The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  And then—

  Nothing changed.

  I realized the homeland wasn’t bad medicine. It just wasn’t the medicine they needed.

  In talking to my dad about writing this essay, I’ve tried to gain clarity. Was it really the jewelry? Only that? When he saw the first draft, he said I’d gotten it wrong. “It wasn’t the jewels. I don’t care about that. It was the betrayal.” In his version of events, Tata had always wanted everything—everything—split five ways. But then in the last vulnerable years of life, when the levees around her mind had started to crumble due to chemotherapy, there’d been a meeting with Tata and her lawyer that only one of the siblings, my aunt, could attend. Then Tata died. Then the will was read, and it wasn’t everything five ways, period—it was everything five ways, save the jewels.

  “After all that?” Dad says, over and over again. “After I got my ass beat in Mississippi for them? Held their hands running from that helicopter in Nicaro? Really? Really?” For him, it’s an irreparable betrayal; no amount of talking can fix it. Once my dad is crossed, he’s crossed forever.

  I know, too, how my aunts feel: that their brothers have accused them of manipulating their own mother in her final years. Another wound not easily healed.

  The last time I went to Dad’s house, I asked if he could scrounge up a Xeroxed note he claimed Tata wrote in her last couple years saying everything should be split five ways. He didn’t find it. Instead, he found a handwritten letter about her will from years earlier, 1996, only two years after my grandfather had died, when the question of death and its resulting mess of logistics must have felt fresh and urgent. I’d never seen it before. It’s a short note—all of six sentences—addressed to “Dearest Carlos Miguel” and signed “All my love, Mami.” I hesitate to make too much out of it; she lived another 15 years in good health. But one line stands out, the final words underlined so hard the emphasis could gather dirt: What I really wish is that the five of you get together and make all the decisions together.

  It’s all fallible. I don’t know if the Xerox exists, or if Dad’s confusing it for this note, which any lawyer would toss out the window. Dad’s memory is porous. So are my aunts’ and uncles’, and mine. The whole exercise of making an ironclad account of my family’s disintegration has felt like sculpting with smoke. It doesn’t matter; the result’s the same. Dad has settled into his permanent groove—Really? Really?—and so have my aunts and uncles.

  “Idiotas,” Tata might have said. “Greedy, jealous, inconsiderate. Ruining everything over some gold bracelets and a piece of paper.”

  It’s not the story I wanted to tell. But today, I feel like Nilsa; my pen has run out of ink. I wanted to return from Cuba with the One Ingredient to fix our family’s amnesia, but it’s not a question of recipe; it’s a question of our mother tongue. Lengua del Pájaro. The truth is, my family does not speak the same language anymore. Half of it has been thrown away.

  ALEX MACGREGOR

  Is This the Most Crowded Island in the World? (And Why That Question Matters)

  from Longreads

  Geographers have an affinity for superlatives. Among the millions of named features on earth, if something can claim to be the biggest, tallest, deepest, longest, or otherwise most extreme, it gets a lot of attention.

  Asserting any superlative involves a degree of hubris. Our world has been picked over for superlatives, but how sure can we really be about any one claim? Any elementary school class will recite in unison that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world—that is, unless the class happens to contain an Ecuadorian student. Ecuadorians correctly learn that the highest mountain in the world could be measured by distance from the center of the earth, rather than from mean sea level. By this measure, Ecuador’s Chimborazo is taller than Everest. An asterisk is warranted for even this basic claim.

  Of much less prominence on the globe, but also a tricky superlative to nail down, is the most densely populated island in the world. A handful of the perhaps 100,000 islands on earth have stratospheric population densities: Ultracrowded islands exist in places as disparate as Kenya, Hong Kong, France, and the Maldives, but it’s regularly cited that, by the numbers, the densest of all is Santa Cruz del Islote, a three-acre islet of about 1,200 people off the coast of Colombia. This claim has been repeated in numerous publications, most recently by the New York Times, and it’s even the subject of a short documentary. Journalists usually emphasize the bonds of family and community in a place so radically removed from Western consumerism.

