The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 7

  We end our day at the Jordan River, which is frankly not much of a river. Trisha and I find our way to a large observation deck that looks down onto a popular baptismal site. The shoreline—all wild viny drapery—more closely resembles the sculpted scenery of a Disneyland log-flume ride than indigenous vegetation. Nearby is a bulletin-board hall of fame, on which we see photos of various post-baptism celebrities in drenched white T-shirts: Oliver North, Whitney Houston, Mike Huckabee. There’s also a photo of the actor James Van Der Beek not getting baptized, but rather chilling on the viewing platform, which seems like a very James Van Der Beek thing to do at the Jordan River.

  As we walk along the deck, a group baptism is getting under way below us. The baptizees, all in white gowns, silently descend a stairway. One after another, each person is dunked. The proceedings are quick; it’s an assembly line. Standing by me on the viewing platform is an older man from my tour, shaking his head. He’s one of the few among us to consistently step back from group prayer, and can always be relied on to say, “Oh, come on,” when someone complains about having to walk uphill. He seems to me less a conservative than someone who’s sick to death of everyone’s whiny bullshit. This is the type of conservative I could very much see myself becoming one day, if I ever became a conservative.

  “Getting baptized?” I ask him.

  He chuckles. “Nah,” he says as the baptizees below us hug and weep. “Had it done. Think it worked.”

  That night we have dinner in our new hotel in Jerusalem. Afterward, on the way to our room, Trisha and I run into our guide, David. “Goodbye, guys,” he says. We keep walking and tell him we’ll see him tomorrow. “No,” he says. “Goodbye.”

  We stop. It turns out that, only ten minutes ago, a Genesis Tours representative took David aside and told him that everyone on Bus Five got together, voted, and cast him out as our guide. I assure David that there’s been no such vote as far as I’m aware, which seems to cheer him up a bit. After David announces that he’s going to his room to call his wife, Trisha and I gather together all the Bus Fivers we can find. Not one of them has heard of any secret vote to ditch David.

  Together we confront the nearest Genesis Tours lackey, who is sitting behind the official Genesis Tours information station in the hotel lobby. The kid’s job (he looks twenty-one) appears to be to ensure that our most elderly Stand with Israelites don’t get lost between the dining hall and the elevator. We pour recrimination on the poor guy for a while; the phrase “travesty of justice” is used. The representative remains irritatingly poised: “Thank you for bringing this to our attention, but there were several complaints.” Our group breaks away, huddles up, and assembles a short list of the likeliest anti-David complainers.

  Another Genesis Tours representative is spotted trying to tiptoe past us in the lobby; we fall upon her like locusts. As leader pro tempore of the insurrection, I try to appear calm and steadfast, knowing full well that I’m backed up by a dozen peppery American conservatives. I am in the middle of patiently explaining why we, as a group, believe David’s firing was unjust, when someone bellows, “You’re ruining my vacation!”

  We all turn to find Roger, a large, courtly Southerner. All I know of Roger is that he believes he can prove that the Gospels were originally written in Aramaic rather than Greek. He always sits up front on Bus Five, near David, and asks by far the most questions of anyone in our cohort. The face of this hitherto kind, gentle man is now trembling with anger.

  I try to de-escalate the situation, but the Genesis Tours representative talks right past me, telling Roger that he’s being rude and aggressive. Roger demands a full and immediate refund. The Genesis Tours woman has heard enough, tells us there’s nothing she can do, and storms away. We haunt the lobby for another hour or so, pestering all who will listen, but eventually the word comes down: David’s removal from Bus Five is final.

  The next morning, at breakfast, a bunch of us decide that more conspiring will only hurt David and his chances of future employment. The guide community in Israel is small; the more we complain, the more likely it is that news of this incident will spread, potentially tarring David as a problematic tour leader. As we eat scrambled eggs and sip apple juice, we laugh in recollection of our anger the night before and congratulate ourselves on our newfound emotional maturity. Supply-side logic is trotted out: It’s not our place to tell Genesis Tours who they can’t fire. They have a right, as business owners, to do what’s best for their business. We’re living again in a reasonable, if depressing, adult world. “The best thing we can do for David,” I find myself saying, “is give him a generous tip and let him know we support him.”

