The Best American Travel Writing 2002 - Softcover

Mayes, Frances; Wilson, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618118802 ISBN 13: 9780618118809

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2002

Synopsis

The Best American Travel Writing 2002 is edited by Frances Mayes, the author of Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany and the master of "running away to live in the place of one"s dreams" (Los Angeles Times). Giving new life to armchair travel for 2002 are David Sedaris on God and airports, Kate Wheeler on a most dangerous Bolivian festival, André Aciman on the eternal pleasures of Rome, and many more.

About this title

About the Author:

JASON WILSON is the author of Godforsaken Grapes: A Slightly Tipsy Journey through the World of Strange, Obscure, and Underappreciated Wine and Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits. He writes regularly for the Washington Post and the New York Times. Wilson has been the series editor of The Best American Travel Writing since its inception in 2000. His work can be found at jasonwilson.com.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Foreword

I traveled to Helsinki for the first time several Novembers ago. It probably
won"t surprise anyone when I report that Helsinki in November was brutally
cold with a wind that whipped across the half-frozen harbor, that the sun
didn"t rise until midmorning and quickly set by early afternoon, or that it
snowed part of every day.
I wandered around the city"s snowy, quiet streets without purpose,
following signs I could not read. I haggled with a Russian fur vendor over a
muskrat hat in the market square. I drank coffee while sitting on boxes inside
a tent near the fish vendors. I whiled away a dark afternoon at a tiny table in
Café Engel, looking out across the stark Senate Square, warmed by sun
lamps that the barista told me had been set up to counteract "the winter
blahs." I ate reindeer served with cloudberries and lingonberries, dropped
markkas into the cup of a blind accordion player, and listened to people ice-
skating in the park across the street as I lay in my hotel bed.
The trip seems rather uneventful in the retelling, I know. And it
surprises me a little to say that this trip has become a meaningful part of my
personal history — more than I ever could have imagined when I bought my
plane ticket. The reason has as much, or more, to do with context as with
the destination.
If you remember back to the mid- to late 1990s, you may recall
those years as the zenith of America"s sudden, red-hot love affair with
gourmet coffee and its accouterments. It also happened to be the zenith for a
certain genre of niche, connoisseur magazine. During those years, I wrote
for — and later improbably became the editor of — an attractively designed
magazine called Coffee Journal, which covered what it termed the "coffee and
tea lifestyle." The magazine dutifully tasted and compared coffee roasts,
reviewed the newest espresso machines and grinders, provided biscotti
recipes, and profiled cafés all over the world. Travel was a major part of this
so-called coffee and tea lifestyle, and I wrote stories about visiting coffee
farms in Nicaragua and Haiti, as well as an article entitled "The Best
Coffeehouses Coast to Coast." By the time I took the reins, the magazine"s
demise was imminent. America"s love affair with gourmet coffee had cooled
considerably.
Following an argument with the publisher over whether our next
issue"s cover would be a photo of a coffee mug with doughnuts or simply a
photo of a solitary coffee mug, I decided to assign myself a travel story on
the coffeehouse culture of Helsinki. The clever Coffee Journal angle for this
travel article, I am embarrassed to admit, would go as follows: A widely
circulated statistic asserted that nine cups of coffee was what the average
Finn drank each day, the highest per capita consumption in the world. Taking
that bit of information as my cue, I would sit in Helsinki"s finest cafés, drink
nine cups of coffee each day just like the Finns, make notes on the interiors
of cafés and those sitting in cafés, and soak up just enough local color on
which to hang an itinerary our readers could clip out and follow. It was
basically the type of story one writes for a connoisseur magazine that has
long ago exhausted its niche. Come to think of it, it"s exactly the type of thin,
slave-to-the-angle story I read in abundance over the course of the year while
searching for quality travel stories for this anthology. I might add that it"s the
type of story that rarely, if ever, gets selected.
Well, I made my Finnair reservations, and two days later Coffee
Journal ceased publication. I was now unemployed, but since it was
November and flights were as cheap as they would ever be, I decided to fly to
Helsinki anyway. Free of artifice or gimmick or even the need to do any
particular sightseeing at all, I chose to wander in the cold and do just about
nothing that would be of interest to the average travel editor.
I met a number of Finns who were tremendously amused that I
had come to visit their city in November, a month that the Finns consider to
be the worst and most unpopular time of year. So amused was one man, a
journalist, that he wrote a story about my visit and published it in the
Helsingin Sanomat, the nation"s largest daily newspaper, under the
headline "Silence of November as a Souvenir." The journalist quoted me as
saying, "I enjoyed the silence when walking the streets." Instead of my
writing a travel story, one was written about me.
That newspaper clipping in its original Finnish hangs on my
bulletin board. When I look at the article, it does indeed make me think of the
strange, silent beauty of Helsinki"s streets that I enjoyed, and of the snow-
coated gargoyles and statues, including the two giant stone men who hold
ball-shaped lights in front of the railway station. But soon enough, I find
myself thinking of being unemployed, of how worried I was that I had made
bad decisions, of loneliness and melancholy, and of how callow and absurd
my thinking often tends to be. Now that some time has passed, I find that
Helsinki also marks the end of things — things such as the end of my
twenties, and in many ways the end of the 1990s too.

