The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  Having eventually freed myself, I walked outside and stood next to a man who had stepped out of central casting on his way to Thunderdome. His name was Barrel. You know how people named Clark just “look” like a Clark? Well, Barrel just “looked” like a murderer. He had the size and build of a grain silo wrapped in denim and wore at least two pairs of jeans. Also, he carried an aluminum grabber tool. It was his hair, though, that was most worthy of note, for his large sunburned head was home to two quite opposing hairstyles: the front hemisphere shorn to stubble, the rear running wild in thick fields of ripe, silvery wheat, the two halves divided by a perfect prime meridian of barbering, as though he had jumped from the barber’s chair mid-haircut, having been alerted of more denim in the area. He looked like a sort of demented Hells Angel Hobo Viking. “What do you call that kind of haircut?” is what I would have asked, had I wanted to die.

  Barrel was engaged in conversation with a smaller man who rested an injured leg on a basket of laundry. Their conversation concerned the nature of his wound and the universe.

  “You got a rod there in your leg?” asked Barrel.

  “Yeah,” said Leg Boy.

  “Does it take the place of your shinbone?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’ll be hellfire if there ever was.”

  “In Ohio at least.”

  “Might even get the old burning bush if you lucky.”

  “I’ll tell you what it was—” said Leg Boy, preparing to drop on us some Leg Wisdom. But what sort of dramatic zeniths such dialogue could reach, I shall never know, because Barrel stopped his interlocutor to ask:

  “Say, you ever listen to Bob Seger?”

  On a bus, people speak as if they shared long histories. And I suppose the bus becomes its own kind of long history. Eighteen years before, I met a veteran from the first Gulf War who, standing outside the Cheyenne station, surveyed the vast plains before us and announced to me, “All women want to kill a man.” I had met him 10, maybe 15 minutes before. At the time, I assumed he was mentally disturbed. But having now been married 10 years to a woman in whose eyes I have seen murder, I am not so sure.

  One doesn’t hear such truths on Delta. There’s no time for it. And that’s the one thing Greyhound has plenty of.

  There comes a time in every Greyhound journey when the switch is flipped. Gone is the sanguine, tolerant liberal arts major who believes in the beauty of human frailty and the quiet dignity of poverty, replaced by a famished hobgoblin with scoliosis. The transformation is largely a result of the seats. They are not bad seats. They even recline, which is nice, although it’s not really reclining, but more of an opportunity to continue to be uncomfortable while shattering the previously injured shinbones of those in one’s immediate rear.

  The problem with the seats is what happens when there’s an empty one next to you. On an airplane, an empty seat is a small miracle, a sacred place to set one’s book. On a bus, though, the empty seat invites lurid napping positions that resemble the attitudes of those who’ve been buried in lava and discovered many years later.

  On an airplane, seats are reserved. When a flier approaches, especially when he is ovular in shape, one quietly prays that the Lord has predestined him to sit somewhere else, preferably near a small screaming child, whom the large person may by chance desire to eat. But if he sits next to you, you understand: it is not his fault. Not so on a bus, where seats are unreserved, where one’s only recourse to keeping a seat open, short of detaching a limb and placing it there, is to appear insane.

  There in Myrtle Beach, 20 of us had been invited to reboard while newer travelers pressed toward the door to menace the cabin. As they began to board, I looked around. Fifty seats. Twenty of us, sitting alone. That’s 40 seats taken, leaving 10. Which is really 5. The five new passengers emerged, claimed these empty pairs of seats, and the cabin grew tense. Every new passenger shot up into the bus and began to search for a victim, someone with whom to mingle bodies and odors. Our open seats were our most valuable currency, and they were about to be taken from us. My only choice, I knew, was to look crazy.

  But how does one look crazy? My wife had often told me to not look at her “all crazy like that.” “Like what?” I would say. “With the dead eyes,” she would say.

  I made the dead eyes. Also, I set my baseball cap high on my head, so I looked like a farmer with dead eyes. But the eyeglasses, those professorial spectacles! They would undo me, make me look dependable and cogent. And so I turned them upside down, which made me look undependable and German. Then I slouched a little and bared my teeth, as though I had been dead for many days. A small, grandmotherly woman of what looked like Oceanic provenance shuffled toward me, surveying me like a large fruit she wished to purchase.

