The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction

  ELIF BATUMAN: Cover Story

  TOM BISSELL: My Holy Land Vacation

  STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST: Chiefing in Cherokee

  PETER FRICK-WRIGHT: Cliffhanger

  JACKIE HEDEMAN: The Ones Who Left

  LESLIE JAMISON: The Big Leap

  JODI KANTOR AND CATRIN EINHORN: Refugees Hear a Foreign Word:Welcome

  RANDALL KENAN: Finding the Forgotten

  SAKI KNAFO: Waiting on a Whale at the End of the World

  GWENDOLYN KNAPP: Plum Crazy

  DAVID KUSHNER: Land of the Lost

  GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS: On the Road

  ROBERT MACFARLANE: The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web

  ANN MAH: Volunteering for the Harvest

  ALEXIS OKEOWO: The Away Team

  TIM PARKS: A Palpable History

  SHELLEY PUHAK: Eva, she kill her one daughter

  ELIZABETH LINDSEY ROGERS: One Person Means Alone

  KATHRYN SCHULZ: Citizen Khan

  WELLS TOWER: No Amount of Traffic or Instagrammers or Drunks Can Take the Magic Out of (Semi-) Wilderness

  REGGIE UGWU: My Father’s House

  KIM WYATT: The Currency of Moons

  Contributors’ Notes

  Notable Travel Writing of 2016

  Read More from The Best American Series®

  About the Editors

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Lauren Collins

  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.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  ISSN 1530-1516 (print) ISSN 2573-4830 (e-book)

  ISBN 978-1-328-74573-6 (print) ISBN 978-1-328-74233-9 (e-book)

  v1.0917

  “Cover Story” by Elif Batuman. First published in The New Yorker, February 8 and 15, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Elif Batuman. Reprinted by permission of Elif Batuman.

  “My Holy Land Vacation” by Tom Bissell. First published in Harper’s Magazine, July 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Thomas Carlisle Bissell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Chiefing in Cherokee” by Stephanie Elizondo Griest. First published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Stephanie Elizondo Griest. Reprinted by permission of Stephanie Elizondo Griest.

  “Cliffhanger” by Peter Frick-Wright. First published in Outside, November 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Peter Frick-Wright. Reprinted by permission of Peter Frick-Wright.

  “The Ones Who Left” by Jackie Hedeman. First published in The Offing, December 8, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Jackie Hedeman. Reprinted by permission of Jackie Hedeman.

  “The Big Leap” by Leslie Jamison. First published in AFAR, July/August 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Leslie Jamison. Reprinted by permission of Leslie Jamison.

  “Refugees Hear a Foreign Word: Welcome” by Jodi Kantor and Catrin Einhorn. First published in the New York Times, July 1, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

  “Finding the Forgotten” by Randall Kenan. First published in Garden & Gun, September 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Garden & Gun. Reprinted by permission of Garden & Gun.

  “Waiting on a Whale at the End of the World” by Saki Knafo. First published in Men’s Journal, November 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Saki Knafo. Reprinted by permission of Saki Knafo.

  “Plum Crazy” by Gwendolyn Knapp. First published in Oxford American, Fall 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Gwendolyn Knapp. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Land of the Lost” by David Kushner. First published in Outside, November 2016. Copyright © 2016 by David Kushner. Reprinted by permission of David Kushner.

  “On the Road” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. First published in the New York Times Magazine, September 25, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

  “The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web” by Robert Macfarlane. First published in The New Yorker, August 7, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Condé Nast. Reprinted by permission of Condé Nast.

  “Volunteering for the Harvest” by Ann Mah. First published in the New York Times, September 25, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

  “The Away Team” by Alexis Okeowo. First published in The New Yorker, December 12, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Alexis Okeowo. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

  “A Palpable History” by Tim Parks. First published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, May 11, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

  “Eva, she kill her one daughter” by Shelley Puhak. First published in Black Warrior Review, Spring/Summer 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Shelley Puhak. Reprinted by permission of Shelley Puhak.

  “One Person Means Alone” by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers. First published in the Missouri Review, Fall 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Citizen Khan” by Kathryn Schulz. First published in The New Yorker, June 6 and 13, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Kathryn Schulz. Reprinted by permission of Kathryn Schulz.