  All of which makes for an uplifting read about a fascinating place. But what if the premise is wrong? I can’t comment on the experience of life on the island. But we’ve already learned to be wary of superlative claims, especially when Westerners are the ones keeping score; what about this one? What if this is merely a very crowded island, and not the most crowded island?

  After taking a few trips to other countries as a backpacker, I decided to try my hand traveling in a country that had always fascinated me: Haiti. First I went to the more straightforward northern region of the country, then to Port-au-Prince and other areas. I decided to cut back on time-wasting apps and devote those spare moments to learning Kreyòl instead. I read up on the Haitian Revolution. I made a minor pastime out of studying the country bit by bit on Google Earth.

  One day, while poring over the south coast of Haiti on Google Earth—whether I was scouting for places that might be interesting to visit or just killing time I can’t recall—I found an island that looked really densely crowded. From above, it’s difficult to see that it’s even an island—just a big clump of houses surrounded by a narrow band of beach. Had I stumbled upon a place that might challenge Santa Cruz del Islote’s claim? Could this island really be the world’s most crowded?

  This far-fetched possibility was tricky to disprove. The internet offers virtually no information about this mystery island, or really about any of Haiti’s many fishing islands packed with people. This particular island has dozens of houses and is smaller than a football field, yet Haiti doesn’t log a single entry in Wikipedia’s list of the most densely populated islands on earth.

  Unable to find a sufficiently detailed map of this corner of Haiti, I invested in a navigational chart. After all, this isn’t the nineteenth century, and with satellites, airplanes, and 7 billion people wandering the planet, I figured this patch of land must surely be among the millions of features geographers have documented. When the highly detailed map showed up at my house a few days later, I excitedly flattened the monochromatic, water-resistant sheet on the floor. I went straight to the spot where this mystery island sits, and there I found a little islet: Caye de l’Est. Eastern Cay.

  Bingo. So Google Earth didn’t fabricate a spit of sand covered in houses to troll geography nerds like me. (At least not again: in 2013 a glitch caused Google Earth to display a fake island in the South Pacific the size of Manhattan.)

  I scoured the internet for information on the island, freshly armed with this somewhat distinctive name. I mostly came up dry. The search results related to this island are all generic web pages without a shred of actual information on the place: automatically generated web pages with skeletal information, but nothing of real value. No news stories, no mission trip reports, no Wikipedia page, no travel blogs. Nothing about its people; nothing indicating its people even exist. A ghost island.

  Another, more ominous, revelation of the navigational chart is that Caye de l’Est used to be one of many sandy cays in the Baie des Cayes, the body of water that runs between Île-à-Vache and mainland Haiti. The map shows 15 islands; some named, others unnamed sandbars. Nowadays, per Google Earth, 5 remain: a small island near Île-à-Vache, 2 tiny sandbars, a large island with scores of houses called Caye de l’Eau, and, isolated miles from the others, Caye de l’Est.

  Since no other information on the island was forthcoming, my next move was clear: next time I found myself in Haiti, I would make the journey from Port-au-Prince to Caye d
e l’Est. Or whatever the island is really called—Haitians rarely cooperate with outsiders’ names. Most towns, streets, and intersections in Haiti follow an informal but exclusively used nomenclature. I knew that, whatever Haitians call this island, it’s probably not Eastern Cay.

  Haiti’s population density routinely surpasses what other countries consider extreme. The 14 square miles of Port-au-Prince’s city proper, a sprawl of mostly one-story houses, hold about a million people: it has a population density equal to Manhattan’s. Atlanta’s larger metropolitan area covers roughly the same land area as the nation of Haiti, yet Haiti’s overwhelmingly rural footprint packs in almost twice the total population of heavily suburban metro Atlanta. If the state of Georgia had the population density of Haiti, its population would equal that of California and New York combined.

