The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Read online

  Maguire is planning experiments to see if it’s possible to intervene with the learning process to improve navigation. As for what we can do to retain our skills, she and other researchers offer the same strong suggestion: as often as you can, turn off the GPS.

  One of the most passionate and informed champions of that advice is Harvard professor John Huth. A highly respected experimental physicist who was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson (the so-called God particle, because it endows other particles with mass), he became obsessed with our disappearing ability to find our way in the world after a tragic event near his home on Cape Cod.

  On a Sunday in October 2003, two young kayakers set off onto Nantucket Sound from the southern coast of the Cape. Mary Jagoda, a twenty-year-old from Huntington, New York, and her nineteen-year-old friend Sarah Aronoff, from Bethesda, Maryland, paddled into the choppy, sixty-degree waters without a compass, map, or GPS. A dense fog soon rolled in. When they were reported missing an hour or so later, a frantic search ensued. The following day, their kayaks were spotted tied together but empty. Coast Guard cutters, helicopters, and local police canvassed the area through the night to no avail. Jagoda was recovered on Tuesday, having died from drowning. Aronoff was never found.

  Huth was kayaking just a half-mile from the women when they went missing. He, too, had become disoriented in the fog, but he’d been sure to take note of the wind and wave direction before leaving the shore, a habit he’d picked up after a scary experience several months earlier in Maine. He paddled back to shore blindly but with a strong sense of where he was headed.

  The deaths of the women left him with a serious case of survivor’s guilt. His response was to embark on what he now calls a year of self-imposed penance by learning everything he could about navigation. He used flash cards to memorize constellations, studied the routes of 1600 BC Pacific Islanders and medieval Arab traders, and learned to orient himself using shadows. Eventually, he says, “I realized I was looking at the world very differently than I had beforehand.”

  He dug in deeper, compelled by a sense of duty to fight back against automation bias, the human tendency to trust machines more than ourselves. In 2009, he began teaching a new undergraduate class at Harvard on primitive navigation techniques. The course led to his 2013 book, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, which makes a powerful case for learning how to get where you need to go simply by paying attention to the environment around you.

  Last summer, I visited Huth on Cape Cod to get a primer on what he teaches his Harvard students. One morning, he suggested we try a method for tracking distance used by the Roman legionnaires. Huth, an athletic, bearded fifty-eight-year-old, was wearing cargo shorts and a white T-shirt as we walked silently along a rocky beach near his home, counting paces, with every 1,000 paces equaling mille passus, the Latin phrase at the root of the word “mile.” We passed lobster-red tourists, stopping every so often so he could compare our paces, which he penciled into a small notebook for later calculation. After a little while, he led us up a series of sand dunes.

  “It was right here,” he said, pointing to an overgrown patch of beach grass where, he explained, there used to be a handmade wooden sign with a picture of one of the kayakers. There had been one phrase on it, he recalled: “No one is lost to God.”

  Over Huth’s years of research on traditional navigation, one of the places that turned out to be an especially rich source of techniques was Iceland, an isolated island frequently shrouded in fog and surrounded by tempestuous seas. Europeans discovered it by accident, just like they had North America. As Huth recounted to me, a Norse sailor named Naddodd arrived there after drifting off course on his way to the Faeroe Islands. Others found means of reaching it purposefully. When the Norse colonized the country in the ninth century, they found it populated by Irish monks who had arrived, Huth speculated, by following the paths of migrating ducks. (Subsequent Norse explorers employed ravens.) As the Norse learned, Iceland’s weather was so unruly that summer offered the only reliable winds to get there. Sailing fifty-foot wooden boats with tar-soaked moss sealing the hulls, they would hug the coast of Norway as they traversed between known landmarks.

  Huth was particularly fascinated by how “for the Norse,” as he writes in his book, “time reckoning and direction were intertwined.” They divided days into eight pieces that reflected the eight divisions of the horizon—north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, and northwest—and created clocks by reading the sun’s relative position to markers, like a farmhouse or large rock. “The time of day,” he writes, “is then associated with a place.”

  Huth hopes that modern humans will rediscover that deep sense of place. In the meantime, he rails against our choice to “outsource so many of our cognitive functions to automation.” There are, he told me, “tons of examples of people substituting automation for actual reasoning.” None better, of course, than Noel Santillan.

  As it happens, Huth could have found himself in his own lost-tourist predicament a couple of summers ago, when he took a vacation to Iceland with his wife and daughter. As usual, he relied on a map instead of a GPS to get around. But as he drove into Reykjavík from the airport, he got mixed up on the city’s winding roads. At that point, he did what the Norse did centuries before: he sought out markers that he had already identified and coordinated them with the cognitive map he’d created in his head—the water shouldn’t be over here, it should be over there.

  “I just stopped, looked around, and tried to identify landmarks,” he told me as we completed another mille passus. Fairly soon he was back on the right path.

  This, he said, is what Santillan should have done. “If I’ve gotten to the point where the roads start looking impassible, I would say, ‘Okay, this is fucked.’ Then I’d basically try to retrace my steps.”

