The Best American Travel Writing 2016

by Bill Bryson

  But Baltic is based in Kaliningrad, a haven for organized crime, and the Russian government doesn’t generally interfere with anything that goes on there. Baltic has yet to be fined, and even if international monitors were to step in, it would be difficult for them to do so. Baltic’s headquarters are hidden away with no signage on the building, and there’s a good chance that many Kaliningrad residents don’t even know the place exists.

  Because they aren’t sold commercially, Jin Ling cigarettes are not well known in Russia, a country, like Ukraine, that loves its cigarettes. If Baltic Tobacco were to sell its cigarettes legally in Russia, the company would have to play by some of the government’s rules, and it has no interest in that. That’s because there are plenty of places where Jin Lings can be found all throughout Europe—all on the black market.

  Jin Lings are in a perfect position to be trafficked all over Europe. Kaliningrad is geographically separate from the rest of Russia, sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland with a sizable coastline on the Baltic Sea. Jin Ling cigarettes can easily be smuggled on land through Kaliningrad’s two former Soviet bloc neighbors. They have made it as far as Britain, and in case anyone needs a highly ironic reminder, all packs of Jin Lings have a duty-free sticker on them. (They also don’t include any of the EU-mandated health warnings.) In Britain, it’s common for Jin Lings to be sold door-to-door in poorer housing developments or at convenience stores. Less officially, traffickers open their trunks and sell the cigarettes directly from their cars to customers.

  In 2007, 258 million Jin Ling cigarettes were seized by European officials. But Baltic Tobacco isn’t simply dodging taxes. In 2012 a house burned down due to a woman leaving a cigarette unattended. All legally produced cigarettes must comply with a law requiring a cigarette to self-extinguish if the smoker leaves it unattended. In this case, the unregulated Jin Ling kept smoldering and a 71-year-old woman died in the fire. In 2014, in another raid of Jin Lings, officials discovered some of the cigarettes contained asbestos. But even with all these deterrents, Jin Ling production continues to increase—so much so that the apparent owner of Baltic Tobacco commented that the company is having trouble meeting the demand for its cigarettes. And, one can only assume, since Baltic has little to no interest in the Russian market, the Kremlin doesn’t see any need to do anything about this. As far as they’re concerned, Baltic Tobacco is a huge success story—a homegrown business that employs Russians and keeps the economy growing.

  And in Ukraine and all over the world, there’s little doubt that cigarette smuggling is a way of life.

  I’m guessing the grandmas would have far more misgivings crossing the Ukrainian border in 2015, no matter how desperate they were to smuggle their cigarettes. With fighting raging on for more than a year now in the eastern part of Ukraine, it’s difficult to even ascertain where the borders are anymore.

  For all of us on the smuggling bus in the summer of 2008, we knew we’d have to cross the border twice: once on the Ukraine side and then again a few minutes later as we were about to enter Romania. For the Ukrainian grandmas, this second check was the biggest hurdle to clear.

  Once we’d reached the Romanian border, the bus driver stopped and called out to the passengers. More hands shuffled and more U.S. dollars were passed forward. A border guard rapped on the door to indicate that we should all exit the bus.

  Once again, we all gathered up our luggage and filed off. Unlike the quick Ukrainian border check, however, on the Romanian side, we waited for several minutes. I began to sweat once again, and this time I could see that my fellow smugglers were sweating, too.

  The first one to be searched was the bus driver. With the wad of greenbacks protruding from his back pocket—this had to be part of the plan, right?—he stepped forward once the three Romanian border guards showed up. Their black guns seemed to leap out at all of us. But maybe three men on the border patrol just meant that the total bribe money would end up being a little steeper.

  When the first guard asked the driver to show him his Hugo Boss bag, I figured we were getting another up-close look at the sham of an international border check.

  But the Romanian guard didn’t stop at the top of the bag. Removing a single sweater, he revealed the cartons upon cartons of Marlboros beneath it. Furious, the guard started shaking his head. The bus driver started talking to him, pleading with him, but the guard was having none of it. He yelled at the bus driver, who appeared to be trying to plead his case. I wondered if the American money in his back pocket would come into play.

