The Turk Who Loved Apples Read Free Page A

where you started.
    Now that I recognize my own independent streak, I can see, too, how it’s aided me as a traveler. Because when you travel, things will go wrong: baggage will disappear, your guts will betray you, and you will find yourself alone in a poor, strange land where you don’t speak the language. The illusion of control that you set out with, fueled by a fevered studying of guidebooks, planning of itineraries, and e-mailing of friends of friends (of friends), will evaporate, leaving you with no one to rely on but you. Money and experience can insulate you from calamity, but never perfectly; when it comes down to it, you are responsible for your own happiness. Are you ready for that kind of responsibility? I wasn’t always—but I am now, I think.
    Which is why I cannot present this book as some kind of elaborate instruction manual for becoming a good traveler yourself. No,this is simply how and why I did what I did, related in what I hope is an entertaining and dramatic format. For me to claim you should make similar choices would be worse than presumptuous—after all, you are not me—it would be dangerous. If anything, I want you, too, to become an independent traveler, to think and act for yourself wherever you might be, without the aid of guidebooks and the kinds of newspaper and magazine articles I write for a living. I want you to experience and understand the miserable things that can happen when you travel, to learn how to deal with them, and, like Sisyphus, to transcend them, to find joy in the crushing inevitability not so much of failure but of near-failure. I want you to leave home and return with stories to tell, not of disasters dealt with the way Matt Gross would have but of how you improvised your own solutions. The Turk Who Loved Apples should be the last guidebook you’ll ever need. And if things actually work out that way, then, well, as Kemal Görgün, our eponymous apple farmer, would say: WOW.

Chapter 1
Schrödinger’s Boarding Pass
       Perpetually Unprepared—and Totally Comfortable with That—I Set Off for Vietnam, Tunisia, and Beyond       
    O ne night in early August, about a week after my twenty-second birthday, I drove head-on into a pickup truck on Maryland’s eastern shore. I’d been coming down from Washington, D.C., to Chincoteague, Virginia, to meet my parents for a brief beach vacation; my girlfriend, Tammy, was in the passenger seat. It had been raining hard, with heavy traffic, but then, near the town of Salisbury, the showers stopped and the road cleared. I relaxed—too soon. The unfamiliar highway curved, I hit the brakes, and my lilac Plymouth Acclaim skidded across the lane and directly into the oncoming pickup. Bang.
    An instant later the street was silent. Tammy and I looked at each other; neither of us was hurt. Nor was the driver of the pickup, just then clambering out of his vehicle. Soon, a police car arrived on the scene. The officer told us we were the third accident at that spot that night. Then he brought us to the station, where I called my mother at the bed-and-breakfast in Chincoteague to come get us.
    While we waited, I took a photo of Tammy, looking miserable and exhausted in the yellow lamplight. And then a serene calm settled over me. Understandable, I think, for someone who’d just survived a potentially disastrous wreck, but my happiness was more a sense of relief—relief that the car was totaled.
    Because from the moment I’d acquired the vehicle, it had been the source of constant troubles. The Acclaim had come into my possession only because my maternal grandmother, who’d owned it previously, had died three months earlier. She’d lived in Wilmington, Delaware, and I, finishing up college in nearby Baltimore, was carless, so without much ado, the Plymouth became mine.
    But not for long. Less than a week after I’d driven it back to