The Best American Travel Writing 2016

by Bill Bryson

  Festa had spent several years in the north of Italy, working as a technician in a chemical lab, but he was not embarrassed about his southern past. Now 67, he looked like many older Materans, with an orangey skin tone that resulted from spending so much time outdoors when he was young. Marching with him up the hill, I could see that he enjoyed revisiting scenes of his boyhood: the steep path where he had carried water jugs home to his family, the place where he and some friends had accidentally kicked a soccer ball off a cliff. He showed me the outlines of old cisterns and called up the names of farmers who had cultivated the olive and fig trees that now grew wild. Many of his memories were about struggling to get enough to eat: he pointed to a parapet where he had put down bird traps (“I never caught any”), and to the roofs where his family had left almonds to dry. “No one worried about us back then,” he said. “Those were different times.” It had been a community, he remembered, where everyone helped everyone else. As we walked, he bumped into old friends and joked with them in the traditional Materan dialect, which is spoken slowly, with open vowels.

  Festa had a comfortable pension; the Italian system had done right by him in the end. We walked past the Duomo—where he and his 10 siblings and half siblings had been baptized—and past the town’s one outdoor postcard vendor, then followed the narrow path to the Sasso Caveoso, the poorest part of the town, where he had grown up. He had no trouble finding his grotta, now abandoned and exposed to the weather. Mold grew on the walls, and some of the stone facing had flaked off. Archaeologists had dug into the floor, then covered their holes with straw. He remembered that the cave had two functioning lights, installed by the Fascists. Wires still dangled from the cave roof. His parents and his grandparents slept in the front, and he and his siblings slept in the back. Smiling, he said, “Una pazzia totale!”—What madness! He remembered that he and a brother had walked the family pig every evening before putting it in a stall behind their bed.

  Festa’s family left the Sassi in 1959, when he was 11, for Spine Bianche, one of the nearby developments built by the modernists. “We were so happy we jumped on the bed!” he recalled. He now owns his own house, in the north of town. As we drove to see it, I got my first good look at modern Matera. Given the economic difficulties of Basilicata, I was surprised by how vital the place seemed. It was a midsize city, with busy trattorias, a via nazionale that backed up at rush hour, and a dog-shit problem. We drove past a 10-foot-high statue of De Gasperi, the man who had emptied out the Sassi; his hand pointed upward, as if in benediction.

  Festa’s house is about two miles from the Sassi, on a street of flat-roofed two-story buildings that seem to pay homage to the old grotte. The interiors, though, could not be more different. Festa proudly went through his garage to unlock the main door. He showed me pear and grapefruit trees that he was cultivating in a tiny enclosed garden in back, the shiny marble floors, and the two kitchens—one in the basement for days when it was too hot to cook near the living room. Everything sparkled. The Sassi caves are celebrated for their lack of right angles; Festa’s home was a series of perfect squares. Nothing had any history to it, except for one red rotary-dial phone, which was meant to be decorative. “I like pretty things,” Festa explained.

  Around every corner in Matera, it seemed, I came across clusters of new residents—the prime engines of revitalization in the Sassi. Many of the men had two-day stubble and wore jackets that kept them warm inside the caves. Bit by bit, these locals were reviving the city, with Web services, excavations, renovations, or small artis-anal stores.

  Some of them were members of Circolo La Scaletta, a volunteer organization cofounded by Raffaello De Ruggieri, the lawyer who helped lead the charge back into the Sassi. During Matera’s dark time, La Scaletta had functioned like the Guardian Angels, watching over the town’s patrimony; its members had saved rare frescoes and uncovered various cavern churches in the Murgia. “We had to choose between being the children of misery or the children of a proud history,” De Ruggieri recalls. “We chose the proud history.” Over time, La Scaletta expanded to include an organization called Fondazione Zètema. One evening, the Zètema group took me to a museum it had just opened, showcasing the work of José Ortega, a Spanish artist who died in 1990 and spent years working in the Sassi. The museum contained several papier-mâché works inspired by local artisans. The house had been beautifully restored, but it felt clammy; to warm up, I opened some wooden doors and went out onto a balcony. Matera is labyrinthine in the manner of Venice: you never know which direction you’re facing. I was stunned to be met by the panoramic expanse of the Murgia, all empty blackness. Standing there felt almost like falling.

