The Best Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  Patrick paused long enough for me to describe the events of the previous night and laughed when I told him how I readied to repel intruders. Now I had his attention, I asked him how Jimmy acquired the Natural moniker. He glanced at me somewhat perplexed and nervously ran his hands through his hair. It was clearly a question he had never had to answer.

  “I can’t really say I know the origin of his nickname,” he replied, nervously. “I think…but I wouldn’t swear to it… Jimmy’s parents were the ones who called him a Natural and, after a while it stuck. You see, he was strange but then maybe no stranger than some of the other folk in this part of the country. I remember my father telling me Jimmy was described as a Natural to stop other people being cruel and saying he was mad, crazy or a nutcase. Maybe Natural just seemed to be a natural thing to call him back then, if you know what I mean. Jimmy was purer than the rest of us in some way. He was innocent like the nature God created. I guess he’s always been a little closer to God than the rest of us.”

  A week after my encounter with Jimmy, I met Declan on my way to Killybegs. He was striding along confidently, a slight swagger in his step. I stopped my car and got out to talk to him. When I told him I had met Jimmy the Natural, he nodded with reverence as though my knowing about The Natural conferred on me a particular status and responsibility. He stepped to within an inch of me, and grabbing my arm pulled me close.

  “Whatever you do, don’t go telling any of the rowdies in town about Jimmy. We don’t want them going out the road when they’re drunk to play some prank on him. He’s one of ours and his secret is our secret. The Natural’s what we would all like to be. Am I right?”

  I nodded and he let go of my arm.

  “The best way to get rid of a hangover is to walk it into the ground,” he shouted as he strode off. He was on his way to sample the hair of the dog. “Keep the faith,” was his parting comment as he disappeared from view.

  After the initial apparition, fishing trips took me to other parts of Donegal and I got home too late to walk into town for a pint. Nevertheless, when driving I never exceeded fifteen miles per hour on the lane for fear Jimmy might suddenly appear in my headlights. He never showed up but I felt deep down he was hiding behind a stone wall or hedge watching me. Without fail, each morning I awoke to find gifts of fish, eggs and sometimes freshly baked wheaten bread wrapped in a napkin, with goat milk in a small pot covered with muslin.

  On the last day of my vacation, I awoke at dawn with a deep sense of regret I was leaving a place where I was happy and at peace. I knew in twenty-four hours I would be waking up in N. Ireland where daily killings and bombings would once again cast a dark shadow over my life. I wanted to say goodbye to the Natural and his sister to thank them for their generosity but Patrick Dempsey and his wife advised against it. They said Jimmy and his sister were very private people.

  After a final breakfast of small, boiled eggs and fried eel, I walked out into the fresh, crisp air. Out of habit I scanned the surrounding fields, as well as the laneway and hillsides, hoping to see The Natural but I was disappointed. To end my vacation on a happy note I decided to visit the cliffs and gaze over the ocean. When I stepped onto the lane below the cottage, Patrick Dempsey drove towards me from the direction of the sea, stopping in front of me.

  “If I was a betting man, I’d say you’re on your way to see a friend of ours,” he said with a big smile.

  I replied I was on my way to have a last look at the ocean. He reached out, took my hand and shook it warmly.

  “Look here Martin, I know I told you not to call at Jimmy’s but it’s really up to you…. I was just being defensive. I told Jimmy’s sister all about you and I’m sure she’d be happy to see you, if it was just to say a quick goodbye. Don’t expect to see Jimmy. Even when I visit, he always hides like he’s playing hide and seek.”

  He paused, revving his car engine.

  “Now, away with you. You’ll want to get back soon to all those fine city folk, won’t you?”

