The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  Martin grew up in and around Nashville, went east for graduate school, where she specialized in oral histories of segregation and took a professor job at a liberal arts school in New England. Then she left it all to come back home. These days, she sings soprano in the church she grew up in, waitresses to make ends meet, and writes about the things she knows best, like how “hot chicken” transformed from its origins in the Nashville black community to a must-eat white tourist food.

  “When I was growing up, Nashville was considered so dorky,” she told me. “It was everything you wanted to escape as a southerner.” But it still drew people from all over. “Up until ten years ago, you could still live the Nashville dream,” she said. “Move here when you’re twenty-two, put in your time, and by the age of thirty-two, you’d be a studio musician. You could survive. You can’t do that anymore. And that’s going to change what the city is.”

  That change, of course, has already happened: the core of Nashville is increasingly white, increasingly rich, increasingly polished. “I look at the transplants, and I’ve been surprised by how airbrushed and packaged they seem,” Martin said. “A few years ago, I was interviewing a white supremacist for a piece, and when he found out where I was from, he told me, ‘Oh, I love Nashville, it’s such a beautiful town.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes, the river, and the parks, and the . . .’ And he cut me off, and said, ‘No, no, I mean the women.’”

  The women aren’t white supremacists. But they are very white. Same for the bachelorette parties and Draper James. “It’s all a packaged experience of how to be female: what you’re supposed to look like, what you’re supposed to act like, how to perform sexuality and hotness,” Martin told me. “It’s a cartoon of southern white sexuality.”

  Each vendor that partners with companies like Bach Weekend receives slightly less than they normally would for services (drinking, transportation, line dancing). In return, they get a steady stream of customers. Kristen Nicole Hall, the owner of Studio Goddess, doesn’t have to take that deal. She has more bachelorette customers than she can handle.

  Hall wears her hair in a high topknot and has the centered, soothing demeanor of a power yoga teacher. But she also has the arms and back of a competitive swimmer—the direct result of years learning how to hold her body above the ground on the pole.

  Unlike the rest of the bachelorette providers I spoke with, Hall was born and raised in Nashville. “I’m a unicorn,” she said. “Most people don’t even know anyone who’s from here.” She attended Middle Tennessee State University, majoring in chemistry and biology, but graduated smack into the economic downturn. She started doing “pole,” as practitioners put it, in a back studio frequented by exotic dancers, plus a handful of others who pole danced for fun and exercise. One of them, a district attorney, asked her, “What if we had a space just for this?”

  Recreational pole dancing had already spread to urban areas across the country, but, as Hall told me, its sexualized connotation was harder to shake in the South. “I just tell people, ‘It’s okay to move your body in a way that feels honest.’” The studio’s offerings have expanded to aerial, acroyoga, and dance classes like “Shake Your Abs,” which run throughout the week. But it’s the bachelorette parties—taking classes in pole dancing, “Southern Swagger,” and burlesque—that keep the doors open.

  Studio Goddess has hosted as many as 32 groups in a single weekend, but the average during bachelorette season is between 20 and 25. One from Louisville, Kentucky, is currently in the studio, wearing purple shirts (NASH BASH JUST DRINK) and very tentatively dancing in the general vicinity of the poles.

  The teacher has a blond bob, a classic Wasp look, and very un-Waspy dance moves. She’s a graduate of the New England Circus Arts School, and works as a performance artist during the week. “Put your back to the pole,” she tells the group. “Now raise your arm above, grab the pole, then slide your hands down, and swing that hair forward.” The song playing is by Beyoncé. The soundtrack is almost always Beyoncé. There’s a lot of nervous giggling.

  Most enter the room bashful and tentative, but exit in a very different state. “There’s something about these classes,” Hall said. “We’re told that we have to be sexy for men, but in the room, you’re not doing it for others. It’s for us.”

