The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  It is to the original assigning editors' credit that many of these explorers were perfectly matched to their destinations from the start. Many of the accounts featured here are less unknown chemistry experiments and more cases of hydrogen + fire = explosion. Harper's Magazine is no dummy. It knew what it was doing when it sent William T. Vollmann to Kurdistan, just as Vanity Fair knew what it was doing when it sent Maureen Dowd to Saudi Arabia, just as Travel + Leisure knew what it was doing when it sent the instinctively funny Gary Shteyngart to eat and drink his way through a Russian neighborhood in Tel Aviv. The results are predictably, transportingly phenomenal. In Vollmann's case, they are eye-opening as well. In "A Head for the Emir," a title that becomes quickly and disturbingly relevant in Vollmann's narrative of traveling across checkpoints within Kurdistan, the "air smelled of manure from the cattle that came grazing there, human urine, and sweat: of the many people all around, the closest man, in sandals and striped shirt, squatting."

  Other selections are no less rewarding—some might say even more so—for the gamble their publications took on an unknown kid. Emily Witt's account of two very neon years in Miami, chronicling her struggle between gluttony witness and gluttony participant for N + 1, is so artfully crafted one wonders how anyone else could dare to write about the city after she's through with it.

  There seems to be a stylistic choice among travel writers: Do they become the doctors making their rounds or the patients being experimented on? The point of travel writing is not always to exhaust a subject, to record everything so that the next person won't have to. The writer runs the risk of sucking the life out of a place. But it's a risk that pays off wonderfully for Witt, and she is actually part of a two-woman cleanup crew. I assume she won't mind terribly if I suggest that she has a kindred spirit here in Annie Proulx. "A Year of Birds," about Proulx's summer spent meticulously documenting Wyoming eagle nests, is a rare bird itself. True, it's hard not to include an essay on bald eagles in a book with American printed on the cover. But you really have to be as grossly talented as Annie Proulx to write thirteen thousand words on birds—and birds only. It's like saying, "I'm going to do this and you're going to sit there and enjoy it because it's just that good." And of course she's right. I imagine that reading her piece is not unlike being an actual bald eagle, dipping up and down and playing in the wind. Behold: "Days of flailing west wind, strong enough to push its snout under the crust of the fallen snow wherever hares or I had left footprints, strong enough to then flip up big pancakes of crust and send them cartwheeling east until they disintegrated in puffs. Eagles love strong wind. It is impossible to miss the joy they take in exhibition flying. The bald pair were out playing in the gusts, mounting higher and higher until they were specks, then splitting apart. After a few minutes of empty sky the unknown big dark bird flapped briefly into view before disappearing in a snow squall."

  Proulx also quotes from Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, which points out that "books on nature seldom mention wind; they are written behind stoves." Leopold makes a solid point: 2010 was not without its dramas, but the more perennial unsung adventures of travel rarely get, well, sung. There is so much world to see, why dwell on the minutiae of how we get from point A to point B? After all, the play's the thing. Not the drive to the theater. Which is precisely why, in our GPS-reliant reality, Jessica McCaughey's "Aligning the Internal Compass" is of note. In what sounds like a personal nightmare for most travelers, McCaughey intentionally engages in the lesser-known sport of "orienteering." See also: getting lost in the woods on purpose. With unexpected twists and turns, literal and metaphorical alike, it's an endearing but never precious exploration of an otherwise unglamorous subject—getting there. When one is publishing one's travel writing in a periodical, there is an unspoken competition for relevancy. The essay that opens with the traveler being catapulted into a secret bay by a lost tribe of Mongolian shamans wins, right? An essay such as McCaughey's is not flashy. It may not be a frontrunner for Most Newsworthy Travel, but it has a happy home in the Most Eternal Travel category.

  Actually, "getting there" was a general problem all over the globe in 2010. Even when a writer was already stationed at the "there" in question. To sit with Keith Gessen, sipping on overpriced coffee at a café, watching his sister sit in traffic just feet away, trapped in Moscow's infamous gridlock, is to be frustrated along with him. "Stuck" is a cultural history of Moscow via its abysmal traffic loops. Thanks to Gessen, we see a gridlock so persistent that it presents an alternate form of human contact. There's the voice, the touch, the written word, and now the hostile merging of lanes. It is a frustration known only too well in America to those who have foolishly attempted to drive from New York City to Long Island on a summer weekend. "To get to the Hamptons, just east of Manhattan," explains Ariel Levy in "Reservations," "you must sit on the Long Island Expressway—the biggest parking lot in the world, as they say—for hour upon hour of overheated immobility." But of course tourism and travel can (and probably should, if at all possible) be two different things. Levy's exploration of the Shinnecock tribe's financial and cultural survival goes deeper than the question of outsider traffic in a way that is, ironically, transporting. And who can resist its featured star, the memorable Lancelot Gumbs? He is a character reminiscent of The Orchid Thief's John Laroche.

