The Best American Travel Writing 2016

Bill Bryson and Jason Wilson, editors. The Best American Travel Writing 2016. NY: Mariner, 2016.

Do you know about the "Best American" serieses? There's an annual Best American Essays, a Best American Science and  Nature Writing, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Writing, and my favorite, Best American Travel Writing. Reading these collections is a great way to sample authors (if you like the essay, investigate the books they've written or look for more essays), and keep up on current writing in your favorite literary genre. I have a stack of Best American Travels (and the occasional other genre) at home, and while I can't claim to have read them all, I've read parts of some

and all of others. Part of the beauty of anthologies for me is that I feel no reader's guilt for not reading the whole book cover-to-cover. I preorder BATW  every year because I love reading travel essays, I write travel essays, and the series editor, Jason Wilson, was my writing mentor while I studied for my MFA in writing. His introduction to the collection is always fun to read, and without a doubt the guest editor's introduction or foreword will be quality writing as well. This year's guest editor is the hilarious Bill Bryson. And then I savor each and every essay. Even if I wasn't travel writing myself, I would be enamored with these essays. Who doesn't want to learn about places they haven't been?

Just before I began reading Best American Travel Writing 2016, I read a writing craft essay by Ann Hood about literary first lines in Tin House’s Writer’s Notebook II. She describes a first line as a hand extended by the writer to the reader. That’s a genteel way of thinking about a hook! I picked up Best American Travel Writing 2016 and studied the first lines in that collection. I chose my favorites, not necessarily by my favorite authors:

Dave Eggers: “The year I turned 43, I woke up one morning and thought it would be a good day to go to Hollister.”

Pico Iyer: “The foreign has long been my stomping ground, my sanctuary, as one who grew up a foreigner wherever I happened to be.”

Helen MacDonald: “I’m walking beside a hedge of tangled dog roses in a nature preserve in eastern England, toward a hide, a building whose purpose it is to make me disappear.”

Jeffrey Tayler: “Tens of thousands of dragooned serfs perished while draining the swamps to lay the foundation of St. Petersburg, and residents like to remind visitors that their city, enchanting though it may be, ‘rests on bones’.”

Eggers and Tayler’s lines simply intrigued me, Tayler with fanciful language and Eggers with a familiar (but not really) place name. Iyer’s idea of the foreigner connected with my own self-diagnosed outlier status. MacDonald’s hide reminded me of the hides on my favorite birdwatching trails and how tempting they are to stand in and not be seen. All four authors put out a hand and drew me in.

Reviewing the lines after reading the essays, I noticed that my list of favorites had altered slightly, influenced by the stories they evoked in my mind. For example, Thomas Chatterton Williams’s line, “My father, a bookish black man old enough to be my grandfather, grew up in Texas while it was still a segregated state.” On the surface, this line gives us information about the essay: they are black, from Texas, and his father is much older (like mine) and remembers that state when it was much different. That’s a lot of information for one sentence. After I read the essay and realized that his ‘expert’ was Jake Lamar who I know (another writing mentor), I was very interested in the story. I’m not black, or a man, or living in Paris, but I feel like I have a good idea of what it must be like from reading this essay.

Here’s my assessment from this informal first-line study: before reading the essays, I liked best the first-lines that pulled me in with imagery, fanciful or familiar. After reading the essays, I still liked those, but appreciated the first-lines that signaled the content of the essay to follow. Some did both. I want my first lines to do both.

My other takeaway from this collection is a broadening definition of ‘travel’ writing. I think of a travel story as the recounting of a trip with a beginning and an end. Perhaps the writer includes the ‘getting there’ and the ‘going home’ or perhaps not. The protagonist in William Finnegan’s “Off Diamond Head” moves to Hawaii with his family as a child. I enjoyed the surf talk, related to the ocean’s moods, and appreciated the use of TV show titles to set the time. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had gone to a place and were going to be left there. It was more of a story of a sense of place than a travel story. This is not a bad thing as it made for a contrast to the essays about a finite trip. I’m intrigued—can I do this? Can I write about a place that I don’t actually leave at the end and call it travel? 