  The bachelorette party streams out of the studio, glowing with a fine sheen of sweat, and picks up champagne glasses filled with mimosas. “People post pictures on social media complaining about the bachelorettes—their plastic cowboy hats, their Steve Madden cowboy boots,” Hall said. “And I always comment on their posts: ‘These bachelorettes are paying for my future kids to go to college.’” They help her teachers pay off student loans, help them cover child care, help them pursue artistic dreams during the rest of the week. As Hall tells her weekday students when they bemoan the lack of weekend offerings: “Listen: these girls make your classes possible.”

  Back on Broadway, the sun is setting, and the streets are beginning to clot with crowds. A different country cover band blasts through the open windows of each honky-tonk. Out of one, you can hear the guitar line of Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long,” which is actually the guitar line from “Sweet Home Alabama,” lifted and repackaged. It’s a fitting metaphor for what’s become of the street in general, as stages that once served as spaces for original music have metamorphosed into Epcot versions of their former selves. This is the future of Broadway: less Robert’s Western World, more Redneck Riviera (the new project from Big & Rich’s John Rich) or FGL House, centered around the brand of Florida Georgia Line. These multilevel, choose-your-own-adventure bars, built on the idea of Nashville, are boxing out the places that composed that idea in the first place.

  But this is the blissful part of the night—when you’re drunk enough to lean into spectacle, forget whatever article you’ve read on the side effects of gentrification, and neglect your best intentions to only go to the “authentic” honky-tonks, rather than the ones that have the best call-and-response drinking games.

  On the street, traffic has ceded almost entirely to party transportation. A Redneck Riviera open-air bus is filled with women dancing to “Single Ladies” and holding up cutout photos of the absent groom-to-be’s face. Down the street, a group of Peoria nurses is stalled on a Party Wagon on the side of the street. When our photographer steps toward them to get a shot, they start to woo! as if on cue. “When the girls go downtown, and everyone takes pictures of them,” the owner of the Party Barge told me, “they tell us it makes them feel like Britney.”

  Unlike the traditional bachelor party, whose stated allure is a final, debauched moment of release before settling into monogamy, the bachelorette party—at least in its contemporary iteration—offers a last chance to be a public center of attention in a socially acceptable way. Crucially, that unruly spectacle—the moment when you get to feel like Britney, or believe you can dance like Beyoncé—is a plane ride, a long drive, and a world away from your “normal” life. Some of what happens in Nashville stays on Instagram, but most of what happens gets mothballed in the memory of your friends as that weekend when shit got crazy.

  When the freeways of the mid-twentieth century first began to take shape, they were celebrated as great connectors: a way to introduce Americans to so much more of what our vast and diverse country had to offer. Freeways, like cars, and railroads before them, helped democratize travel, but also personalized it. Cheap gas made the entire nation your potential destination. Cheap airfare has only accelerated the process: for $300, you can fly nearly anywhere in the US, then leave it behind after three days and a handful of Instagrams, a public notch on your conspicuous leisure belt.

  Like so many others of my age and professional class, I’ve taken these weekend trips. I’ve posted these Instagrams. I’ve been on similar bachelorette parties. I’ve had fun and I’ve documented myself doing it, providing proof of something for both myself and others. I don’t think women claiming time for themselves is wrong; I don’t necessarily think
women taking up public space is, either. But watching the bachelorettes of Nashville against the backdrop of citywide gentrification reminded me of how mindlessly I did all of it. Friction, resistance of any kind—whiteness, youth, and money removed it all. Which again begs the question: Who can have a city bend to their will, and whose will is bent or blatantly ignored in the service of others?

  That night, waiting to cross Broadway, I find myself sandwiched next to an older couple, dressed up for a dinner on the town. At the stoplight, a Pedal Tavern has just coasted through a red light, holding up traffic in all directions.

  “I guess they just have the right-a-way, don’t they,” the husband says. “They just go whatever speed they want, yell whatever they want, do whatever they want.”

  The wife stares at the women in the Pedal Tavern, who are seated facing inward, so that they look only at one another. “I guess they do,” she responds. “I guess they do.”