  “No Amount of Traffic or Instagrammers or Drunks Can Take the Magic Out of (Semi-) Wilderness” by Wells Tower. First published in Outside, May 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Wells Tower. Reprinted by permission of Wells Tower.

  “My Father’s House” by Reggie Ugwu. First published in BuzzFeed, April 2, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by BuzzFeed, Inc. Reprinted by permission of BuzzFeed, Inc.

  “The Currency of Moons” by Kim Wyatt. First published in Creative Nonfiction, Spring 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Kim Wyatt. Reprinted by permission of Kim Wyatt.

  Foreword

  IS TRAVEL WRITING DEAD? That’s the question the distinguished UK literary magazine Granta posed to a dozen or so writers in its Winter 2017 issue. Like so many of these faux-pr
ovocative questions (“Is the novel dead?” “Is the cocktail dead?” “Is baseball dying?”), no definitive answer was reached. As Geoff Dyer, who was among the respondents, wrote: “Yes and no. Sort of.”

  Ian Jack, Granta’s former editor, was more blunt: “Travel writing isn’t dead. It just isn’t what it was.”

  Much of the discussion dwelled on nomenclature, the idea that the genre’s name—“travel writing”—did not adequately capture what it is to write about place in 2017. “So what matters to me is not whether a piece of writing is called travel writing,” wrote Mohsin Hamid.

  Dyer offered up Miles Davis’s work from the 1970s as a possibility. At that time, Davis no longer referred to his music as “jazz” but rather “Directions in Music.” Said Dyer, “That’s what I’m after: Directions in Writing.”

  So yes, a generally weird discussion in the pages of Granta. Still, the simple fact of the magazine asking the dreaded “Is travel writing dead” question was astonishing enough, and somewhat alarming to those of us who’ve been ardent readers of both travel writing and Granta since the 1980s.

  Granta, after all, led a revival of travel writing in the 1980s, advocating for what had become a badly atrophied, nearly moribund genre in the late twentieth century. With Bill Buford as its editor, Granta dedicated two special issues to new travel writing, in 1984 and 1989. Legendary travel writers regularly turned up in the magazine’s pages: Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Martha Gellhorn, Jan Morris, Ryszard Kapuściński.

  I can’t overstate how exciting and freeing it was when I first discovered writers like Chatwin and Kapuściński and Gellhorn and Rebecca West and Ted Conover and Pico Iyer. While I was supposed to be focused on fiction in my graduate creative writing program in the early 1990s, I found my mind drifting toward travel writing. This was still before the rise of so-called creative nonfiction, several years before the mainstreaming of the memoir, and a decade before the emergence of personal blogs. Travel writing, in those days, was not a topic of polite discussion in graduate fiction seminars. (Of course, now we know that Chatwin and Kapuściński introduced quite a bit of fiction into their work.)

  In any case, the travel writing published by Granta would inspire me, in the mid-1990s, to create my own journal devoted to travel, Grand Tour, which lurched along for a few years, then died and went to small-underfunded-literary-magazine heaven. Out of Grand Tour’s ashes, however, this Best American anthology emerged. In early 2000, I scoured through the travel stories of 1999 along with our first guest editor, Bill Bryson—one of those travel writers whom I’d first read in Granta—to gather our first anthology.

  We’ve been following a similar model now through eighteen editions, spanning 9/11, the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lifting of the Cuban travel ban, the Syrian refugee crisis, the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump—chronicling the world as it’s been transformed in so many previously unfathomable ways.

  Travel itself has also irrevocably changed over that time. Consider what did not exist when we began this anthology eighteen years ago: euro notes and coins, Google Maps, translation apps, Uber, Yelp, “premium economy,” boarding passes scanned from iPhones, and TSA “PreCheck.” The readers of The Best American Travel Writing 2000 could wander through security without removing their shoes and belts, toting bottles of liquor stowed in their carry-on baggage, yet they could scarcely have imagined snapping a photo during their flight and posting it to Instagram. Nor could they have envisioned the story about Airbnb in Tokyo that ran in last year’s anthology, or the story about an epic misuse of GPS in Iceland that appears in this year’s.

