The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  It has been another 50 years, and not only architects but many New Yorkers in general would gladly take Madison Square Garden apart by hand if it meant a chance to see a new Penn Station rise. But nothing gets done. The Garden was stuck atop the grave of the old Penn Station back in the 1960s because white commuters were supposedly too afraid to venture very far into the big, bad, black city—about as terrible a perversion of urban planning as has ever been practiced. Ironically, the scariest people around the new Penn Station are the drunken suburban louts in their Rangers jerseys on game night.

  Plans for building a twenty-first-century train station in the Beaux Arts central post office across Eighth Avenue from the Garden have been on the books for 20 years now. Architects have churned out any number of wondrous fantasies of what a new station might look like. But the Garden and its teams are owned by a thuggish cable-TV heir who stubbornly holds out against any intrusion on his ugly cash cow. Amtrak, citing money worries, still hasn’t fully committed to the proposed new facility, to be dubbed Moynihan Station (in honor of former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a leading rail advocate), and all the grand plans aside, it’s unclear what passengers would get in the end—maybe just a bigger Amshack.

  As one state official told the New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman in 2012, the “project aspires to be more like the Frank R. Lautenberg Station in Secaucus, N.J.”

  We have always been a country of boom and bust, and a rail has always run through our wildest schemes. The train was a wonderful tool that came into being before anyone, even the men who owned it, really knew what to do with it. As with the rest of our democracy, it was the learning, the mastering of these men and their machines, that would eventually provide us with some measure of what this country has always personified.

  We did incredible things with trains. We ran them through mountains and deserts and under rivers and swank avenues and beautiful buildings. We turned them into rolling luxury hotels and made them into something so extraordinary that adults as well as children came running just to watch them as they passed. We learned how to coast them into stations without their locomotives and how to string whole cities of commerce around them. We looked 100, 200, 300 years into the future, and built railroads to match our vision. Then we discarded trains as something hopelessly antiquated and unnecessary.

  The America we live in today does not even have the political will to connect a train to a platform in many places, much less build a new generation of supertrains. Amtrak and its supporters remain confident that it can endure, even triumph, and they may be right. Trains still have advocates even in the reddest of western states, and unlike so many of the public-sector areas that the right’s corporate sponsors would like to fully privatize—education, health care, prisons—no one seems eager to get their hands on a passenger-rail system.

  But the odds are just as good that Amtrak will vanish completely. Against the rigid ideology that now drives the Republican Party, the old politics of horse-trading and constituent services may not suffice. The government shutdown ended 12 days after we pulled back into the bowels of Penn Station, a big defeat for the Tea Party movement. But within weeks, its memory was obliterated by the Obama administration’s botched rollout of its already woeful health-care plan. The unwillingness of the Democratic leadership to commit to any public good has already disfigured the liberal idea, and its continuing failure may well sweep our national rail service away, along with everything else. For all Amtrak’s shortcomings, losing it would be a very bad thing. The train muddles through wonderfully, given all the restrictions we put on it. We are capable of more—or at least we used to be.

  STEPHEN CONNELY BENZ

  Land of the Lost

  FROM JMWW

  MORNINGS IN MOLDOVA: I left the flat, descended six stories in a dark stairwell—bare concrete, pervasive smell of boiled cabbage—and emerged in the tenement courtyard where, every day, stray dogs were plundering the garbage bins. Then I walked along Avenue Kogalniceanu toward the university, a 2-mile trudge on treacherous, muddy sidewalks. A dense fog made everything—buildings, trolleys, pedestrians, mongrels—appear insubstantial. Through the gloom, thousands of shadowy crows watched from tree branches. Moldova’s weather was supposed to be mild for Eastern Europe, but during my time in the country it seemed to be perpetually raw and overcast. The chill went to the bones; I never felt warm, despite the high-priced cold-weather gear I had brought with me.