  He grinned impishly and drove off, waving until his car disappeared from view. Minutes later, I was making my way along a tiny, grass-covered path to Jimmy’s place, marveling at high hedges heavily laden with blackberries that almost hemmed me in. Unexpectedly, the path widened and I found myself at a wooden gate to a clearing that dipped towards a dark two-storey stone house with two adjacent outbuildings. The smell of a peat fire filled the air in smoke rising from a brick chimney above a dark, slated roof. A cockerel and a dozen hens were picking through bread crumbs scattered on a grassy, gravelly patch of ground in front of the house. On a window ledge, a scrawny black cat hissed at me and arched its back. In the blink of an eye, it jumped to the ground, shunted sideways and vaulted over the bottom half of the door into the kitchen. It was at least a minute before I saw Jimmy’s sister standing inside the door, the black cat clutched to her breast. Our eyes met and for a moment, I thought she was going to remain where she was. But, with a smile and a nod at me, she moved the lower section of the door aside and walked towards me, shooing away the cockerel and the hens.

  She was a small, wiry woman with jet-black hair plaited at the back. Her eyes matched the color of her hair and her face was ruddy, with deep lines running from high cheekbones to her neck. Like Patrick Dempsey’s wife, she wore a woolen jumper and a long skirt covered with an apron which stretched from neck to halfway below her knees and ankles. Her legs were wrapped in heavy brown stockings and she had brown boots laced high above her ankles.

  “You’re Martin, aren’t you?” she asked, almost in a whisper, her right hand outstretched. As I shook it, the cat jumped to the ground and ran back to the house. I still had her hand in mine. Hers was long and slender but it gripped mine tightly. Black eyes were her most striking feature and they shone with warmth and sincerity. She was a little nervous and made no effort to hide it. I began to thank her but she brought her left index finger to her mouth to silence me. She then slowly retreated from the gate. As she walked back to the cottage the cat ambled towards her, his tail erect in the shape of a question mark. She picked him up and took him indoors. I gingerly turned to make my way back to the canopy of blackberry bushes when something compelled me to look back at the farmhouse one last time. An arm was slowly reaching out from behind the front door. As it extended, I saw it held a mackerel, its head pointed towards the ground. Ever so gently, the hand was moving the mackerel back and forth in a swimming motion like a child playing with a toy. Suddenly, a face appeared above the fish. It was the face from my apparition. It was a smiling Jimmy the Natural wearing a tightly-knit woolen hat. His face resembled a moon one might see on a bright night and his eyes were wide as saucers. As quickly as he appeared, he vanished. It was the last I saw The Natural.

  A decade later, I met a fisherman who frequented Killybegs. I asked him if he had ever come across Declan and his brother. He told me he had known them well and they were “great craic” (great fun) but something horrible had happened to them. They were burned to death in their sleep after a night out drinking in Killybegs. Police believed the fire was caused by a discarded cigarette butt. The brothers, who never drank together died in the same bed and were buried in the same grave, he claimed.

  Looking back, it is hardly surprising that Jimmy the Natural comes to mind when I think of beauty, lost innocence and the kindness of strangers. I often reflect sadly on how Patrick Dempsey and other locals felt they had to protect him from a cold, cynical world that too often shunned diversity and inner beauty. Some details of this story, including names, were altered for the reasons I have just expressed, namely I would not wish anyone going in search of The Natural.

  Martin Dillon worked for the BBC in Northern Ireland for eighteen years and has won international acclaim for his nonfiction books about Ireland, including The Shankill Butchers, God and the Gun, and The Dirty War. He is often called on as one of the foremost authorities on global terrorism.

  JOHNNA KAPLAN

  Flyover Country

  It
’s too big to grasp—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

  BETWEEN BACK EAST AND OUT WEST, IN THAT OBSCURE sweep of green you glimpse from the airplane window before you close the shade and put on your headphones, roads roll out across the fields like shiny gray ribbons. The sun rises over tiny rivers that you can drive across in a fraction of the time it would take to pronounce their names. It sets over cities you never think about dominated by mountain ranges you never knew existed. During the years I lived in Missouri and almost everyone else I knew lived between New York and Boston, I drove back and forth many times across this unappreciated expanse of America.

