The Best Travel Writing 2011 Page 9

“Memory,” he muttered. Then, shaking his head, he added bitterly, “Our national bird.”

  I considered Lev’s comment as I watched the stork settling onto its enormous nest. I’d come in search of my own history to a place where there were no historical records. I’d sought a memory in a land where the campaign to vanquish memory had been waged for over six decades. Before retreating from Russia in 1943, the Nazis had torched all their records, then dug up their victims’ bodies and burned them as well to destroy the evidence. For the next half-century, the Soviets had carried on that campaign, blotting out even the memory of those erasures. When the Soviet empire disintegrated, Belarus had been cast adrift, like that piece of colored cardboard missing from Marina’s globe where her country should be. Now its leader clutched the helm of state with a rusty iron fist and protected the secrets of two dead empires. My journey to wrest a memory from the shadows had led me to this land where nobody remembered.

  To conjure my grandmother into memory required something unshifting—a place, an image, a solid fact, yet the site of her murder had also been banished, buried beneath mountains of trash, then further obscured by the official blue stamp on the city map. My father, too, had rejected the past, even cast off his name, renaming himself after the shape-shifter of Greek mythology. To Proteus, memory had also become the enemy.

  As we returned to the road and headed back toward Minsk, I watched the stork though the car’s rear window until it was out of sight. I pictured my grandmother, Berta, as she may have looked as a young woman—her eyes maybe green, like mine. Maybe full of hope. But all I know of her story is that it concluded somewhere beneath those mountains of relics, layer upon layer of relics, flung away to rot or to burn or to blow, feather-light, in the wind.

  Carolyn Kraus is a professor of Journalism and Screen Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her essays have appeared in Partisan Review, The Antioch Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She has written as “Our Far-Flung Correspondent” for The New Yorker, and as an op-ed contributor to The New York Times. This story won the Grand Prize Gold Award in the Fifth Annual Solas Awards (www.BestTravelWriting.com).

  MATTHEW CROMPTON

  Camel College

  The school of life is open to all.

  BY THE TIME I MET AJIT, THE CAMEL DRIVER, I’D ALREADY written India off.

  I’d tried meditation and yoga, then yoga and hashish. I’d read voraciously—Aurobindo and the Bhagavad Gita, Salman Rushdie and Shantaram. I’d stayed in ashrams and hiked through ruins, haggled in markets and took freezing dips in the Ganges, seeking an experience of this country that everyone assured me was one of the most beautiful and amazing places on earth. But in early 2008, after months of traveling the subcontinent, the truth was that I hated India.

  This should hardly be surprising. India was sickness, noise, pollution, and death. It was barbarism, poverty, and touts, cow shit and garbage, people pissing in the streets. Others were always quick with advice, but the more of it I got, the more it seemed like fortune cookie wisdom, false bits of other people’s knowledge, that I could no more use than I could wear their shoes or eyeglasses. So it is ironic that when I finally came to make peace with India—to understand it—I owed it all to an unassuming man in pink plastic shower slippers.

  That was Ajit. Stick thin, in his mid-thirties, he had the slight frame of a man who grows up poor in a poor country. A black dhoti wrapped around his legs in the cold clear desert morning, and bare feet sheathed in those pink plastic slippers like a little girl would wear to the beach, the teeth in his dark, sun-baked face were stained yellow-brown with the tar of beedis, which he chainsmoked continuously.

  “Anyeong haseo!” he called out to the Koreans as they arrived by jeep from the desert outpost of Jaisalmer; “Shalom!” he said to the Israelis, gritty and ashen-faced in the early morning sun after a late night of partying; “Welcome, welcome!” It was mid-January in the Great Thar Desert, out in the far western margins of Rajasthan, the very edge of India, the rope of one stubborn animal in Ajit’s nonsmoking hand as we padded through the landscape of scrub trees and dunes, blowing sand.