  Then Roger sidles up to our table. He’s wearing a neon-green polo shirt, his hair is still wet from his shower, and he’s breathing like a bear that just tore apart an animal carcass. I invite Roger to sit. He declines, so I stand and take him aside to explain the group’s thinking. Roger—head atilt, eyes focused—listens carefully.

  “So,” he says when I’m done, “your suggestion is surrender. To give up. Am I correct in that understanding? You wanna wimp out and enjoy your vacation—no offense—instead of doing the right thing. That’s what you all have decided to do. Let me know if I’m mischaracterizing this. Again, no offense. It’s okay if that’s what you all want.” And here Roger’s voice begins to rise: “Because my opinion is revolt.” He throws his arms out—the classic demagogue pantomime of the world’s last reasonable man. “Why are we here again? To stand with Israel. If we don’t stand for David, we’re just like those Americans who don’t stand with Israel.”

  Is this why conservatives so often win and liberals so often lose? Roger is a man who still believes the world can and must be bent to his will.

  “Okay,” I say to Roger. “So what’s your plan?”

  Roger, who obviously spent the night thinking through a plan, answers quickly: “We occupy the bus. Take over.”

  We all head out to Bus Five, with Roger leading the way. Walking right behind him, I say, “You realize you’re basically a Bolshevik right now, right?”

  “Works for me,” Roger says, not breaking stride.

  Bus Five has two doors; we quickly set up a loyalty checkpoint at both. “I refuse to share a bus with someone who complained about David,” Roger says. As the remaining Bus Fivers board, they will be interrogated. If they admit that they objected to David, they will be encouraged either to renounce their disapproval or to find a seat on another bus. Checkpoints, loyalty tests, Maoist self-criticism—I point out that these are overtly left-wing tactics. “Hey,” someone says, “it works for liberals! Let’s make it work for us!”

  Unfortunately, our plan quickly breaks down in its particulars. No one passing through Roger’s (objectively terrifying) loyalty checkpoints is willing to admit that they complained about David. The couple that always kvetches about walking, for instance, who’ve been identified by multiple sources as members of the anti-David faction, lie to Roger’s face. No, they say. They never complained. Roger allows them onto the bus, only to be informed of their real views once they’re aboard. “I’ll deal with them later,” he says, flustered. Soon gossip begins to move through our group with sinister fluidity; people are silently thumbing toward others whose backs are to them and mouthing “Complained!” One elderly woman says to Roger, “I heard we have a liberal in the group.” Trisha and I share a glance. “I don’t know anything about that!” Roger cries.

  A snooty rich woman upon whom fancy scarves and sunglasses are exhibited daily approaches the bus with her rigorously silent husband. We all know for a fact (don’t we?) that they complained about David, multiple times. To her credit, the woman confesses, but she assures Roger that she didn’t want David to get fired. Roger thanks her for her honesty and asks if she will now stand with the group, Roger, and Israel to ensure David’s return. She and her husband stare at Roger while sweat drips down his face. “Yes,” she says quietly.

  By now most of the other Genesis Tours bus
es have left the hotel and begun the day’s itinerary; several members of the anti-David faction have joined those buses. Our revolution began with amity and optimism, but now it feels misshapen with anger and resentment. I realize that if someone tries to push past Roger to get on Bus Five, I am prepared to restrain that person, using force if I have to. Pastor Marty is now beside me, saying that while he’s typically inclined to play peacemaker, in this case an injustice has been done.

  A petition is drawn up and signed by twenty of us, thirty of us, and soon forty of us, despite there being only forty-six passengers on Bus Five. One guy taps me on the shoulder and reveals with a snicker that he signed Bill Clinton’s name to our petition. I smack my forehead and point out that if our petition is going to be taken seriously, we need it to be legitimate. The man, grasping the enormity of his blunder, bites his lip, chases down the petition holder, and violently scratches Bill Clinton’s name from the document.

