The Best American Travel Writing 2003

by Frazier, Ian; Wilson, Jason

• ISBN13: 9780618118816
• ISBN10: 0618118810
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-10
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

More and more readers are discovering the pleasure of armchair travel through the hugely successful Best American Travel Writing, now in its fourth adventurous year. Journey through the 2003 volume from Route 66 to the Arctic; go deep into Polands Tatra Mountains and through the wildest jungle in Congo. Selections this year are from equally far-flung sources, including Outside, Food & Wine, National Geographic Adventure, Potpourri, and The New Yorker.

Table of Contents

Foreword	xi
Introduction by Ian Frazier	xv
LISA ANNE AUERBACH.
Pope on a Rope Tow	1	(7)
from Outside
REBECCA BARRY.
The Happiest Man in Cuba	8	(12)
from The Washington Post Magazine
STEPHEN BENZ.
A Cup of Cuban Coffee	20	(11)
from Potpourri
TOM BISSELL.
Eternal Winter	31	(28)
from Harpers Magazine
GRAHAM BRINK.
Stranger in the Dunes	59	(8)
from The St. Petersburg Times
PETER CANBY.
The Forest Primeval	67	(28)
from Harpers Magazine
SCOTT CARRIER.
Over There	95	(26)
from Harpers Magazine
PETER CHILSON.
The Road from Abalak	121	(14)
from The American Scholar
TOM CLYNES.
They Shoot Poachers, Don't They ?	135	(22)
from National Geographic Adventure
GEOFF DYER.
The Despair of Art Deco	157	(9)
from The Threepenny Review
JACK HANDEY.
The Respect of the Men	166	(3)
from Outside
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS.
The Ballad of Route 66	169	(24)
from Vanity Fair
EMILY MALONEY.
Power Trip	193	(4)
from World Hum
BRUCE McCALL.
Winter Cruises Under Ten Dollars	197	(2)
from The New Yorker
DANIEL MENDELSOHN.
What Happened to Uncle Shmiel?	199	(19)
from The New York Times Magazine
LAWRENCE MILLMAN.
Lost in the Arctic	218	(11)
from National Geographic Adventure
STEVEN RINELLA.
Gettin' Jiggy	229	(7)
from Outside
KIRA SALAK.
Mungo Made Me Do It	236	(19)
from National Geographic Adventure
JACOB SILVERSTEIN.
The Devil and Ambrose Bierce	255	(17)
from Harper's Magazine
ANDREW SOLOMON.
My Dinner in Kabul	272	(4)
from Food & Wine
MICHAEL SPECTER.
I Am Fashion	276	(21)
from The New Yorker
HANK STUEVER. Just One Word, Plastic	297	(17)
from The Washington Post Magazine
PATRICK SYMMES.
Blood Wood	314	(17)
from Outside
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN.
Where the Ghost Bird Sings by the Poison Springs	331	(20)
from Outside
Contributors' Notes	351	(4)
Notable Travel Writing of 2002	355

Excerpts

IntroductionI travel for all the usual reasons - to see new places, meet new people, have exciting experiences, etc. Also, I travel just because I like to move. Motion simply for its own sake is often my goal. This is true not only when I travel but anytime. The other night as I was loading the dinner dishes into our freestanding, roll-around dishwasher, my sister-in-law, who was staying with us, observed me carrying each dish individually across the kitchen, and suggested I could save myself some steps by rolling the dishwasher closer to the sink. I told her that I didnt mind, that I was enjoying the walk. I was being kind of glib with her: I know this love of motion must be controlled. When Im doing research in a library, reading microfilmed newspapers on a microfilm-reading machine, I always have to restrain myself from zipping the whole roll back onto its spool at high-speed rewind, just for the thrill of it, before Im completely done. The whine of the spinning spool, the accelerating flicker of the speeding days, express my restless disorder perfectly. I attribute this disorder partly to my being from Ohio, and partly to my dad. 1. Ohio. When I was growing up there, Ohio seemed centrifugal. Some mystical force the place possessed flung people from it, often far. The northern part of the state was a corridor where westbound traf.c on the Ohio Turnpike picked up speed on its first real stretch of flat country past the Allegheny Mountains. When we slept with our windows open in the summers, the sound of accelerating traffic on the Turnpike a couple of farm fields away was with us morning and night. I remember Rose Rugan and Kim Gould, two girls I had crushes on, leaning on the railing of the Stow Road bridge over the Turnpike and watching the trucks and cars whoosh past beneath. As I rode by them on the bridge on my bicycle, they turned to look at me over their shoulders; for a moment, a huge concentration of hope and longing and possibility shivered through me invisibly. Not many years afterward I walked to that bridge carrying a small suitcase, hopped the fence, climbed down to the highway, stuck out my thumb, and disappeared, like the taillights of that famously fast local dragstrip racer whose racing name was Color Me Gone. Ohio seemed not somewhere to be, but somewhere to be from. We knew the Wright brothers, from Dayton, had learned to fly and had flown away, and John D. Rockefeller had departed with his Cleveland-made millions for New York City, and popular local TV personalities had vanished into vague careers in Hollywood, and most Cleveland Indian baseball players didnt get to be any good until they were traded to the Yankees. The high school kids our parents held up for emulation, the brains and athletes, went off to distant colleges and never returned, while everybodys grandparents decamped to Ohioan-filled retirement communities in Florida or Arizona. When we were still in elementary school, some of our

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