Pico Iyer’s “The Foreign Spell” is the most perfect essay in the collection. I bestow this honor based on his elegant writing and the piece’s satisfying form, but most of all because of his thorough explanation of his concept of being foreign. I get it and I can relate. Helen McDonald’s “Hiding from Animals” is my first-runner-up. I wrote this in the margin: “I wish I wrote this.” She thoroughly described the joys and frustrations of watching animals that I feel out in nature with my camera and binoculars. She transported me to my favorite spots. 

As a person who is known to do a bit of research and inflict it upon my readers, I appreciated the researched meat that D.T. Max added to “A Cave with a View” as he balanced the old and new in Matera. Tony Perrottet amplified his story “Darwin’s Forgotten World” with research throughout. One of these days I’ll read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but until I do I’ll be needing some explanation. Perrottet supplied that and more. Related to research is authenticity which seems to be Patrick Symmes’s concern in “Peak Havana.” He made it clear that what we see in the travel literature is not exactly an accurate portrayal of the real Cuba. I would like to see for myself.

Since I spent time with first lines, I made sure to note the best last lines and conclusions. Alice Gregory gave us a personal revelation in “Climb Every Mountain,” and David Rowell admitted that actually playing the hang was not all he imagined it would be in “Swiss Dream.” Helen McDonald’s nature-watching ending finished off that piece nicely for me, encouraging the reader to slow down and spend the time to appreciate nature. The most powerful ending for me is Justin Nobel’s in “Growing Old with the Inuit.” After a deft synthesis of his journey, the unfamiliar culture of Inuit aged, and his quotidian experience with his grandfather he ends with:

We are holding hands on the couch. I want to carry him up a holy mountain, abandon him on an ice floe, stab him in the heart, but I don’t have the guts. Those days are indeed over. There will be no ring of rocks, and everyone has forgotten their favorite tool. These days, the world over, we die on our couches.

You should read The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. NY: Penguin, 2012.

This is the kind of book I like to read slowly and savor. Macfarlane’s descriptions of walking and thinking inspire me to think about thinking while walking. There’s a tradition of this throughout history, but until Macfarlane’s book I hadn’t put the pieces together: Australian Aboriginal Songlines, the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost’s ‘talks walking’, and as I read elsewhere recently, Ludwig van Beethoven working out musical composition while walking. I do it, too. I think about problems that need solutions, or how I’m going to frame a piece of writing, or how I’m going to start a difficult conversation. Maybe it’s the act of walking that gets the blood circulating or the oxygen powering the brain.

Macfarlane’s walks are trail walks, and usually in the United Kingdom. His descriptions of the geology and geography sent me to my reference shelf more than once to look for maps, definitions, and photographs of things like chalk. He walks on chalk, gneiss, flint, silt, snow, and ice, and is conscious of every surface under his feet. He describes how footprints in the snow rise up as the wind blows the loose snow away from the solidly frozen prints. Wow.

My best walks are on sand, at the beach where I walk barefoot except in the coldest weather. Macfarlane discusses walking barefoot and the sensuousness of it. You feel the trail underfoot and remember it differently, he says, than if you walk it in footwear. I think the most compelling part of the book for me was his description of walking next to the 5000-year-old footprints preserved in the silt. My beach walks send my brain in three directions: what I’m seeing at the moment (birds, boats, people); memories of ‘talks walking’ with people (my father, cousins, nephew, old boyfriends); and the history of this favorite beach (whaling, World War II, the opening of the ferry).

Macfarlane considers water paths, too: sea routes. These are traveled by sailors over and over, and they share information about hazards and storms. People along water routes share culture, too. I’m reminded of the towns and cities on the Danube River and how musicians have traveled the river for centuries sharing tunes (a kind of oral history), techniques, instruments, and notation more so than with musicians further inland. Wolfgang Mozart was dissatisfied with his hometown of Salzburg and floated south on the Danube to Vienna where he thought he would have better opportunities. Gustav Mahler was moved north on the Danube by Emperor Franz Joseph so that he could raise the standards of the Vienna Court Opera. There are many such connections between the cities on the Danube water trail.