  “I’m a camel man, in the bloody sa-a-and!!! Life in desert, it’s fan-tastic!” he sang out to the tune of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” as we rode, spinning line after line of a hilarious desert-themed spoof. It was his wit I noticed first, the way he surprised us with his song, or the sharp turn at the end of a cuckold joke that left us laughing. It dawned on me as we rode that not only was he speaking good English to us, he was also making small jokes to the Koreans in their language, and directing the other camel drivers in rough Rajasthani Hindi. As the cold morning warmed into afternoon, Ajit began to seem decidedly wiser than just a low-caste man making a hard living humping tourists through the desert, and that night around our campfire in the undulating waves of a dune sea, I asked him about it.

  “Did you study somewhere?” I asked.

  “Only Camel College,” he said, smiling.

  “What is Camel College?”

  “I am illiterate,” he said to me, looking straight into my face. “I cannot even write my own name. Everything I know, everything, I know from Camel College.”

  “You mean, just doing this?”

  He poked at the fire with a stick. “The desert, my life,” he said, “is how I learn.”

  His sly smile told me that he’d said these things before, to countless tourists before me. But though I felt pity for him then, a superior pity for the poverty of his education, there remained something about the way he said those words that struck me, something that I couldn’t place. The night wore on and the fire died, but the words kept floating through my head.

  “Camel College… The desert…is how I learn.”

  I left that desert a day later, but the words stayed with me. They became a Zen koan to be unraveled, a rash that I just had to scratch. Traveling another month across northern India in my accustomed state of fear and loathing, they sat like a bolus undigested in my gut, to be chewed up and swallowed down and then chewed back up again. And it wore on like this, my mind ruminating day after day, week after week, until one random evening in New Delhi.

  On that day, I had journeyed south eight hours by train from the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, and exited the train at New Delhi station, directly across from the mouth of Paharganj, the Delhi tourist ghetto.

  As I walked out in the burnt-orange light of dusk, the traffic swirled around the station junction like a maelstrom, autorickshaws with horns screaming, buses groaning beneath a weight of passengers so great that they hung from the doors and windows. The fruit-sellers’ tables across the street buzzed with fat black flies, skinny, sickly pariah dogs moving beneath them, searching for scraps. Cycle-rickshaws on the margins of the street detoured around cows, who stood placidly on their shit-smeared legs, munching garbage. The perfume of India hung in the air, smoke from burning garbage and exhaust, curry, incense, sewage, sweat, decay. “Cheeepest and best! Cheeepest and best!” screamed the touts in the Paharganj thoroughfare, as a legless man with filthy clothes and filthy hands, a filthy face, wheeled by on his stomach on a little ball-bearing cart.

  Oh God. This scene, this exact moment, was everything about India that I hated and feared. It was the India I faced like an abattoir each morning as I went out for coffee, a reality in purest defiance of the sanitized brochures and postcards of the Taj. But in that moment, for the first time, faced with the things I hated, I did not turn away. I looked and, looking, saw with new eyes something exquisite in the chaos, the thousand players and dramas of the Delhi street all seamlessly meshing and mixing, animals and humans and traffic swirling balletically together.

  God help me, I realized, this was actually beautiful. Why had I resisted this, I wondered? This mad borderless beauty, why had I hated it? I understood then how habitual my fear had become, a reaction so deeply internalized that I now hid automatically from what I had first found ugly, without ever really looking at it.

  St
anding and looking, the sense of peace spreading over me was immense. Bodies washed around my own, stationary like a stone in a tide. And I realized, standing there, that the resistance had completely gone out of me. This openness was the key to India, its very heart; and yet there was no class or book in the world that could have taught me this. It could only be learned through Camel College.

  Oh Ajit. How misplaced my pity had been for him that night, thinking that because he could not read, his education had been lesser than my own. That was his Camel College, the lesson of the desert that he had smiled about so enigmatically that night: that the desert brings to you exactly what you need to learn.

  Seeing his face grinning at me in my memory, a little smile passed my lips. He had been the perfect tutor, instructing without effort, the embodiment of his life’s lesson. Smiling, I walked on through the street in the twilight, feeling in my heart like a man long gone from a place, being finally welcomed home.