  The members of Zètema suggested that I visit some of the rural cave churches in the area. In Matera, they pointed out, there was a confluence of Eastern and Western Christianity. Some of the town’s Renaissance churches were deliberately built on top of the more Eastern cave churches of an earlier age. In Matera, the new has always covered up the old.

  I decided to seek out a local “rock church” that is nicknamed the Crypt of Original Sin. It can be visited only by appointment, and is situated just outside Matera, along the Appian Way. Above the church is an enormous railroad bridge that connects to nothing—it was part of a failed attempt to link Matera to the main national railway lines. Approaching the cave in a car, I didn’t see anything special. This was no accident: the monks who lived here, 1,200 years ago, did not want to be noticed.

  A small group of Italians were also visiting the church, and so we all descended into a low underground chapel. When the group’s guide turned the lights up, we found ourselves in the presence of half a dozen surprising frescoes. They were in the stilted Byzantine style, but they seemed imbued with an extraordinary modern sensibility: the flat figures looked at you with rounded, lively eyes, as if they might say hello to you on the street. The images, which depicted scenes from the Bible, were the least didactic series of church frescoes I’d ever seen. Mary was a warm, brown-eyed mother holding a baby in her arms. Saint Peter had a beard and mustache, like a Levantine patriarch. The joy of being alive seemed more potent than worries about the Fall. Eve held out to Adam a wonderfully suggestive fig, instead of the usual apple. In an adjoining fresco, Adam raised his arms toward God as Eve emerged robustly from his rib. God was invisible except for his hand; long and delicate, it was the hand of an artist, not that of the muscular world-maker depicted on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Amazingly, the rock church had been entirely forgotten during the war and the years of the Sassi’s depopulation. Now, like so much of Matera, it was found.

  FREDA MOON

  Born to Travel

  FROM AFAR

  I’m waist deep in water that’s brisk only in contrast to the sultry air of a 90-degree day. The sea is the color of the sky, a pale wash of blue, and clear to the sandy bottom. But I can’t see my feet. They’re obscured by my pregnant belly, which is round and taut and frighteningly large. As I stand, acclimating to the faint chill of the Panamanian Pacific, a school of tiny, transparent fish moves toward me like a stampede of Pamplona bulls. Thousands of see-through fish in a see-through sea. I slowly lower myself into the shifting, undulating cloud of marine life, letting the buoyancy of my belly pull me to the surface, where I bob like an apple in a barrel.

  From sea level, I look up at the nearby hillside—steep and cluttered with small, Easter egg–hued homes—and imagine my mother here, in this water, on this island, 35 years ago. At the time, she was 28 and several months pregnant with me, her first child. Her hazy accounts of traveling in Central and South America before I was born—“with you in my belly,” as she invariably puts it—were among the defining origin stories of my childhood. And Isla Taboga, a 50-minute ferry ride from Panama City, was her first stop on a spontaneous, multimonth journey that shaped my perception of travel as much as any of the family trips we would later take. I’m now six years older than my mother was then, a travel writer by profession, and seven months pre
gnant with my own daughter, who is the size of a papaya, according to my smartphone app.

  When my mom learned she was pregnant, a casual late-’70s encounter morphing into a lifelong commitment, my dad was not immediately enthusiastic. It was unexpected, and it took him a while to get used to the idea. Never one to sit around waiting for a man, my mom bought a plane ticket: first from the Bay Area to New York City, then to Panama, then to Ecuador. I’ve always assumed the trip was a simple escape—a sun-seeking last hurrah before single-motherdom, a way to show my dad that she didn’t need him.