  Stepping gingerly down the street, I always started to feel nervous as I approached the university. It was not the classes in American literature and culture that put me on edge—I enjoyed teaching the classes and I liked the students. No, the little spasm of dread I felt as I mounted the steps to the philology building each morning was entirely due to my unavoidable encounter with the gatekeeper, the Matron of the Keys—a short, stout woman about 60 years old who dressed in a starched white outfit reminiscent of a nineteenth-century asylum nurse. It was from her that I had to obtain the key to my classroom—kept with all other classroom keys in a cabinet that she guarded from behind a desk at the entrance to the building. This was her domain, and she ruled over it with an iron will and a suspicious mind.

  Each day I had to ask for the key, and she would only acknowledge requests made in Russian—proper Russian. Upon independence from the Soviet Union, Moldova had adopted Romanian as its official language; nevertheless, many Russian-speakers refused to conduct business—even government business—in anything but Russian. The matron did not approve of my Russian pronunciation, and day after day she made me repeat the classroom number—458—many times, correcting each phoneme with a martinet’s exactitude and demanding that I try again. She would not accept the individual numbers—four, five, and eight. Nyet. Only the correct complete number would meet the requirement: four hundred fifty-eight. She knew exactly who I was (I stood out as a foreigner, not least because of my burgundy-colored down parka), and she knew exactly which room key I needed, but she would not alter the procedure. No key could be issued until the number was stated correctly.

  We went through five, six, seven cycles of “Nyet. Bad. Listen. Repeat. Again.” Eventually she would pause after another of my stammered attempts, then grunt a grudging approval: Da. The key was surrendered, and I signed my name in a huge ledger along with thousands upon thousands of other signatures (many of them mine) to acknowledge receipt of the key and acceptance of dire penalties should the key not return. Finally—finally!—I could climb the four flights of stairs (the elevator was always malfunctioning) where my hundred or so students awaited me in the hallway. We opened the door and entered the forlorn lecture hall—a concrete room equipped with broken desks, a cracked chalkboard, and ill-fitting windowpanes that allowed the wind to whistle through. There was no heat. Outside, flurries eddied about, and sparks showered down from trolley wires. With chalk I had bought myself on a weekend trip to neighboring Romania (a relative consumer paradise compared with Moldova), I wrote an American poem on the chalkboard. The students copied it down in their notebooks—most of them managing to memorize it in the process (a skill developed during years of forced memorization in school)—and the lecture began.

  This was my Fulbright year, the fulfillment of a longstanding desire. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, I was eager to revisit Eastern Europe to see what had changed in the years since I had been a university student on a study-abroad tour of the Soviet bloc at the height of the Cold War. I was thinking I would go to Poland, the Czech Republic, or maybe Hungary. But when my chance came, a chance to teach as a Fulbright Scholar, the assignment was not for Prague or Bratislava or Budapest or Vilnius. The call came not from Kiev or Sofia or Bucharest or Warsaw. It came instead from tiny, remote, unknown Moldova and its capital city with two names: Kishinev in Russian, Chišinau in Romanian. I was initially ambivalent, but when I learned more about Moldova—such as where to locate it on a map—I wholeheartedly embraced the opportunity to live in such an isolated
place still relatively unaffected by the rapid Westernization that had transformed other countries of the former Soviet bloc.

  Moldova became an independent country in 1991 following the collapse of the USSR. Until then, the area now called Moldova had never before been truly independent. From 1944 to 1991, it was a republic of the Soviet Union. Before that, between 1918 and 1944, it had been a province of Greater Romania. Czarist Russia controlled the territory from 1812 to 1918. And once upon a time, Moldova had languished as a tributary outpost of the Ottoman Empire, ruled fitfully for several hundred years by the Turks. A tiny wedge of steppe land between the Prut and Dniester Rivers, known for much of its history as Bessarabia, Moldova had been traded back and forth in the various treaties that temporarily resolved disputes and wars among the regional powers. For centuries, Moldova had never been more than a pawn in the diplomatic chess match—maybe not even a pawn, but merely a square on the board waiting to be occupied. Yet after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moldova had suddenly become an independent country left to its own devices and struggling for survival and identity.