  Santillan had no idea how he’d become lost again. For whatever reason, the GPS had led him not to the Blue Lagoon but to some convention center off an empty road. All he wanted to do was submerge himself in those wondrous warm waters, but instead he was trudging through the snow to see if anyone inside could help him find his way.

  As he stepped into the building, a funny thing happened. He was recognized—again. The people inside were workers from the Blue Lagoon who had assembled there for a meeting, and they had seen the news reports about him. The fact that Santillan was lost again made him all the more credible. After patiently posing for a bunch of pictures, he succumbed to an old-fashioned way of getting to where he was going: following the directions given to him by another human being.

  And so, with the GPS turned off, he drove on—a right here, a left there—looking for landmarks along the way. His hippocampus, activated by the incoming data, stitched together the beginnings of a cognitive map. Before long he was soaking in a steamy bath, white volcanic mud smeared on his face—though not enough to mask his identity from some fawning spa employees. By then he’d already vowed to return to Iceland. Maybe, he thought, I’ll even live here at some point. Until he returns, he has something to remember his misadventure: an Icelandic GPS. The rental agency presented it to him when he returned his Nissan. Santillan tried hooking it up to his car when he got back to New Jersey, but alas, the foreign model didn’t work. So now it sits in a box in his bedroom, a reminder of his time as the Lost Tourist, a nickname he considers a badge of honor. “I like it,” he says, “because that’s how you find interesting things. If you don’t lose yourself, you’re never going to find yourself.”

  GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS

  On the Road

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  There is a vast gulf between how people tend to think of “tourism,” an agreeable pursuit for themselves and a great benefit to their local economy, and how people tend to think of other tourists, as interlopers, beholden to oafish appetites for packaged experience. Those of us who travel professionally, with a view to record for those at home our encounters on the road, try to bridge that perceptual divide. T
his can be uncomfortable. Tourists in bad faith, we are paid to elevate our naive consumption (of city, museum, vista, ruin, breakfast) to the level of a vocation. The internal anxiety that this contradiction inspires in us often gets displaced, in an amusing way, onto others on the same circuit. Professional travelers like nothing better than the opportunity to point out the crumminess of other professional travelers.

  The classic formulation is the opening salvo of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 “Tristes Tropiques”: “Travel and travellers are two things I loathe—and yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions.” It has been fifteen years, he continues, since he left the remote interior of Brazil, but the prospect of this book has been a source of shame. All he wants to offer is a humble contribution to the anthropological record, “an unpublished myth, a new marriage rule, or a complete list of names of clans.” But those delicacies of knowledge are so rare, the tribulations of their collection so great, that it has proved almost impossible to separate the wheat of anthropology from the chaff of adventure: “insipid details, incidents of no significance.” It is with great hesitation, then, that he takes up his pen “in order to rake over memory’s trash-cans.” He parodies a typical travel-book sentence of his day: “And yet that sort of book enjoys a great, and, to me, inexplicable popularity. Amazonia, Africa, and Tibet have invaded all our bookstalls.”

  Mark Twain pioneered this aggressive self-defense in the 1860s, the early years of democratized and commodified guidebook travel. By the time Lévi-Strauss took up the cudgel, photography was beginning to catch up with tourism, and since then travel writing and travel photography have come to seem, to the skeptical, like two sides of the same counterfeit token. Lévi-Strauss continued: “Travel-books, expeditionary records, and photograph-albums abound . . . Mere mileage is the thing; and anyone who has been far enough, and collected the right number of pictures (still or moving, but for preference in colour), will be able to lecture to packed houses for several days running.”

  The travel writer, at least, had to sit down and actually bash it all out, which gave him or her some measure of self-respect. The travel photographer had it worse. The right to call itself art rather than mere mechanism had been photography’s struggle since the medium was invented, but now practitioners had to differentiate their efforts from the unstudied shutter-clicks of rank amateurs. The problem grew even more dire as travel photography transitioned from a hobby to perhaps the ultimate signifier of the inauthentic and the conformist. In his 1954 essay “The Loss of the Creature,” Walker Percy imagines a sightseer upon his first approach to the Grand Canyon: “Instead of looking at it, he photographs it. There is no confrontation at all. At the end of forty years of preformulation and with the Grand Canyon yawning at his feet, what does he do? He waives his right of seeing and knowing and records symbols for the next forty years.” In this case, the travel photographer has committed the original sin: His job is to create the ideal image against which the multitudes will inevitably find their own experiences wanting. The travel photographer is thereby caught in a bind. Either he is no better than the desultory tourist, or he is responsible for the fact that our experiences rarely resemble the advertisements or postcards.

  By now, Percy’s contempt for this cliché—the traveler so busy with documentation that he misses out on some phantom called the “experience itself”—has itself become a cliché. But we are not much closer to resolving the fundamental paradox of travel, which is just one version of the fundamental paradox of late-capitalist life. On the one hand, we have been encouraged to believe that we are no longer the sum of our products (as we were when we were still an industrial economy) but the sum of our experiences. On the other, we lack the ritual structures that once served to organize, integrate, and preserve the stream of these experiences, so they inevitably feel both scattershot and evanescent. We worry that photographs or journal entries keep us at a remove from life, but we also worry that without an inventory of these documents—a collection of snow globes for the mantel—we’ll disintegrate. Furthermore, that inventory has to fulfill two slightly different functions: it must define us as at once part of a tribe (“people who go to Paris”) and independent of it (“people who go to Paris and don’t photograph the Eiffel Tower”).