I was wondering in the first few chapters when this book might have been written. I was reading on my Kindle, and I’m not as adept as I should be flipping around on that thing. So rather than walking over to a computer to look up the publication date that I hadn’t noticed thus far, I challenged myself to look for clues. I pictured a thin, fifty-something, English professor in an Argyle vest, smoking a pipe while walking the chalk trail in the 1930s. Soon I encountered references to Guns N’ Roses, Antiques Roadshow, and the movie Matrix. The book was published in 2012 when the author was 36. Aside from those references, though, I contend the stories and descriptions in this book could have taken place anytime in the last century. The nature experience is pure, without interference from popular culture or current events.

The reader is introduced to some interesting people during the author’s walks. The poet Edward Thomas sounds like he was a difficult person to know, but he was a thinker and a walker. For him, paths “connected real places, led outward to metaphysics, led backwards to history and inwards to the self.” He’s on Macfarlane’s mind throughout the book, relevant to much of what Macfarlane is trying to express. Richard Holmes, a writer of biographies and the of world of biography writing, said that writing a biography resembles “a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s past.” Isn’t much research like that, though? His book Footsteps (1985) is now on my list. Eric Ravilious painted the chalk trails and much of the South Downs area of England, and in doing so Macfarlane says, supplied him with a mental landscape of the trails he was walking. A quick Google search revealed that Ravilious is quite popular in the UK with exhibits opening here and there and a long list of books about his paintings.

This book will stay with me for a long time. It was an enjoyable read on one level, but on another level inspired me to get out and walk and think. I believe I will not be able to take a decent-length walk from now on without thinking about Macfarlane’s book. I’ve been gushing about it to my thinking and walking friends. And as with most of my favorite books, it encouraged further reading on Edward Thomas, Richard Holmes, Eric Ravilious, even Robert Frost who made an appearance…and walking.

The Great Railway Bazaar

Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar. Mariner, 1975.

“Speed puts some people to sleep; others it makes breathless. It doesn’t enliven conversation. I missed the slower trains with the lounge cars and the rackety wheels.” (p. 291)

Paul Theroux wrote those lines on the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, Japan, towards the end of his four months on the rails in Europe and Asia. At this point, the reader is beginning to notice that

Theroux is travel-weary. Four months is a long time to be on a train, and that he had to arrange each leg of the journey as he arrived at each new destination have made the trip an adventure. He chats with people on the train, at the stations, and in the places he visits. The variety of people and places is truly a ‘bazaar,’ (a Railway bazaar), and this reader feels as if she’s simultaneously taken the trip with Theroux and time-traveled 40 years back in time. The journey is described in detail in The Great Railway Bazaar from 1975.

The quote above caught my eye and caused me to reflect on some train trips I’ve taken. Madrid to Granada, Spain: similar to Theroux’s descriptions in that the changing views out the window (weather, local clothing, city vs. country) contrast the train’s interior situations (characters, conversations, behavior, ambient light). My exterior view changed from urban to rural (with windmills and olive trees), and the scruffy interior of the train was populated by an assortment of travelers. There was a movie to entertain us (Theroux didn’t have movies!), and a dining car from which my companion brought me a surprisingly delicious ham sandwich. Most of Theroux’s rides were more colorful and exotic than this, but my experience helped me understand him. Towards the end of his adventure when he had become weary, he described the Japanese Super Express which blasted through dull suburbs populated by silent passengers. This train reminded me of the German bullet train on which I traveled from Cologne to Berlin, Germany, also through blah suburbs with travelers and commuters wrapped-up in their own work or reading. It was cool to speed through the country on such a fast train, but the ride did not supply much in the way of travel adventure. The Spain train had character.

In Spain, the train approaches the plain.

Theroux had ample time to come up with astute observations during his four-month trek. I copied six pages of interesting sentences that might be quotable in future train-themed essays. He’s quotable even when he gets cranky on the Trans-Siberian Express and has to walk through below-freezing temperatures in-between cars in order to get to the dining car three cars away. He has bad dreams and feels guilty about leaving his family so long: “Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed and imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall,” (p. 323).

