The Best American Travel Writing 2013

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  After this, Hafiz recalled, “my bird suddenly got a second wind. He defeated his opponent, and my partner picked up my winnings. I put the bird under my coat and went home, but when I got home I saw he had died along the way.” He grinned ruefully.

  The men who gamble large sums on cockfights do not regard themselves as having repudiated their religion. Hafiz’s description of his encounter with the Taliban reminded me of the words of another cocker I spoke to at the tile factory. He said, “Everything we do is sinful. You walk down the street and look at a woman—it’s a sin. Under Islam, traders are supposed to make no more than ten percent from their transactions, but here in Afghanistan there are people who make five-hundred-percent profits.” Then he quoted an Afghan saying: “Drinking wine is forbidden; tell me something that is permitted in this world!”

  We arrived at a small provincial town, came off the main road, and followed a dirt track away from the houses and in between the fields, many of them planted with vines. High adobe walls encircled even the smallest plot—a testament to the precariousness of ownership in Afghanistan. Our destination was the bank of a canal that was lined with parked cars. We walked across a bridge to a big ruin, also made of adobe, which had once been the home of a prominent local family before it was colonized by the cockers. By now the sun was up, warming our backs.

  A dozen owners were in the pit, sorting out which bird should fight which. Hafiz saw friends and went off to say hello, kissing cheeks and exchanging the usual profanities. A coal-fired samovar chugged away in one corner, and Karim and I breakfasted on green tea and greasy french fries wrapped in bread. A couple of armed men wandered around. Spotting me, the only foreigner in the place, one of them asked whether I was a suicide bomber. I said no, and he accepted a cup of green tea.

  During an interval between fights, we sat by a stream and chatted with a local commander, a youngish man wearing a dun-colored shawl. He had joined the mujahideen as a 13-year-old, he said, and after a few years came to lead a force of 2,000 men. Now he was a high-up official at the Culture Ministry in Kabul, with responsibility for museums across the country. It crossed my mind that this culture czar might not be able to read or write. And that the cost of his sleek black SUV and of maintaining his various flunkies could not have come out of a government salary.

  The commander told me that the essence of cockfighting was showq, or love—love of the fight, of the fraternity, and of the valiant birds themselves. I had heard similar sentiments from owners and gamblers back in Kabul. The grandees of the pit, distinguished white-bearded gentlemen, had called for enough showq to “turn our woes into flowers!”

  Hafiz survived on showq that day. He lost more than $200, which was split among the five-man syndicate of which he is a member. Still, he had Friday to look forward to.

  The old tile factory filled up. The owners gathered in the pit, setting their birds on the ground, sizing up prospective adversaries, arranging the fighting order. Bets were placed. Someone exclaimed, “Whoever is not true to his word is a pimp and a cuckold!” A younger man protested: “If I am not true to my word, stone me to death!”

  A bear of a man named Bagho got impatient. He seized a stick and began circling the pit, whacking the ground and sending up clouds of dust, shouting at people to take their seats. Bagho is a fixture of the Kabul cockfighting scene. He used to be an abdar, but the birds he was allotted generally lost, and it was said that Bagho had brought them bad luck. In the end, people stopped asking Bagho to be an abdar.

  Abdar means “he who has water,” a name that evokes one of the abdar’s key functions, which is to ensure his bird does not overheat. At regular intervals he fills his own mouth with water, separates his bird from his adversary, and sprays the bird’s head and anus. Using a cloth that he keeps slung over his shoulder, he fans the bird and wipes him clean of sweat and blood. Curling the cloth tightly, he puts it down the bird’s throat and retrieves potentially hazardous feathers that he has swallowed while pecking his rival. The abdar replaces broken spurs and beaks with spares that have been lifted from dead warriors. He uses his tongue to clean bloody eyes, and he stitches up chest wounds. His job is not for the squeamish.

  The first and second fights began, proceeding in alternating 20-minute periods. Every so often I glanced at Hafiz, who was sitting on the lowest step, his bird under his coat, conferring with other members of the syndicate. Hafiz had been paired against Zilgai and Sabur and was more pensive than I had seen him up to this point.

