. Reprinted by permission of National Geographic Society.
“Memento Mori” by Dimiter Kenarov. First published in The Believer. Copyright © 2011 by Dimiter Kenarov. Reprinted by permission of Dimiter Kenarov.
“The American Scholar” by Robin Kirk. First published in City of Walls, Autumn 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Robin Kirk. Reprinted by permission of Robin Kirk.
“Holy City of the Wichitas” by Kimberly Meyer. First published in Ecotone 11. Copyright © 2011 by Kimberly Meyer. Reprinted by permission of Kimberly Meyer.
“How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer” by Monte Reel. First published in The Believer, Vol. 84, October 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Monte Reel. Reprinted by permission of Monte Reel.
“Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden” by Henry Shukman. First published in Outside, February 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Henry Shukman. Reprinted by permission of Henry Shukman.
“My Days with the Anti-Mafia” by Thomas Swick. First published in the Missouri Review, Winter 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Thomas Swick. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Swick.
“The Wicked Coast” by Paul Theroux. First published in the Atlantic, June 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Paul Theroux. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
“The Reckoning” by Kenan Trebincevic. First published in the New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.
“Garbage City” by Elliott D. Woods. First published in VQR, Spring 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Elliott D. Woods. Reprinted by permission of Elliott D. Woods.
Foreword
WITH EACH PASSING YEAR, we seem to reach another strange milestone in the evolution of travel. I have been seized by this thought each year during the process of putting together another edition of this anthology, and it never ceases to amaze me how much travel has changed since we began publishing The Best American Travel Writing in 1999.
This past year it struck me as I was browsing the App Store, downloading English-Spanish editions of popular voice-activated translator apps for my iPhone and iPad. I was doing this at the behest of an editor, who had asked me to test out these apps during a trip to Spain.
Since I was genuinely embarrassed at how badly my Spanish had deteriorated over the years, I was hopeful that the trio of apps I was downloading—Google Translate, SpeechTrans, and Jibbigo—might work better than the reviews suggested. I briefly considered a fourth, iLingual—one in which you take a photo of your mouth and then hold the iPhone or iPod Touch up to your face while the screen animates your lips in the foreign language. Thankfully, for my dignity’s sake, I couldn’t find iLingual for Spanish, only in French, German, and Arabic.
Eating breakfast at my kitchen table a few days before departure, I gave Jibbigo—the speech-to-speech translator that seemed the most user-friendly on the iPad—a test spin.
“I’m eating French toast,” I said slowly, trying to be clear.
“I need in French toast” is what Jibbigo transcribed on its screen, which then spoke in a sultry female voice: “Necesito francés en tostada.”
I shushed my kids, who were watching cartoons, and turned down the TV—I’d read that background noise really threw speech-to-speech translators off.
Once it was silent, I again pushed the red Record button on the screen. “I am eating French toast,” I said, even more slowly and with as much enunciation as I could muster.
“All right and even French toast,” Jibbigo transcribed on its screen. “Está bien incluso y pan tostado francés,” said Sultry Voice.
“Noooo!” Now my kids began laughing at me and Jibbigo.
One of my sons grabbed the iPad. “Mom, are you cutting pears in the kitchen?” he said through the app to his mother, who was indeed cutting pears in the kitchen. “Are you hiding Harrods in the kitchen?” wrote Jibbigo, which Sultry Voice dutifully said in a bizarre game of mistranslation-down-the-lane.
By then my kids were hysterical. I grabbed the iPad back, pressed the red button, and shouted, “Go get dressed and ready for school!”
“Do you just ready for school?” translated Jibbigo. “Solo la lista para la escuela?” said the voice. “Ahhhhhh!”
Needless to say, I was not particularly optimistic about the utility of a speech-to-speech translator during my journeys through the wine regions of Ribera del Duero and Toro. But I was determined to give it a try.
My first chance to use the app—once I’d gotten off the plane and through customs with a mere “Buenos dias”—was at the rental car counter. As I approached it, I spoke slowly to Jibbigo. “I have reserved a rental car for Mr. Wilson,” I said.
“I have reserved a rental car for Mr. Wilson,” transcribed Jibbigo. “He reservado un coche de alquiler para el Señor Wilson,” purred the sultry voice.
Okay! I thought. Here we go! Maybe I’d misjudged Jibbigo. Maybe this was all going to work out fine! Reaching the counter, I hit play. “Yeah, we have that reservation,” said the young woman behind the counter. In English. She raised an eyebrow at me. “And no worries, sir. I speak English at a high level.”
In fact, in most interactions with tourist-service people—hotel clerks, taxi drivers, cashiers—a speech-to-speech translator was very unnecessary. Basic, polite high school Spanish worked just fine. Jibbigo usually just complicated matters.
In a crowded, noisy café I asked Jibbigo, “May I have a café con leche?” and Jibbigo responded with “May I have a tactical mentioned?” To which Sultry Voice said, “Puede darme un tactical mencionado?” Of course, I’d accidentally thrown off Jibbigo by not saying “coffee with milk.”
So I simply said, “Café con leche, por favor,” to the guy behind the counter—and it all worked out fine.
At one point, driving through a toll plaza, I figured I’d use the translator to ask the toll-taker whether I was going the right way. I pulled out the iPad and said, “Is this the right road for Valladolid?” Jibbigo transcribed, “Is this the right road for liability?” and Sultry Voice said, “Es este el camino correcto para el obligatorio?”
The toll-taker looked at me like I was nuts. So instead I did what many Americans do in a foreign country—I pointed wildly ahead and said, loudly, “Valladolid!?”
“Si, si. Claro,” the toll-taker said.
