The Best American Travel Writing 2019 Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction: Travel in the Time of Awakening

  STEPHEN BENZ: Overlooking Guantánamo

  MADDY CROWELL: The Great Divide

  DAVID FETTLING: Uncomfortable Silences: A Walk in Myanmar

  ALICE GREGORY: Finished

  MATT GROSS: How the Chile Pepper Took Over the World

  RAHAWA HAILE: I Walked from Selma to Montgomery

  PETER HESSLER: Morsi the Cat

  CAMERON HEWITT: A VISIT TO CHERNOBYL: Travel in the Postapocalypse

  BROOKE JARVIS: Paper Tiger

  SAKI KNAFO: Keepers of the Jungle

  LUCAS LOREDO: Mother Tongue

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

  JEFF MACGREGOR: Taming the Lionfish

  LAUREN MARKHAM: If These Walls Could Talk

  BEN MAUK: The Floating World

  DEVON O’NEIL: Irmageddon

  NICK PAUMGARTEN: Water and the Wall

  ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: How Nashville Became One Big Bachelorette Party

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

  NOAH SNEIDER: Cursed Fields

  WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN: The End of the Line

  JASON WILSON: “The Greatest”

  JESSICA YEN: Tributary

  JIANYING ZHA: Tourist Trap

  Contributors’ Notes

  Notable Travel Writing of 2018

  Read More from the Best American Series

  About the Editors

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Alexandra Fuller

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Travel Writing™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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  www.hmhbooks.com

  ISSN 1530–1516 (print) ISSN 2537-4830 (e-book)

  ISBN 978–0-358–09423–4 (print) ISBN 978-0-358-09426-5 (e-book)

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Cover photograph © Ed Freeman / Getty Images

  Fuller photograph © Tig

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  “Overlooking Guantánamo” by Stephen Benz. First published in New England Review, vol. 39.4. Copyright © 2018 by Stephen Benz. Reprinted by permission of Stephen Benz.

  “The Great Divide” by Maddy Crowell. First published in Harper’s Magazine, March 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Maddy Crowell. Reprinted by permission of Maddy Crowell.

  “Uncomfortable Silences: A Walk in Myanmar” by David Fettling. First published in Longreads, March 28, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by David Fettling. Reprinted by permission of David Fettling.

  “Finished” by Alice Gregory. First published in The New Yorker, October 8, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Alice Gregory. Reprinted by permission of Alice Gregory.

  “How the Chile Pepper Took Over the World” by Matt Gross. First published in Airbnb Magazine, Winter 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Matt Gross. Reprinted by permission of Matt Gross.

  “I Walked from Selma to Montgomery” by Rahawa Haile. First published in Buzzfeed, April 1, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by BuzzFeed, Inc. Reprinted by permission of BuzzFeed, Inc.

  “Morsi the Cat” by Peter Hessler. First published in The New Yorker, May 7, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Peter Hessler. Reprinted by permission of Peter Hessler.

  “A Visit to Chernobyl: Travel in the Postapocalypse” by Cameron Hewitt. First published in Rick Steves’ Europe, November 20, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Cameron Hewitt. Reprinted by permission of Cameron Hewitt.

  “Paper Tiger” by Brooke Jarvis. First published in The New Yorker, July 2, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Brooke Jarvis. Reprinted by permission of Brooke Jarvis.

  “Keepers of the Jungle” by Saki Knafo. First published in Travel + Leisure, July 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Saki Knafo. Reprinted by permission of Saki Knafo.

  “Mother Tongue” by Lucas Loredo. First published in Oxford American, Summer 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Lucas Loredo. Reprinted by permission of Lucas Loredo and The Oxford American.

  “Is This the Most Crowded Island in the World? (And Why That Question Matters)” by Alex MacGregor. First published in Longreads, February 19, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Alex MacGregor. Reprinted by permission of Alex MacGregor and Longreads.

  “Taming the Lionfish” by Jeff MacGregor. First published in Smithsonian, June 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Jeff MacGregor. Reprinted by permission of Jeff MacGregor.

  “If These Walls Could Talk” by Lauren Markham. First published in Harper’s Magazine, March 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Lauren Markham. Reprinted by permission of Lauren Markham.

  “The Floating World” by Ben Mauk. First published in The New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2018. Copyright © 2018 The New York Times. Reprinted by permission.

  “Irmageddon” by Devon O’Neil. First published in Outside Magazine, April 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Devon O’Neil. Reprinted by permission of Devon O’Neil.

  “Water and the Wall” by Nick Paumgarten. First published in The New Yorker, April 23, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Nick Paumgarten. Reprinted by permission of Nick Paumgarten.

  “How Nashville Became One Big Bachelorette Party” by Anne Helen Petersen. First published in Buzzfeed, March 29, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by BuzzFeed, Inc. Reprinted by permission of BuzzFeed, Inc.