"I found that what I remembered, what seemed to transcend topic, and what
affected me were not only essays with a grounded sense of place, but ones
written in a highly personal voice," writes Frances Mayes in explanation of
why she has chosen the twenty-six pieces that make up this year"s
anthology.
I couldn"t agree with her more. We all know it"s impossible to
separate honest personal experience from the place at hand. Life happens
even when we"re in a new place, far away from home. That"s why it always
baffles me when writers and magazine editors try to pretend otherwise.
My friend Maggie recently showed me a postcard she"d received
from her seventy-year-old mother-in-law, sent from Colonial Williamsburg. The
photo was a typical scene of docents in period costume riding in a horse-
drawn carriage. The caption on the back read, "A gentle mist and autumn
shades of yellow, orange, and red provide the backdrop for this splendid
carriage that conveys passengers around Palace Green." Pretty banal stuff.
But then I looked at the hand-scrawled personal note:

Dear D — s,
We have had light rain — no carriage ride this year. Edgar and I have played
tourist and enjoyed the history and each other"s company.
Dad has gotten herpes zoster back (10 years since) and in his
ears?!!!! Went to a "doc in the box" for treatment. Better already.
Driving home today.
Love,
Grandmother

While I felt sorry and chagrined for Edgar, Maggie roared with laughter at the
thought of her prim and proper mother-in-law scribbling this note. Clearly this
postcard, and this otherwise straightforward trip to Williamsburg, had already
become part of her family"s comic shared history.
Some other friends, Dave and Andrea, just returned from a trip to
Vietnam, where they went to adopt a beautiful four-month-old girl. I watched
their travel videos, with some great scenes capturing the hustle and bustle of
Saigon, including some fabulous footage of Dave getting a haircut by a street
barber as deafening motorbikes careen by. Of course, everything else on the
video is overwhelmed by the dramatic footage shot inside the Saigon
orphanage, where expectant parents from the United States wait for
Vietnamese nurses to bring out their babies. This was a human moment that
certainly transcended the destination. Even in amateur format, the
expressions and reactions of these parents were riveting to watch. That
moment defined Dave and Andrea"s trip to Vietnam, and no one else"s. How
different is their trip from that of the fifty-year-old war veteran who revisits the
jungle where his buddies were killed thirty years ago? How different is the
Vietnam experience of a twenty-two-year-old backpacker just out of college,
who has never been outside the United States before?
The travel writing one finds in magazines too often suffers from a
reluctance to transcend the topic at hand, a reluctance toward digression of
any kind. I realize that some of this is the result of space concerns, but it is
still unfortunate. Anyone who reads travel classics such Gerald Brenan"s
South from Granada or Robert Byron"s The Road to Oxiana or D. H.
Lawrence"s Sea and Sardinia or Graham Greene"s The Lawless Roads
knows that digression is a part of all great travel writing. In many ways, the
digressions are the story.
The stories collected here are fiercely personal. How does tragedy
turn a simple walk home in Manhattan into a meditation on how much New
York matters, and how much we have to lose? Read Adam Gopnik"s "The
City and the Pillars" within these pages to find out. What personal ghosts
turn a pleasurable summer getaway to Rome into a haunting reminder of
what"s eternal? Read André Aciman"s memoir "Roman Hours." What turns an
octogenarian grandfather"s annual winter retreat to Acapulco into a lesson on
how to live the good life? Devin Friedman will share that wisdom. How does a
famous chef"s trip home to Cambodia to cook dinner for his family turn into a
bittersweet tale of reconciling the past? Molly O"Neill"s skillful hand will show
you in "Home for Dinner." Whose sensibility turns a flight delay into one of
the funniest essays you will read all year? David Sedaris"s, of course.
All the writers whose work you will read in this anthology share
the ability to transcend their chosen destinations, to understand that a trip"s
context — whether personal or political — is as important as the trip itself,
and they all deliver a compelling and beautiful narrative.

