The Best Travel Writing 2011 Page 17

  When I took the smaller roads I stayed in places that felt as if history had stopped just before the steamboat was abandoned in favor of the train. They felt not merely preserved but suspended, as if in amber. In Madison, Indiana, everything was pastel-colored. It seemed every business was an ice cream parlor, or a soda fountain, or a candy store. At a bright little coffee shop, you could have your coffee black, or you could add cream, as if the modern notion of milk in coffee had not yet arrived. From Main Street the side streets led down to the river or up to the highway. The town faded at its outskirts, its pastels turned to sepia, and then it simply stopped.

  The Ohio River spawned other places like this, quiet and as sweet as if they were dusted with confectioner’s sugar. The river was quiet too. It had none of the mythology, the romance and tragedy, of the Mississippi and the Missouri. But it had a sort of confidence, being the pathway to those other rivers, the first leg for every East Coast dreamer’s journey. It flowed lazily; in places it hardly moved at all. It tolerated the pale blue bridges built across its width and the little boats, American flags flying, tied up along its docks.

  From these fragments I created lasting associations, mostly to do with time. In my mind, it was always just before dawn in Ohio: either dark and cold and scraping snow from the windshield in motel parking lots, or waiting for the summer heat to come and burn away the fog. Ohio was sleeping trucks humming at rest stops, and sleeping towns.

  Indiana was mist rising from fields and flocks of black birds taking off in formation and streaking across the newly sunny sky. It was a single pick-up truck racing along an access road, for the fun of it, not because there was anywhere to go. Indiana seemed to exist perpetually in intense daybreak; how could it ever be night or noon in towns named Aurora and Rising Sun?

  Illinois was afternoon, bright and encouraging, because if I was in Illinois that meant I had just set out or was about to arrive. Since I was never tired in Illinois, I was always seeing things I might have overlooked when less alert, like vintage Americana arranged in the windows of antique stores, and post offices so tiny and bright white that they seemed capable of delivering only letters handwritten with a quill pen.

  West Virginia was night coming on, which made the Alleghenies mysterious. I could never orient myself properly in West Virginia, because it had extra dimensions, not just forward and back but up and down. I admired the buildings planted tenaciously on the sides of mountains, the drivers who fearlessly navigated the roller-coaster roads, the hidden rivers with names I always forgot but which converged and flowed as proudly as if they were major thoroughfares. There was something a little dangerous, too, in the inscrutable mountains and the unexpected rivers. And then there were the back roads, roads that curved and dipped and sloped and bent, that kept your hands clasped on your steering wheel and your arm muscles tightened for hours at a time.

  Pennsylvania was all about the weather. The skies there were like a time-lapse film of seasons changing. For years I never washed my car, I only drove every few months across Pennsylvania, and it was washed for me. In an instant the clouds would darken and the rain would pour down until the only sound I could hear was water splashing on the roof of the car and windshield wipers vainly fighting the deluge. Then the sun would come out and the landscape would feel altered, purified, blasted clean. In the fall the leaves changed in sections. On my left out the window, spectacular reds, yellows, and greens. On my right, soft russet and butter and pale pumpkin and sea foam, shimmering in the wind. It was in Pennsylvania that I rounded a corner and saw, for the first time, purple mountains. I thought, Now I understand.

  Over time the patchwork quilt I had once seen only from airplane windows unfolded itself for me. I came to know this flyover country, not in the intimate way of locals, but in the fond, incomplete way that only outsiders can know places.

  When I look back at the photographs I took along these drives, I see that they are all of the same things: rivers, boats on rivers, little multi-colored buildings in a row. I did not need to travel to take those pictures. I could have found those scenes in Missouri or New York. I realize now that they were not pictures of any specific place, really, but of a time. What drew me was that brief interlude of history when the roads were rivers, and rivers led to frontiers unknown and unimagined. And yet there is something settled about my pictures, too, something solid and domestic about those little buildings in a row. A stranger looking through my photos might conclude that I was looking for a home. I wasn’t. But I found one, in a way, in the comfort of the road, the motion of leaving and arriving, the freedom of spending all day nowhere, everywhere, in between.