  Usually I took the Interstates, which were their own world, divorced from whatever was going on in the unseen towns beyond them. The presence of civilization was indicated by watchful cows and by truck stops, which periodically appeared in the distance like miniature cities. I drove alongside lumbering big rigs. I was forever passing them, and they were forever appearing in front of me again. I sometimes felt like the only person in a sea of things, all kinds of things being busily carried to and fro. It was an odd vantage point, I was unused to seeing so much commerce with so few consumers.

  For entertainment there were billboards: “Avoid Hell. Repent. Trust Jesus Today.” “Where will you spend eternity? Jesus Christ is the answer!”

  For reassurance there were Lewis and Clark Trail markers, which momentarily overruled the doubts I had about the sanity of my decision to move. I told myself that in leaving New York I was not giving up or stepping down. I imagined that I was better suited for another era, a time when West was the direction everyone in America wanted to go. Also comforting were the national forests, which reminded me that it didn’t matter if I couldn’t decide whether the East or the Midwest was my home; they belonged to the same country, after all, and I could claim that all of it was mine. Sometimes I was the only one driving through a national forest—not just mine, but mine alone.

  Sometimes as I drove I forgot exactly where I was, which may have been because only those who lived there considered it a definable place. More than once, after an hour spent coaxing my car uphill, sure that I was crossing some grand and storied range, I looked at my map and saw that the peaks which I had just struggled to summit merited nothing more than a nameless green blob.

  I spent too many nights in a dot on the map called Triadelphia, West Virginia. For a long time I thought it was Wheeling; I think it thought it was Wheeling. I learned it was Triadelphia because I got out the phone book in a hotel and checked. In Triadelphia hotel lobbies, surrounded by burly plaid-shirted men, I blended into the walls, so out of place I paradoxically became invisible.

  When I didn’t stop in Triadelphia I stopped in St. Clairsville, which was technically in Ohio but seemed to also want to be Wheeling. It appeared to have been built as a repository for cheap chain hotels. St. Clairsville was prone to intense fog, which confused the birds. They flew strangely, slow and lower than usual. Once one slammed its tiny body against my windshield. I was sure I’d killed it, but it left no mark.

  At first I was surprised by the distances I had to cover. Ohio, a state I had never previously deigned to consider, was huge, its size all out of proportion to its importance. I learned to look out for particularly Ohio-like things: boats inexplicably stranded on the left shoulder of the highway, and barns brightly painted to commemorate the state’s bicentennial. Once in Ohio on a snowy morning I saw a line of cars along the left shoulder of the road. Police cruisers, their red and blue lights eerie in the white almost-dawn, surrounded a little car, parked; an eighteen-wheeler, facing the wrong direction; a Brinks truck, lying upside down in the little grassy ditch of a median; and a second Brinks truck, waiting patiently to collect the loot.

  Sometimes time zone changes were posted on signs, and sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes they popped up where I wasn’t expecting them. I drove across Tennessee, which looks small on a map but in reality goes on and on, and was surprised to find that I’d driven an hour in a second. I was vaguely confused for the rest of the day. The time zone changes in the middle of Kentucky too, but I never noticed it there. I once managed to drive across Kentucky and only step out of the car once, for three minutes. In those three minutes I was called “Hon” by two separate strangers.

  Occasionally I would glimpse from the highway a gilded dome, of a church or a courthouse or a town hall, and think about how almost every place that had ever been built thought, at some point, that it was going to be spectacular. I thought about its inhabitants and investors, who must have dreamed of glorious futures, and bet on that one imposing structure, and eventually realized the whole thing would never pan out.

  Mostly what I saw from the highways, though, was fields—soybean fields and cornfields and fields of crops I couldn’t identify. In Illinois I was once stuck in traffic in a cornfield, a thing I hadn’t thought possible. Also in Illinois, but not while stuck in the cornfield, I looked up and saw streaks of pink and blue, like a daytime sunset, stamped with a herringbone pattern of clouds. In the distance they stretched as far as I could see, their interlocking V’s reminiscent of a pair of tweed pants. As I got closer, the pattern became larger, until, above me, there was nothing but a series of lines.