  She moved on.

  The bus exhaled, raised up, lurched forward. I held my pose of the German farmer corpse for a good 10 minutes, until everyone was settled. A girl in a Haverford sweatshirt eyeballed me over a seat. What was someone like her doing on this bus? Was she taking notes? What was she, some kind of journalism major? Stop taking notes about me! I am not an animal!

  Greyhound Stage Four: I Am an Animal.

  Had it really taken 10 hours to get to the capital of South Carolina? I hadn’t eaten in a full day and hobbled off the bus in search of meats. In the terminal parking lot, I noted with delight an unfinished wiener that had been dropped onto the asphalt. Of course I wouldn’t eat it. Of course. But then, there it was. Shouldn’t I pick it up? To throw it away, or put it in my shoe?

  My previous life as a homeowner and member of many benevolent societies had grown dim. Who was that man? He smelled of luxurious soaps and lotions. What relation was he to this old, stooped pilgrim, whose coy limbic system now believed it was operating inside a homeless man? I walked away from the terminal, over a hill, where I noted many fine eating establishments. Were they real? Dare I risk missing my connection for the procuring of their meats? Onward I walked, pausing at a gas station to purchase cigarettes, for I no longer feared death.

  I found myself on the median, where my weariness overtook me and I sat down to smoke, which drew the attention of passing officers of law enforcement, who sent glad tidings to me through their loudspeakers. In time, I made my way onto the porch of a taco establishment that sold cans of beer, of which I consumed many. My jangled nerves calmed, and I noted the time was 5:25 P.M. Casually, I also noted the time of departure on my ticket was 5:30 P.M.

  I ran.

  Up the hill.

  Past a craps game.

  Past a man who wanted a quarter.

  Running, sweating, backpack heaving to and fro, I ran. I ran so hard my crack was showing. When I finally made it to the queue, a cigarette behind my ear, gray with my athletic ministrations, beer in hand, tomatillo on my pants, vaporous abominations about my person, I realized my transformation was complete.

  “What up?” a passenger said.

  “Chilling,” I said, panting.

  “I get one dem smokes, homes?”

  We smoked, there in the line, me and my homeskillet.

  Four hours later, and with a crick in my neck that rendered me unusually susceptible to attack from my immediate right, I woke up on a mountain. It had taken us 14 hours to travel 300 miles, which is less than half the average running speed of the dog with the same name as the bus.

  Had I really made it? Yes. Was I a changed man? Perhaps. What would my new life be like, with limited lumbosacral function? Interesting. But I no longer cared. I had achieved Greyhound Apotheosis, the strange, unbidden nirvana that comes after the hope and anxiety and fear and dementia blur like roadside trees. A certain peace overcomes one.

  A funny thing happens when you tell people you’re about to ride a Greyhound bus: They give you a look, like you asked them to smell a sock you found in the garbage.

  “On purpose?” they ask.

  “Yes,” you say.

  “But why?” And their voices will drop and they lean in. “Is everything oka
y?” What they are saying, of course, is that People Who Are Okay do not ride buses, unless those buses are going to Disney World. These people cannot handle the Truth of the Bus. And what do we learn from this Truth? Many things. How to carry one’s clothes in an ice chest, or a bologna sandwich on the head. What a human hand costs, what a phone is. And what women want. And also what Bob Seger’s fans want. And that perhaps more of us are one bad month from needing to ride Greyhound than we’d like to admit, and that some of us are already there.

  These are not easy truths to learn. But there’s another kind of reaction you get when you’re about to ride a bus. What you get is a look. A look that remembers. “I did it once, when I was nineteen,” they say, dreamily, as though speaking of an enchanted evening many moons ago filled with love and peyote and the cries of distant coyotes. And they will tell you where they went—Memphis to Cincinnati, Denver to Mobile, Jackson to Yellowstone—and they will not speak harshly of the seats, the stations, the toilets. They will remember only the people and the America it showed them and the wild and reckless reasons that drove them to it: to see a girl, or a headstone, or a mountain. And they will recall it fondly, as I do now.