  The second fight ended with the withdrawal of one of the birds. I went out for tea, and when I came back the third fight was underway. There was much excitement, not only because the contestants were evenly matched but because one of the cocks, a sturdy, black-flecked creature, was owned by the nephew of one of Afghanistan’s most powerful warlords. The nephew in question, a thin man of about 40, sat impassively, but his young companions were less inhibited. Their faces became ugly and contorted as the fight grew bloodier, and they ran into the pit to shout bets and punch the air.

  By the end of the second round, both birds were exhausted and bleeding. They hung off each other, their necks entwined, before stepping back and launching themselves into the air, kicking furiously. Some way into the third round, the black-flecked bird suddenly stumbled. One of his wings rested on the ground. The men around me yelled, “He’s blinded!”

  I turned to Karim and asked, “Surely they’ll stop the fight now?”

  He shook his head. “Do you know how much money is riding on this? More than thirty thousand dollars! They’ll do anything to make sure he can fight on!”

  There was pandemonium as the spectators milled around the pit and the abdar locked the stricken bird between his legs and stitched a gash that had opened under the bird’s darkened eye socket. Then he rummaged through his pockets for a replacement for the bird’s shattered beak. Someone loudly accused the abdar of improperly interrupting the fight. Others retorted that he was behaving within the rules.

  The abdar cradled the black-flecked bird, who it was now clear had been paralyzed. His single eye stared, dying and uncomprehending. Money started changing hands—more money than I had ever seen in Afghanistan. The nephew of the famous warlord went off in his Land Cruiser with his bodyguards.

  At the end of the fight, Hafiz rose from his place at the side of the pit. It was getting dark; his fight and several others would have to wait until the following day. He put his bird into a box on the back of his bicycle and pedaled off. But when he reappeared the next morning, the bird’s face was a shade darker than it had been, and his eyes were listless and dull. Whether from being kept the whole of the previous day in the chilly factory or from being moved around in Hafiz’s drafty box, he had caught a chill.

  Later I learned that Hafiz’s partners in the syndicate had urged him to withdraw the bird and pay Zilgai the standard forfeit, but he had insisted the fight go ahead. Was it a kind of madness, or the need to gamble, that led him to field a bird that was sure to lose? At times, over the course of the three rounds he fought that day, Hafiz’s bird came to life, and Hafiz with him, jerking his little limbs, his dastmal over his head—a fighting cock in a man’s body.

  But the bird with the white-flecked saddle landed only a few good hits. It was a battle of attrition, which only the brothers’ stronger, fitter bird could win.

  That night Hafiz stayed up, sweating him, murmuring to him. At dawn he failed to crow. It was a terrible omen. Hafiz brought him back to the tile factory. The bird’s face was almost black. The fight restarted.

  A more futile, avoidable death cannot be imagined. The decisive blow, inevitably, was a spur in the eye. Hafiz’s bird staggered backward, and the assembled cockers turned on him with their usual vitriol. The abdar brought the bird over to Hafiz, who looked down and exclaimed, “No! God! It’s all gone bad!” Zilgai and Sabur smiled.

  Hafiz conceded defeat. The syndicate paid out around $1,000, a third of which came from Hafiz’s pocket. “I got him as a c
ockerel and raised him,” Hafiz said, to no one in particular. “What can I do if he turns out to be impotent on his wedding night?” Then he rode away on his bicycle. Two days later, Hafiz’s bird died of his wounds.

  IAN FRAZIER

  A Farewell to Yarns

  FROM Outside

  A TRUTH ABOUT the outdoors is that it causes people to lie. Strange forces out there in the wild have always conspired to corrupt human honesty. Over time, intelligent listeners and readers came to accept that an adventurer’s reports would not consist of one-to-one representations of fact but instead would contain exaggerations, distortions, omissions, additions, events that foolish people wanted to believe had happened but hadn’t, and deliberate, implausible, fantastical lies. Maybe that was even a reason the restless and sketchy among us ventured into the wilderness in the first place: because if we claimed we did or saw something amazing there, who could prove the contrary? Returned from our journeys, we could brag all we wanted without fear of contradiction. An enormous attraction of far places has always been that no one else was inconveniently in the neighborhood to check.

