The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  The baby Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin—later Mary Shelley—grew up in a household that would come to include the increasingly cold and taciturn Godwin; his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont; and five children including herself, no two of whom had the same two parents: her older half-sister Fanny Imlay, Mary Jane’s two children, Charles and Claire, and her half-brother, William Godwin Jr., born of Godwin’s second marriage. By all accounts it was a chilly, bookish, and genteelly impoverished childhood, presided over by the invisible ghost of the dead Wollstonecraft, whose portrait hung over the fireplace in Godwin’s study. In graduate school, ever since I had learned about Mary Shelley’s life, my imagination had snagged on this detail. Over and over I pictured the slight girl with light auburn hair—trained from birth to the knowledge that she would uphold her mother’s and father’s intellectual legacies—slipping into her father’s sanctum to gaze at this picture: her only connection, aside from books, to her mother, whose death she must have felt she had caused. Perhaps this is the birth of the braided strands of horror and yearning and guilt that surround sex and childbirth in Frankenstein; perhaps this is the source, a daughter’s secret conviction of her own monstrosity. Perhaps Godwin punished her, in any minor transgression, by shutting her out of the study, not allowing her to gaze on her mother’s face. Perhaps this was the way she punished herself.

  That portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft still hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. It was painted by the Godwins’ friend John Opie in 1797, when she was pregnant with Mary. A few years before, Opie had painted Boadicea Haranguing the Britons, in which a classically robed Boudicca, arm upraised, exhorts her male soldiers to go forth into battle. Her two daughters—as in the statue—huddle close by, sad and drooping. Boudicca’s gaze is firm, her long hair is chestnut-red: comparing the two pictures, I wonder if Opie used Mary Wollstonecraft for his model of Boudicca, consciously or unconsciously. It makes sense.

  I dawdled through the slowly ascending levels of the National Portrait Gallery, shy and intent. There was something loverlike in my approach to Wollstonecraft’s image, because I longed for what it represented: an echo of a woman in that past in whom I could recognize myself, a shadow of a face that could look into mine, a smile that could surround and gather me, speak to me of its own experience and teach me how to meet it. I was naïve. But I wasn’t wrong. We look in lovers—and in friends, and in mentors, and in mothers—for what they can make us into, how they can call us onward and upward out of ourselves, how they can make us into something more.

  And suddenly, there she was. In the upper right corner of the main wall of Room 18 of the National Portrait Gallery—surrounded by portraits of William Wordsworth in the center, Godwin in the upper left, Mary Shelley on the bottom left, and Percy Shelley on the lower right—hangs John Opie’s famous portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft. She sits looking slightly down and to the left, with a small, preoccupied smile. Her auburn hair is gathered under a plain dark cap, her gaze soft. Her hands rest in her lap, one arm curved near her pregnant stomach, which just shows under her simple white gown. Mary Shelley must have stood looking up at this picture too, knowing she was the baby sheltered in her mother’s arm. Standing in front of it, I smiled even as my eyes filled with tears, remembering Wollstonecraft’s words in Letters from Norway: “It appears to me impossible that I shall cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable—and life is more than a dream.” Wollstonecraft’s eyes seemed to shift and shine, the corners of her mouth to quirk deeper into a wry smile as she looked down me, another young female petitioner. Well?

  Compared to her earlier portraits, this is a compassionate face. Mary Shelley’s gazing is so understandable: I would stand and look at this portrait if Wollstonecraft were my mother, too. In a sense, she is, as Boudicca is, as Dicey is. Yet this search for our mothers is complicated. In his account of Boudicca’s army’s initial raids against the Romans, Cassius describes the Britons’ treatment of aristocratic Roman captives: “They hung up naked the noblest and most distinguished women and then cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, in order to make the victims appear to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the entire body. All this they did to the accompaniment of sacrifices, banquets, and wanton behavior, not only in all their other sacred places, but particularly in the grove of Andate. This was their name for Victory, and they regarded her with most exceptional reverence.” Pro-Boudicca historians swallow hard and speculate that maybe Boudicca herself was not present at these “banquets,” that surely she never could have done such things to fellow women. Yet this is disingenuous essentialism: the idea that women are “naturally” more nurturing and supportive of one another than men, that women are “naturally” nonviolent, that women “naturally” express their strength in non-physical, non-masculine ways—which can lead right into a benignly bigoted ghetto, policed by women themselves. Obviously I don’t think skewering enemies is the best sign of womanly strength. But as we search the past for ancestresses who guide us to be the strongest women we can be—physically and emotionally—we need to remember that strength has a range, that violence is present even where we don’t want to see it, that difficulty and complexity and mistakes and historical contingencies are as much a part of our foremothers’ lives as they are of our own. Boudicca wanted to drive the Romans away. She wanted to win. These were the rituals her tribe had been performing against captives for years. She likely saw no reason for things to change.