  Instead, another guard confiscated the bags and banished the bus driver back to the line. His head down, he retreated as the first woman was summoned forward.

  “I don’t think this is going well,” I whispered to Erin, looking at my own backpack on the pavement and trying to ascertain if my carton of Marlboros was visible from the outside.

  More yelling followed from the border patrol. They’d taken the clothes off the top of the grandma’s Hugo Boss bag, too. She was berated and then dismissed without her cartons. I could see tears streaming down her wrinkly cheeks.

  The border patrol stopped after the third smuggler’s bag was searched, and summoned over two more guards. The five of them stood next to the piles of Hugo Boss bags they’d confiscated, seemingly discussing how to handle the situation. They hadn’t inspected any of the women’s bodies, but the plastic bags contained the great majority of the cigarettes. Part of me wondered if maybe this was still part of the plan; maybe the guards were using this as a tactic to extract an even larger bribe.

  “Please tell me,” Erin said quietly, “they’re not going to check your bag.”

  The meeting of the border patrol broke up, and two of them headed right for the middle of the line, where Erin and I were standing with the British man.

  They were coming for us.

  In the same authoritative tone, the guards pointed at us and roared, “Bag-gaj! Bag-gaj!”

  Terrified, I looked down to my two bags in front of me and did the only thing I thought might save my skin: I grabbed the smaller, cigarette-free bag and offered it up to the border guard. He interrupted me with his booming, irritated voice.

  Oh shit, I thought. I’m screwed.

  But as the guard continued yelling, I could see that he wasn’t looking at me anymore; he just kept pointing to the bus.

  “Hey,” I said, “I think he’s telling us we can go back to the bus.”

  “Are you sure?” Erin countered.

  The pointing continued, and the British man chimed in.

  “Yeah, I think they’re telling us to go—telling us to get our bags and head to the bus.”

  With this, the guard nodded his head. I grabbed my bags and tried to act like I wasn’t about to flee wildly. Once back on the bus, we quietly settled into our seats.

  Erin was the first to speak.

  “I can’t believe what’s going on. Can you? What in the world is going to happen to all of them?”

  “I have no idea,” I responded as I shoved the backpack containing the Marlboros as far under the seat as I could.

  Of course they were breaking international laws, but these weren’t exactly hardened criminals. Their smuggling was only a drop in the bucket of much larger worldwide operations. The cigarettes they intended to sell in Romania for probably double the price they’d purchased them most likely helped feed their families. And from what I’d seen in Ukraine, there wasn’t an abundance of economic opportunities for women like them. While they were clearly committing a crime, knowing that they were in the process of getting caught, I started to wonder if I saw them as the victims.

  A few minutes later, the grandmas started to rejoin us on the sweaty bus. The first came flying up the stairs in a huff, peeling away at the layers of clothing on her body, revealing a multitude of Marlboro packs fastened to her arms as she headed to the back.

  In all, only seven or eight of them returned. These were the best disguise artists, as far as I could tell. The rem
ainder—at least 30 women—we never saw again.

  The last person to reenter the bus was the driver, also looking relieved. He wiped his face and headed straight for me.

  “Cigareta! Cigareta! Cigareta!”

  When I withdrew the Marlboros from my backpack and handed them to the driver, he held them so close to his face that I thought he might kiss the carton. It was the only one of the 500 we’d left Ukraine with to make it across the border. As he marched to the front of the bus, I noticed his pockets no longer contained any U.S. dollars. But he was focused on the glory of his one carton of cigarettes—a carton that might net him $10 of profit in Romania. For a country where the average annual income per person in 2008 was around $3,900 U.S., that one carton of cigarettes certainly meant something to the bus driver. By the time 2015 rolled around, the per capita GDP was exactly the same in a country that’s struggling mightily to move forward economically. Every pack of smuggled cigarettes counts.

