The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Read online

  Hopper might remind Dyer of a photographer like Walker Evans, but the first thing a gas station at dusk recalls, for many travelers and travel writers who feel the need to justify their restlessness, is Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel” and its “grease-stained filling-station floor.” Earlier in the poem, Bishop asks us to think of travel’s arduous return, and asks rhetorically if we might have been better off staying put. The answer is familiar. We were right to go, but not because we got anywhere or achieved anything. It’s because of the small moments of incidental grace, the insipid bits Lévi-Strauss disparaged (and subsequently indulged): “But surely it would have been a pity/not to have seen the trees along this road.”

  It’s hard not to suspect that we’ve seen Bishop’s gas station before; it’s the same Hopper we recognize from David’s Instagram feed. At this point, given the layers of quotation and allusion, it seems silly to treat David’s image as if it were, as Percy might have had it, some flimsy representation standing between himself and an unmediated world, or a private snow-globe reminder of that stretch of interstate. It wasn’t an act of representation at all, and it certainly wasn’t private. It was the expression of affect he wanted to communicate in that moment—something a little smart, and a little sad, and a little funny, and all in all very David. The image, an Internet square of labyrinthine self-referentiality—a photograph that recalled a painting that was at home in a poem—recalled for me a different line of Geoff Dyer’s, where he quotes John Berger on Paul Strand’s portraits: They arrested a moment “whose duration is measured not by seconds, but by its relation to a lifetime.”

  One difference between a quest and a “road trip”—in the broadest sense of the term—is the degree to which the traveler knows what he or she wants. This is how we know to differentiate between the necessary and the incidental. Lévi-Strauss set out for Brazil’s interior with a point, so it was obvious to him what was relevant (an unpublished myth, a new marriage rule) and what was dross (the logistics of transport). The appeal of the road trip, or the long through-hike, or the pilgrimage, is that the “point” is so deliberately minimal—to arrive at, you know, the end—and the decisions involved so banal (stop for gas now, or in a bit?) that the distinction between signal and noise is blurred. When the question of significance is deferred, all moments are rendered equally significant.

  The tourist caricature is in a funny position. The “point” of his or her vacation is not something discrete, like Lévi-Strauss’s registration of a new marriage rule, but simply the accumulation of rarefied experience for its own sake, which means that every single moment must be optimally memorable—that is, photographable. Unlike the tourist, the traveler accepts that the point isn’t the intensity of the peak experiences but the way the journey itself sacralizes any given moment as a metonym for the whole. Feel free to photograph the gas station.

  There’s a parallel in photography. The first time I looked at David’s gas station, I was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where I’d just seen galleries of large-format photographers, including Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth. They document all the shipping containers in a southern Italian port, the controlled chaos of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Their painterly intensity and formal composition derive from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s definition of photography as “the decisive moment,” the juncture of maximal effect and maximal information. In Diana and Nikon, her 1980 book on photography, Janet Malcolm expanded on the idea, remarking that “the arresting of time is photography’s unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer’s chief responsibility.” She contrasts the pictorialism of such photographers as Cartier-Bresson, Steichen, and Atget with the apparent vulgarity of subsequent generations of street photographers.

  For Dyer, the road trip plays a crucial role in this midcentury photographic turn to the vernacular. It was Robert Frank, Dyer writes, who gave us the “ongoing” moment instead of the “decisive” one. He invented America as “a place to be seen from a car, a country that could be seen without stopping. If we do choose to linger it is often to try to work out why Frank took a particular picture (what’s so special about this?).” Garry Winogrand “pushed things a stage further, combining Frank’s ad hoc aesthetic with a pictorial appetite so voracious it bordered on the indiscriminate.” The point of a photograph of a trail, or some billboard half-seen out the window of a bus, is that it could easily be exchanged for the image taken immediately before or immediately afterward. The random sample communicates in one unpremeditated frame all the significance that particular person’s drive down that particular road could possibly contain.

  This is the aspiration common to road-trip literature and road-trip photography: the moment at the gas station is held, insistently, to express as much about the total experience as the shot of the Eiffel Tower. But there remains, at least for me, a tension between the stories we tell about the road and the photographs we take along the way. When I’ve returned to things I’ve written about extended overland travel—whether a book, or travel articles, or just emails to friends—I feel settled, almost subdued, by my own accounts, by the way a succession of random gas-station incidents has been given a form. Though in each case I tried to capture the miscellaneous experience of that particular interlude, the mood of each has inevitably been coerced into coherence. Yes, I think, this is how it happened, and this is what it meant, and what it will now continue to mean in retrospective perpetuity. These texts, over time, overwrote the memories from which they were drawn.