  We’ve occupied Bus Five for more than an hour, by which point we’ve won our Palestinian bus driver to the cause: he has promised that he will not go anywhere without David. But no one from Genesis Tours has come out to speak with us. I take Roger aside, praising his leadership. However, I tell him, we’ll need to instigate a showdown with Genesis Tours if we want to bring this to an end. Roger shakes my hand and gives me his blessing. I rush off to the hotel lobby and find several Genesis Tours representatives speaking excitedly into their cell phones.

  A company emissary returns with me to Bus Five and listens as Roger enumerates our demands. They are (a) the expulsion from Bus Five of all who complained about David, followed by (b) David’s reinstatement as Bus Five’s rightful guide. Any failure to meet these demands will necessitate a complete and total refund of our package tour’s costs. The emissary runs a hand across his bald head, makes a few agitated calls, and promptly disappears.

  It’s hard to be certain what happens next. Several of us have begun to argue about strategy. Others are upset that we will probably not get to see all the scheduled sites today. Roger, for some reason, heads off to the hotel. With Roger gone, I feel lost and dispirited. I wonder if I ever really believed in the movement so much as I did in the man. Ten minutes later, he reappears, his hands stuffed glumly in his pockets. When he’s within twenty feet of us, though, Roger smiles beneath watery, exhausted eyes. “David’s coming back!” he says. We cheer. We applaud. Roger falls into the arms of another Bus Fiver and says through tears that he can barely talk. “I’m just glad it didn’t end in violence,” I hear someone say.

  Fifteen minutes later, a red-eyed David boards Bus Five wearing his official tour-guide headset. He is greeted with a series of ovations. In a lull between rounds of applause, David tells us he slept only two hours the night before. I realize, and I can’t be the only one, that we’ve perhaps made David’s life significantly more complicated. Maybe he just wanted to go home?

  VI. Tribes

  A few days later, the end of our tour approaching, we board Bus Five to be warned that the coming day will be “emotional.” This is code for our imminent visit to Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial.

  I’ve visited half a dozen Holocaust museums around the world. I weep every time, never knowing whom I pity more: those who died, or those who did not. I weep, too, pondering the apathy that allowed a regime and its quislings to murder 6 million Jews. Clearly a great number of Europeans did not much care whether the Jews were exterminated; Theodor Herzl recognized as much in France four decades before the Holocaust began, and there modern Zionism begins. What most upsets me, though, is thinking about those who did care that Jews were being exterminated—and did nothing. I picture myself in Germany, in 1939, with Trisha, sitting in our kitchen while we feed our daughter. We hear scuffling next door in the apartment of our Jewish neighbors. We know what’s happening and why. I know if I say anything I’ll be killed, possibly before my daughter’s eyes. So what do I do? I cover my daughter’s ears.

  Wandering the concrete pyramidal hallways of Yad Vashem, you can quickly understand why Israel’s security fears are so overriding, even with the most dominant military force in the region protecting it and the world’s last remaining superpower supporting it. Thousands of its citizens can recall an entire continent colluding to rid itself of even the most assimilated and accomplished Jews. This gnawing, passed-down, tribal fear is what holds together an increasingly fractious Israeli society, just as Palestinian society—comprising Muslim and Christian, Israeli citizen and occupied subject—is held together by its tribally shared anger and humiliation at Jewish hands.

  Looking at more displays within the Hall of Remembrance, however, you can also begin to see how this commonality breaks down. Israel has violated international law, sure, but not like this. Israel has committed wartime atrocities, yes, but not like this. The Palestinians have suffered, undeniably, but not like this.

  Critics of the Jewish state often allege that Israel uses the Holocaust as both sword and shield; they view talk of avoiding another Holocaust as preposterous fearmongering. But at Yad Vashem, you’ll find room after room filled with photos of thousands of Jewish families who could not have imagined the first Holocaust. Whether the assailed, protectionist mentality inculcated by that experience is a reasonable reaction or a delusion is beside the point. Whatever else it is, this mentality is probably ineradicable in our lifetimes.