  The mix of exotic drama and good old-fashioned human drama is what makes many of these essays sparkle. As I read, I found that both qualities could be traced to the initial impetus for writing the essay. Having gone through the same process myself, I will cop to its being a bit formulaic. The magazine pitch goes something like this: (1) writer has the notion of a location in his or her head, (2) writer travels to said location, where upon arrival the notion is (2a) corrected or (2b) confirmed, (3) magazine, hopefully, prints piece. The result is many travel pieces that revolve around falling in love with the idea of a place prior to arrival. Thankfully, in this year's selections the ideas themselves are anything but formulaic. Sometimes the idea manifests itself literally. (See, for example, Porter Fox's essay, "The Last Stand of Free Town," about the micro-nation of Christiania, a state within a state in Copenhagen and a temporary autonomous zone built on utopian ideals.) Sometimes the idea is more of a fixation. In Tom Ireland's "Famous," the author develops an almost Capote-like obsession with the two terrorists responsible for the 2008 killing spree at Mumbai's Victoria Terminus. And sometimes it's just a beautiful thought. In André Aciman's "My Monet Moment," the author travels to Bordighera, Italy, to track down the exact spot where his favorite painting was painted.

  "I like not knowing," admits Aciman. "Knowing anything about the painting would most likely undo its spell. But I can't help myself."

  Though one of the lighter pieces here, Aciman's account does touch on another theme in travel writing, and that is the idea of taking our world for granted. Of recognizing common misimpressions and issuing correctives through writing. Aciman had casually ogled a print of Monet's painting for years before he decided to do something about it. It's always fascinating to watch gifted writers leave town to explore the lives they're already living. Téa Obreht's "Twilight of the Vampires" starts with the much-heeded superstitions of her native land, which did not strike her as unusual as a child. But her essay soon becomes an eerie account to end all eerie accounts when she returns to Serbia to hunt for real-life vampires.

  Here is a place where people do not so much fall in love with ideas as obey their every whim. A road trip outside Belgrade drives us through a country where ritual reigns high above religion. Though it's not all menacing descriptions of open graves, 1970s horror films, and dried goat meat. Obreht's piece also contains the single most amusing image in the pages of this book: "Among numerous indignities through history, the Roma suffered the obscure nuisance of vampire watermelons."

  If the superstitions of Serbia overwhelm any religion, so does Haitian folklore overwhelm any earthquake. Mischa Berlinski's love letter to a devastated country is something special in
deed. In "Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead" there are enough descriptions of a Haiti you've never seen to correct the images you might have if you have been mainlining CNN only. When the January 2010 earthquake hits, Berlinski and his wife are stationed "only about 125 miles from Port-au-Prince but remote, like an island off the coast of Haiti ... There were more coffin makers in Jérémie than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the paved roads petered out at the edge of town ... In the mornings, merchants came down from the hills past our front gate with baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, and at night in bed under the mosquito net when the moon was silver and big, we heard voodoo drums and strange, spooky singing. I don't know if I've ever liked a place more in my life." It is an epic, heart-wrenching essay about hope, and these emotions are delivered in such a way that I don't feel the least bit silly in using clichéd adjectives to describe them. I became so immersed in the narrative and was so wracked with worry about the fate of Berlinski's friend Venance, I nearly forgot the title of the essay.

  I've noticed that the best travel writing doesn't have real resolutions. Instead of providing a sense of closure, which normally comes when the last word is typed and the writer and reader agree to part ways, the most memorable essays here feel like a beautiful mess at the end. This is because it's impossible to tie them up neatly. The places and the people who inhabit them still exist. Their stories go on. It's what makes travel writing so unusually difficult. All writing revolves around choices, around killing your darlings and the like. But if that's true, it means that travel writers have it harder than anyone else. How do you choose what goes and what stays when everything is new and of note? What about when it's assaulting all of your senses simultaneously? Some adventures would register to anyone as more significant than others, but the moment the writer takes leave of his or her normal life, everything falls under the purview of new experience. Nothing is safe from examination, including the writer. "It was quite fair," says Annie Proulx of the eagles that watched her like, well, hawks. "I peered at them through binoculars, they peered back."

  The This American Life broadcast moved on to the next adorable story after the interview with the psychologist. It made no mention of the woman's response to the little girl on the airplane. Endeared as this woman must have been, there was a pair of wide eyes staring back at her, waiting for a reply to a perfectly reasonable question. No, really: When do we get smaller? I wonder what she said. Perhaps the little girl was encouraged to look out the window and down at the landscape below. Look at all those new places! Imagine how many kinds of lives are being lived down there right this minute. And how incongruous for the human brain that it all fits in a tiny rounded window. Whole cities! Whole oceans! Whole countries! And it's all right there, laid out for our viewing. Ready to be examined. Of course, therein lies the little girl's answer. We never do get smaller. It's just that the world gets bigger.