  Johnna Kaplan is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, and various online travel magazines. She travels as much as she can, motivated mostly by a love of history and a congenital inability to stay in one place for more than about a month. She blogs about her conflicted relationship with Connecticut at www.thesizeofconnecticut.blogspot.com.

  KATHERINE JAMIESON

  Educating the Body

  Lessons learned from the tropics.

  MY SKIN FAILED ME THAT FIRST SUMMER IN GUYANA. I tried pasty lotions and wide-brimmed hats, long sleeves in the midday heat. Still, I turned bright red: I shone like a cherry. Miss, like ya get burn up? my students said, pressing a finger onto the red glow of my shoulder. Ya must careful! Sun hot! But there was nothing I could do. Skin peeled from the part in my hair. Light streamed through my gauzy curtains, and when I left the house it burned through my clothes. It colored my days and savaged my pores until I was red and raw, until I could no longer remember what it was to be touched without wincing.

  There are no vestigial British aristocrats in Guyana, none of the prim, post-colonial garden parties you might imagine in Barbados or Jamaica. The English lost sanity in the heat, counting mosquitoes by the thousands. Eventually they gave up and sent Scottish farmers, leaving behind generations of McCurdy’s and Douglases. I was one of only a few hundred white faces in the country, and the others were ravaged like mine. Guyanese call albinos “devil-whip.” Blue-eyed and freckled, their skin is tawny and thick like a scar. The Guyanese with Portuguese ancestors have wrinkles that crumple their skin, starburst lines radiating out to their bleached hair. Every evening in my mirror I saw the day’s burnings. In their faces, I saw a lifetime’s.

  Coastal life in Guyana is a temporary concession between two powerful neighbors: to the North, the Atlantic which mingles its muddy brown into the clear Caribbean Sea miles off the coast; to the South, the “Interior”—vast jungles, savannahs, riverways, and mountains, inhabited by some of the rarest flora and fauna in the world. The land is massive, thousands of tracts of virgin rainforest stretching across to Venezuela and Suriname, down to the Brazilian border. I lived, as the majority of the population does, in a narrow band of cultivation along a one-road highway, just miles from blackwater creeks that wind down to Kaieteur, one of the most powerful single-drop waterfalls in the world. Humans have created a viable habitat here, growing rice and sugar, irrigating fields, and building roads. These tasks are backbreaking and the results require constant diligence to maintain. When abandoned, the land quickly reverts to overgrowth. Life here is a constant campaign against an encroaching jungle.

  There is lore that North Americans adjust over time, that their blood thins (or is it thickens?) in the constant heat. This did not happen for me. From the night of my arrival at Timehri airport, I sported small beads of moisture across my forehead and nose. My Guyanese friends laughed at my inability to “acclimatize,” and took to pointing out how often I was sweating when they were not even hot. My constitutional deficit plagued me, and I wondered how others managed to rise to the demands of tropical living. Sun and insects were the grounding factors of my life, the burns and bites a constant reminder of where I was, and the physical battle I was always losing.

  The sun was at the heart of it, impassive, granting its twelve hours of sunlight to all eq
ually. Yet its constancy made it seem a foreign sun, very different from the one that had once merely tanned my skin and warmed my face. Because Guyana is just north of the Equator, daily, throughout every month of every year, the sun is at its strongest, rising at 6:00, setting at 6:00. It often seemed to pulse with white light, and it is this sensation that I remember most, a constant rippling that emanated from this blinding yellow ball in the sky.

  From the sun came the heat, which bore down separately, an unwelcome layer resting on me, as willful as another being. It felt like many small children clinging to my body: one at my hip, two on my legs, another splayed across my chest and head. At first they are manageable, benign, but they soon begin to get heavy. You can’t put them down, they are clutching at you. Other times it seemed a parasite. My body was inhabited. I became a complex system for the simple act of diffusing heat.