On the last page he reveals what he has learned from the trip: “…the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows,” (p. 342). I thought that sentence was particularly interesting because Theroux writes both travel and fiction, and I wonder how he thinks differently when creating each.

I would not have been disappointed by his ending if he had left it at that, but the crafty Theroux then worked in the book’s first sentence as its last, about how he “seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.” That’s true for me, too, and I would add that I have never heard a train song and not wished I was on it (with the possible exception of the Grateful Dead’s).

But Beautiful [A Book About Jazz]

Dyer, Geoff. But Beautiful [A Book About Jazz]. Picador, 1996.

I was impressed with how Geoff Dyer writes about music. I picked up the book with a certain prejudice, since I had just read about how he likes to study a subject intensely for a few years and then create a book about the topic. He calls it ‘gatecrashing.’ This sounds familiar: I do kind of the same thing although I may not immerse myself for quite as long (usually it’s a year-long project chosen on New Year’s Day), and I produce an article or essay instead of a full-length book. I’ll be honest with the reader about my dilettantism and even crack jokes at my own expense. I blogged about my gatecrashing here in 2012: http://margaretmontet.blogspot.com/2012/12/resolving-happy-new-year.html.

What would a whole book about jazz by a non-jazzer be like? It was compelling! Without using jargon, he describes the sonic fabric, the onstage environment, and influences acting upon the musician. It’s no secret that many depend(ed) on substances in order to cope with life on the road, or unstable home and family lives damaged by that life on the road. They toured anyway, creating new interpretations of standard solos and tunes as they travelled from town to town. That recording you’ve listened to a thousand times of Art Blakey’s group playing “A Night in Tunisia” would sound different live in Philadelphia, and different again in Chicago. Dizzy Gillespie’s version would sound different still. You’d still recognize the tune, but the performances would differ. The point in jazz is not to make your performance sound the same as the original (as with a pop or rock cover band), but to make it sound new and unexpected. With the standard tunes often performed in jazz, it’s not even common knowledge who recorded it first. 

But Beautiful profiles Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, and Art Pepper. Somehow, Dyer makes clear to the reader that the performance being created onstage as we read is a direct product of the experiences and tribulations that each musician has gone through. Their emotions and memories come out in the music. We are there on the stage with the musician, with cigarette smoke impeding our breathing, and the sound of ice in glasses mingling with the music. Dyer is a Brit—this is obvious from words like serviet for napkin—and he seems unaware of jargon that an average American jazz fan like me would know. At one point he has Ben Webster telling Charlie Parker that “you don’t play the tenor sax that way.” But we all know, (don’t we?), that Parker played alto saxophone. I’ve noticed over the years that saxophone players say ‘saxophone,’ not ‘sax,’ or more simply refer to the range: ‘Charlie Parker played alto.’

These quibbles don’t take away from the book. The descriptions of the musicians are superb. I was tempted to call out from work so that I wouldn’t have to put the book down.

“Throughout I relied more on photographs than on written sources…” That acknowledgement appears in the paragraph leading into Dyer’s bibliography. Sure, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but still, what a curious, interesting way to put together a profile of a jazz musician. That comment stopped me in my tracks as a lot of the book did. Dyer is writing as a listener and as such has no need for pesky jargon. He has to make himself clear to his readers, not his jazz subjects, and he does this with aplomb.

Arctic Dreams--Go Get a Sweater

Barry Lopez. Arctic Dreams. Vintage, 2001.

    The first book in this new BookoftheMonthClub is the 1986 National Book Award Winner for Nonfiction, and thus a model for nonfiction writers like me. But I think anyone interested in nature writing, a sense of place, or simply excellent, compelling prose would appreciate this particular book. I started it years ago and got distracted. It sat on my Shelf of Shame (books I started and didn't finish) until I read it for my Master of Fine Arts program (a different kind of book of the month club!). It's the kind of book that takes a while to get into, but the tenacious reader will be rewarded with an awareness of a unique environment on our planet. Narwhals live there!

Firkin. "Narwhal." 25 Sept 2016. https://openclipart.org/detail/262550/narwhal

     American writer Barry Lopez informs the reader in the book’s Prologue of three themes that guide Arctic Dreams:

• The influence of the arctic landscape on human imagination
• How a desire to put a landscape to use shapes our evaluation of it
• What does it mean to grow rich?

