The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  But what is certain is that over the past 500 years, Thailand’s chiles have flourished in dizzying variety. Today, there are prik kee noo suan,7 or “mouse-shit chiles,” skinny and hot and known in America simply as “Thai chiles.” Prik chee fah, or “sky-pointing chiles,” are longer and milder, growing up from bushes instead of dangling. Prik som are orange and meaty. Prik kaleang, the chiles named for the Karen hill tribe, may be the hottest of all, but they were not included in a 2008 Kasetsart University study that measured the pungency of Thai chiles and rated most between 45,000 and 80,000 Scoville units, at least 10 times hotter than jalapeños. Of course, that’s just the beginning. Trying to track down every variant, when flavors and names proliferate and overlap, is a fool’s errand.

  Which is how this fool came to be in Phatthalung, about 500 miles south of Bangkok, closer to Melaka than to the Thai capital. On the west the district was bordered by greenish limestone mountains that erupted from the rice-paddied plains; to the east was Thailand’s biggest lake, and beyond the lake the sea. Whichever direction I looked was pure Thai picturesqueness.

  Loveliest of all was right before me: two long fields of prik khao chi, a relatively rare variety of chile known as “white nuns” because they don’t redden when ripe. On the bush, they were a very pale yellow, skinny and wrinkly and crooked, and when I nibbled one it gave off a ton of heat and a fresh, bright aroma that was, I’d been told, essential to southern cuisine, which is known not just for its intense fire but for its sourness and fermented fishiness. The night before, at the quiet lakeside restaurant KiengTalay, I’d dived headlong into those flavors—a tart and crunchy lotus-shoot salad, soupy-shrimpy curries with crabmeat or whisker sheatfish—until a pleasant funk lodged in my nostrils and my throat burned and lips puckered. The heat had taken its time building, a signature southern style derived from local chiles.

  These white nuns had been grown by Vichit Janphaleuk, who was 64, with wavy hair just going gray and a loose checked shirt, and who’d specifically chosen to farm chiles 30 years ago. It was a decision born of practicality.

  “This area is going to be flooded every year,” he said through a translator, “so if I grow something else, it’s going to be flooded before I even sell it.” With chiles, he can harvest about 100 kilos a week of the fast-growing crop from May until the floods hit in November.

  But growing chiles, he’d also come to realize, is more than a business—he sees it as a responsibility. “Because everyone eats chiles in daily life,” he told me, “I need to make high-quality chiles, clean chiles, to feed everybody—maybe around the world!”

  That’s not to say it’s an easy business. Currently, Vichit sells his prik khao chi for around 45 baht per kilogram, or about $1.50. That seems decent, but a few years back, he said, the price was 200 baht per kilo. Meanwhile, he had a half field of prik kee noo he wasn’t even bothering to harvest—the price was simply too low.

  Because out in the countryside, everyone had chiles already. They’d been planted around the house I rented nearby, and they grew wild, too. A bird poops in your yard, and—boom!—you’re growing prik kee noo, “wild bird-poop chiles.” Maybe you’d farm prik khao chi for restaurants or city dwellers, but for many Thais, it doesn’t make sense to spend hard-earned money on what’s freely available out back. Spice is spice is spice.

  Well, sort of. Slightly more than 24 hours later, at the opposite end of Thailand, I was facing down a fundamental challenge to that idea, put together by the young, round-faced chef Weerawat “Num” Triyasenawat in the narrow kitchen of his ambitious restaurant, Samuay & Sons, in Udon Thani.

  On the counter before us lay five bowls of som tam, the mortar-pounded salad of shredded green papaya, chiles, and fermented fish paste that is an icon of Isaan, this inland region along the northeast border with Laos. Som tam is also iconically incendiary: you sometimes order it with a number indicating how many chiles to include.