The stories included in this anthology are selected from among hundreds of
stories in hundreds of diverse publications — from mainstream and specialty
magazines to Sunday newspaper travel sections to literary journals to in-flight
magazines. My eyes are far from perfect, but I have done my best to be fair
and representative, and in my opinion the one hundred best travel stories
from the year 2001 were forwarded to Frances Mayes, who made the final
selections.
And so with this publication, I begin anew by reading the hundreds
of stories published in 2002. I am once again asking editors and writers to
submit the best of whatever it is they define as "travel writing." These
submissions must be nonfiction, published in the United States during the
2002 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 tearsheets, the complete publication, or a
clear photocopy of the piece as it originally appeared. I must receive all
submissions by January 30, 2003, 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, The Best American Travel
Writing, P.O. Box 260, Haddonfield, N.J. 08033.
It was an honor to work with Frances Mayes, whose well-
documented life in Tuscany I have deeply envied for some time. I enormously
appreciate her efforts to pull this collection together on the heels of finishing
her first novel. I would also like to thank Samantha Pinto for her assistance
on this year"s anthology, as well as Deanne Urmy, Melissa Grella, and Liz
Duvall, among others at Houghton Mifflin. But of course the writers included
here deserve the greatest praise. The Best American Travel Writing is
dedicated, as always, to them.

Jason Wilson
Introduction

Monarch butterflies are camping in the eucalyptus trees around my house, a
California pause in their long yearly migration. Sitting at the kitchen table
reading essays for this book, I look up and see them flickering among the
leaves, showing their orange wings to the sun. I wonder — is travel a natural
instinct? Birds ride updrafts across continents; turtles are born knowing how
to swim from Africa to Brazil; wildebeest herds thunder across the veldt, on
their way somewhere. Chaucer"s storytellers felt the spring sap rise in their
veins, sending them out on pilgrimages to seek the holy blessèd martyr.
Today, late February, the crabapple trees in full frisson, I"m longing to air out
my carry-on bag, search for my passport, and take the first thing smoking on
the runway for I know not where. Maybe some primitive push in the genes
makes humans light out for the territories, makes us long, from time to time,
for anywhere, anywhere other than where we are.
When I graduated from high school, I was given a set of leather
luggage by my mother. It was smoky blue leather with my initials stamped
clearly in silver, FEM. A large, a medium, and a round bag, all lined in quilted
satin. I was ready to go. Where was I going? Only to college in Virginia, eight
hundred miles from home. That was my first encounter, all on my own, with a
new geography. As a teenager, I had traveled with my mother — to
Washington and New York and to see the battlefield at Gettysburg. My father
always said, "Packing and Unpacking. If we had a family crest, we should
carve Packing and Unpacking in Latin across the top." We loved to go. Not
that we went very far. From our house in southern Georgia, when I was a
child, we traveled to St. Simons and Sea Island, two of the Golden Isles of
Georgia; to Atlanta, Daytona Beach, Fernandina Beach; sometimes as far as
Highlands, North Carolina. Although she never considered Europe or Hawaii
or even California — there be beasties — my mother was restless.
Occasionally my parents went to New York. After my father died, my mother
tried a few Caribbean cruises, where she hoped to meet someone glamorous
who would rescue her from the boredom of life in a small town. Instead she
would come home with stories of ladies from Upstate New York being pelted
with tomatoes by angry natives in Barbados, of dining with a Canadian
gentleman who excused himself shortly before the check arrived, and of
sharing a stateroom with an old friend who had nightmares and called
out, "My virtue, my virtue," in the night.
These, I suppose, were the first travel stories I ever heard. We
were bees in amber in that small town. Within its one-mile parameter, we
lived in a world unto itself. When I came across Thoreau"s wry remark about
having "travelled much in Concord," I knew exactly what he meant.
Besides my brief excursions away from my hometown, books
gave me the idea of travel. In our town we didn"t have much to entertain us,
but we did have a Carnegie library. I methodically read my way across the
shelves, with the librarian occasionally calling my mother to report that I was
reading unsuitable books. I must admit that I devoured Frank Yerby"s stories
of octoroons and plantations, and all writers who oozed the Deep South
mythos. But what I came to recognize as a sense of place I happened upon
in D. H. Lawrence, Dostoyevsky, Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry James.
Other worlds, I realized, whole other worlds are out there.
...

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0618118802
• ISBN 13: 9780618118809
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 351