  “These Brazilians Traveled 18 Hours on a Riverboat to Vote. I Went With Them” by Shannon Sims. First published in Pacific Standard, Oct 26, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Shannon Sims. Reprinted by permission of Shannon Sims.

  “Cursed Fields” by Noah Sneider. First published in Harper’s Magazine, April 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Noah Sneider. Reprinted by permission of Noah Sneider.

  “The End of the Line” by William T. Vollmann. First published in Smithsonian, October 2018. Copyright © 2018 by William T. Vollmann. Reprinted by permission of Writers House LLC.

  “‘The Greatest’” by Jason Wilson. First published in The Washington Post Magazine, March 18, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Jason Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Jason Wilson.

  “Tributary” by Jessica Yen. First published in Fourth Genre, vol. 20.2. Copyright © 2018 by Jessica Yen. Reprinted by permission of Jessica Yen.

  “Tourist Trap” by Jianying Zha. First published in The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Jianying Zha. Reprinted by permission of Jianying Zha.

  Foreword

  This is the 20th year of The Best American Travel Writing, and in those two decades of sifting through the thousands of articles, essays, dispatches, and report
s, I figured I’d seen just about everything in the realm of travel storytelling. Then I received my September 23, 2018, copy of the New York Times Magazine. This was the magazine’s fall Voyages Issue, its special twice-a-year travel-themed edition, which more than once in the past has featured a piece that has ended up in this anthology.

  In this particular Voyages Issue, not a single sentence of travel narrative appeared. Nearly all the pages in the print edition were given over to large photographs from various locations around the world, each with a number. Those numbers corresponded to a soundtrack, available online, and each marked a recording of unique sounds in the particular place shown in the photo. In the issue’s opening explanatory essay, Kim Tingley writes, “Paradoxically, the photographs on the following pages, accompanied by the recordings, are fixed. They are defined by the page, whereas sound has no similar boundary. We see them in the present tense, but we listen (always, but doubly so with recordings) to the past.”

  Readers, like me, listened to audio of hot lava pouring from an active volcano in Hawaii; the piercing cries of male and female indris, the largest living lemurs in Madagascar; the high-pitched “conversations” of New York City sewer rats; the cracking of the earth in the Atacama Desert of Chile; the bustle of a bus station in Lagos, Nigeria; the buzz of a coral reef in the US Virgin Islands. Some of the sounds were startling: Who knew that hot lava sounded like breaking glass? Who knew that coral reefs sounded like bacon sizzling in a pan? Who knew what rat laughter sounded like? The whole experience was entirely engrossing.

  Yet for a travel writer, the exercise itself was likely more disturbing than even the rat laughter. The photographs may have been “fixed” in the present tense and the audio in the past, but the words were absent from both present and past. It didn’t take a pessimist to understand the suggestion of what the future of travel publishing may look like, too.

  There’s been a lot of “reimagining” of travel writing over the past few years. In fact, I would argue that no other literary genre gets as much “reimagining.” And I can understand why. There’s a lot of bad travel writing. And bad travel writing can be self-indulgent, ill-informed, overwrought with purple prose, and lacking context. Worse, it can be full of prejudice and stereotypes, and historically was an instrument of colonialism and propaganda. But the best travel writing is none of these.

  About a month and a half after the no-text, audio Voyages Issue, the same newspaper’s Travel section changed editors. The new editor, Amy Virshup, posted a piece titled “We’re Reimagining Our Travel Journalism. Tell Us What You’d Like to See.” There were a number of wrongheaded assertions about travel writing that Virshup put forth. She insisted, for instance, that travel journalism would be best accomplished by “using more writers who actually live in the places readers want to visit.” The idea driving this seemed to be that the editors hear complaints from locals who live in places they cover, “and often they want to tell us what we missed.”

  The cynical view of this, of course, is to believe that the Times is actually “reimagining” its travel budget and wants to save money by using people who already live in a particular locale. But if it truly does represent a sincere, philosophical reimagining, it’s still misguided. The genre is called travel writing for a reason: it involves a traveler. Mostly, the traveler in good travel writing is not a local and doesn’t pretend to be.

  Good travel writing brings fresh eyes, and an outsider’s view, to a place—even if it’s a traveler returning to somewhere they were born, or their parents were born, or somewhere they lived for a long time but not anymore. To be clear, being an outsider is what makes travel writing incredibly difficult. An outsider describing and telling stories about a foreign place is challenging, and the potential to offend or go awry is always there. But that challenge is what also creates dynamic, tense, thrilling, and important stories. An honest, engaging traveler inspires us to make our own journeys and helps us to see and understand new (to us) places. Good travel writing is about human connection.

  In fact, one of the most misguided principles espoused by the Times’ new travel editor is to move away from first-person narratives. She writes, “In general I want to take the word ‘I’ out of our coverage.” This probably sounded great in a conference room. But a true first-person “I” actually gives the reader some point of view to work with or against—agree or disagree—and some basis and context for the human experience. Removing the “I” altogether and doing some faux-objective third-person, or even crowdsourced, travel coverage feels like a fool’s errand, the Yelp of travel. Can there be true insight if the reader doesn’t know what filter that insight is coming through?