  In the years following independence, attempts to dismantle the Soviet system had been chaotic and inconsistent. Yes, democratic elections had occurred in Moldova. Yes, the invisible hand of capitalism had tinkered, or rather fumbled, with the economy. But by the late 1990s, the economic, political, and cultural transformations were still incomplete. Important structural reforms had not yet taken place, and the IMF and the World Bank were pressuring the Moldovan government for more drastic changes. The economy and the government were still largely in the hands of Soviet-era apparatchiks who had simply adopted new titles in the transition. Many were now linked to the emerging Russian mafia.

  As the first decade of independence drew to an end, income distribution in Moldova was widening considerably, with a very few getting rich—primarily through corrupt capitalist ventures—while the vast majority grew poorer and poorer. In some cases desperately poor: according to reports, large numbers of Moldovan women were being enticed to work as prostitutes in Western Europe, where many of them had disappeared into the netherworld of sex slavery. There were rumors that traffickers in human organs were buying Moldovan kidneys to sell on the black market. Before my year in the country was over, Moldova would officially become the poorest of the former Soviet republics and the poorest country in Europe, dropping below even woebegone Albania. This was the gist of the situation in Moldova when I arrived.

  When I wasn’t at the university, I spent much of the day walking in parks and along city streets. Kishinev reveled in its parks, and the parks were without question Kishinev’s best feature. There was the Park of the Cathedral, with its flower stalls and diminutive copy of the Arc de Triomphe (not big enough for a street, it straddled a sidewalk). Across the city’s main boulevard was a park dedicated to Stefan the Great. A huge statue of Moldova’s national hero—sword in one hand, cross in the other—guarded the entrance to the park. In the fifteenth century, Stefan took on the ruling Turkish lords and managed to establish Orthodox Christian hegemony over the region. The brief sovereignty, however, didn’t last beyond Stefan’s lifetime. Upon his death, the Turks returned with a vengeance, and for the next 300 years Moldova languished on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire.

  Near the middle of Stefan the Great’s park stood a column dedicated to Alexander Pushkin. It was to Kishinev in 1820 that the Russian poet was banished for his liberal proclivities. Young and unknown, Pushkin spent three long years in the isolated town. At the time, Kishinev was little more than a village of peasants in the far southwestern corner of Russia, a place of unsophisticated culture and few amenities. Fittingly, Kishinev’s most celebrated resident lived there involuntarily and spent his three years in the town pining to leave. He referred to the place as “accursed Kishinev.” Another city park surrounded an artificial lake dug by the Communist Youth in the 1950s. In a remote corner of this park stood the formerly prominent statues of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe similar statues had been destroyed. But the Moldovans had not been so drastic in their treatment of fallen heroes. Removed from their positions of prominence and banished to a copse on the far side of an isolated lake, the trinity watched over the transition to capitalism from afar. The busts of Marx and Engels brooded ineffectually, while Lenin stood full of ferocious energy, one leg forward, as though he were ready to mount a countercharge against the forces that had exiled him.

  The city’s infrastructure provided further evidence of Moldova’s struggles. Walking around, you saw the decaying apartment blocks of the Soviet era, some buildings eroding before your eyes as the wind wore away mortar and sent pellets of concrete eddying down to the sidewalks. One abandoned shopping center had a postapocalyptic look to it: disintegrated stairways, collapsed storefronts, exposed rebar, corroded girders. So it was wherever you looked: decaying buildings, choppy roads, crumbling sidewalks. And unfinished buildings, too: scores of construction projects that had been abandoned in 1991 when Moscow’s largesse had dissipated along with the quotas and five-year plans that had put the projects into motion. As a consequence, abandoned projects were everywhere, untouched for years.