  But during my own pregnancy, I’ve thought often about her months traveling in Latin America as a young, pregnant hippie and wondered what that time might have meant to her. A beautiful and creative but intensely volatile woman, Mom struggled with motherhood. The extreme highs and lows that define her temperament were not easy for me or my brother, who is three years younger and has a different father. My relationship with her has been one of the challenges of my life. It is this messiness that has made identifying with my mom now, as I prepare for motherhood myself, feel all the more urgent.

  Though Mom talked about her trip often when I was a kid, it is now more than half her lifetime ago. Her memories, understandably, have become fuzzy and unreliable. My two days on Taboga were less a re-creation of her travels than an extrapolation, an exercise in empathy.

  My parents never did become a couple, but my dad soon devoted himself to fatherhood, and the two of them raised me together-but-separate in rural Northern California. Both were travelers. My mom loved road trips through the American West with unplanned stops at kitschy roadside attractions, Native American powwows, and undeveloped riverside hot springs. Dad’s adventures were fewer, farther between, and more ambitious. When I was 11, he and I spent more than two months traveling in Southeast Asia. Later, during my sophomore year of high school, he bought a sailboat, took me and my brother—who needed a father, so my dad treated him as a son—out of school, and cruised from San Francisco to the Panama Canal with us in tow.

  In the 20 years since, my dad has spent half of each year on that same 44-foot sailboat, Coyote. Having circumnavigated the Car-ibbean, he is now—coincidentally—back on the Atlantic coast of Panama, in Bocas del Toro. So in addition to retracing my mom’s steps, I’ve come to see him.

  The trip began with a two-leg flight from San Francisco to Panama City via Atlanta. Tucked into my passport was an official-looking midwife’s note scrawled on a prescription pad: “Freda Moon is pregnant and healthy. She is able to fly without problems.” But on six flights in two countries over 10 days, my permission slip was never needed. What was needed, though, was a sense of humor.

  At the SFO security check, I zeroed in on the closet-size cylindrical scanning device, eyeing it with a skepticism and concern I’d never had before. When the machines first appeared post-9/11, I’d been interested in their safety, long enough to do a Google search and never think of them again. Suddenly, I felt insufficiently informed. Erring on the side of extreme caution, I asked for a patdown and waited for a “female assist.” When the middle-aged screener finally waved me over, she briefly examined my belly and announced, “You’re having a boy!” She’d had three. She could tell.

  “A girl, actually.”

  The screener’s face turned sour. “But you’re so . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head in disbelief as she slid the back of her hands over my breasts, pausing at the seam of my bra, scrutinizing the wires below my armpit. “Is that your bra?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded.

  “I don’t think you need that much support,” she said, giving me flashbacks to my flat-chested adolescence.

  She moved down, patting at my growing middle.

  “Are those maternity pants?”

  “No,” I said. “They’re just stretchy and rest low on . . .” I stopped midsentence. How did I end up here, I thought, justifying my wardrobe to a stranger as she gropes my crotch?

  Fourteen hours later, I arrived in Panama City, where I was greeted with a simple but glorious sign: a stick figure with a bowling ball belly and an arrow pointing toward an empty lane. I was entitled, it seems, to bypass the snaking customs line—to stroll past the elderly couples with onerous luggage, the exhausted-looking families with small children—and enter a special aisle reserved for diplomats, the disabled, and pregnant women. As I slipped through international immigration and out of Tocumen International Airport in under five minutes, I felt like I was getting away with something.

  When I stepped off the ferry in Taboga the next morning, it was barely 9:00 a.m., but the sun was already pulsing overhead. I was greeted at the dock by a sullen young man in a glorified golf cart. Taboga’s only town, San Pedro, is patterned with a web of paved footpaths, and only a few are wide enough for these comically compact vehicles. After a silent 15-minute ride, I was deposited at Villa Caprichosa, an Italianesque seven-room inn incongruously terraced into the hillside above a tangle of clapboard homes.