  And they will not want to do it again. But they will want to be able to do it again. It is a dream they have, you can see. To just leave. Deep urges they do not understand will drive them to go. One day, again, soon. And there is a bus waiting to take them there.

  A Bus of the Future.

  They say it has Wi-Fi and toilet paper.

  PETER LASALLE

  Au Train de Vie: That Voice You Hear When Traveling

  FROM The Missouri Review

  I accepted with no other conscious prejudice on my walk than that of avoiding the wider avenues or streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. However, a kind of familiar gravitation led me farther on, in the direction of a certain neighborhood, the names of which I have every desire to recall and which dictate reverence to my heart.

  —Borges, “A New Refutation of Time”

  I don’t know who I dream I am.

  —Pessoa, from a poem

  I’LL BE HONEST. I had a couple of large sadnesses to confront that summer in Paris. So I suppose it wasn’t surprising that it repeatedly happened.

  You see, I often found myself at this one spot at the end of my meandering walks through the balmy, traffic-empty streets of the early evening. The walks were in an everyday pocket of the Grands Boulevards, toward Place de la République—the outdoor cafés along the boulevards crowded but not noisy, if that makes any sense, the puzzle-barked plane trees even greener and leafier than the last time you noticed, if that makes any sense, too, everything in almost too-clear focus amid the thick honey sunlight that does linger till nearly 10 in July and August in Paris—and, yes, after an hour or so of rather aimless and surely comfortable walking, I usually seemed to end up there again. And the “there” I’m referring to meant climbing the odd serpentine stone steps behind the stately Gare de l’Est train station; it meant continuing on along that decidedly shabby dead-end street, Rue d’Alsace, which overlooks the vast, cluttered railway yards, to sit down again in one of the big cushiony seats—old and salvaged from maybe a French Pullman car, set out right on the cracked sidewalk—for me to order a simple syrupy black coffee at the café called, tellingly and almost too appropriately, Au Train de Vie.

  But even that doesn’t get at it.

  Or it isn’t quite exact to say I repeatedly ended up there, because it was somehow beyond that. It was as if I had to go there, or more so, as if a voice was telling me to go there again because it was where I was supposed to be, where I, well, I needed to be right then and at that time of my own life in Paris.

  And now, months later and back here in Austin, I’ve been thinking more about this—thinking a lot about it, in fact.

  I’ve been thinking of it and specifically how it all reflects a feeling certainly metaphysical that many of us have experienced. And I realize it’s something about which two writers I personally admire have had a good deal to say, not only that icon of French flâneurs, the surrealist Louis Aragon in his dreamily meditative volume Le Paysan de Paris, but also the acknowledged master of the metaphysical itself, the Argentine wizard Borges, with the same sort of experience often happening to him as well, probed in a poem like “Street with a Pink Corner Store” or the haunting essay that confronts the phenomenon head-on and analyzes it fully, “A New Refutation of Time.”

  All of which I’ll get to in a bit, but first maybe at least some filling in is needed concerning my sadnesses that summer of 2011.

  Truth of the matter is, I’d been outright lucky enough to receive from my university in Texas, where I teach creative writing, a grant to turn a short story of mine—a piece from a literary magazine and set in Paris—into something longer. The project would have me spending the summer in Paris. I would do the writing there and also research in more detail the actual setting of the scenes in the narrative.

