The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  Monte Reel’s “How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer,” which I have chosen to open this volume, introduces us to the Victorian-era travel guides, which he calls “lovingly compiled tip sheets on the acquired art of paying attention.” The epigram from Burton appears in his essay. Emerson also gets his due here, because Reel applies the Victorians to that peculiarly unknown land, the local Sprawlsville. “Instead of being a vacuous purgatory that deserved pity, the mall grew in complexity with each stride. The point that the how-to-explore books collectively hammered home is this: if you sincerely investigate it, every detail hides reason, and any environment is far more sophisticated than our senses appreciate.”

  Sincere investigation demands an exposition without constraints. When someone asks an author how long his work in progress will run, the best answer is “As long as it takes to say what I need to say, and no longer or shorter.” Victorian adventurers, of course, most often traveled on their own capital. What Marx called “the cash nexus” now taints the production of most “professional travelers.” Essays in mainstream periodicals are vulnerable to several types of commercial damage. First of all, the editorial department, not the writer, sets the word count, which relates to the subject and the writer’s nature only accidentally. Second, the draft received passes through any number of hands, whose cuttings and pastings need not be in concert. It is not only a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, but also of nobody knowing who has added how much salt. Third, the number of advertisements slated for a given issue goes far in determining how fat it can be. Thus after an essay has been hacked down to meet a given word count, it may be mutilated again, or even expanded. I have occasionally had something excised from an article of mine, only to be asked at the very end, by someone who never saw the original, to add just that, but in a different part of the essay, since the place where it once lived is long gone. These bemusing vicissitudes of the freelancer’s circumstances render the treasures brought home from the voyage—that is, the details, and their causes and meanings—subject to vandalism. Hence “the acquired art of paying attention” is best served outside the marketplace—either by travelers of independent means, such as Richard Burton, or by travelers who control their own means of production, such as the daring train-hopper Aaron Dactyl, a portion of whose self-published magazine appears last in this book. Most of us do sell ourselves, and our work as published by the magazines shows the consequences. My feelings about this are well described by one of Timbuktu’s historians: “In my worst dreams, I see a rare text that I haven’t read being slowly eaten.” He, of course, is referring to bugs, not editors. You will meet him in Peter Gwin’s “The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu,” which is perhaps the most traditionally Victorian of this year’s travel essays: carefully drawn, rich in anecdotes and observations, complete with romance (of a sad sort) and danger, and set in a locale that we might now call Orthodox Exotic.

  To the Victorians, Africa was still the Dark Continent and much of the planet remained unmapped. Nowadays we have gained the semblance of an acquaintance with most of it (excluding the oceans). But insightful travelers perpetually discover the gloriously and ominously unknown darkness of everywhere. When Henry Shukman visits the forbidden country around Chernobyl, he finds an astonishingly rapid alteration into something resembling the Zone in that Tarkovsky movie Stalker. Gray wolves and wild boar now roam “a place where the animals are mostly undisturbed, living amid a preindustrial number of humans and a post-apocalyptic amount of radioactive strontium and cesium.” Here too are albino birds, red-needled pine trees, and field mice that might be growing resistant to radiation. What if someday the science required to save us from our inevitable new atomic errors comes out of this place? Or what if Chernobyl proves that “moderate” nuclear accidents are worse than we can imagine?

  A natural companion to Shukman’s essay, Elliott D. Woods’s praiseworthy exposition of trash ecology—a topic that is getting ever more attention nowadays—brings us to the outskirts of Cairo, where “a haze produced by the exhalations of some 2,500 black-market recycling workshops carpets a landscape of windowless brick high-rises and unpaved alleys piled high with garbage.” The people who live and glean here are called zabaleen. It is unexpected—and heartening—to learn that “in sixty years, the zabaleen have gone from serfs to recycling entrepreneurs.” Unfortunately, they lack many rights. As a measure against swine flu, and perhaps “to appease Muslims whipped into a frenzy by the H1N1 scare,” the Egyptian government recently killed 300,000 garbage-eating pigs belonging to the zabaleen. All the same, Woods’s observations give cause for thought and hope combined. It seems to me that if governments and NGOs were to take note of this essay and encourage appropriate local manifestations of the profit motive to address this problem, then perhaps our future need not involve Soylent Green.