  It occurs to me, while Trisha drifts away to watch an old Nazi propaganda film, that this sense of potential extinguishment is the link between Israelis and American conservatives. Israelis respond to what has happened; American conservatives respond to what they fear will happen. Both are losing. Israel’s democracy crumbles under the pressure of occupation without end, and white conservatives’ cultural supremacy breaks apart under the pressure of rapidly changing demographics. In the face of these challenges, both attempted a short-term fix: harnessing the political power of a fanatically religious base of support. The demotic anger political elites believed they could wield in pursuit of their goals came to control the agenda, and now there’s no way out. I think of something I’d heard a fellow Bus Fiver say: “I bought a couple Israeli flags—so people’ll know where my heart’s at.”

  Inside the Hall of Remembrance, I stop at a display devoted to the principal of a Hebrew school in Warsaw, who wrote avidly in his diary right up to the beginning of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. “Anyone who could see the expulsion from Warsaw with his own eyes would have his heart broken,” reads an entry from that final night. “The children, in particular, rend the heavens with their cries.” His last line is: “If my life ends, what will become of my diary?” On the museum card it says he went to Treblinka the next day.

  I walk into Yad Vashem’s Children’s Memorial. It’s so dark you can barely see the person standing in front of you. Flickering within the oceanic black are tiny lights—flames, seemingly millions of them, reflected doubly and triply in the mirrors that line the way through. A voice reads the names and ages—“Akiva Broner, twelve. Eva Gruenwald, four”—of the 1.5 million children killed during the Holocaust. The memorial, by design, simulates how the Holocaust felt from a child’s point of view: lost, confused, instinctively reaching out to strangers, and following a distant point of light. This experience feels a certain way to me, as a parent. Having a child causes one seismic internal shift: you feel less like someone else’s culmination and more like a single, modest link in a chain of continuance. The lights all around me are a million and a half broken links, and I try to imagine that—to imagine dying, separated from Trisha and my daughter, not knowing where they are or how badly they’re suffering. A worse fate there cannot be, and yet every name that’s read aloud is one more instance of it.

  In the darkness, my hand comes to rest on solid wood. I push open the familiar gate and a gush of light breaks across me. I’m standing on our stone patio in Los Angeles. My daughter is sitting on the flagstones, looking up into the tree outside her bedroom window, where the o
wl that keeps her awake at night lives. Trisha and I go to her and become the thing that we are—a tribe, in miniature.

  Here are the people, I sometimes fear, for whom I would do or justify anything.

  STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST

  Chiefing in Cherokee

  FROM Virginia Quarterly Review

  By the time we rolled into Cherokee, North Carolina, Nick and I had been crisscrossing the country for three months straight, scouting for stories for an educational website called the Odyssey. Because it was the year 2000—that is, when cell phones were mostly used for urgent matters—we had filled our endless road hours with conversation. But neither of us said a word as we cruised down Tsali Boulevard, the town’s main strip. We just stared and shuddered.

  Practically every storefront sign featured a Native American rendered in caricature above a business name like MIZ-CHIEF, SUNDANCER CRAFTS, or REDSKIN MOTEL. Store pillars had been carved and painted as totem poles. Teepees crested the rooftops. Souvenir shops advertised two-for-one dream catchers. Mannequins dressed in warbonnets were posed mid-wave in the windows. Nick and I had traveled here to research Andrew Jackson’s forced relocation, in 1836, of the Cherokee from their ancestral lands to territories out west. At least 4,000 Cherokee died from hunger and exposure along the way. We wanted to learn how the tribe had processed this tragedy, how they explained it to their children. Indigenous Disneyland wasn’t what we’d had in mind.

  Up ahead, a billboard touted LIVE INDIAN DANCERS in a tawdry font. Nick pulled over so we could join a flock of tourists gathered around a teepee propped on the side of the road. Two men wearing elaborately feathered headdresses were midway through a performance. The younger one was playing a drum; the elder was telling a story about the Titanic. Too many people had crowded into the life raft, he said. They were sinking. Three brave men needed to make the ultimate sacrifice. A French man shouted, “Vive la France!” and jumped overboard. Then a Brit yelled, “Long live the Queen!” and jumped overboard. Finally, a Cherokee stood up. He looked around at all of the passengers and said, “Remember the Trail of Tears!” Then he grabbed a white boy and threw him overboard.