  The high population density that defines the landscape of modern Haiti is a recurring theme from the country’s history: too many people on too small of an island. Early Haitian history is, as most people are aware, the story of humans shackled and abducted from their homes in Africa. In the colony of Saint Domingue, which was later to become independent Haiti, France used a brutally efficient supply of slaves to establish one of the most lucrative cash crop colonies earth has ever known. This was not farming; this was a factory plantation economy. The ability of the island to provide food to sustain its population was not a consideration of the French. The goal of Saint Domingue was to maximize sugar and coffee production by whatever means necessary, and this meant a huge supply of slaves—roughly twice as many slaves were imported to Saint Domingue compared with the United States—and a shockingly high mortality rate. The colony became one of the most densely populated places in the colonized Americas; its population quickly dwarfed the Spanish side of the island, the present-day Dominican Republic.

  The enslaved population rose up and obliterated the plantation system, seeing in the beginnings of the French Revolution an opportunity to break free from their chains. But before Haiti was even independent of France, the heroes of its slave rebellion debated how a country so packed with people could ever feed itself; surely a return to plantation economics and cash crops was inevitable to feed the overcrowded nation. It was ultimately this unpopular assessment that led to the legendary Toussaint Louverture’s downfall.

  Haiti’s population has grown 20-fold since those days.

  The debate over whether Haiti was to focus on food or export crops was never settled, but was instead eclipsed by the second great theme of Haitian history: with disasters natural and human-made, big and small, the deck has been stacked against Haiti from the beginning.

  The 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince was just the latest in a series of damaging tremors, but the scale of destruction and harm, still widely visible to this day, cannot be overstated. People have often asked me when I mention traveling to Haiti whether it has recovered from the hurricane. I tell them that they’re probably mistaking the 2010 earthquake for a hurricane—except, sadly, they might not be. Devastating cyclones came through in 2004, 2008, and 2016, flooding coastal areas, destroying crops and livestock, and spreading disease. Each one would probably be dubbed “the hurricane” in most places; in Haiti, you must be specific.

  Diseases have also played prominently in Haitian history. Haiti was, cruelly, a byword for HIV in the 1980s, although changing behaviors and public health efforts have reduced the infection rate significantly. More recently, the UN’s peacekeeping force, MINUSTAH, spread cholera to the country through poor sanitation at a base in the center of the country, causing 11,000 deaths and stoking international outrage. Nonetheless, I learned that Haitians are equally angered by a completely different grievance against MINUSTAH: kadejak, a word my nascent Kreyòl vocabulary didn’t contain. Kadejak means “rape.”

  I could go on about Haiti’s misfortunes, but that’s not the point of this—that story has been told before, and better than I can tell it. At the root of all these catastrophes is a human-made culprit: debt.

  Shortly after independence, France forced Haiti to accept a crippling indemnity at the threat of a blockade or outright invasion. Haiti was to pay 150 million francs that it clearly didn’t have. This financial ransoming ultimately left Haiti indebted to French and American banks until after World War II. At one point, 80 percent of Haiti’s tax revenue went toward servicing debt on this indemnity, which was ostensibly compensation to France for the theft of French property during the Haitian Revolution, mortgaged all the way into the 1940s and paid for by the children and grandchildren of enslaved people who fought for and won their freedom. The exact toll is incalculable: Haiti’s government was, by design, unable to make a single payment on time, and conveniently had to take out loans from French and American banks at predatory terms. This was a much cleaner way of exploiting the island than direct slavery. Estimates place the present-day value of the payments between $20 and $40 billion. And that’s not the end of it. It’s impossible to know the additional damage caused by the creation of the Haitian police state by the United States during its occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934—an occupation to enforce Haiti’s debt to the United States, naturally—and by the subsequent deployment of this police state by future regimes against the Haitian people.

  The powerful forces of the world ensured that a nation born in a slave rebellion could never stand among them as equals.