  Writer, photographer, and part-time metaphysician, Matthew Crompton has at various times called Cleveland, San Francisco, and Seoul home, though he’s most comfortable in a perpetually itinerant state. His travels have taken him through all the worst hotels on three continents, though he counts himself lucky to have caught giardia only once. His writings and photographs have been published in Asia, Australia, and the UK; it’s agreed that women, zoo animals, and most Marxists find him irresistible. Follow him at goingaroundplaces.wordpress.com.

  GARY BUSLIK

  Lanterns of Fear

  It was a trip down memory lane—a dark path indeed.

  FOR OUR HONEYMOON, MY WIFE AND I TOOK A CARIBBEAN cruise. I don’t remember much about it. It was a long time ago. I thought if the day ever came when I’d need to remember, all I’d have to do is pad over to our media room cabinet, pluck out a few slide trays, set up the old projector, and have a look-see. I thought my wife would want to put down her book, pop us some Orville Red., and join me down memory lane. I thought when the projector click-clacked and such-and-such picture dropped into place and blazed in Technicolor onto the dining room wall, she would reach over, clasp my hand, and coo, “Oh, I forgot about that! That was the day you bought me that ruby heart pendant. I forgot all about that!” And she would lean over and kiss me, just as she did that day in the St. Thomas jewelry store. That’s what I thought.

  Undoubtedly, prehistoric showmen cast fire-shadow images on cave walls. But the known history of projectors began with sixteenth-century experiments in optics and lighting, at a time when the mystical and magical power of projected images—the Inquisition had burned Bruno at the stake for his devotion to imagistic magic—was giving way to scientific enlightenment.

  The camera obscura, a device that with mirrors and lenses captured the images of external objects on a surface inside a dark box, so fascinated Renaissance Europeans that artists like Vermeer and Rembrandt included the wondrous invention in their paintings. From this obsession with capturing and casting reality came, in 1659, the “magic lantern,” the first projection device using both an artificial light source and a lens—and therefore the modern slide projector’s first direct ancestor.

  The popularity of this invention spread around the world, resulting in its becoming, by the nineteenth century, a commercialized source of public and home entertainment—in the case of children, not always pleasant. The writer Marcel Proust, for example, recalled his childhood fear of the magic lantern slide shows his great-aunt projected on his bedroom wall: “It substituted for the opaqueness of my walls, an iridescence of many colors. But my sorrows only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room. Now I no longer recognized it and felt uneasy in it.”

  In her autobiography, sociologist Harriet Martineau records a similar childhood reaction: “Such was the terror of the white circle on the linen sheet of the dark drawing room, and of the moving slides, that, to speak the plain truth, they sat on my heart and soul the black night through. And sometimes even morning light could not drive them away.”

  Thus the first slide projectors came to be known as lanternes de peur—“lanterns of fear.”

  I don’t look at our honeymoon slides anymore, but I’m pretty sure we took shots of the usual tourist scenes: my wife waving in front of pastel, gingerbread Curaçao harbor facades; my wife navigating a bamboo raft down the Martha Brae River; my wife at a St. Maarten beach bar, mugging with her new ruby necklace; my wife aboard ship, leaning on the railing, back-dropped by sea and sky, her eyes wide and young and happy—the loveliest blues I had ever seen. I took a lot of pictures of my new wife—I don’t recall having taken any without her in them. But I don’t much remember specific shots—except the one with her at the ship’s railing. She’s standing there in her shorts and halter top, the most beautiful woman I ever knew, affecting a saucy smile, pointing with her seashell-braceleted wrist to a sign stenciled on the gunwale: DANGER.

  That’s the only one I’m really sure about. It was a long time ago.