  Thomas Swick’s account of the group called Addiopizzo, which encourages business establishments not to pay Mafia extortionists, is equally worth reading, because it introduces us to brave people who stand up to evil. That Addiopizzo is necessary in an EU country in this day and age is rather shocking; that it may prove effective would be a still greater surprise. I was very impressed that thirty-five hundred of Palermo’s citizens summoned the courage to put themselves on public record that they gave their business to extortion-free bars, restaurants, and the like. At the site where gangsters murdered a man named Paolo Borsellino, a note quotes the victim: “The fight against the Mafia should be a cultural and moral movement that involves everyone, especially the younger generation.”

  A traveler’s experience is necessarily narrow, unique, suggestive at best but never definitive. It is up to us as readers to judge the situations described. What need the Mafia fills today for anyone but its own members remains unknown to us. Very likely Swick could not have interviewed Addiopizzo and the Mafia on the same ticket. His glancing illumination of this subject, like most any one person’s, is necessary but not sufficient. In this anthology we are fortunate enough to have two points of view on the situation of Northern Ireland. I have paired Robin Kirk’s grim snapshot of Belfast, which is well worth reading for its own close observation and analysis (“what is disturbing about segregation in Northern Ireland is not that there are tradeoffs; it’s that the people entrench themselves in segregated communities, and many of their leaders help them do it”), with J. Malcolm Garcia’s brave and heartrending investigation into a young man’s murder in a small village in this region. In its fidelity to local speech patterns, elimination of the superfluous, and painstaking arrangement of vignettes, Garcia’s piece is not only journalism but literature.

  While we are on the subject of literary excellence, this seems the place to mention Paul Theroux’s lovely vignette of the Maine coast, which draws no less on his historical and literary knowledge than on his accomplished eye, and Michael Gorra’s letter from Paris, which rounds out this next plausible pair. The latter ends with the happy Emersonianism of the author and his daughter watching old American movies in the Rue des Écoles, “sitting at home only and precisely because we are also abroad.” Both of these offer us the appearance of an organic and intrinsic brevity. Hence they seem undamaged by copy editors’ deletions. Both are a pleasure to read in and of themselves.

  Another very short piece is Kenan Trebincevic’s carefully understated parable of a return to Bosnia, and of an encounter with a neighbor who extorted property from his mother during the war. Anyone who has reflected at all on Yugoslavia’s civil war can well imagine the horrors that Trebincevic leaves out. The story he tells is simple, affecting, hideous.

  Meanwhile, Bryan Curtis’s visit to the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame seized mordant hold of me: “We miss the gringos, man . . . They all left, like the Mayas did.” I never could have imagined that comparison. It is funny, eerie, and true. Curtis alludes to “the bodybuilder Beatriz de Regíl González, who in her bio is compared to a beautiful flower in Tijuana’s garden,” and I longed to see her portrait, so that I
would know how beautiful she was. “Eighty years ago,” writes Curtis, “Old Tijuana had a bell tower. It was built to convince Americans they were experiencing European luxury. Now we’re standing in a copy of that tower—a Xerox of a dream of Europe . . . Finally, this belltower plays a fake bell.” Were I an editorial magnate, I’d invite this writer to spend a year in Tijuana and write down a million crazy details.

  Kimberly Meyer’s prior residence in Oklahoma eventually led her to the Holy City of the Wichitas, which she describes at greater length and with less cynical bemusement than Curtis does Tijuana. “We do use a donkey and a live baby Jesus,” explains an exponent of the passion play. “We’ve never had to use a doll.” What the reader makes of this is up to him. Perhaps the bell tower in Tijuana will come to mind. Or perhaps it will ring significant as an emblem of strict and praiseworthy sincerity. Meyer makes her own point of view gently clear, without telling us what to think.