  “Here Be Monsters,” the old maps announced, next to drawings of walking leviathan-fish with huge maws and claws and fangs. The pictures must have been accurate; how would the mapmakers have known what to draw unless eyewitnesses had told them? Somewhere out there, travelers said, lived blue-eyed Indians who spoke only Hebrew—a Lost Tribe of Israel, miraculously transported to remotest Asia or the American West. Those who revealed this discovery had not, it turned out, met the blue-eyed (blue-eyed?) Hebrews themselves but once crossed paths with parties who had. Inventive wanderers said they had seen snakes that had bit their own tails and made themselves into hoops and rolled across the ground, cannibals with three heads, Arctic dwellers who covered their ears against the sound of the sunrise, and beautiful Amazonian women warriors who held healthy young men (often the wanderers themselves) captive for sex. Explorers claimed they had climbed mountains they hadn’t climbed and had reached the North Pole when in fact they never reached it. Apparently sober individuals gave firsthand accounts of seeing yetis in the Himalayas and Nessie in her loch and jackalopes on the prairies. Old-time sailors boasted of sleeping with beautiful mermaids, annoyingly omitting the precise physical details, and according to certain fishermen, mermaids offering to grant them three wishes had come up in their nets. The words fisherman and liar are linked in our brains for good reason. And in the interest of brevity, I will pass over the many stories involving logging roads, elk hunters, space aliens, and intergalactic crossbreeding. There are some doors man was not meant to open.

  Lies made the wild scary and alluring. When I was a boy, local places I knew about buzzed excitingly with crazy tales. In rural Illinois, Argyle State Park was said to be inhabited by a creature called the Argyle Monster—a huge cougar that had lost its front feet in a trap and ran through the forest on its hind legs at dusk and “screamed like a woman.” Or so said Billy somebody, who told his friends, who were friends of mine, who told me. I never saw the Argyle Monster myself, but it ran on its hind legs through my imaginings and colored the dusk of this unremarkable state park a deep and thrilling sepia when I walked back to the picnic area after fishing. It’s been decades since I went there; I regret that I quit being afraid of the Argyle Monster long ago.

  More recently, as a grownup supposedly immune to phantasms, I learned from Russians when I was traveling in Siberia that somewhere in its remotest parts is Coca-Cola City (Gorod Koka-Kola), which was built during the Cold War as a reproduction of an American city. The residents of Coca-Cola City speak perfect English and use American products and behave like Americans, providing a realistic setting in which the Russian spymasters can train special operatives who will be sent to the U.S. Coca-Cola City is alleged to be the topmost of top-secret sites, and it is closed, of course, to all visitors. I’m not sure if that’s why I never could pin it down on the map. I suspect that it does not exist and never did—but who can say? The rumor of it made Siberia more Siberian for me.

  You might not think that any human creation as hardy as lies could be in danger of dying out, but I’m afraid that, at least outdoors, they are. Nowadays, a good outdoor what-if story has a much smaller chance for survival. Some years ago, you may remember, observers in the deep woods of eastern Arkansas said they had seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, the wonderful and near-mythic bird that black people called the Lord God Bird because of its soul-shivering appearance. There had been no confirmed sightings of the ivorybill in decades, and its possible extinction was and is bad news. The observers who said they had seen it weren’t trying to deceive, just being wishful, and because they recorded it with a video camera their wishfulness was eventually dashed—close analysis of the video revealed that the bird was not an ivorybill.