  Obviously, in my dreamy search for my own ancestresses in America and London—including Dicey Langston, Boudicca, and Mary Wollstonecraft—I’ve been as guilty of idealism as anyone. All I can do is try to be guided by what I think I see in these women at their best moments, and what enables me to keep reaching for it myself: a self-reliant strength of body and mind, tempered with a righteous appetite for justice and with mercy to others and to our own erring, wandering selves. In the Methodist South of my childhood, the Biblical image of “a virtuous woman” held sway, yet it wasn’t until I attended my first Jewish wedding—with Allan—and heard this same scripture translated as “a woman of valor” that its meaning came truly clear. “Virtue” is cloistered and mealy-mouthed compared to “valor,” which suggests the same straightforward, temperate, and merciful courage of body and mind that Wollstonecraft advocated in all her work. The woman of valor not only buys and sells her own land and provides thriftily for her whole household, she is charitable and wise: “she stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy,” reads the King James version of Proverbs, which both Wollstonecraft and Dicey Langston would have known. “Strength and honor are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.” The way to not only survive but to be able to give to others is to become a woman of valor, not afraid to act—including, when necessary, in righteous anger—and to acknowledge complexity. It might not be legal or morally comfortable or right, but I know this about myself: hard as I strive for mercy and peace, I would, like Boudicca, do my best to kill men who raped any daughters of mine. And I would not be afraid.

  Wollstonecraft’s portrait still floats in my mind, right beside the gleam of sunlight off Boudicca’s Thames-side statue. I still see Boudicca’s daughters, too, huddled in her chariot behind the rearing horses, peering around her in a gesture both fearful and supportive. They are bound to her furious, loving onward course, bound to their mother’s path as, in one way or another, daughters always are. In John Opie’s painting of Boudicca, the daughters lean dispiritedly against her, hoping she can incite the men to take up their cause, knowing that as ever she will probably have to do it herself, but for them, she will. Yet his portrait of Wollstonecraft gives us still another image of a mother, pointing us along what seems like a good way for a woman to keep on traveling: go forward in mercy and wisdom, and a little bit of
humor, looking both behind you and ahead, always remembering that a woman of valor is strong in more ways than perhaps even she will ever know.

  A native Alabamian, Amy Weldon is currently associate professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, Story Quarterly, Southern Cultures, Fiction Southeast, and others. She has recently completed a novel, Eldorado, Iowa, and her weekly meditations on sustainability, spirit, and self-respect can be found on her blog, cheapskateintellectual.wordpress.com.

  JOHN FLINN

  Hiking in Grizzly Country—Or Not

  The author wrestles with existential issues.

  Is it possible to be scared out of your wits and profoundly grateful at the same time? Those competing emotions are racing through my brain, although at the moment “scared out of my wits” is out to a commanding lead.

  It’s nearly dawn, and in two hours I’m supposed to be hoisting my backpack onto my shoulders and setting off on a fourteen-mile hike to a backcountry lodge in the Canadian Rockies.

  Alone.

  Through country teeming with grizzly bears.

  A guide was supposed to have accompanied me, but he canceled and no backup could be found.

  “Ah, there’s nothing to be a’scared of,” said the lodge owner. “I’ve been around those bears my whole life. I’ve been this close to them”—he held his hands 3 feet apart—“and I’ve never had any trouble. None at all.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that he sounded just like Timothy Treadwell, star of the documentary “Grizzly Man,” right before he began his journey through the gastrointestinal system of a lip-smacking ursus horribilis.

  It had been shaping up as a bad summer for grizzly encounters. At the moment, four teenagers from an Outward Bound course were recovering in an Alaska hospital after being attacked by a mama grizzly. A couple of weeks earlier, a man had been killed in Yellowstone National Park—to go along with the two killed just outside the park last year—and a few days after I got home from Canada a hiker was mauled in Glacier National Park.

  Everyone I talked to in Jasper agreed that the trail I would be walking was one of the most reliable places around for coming face-to-face with a grizzly. Someone pointed me to a YouTube video, shot two weeks earlier, of an enormous mother and two cubs lumbering alongside the path.

  My courage needed some serious bucking-up, so the night before the hike I went to a lecture on bear safety. The naturalist began with a scary story about a close call she’d once had with a grizzly—on the very same trail I’d be walking, naturally—and stressed that the safest thing hikers could do was travel in a group of four or more.

  (Hiking alone, it occurred to me, deprived me even of solace in the old joke that ends, “I don’t have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you.”)

  The naturalist didn’t think much of my two main lines of defense: Some jingly bear bells designed to prevent surprise encounters—they’re not even remotely loud enough to do any good, she said, but they make great souvenirs—and a canister of “bear spray,” a weapons-grade version of the Mace women carry to fend off muggers. “Sometime it deters the bears,” she said, “and sometimes it just makes them mad. And sometimes the wind blows it right back in your face while the bear is charging.”

  So I think I’ve got the “scared out of my wits” part of my dilemma covered pretty well. What about the “profoundly grateful” part? That’s a little trickier, but hear me out.

  Everyone has his own personal definition of wilderness, and this is mine: A place where humans are not at the top of the food chain. Or, to put a finer point on it: A place where there are creatures who can, and will, without even giving it a second thought, eat you.