After reading the book, I’d agree to the first, but the second two points got lost for me in the complex texture of the narrative. They were addressed near the end. I was riveted by his descriptions of the stars of this vulnerable arctic ecosystem, the 607 (!!) species of birds, and the muskoxen, polar bears, and narwhals. I’ll read anything Barry Lopez decides to write about narwhals and wonder with him what that single tusk is meant for and what it is like to live in a three-dimensional acoustical space. As curious as I was about the animals my interest came alive when Lopez began describing the historic and contemporary people of the arctic region: Eskimos (his word), explorers, artists, historians, and writers, and how they have survived (or not) in the brutal, unforgiving climate. Representatives from different walks of life bring us multiple perspectives on a place. The arctic has influenced my human imagination and I haven’t even been there.

     “I am not entirely comfortable on the sea ice butchering walrus like this.” That sentence appears on page 408, in the Epilogue. It’s one of the most compelling in the book at face value, but it tells us about Lopez’s journey. He never seems like a neophyte to the reader, but this sentence reveals that although he’s uneasy with the walrus butchering, he is comfortable with the eskimos (and they with him) to be present at the event. He has told us about the eskimos’ relationship with the land and how hunting is a succinct metaphor for that relationship. In order to hunt, the hunter goes out on the land and becomes part of the animal world. During the walrus butchering, Lopez has become part of the eskimo world and the animal world. Lopez does not treat this experience lightly.

     Lopez ponders the theme of ‘a sense of place’ throughout the book. He admits that he loses perspective and distance while contemplating the various kinds of Ice: icebergs, glaciers, ice islands, tabular icebergs, nilas, gray ice, pingos, and ice shelves. Imagine having to ask if that animal is a small one up close or a large one far away! Lopez read many journals about the same regions, realizing through the process that gaps in knowledge emerged eventually. Also through his careful study of the history of exploration in the region, he notes that the earlier explorers were simply trying to find a Northwest Passage and get through it. Later explorers planned to ‘overwinter’ and learn what they could about the environment. He identifies patterns in historical writings of exploration rather than merely reporting interesting factoids. Considerable thinking about thinking is going on in this book.

     Maps, Lopez says, give us a false sense of place. The making of maps is traditionally a contemplative exercise. ‘Imaginary lands’ and ‘fabled landscapes’ are depicted, and sometimes maps are used as mnemonics—here is where that person lived, here is where I saw that deceased willet. I was inspired to draw a mnemonic map of a walk I take often. It’s not easy to get things in the right place on gridded streets, so imagine the difficulty of mapping a jagged coastline.

     Lopez describes how land and place work their way into the mind of a person. The place humbles the person and he becomes part of the landscape along with the polar bears and muskoxen. He’s like the animals, depending on the landscape for survival. That’s the large sense of place, the Umwelt, or ‘our place.’ I cannot comprehend the mind-expanding experience of living in the arctic. The closest I come to that kind of dangerous beauty is watching a huge blizzard or hurricane and then dealing with the recovery. It is awesome in the literal sense as well as the vernacular. Nature is boss and will put me in darkness or light as she sees fit.

     On a smaller scale, one might find an object, a tool or a building, and wonder what ideas were attached to this artifact when it was created and used. Take this line of thought further and imagine what thought accompanies industry in the arctic region. Those not part of the landscape probably think “What else is it good for?” and “It is too vast to be hurt.” The land must produce somehow or it is a waste of real estate. We readers of Arctic Dreams know this is not true. This immense, accident-prone ecosystem supports life independent from what we know as far as we know. There’s no waste in that.

     “I lost for long moments my sense of time and purpose as a human being.” Lopez says this on page 404 as he contemplates the glacial landscape at Axel Heiberg Island. At times, this was my experience while reading this book. I lost track of time and place and achieved a clarity of the reading mind similar to the ‘flow’ in creativity. The rich tapestry of Lopez’s National-Book-Award-winning prose knocked me out. I’ve known this phenomenon before, but it is a rare treat to be so transformed and transfixed.