The Best American Travel Writing 2013 Read Free Page A

an umbrella during a long and quiet vacation of my own, with stacks of magazine articles in a big brown shopping bag next to me. I pulled the stories out of the bag randomly, one after another, like an endless succession of salty or sweet snacks. I had a vague idea of what I was looking for (to be transported), but I had no way of anticipating what would transport me. I was pretty sure I didn’t want any service articles (“How to Do Barcelona in Three Days!”), nor was I looking for any ideas for my own future trips. I don’t read great travel writing to say, at the conclusion, “I want to go there!” I read great travel writing to feel, at the conclusion,
I have now been there
.
    I wanted, by the end of my reading, to know all these places deep in my own bones.
    Among the articles that I rejected were tales of extraordinary daring, gorgeous adventure, exotic locations, and impossible situations—but boring. Sometimes I was surprised by how boring the writing about such interesting places could be. I wondered, Do these people not have editors who make them write a dozen drafts so that they get it done properly?
    What surprised me more, though, was when I found fascination in subjects that I might otherwise have thought to be dull, or even spent. To my mind, one of the most remarkable pieces in here is Daniel Tyx’s story about
not
traveling—a faithful recounting of the year in which he
didn’t
walk the U.S.-Mexico border, as he had once quite seriously planned to do. (This was during a time in American literary history when, as Tyx says, “everyone seemed to be doing something with their year, then writing about it”—a tactic with which I am somewhat familiar.) Tyx writes about the epiphanies he
didn’t
have because of not taking that long trip (the loneliness he
didn’t
conquer; the landscapes he
didn’t
witness; the cultural exchanges he
didn’t
enjoy). He ponders with real feeling and seriousness the question of what we become when we let such a journey pass us by. What happens when we choose, instead, to live a quieter year, with more domestic revelations, full of “the satisfactions and preoccupations of daily life”? This psychologically honest account was somehow heaps more interesting and suspenseful to me than a macho article about the most dangerous ski trail in the world, or whatever. I would not have imagined that this could be true—that the act of
not
traveling could make for such a good travelogue—but Daniel Tyx did it.
    In fact, it was humbling for me to read many of these pieces, because they kept messing with my assumptions about what constitutes an interesting story and what does not. There are magnificent articles in this collection that I would never have assigned if I were a magazine editor. If, for instance, John Jeremiah Sullivan had come to me and said, “I want to write a long feature article about my trip to Cuba to visit my wife’s family,” I would have said, “Dude, nice try, but there’s no way I’m paying for your trip to Cuba to visit your wife’s family!” Because nobody needs to read another article about an American visiting Cuba! Seriously! I would probably have told Sullivan to go write about the most dangerous ski trail in the world instead. And I would have been dead wrong, because
everyone
needs to read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s story about his trip to Cuba to visit his wife’s family. It is so good, so trenchant, so quivering with human life and love and the real familial consequences of insane political theatrics that I placed it very first in this collection—right at the front of the book—just to make sure nobody skips it.
    Here’s another story that would never have existed if I were a magazine editor: Kevin Chroust’s recounting of the time he ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Here’s what I would have said if I were his writing boss: “Kevin, does the world really need to be subjected to another story about reckless young men running with