The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  “We’re doing this pilgrimage for the second time,” Zhaxi said. “We’ve taken two months to get this far.” He glanced at our mules. “We carry all we have on our backs.”

  Two months! Surely they traveled following the path laid out by Shantideva in the Bodhicaryavatara, “taking [their] rest and wandering as [they] please . . . a clay bowl [their] only luxury.” With my pack animals and GPS, I felt like a profligate on a luxury tour.

  “Are you begging for alms,” I asked, “as Buddha’s disciples did?”

  “No, we’re buying our food,” said Zhaxi, showing me a wad of yuan.

  I told them of my interest in Buddhism and queried them about their practices. Had they read the Dhammapada?

  “The what?” both replied.

  Neither had heard of it; they read the Nyingmapa texts. I sensed again how deeply the (Indian) Buddhism I studied differed from theirs. I felt an even deeper alienation when they pulled out their Pö Bas, thumb-size leaden statuettes of the Buddha on what looked like stout triangular knife blades. Good-luck charms, they said, asking me to show them mine. I had none, and told them I didn’t believe in such things.

  “What, you don’t carry a Pö Ba?” said Li. “Aren’t you worried on such a pilgrimage? With my Pö Ba, I know no harm will come to me!” Tenzin looked equally alarmed. What the heck was I doing out in these dangerous mountains without a Pö Ba?

  We were picking our way along a narrow trail circumventing a wall of rock and packed earth. A drizzle was falling—bad news.

  “Weixian!”—dangerous—Tenzin declared, slowing and pointing to cracks in the trail. Boulder-size stretches of it, sodden by rains, often broke free and slid down the mountain during the typhoon months, which were also avalanche season—that is, now.

  The next morning had come on foggy but torrid. We had left Abe kicking up dust, following a tenuous, foot-wide path; one slippage of earth, and we would tumble hundreds of feet into the Salween below. Death could strike, in Shantideva’s words, like “a shattering thunderbolt from nowhere.”

  Floods had washed out the pedestrian bridge we needed to cross, which compelled us to detour up along the Yakura (a river as frothy and violent as the Salween), our destination, I assumed, another bridge.

  But no. Between steel fixtures on opposing banks, 50 yards apart, a pair of rusty cables hung over the water.

  “We’ll have to cross by pulley,” Tenzin shouted above the current’s roar. “I’m afraid now. This could scare the mules and hurt them.”

  The wild-haired pulley masters, a man and a boy as wiry as they were grimy, allowed for little ceremony. Anadorma presented herself at the cable first. The man swung the “saddle” (a loop of doubled-over canvas dangling on a chain hooked to the cable) around her behind. He grabbed a mess of weeds (to protect his hand), settled into his own saddle, embraced her tightly with his free arm, and kicked off. The two zinged down over the rapids—he controlled their speed with his weedy grip on the cable—and landed with a bounce on the other side. The boy transported our gear the same way. The man then zinged back over to us from the second, higher pole-and-cable arrangement.

  “Bring on the mules!” he shouted, switching the cloth saddle with heavier tackle.

  Tenzin led unsuspecting Ramo to the pulley master. Without ado, the man looped and locked him into the tackle, placed his foot on his flank, and shoved the poor beast bug-eyed over the edge. The mule, whinnying insanely, swung out three-quarters of the way and lost momentum, halting above the rapids, where he hung kicking and neighing in blind panic.

  A frenzied exchange of shouts ensued, with the man issuing commands to the boy on the other bank; the lad strapped himself into his saddle and pulled himself along the cable, stopping well clear of the lethally flailing hooves. He swung a hooked cable that latched on to the mule’s line, and then pulled himself and his terrified charge back to the other bank. He nearly caught a horseshoe in the face releasing him from bondage.

  Hujya and Tenzin went next, leaving me last. “Cross the river bravely,” said the Buddha, referring to the torrents of fear and desire one must ford to attain Nirvana. I managed to be brave enough, though the cable somehow scraped my shirt, shredding it and singeing my chest. But I alighted otherwise unharmed.