  Now that social media has given us a public forum, both theatrical stage and deposit institution, for this inventory, we have brought to this paradox increasingly elaborate methods of documentary performance. But the underlying strategies are nothing new. The most elementary strategy is the avoidance of the Grand Canyon/Eiffel Tower conundrum entirely, but this works only if you’re confident that you’ve identified a satisfying alternative. (As Paul Fussell put it in his 1979 book Abroad, “Avoiding Waikiki brings up the whole question of why one’s gone to Hawaii at all, but that’s exactly the problem.”) Another is to forefront our own inauthenticity as a disclaimer. In his 1987 book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin described his lifelong attempt to write a book about nomads as a repudiation of his earlier involvement with art: “I quit my job in the ‘art world’ and went back to the dry places: alone, travelling light. The names of the tribes I travelled among are unimportant: Rguibat, Quashgai, Taimanni, Turkomen, Bororo, Tuareg—people whose journeys, unlike my own, had neither beginning nor end.” People, that is, who had a motive for travel that went well beyond the vanity of documentation.

  Even if you understand and sympathize with obsessive documentary travel, summer can make anyone feel as uncharitable as Percy felt toward that poor sightseer at the lip of the Grand Canyon. More than one friend told me that their main vacation in August was a vacation from Instagram, because they’d endured more than enough ostentatious displays of wealth and leisure for one season. I know other people who deliberately switched to Snapchat, but then sent out reminders to that effect; they wanted a contemporaneous audience but felt uncomfortable going on the permanent record. For some reason, the real-time digital exhibitionism of excessive summer holidaying makes me feel generous; the more desperate a bid to be liked, the more enthusiastically I go ahead and like it. I have an acquaintance—someone I like but barely know—who spent what seemed to me to be an exorbitant amount of time doing absolutely nothing at all on the remote Italian island Pantelleria, photographing that nothing at all as though he were on sabbatical inside a Fellini film. I assiduously liked every single post. (I’m not perfect. I still categorically withhold my likes from some classes of image: photos of chefs in Copenhagen; photos of food in Copenhagen; photos of people who have recently eaten in Copenhagen.)

  My favorite social-media vacation of the summer, however, belonged to my friend David, who intermittently recorded a long cross-country road trip. It was a solo undertaking, and the loneliness of much of the imagery made me feel as though it deserved special attention.

  A week before David left, in mid-August, he posted a brief prelude in the form of a diptych: an uneventful video of a street scene taken from his stoop in Brooklyn followed by a black-and-white shot, taken between Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, of a horseless buggy covered with a clear tarp; one of the new skyscrapers of the Hudson Yards development rises in the background. The two images in succession—the sentimentality of home, the gently self-mocking irony of the black-and-white wagon—felt like a personal send-off in a minor key, an understated announcement that he was on his way.

  His first road picture was geotagged “Chicago Downtown” but could have been anywhere: the battered steel door between the faux fluted pilasters of a down-at-heel industrial building, its cinder-block facade unevenly repaired; above the door, someone had stenciled a simple, charming scene of white snowcapped mountains and a floating white moon. The image was lovely but nothing special, but it seemed to me instantly legible: I’m mooning around alone on this random block in Chicago, if anyone wants to hang out. If he’d posted a photo of the Sears Tower, say, it wouldn’t have played as invitation. The next series of images were taken from art museums, one from a permanent
collection and the other from a show on view for only a short time. There was something reassuring about these posts, which seemed to me to advertise both the actual artworks depicted and the fact that he was doing a salutary job keeping himself company.

  Over the course of the next week, there were some images I found inscrutable (audio CDs, stamped in red as RESTRICTED, of Bruce Dern doing a Henry V monologue at the Actors Studio), some readily intelligible as artifactual Americana (Smith & Wessons in the case of a Badlands pawnshop), and others that attempted sidelong glances at tourist landmarks (not Mount Rushmore itself but a shot of a family selfie in front of it; a photo of the Rocket Motel’s neon next to its own identical postcard). There were a few pretty sunsets—one in Minnesota, one in Wyoming—that spoke of a late-day solitary melancholy.

  The best image of his trip was of a nighttime gas station. “What is it,” his caption asked, “about #gasstationsatdusk?” The picture got a lot of likes—more than his others tended to—and occasioned a number of passing remarks in the comments, especially from other artists and art critics. One contributor said something about Ed Ruscha and Matthew Barney. But the unmistakable reference, one art historian pointed out in the comments, was to Edward Hopper. Hopper was a painter, of course, but as Geoff Dyer points out in his book The Ongoing Moment, Hopper “could, with some justification, claim to be the most influential American photographer of the twentieth century—even though he didn’t take any photographs.” Dyer wrote that in 2005, long before Instagram existed, but the platform’s retro filters only deepen the likeness.