  We had no idea what happened to the rest of the smugglers; were they fined, jailed, warned, barked at, or just left on the side of the road? Perhaps Philip Morris had a shuttle ready to pick them up and take them back to the factory so they could buy more cigarettes. Perhaps they’d dive back into the smuggling ring. This was, after all, a profitable business when you didn’t get caught.

  The driver started the engine and we rattled along the bumpy Romanian road. As he swerved to avoid potholes, he lit a cigarette and started puffing away. I still didn’t understand the appeal; at the age of 29, I’d never even smoked a cigarette.

  The green, hilly forests of northern Romania whisked by us as we gazed out the window. We passed a dilapidated farmhouse painted a faded red. In the distance, an older woman was bent over, working in the fields. As she glanced up at us and waved, I wondered which brand of cigarettes she smoked.

  KEA KRAUSE

  What’s Left Behind

  FROM The Believer

  If you’re from Seattle, like me, you learn early in life that Montana is spacious, touristy, and full of wayward relatives who knocked off the grid a long time ago. You know about Glacier and Yellowstone and the lax speed limits on the swaths of flat, endless highway beneath limitless skies. And of the few big towns in the state, you know sparse details: Helena is the capital, Missoula is a liberal stronghold, and in Butte a flooded copper mine—the nation’s biggest body of toxic water, called the Berkeley Pit—functions as a town monument, a plaguing reminder of the price of industry, and, for some, a lab of curiosity. Montana is a weird, wide-open space—it’s the 4th-largest state in the country, but 48th in population density; a place where you can still write personal checks for groceries, where bars feature attractions like live mermaids, and where Americans and mine waste alike are seemingly left alone to do whatever they want.

  For years, as you approached Butte along I-90, all-you-can-eat-buffet-style billboards recommended the bizarre detour of the Berkeley Pit, marketing mine waste as historic pollution worth visiting. A massive hole filled with battery-acid-strength water, the signs suggested, isn’t a far stretch from picnicking at a battleground or an old fort, retired sites from a different sort of war. Eventually, administrators realized that advertising the pit as a tourist attraction was damning to the town’s reputation and took down the enticing signage, but visitors can still pay two dollars and, from a viewing stand, enjoy a recorded history of the town and the breathtaking vista of one of the greatest American copper-mining calamities of the 20th century.

  Butte’s history has all the heroic and romantic trappings of Wallace Stegner’s nostalgic frontier saga Angle of Repose. After fortune-seekers panning for gold in Butte in the 1850s couldn’t find any, the town was nearly left to return to nature. With only a handful of tacit laws keeping the peace, and without a mother lode, most men moved on. But miners working for one persevering entrepreneur named Marcus Daly, who had the copper version of the Midas touch, discovered a massive vein of the brown metal in 1882 and transformed Butte into the biggest copper-producing city in North America and, at one point, the entire world.

  Upon my first visit I knew about the grandiose Butte lore and the pit, and I knew the word “perpetuity,” which the Environmental Protection Agency appropriated while deeming the pit a Superfund site under the EPA’s remediation program. The word was potent and suggested lifetimes: of scars, of people, of a pit—challenges that come without instructions. Everyone deals with their own disasters in perpetuity, and at the time I had my own: gray teeth and a crisscrossed lip from an accident years ago, a hastily instigated breakup, friendships lost in gulfs of my neglect. This was how the people of Butte would deal with the pit as well: perpetually, for a very long time.

  The morning I met Joe Griffin, the state of Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality representative, I got into his car without knowing where he was taking me. My Virgil in a dusty Subaru, Griffin led me on a twisting road away from Uptown Butte, through intermittent neighborhoods with boarded-up Craftsman bungalows, rusted-out cars, and the skeletal remains of bars and businesses, their irrelevant signs still dangling from chains with joints that creaked in the light summer breeze.

  We came to a final stop in front of the fenced-in Bell Diamond mine, its gate guarded with a heavy chain. The air smelled of hot springs and hard-boiled eggs, and the elemental presence of sulfur clung to my hair and clothes like campfire smoke. Unbeknownst to me, the reason we were at this particular mine wasn’t to observe the steel, mantis-shaped headframe that once lowered men and horses nearly a mile underground, nor to marvel at the ground itself, sparkling with feldspar and pyrite like a mirror-ball. Instead, we had come to take in the view of the Berkeley Pit, which, upon first take, surprised me with its similarity to a natural lake that might hold minnows, boats, and swimmers.