  We set out to rejoin the Salween, traipsing through barrens where prickly pear cacti replaced pines, with the sun hot on our necks and the temperature rising into the 90s. Now and then Tenzin severed cactus leaves with his knife, split them, and offered me the icy, pulpy green fruit within—a cooling consolation as the heat mounted.

  By late afternoon, caked in grit and mightily tuckered out, we reached the shepherds’ huts of Wencuan, a clearing by the river at a mere 5,800 feet, where we would rest for a day—our seventh on the trail, and the halfway point in the pilgrimage.

  The Salween eddied and seethed beyond our camp, which stood beneath tawny serrated cliffs, 15 or 20 feet from the water. After pitching my tent, feeling filthy after having taken only occasional bucket baths for a week, I grabbed my soap, shampoo, and towel, and climbed across boulders to a secluded cove, fed by a spring, where a depression of stone, ringed by ferns and flowers, formed a thigh-deep pool emptying through a tiny channel into the river.

  I stripped and climbed down into the pool, expecting the shock of frigid water. But it was warm! (Wencuan, I later learned, means “warm springs.”) Nothing could have raised my spirits more. I soaped and splashed, heated further by the bronzing afternoon sun, my aching joints soothed and loosening. A week’s worth of dirt swirled away into the Salween. Bathing here seemed like a sacred ablution.

  I finished and spread out to dry my clothes, money belt, and boots, all of which had been damp for days and smelled of mildew. Then I climbed up the main boulder and stretched out on its hot surface, to let the sun heal me further. Above me dangled prayer flags, and someone had carved Tibetan verse around a pair of open eyes etched into the rock wall above me, reminding me of the Buddha’s words: “The disciples of [the Buddha] are wide-awake and vigilant, rejoicing in meditation day and night.” Avoiding intoxicants, ever wary of desire’s deceits, one strives purposely for Nirvana—the state of truth and bliss beyond self, passion, and cravings.

  I meditated, my thoughts gradually disappearing into the river’s entrancing roar, until I surrendered to the Void. Or, more succinctly, fell asleep.

  Back at camp a while later I found that Tenzin and Anadorma had also bathed. They sat, spiffy and burnished, by the fire sipping cups of bai jiu (moonshine), enjoying the evening cool.

  “Like some?” asked Tenzin.

  “No thanks.”

  I wanted nothing to interfere with my senses’ imbibing all such a healing evening had to offer.

  The moon soon waxed; bats circled and dipped in the gloaming. We chatted, really relaxing for the first time, and stayed up late. (We were to rest the next day.) They told me about their daughter and how she has to study in another village because remote Yongzhi has only a (poor) primary school. Though belonging to a minority people exempt from the one-child law, they found one child was enough—all they could afford, in fact. The politics of repression never came up. Villagers in remote areas such as theirs had little to do with the Chinese authorities.

  Tenzin said, “I’m happy with my work. I get to make the pilgrimage over and over; the more times, the better.” The merit he gained would return to him. He had chosen what the Buddha called the “right livelihood”—a prerequisite for enlightenment.

  On a black stormy night two days later all notions of bliss had passed. We found ourselves beyond the village of Tsana, struggling up another splashing cataract-path, never having recovered from the previous day, when the sun broiled the mercury to a hundred degrees, the earth turned ashen and sterile, landslides had destroyed stretches of the trail, and not even servings of cactus fruit could quench our thirst. Trekking in the dark here was madness, for obvious reasons; but, having no Tibet permit (which Nuoji had lacked the time to arrange for me in Zh
ongdian), I could not afford to be seen by the Chinese authorities in Tsana. So we crossed through it after midnight, encountering no one.

  Now we clambered up and up, slipping on the rocks. My headlamp cast enough light for me to see, but not, of course, for the mules, which often stumbled. Stone walls soon hemmed in the watery trail—we were, it seemed, cutting through a village. Finally, on hearing Tenzin’s plan to forge ahead to Sondula Pass all night and all the next day, I objected. Tsana was behind us, and now we had to rest and wait for dawn.

  He assented. We turned off the gutter and into a village home’s courtyard. Relieved, I got careless. I took two steps and fell over a pile of firewood, landing on my hands. As I pulled myself up, my left hand burned with pain. I trained my lamp on it to discover I had dislocated my ring finger, knocking it out of joint at the main knuckle, leaving the last two phalanges nearly perpendicular to the first.