  That night, however, we were not just testing our (okay, my) chile tolerance but trying to figure out which variety of chile worked best. Each bowl had been prepared identically, but with different peppers—prik kee noo suan, prik leung, prik jinda dang, and smoked prik kaleang; the final bowl contained all of the above. Along with Num and me, the judges included three of his female cooks, who giggled as I reached out with my bare hand, pinched a bundle of papaya from the first som tam, and popped it gamely in my mouth. Unlike in the south, with its slow-to-build fire, Isaan-style heat hits you right up front, repeatedly, like a Thai kickboxer out for a quick win. Behind each beautiful capsaicin burst lay subtleties—the invigorating freshness of the prik leung, the meaty-smokiness of the prik kaleang. By the end, I was dripping sweat.

  Heat had been a factor in Isaan cooking for ages, Num told me: “Before the chile came to our region, people in ancient times used pepperwood to spice up the dish,” along with makhwaen, Krachai, and long pepper. (Southern spices like cinnamon and cloves were too expensive for isolated Isaan.) But heat was never just for heat’s sake. It worked in concert with the vast orchestra of ingredients found only in this region, many of which I’d never seen before: herbs that were peppery, astringent, lemony, obscure, addictive; foraged mushrooms as dainty as daisies or as massive as porcini; hairy tomatoes.

  In fact, this was the whole point of Samuay & Sons, whose tasting menu I leapt into as soon as I’d finished with the som tam. Each of chef Num’s seven courses highlighted Isaan-specific ingredients and flavors, alongside the world-class technique he’d honed at San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Commonwealth. Meaty, thin-shaved prawns were tiled next to a pool of smoked pineapple curry; a morsel of chicken, mango, and yellow curry punched way above its weight. I adored a dense block of “soured fish confit”—fermenty and rich—and its miraculously cooling accompaniment, rice in a watermelon consommé.

  Chiles were in there, too, but harder to pinpoint. At first I worried that the som tam taste test had blown out my palate. But no—that spice bath had only sharpened my senses. Chef Num had achieved the type of balance that Pim had described to me before I’d set off, deploying chiles that “hurt a little” but then stood humbly aside to let the true stars shine.

  When I returned to Bangkok, I felt like I was finally getting a handle on the chilefication of this country. Peppers likely came to Siam in the sixteenth century, brought by the Portuguese and, later, the Spanish. They took off because people were primed to like spice and because chiles grew easily, even wild, so everyone could afford them. Now they were ubiquitous, essential components of every strain of regional Thai cuisine, and getting more popular by the day.8 A film director, I’d heard, was planning a movie about chileheads, and a candy company was selling “Hell Spicy Jelly,” jelly beans that contained Carolina Reapers, one of the world’s spiciest peppers.

  The future began to look even more fiery one Friday, when I traveled about 100 miles west from Bangkok to the edge of Kaeng Krachan National Park. Just as a soft rain began to fall, I arrived at the farm of Prew Pirom, the 41-year-old owner of Pla Dib, a Bangkok restaurant that happens to be my all-time favorite. Prew wore a broad hat and a round-cheeked, persistent smile as he showed me around: his small, chic home adapted from shipping containers; a pond for raising catfish. Citrus and other fruit trees surrounded half a dozen airy greenhouses, inside which grew eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuces, and chiles. Scotch bonnets, to be precise. I did a double take. Jamaica’s pride, here in Thailand?

  The seeds, Prew explained, were gifts from two foreign friends who’d picked them up in Jamaica. He grew them, offered the chiles to customers on pizza, integrated them into Thai dishes like braised pork leg, and fermented them into a sparkly, fiery sauce—finally, he had a chile that was hot enough for his taste. His capsaicin tolerance, he said, was above average. (Every other Thai I asked said the exact same thing.)

  Scotch bonnets, I figured, should have great potential in Thailand, but could they take off? Whoever tried one, Prew posited, would like it. Perhaps he could l
et birds feast on his Scotch bonnets and have them spread the seeds far and wide. It worked in the sixteenth century; why not now?

  Before that future arrives, though, he’s got to stabilize his crops. Some of the pepper plants he showed me were small, their leaves a mottled white and yellow, victims of a disease he said had afflicted all peppers in the area. Just like the farmers in Jamaica, Prew was facing the double-edged sword of a warm, moist climate. But then, I thought, maybe a Thai problem needs a Jamaican solution! Right away, I fired off a WhatsApp message to Gary Coulton—could his high-quality seeds help? Could I put him in touch with Prew?