  My walks also took me past a place that I mistook at first for a nature preserve. From the street, all I could see was a tangle of growth—an unkempt forest—behind a high wall. Eventually I learned that this was the old Jewish cemetery, long abandoned now that there were almost no Jews left in Moldova. Other than being the locale of Pushkin’s exile, Kishinev had secured its small place in history as the scene of gruesome pogroms. At the beginning of the twentieth century, nearly half of the city’s population was Jewish. Kishinev was under Russian jurisdiction at the time, and Russia in 1900 was a virulently anti-Semitic state. Jews were loathed and feared. The czar’s authorities considered them revolutionaries. The peasants envied Jewish business successes. Folk stories of ritual murders—Jews killing Christians for their blood—circulated, and the authorities did little to squelch them. Profit-driven newspapers worked rumors into fully realized reports of atrocities. The tabloids printed accounts of Russian boys and girls falling into the clutches of butcher Jews who were diabolically collecting Christian blood for their Passover feasts. Such a story surfaced in Kishinev just before Easter 1903. Over the Easter weekend, the city’s good Christians went on a rampage, exacting their revenge on the Jews by burning and looting Kishinev’s ghetto. Hundreds of Jews were seized from their homes, clubbed, and mauled. Some 43 Jews died. The twentieth century had just begun, and remote Kishinev was foreshadowing its major motifs. Indeed, the 1903 pogrom was only a prelude to what was to come in Moldova. When Romania (to which Moldova then belonged) aligned itself with Nazi Germany, 400,000 Bessarabian Jews and 40,000 Gypsies were sent to nearby concentration camps. Many were eventually deported to Auschwitz.

  By the end of the twentieth century, very few Jews lived in Kishinev (less than 1 percent of the population), and almost no one I met had heard of this history. A small, unassuming stone slab in a park on the edge of the city was dedicated to the victims of the 1903 pogrom, but the history museum ignored the matter altogether. Most people I spoke to were puzzled by mention of the pogrom. Such a thing had never happened in Kishinev, they were sure. Nor did they believe that the city had once been nearly half Jewish. During their lifetime, the city’s Jewish background had been all but obliterated. For example, the official city map did not indicate the location of the Jewish cemetery. To passersby, it was just a large, abandoned tract of land hidden behind deteriorated walls. When I finally learned what was behind the walls, I made several visits and found thousands of uprooted and overturned gravestones entangled in a dense thicket of vines and briars. But according to the maps, the cemetery did not officially exist. Nor was the location of the erstwhile concentration camps marked or memorialized in any way. My Moldovan acquaintances professed surprise that such places had ever existed and questioned my sources of information.

  My status as
a Fulbright Scholar and my consequent connection to the American Embassy put me in close contact with the expatriate community in Moldova. This community included personnel at the Western embassies and aid workers representing various NGOs. Some of the expatriates had formed a “diners’ club,” which met once a month at local restaurants, where we were often the only patrons except for perhaps a handful of government officials and Russian mafia functionaries huddled in a corner. Many Moldovans I knew had not been to a restaurant in years; none had been to the fancier establishments (probably mafia-owned) that the diners’ club favored.

  On a typical outing, 25 or 30 of us were seated at a long table. Musicians played loud Gypsy-style versions of movie and show standards—the themes from Dr. Zhivago, Titanic, and James Bond were in heavy rotation—meant to entertain us during the long, inexplicable waits between courses. When a break in the music permitted conversation, the expats returned to their favorite themes: the rapid disintegration of the country and their intense desire to get out. Many expressed anxiety about being trapped in Moldova. True, some claimed that “Moldova could get in your blood” and professed to truly love the place, its people, its culture. These were the foreigners who had married Moldovans or who had some ongoing research project, something that tied them to the place. But for most of the foreign community, Moldova was a temporary post in a disagreeable backwater. They spoke longingly of previous assignments or speculated and dreamed about where they would go next, once they had “put in time” in Moldova.