  Dimiter Kenarov’s beautifully written essay about Bulgaria’s street necrologues (which likewise decorate the street walls and lampposts of Serbia) pays respect to such absurdities as this farewell to the renowned Georgi Dimitrov: “We promise to guard like the pupils of our eyes our maritime border for the successful building of socialism in our beloved Motherland.” Here we could almost be in Tijuana’s fake bell tower. Kenarov remarks that “the eternal border between the upper world and the underworld, the city and the cemetery, has disappeared in Bulgaria. No one is truly dead without a necrologue, and yet necrologues are meant to keep the dead alive.” So it is with Burton and Emerson, Dark Continents and Chernobyl. (As Pink Floyd said: “Matter of fact, it’s all dark.”) This ambiguity, or whatever you want to call it, shines out at us in Pico Iyer’s account of Varanasi, where Shiva met Vishnu—what could be more emblematic than that? Hence the Ganges with its thirty sewers: “Bathe yourself in its filthy waters . . . and you purify yourself for life.” Wandering among sadhus who “want to live in a world of ash,” Iyer concludes: “Spirituality in Varanasi lies precisely in the poverty and sickness and death that it weaves into its unending tapestry; a place of holiness, it says, is . . . a place where purity and filth, anarchy and ritual, unquenchable vitality and the constant imminence of death all flow together.” Here too he experiences a turning-backward epiphany not unlike that of Gorra in the Parisian repertory theater: Varanasi comes to remind him of his twisting-laned birthplace, Oxford.

  Lynn Freed’s mini-memoir of the approaching end of apartheid in South Africa is of the highest order, not only for its style but also for its very profound meditation on fear in relation to political change. In his essay, Kenarov references the Bulgarian sociologist Emiliya Karaboeva, who seeks to classify what most recurs in necrologues. She concludes: “The key words are love, pain, and sorrow, but the most important one is love.” In Freed’s brief vignette the love of what is endangered is implicit: this family, this home which may someday be invaded by killers, this life.

  In every anthology of travel writing there should always be a hot-and-miserable piece bookended by a cold-and-miserable one. This year the first is furnished by Luke Dittrich, who shares with us the first installment of his walk along the Mexican-American border. Like many wise journalists, he has provisioned himself with a stroller full of water. Although the voracious mouthparts of copy editors have gnawed random holes in his narrative in obedience to their commercial instincts (I know this area somewhat, and was saddened by the deletion of localities that I know that Dittrich must have passed through), what remains is a pleasing read. His encounters with smiling or poker-faced Border Patrol agents are always an entertainment.

  So much for hot. For cold, I give you Mark Jenkins’s skiing trek with his brother through Norway’s Hardangervidda National Park. Roald Amundsen, who as you probably know led the first successful expedition to the South Pole, tried twice to cross Hardangervidda. Each try almost killed him. Just as Amundsen’s own organizational excellence and modest understatement damaged him in comparison to the dead hero Scott, so Jenkins’s account (which also shows certain signs of editorial damage) first struck me as less impressive than his accomplishment. But as I thought over that chilly escapade, I grew increasingly glad not to have accompanied the cheerful Jenkins brothers. Although they had the benefit of those newfangled trekking huts, the headwinds and whiteouts described in this story could easily have been fatal. The Jenkins brothers are obviously fine orienteers and in excellent shape. I salute them.

  During this same year, Mark Jenkins (are there two of him, or is he just busy?) also managed to spelunk through the beautiful world of Vietnam’s Hang Son Doong, which by one measure may be the largest cave in the world. This is travel adventure in Burtonian style, for parts of this place, Jenkins informs us, have not been previously explored. Simple human daring ought to weigh large in an anthology like this. I wish I had been there to see the giant cave pearls—water-formed balls of calcite.

  Finally, Aaron Dactyl hops freight trains, without even a donkey, a baby Jesus, or a bell tower among his props. In his way he has gone as far as Richard Burton. I have excerpted a few pages from his Xeroxed magazine Railroad Semantics.

  WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

  MONTE REEL

  How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer

  FROM The Believer

  IN ZANZIBAR, LATE in 1856, Richard F. Burton and a caravan of porters prepared to venture into the heart of Africa’s interior to search for the source of the Nile River. A ropy knot of scar tissue shined on Burton’s cheek—a souvenir from his most recent expedition, upon which he caught a spear to the face during an ambush by Somali tribesmen.

  An English diplomat on the island tried to warn Burton against pressing his luck a second time. The diplomat told Burton that a wandering French naval officer recently had been taken prisoner by tribal warriors. The natives had tied the luckless pilgrim to a tree and lopped off his limbs, one by one. The warriors, after dramatically pausing to sharpen their knives, relieved the Frenchman of his misery by slicing off his head. A true story, the diplomat insisted.

  Burton wasn’t fazed. Severed limbs, rolling heads—even the grisliest of portents couldn’t deflate his spirit, not before a journey into uncharted territory. He’d spent his life cultivating a world-worn persona that confronted anything resembling naïveté with open hostility, but a blank space on a map could reduce him to giddiness: “Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands,” he wrote in his journal before that trip inland. “The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood.”

  Africa, as it turned out, would wring much of that blood out of him. In the months ahead he would suffer partial blindness, partial paralysis, sizzling fevers. Hallucinations crowded his brain with ghosts. A swollen tongue got in the way of eating. But the bottom line: he would survive to explore again. And years later, flipping through that worn journal from 1856, he would pass retrospective judgment on his pre-expedition enthusiasm: “Somewhat boisterous,” he concluded, “but true.”

  This kind of aimless gusto for all things unexplored defined the golden age of inland travel, which roughly coincided with Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) in England. It’s no coincidence that these were the same years when steamships and telegraphs began to shrink the globe. Industrialization transformed urban landscapes and fueled the expansion of colonial empires. Railroads standardized the world’s clocks, and a new strain of hurried angst—what poet Matthew Arnold labeled “this strange disease of modern life”—began to devour souls by the millions.

  Enter a new breed of adventurous explorer, which Burton perfectly exemplified. These men filled the membership rolls of the “geographical societies” that started to pop up in London, New York, Paris, Berlin, and most other capitals of the industrialized world. Geographical expeditions became the antidote to an increasingly ordered, regulated, and unmysterious way of life.

  But what purpose would be served if the person who finally entere
d terra incognita couldn’t handle its unpredictable challenges? What was the point of travel if the person who finally laid eyes on the previously unseen didn’t really know how to look at it?

  It quickly became clear that far-flung voyagers, even those as hearty as Burton, needed focus when confronting the riddles of undiscovered worlds. They needed guiding hands. They needed how-to manuals.

  Victorian adventurers rarely took a step into the wild without hauling a small library of how-to-explore books with them. Among the volumes Burton carried into East Africa was a heavily annotated copy of Francis Galton’s The Art of Travel: or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries. Originally conceived as a handbook for explorers, and sponsored by England’s Royal Geographical Society, the book was required reading for any self-respecting Victorian traveler. Before rolling up his sleeves and getting down to the hard business of exploring, he could turn to page 134 to learn the best way to do exactly that:

  When you have occasion to tuck up your shirt-sleeves, recollect that the way of doing so is, not to begin by turning the cuffs inside-out, but outside-in—the sleeves must be rolled up inwards, towards the arm, and not the reverse way. In the one case, the sleeves will remain tucked up for hours without being touched; in the other, they become loose every five minutes.

  The amiably neurotic Galton left nothing to chance. His index is studded with gems like “bones as fuel” and “savages, management of.” If Burton couldn’t find the advice he was looking for in Galton, he could always consult one of the other books in his trunk that were written with explorers in mind. The stated aim of Randolph Barnes Marcy’s The Prairie Traveler: The 1859 Handbook for Westbound Pioneers, which Burton himself edited in later editions, read like a manifesto for every handbook of this kind: “With such a book in his hand,” Marcy writes, “[the explorer] will feel himself a master spirit in the wilderness he traverses, and not the victim of every new combination of circumstances which nature affords or fate allots, as if to try his skill and prowess.”