  My burns always surprised me. They seemed to appear from the inside out, a new layer of skin forcing its way to the top, then peeling off in delicate ribbons. My fingertips, as they had applied the lotion, were often visible in the outline of crimson. In a vain attempt to stem the pattern, I once sat under an awning for hours at a school event. My colleagues laughed at me at the end of the day: Miss Katrin, like ya still get red! Every part that wasn’t covered—my face, arms, and neck—was singed. I learned later that I had been burned from the reflection of the sun off the grass.

  While the sun was of constant concern, it was flying insects that taught me the most about the life and death of the body. Sunlight and heat are general conditions, but the attentions of a fly or mosquito are a personal torment. They act as one unit, one encompassing blight: one fly is all flies, one mosquito all mosquitoes. It is rare to spend a moment in Guyana when something is not flying or landing near or on you. The air I breathed was often a swarm; I swallowed more than I care to remember.

  Every time a fly walks on you it is a foreshadowing of your death. Tropical flies are persistent and, after awhile, there is no energy left to brush them off. They are satisfied to just watch and circle, like buzzards, exploring every crevice of your body to determine how useful you will be to them if you die. At first it is a ticklish feeling not entirely unpleasant, but each time you have to accommodate its legs, its disregarding death-filled eyes, you lose a little bit of your body. Flies leave you with no dignity. Their work is to scavenge you, even as you live.

  Mosquitoes are a constant reminder that to live is to suffer. Malaria, passed by mosquitoes and endemic in Guyana, does not usually kill you. One type of the disease, falciparum, will make you very sick, with skyrocketing fever and jaundice. The other, vivax, quietly enters your liver, forever. Mosquitoes are a kind of religion in Guyana, demanding rituals for prevention and destruction. Weeks are spent clearing standing water, where they breed, patching holes in nets, burning toxic green coils inside and enormous pyres out. Regardless, the air is thick with them for months on end.

  Regions of Guyana close their schools during mosquito season. A friend recounted being chased by swarms, carrying repellent with her as an urban woman carries mace. On a boat trip across the Berbice River, I once watched as the back of my companion’s white shirt was spotted with twenty, then thirty, black dots. I brushed them off; twenty more appeared. They are most active after dusk, but at times I imagined that at every moment, a mosquito was on me, near me, or—paranoid from the incessant whining high in my ear—inside me. Exiting the mosquito net in the morning, the first bite is an outrage, the second an insult, the third an annoyance, the fourth, or millionth, a bitter defeat. Eventually, my skin stopped reacting to the mosquito saliva, did not swell, hardly itched. But the humiliation of the initial prick is eternal, the insertion of the microscopic proboscis a violation, a theft of blood to perpetuate a species that is a bane. Mosquitoes steal their lives from us.

  The Guyanese word for the cumulative effect of tropical indignities is “stink.” Stink is curdled sweat, sweat that has turned rancid. It is every drop of a day’s working, sitting, breathing sweat, from the first beads as you walk out in the morning, to the most recent emission from your exhausted pores. Stink is about exposure: the battles with light and heat that demand carrying a handkerchief to mop your face and covering babies’ heads with knit caps. It is the lost tranquility from tangles with flies, the lost sanity from encounters with mosquitoes. Stink is a wringing out of your body until the worst smells emerge, and, if not purged, the worst disease.

  There is but one redemption. To reclaim the unscathed body that emerged into the world that morning, you must bathe. Bathing happens in small concrete rooms under an open pipe gushing only cold water. During blackouts, when water does not come to the pump, it is done from a bucket. It is a singular pleasure.

  This is how the Guyanese taught me to do it: First, let the cold water run over you. Wash off the top layer of powder and perfume, blood, cow dung, mucus, tears, mango juice, and minibus exhaust. Heat draws down; blood recedes from the surface. Turn off the water and soap your skin to a thick lather. Do not overlook an inch or a crack because here is where the rash will begin. Scrub the dust from your hair. After you are thick with foam, munificent suds cresting, let the icy water run its numbing deluge. A simple alchemy—skin, water, soap—but it never fails to restore the memory of that first skin, before the burns and scars, before the day.