  SHANNON SIMS

  These Brazilians Traveled 18 Hours on a Riverboat to Vote. I Went with Them.

  from Pacific Standard

  Everyone aboard the Michael was there for one reason: they were going to vote in the Brazilian presidential election. It was early morning, and the passengers streamed up the wobbly gangplank and onto the boat docked at the chaotic port in Santarem, smack in the middle of the Amazon. They carried with them big duffel bags and babies, and families jostled through the crowd to reach the most desirable spots and hang up their hammocks. Enterprising vendors boarded as well, shouting offers of three-for-one pastries and ice-cold water, adding their enthusiastic weight to the sway of the rocking boat. The Michael is one of the oldest boats to dock at Santarem; its sky-blue paint had chipped away many trips ago, and the wooden floor of its top deck was riddled with splintery cracks and rusty exposed nails. The bathroom—it was likely what you’re imagining.

  But none of the other passengers overloading the boat seemed fazed by the conditions, and, unlike me, none of them seemed daunted when we set out onto the wide river finally. It was close to 100 degrees, and we were facing nine hours on a rickety boat full of crying children, far from cell signal or signs of industrialized civilization. I couldn’t believe that people were taking this hot, long, uncomfortable voyage just to vote in the election. The captain turned up the volume on his cheesy Brazilian soundtrack, adding a background thump to the human racket. It was going to be a long nine hours.

  If you’ve followed any recent news from Brazil, you’ve heard about the all-important election coming up this weekend. The stakes are high: if the polls are right, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right, homophobic demagogue, will become leader of the world’s fourth-largest democracy. As Bolsonaro’s polling figures have risen, his campaigning style has become cocksure, and he expounds an alarming vision, one in which the government does away with the “coddling” of blacks and gays and women and “banishes” leftists from Brazil. The only man who can stop Bolsonaro is former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, a political stand-in for ex-president and leftist rabble-rouser Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who has been jailed for corruption.

  But Haddad’s party, the Workers’ Party, has failed to confound the mythos that Bolsonaro has created for himself as an anticorruption warrior. The result is a battle between two starkly different visions for Brazil’s future.

  What hasn’t made the news, though, is a portrait of a different Brazil from the one seen at the protests in Rio de Janeiro or the political rallies in São Paulo. It’s a Brazil that even most Brazilians don’t know, one that takes hours to reach by boat. In the village of São Pedro, deep in the Amazon, along the banks of the Arapiuns River, life could hardly be more removed from life in the cities. It’s a place where there’s no Wi-Fi and no real economy, a place where the dominant sound, besides the river, is the loud roar of the generator in the town square. But these citizens’ votes will count just as much as the votes in the big cities—and here, some communities’ long-term survival could be directly threatened by a Bolsonaro victory.

  So that’s where I headed, for the first round of the election, on a trip that would reveal the contours of the place, and the country, in ways I could not have foreseen.

  São Pedro is one of thousands of riverside villages throughout the Amazon region whose residents—called ribeirinhos, or, roughly, “riverside folk”—are only vaguely connected to the rest of Brazil. Saude e Alegria, a nonprofit organization that monitors riverside communities in the Amazon, estimates that, in the four municipalities the group studies in the western part of the state of Pará, 70,000 people live in 250 ribeirinho communities. The curving Arapiuns River, on which São Pedro lies, hosts 68 communities along its banks; São Pedro, home to about 200 families, is one of the largest. Most of the other communities along the river are smaller, populated by not more than a few hundred people. The lives of these ribeirinhos, their struggles and hopes, represent some of the most overlooked stories in all of Brazil.

  Part of why ribeirinhos are so easily overlooked by both government and media is because they don’t fit into simple categories. Their narratives are complex, and even determining the ethnic identity of ribeirinhos is a challenge. Some ribeirinhos identify as indigenous, some don’t. Some speak Portuguese, some don’t. The only commonality is that all of them are, by almost any standard, very poor.