  Having taught in Paris on exchange several times over the years, I had a number of friends in the city, and they all contributed to my e-mail–organized campaign that spring to check around for a rental for me. One friend—a guy who was a lot of fun, formerly my departmental chairman at one of the Paris universities where I’d taught and the leading Saul Bellow scholar in France, now retired from university teaching and always a quite dashing figure, married to a lovely opera singer—came up with a deal he jokingly pronounced I couldn’t refuse. His wife’s uncle had just refurbished a very large apartment that had been in the family for years, and this elderly “Oncle Robert”—living in Cannes now and seldom using the place—was willing to rent it out to an American writer in need and at what turned out to be a truly bargain price that could fit the modest budget of an academic grant. It was more than perfect, five stories up in a frilled, buff-stone 19th-century edifice of the type that the controversial designer of the Grands Boulevards, Baron Haussmann, would have heartily endorsed and, now that I think of it, probably was directly responsible for when the area had first been redeveloped, actually an upscale address for a residence back then; overlooking the handsome Porte Saint-Martin ceremonial arch built by Louis XIV, it had a full four bedrooms. And best was that there was nothing whatsoever touristy about the location even in summer, when Paris can be overwhelmingly and often discouragingly touristy. Far from chic nowadays, the neighborhood was a fine combination of the ready-to-wear boutiques of the busy Sentier garment district and the epicenter of the sub-Saharan African community today, working-class and colorful and alive, offering a concentration of cubbyhole hairdressing salons for wonderfully complicated African coiffures that I suspect has to be denser than anywhere else on known earth. The first sadness came after my teenage nephew visited for a week.

  Of course, this shouldn’t have entailed a sadness. And with me a bachelor and used to having lived on my own for so long, it’s always been good to have somebody around for a while, especially a kid like my nephew.

  We got along more like buddies than anything else, my assuming in the relationship the standard crazy-uncle role, I’d say. For him I was the oddball writer who, maybe because I had spent a lifetime around campuses teaching, had never really grown up and seemed somebody often a little more tuned in on his interests than his good, understandably concerned (but oh-so-parental) mother and father, who did, also understandably, dote on him, an only child.

  Tall, polite, bright, with an easy smile and longish hair in the Beatles mode rather than the buzzcut more favored by teenage guys today, he was captain of the hockey team at his prep school in Providence (mostly a benchwarmer and no star, who got elected captain only because his teammates liked him, he admitted) and also a budding playwright (he was intent on expanding the aspiration that summer and was in the midst of taking a screenwriting course at Brown U., very excited about it). He jumped at the idea I had proposed of coming over to spend time with me and practice his French, the two of us eventually convincing his paren
ts to subsidize the trip as a year-too-early graduation present. During the day he would explore the city on his own, soon proud that with a little foldup map and the stack of Métro tickets I gave him, he was gradually mastering the underground system.

  The kind of adventures expected to befall a 17-year-old ensued in the course of his trying to cover all of what he had decided were the big-time sights. At the Eiffel Tower he stood in the line for the elevator and met some kids from Australia, hooking up with them for all to make the ascent together. Finally as high up as you could go there, the second observation level, they took turns taking pictures of each other with their cell-phone cameras in poses as if they were falling over the retaining rail and into the full, wide expanse of Paris itself spreading out hazily soft blue and green in the background; he assured me it would be great to post on his Facebook page and his friends back home would get a real kick out of it. At the Arc de Triomphe he witnessed a police raid on a crew of those ragged guys—boys, really, African and only his age—who sell souvenir junk at the tourist hot spots, tiny key-chain trinkets cheaply plated and the like, the boys adept at fleeing fast from the cops with the stuff they spread out on blankets to peddle without a license. In the slapstick scenario of the particular raid he witnessed, the same blankets did become ready sacks to hastily wrap the trinkets in as they scattered in all directions across the traffic of L’Etoile. My nephew described how the burly cops in their military-serious uniforms—garrison caps low on the brow and combat boots—were left looking very stupid and standing in frustration with hands on their hips as the boys, running away, laughing, mocked them in what was surely a perpetual cat-and-mouse game. He said it was all wild, at first excited to tell me about the crazy episode, next admitting to me that he did feel somewhat bad because he had picked up one of the dropped little gold Eiffel Tower key chains during the mêlée (he showed it to me, I assured him he shouldn’t have qualms, saying that I’d seen them offered at four for a euro, so it was no great loss to anybody); he then told me how he really would like to learn more about the boys and their lives. On another stay in Paris, while teaching at the university at Nanterre, I had dated a French woman who taught with me in the department, Études Anglo-Américaines, and also volunteered with programs for African émigrés, so I knew how the system worked from her explanations, the boys being sort of indentured to whomever had brought them to France. I filled my nephew in the best I could, as he listened to every word of it, intrigued and also concerned about those boys.