  Revisiting my photographs from those same trips is dislocating in a different way. The difference may, of course, be a question of my own orientation: I’m habituated to the way a given experience is encoded in language. Writers love to repeat the truism that they need to see what they write to know what they think; seeing what you shot betrays the extent to which what you think is produced, and thereby constrained, by its method of thought. Always I find my photographs replete with remainders, pedestrian details that contradict and undermine the equally pedestrian account I committed to words. The colors are different. Drops of scarlet blood on a hard tarmac black as obsidian. An overturned brass samovar in a dingy brown train compartment. A bright alarum of pink cherry blossoms against a glass-flat cobalt sea. There is something about those moments, fugitively apprehended as they might have been, that seem to me now odd and decisive. They don’t at all seem like random samples of the ongoing. I never think, What was so special about this? I think instead, Yes, I remember now exactly what was so special about this. They mutely twitch with escaped significance. When we see what we saw, we are reminded of what was apprehended—and let go.

  ROBERT MACFARLANE

  The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web

  FROM The New Yorker

  Epping Forest is a heavily regulated place. First designated as a royal hunting ground by Henry II in the twelfth century, with severe penalties imposed on commoners for poaching, it has since 1878 been managed by the City of London Corporation, which governs behavior within its bounds using forty-eight bylaws. The forest is today almost completely contained within the M25, the notorious orbital motorway that encircles outer London. Minor roads crisscross it, and it is rarely more than four kilometers wide. Several of its hundred or so lakes and ponds are former blast holes of the V1 “doodlebug” rockets flung at London in 1944. Yet the miraculous fact of Epping’s existence remains: almost 6,000 acres of trees, heath, pasture, and waterways, just outside the city limits, its grassland still grazed by the cattle of local commoners, and adders still basking in its glades. Despite its mixed-amenity use—from golf to mountain biking—it retains a greenwood magic.

  Earlier this summer I spent two days there, wandering and talking with a young plant scientist named Merlin Sheldrake. Sheldrake is an expert in mycorrhizal fungi, and as such he is part of a research revolution that is changing the way we think about forests. For centuries, fungi were widely held to be harmful to plants, parasites that ca
use disease and dysfunction. More recently, it has become understood that certain kinds of common fungi exist in subtle symbiosis with plants, bringing about not infection but connection. These fungi send out gossamer-fine fungal tubes called hyphae, which infiltrate the soil and weave into the tips of plant roots at a cellular level. Roots and fungi combine to form what is called a mycorrhiza: itself a growing-together of the Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (riza). In this way, individual plants are joined to one another by an underground hyphal network: a dazzlingly complex and collaborative structure that has become known as the Wood Wide Web.

  The relationship between these mycorrhizal fungi and the plants they connect is now known to be ancient (around 450 million years old) and largely one of mutualism—a subset of symbiosis in which both organisms benefit from their association. In the case of the mycorrhizae, the fungi siphon off food from the trees, taking some of the carbon-rich sugar that they produce during photosynthesis. The plants, in turn, obtain nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi have acquired from the soil, by means of enzymes that the trees do not possess.

  The implications of the Wood Wide Web far exceed this basic exchange of goods between plant and fungi, however. The fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources—sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus—between one another. A dying tree might divest itself of its resources to the benefit of the community, for example, or a young seedling in a heavily shaded understory might be supported with extra resources by its stronger neighbors. Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send one another warnings. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant that it should raise its defensive response before the aphids reach it. It has been known for some time that plants communicate aboveground in comparable ways, by means of airborne hormones. But such warnings are more precise in terms of source and recipient when sent by means of the myco-net.

  The revelation of the Wood Wide Web’s existence, and the increased understanding of its functions, raises big questions—about where species begin and end; about whether a forest might be better imagined as a single superorganism, rather than a grouping of independent individualistic ones; and about what trading, sharing, or even friendship might mean among plants. “Whenever I need to explain my research to someone quickly, I just tell them I work on the social networks of plants,” Sheldrake told me.

  Sheldrake is twenty-eight years old and tall, with a tight head of dark curls. When we met, he was wearing a blue paisley-pattern neckerchief, a collarless woolen jacket, and a khaki canvas rucksack with gleaming brass buckles. He resembled a Victorian plant hunter, ready for the jungle. In addition to his academic pursuits, Sheldrake plays accordion in a band called the Gentle Mystics, whose tracks include a trance epic called “Mushroom 30,000,” and whose musical style might best be described as myco-klezmer-hip-hop-electro-burlesque. Once heard, bewildered. Twice heard, hooked.

  As an undergraduate studying natural sciences at Cambridge, in the late aughts, Sheldrake read the 1988 paper “Mycorrhizal Links Between Plants: Their Functioning and Ecological Significance,” by the plant scientist E. I. Newman, in which Newman argued boldly for the existence of a “mycelial network” linking plants. “If this phenomenon is widespread,” Newman wrote, “it could have profound implications for the functioning of ecosystems.”

  Those implications fascinated Sheldrake. He had long loved fungi, which seemed to him possessed of superpowers. He knew that they could turn rocks to rubble, move with eerie swiftness both above ground and under it, reproduce horizontally, and digest food outside their bodies via excreted enzymes. He was aware that their toxins could kill people, and that their psychoactive chemicals could induce hallucinogenic states. After reading Newman’s paper, he understood that fungi could also allow plants to communicate with one another.

