The Best American Travel Writing 2005
by Jeffrey M. Freedman
Travel writing serves the indispensable need to transport readers, through vivid description and narratives, to foreign locales that they have either not been able to visit, or are preparing to visit and want to know more about. Generic travel books appeal to the traveling herd, the voyagers who just want to know how to find the Eiffel Tower and a motel with air conditioning. Truly effective travel essays, on the other hand, offer us the opportunity to see unfamiliar territory (whether ordinary or exotic) through the eyes of those who are more observant, more thoughtful, and, hopefully, smarter than we. Skilled travel writers write for themselves. In the process, however, they also write for us in a way which allows a voyeuristic glimpse of country, town and city, through the senses of someone who might or might not share our world view and travel objectives. What matters is that we are getting an honest, unique sense of the immediacy of place.
All of the essays in this collection provide this. Series editor Jason Wilson searched for the rare pieces that weren’t “aggressively positive”; Jamaica Kincaid chose finalists who succeeded in “underlining my sense of displacement.” Both succeeded.
The essays in this collection are not ordered by geography or subject matter. If there is a consistent thread throughout the volume, it is an emphasis on the writers’ visceral reactions to places and people. In “Trying Really Hard To Like India,” for example, Seth Stevenson gives us his gut reactions to being treated to the almost insufferable urban conditions of India. Jim Harrison’s “A Really Big Lunch,” in which the author relates his gustatory indulgence in France, achieves the same sense of raw and purely felt experience.
Both Jamaica Kincaid’s and Jason Wilson’s introductions emphasize the extraordinary difficulty of trying to choose the best narratives from an entire year’s worth of travel writing. The prevailing sentiments throughout the collection are, as Kincaid points out, curiosity and displacement. None of the essays is safe, comfortable or predictable. All are informed by emotional or intellectual discovery and often unnerving revelations about the traveler and the place traveled.
Best American Travel Writing 2005 doesn’t purport to be an incisive compendium of travel to destinations of the kind frequently covered in National Geographic or Harper’s. Although the book includes several “highbrow” essays, most are more like Jim Harrison’s “A Really Big Lunch”—a rowdy, unexpurgated account of gustatory overload in France. In the essay, Harrison describes his experience as a guest at a 37-course lunch in Burgundy and, in the process, provides readers with a comprehensive overview of French table manners, the French obsession with wine and food, and the way in which road travel turns his belly into the master of his mind. What distinguishes this essay is Harrison’s keen eye and stomach for foreign cooking. He makes it obvious this experience is something he could never have had in North America or any other part of the world. His observations of the habits, rituals and distinct culinary skills imparts a feeling of place that is one of his great skills as an epicurean vagabond.
In contrast to the down-to-earth hilarity of “A Really Big Lunch,” Tom Bissell’s “War Wounds” strikes a somber note. With the immediacy that is the hallmark of all great travel writing, Bissell tells of his boyhood trip to Vietnam with his veteran father, who attempts to face squarely the emotional scars he suffered while a soldier. Bissel’s prose style is lean, but big on visceral memories of being in the haunted landscape in which his father once fought. No flowery, verbose style, here. The essay is all about revisiting a place that is both familiar and horrifying. What makes this such a cogent travel narrative is its fearless exploration of how the trip affects both father and son, who have a less-than-ideal relationship. Bissell’s ambivalence about being in Vietnam with his father is clear. What is also clear, however, is that he must make the journey, one that ultimately changes his and his father’s relationship in the kind of profound and permanent way that can only happen when people step outside their familiar boundaries, literally and figuratively.
The immediacy and descriptive clarity of Harrison’s and Bissell’s narratives are characteristic of most of the essays in this collection, whether the writers are discussing lunch, old war wounds or, as in the case of one of the most moving entries, Peter Hessler’s “Kindergarten,” a five-year-old girl’s struggle to maintain physical and psychological well-being despite the country’s draconian educational traditions and child-rearing practices.
Kira Salak’s “The Vision Seekers” begins with this eye-popper: “Here’s The Truth: I traveled more than four thousand miles to the middle of the Peruvian Amazon to be cured by ‘shamans.’” Hit with an opener like this, it’s impossible not to take the bait and read more. Although Salak is seeking relief of very real, physiological maladies such as migraines, she is also searching for more mystical revelations. By the end of her four-thousand-mile sojourn off the beaten track into the wilds of Peru, neither writer nor reader is disappointed.
The essays in Best American Travel Writing 2005 are not merely prosaic glorifications of exotic locales. Whether discussing suburban Florida, the bullet-riddled border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, or the haunted and haunting geography of Vietnam, the authors show us the overlooked and arcane aspects of the countries they’re visiting. This is particularly the case with “Into the Land of Bin Laden,” in which Robert Young Pelton talks to a soldier who makes the startling admission that “I have no idea who we are fighting,” and in “Tight-Assed River,” in which John McPhee sails with the men who pilot football-sized barges through the Illinois River.
At least half of the essays in Best American Travel Writing 2005 are travel narratives intended to exorcize psychic or physical trauma. “My Thai Girlfriends,” by Tom Ireland, for example, describes, in scintillating prose, the struggles of an American living in Thailand to gain the trust and acceptance of his Thai neighbors, who suspect him of being a phony. In “If It Doesn’t Kill You First,” by Murad Kalam, the author, a novelist and convert to Islam, writes about his personal and spiritual hegira to Mecca—a journey fraught with all the threats of the post-9/11 Muslim world.
The Best America Travel Writing 2005 isn’t for readers in search of essays that merely describe popular tourist sites, destinations, and impressions that are heavy on commercial appeal but light on personal rumination and experience. However, for readers who appreciate travel writing that is as much about the author’s personal voyage as about the places the writer visits, I highly recommend this book.