Again I knew I’d complicated matters by saying the name of the city rather than just “Is this the correct road?” But honestly, it’s not easy to remember Jibbigo’s limitations when you’re holding up a line of traffic.
This is not to say that all my interactions with translation apps were unsuccessful. In a tapas bar in León, I used Google Translate to help with a nice, informative conversation with the bartender about the Prieto Picudo wines of the region. The bar was so noisy—with Barcelona’s league-title-clinching game blaring on the TV—that Jibbigo or SpeechTrans would have been useless.
With Google Translate, I kept surreptitiously tapping my questions and conversation cues into the iPod Touch as the guy poured another customer’s drink. It simply looked as if I were perhaps texting friends at another bar. When the barman returned, I had my queries all mapped out in my head.
I did this in a couple of other situations too, and what I realized is that because I already have some competency in Italian, I often knew more Spanish words than I thought. The translation apps helped me fill in the blanks and formulate more coherent sentences. Still, I’m not sure how much they’d help a complete beginner with only Sesame Street Spanish.
In the end, there was one situation, a casual dinner-party scenario, in which Jibbigo was relatively useful—and enlightening. I was drinking wine in an ancient wine cellar near Toro, Spain, with a young organic winemaker named Maria. She makes a lovely Toro wine called Volvoreta, which means “butterfly” (and which Jibbigo translated as “Buddha actor”).
We sat at a stone table with her father and some family friends, few of whom spoke English. Maria spoke English pretty well and translated, but occasionally we got bogged down by a phrase or a concept.
For instance, they talked for ten minutes about “AYN-stain,” and I failed to realize that they meant Albert Einstein until someone typed his name into the translator app on my iPad. At one point we got stuck on the word musa. Maria is charming and attractive in a Dionysian earth-goddess sort of way, and someone at the table was suggesting that she was a musa to wine writers. Jibbigo clarified that they were suggesting that Maria was a muse.
Maria pointed to a review of her wine in an American wine magazine. After using all the usual descriptors of fruits and aromas and mouthfeel, the critic had referred to her wine as “classy.”
“Classy?” she asked. “Tell me what this word means, classy.”
Wine is nearly impossible to explain in your native tongue, let alone one you’re not proficient in. “Well,” I said, fumbling around in my native language, “classy is kind of a difficult word to translate. There are several different meanings. You sort of have to know who’s using it.”
Classy is slightly old-fashioned, and these days can be literal or ironic and mean anything from “elegant” or “stylish” to Ron Burgundy’s sign-off in Anchorman (“Stay classy, San Diego”) to the kind of snarky thing you say to a friend who, say, takes a swig straight from the wine bottle. Wine critics aren’t generally known as ironists, but they still are fairly precise in their adjectives—so the choice of classy instead of elegant or stylish meant something.
As I tried to explain the nuance to Maria, one of the friends, slightly impatient, said, “Elegante. It means elegante.”
“Well, sort of,” I said.
“Try your iPad,” Maria said.
“Classy,” I said into Jibbigo.
“Elegante,” said Sultry Voice.
Everyone had a nice laugh at the silly American journalist with the iPad who was trying to complicate everything. Which was a good thing. After all, it was good to be reminded that some ideas, some concepts will never be easily translatable. Sure, people are always inventing new gadgets to make travel easier. And every day it gets easier to reach out and to connect with people of different cultures. But even with the advent of new technologies, it’s important to remember that it’s still possible to miscommunicate, to get confused, and to become lost. That’s the thing about travel—perhaps the essential thing, the thing that teaches us the most—that never changes. And that thing is what this anthology delivers once again this year.
The stories included here are, as always, selected from among hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications—from mainstream and specialty magazines to newspaper travel sections to literary journals to travel websites. I’ve done my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion the best travel stories from 2011 were forwarded to William Vollmann, who made our final selections.
I now begin anew by reading the hundreds of stories published in 2012. I am once again asking editors and writers to submit the best of whatever it is they define as travel writing. These submissions must be nonfiction, published in the United States during the 2012 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author’s name, date of publication, and publication name, and must be tear sheets, the complete publication, or a clear photocopy
of the piece as it originally appeared. I must receive all submissions by January 1, 2013, in order to ensure full consideration for the next collection.
Further, publications that want to make certain their contributions will be considered for the next edition should make sure to include this anthology on their subscription list. Submissions or subscriptions should be sent to Jason Wilson, Drexel University, 3210 Cherry Street, 2nd floor, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
It was a thrill and an honor to work on this edition with William Vollmann, whose adventurous work I’ve always admired. I am also grateful to Nicole Angeloro and Jesse Smith for their help on this, our thirteenth edition of The Best American Travel Writing.
JASON WILSON
Introduction
“OF THE GLADDEST MOMENTS in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands.” Thus Sir Richard Burton, who knew whereof he spoke. I myself have always been a partisan of that point of view, although Emerson’s “travel is a fool’s paradise” gratifies me just as much. To set out for someplace far away or strange is to take an active part in that baffling journey of ours through life into death; to stay home and improve one’s self-knowledge (perhaps through armchair traveling) is to do the same; both men were right.
My friend Steve Jones, with whom I hop freight trains now and then, eagerly reads this anthology every year. I asked him what he likes best about it, and he said: “I like the variety of the places the writers are going and how odd those places can be, and also the writing style. I like the fact that some pieces are somber and some are just quirky and there are usually a couple of hilarious ones thrown in.” During my selection of essays (from sixty-odd finalists, among whom I discovered both the editor of this series and myself; these of course were rejected immediately to avoid any conflict of interest), I tried to consider what might please Steve, in hopes of pleasing you.