  “All of these trees will have mycorrhizal fungi growing into their roots,” Sheldrake said, gesturing at the beech and hornbeam through which we were walking. “You could imagine the fungi themselves as forming a massive underground tree, or as a cobweb of fine filaments, acting as a sort of prosthesis to the trees, a further root system, extending outwards into the soil, acquiring nutrients and floating them back to the plants, as the plants fix carbon in their leaves and send sugar to their roots, and out into the fungi. And this is all happening right under our feet.”

  We reached a broad clearing in which hundreds of bright-green beech seedlings were flourishing, each a few centimeters high, drawn by the ready light. Sheldrake knelt down and brushed away leaves to reveal a patch of soil the size of a dinner plate. He pinched up some of the earth and rubbed it between his fingers: rich, dark humus. “Soil is fantastically difficult stuff to work with experimentally, and the hyphae are on the whole too thin to see,” he said. “You can put rhizotrons into the ground to look at root growth—but those don’t really give you the fungi because they are too fine. You can do below-ground laser scanning, but again that is too crude for the fungal networks.”

  Gleaming yellow-brown spiders and bronze beetles battled over the leaves. “Hyphae will be growing around in the decomposing matter of this half-rotting leaf, those rotting logs, and those rotting twigs, and then you’ll have the mycorrhizal fungi whose hyphae grow into hot spots,” Sheldrake said, pointing around the glade. In addition to penetrating the tree roots, the hyphae also interpenetrate each other—mycorrhizal fungi on the whole don’t have divisions between their cells. “This interpenetration permits the wildly promiscuous horizontal transfer of genetic material: fungi don’t have to have sex to pass things on,” Sheldrake explained. I tried to imagine the soil as transparent, such that I could peer down into this subterranean infrastructure, those spectral fungal skeins suspended between the tapering tree roots, creating a network at least as intricate as the cables and optical fibers beneath our cities. I once heard the writer China Miéville use a particular phrase for the realm of fungi: “The kingdom of the gray.” It captured their otherness: the challenges fungi issued to our usual models of time, space, scale, and species. “You look at the network,” Sheldrake said. “And then it starts to look back at you.”

  After two hours we ran out of forest, rebounded off the M25, hopped a barbed-wire fence, and came to rest in a field that looked as if it belonged to a private landowner. We weren’t lost, exactly, but we did need to know where the forest widened again. I pulled up the hybrid map of Epping on my phone, and a blue dot pulsed our location. The forest flared green to the southwest, so that was where we headed, crossing a busy road and then pushing deeper into the trees until we could hardly hear car noise.

  When Sheldrake began his PhD, in 2011, there was no single figure at Cambridge with an expertise in symbiosis and mycorrhizae, so he contacted researchers he admired at other institutions, until he had established what he calls a “network of subject godparents—some in Sweden, in Germany, in Panama, in America, in England, where I was beholden to none, but part of their extended families.” In the second year of his doctorate, Sheldrake went to the Central American jungle for fieldwork: to Barro Colorado Island, located in the man-made Gatun Lake, in the Panama Canal. There he joined a community of field scientists, overseen by a grizzled American evolutionary biologist named Egbert Giles Leigh Jr.

  Some of the science undertaken on the island was what might be called methodologically high-risk. One young American scientist, researching what Sheldrake called the “drunken-monkey hypothesis,” was attempting to collect monkey urine, after the monkeys had feasted on fermenting fruit, and assess it for intoxication levels. Sheldrake faced his own research frustrations. Much of his early work involved him taking spore samples back to the lab for scrutiny, and he became uncomfortable with how so much of what he dealt with in the lab was “absolutely dead, boiled, fixed, embalmed.” He longed for more direct contact with the fungi he was studying. One afternoon, he was examining mycorrhizal spores under a microscope, when it occurred to him that they looked just like caviar. Af
ter hours of cleaning and sifting, he had enough to pile, with a pair of tweezers, onto a tiny fragment of biscuit, which he then ate. “They’re really good for you, spores, full of all these lipids,” he said. On occasion he has cut them into lines and snorted them.

  During his second season on the island, Sheldrake became interested in a type of plants called mycoheterotrophs, or “mycohets” for short. Mycohets are plants that lack chlorophyll, and thus are unable to photosynthesize, making them entirely reliant on the fungal network for their provision of carbon. “These little green-less plants plug into the network, and somehow derive everything from it without paying anything back, at least in the usual coin,” Sheldrake said. “They don’t play by the normal rules of symbiosis, but we can’t prove they’re parasites.” Sheldrake focused on a genus of mycohets called Voyria, part of the gentian family, the flowers of which studded the jungle floor on Barro Colorado Island like pale purple stars.

  A central debate over the Wood Wide Web concerns the language used to describe the transactions it enables, which suggest two competing visions of the network: the socialist forest, in which trees act as caregivers to one another, with the well-off supporting the needy, and the capitalist forest, in which all entities are acting out of self-interest within a competitive system. Sheldrake was especially exasperated by what he called the “super-neoliberal capitalist” discourse of the biological free market. One of the reasons Sheldrake loved the Voyria, he explained, is that they were harder to understand, mysterious: “They are the hackers of the Wood Wide Web.”