  My driver handed me his cell phone. On the line was a woman named Margaret, who explained that she was a friend of the owner, who had to go away unexpectedly. I was given the Wi-Fi password and told there would be no other guests that night, and I was welcome to use the private pool in the upstairs suite. I had the place to myself. It was thrilling, as if I’d stumbled upon an abandoned chateau, front door ajar. But I felt something else too—something out of character and embarrassing: I felt vulnerable. What if I go into early labor, I thought, flashing on a “Signs of Pre-Term Labor” checklist my midwife gave me during my most recent visit. There wasn’t a landline in the room, and my cell didn’t have service. If I shouted for help, would anyone hear? Would someone come?

  Mostly, though, what I felt was hunger. Other than an energy bar I had brought from home, I’d barely eaten since the day before. It was the Monday of Semana Santa, the Holy Week preceding Easter, and San Pedro was sedate. I opted for food at the first open restaurant I saw, the bougainvillea-draped Vereda Tropical, where I had the dining room to myself and was served a tortilla-less rendition of huevos rancheros. Afterward I climbed back uphill to Caprichosa. It was almost noon. The sun scorched, and each concrete step felt like a hurdle. By the time I made it to my room, all I could do was change into a bikini, guzzle water from the mini-fridge, and collapse on the bed beneath a ceiling fan. Two hours later, I woke without having realized I’d fallen asleep. It was my first taste of the tropics as a pregnant woman, and I’d been defeated by a 10-minute walk in the midday heat. I spent the rest of the afternoon alternating between a miniature faux infinity pool and the shade of a red umbrella. From the heights of Caprichosa’s plant- and sculpture-filled terrace, I could see the beach, a narrow shard of sand that at low tide joins Taboga with El Morro, a small, rocky mound just offshore.

  I made my way down to the ocean and am now bobbing like an apple. In the distance, there is a field of freighters that recall childhood games of Battleship. Hulking, rusted beasts with stark paint jobs—black, white, red, and blue—the ships look like floating factories, wrapped in industrial pipes and chugging exhaust. Beyond them, the skyline of Panama City is a metropolitan landscape of jagged jack-o’-lantern teeth. Though Taboga’s beaches are immaculate, it is hard not to think of that field of working ships, that ugly urban runoff. The pool, I tell myself, poses no such risks, and I return to my aerie.

  I wouldn’t say I’m lazy on Taboga so much as purposeless. Twice a day, I walk to one end of town and back again. I stroll the paths and climb the stairs and sit on the beach and register the details of the place: the Catholic altars embedded in concrete walls, the large frogs that startle at my feet, the particular way the evening wind off the water rattles the bougainvillea vines. They’re the kinds of things you notice when you’re alone. Then I think, This is probably the last time I will be alone for a very long time.

  But I don’t feel alone. Not in the way I used to. I now understand why every story of my mom’s time in Central and South America incl
uded me, as if I were a companion, a fellow traveler. What I’d always seen as one of her many eccentricities has revealed itself to be a bond I didn’t know we had. Not the bond of mother and daughter, but the bond of mothers who travel—who insist on traveling even when we are told again and again that having children means our days of travel are behind us.

  As a rule, I don’t think men should receive special praise for being parents to their children. But my dad was an unusual father. A single dad in the late 1970s, before it was cool, he shared me with my mom—an equal parent, by his telling, caring for an infant by himself for days at a time. We’ve always been close, but in recent years we’d lived on opposite sides of the country and I’d seen him less. My pregnancy, and his impending grandparenthood, compelled me to close that gap. Spending more time together became a priority. All the better if I could see him while also being weightless in a warm ocean, drinking maracuyá (passion fruit) juice, eating just-caught fish, and revisiting a place, Panama, that has played a recurring role in my life since before I was born.

  By the time I step off the prop plane and onto the blazing runway in Bocas del Toro, my dad has been here for two months, working on getting Coyote ready for another Canal crossing and its next ambitious passage: a single-handed transpacific sail to Hawaii, perhaps. At 70, he is recovering from his fourth hip replacement. Meanwhile, his dinghy, the small inflatable motorboat that is a cruising sailor’s primary local transportation, was stolen last year and has yet to be replaced. In every way that matters to him, my dad is less mobile than he’d like. When I arrive, he seems restless but eager to introduce me to his friends at the marina, excited by the prospect of me planning and being in charge of our adventures for once.