  This cycle of daily physical corruption and ablution became a marker of my two years in Guyana, proof of the regularity of miracles. My mind was educated before I came to this country, but my body was not. I had never experienced such relentless exposure to the extremes of the natural world. Surviving the physical environment was not just a personal quest, it was part of my work. In the end, the lessons were simple: rest, bathe, heal. Take the world into your body, and then, as gently as you can, let it go.

  Katherine Jamieson is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Programs, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Writer’s Chronicle, Meridian, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011. “Educating the Body,” is part of a longer manuscript about her experiences living in Guyana. Read more of her essays, articles, and stories at katherinejamieson.com.

  COLETTE O’CONNOR

  Sun Valley with Dad

  She gets another lesson in how to be.

  “IT’S LIKE I’M THE DOG,” SAYS DAD IN THE BACK SEAT. “I never know what we’re going to do until we do it.” My sister is at the wheel and I’m riding shotgun as we pull off I-80 east outside Elko so the Flying J truck stop can refuel us with gas and also salty cashews. At age eighty-three Dad has lost his hearing to the extent, say the doctors, a 747 can rev for take-off next to him and one ear would not even know; the other might have a hint. So it’s a surprise, our stop, since Dad missed the discussion leading up to it. But he is game for whatever adventure the Flying J flings at us.

  “You girls get whatever you like,” he says and rolls down the window to test the temperature of the Elko air. I flash on our childhood fox terrier, Molly, who on the road loved to sniff strange climes from the car. “This is your trip.”

  Our trip is a ski weekend in Sun Valley. It’s a weekend worth the thirteen-hour drive to Reno and across the vast, flat stretch of Nevada north to Twin Falls and north some more into that part of Idaho where the Sawtooth Mountains promise snow. Worth it for the ski fever burning me up with yearning and the gotta-get-out-of-Dodge feeling seizing Camille. Dad is along, for there is no way in hell a car is headed to Sun Valley without him in it, as the dog or not. A lifelong skier, he has been making the trip at least once a year since high school in ’41, and the resort dubbed “an American Shangri-La” after its discover by an Austrian count in 1935, thrills him each and every time.

  And, really, how could it not? With 2,054 skiable acres offering a descent of 3,400 vertical feet of fun, Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain—beloved as “Baldy”—has thirteen high-speed lifts, sixty-five varied runs and a handful of on-mountain ski lodges made warm and sumptuo
us by oriental carpets on the floors, snazzy granite in the bathrooms and massive rock hearths kept blazing all day. In a sport known for its cold and discomfort and crowds and, yes, expense, Sun Valley’s efforts to eliminate all trace of…well, suffering, result in a rare ski experience of remarkable beauty and comfort.

  We feel completely Thelma and Louise, my sister and I. The freedom of the road and the whizzing-by vistas empty of all but the occasional grazing cows, wind-whipped tumbleweeds and lonely-looking homesteads with names like Rancho Costa Plenty soothe our city-singed nerves. We talk nonstop and laugh, and Dad in the back nods off often. On the outskirts of Jackpot, Nevada’s last stop for gamblers enamored of burgs built exclusively of neon, I twist in my seat to see if he’s breathing and regard the deep-blue shiner under his left eye, the small scabby gash on his nose. Last month’s ski accident.

  “Now, I don’t want you girls to push me,” he had said at lunch hours earlier when we stopped at a casino café in Winnemucca. Our perky server Angie, who was, she claimed, age ninety-one and bent nearly double from osteoporosis, scribbled his BLT order onto her pad with a gnarled-knuckled hand and zinged me a wicked wink. I swear that wink said, Go ahead. Push old Pops all you want—he can take it. We’re tougher than you think.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” said Camille as slot machines pinged and dinged in the background. “Everyone at their own speed.”

  “I’m afraid I could be finished,” he said, suddenly glum. “My balance is shot and when the light gets flat I can’t see a goddamn thing. If I let myself get tired….” Well, it will be a Dad on the ski slope crashed, we knew. Not once in at least seventy years has the Ski Patrol had to haul Dad off the mountain in an emergency sled, and to have that humiliation visit him now, with us, simply was not the hope Camille and I had for the weekend. We would not insist he ski with us. As always.