  Haitians must resort to extreme means of survival in light of a densely overcrowded countryside and economic disadvantages. The country has routinely asked too much of its rugged terrain, pushing Haitians to cultivate marginal plots for meager yields. Less visibly, the same thing has happened to its waters. The need to fill hungry bellies yesterday created overfished reefs today. Haitian fishing is done by sailboat or canoe. Fishermen scour the remaining productive reefs. Since speeds are slow, being close to the fish means everything. A sandbar stable enough for thatch houses in the middle of a good reef opens the reef up to intensive fishing that would be impossible otherwise.

  Sailing in a Haitian fishing boat sounds like a dicey proposition in theory: a handmade wooden vessel propelled by patched-together sails, out in the ocean without a life jacket in sight. Friends and family seemed especially wary about this part of my admittedly unusual journey. But in the moment, setting off toward azure horizons, my mind was quickly put at ease. The skills of the two-person crew more than made up for the simple craft—I felt safer on one of these than on a hobbyist’s motorboat, life jackets and all. These guys are badasses, and not just for their decades of experience dealing with every possible weather condition and vessel mishap that a lifetime of fishing in the Caribbean could throw at them: they used to make clandestine runs to Cuba during the tumultuous wind-down of the Duvalier era, over a hundred miles of open ocean, with perils awaiting them at both ends of the journey.

  My errand was humdrum by comparison. We set sail from Île-à-Vache—a picturesque island of rolling hills, beaches, palm trees—on a seven-mile journey across the Baie des Cayes on a clear, calm day. The crew knew our destination well. They even had friends there—this is no ghost island after all! They also had a name for it. A real name.

  Caye de l’Est is really called Ilet a Brouee.

  Apart from a handful of hot spots with enough tourism to be monetized by the locals, Haiti is an intensely emotional place for the independent traveler. A blan walking around unchaperoned by the dehumanizing security apparatus which typically accompanies aid workers presents a rare opportunity for real human interaction with a foreigner—and Haitians are often inclined to take it. It’s not uncommon to be invited to sit down and chat, whether taking refuge in a doorway during a rainstorm in Port-au-Prince or wandering the streets of a small town. Usually, it’s friendly banter—playful, poking fun at the blan. This adds another dimension to the emotional challenge Haiti can present.

  On Ilet a Brouee I felt this emotional awareness pushed to an extreme.

  Sure, mixed into my emotional stew was
a sense of excitement, as I was finally getting to see this unacknowledged place after years of wonder. But my heart also dropped as the island came into focus on the horizon, a larger and larger wedge between the turquoise water and cobalt-blue sky.

  I’m certainly aware of the negative image the media exploits when Haiti makes headlines, but I was holding out hope that this crowded little island might have a measure of stability, permanence, and—dare I say it—prosperity. Like the stories of its cousin a few hundred miles to the south in Colombia. Or maybe a story of people living in harmony with the natural world, like you would see on Human Planet. But another lesson of Haitian history is that narratives imported by foreigners never hold in Haiti; Haiti writes its own narratives. Ilet a Brouee appeared, at a glance, to be a tangle of sticks, tarps, and thatch, of unstable structures huddled on a sliver of beach.

  After we pulled as close as you can get to the island, I scurried over the side of our boat and waded carefully to shore. Suddenly more than a little overwhelmed by the situation, the crew navigated my introduction to some of the older residents. I was now doubly indebted to them. This island, apparently off the edge of most foreigners’ radar, is about as curious a place as any for a blan to wind up unannounced.

  They graciously gave me permission to wander around and take pictures.

  Ilet a Brouee is a maze of alleyways through crooked thatch- and tarp-covered houses—some more permanent than others—with a handful of turns before you reach the center of town or the shoreline. The main landmarks in town are the two concrete buildings—the church and the store—and the modest town square in the middle, outfitted with two solar streetlights: a defunct old one and a shiny new one.