  This evolution is, of course, the sort of thing that’s supposed to happen with travel writing. In my very first foreword, to The Best American Travel Writing 2000, I wrote:

  Travel writing is always about a specific moment in time. The writer imbues that moment with everything he or she has read, heard, experienced, and lived, bringing all of his or her talent to bear on it. When focused on that moment, great travel writing can teach us something about the world that no other genre can. Perhaps travel writing’s foremost lesson is this: We may never walk this way again, and even if we do, we will never be the same people we are right now. Most important, the world we move through will never be the same place again. This is why travel writing matters.

  What’s important to remember about travel writing is that it’s not just about where one goes, or who makes the trip, or how they travel, or why. It’s also about when that journey takes place. As I read through the pile of this year’s travel writing, it struck me that whoever is assigning travel pieces at many magazines has forgotten that the when is as important as the where, who, how, and why.

  To be perfectly candid, there was an alarming dearth of travel stories published in 2016. Lauren Collins, our guest editor, and I faced a challenging pool. I can’t say that some version of the question posed by Granta—Is travel writing dying?—didn’t cross my mind during this year’s selection process.

  Part of the reason was that, in many publications, precious pages were given over to coverage of the exhausting, maddening, disheartening 2016 presidential campaign. So many of the stories published on place took the form of reports “from Trump Country” or journeys “through Trump’s America” or explorations “into the heart of Trump Land.” But these stories all felt way too late—like ten or twenty years too late. In 1997, Michael Paterniti wrote an amazing piece for Esquire, called “Eating Jack Hooker’s Cow,” in which he visited Dodge City, Kansas. Reread that piece in 2017 and you’ll learn more about why we now find ourselves living in such a divided nation than by reading most of last year’s “Trump Country” dispatches.

  Paul Theroux once wrote: “The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, make voluminous notes, and tell the truth. There is immense drudgery in the job. But the book ought to live, and if it is truthful, it ought to be prescient without making predictions.”

  In 1988, Theroux published Riding the Iron Rooster, a travel book about a year he spent riding trains in China, accompanied by a Communist Party bureaucrat. At the time, China was closed to foreigners, and in Theroux’s book, he was extremely critical of the country, painting an unflattering portrait of a dull, cynical, ugly place. There are pages and pages of dialogue with young people complaining about the government and government officials complaining about students. “I hated sight-seeing in China,” Theroux wrote. “I felt the Chinese hid behind their rebuilt ruins so that no one could look closely at their lives.”

  Riding the Iron Rooster was attacked by critics for being ungenerous and impolite. Mark Salzman, in a New York Times review, insisted that Theroux had drawn conclusions “that don’t ring true.” Salzman wrote, “More often than not, he is passing judgment on China rather than describing it, all from a very limited perspective. The result is an opinionated, petty and incomplete portrait of that country.” Less than a year after that review, the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred, setting off the complex chain of events that ushered forth the contemporary China we now know. With those events in hindsight, someone who now reads Riding the Iron Rooster is more likely to see the book as an example of what the best sort of travel writing can reveal.

  Perhaps what Granta suggests with its “Is travel writing dead?” issue is that the genre reached its high-water mark in the 1980s (not coincidentally when Granta was at its own peak). Or perhaps the editors are wondering whether travel writing is outdated or old-fashioned or in need of a fancy, avant-garde, literary “subversion.” Whatever the case, these are ridiculous notions. Travel writing has existed longer than most other forms of literature, dating at least to Herodotus in ancient Greece. And travel writing has faced criticism for nearly as long. In the first century AD, the Roman essayist Plutarch was already calling bullshit on Herodotus, accusing him of bias and “calumnious fictions.” Maybe the most subversive, experimental “direction in writing” one could actually take is to try on
e’s hand at a classic, traditional first-person travel narrative?

  Pico Iyer (guest editor, The Best American Travel Writing 2004) was one of the writers who took up Granta’s question. I’ll let his response stand as mine: “Travel writing isn’t dead; it can no more die than curiosity or humanity or the strangeness of the world can die.”

  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’ve done my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion the best travel stories from 2016 were forwarded to guest editor Lauren Collins, who made our final selections. Though she and I debated “What is travel writing?” during this selection process, I believe loyal readers of the series will find that the key elements of great travel writing never really change. I’d like to thank Tim Mudie, at Houghton Mifflin, for his usual aplomb in helping to produce this year’s outstanding collection, our eighteenth. I hope you enjoy it.

  I now begin anew by reading the travel stories published in 2017. 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 2017 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author’s name, date of publication, and 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, 2018, 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.