  I encountered a tornado only once, in Paducah, Kentucky. I hid in a highway rest stop which was like no highway rest stop I’d ever seen, a stately historic building that became, for a few hours, a shelter for travelers from all directions. In Paducah, for the first time, I met grown men who openly proclaimed their fear of weather. In Manhattan, weather had never seemed to stop anyone, and real New Englanders laughed at blizzards. It was like learning a new culture in a foreign land, one where weather was far deadlier, and people had less to prove, than anywhere I’d lived before.

  When I had time I left the highways and took the little two lane roads through towns that showed up on my map as the tiniest of black specks.

  Here the billboards were often homemade: “Life is fragile—Handle with prayer.” “Smile! Your Mom chose life!” That one was illustrated with a smiley face. “Got Faith?” That one had a picture of a faucet dripping wine.

  These towns usually fit in one of two categories: Perfect, with a strip of narrow buildings like an unfurled red and white ribbon, or Unfortunate, with many churches, many cars in various states of disrepair, and sometimes a lonely-looking dog roaming around, in search of a human. When I passed one of these I would ponder why towns with populations of less than two hundred always have a thrift store. Did the clothes simply rotate through all the inhabitants until they either fell apart or made it back to their original owners?

  On the little roads, life unfolded beside me in blurred snippets, and I wrote them down so I wouldn’t forget them. If writing made me drift towards the oncoming lane, it didn’t matter: there was nobody there. I’d take the notes later and type them up, a compendium of Midwestern Things:

  An old man in a plaid shirt and a straw hat drives an ancient tractor down the road. The cars behind him slow down, then carefully inch around.

  A tiny bird runs across the road as fast as its miniscule legs can carry it, so afraid of the oncoming traffic that it forgets it can fly.

  Abandoned railroad tracks parallel to the road. Disused railroad bridges, narrow and rusted and gracefully curved.

  A church in a field, just across the street from a store selling guns and ammo.

  A plump woman at a gas station strains to remove the large plastic numerals displaying the price of fuel. She hoists a pole to the top of the sign and detaches the numbers one by one, lowering them to the pavement. Then she reaches up again and sticks on the new numbers, and the cost of gas goes up.

  Little plumes of flame shoot up by nodding pump jacks.

  A girl on a the back of a motorcycle spreads her arms wide into the wind, holding on with just her legs, like she half wants to fall off, to see if she could fly.

  I saw other things and doubted that I’d seen them at all: was that
really a drive-thru convenience store?

  I saw Ohio’s smallest church, painted clean white, in which one or maybe two people could fit. It stood on a patch of grass near a rest stop in Coolville. In an empty parking lot under a bright blue sky I said incredulously into my cell phone, “I’m in Coolville.”

  Also in Ohio, I drove past the towns of Fly and Antiquity. In Indiana I stopped at an intersection which offered me a choice between towns named Pleasant and Patriot.

  I drove along and let impatient pickup trucks pass me. I listened to traffic reports that originated in cities whose geographic relation to me I could not fathom. With the greatest of urgency, they described road conditions in places I had never heard of. I watched the local news in hotels. The weathermen spoke of viewing areas whose borders I did not recognize and pointed at truncated maps I could not comprehend.

  For a long time it seemed like there was only one enormous state between New Jersey and Missouri. Rural Pennsylvania blended into rural Illinois, creating a region with a way of life all its own. Whole towns often appeared to be asleep, or hiding—on weekday mornings or afternoons, on weekends, it didn’t matter. Their houses and cars were there, but they themselves were invisible. I wondered why anyone lived here, or why they stayed. Then I wondered if they had in fact left long ago, but somehow arranged for their towns to be kept exactly the same, like Midwestern Pompeiis.

  Between the grass and fields and forests, these towns would pop up at intervals. There were never a lot of houses in one place, but there were so many small concentrations of houses so far apart, that I wondered how there could still be unemployment anywhere—surely everyone in the nation could be put to work as mail carriers or census takers in rural Ohio and Indiana.