  Tenzin and Anadorma gasped, aghast. Straightaway urgent thoughts assailed me: How could I go on like this for another week? How could I endure even the three-hour hike back to Tsana and whatever crude medical center they had, a hike that would probably end with my expulsion from Tibet and the failure of my pilgrimage?

  I grabbed my finger and wrenched it back into joint.

  I fell, dizzy, onto the logs, stars spinning before my rain-pelted eyes. A wave of nausea swept through me. I closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind.

  Several minutes later, I timidly tried to flex my fingers. They all worked. I lay there panting for a while, under my guides’ distressed gaze. Then I rose, and we set up camp. Until sunrise we slept.

  A true pilgrimage must involve suffering, I reasoned, watching my finger swell and turn blue.

  Three days later, in the shadow of soaring arrowhead peaks, we hobbled into Jaka (altitude 8,275 feet), a meadow where pilgrims rest before the last, grueling two-day ascent through alpine forest to confront Kawa Karpo at its closest near Shula Pass, the highest of the journey (at 15,764 feet). After this comes the descent to Meili, the terminus village back in Yunnan Province. Fatigued, still addled by the thin air, and my finger hurting and increasingly stiff, I felt in sore need of comfort. But Jaka was a mournful place. By the turgid Wei Chu River a deserted chorten, messily adorned with prayer flags, occupied a gravel courtyard scattered with yellowed leaves from a shaggy-branched tree; next to the temple stood a whitewashed stupa, emblazoned with protecting images of the snow lion (Tibet’s symbol). Between the two structures prayer wheels, metallic cylinders embossed with mantrams, stood idle, their gilt exteriors catching the sun’s expiring rays.

  After hailing the disheveled caretaker, who had emerged from a stone hut across a fallow field to greet us, tugging at his gold earring, my guides set themselves up in his spare room. I pitched my tent by the chorten’s barred entrance, noting, on its door frame and cornices, yellow and blue geometric designs, and pictures of the Buddha in his various manifestations seated in the lotus position.

  About the shrine hung an air of loss and abandon, as if pilgrims would never again cheer this spot. The Buddhas, impassive in their portraiture, gazed down at me in the cooling air. The lapidary lines introducing the Heart Sutra in A Buddhist Bible sounded softly in my mind:

  Everything changes, everything passes,

  Things appearing, things disappearing,

  But when all is over—everything having appeared and disappeared,

  Being and extinction both transcended—

  Still the basic emptiness and silence abides,

  And that is blissful Peace.

  Such cold solace! Buddhism posits the Void, boundless eons fore and aft, the continuous death and rebirth of worlds, worlds in which our presence is fleeting and, in effect, doomed—if we choose to perceive our own failings and successes, our self-made sound and fury, as lasting and meaningful. The way out is to transcend our concerns for self into compassion for the other.

  But as the final sliver of orange sun slipped behind the mountains above, a plump-cheeked teenage herder ambled into Jaka, prodding her two cows with a switch. She saw me and raised her hands, palms pressed together, in a lively greeting, and smiled, instantly raising my spirits. She then skipped around the prayer wheels, spinning them (each squeaky rotation represents a mantram recited), thus invoking Avalokiteshvara, the deity of compassion, the “Glorious Gentle One” who watches over Tibet.

  She waved goodbye to me and poked her cattle up the trail. From on high she looked back at me and, laughing, waved some more. Her laugh rescued me. I climbed into my tent and fell asleep listening to the Wei Chu’s throaty riverine song. In the Void only compassion and human warmth provide relief.

  “Kawa Karpo!” declared Tenzin and Anadorma reverently two evenings later, as we and our mules stumbled to a halt at the edge of a ledge. “Kawa Karpo!”

  Across from us at Meiju Buguo (a cloud-level bluff at 13,751 feet) the “Great God Peak” towered 9,000 feet higher still, reaching into the stormy ether, its summit wreathed in churning cumulus, its tarry black slopes streaked with sugary snow and sliding down into an abyss of mist beneath us. Bon legend has it that Kawa Karpo was once a hydra-headed evil deity who reigned in terror over the Tibetans. The Buddha defeated him in battle, took him as a disciple, converted him to compassion, and, finally, gifted him with this mountain in reward for his transformation.