  The history of slides is, essentially, the attempt to make illusion seem more real than reality. In 1833 David Brewster invented the stereoscope, an optical device that, when viewed through lenses, made special photographs seem three-dimensional. By “projecting” an image onto the retina with the appearance of depth and texture, the device caused not only its makers but its enthusiasts to claim it provided the “perfect image of reality.” Later, Daguerre’s huge paintings, his dioramas, cast on transparent materials and presented in darkened theaters and illuminated from behind, imbued his landscapes with breathtaking realism. Manipulation of the light behind the pictures gave the effect of actual changing light and shade or even of complete transformation from daylight to night, and thus an intense illusion of reality. There is a famous story of a spellbound child observing one of Daguerre’s dioramas and declaring it “more beautiful than nature itself.”

  At the time of our honeymoon, cruises were different than they are today. To eat a meal on board that did not involve foraging for peanuts between your mattress and headboard, you had to don a tie and jacket and enter the ship’s dining room at a specific time and sit with people you did not know. They herded you into this immense, frenetic hall that had all the characteristics of the Chicago slaughterhouse in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, in which upside-down hogs are conveyed squealing with terror to an aproned guy who slices their throats with a rusty knife. I don’t know what women had to wear because, to be honest, I never looked at them. I had eyes only for my new wife.

  We sat with a group of six other couples, middle-aged folks from Nebraska who had never seen a body of water in their lives, let alone an actual ocean, and who seemed pretty baffled by the concept. So there my wife and I were, shouting across the table at a bunch of devil-may-cares from the Heartland, trying to figure out how to get our food down without chewing and get back to our room to screw. Apparently our table mates were part of a group of TV-set salesmen (and their wives) who had won a sales contest that included all the free liquor they could spill on themselves in a week. They talked with their cheeks as florid and bulbous as Bavarian oompah-ers, and, while spitting veal cutlet and routinely knocking over highball glasses with the maniacal gusto of a Spike Jones routine, they barked sage marital advice to me and my new bride that included the phrase, “Never admit anything.” They were jolly and pickled, they ate off each other’s plates, and their wives showed us pictures of their kids and snorted, “Here’s our little shits.”

  In 1870 a Venetian, Carlo Ponti, designed the megalethoscope, a beautifully milled tabletop cabinet—itself a work of art—in which photographs were viewed through a large lens, creating an optical illusion of depth and perspective. Backlit by an internal kerosene lantern, translucent albumen pictures were colored and pierced to create dramatic visual effects, such as stars and streetlamps. Unfortunately, the source of the megalethoscope’s power was also its downfall: its oil lantern heart would occasionally burst into flam
e and destroy the device and, sometimes, its owner’s house.

  The first patent for a 35mm still camera was issued in England in 1908. The first full-scale production camera was the Homeos, a stereo camera, produced between 1913 and 1920. Then came the big-selling Tourist Multiple, which appeared in 1913 for $175 (at today’s prices, the cost of a $3000 Leica) and the Simplex, introduced in the U.S. in 1914. The Minigraph, by Levy-Roth of Berlin, another small camera, sold in Germany in 1915. The patent for the Debrie Sept, a combination 35mm still and movie camera, was issued in 1918, but it was not marketed until 1922. The Furet, made and sold in France in 1923, was the first cheap, small 35mm camera, and looked vaguely like today’s models. But it wasn’t until the great industrialist George Eastman came onto the scene that America became, as with so many products, the world’s leader.

  The moment we finished our entrees, my wife started playfully pinching my thigh to get the hell out of the dining room. She was in a hurry to get away from those Nebraskans and back to our room. She would take her after-dinner drink with her. No argument from me. No need to wait for dessert. We’d make our own.

  George Eastman was born in Waterville, New York, in July 1854. His father died when George was twelve, the elder Eastman leaving his family destitute. At fourteen, George dropped out of high school to find a job. As the history of the Eastman Kodak Company attests, he managed to overcome his economic adversity. In 1884 he patented the first roll film; in 1888 he perfected the Kodak camera, the first designed specifically for roll film. In 1892 he established his famous company in Rochester, New York—the first firm to mass-produce standardized photography equipment. His gift for organization and management, his tireless work ethic, and his lively and inventive mind made him a successful entrepreneur by his mid-twenties, enabling him to lead his company to the forefront of American industry.