  Virshup contends that the first person “made more sense when travel was harder, when most people were never going to take that trip to Patagonia or the Australian outback, so the writer really was the reader’s window into a different world.” That’s a pretty privileged posture for a travel editor to take. Plenty of people who read and love travel writing haven’t traveled widely at all. And even if they have, they’ve likely visited a place only once in their life, and will have done so as a traveler. I travel a lot, professionally, and I’ve never been to Patagonia or Australia. If I do get an opportunity to go, I’d like to read a first-person account by an engaging travel writer. Just like the ones we’re publishing in this year’s anthology.

  The stories included here are, as always, selected from among dozens of pieces in dozens of diverse publications—from mainstream glossies to cutting-edge websites to Sunday newspaper travel sections to literary journals to niche magazines. I did my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion I forwarded the best travel stories from 2018 to guest editor Alexandra Fuller, who made the final selections. I can’t think of a better writer than Fuller to have edited our 20th-anniversary edition. I’m grateful to Rosemary McGuinness at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for her help in producing this year’s wonderful collection.

  I now begin anew by reading the travel stories published in 2019. As I have for years, I am asking editors and writers to submit the best of whatever it is they define as travel writing—the wider the better. These submissions must be nonfiction and published in the United States during the 2019 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author’s name, the date of publication, and the publication name, and must be tear sheets, the complete publication, or a clear photocopy of the piece as it originally appeared. I must receive all submissions by January 1, 2020, in order to ensure full consideration for the next collection.

  Further, publications that want to make certain their contributions will be considered for the next edition should make sure to include this anthology on their subscription list. Submissions or subscriptions should be sent to: Jason Wilson, Best American Travel Writing, 230 Kings Highway East, Suite 192, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.

  Jason Wilson

  Introduction:

  Travel in the Time of Awakening

  There’s a saying in Haiti: A rich man travels, a poor man leaves.”

  —Alex MacGregor, from Is This the Most Crowded Island in the World? (And Why That Question Matters)

  This much is obvious: travel is not a means of escaping the self; travel is a means of revealing the self. Or, in the process of journeying the road less traveled, the self is unraveled and thereby revealed. But, as the essays in this collection reveal, the road less traveled need not be uncrowded—see Ben Mauk’s startling “The Floating World” and Anne Helen Petersen’s refreshing “How Nashville Became One Big Bachelorette Party”—merely approached differently, without an editorial agenda, for example, or without the traditional defensive stance of the heartless third person. And the selves that are revealed are just as likely to be our collective selves, the common human condition, rendered up close and recognizably personal. In any case, when writers put themselves—ourselves I should say—in play, in plight, we can see that there is always room for less of us, and that, as C
harles Wright says in his long-form poem Littlefoot, “The voyage into the interior is all that matters, / Whatever your ride.”

  In other words, properly done, travel shows us who we really are without everything not needed on that necessarily lonely voyage. And, ultimately, there is a joy in the casting off, however bleak the circumstances that force our reduction, however unwilling our emptying, however much must be lost en route. I think of Wes Anderson’s 2007 fictional comedy-drama, The Darjeeling Limited, about three brothers who finally fling away their late father’s expensive luggage, literally and figuratively, on their journey across India to find their mother/themselves. We cheer their eventual disburdenment the same way we cheer great travel writing because the brutal mental slog of that casting off, of that exposure, has been done for us and it is, we know, much harder to do than it looks. In the case of travel writing, it often requires a simultaneous and reflexive look inward, outward, backward, forward: driving on the soul’s busy highway of ideas, weaving lanes (see Alice Gregory’s “Finished,” David Fettling’s “Uncomfortable Silences: A Walk in Myanmar,” and Peter Hessler’s mordant “Morsi the Cat”).

  Vacation, on the other hand, is not travel. It is precisely the opposite of travel, a kind of absenting of responsibility, a means of denying the limits of what we can carry in our expensive luggage. On vacation, a shinier, glossier world than really exists is promised and, depending on one’s ability to pay, delivered. We are supposed to emerge from this vacating place shinier, glossier people. But there is, as the word suggests, a vacuous, vacant aspect to the consolations of the ego, a suffocation by pampering, a regret for the glutted appetite. How much luxury can one body absorb before the soul is itching for something substantial?

  That said, essays on vacations, or vacation destinations, are two of the more satisfying, and telling, pieces in this collection. Jianying Zha’s dystopian “Tourist Trap” had me in tears by the end; forced luxury vacations are one of the new and surprising ways China is attempting to control outspoken government critics. And “‘The Greatest,’” Jason Wilson’s slightly unhinged and unhinging romp around five Trump-branded properties (yes, that Trump) in four countries, is a reminder that there is no need to numb people who are more than willing to numb themselves. (Wilson is the series editor of Best American Travel Writing.)