  SLOANE CROSLEY

  My Monet Moment

  André Aciman

  FROM Condé Nast Traveler

  THE ROMANCE BEGINS FOR ME with a picture of a house by Claude Monet on my wall calendar. More than half the house is missing and the roof is entirely cropped. All one can see is an arched balcony with hints of another balcony on the floor above. Outside, wild growth and fronds everywhere, a few slim trees—palms mostly, but one agave plant stands out—and beyond, along a wide, unpaved road, four large villas and a dappled sky. Farther out in the distance is a chain of mountains capped with what could be snow. My instincts tell me there is a beach nearby.

  I like not knowing anything about the house or the painting. I like speculating about the setting and imagining that it could easily be France, Italy, possibly elsewhere. I like thinking that I'm right about the wide expanse of seawater behind the house. I stare at the picture and fantasize about the torpor hanging over old beach towns on early July days, when the squares and roads empty and everyone stays out of the sun.

  The caption, when I finally cheat and find it at the bottom of the calendar, reads "Villas in Bordighera." I've never heard of Bordighera before. Where is it? Near Lake Como? In Morocco? On Corfu? Somewhere in Asia Minor? I like not knowing. Knowing anything about the painting would most likely undo its spell. But I can't help myself, and soon I look up more things, and sure enough, Bordighera, I discover, lies on the water, on the Riviera di Ponente in Italy, within sight of Monaco. Further research reveals the villa's architect: Charles Garnier, famed for building the Opéra de Paris. Finally, the year of the painting: 1884. Monet, I realize, was still a few years away from painting his thirty views of Rouen Cathedral.

  I know I'm bit by bit demystifying the house. As it turns out, the Internet reveals more paintings of gardens and palm trees in Bordighera, plus one of the very same house. It is a copy of the image on my wall calendar, painted by Monet, not in Bordighera but later that same year in Giverny and meant as a gift for his friend the painter Berthe Morisot. As always, Monet liked to paint the same scene again and again. Sometimes nothing at all changes—just the transit of light spells the difference between impressions of morning and noon.

  Monet went to visit Bordighera for the light. His intended visit of a couple of weeks ended up lasting three laborious months in the winter of 1884. He had come the previous year with the painter Renoir for a brief stay. This time he was determined to come alone and capture Bordighera's seascapes and lush vegetation. His letters were filled with accounts of his struggles to paint Bordighera. They were also littered with references to the colony of British residents who flocked here from fall to early spring each year and who transformed this fishing and agrarian sea town famed for its lemons and olive presses into an enchanted turn-of-the-century station for the privileged and happy few. The Brits ended up building a private library, an Anglican church, and Italy's first tennis courts, to say nothing of grand luxury hotels, precursors of those yet to be built on the Venice Lido. Monet felt adrift in Bordighera. He missed his home in Giverny and Alice Hoschedé, his mistress and later wife; and he missed their children.

  As far as he was concerned, Bordighera promised three things: Francesco Moreno's estate, containing one of Europe's most exotic botanical gardens; breathtaking sea vistas; and that one unavoidable belfry with its dimpled, onion cupola towering over everything. Monet couldn't touch one of these without invoking the other two. Lush vegetation, seascapes, towering belfry—he kept coming back to them, painting them separately or together, shifting them around as a photographer would members of a family who were not cooperating for a group portrait.

  If he was forever complaining, it may have been because the subject matter was near impossible to capture on canvas, or because the colors were, as Monet liked to say in his letters, terribly difficult—he felt at once entranced, challenged, and stymied by them. But it was also because Monet was less interested in subject matter and colors than he was in the atmosphere and in the intangible and, as he called it, the "fairylike" quality of Bordighera. "The motif is of secondary importance to me," he wrote elsewhere. "What I want to reproduce is what lies between the subject and me." What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere. Earth, light, water are a clutter of endless, meaningless things; art is about discovery and design and a reasoning with chaos.

  Many years after seeing the reproduction on my wall calendar, I finally happen upon Monet's third painting of that very same house at an exhibition in the Wildenstein gallery in New York. Same missing back of the house, same vegetation, same sky, same suggestion of a beach just steps away, except that the third floor, which is absent in the first two canvases, is quite visible here; one can almost spot the balusters lining the balcony. And there is another variation: in the background looms not the snowcapped mountains but Bordighera Alta—the città alta, the oldest part of the city—which like so many old towns in Italy is perched on top of a hill and predates the Borgo Marino on the shore. This inversion is also typical of Monet. He wanted to see how t
he scene looked from the other side.

  I want to be in that house, own that house. I begin to people it with imaginary faces. A plotline suggests itself, the beach beckons ever more fiercely. Like a fleeing cartoon character painting escape routes on a wall, I find my own way into this villa and am already picturing dull routines that come with ownership.

  Then one day, by chance, I finally find the opportunity to visit Bordighera and to see it for myself. I have to give a talk on Lake Como, so rather than fly directly from New York to Milan, I decide to fly to Nice instead and there board a train to Italy. The bus from the airport to the train station in Nice takes twenty minutes, purchasing the train ticket another fifteen, and as luck would have it, the train to Italy leaves in another fifteen. Within an hour I am in Bordighera. The train stops. I hear voices on the platform. The door opens and I step down. This is exactly what I expected. Part of me is reluctant to accept that art and reality can make such good partners.