  I’m grateful such places exist, and I wish we had more of them. I’ve walked through grizzly country before, always in the company of other people, and it’s a profoundly humbling and energizing experience. Instead of swaggering like the lord and master of your domain, you walk lightly and modestly: You’re just one insignificant creature among many. You’re part of nature—part of the food chain—not aloof and apart from it.

  The potential danger, no matter how statistically slight (and it is slight), triggers a gusher in your adrenal glands that puts your senses on high alert. Your eyesight grows sharper, your hearing more acute. You feel an extra, nervous, spring in your step.

  Normally we are so accustomed to being unchallenged as apex predators that we barely give it a thought. To see things from the other side, to become potential prey, however temporarily, forces us to rethink our place in the world. Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons we travel.

  Now the sky outside is growing light and my alarm clock has just gone off—quite unnecessary, because I haven’t closed my eyes all night. I’ve been too scared. I make a decision, or, rather, admit to a decision I now realize I made hours ago: I’m not going.

  I vow to come back and do the hike another day, when I can line up some partners and won’t have to run the grizzly gauntlet alone. But for now I’m grateful that the bears have a place that is theirs, not ours.

  A truly wild place.

  John Flinn is the former travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

  GARY BUSLIK

  Escape

  Is it really so bad today?

  Not long ago a blogger friend posted, “As a business, travel writing is now in even worse shape than during the Great Depression.” In their desperate need to hear themselves type, some bloggers write silly things and hope no one pays close attention. But as a guy who grew up hearing from my dad how I, a soft, spoiled, English-major dunderhead, would have starved to death during the Depression, my friend’s assertion caught my eye. Was this just self-pitying hot air—a callous flip-off to our travel-writing predecessors who may have suffered hardships my glib blogger could not even imagine? If, on the other hand, what she said was demonstrably true, I would stick the evidence under my father’s Depression-withered face, and finish him off with a resounding “Ha!”

  I liked the prospect. Dad, having always been the cheapest human being on the face of the earth, has saved a few bucks for his old age, and as far as I know, murder by exclamation is not a prisonable offense. Times, indeed, are tough.

  So I decided to get to the bottom of things.

  Between 1929 and 1933, U.S. unemployment exploded from 2 million to 15 million—nearly a third of the country’s labor force (today, nine percent unemployment is almost grounds for impeachment). In those five years, our national income dropped 50 percent—from $80 billion to $40 billion (these days, even a drop of a few percentage points for three consecutive months is considered a full-fledged recession). The sale of durable goods fell two-thirds, and foreign trade was off 65 percent. More than 6000 banks failed, wiping out life savings (today we’re protected by FDIC). Three years after the 1929 crash, the combined income of (formerly) middle-class families had been cut in half, their income from investments reduced to zero. Two families out of five had multiple working-age members unemployed. Bank deposits were drained by 76 percent, and all assets were depleted by 78 percent. Fully half of all homeowners could no longer retain their homes (bought, unlike these days, with substantial down payments) and were forced to walk away with nothing. Unpaid doctor and dentist bills increased 150 percent. The average family income in this group dropped to $1600 per year, the equivalent of only $10,000 today. Former lawyers, bankers, and architects scrambled for the best street corners on which to sell apples.

  And this was in relatively cozy middle-class America. Those in lower income groups (like my dad’s) were in much worse shape. Nearly half of this work force was unemployed. Shack slums sprang up on the outskirts of every town. When they weren’t standing in bread lines, men, women, and children were scouring big-city garbage dumps like vermin.

  Even the wealthy couldn’t hide. Utility magnate Samuel Insull, before 1929 the second richest man in the United States and a decade later on the
lam for unpaid debts in the millions, died in a Paris subway in 1938 with 84 cents and an unpaid laundry ticket in his pocket.

  No one—professionals, laborers, housewives, or their children—was immune. Everyone was scared, desperate, and suffering. This, the gravest economic times the United States had ever known, had come without warning and without social safety nets (the federal government didn’t create its unemployment compensation program until halfway through the Depression, and even then it was useless to those already unemployed). Rich and poor alike were wiped out. There was no place to go, no relative’s, friend’s, or softhearted employer’s doorbell to ring. Even churches closed by the hundreds. No one was home.

  Infrastructure collapsed. In cities, winters were perilous. Electric power often failed for days and weeks at a time, people freezing and groping in the dark, some families (like Dad’s) nearly starving. The countryside fared no better. The cash income of all farmers had dropped from $11 billion in 1929 to $5 billion in 1932. That same year, wheat, cotton, and beef saw their lowest world prices since the mid-seventeenth century.

  During the 1930s, the U.S. population growth fell to an all-time low. People simply could not afford children. The Sears, Roebuck catalog began listing contraceptive wares for the first time. Children already here were (like my father) pulled out of school to make a living as best they could. Elementary schools in New York City, for instance, lost 150,000 pupils. Boy and girl hoboes wandered the roads and rode the rails by the tens of thousands.