  It would have been nice to think that the bird still survived someplace far away in the forest. But truth is always better than error, I suppose. Consider the recent case of the giant wild hog Hogzilla. A Georgia man said he had shot it while it was running around someplace in the woods, and he posted pictures of it online. This 8-foot-long, 800-pound animal was as monstrous a creature as the Georgia swamps had ever seen. The man added that he had buried the hog in a grave marked with a cross (though feral, it had been a Christian hog, apparently), and because of the excitement stirred up on the Internet the man eventually had to submit the corpse for examination. Through DNA testing, experts determined that it was a mix of wild hog and domestic pig. Its size suggested it had eaten a lot of hog feed. Such a disappointment—Hogzilla, a pen-raised fake. How much more stimulating to believe that there are 800-pound wild hogs infesting the swamps of Georgia. One hates to think what a radio collar and a wildlife-management team would have done to William Faulkner’s bear.

  The Hogzilla debunking was another example of the pesky trend toward factuality currently sweeping the out-of-doors. Technology, of course, is at the root of it. The global landscape used to be a theater of various shadings—sunlit fields and canyons of dark obscurity, trackless jungles, and misty Shangri-las. Now the whole world is like a cineplex when the lights have come on. Almost no place on the surface of the planet is really obscure anymore. Satellites watch it all and can let you know to the millimeter how far continental drift moved your swimming beach last year. What’s up along the banks of the great, gray-green Limpopo? How’s traffic on the road to Mandalay? What’s the snowpack like across the wide Missouri? The Internet or Google Earth will tell you.

  Traveling in Siberia a decade ago, I thought I was pretty much beyond the reach of checkability; in fact-checker shorthand, anything I wrote would be “OA,” which stands for “on author,” meaning “unverifiable by anything other than the author’s say-so.” I did not need to worry that any checker would visit where I had been, nor was it likely that an irate reader would write in claiming I had got something wrong about the tundra zone of the Chukchi Peninsula, given the difficulty of getting there and the absence of any reason to go. But then time and advancing technology proved me wrong. During the many years my Siberian research took, satellite imagery of the earth’s surface became available online, and my claims about the lay of the land in Siberia proved to be checkable after all. Even in far-flung places, descriptions could be verified. If I said there was no bridge over a remote Far Eastern river that I had crossed by ferry, the checker could look on Google Earth and see that, in fact, no bridge showed up in the satellite photo, and a small boat much like a ferry could be seen crossing there.

  Today the adventurer’s tale-telling days are over and his crooked ways have been made straight, and every untruth can be revealed. No point in lying: we’ve got it all on tape, as the TV detectives say. If you claim you drove to Nunavut and we think maybe you didn’t, we’ll just look at the E-ZPass records for the toll roads along the way. And if they don’t tell us, the cell phone towers will. Formerly, a cell phone tower could follow a phone only when the phone was on, and smart criminals knew to tur
n it off before committing crimes. Now phones ping the towers and the towers record the presence of the cell phones in the vicinity, often whether they are on or not, and to escape the network’s observation you must remove the battery entirely. Almost everywhere, some degree of electronic connection can be assumed.

  I never took much notice of the satellites going over constantly until I was out in the night in Siberia, with its grand darkness. In the middle of the Barabinsk Steppe or some other nowhere, I always studied the night sky before getting into my tent. Amid the stars’ wild randomness, the little dots of light crossed the heavens on routes as purposeful and direct as a cue-ball shot. I carried a satellite phone myself. Sometimes I would pick a likely looking satellite and shoot a call to it (I thought; actually, the link was more complicated, and to a satellite I didn’t see) and then do something ordinary like make an appointment with my dentist back in New Jersey or talk to my daughter about her week at school. And all this from a region where exiles in former times used to disappear, never to be heard from again.

  A favorite word for the technological fishbowl effect is transparency. Anything you do in far places, and anything that exists out there, can, in principle, be seen. Transparency is one of those words whose real meaning is its opposite, the way that countries with ministries of culture haven’t any. Of course, all the technology known or yet to be known won’t see even a part of everything or stop people from making things up. It’s just that the realm of colorful prevarication has moved inside, where the heart does its sneaking. Most of the gods and demons and fairies and windigos who used to inhabit their own particular outdoor places died off long ago, and modern technology has zapped the survivors. If you want to spin a yarn, it will be about something inward and private, like whether you took steroids.