  But as Zhaxi had warned, proximity to the godhead comes at a price. Deprived of oxygen, beset with chills, I collapsed on my haunches, my eyes trained upward. In this Tibetan world of rock and sky and ever-thinning air, I faced the awesome deity on his own lofty terrain, craving, for the first time, the intercession of the Glorious Gentle One.

  COLSON WHITEHEAD

  Loving Las Vegas

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  I PITY PEOPLE who’ve never been to Vegas. Who dismiss the city without setting foot on its carpeted sidewalks. I recognized myself in the town the first time I laid eyes on it, during a cross-country trip the summer after college. My friend Darren had a gig writing for Let’s Go, the student-produced series of travel guides. Let’s Go: USA, Let’s Go: Europe, Let’s Go: North Korea (they always lost a few freshmen updating that one). The previous year his beat had been New York City. We’d spent the summer eating 50-cent hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and “researching” dive bars like Downtown Beirut and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, which were beacons of pure, filthy truth in a city still years away from its Big Cleanup. This summer he was assigned the Southwest. The subways didn’t run that far out, but his roommate Dan had a car, a brown ’83 Toyota Tercel, and the idea was we’d hit the open road and split the writing duties and the money three ways.

  It was 1991. We’d just been diagnosed as Generation X, and certainly we had all the symptoms, our designs and life plans as scrawny and undeveloped as our bodies. Sure, we had dreams. Dan had escaped college with a degree in visual arts, was a cartoonist en route to becoming an animator. Darren was an anthro major who’d turned to film, fancying himself a Lynchian auteur in those early days of the indie art-house wave. I considered myself a writer but hadn’t got much further than wearing black and smoking cigarettes. I wrote two 5-page short stories, two 5-page epics, to audition for my college’s creative-writing workshops and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep “Write what you know”—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world’s indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

  First thing, Dan hooked up our ride with new speakers. We didn’t have money or prospects, but we had our priorities straight. I couldn’t drive. That spring I’d sworn I’d get my license so I could contribute my fair share, but no.

  I promised to make it up to Dan and Darren by being a Faithful Navigator, wrestling with the Rand McNally and feeding the cassette deck with dub. Dub, Lee “Scratch” Perry, deep, deep cuts off side six of Sandinista!—let these be indicators of the stoner underpinnings of o
ur trip out west. As if our eccentric route were not enough. From New York down to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to visit a college pal. He took me to my first mall. Even then, I had a weakness for those prefab palaces. “I asked Andy why there were no security guards around,” I wrote in my notebook. “He told me I had a New Yorker’s mentality.”

  Then hundreds of miles to Chicago for a disappointing pilgrimage too complicated and inane to detail here. We bought two tiny replicas of the Sears Tower as consolation. Veered south, taking in the territory, cooking up plots. Inspiration: “discussing the plot of the movie Darren wants to write, about 7-Elevens that land in cornfields.” Down to New Orleans, where we slept in a frat house, on mattresses still moldy and damp from the spring floods. One of Darren’s childhood friends belonged to the frat. His brothers wanted to know why he was “bringing niggers and Jews” into their chill-space. We sure were seeing a lot of America on this trip.

  Then west to tackle our Let’s Go assignment proper. We wrote up the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead. Decided to keep driving so we could spend the night in Las Vegas, the camping thing not really taking. (“Hours of agony. Impossible to sleep. Bugs. A consistent feeling of itchiness.”) Miles and miles of black hills and winding roads, and then at one crest it manifested, this smart white jellyfish flopping on the desert floor. We suited up in a cheap motel downtown. Anticipating all the sweaty, laundryless days and nights we’d spend in the Tercel, we’d hit Domsey’s, the famous Brooklyn thrift store, before we left New York City. We required proper gear for our Vegas debut. Dead men’s spats, ill-fitting acrylic slacks and blazers with stiff fibers sticking out of the joints and seams. Roll up the sleeves of the sports jacket to find the brown stains corresponding to the previous owner’s track marks. We looked great.