  The forefathers of many of the Brazilians living in the ribeirinho communities in this part of the Amazon moved here during the rubber boom, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when latex drove the northern Brazilian economy and Henry Ford made his millions, establishing his Fordlandia outpost in the jungle to better access the rubber trees. The laborers during the boom made improvised homes along the banks of the rivers that braid into the Amazon. Once the industry went bust, many of the rubber workers moved to coastal cities; the ribeirinhos were the ones who stayed. Some of the communities they formed are nestled deep within the river forests and can only be reached by motorized canoes. Political campaigning here is done by boat, or water bike.

  São Pedro, in fact, is one of the few ribeirinho communities directly accessible by the iconic double-decker boats that look like colorful toys and function like Amazonian buses: they make stops at all the riverside communities along a route, picking up and dropping off passengers, and bringing supplies and messages (the communities are often far out of any cell-phone-signal range, so messages are sent by word of mouth). On the boats, many of the passengers already know each other; they’re neighbors or family, or they’ve met on the boat route before.

  These passenger boats, some of which journey for multiple days to reach ribeirinho communities isolated in the forest, become temporary residences for the passengers through all those hours of swaying, as the boat slowly makes its way upriver. They sleep beside one another in hammocks, swinging into each other when the waters get rough. On the boat’s one table near the bathroom, they play dominoes when even the hammocks get too sweaty in the afternoon heat. They cook lunch and dinners together, communal meals of rice and beans that are evenly portioned out so that everyone eats at once. At the different riverside stops, the men help unload supplies, while the women care for each other’s babies. These boats are at once public and intimate. They lack the amenities of modern life, but they also feel like a sanctuary from workaday routines; the most popular activity on board is simply staring out at the forest as it passes by, hour by slow hour. Being on one of these boats is like being in a place that seems to float outside of Brazil, away from the difficulties that you find once the boat lands in the sands of the ribeirinho villages.

  I wanted to see what the election was like for people who live in this overlooked Brazil. So I boarded the Michael, hooked up my dark green hammock, and joined the crowded ride upriver, into the belly of the Amazon.

  In the United States, it sometimes makes the news if people have to stand for more than an hour to vote. But it didn’t seem so inconvenient or strange to the people on the Michael that they were having to commute nine ho
urs in order to vote. In a way, they’re used to it. Because the ribeirinho communities have no real economies to speak of, many ribeirinhos today live a life in transition: Many say they moved to the city to work or study, but their voting residence is still back home in the ribeirinho community. Others still live in the ribeirinho village and take the Michael nine hours twice a week just to go to university or work for a day. Time ticks by slowly on the boat, but the passengers seem altogether unruffled by the commute.

  And voting in Brazil is mandatory. If you don’t vote, and haven’t obtained prior permission to skip the election, you face a cascade of problems: you get flagged across government systems, and paying taxes or even buying a microwave becomes complicated. But voting also doesn’t seem like such an inconvenience when everyone is doing it. Election day is always Sunday, and so if you’re not standing in line to vote on that day, you’re out of the loop. As in the US, Brazilians are registered in their local municipalities, and so they must return to those locations on election day—even if it takes them 18 hours round-trip to do so.

  By the time we embarked out of Santarem, the Michael was packed. A baby had been slung inside a hammock above me, a man was sleeping in a hammock below me, and the floor of the boat had no room to step between the coolers and duffel bags containing the city hauls of the passengers. I was on the upper level of the double-decker, where a hard breeze off the river kept us cool. But the floor below was dark and hot, and full of people.

  In this year’s Brazilian election, protections for the Amazon rain forest are on the chopping block. Bolsonaro, the man almost certain to win, is floating proposals that terrify environmental advocates and supporters of indigenous land rights in Brazil. Bolsonaro has vowed to do away with the legislation that creates indigenous territories, the essential land rights tool for indigenous communities in the Amazon and a proxy for preventing deforestation. He’s also promised to open indigenous lands to mining.