  Panoramically, Butte doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. What most people would consider a downtown area—a space with tall buildings, museums, bars, restaurants, and government complexes—in Butte is called “Uptown” because it’s higher than everywhere else. Everywhere else is called “the Flats”: a suburban valley populated with big-box stores and car dealerships. Uptown, the metropolitan center, is an art deco masterpiece, a six-square-block area with a cluster of nationally protected buildings that are handsome and important the way Wall Street’s once were. But overshadowing its stately and peaceful vista was the treeless pit, looking diamond-cut with its precise edges forming a mile-long, half-mile-wide arrowhead filled with water so brown it looked thick.

  The damage of the pit, in its absurd scale relative to the town, signals the historic pillaging of the land. The discovery of copper beneath Butte coincided with the development of the filament light bulb, a product whose mass production necessitated an abundance of copper wiring. Since Montana would not become a state for another decade, copper companies were left to pursue their own interests without regulation. Butte became an ant farm, with mining corporations ultimately digging out 10,000 miles’ worth of tunnels under the town, a distance that could comfortably span from New York to Singapore.

  Heap roasting was a common technology that used heat to convert sulfides in crushed rock into oxides that could then be smelted and refined into valuable ore. In the process, piles of rock, often the size of city blocks, were set on fire and allowed to burn for days. Smelting was just as noxious, producing excesses of smoke and another form of waste called slag, a muddy slush that would then get dumped from factories into nearby waterways. Silver Bow Creek, which runs through Butte, became a flowing mine-waste disposal site. Smoke from smelting engulfed the town; residents complained about not being able to see across streets. Cattle and other livestock died of arsenic poisoning. Trees ceased to grow.

  In 1955 Anaconda Copper, the largest mining company in Butte, adopted the technique of open-pit mining, whereby land is terraced away to create a spiraling hole in the ground. The company proceeded to dig the Berkeley Pit, a hole big enough to accommodate the Eiffel Tower, near the center of Uptown Butte, d
isplacing hundreds of residents and ruining the morale of the blue-collar mining community.

  Some geological nuances contributed to the environmental problems developing in Butte. The ground beneath the town is an alluvial aquifer, and consists of a watery porousness similar to the way fish-tank rocks sit loosely together. One of several abundant minerals in this soil is pyrite—fool’s gold—which, when exposed to air and water, produces sulfuric acid. For years, companies spent significant time and money pumping groundwater out of mine shafts to accommodate tunneling miners, inadvertently also keeping Butte’s pyrite dry. But when the oil company ARCO bought Anaconda in the late 1970s, copper was at its lowest price in years. To save money, ARCO decommissioned the nearly 100-year-old pumps. As the water rose, it reached the pyrite in the porous soil, producing sulfuric acid and mixing with the already existing pollutants. In 1983, once the tunnels flooded, the next thing to fill was the pit.

  Catastrophe-wise, the pit falls in the middle of the spectrum. The Bingham Canyon copper mine, outside Salt Lake City, is nearly three times its size. Entire coal towns, like Centralia, Pennsylvania, have been evacuated because inextinguishable fires burn for years in mines beneath their streets. Though Griffin and I gazed out on a scene that was conclusively bad for the environment, I would learn that the pit struggles with a Goldilocks dilemma. While it isn’t more disturbing than other sites, it remains the biggest body of contaminated water in the United States, and is essentially a walkable mile from Uptown—so close you could run errands to it on a lunch break. A sense of urgency also distinguishes the pit from those other sites: the contaminated water here is rising. If it reaches what the EPA has designated the “critical water level,” which it is expected to do by 2023 without intervention, it will reverse its course and flow back into the water table. To prevent this, the plan put in place via Superfund is to pump and treat the pit water in perpetuity.