  “As we say in Jamaica,” Gary wrote back, “‘NO PROBLEM, MAN.’”

  Finally, it felt like I was no longer chasing history but right in the middle of it. Chiles may have begun their planet-spanning voyage half a millennium ago, but they were nowhere near finished—there were always new lands to conquer, new palates to convert, new routes to crisscross and double back on, new mash-ups of heat profiles to set afire even the smallest acre of bland land. The world is burning, my friends, and it’s our delicious privilege—in my case, a duty!—to add fuel to that fire.

  Notes

  1. Scotchies are a variety of Capsicum chinense, a species that includes habaneros, ghost peppers, Trinidad Scorpions, Carolina Reapers, and many other kinds of the world’s most insanely spicy chiles.

  2. The West Africans who were taken to the New World as slaves were already familiar with chiles. The Portuguese had introduced them on their fifteenth-century voyages, and they were such a widespread part of the diet that they were a part of the “slabber sauce”—basically flour, oil, and chiles—poured over beans that slaves were fed during the Middle Passage.

  3. The Turks probably acquired peppers from Arab traders, who’d acquired them in India, where they’d been brought by the Portuguese. Around the same time, peppers were also coming in through Western Europe as ornamental plants grown by monks.

  4. Albert Molnár estimated it at 50 percent, but still, that’s a lot of non-Hungarian paprika.

  5. To be sure, there’s plenty of non-spicy food in Thailand, much of it influenced by the ethnic Chinese minority, but even so, chiles remain present and available nearly everywhere you might possibly consume a meal.

  6. The Spanish likely brought chiles, too, though not before 1565, when their Manila Galleon shipping lines started carrying New World goods—primarily silver—to Asia.

  7. English spellings of Thai pepper names may differ depending on source.

  8. Sugar may have something to do with this. Since the 1930s, its price has dropped. Sugar tends to tame chile heat, so the sweeter the dish, the more chiles you can add. This theory dovetailed with Pim Techamuanvivit’s complaint that the food in Bangkok has gotten too sugary since her childhood.

  RAHAWA HAILE

  I Walked from Selma to Montgomery

  from Buzzfeed

  My arrival in Selma, Alabama, on April 4, 2017, was less a choice than a matter of self-preservation. Following years of unarmed shootings, bombings, hate crimes, gentrification, voter suppression tactics, pay gaps, school segregation, dwindling reproductive freedoms, refugee bans, jeopardized health care access, and all of the indignities of life in America as a visible Other, I traveled to Selma because the fury in me had nowhere left to grow.

  On February 9, 2017, 20 days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Alabama senator Jeff Sessions was sworn in by Vice President Mike Pence as attorney general. The travesty of that sentence, the sinister potential of it more than a year later, fuels my anxiety still. It is the reason why, mere months after returning from the Appalachian Trail, I emailed my father on February 22, 2017, to see if he might be interested in meeting me in Alabama for a thru-hike of sorts. I wanted to walk from Selma to Montgomery—following in the footsteps of the civil rights marchers who had come before me—to protest Jeff Sessions’s entire political career, specifically his most recent and wildly dangerous appointment as the head of the Department of Justice. It had been five days since Scott Pruitt was confirmed by the Senate to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. A week later, Ryan Zinke and the literal horse he rode in on would seize control of the Department of the Interior. Within a year, both Zinke and Pruitt would be responsible for shrinking national monuments sacred to indigenous communities, forcing the entire National Park Service board to resign, removing pages “detailing the risks of climate change” from online resources, perpetuating environmental racism, and implementing so many other disastrous policies—while squandering financial resources—that the rest of this essay could consist of them alone.

  I often think of this day, February 22, 2017, when people ask me how it feels to be a black outdoorswoman, what it means to never shrug the reality of my identity from my shoulders in exchange for a backpack and freedom. While the white hikers I’d shared the Appalachian Trail with from Georgia to Maine were busy planning their next adventures, each day in America under the new administration served as a reminder of the myriad ways I’d never be one of them. My feet were bound tighter and tighter by the dual diseases of vanishing civil rights and threatened public lands. The best I could do most days was stand in the pooling blood. I traveled to Selma, Alabama, because I had to, because no other walk on earth made sense to me, or my rage, at a time when walking was the only activity for which my despair made a small hollow. And fam, let’s be clear—I did it for us.

  Today, Selma, Alabama, hosts an annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee that sees thousands descend upon the city to commemorate “Bloody Sunday” and reflect on the work ahead. Representative John Lewis and Martin Luther King III were among the many to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge earlier this March in tribute to the Americans, mostly black, who risked their lives for the right to vote. Every five years, a full reenactment of the walk takes place, with jubilee participants continuing all the way to Montgomery.

  At 54 miles, the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail is the shortest of America’s 19 National Historic Trails, the majority of which (including this one) are meant to be driven, not hiked. At present, no designated safe path exists for pedestrians hoping to walk between the two cities along the dangerous truck route; the road shoulders repeatedly switch sides or disappear altogether, though perhaps this may change someday.

  Regardless, my hope was to walk alone on the margins of US Route 80, also known as the Jefferson Davis Highway, for approximately 10 to 12 miles a day—a leisurely pace for a recent thru-hiker that would allow plenty of time for exploration. My father would then pick me up before sunset and drop me back off in the same spot the next morning. We would stay in Selma for two nights as I walked the first 20 miles, followed by Montgomery for two nights as I walked the middle 20 to 25. After I completed the final 10 miles and climbed the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, my father and I would drive back to Atlanta, where we’d flown into initially, he from Miami, and I from New York City.

  But a sketch of a plan, no matter how well-intentioned, is only that—a sketch. And I can credit much of my walk’s success to the work of an accomplished Japanese American thru-hiker named Liz Thomas (trail name “Snorkel”) who walked the Selma to Montgomery NHT in 2015 and has hiked over 15,000 miles around the United States. Hers was the first website I found when researching what a solo walk of this nature would entail, and her blog posts provided me with a treasure trove of data, including a list of mile markers and notes about places to refill water bottles, grab a snack, or duck behind a shed to pee. Granted, a day with Google Maps might have revealed some of these opportunities. But there is no world in which I could have convinced my father to let me walk on the side of a busy highway for five days had I not been able to point to another hiker’s similar desire and subsequent success. It helped greatly that she’d created a trail guide with recognizable landmarks he could see and understand. Thomas’s foresight to document and share the logistics of her journey for those seeking to walk the same path someday is the kind of outdo
or allyship a person like me dreams about and rarely gets to experience.

  “There’s something profound about walking a trail that was not created because people wanted to have fun and highlight cool natural features—a trail that people walked because they had to,” writes Thomas on her website. The two of us spoke on the phone recently about the aspects of her walk that have stuck with her most over the years. “Walking is a political action,” said Thomas. “Many people want to treat hiking or walking like they’re getting away from politics, and I think—especially for people like me who are pretty good at walking—there’s a privilege that comes with hiking in natural areas, but there’s also a statement that can be made walking in the places we choose to walk.”

  As with most conversations about trails, Thomas and I discussed our shoes and foot pain on the Selma to Montgomery NHT at length. Roadwalking might not offer the same challenges as traversing a scree field or ascending slick granite, but it is far from comfortable over long distances. The hardness of the ground tires feet more rapidly than a natural surface like a forest trail would, while the sun bears down on the asphalt relentlessly, adding to the already substantial heat. That said, roadwalking on most highways beats navigating the grass beyond the shoulder, which can slant even more than the canted asphalt in anticipation of rain. This results in walkers extending one leg farther down than the other, approximating a limp that sacrifices stability and strains the opposite leg.

  It might surprise some to learn that roadwalks play a significant role in connecting many sections of America’s famous long trails. Between 200 and 300 miles of the Florida Trail’s 1,100 miles consist of pavement. The Eastern Continental Trail, which spans 5,400 miles from Key West, Florida, to Newfoundland, Canada, and includes the Florida Trail and the Appalachian Trail, involves a section simply called “the Alabama Roadwalk.”