The Best Travel Writing 2011

by James O'Reilly

  Upon my return to the high desert, I heard all about the horses. At first my neighbors’ frustrated stories amused me. Oh, to live in a place where the biggest problem is a herd of wild horses! But then I saw what all those hooves were doing to the land and the desert, which had seemed so infinite, suddenly became much smaller. I had wanted to believe there was enough room out here for all of us, horses and dogs and coyotes and hares and people, but the chopped ground and suffering grass seemed to prove me wrong.

  One day, out walking the dogs, I was traveling a hoof-chopped path up the mesa south of my house, when I had my first encounter with the herd. I came around a juniper tree and saw the horses ahead on the trail, strung out behind a familiar palomino. They were only a stone’s throw away, alert and agitated. The palomino, their leader, remained steady, searching the air for my scent, watching me intently as the others shifted nervously behind him, ready to bolt. My dogs were fanned out on either side of me, but they remained calm and quiet, waiting to follow my lead. I took one long look at the palomino, raised both hands to him said, “Stay,” and then swiftly cut off the path to the left, heading towards a neighbor’s house not far away.

  I knew the Dunns weren’t home yet and that their one-room adobe was still boarded up, awaiting their return from a summer on the east coast, but I was hoping the skittish herd wouldn’t follow me there. I didn’t run, but I hurried, keeping both dogs just ahead of me. As I approached the house, I stole a look back and my heart skipped. The palomino was following me, with the herd close behind. The dogs and I backed up onto the Dunn’s porch, protected by a few square feet of uneven wooden planks and a knee-high adobe wall. There we faced the herd, gathering ten yards away.

  As the horses lined up facing me on either side of their leader I counted seventeen. They were noticeably colorful—paints and reds and appaloosas—showy, once valuable horses dumped out in the desert. Their coats were roughening, their ribs just barely showing, beginning to show signs of stress, of winter wear. We all stood and watched each other, the dogs the horses and I and in those moments we were the only creatures on Earth. In that remarkable calm, my nervousness gave way to clarity. I had wanted the horses to belong here. I had wanted them to be wild but seeing them all up close, I had to admit they weren’t. Like the dogs, these animals just wanted somebody to follow, a kind person to lead to them to food, to water, to safety. It broke my heart that I couldn’t help them.

  I told the dogs to stay put and walked out slowly towards the herd, talking softly to the horses, holding my hands in front of me, at waist level, palms up, fingers curled slightly to show I had no weapons. A few of them wavered, and began backing away, but the palomino and two others, a paint and a chestnut, took a few curious steps in my direction. I stopped, dropped my eyes and my hands, turned my body slightly sideways and let them come forward. The three approached cautiously, blowing their worries out through their nostrils, ready to bolt should I make a fast move. I breathed evenly and spoke softly and slightly beckoned with my fingers. As they approached, I held out my hand for the brave paint to sniff. Stretching out his thin neck, he tested my skin and then softly lipped my fingers, looking for a handout. I stroked the soft skin of his nose and at my touch he lowered his head and blew a satisfied snort, telling the others I was okay.

  One by one, I went around to the rest of the herd, stroking the tamer ones, giving the skittish ones a kind word from a few feet away. A couple followed me closely, pestering me for more attention, while others backed away nervously, preferring to remain untouched. I remembered my camera and snapped a few portraits. One chestnut, whom I now recognized as part of the pair from last winter, was curious about the camera and seemed to like the snap and whir of the shutter. I don’t know how long I spent with the horses, but by the end of our visit, they were searching for grass and milling about, calm and unconcerned to have me in their midst.

  Back on the porch, the dogs lay quietly. I rejoined them, sat on the low porch wall, praised their calm cooperation and watched the horses. The camera curious chestnut started to approach again, but I held up one hand, palm out and stopped him. After a few minutes, the herd began wandering away, heads low, searching out the few blades of dry grass. As they left I got up quietly, jumped off the edge of the porch and retreated behind the house, out of sight. Before they could notice, the dogs and I reached the edge of the mesa and descended a steep, rocky path, one the horses would be reluctant to follow.

  By December, the desert outside was cold and gray. The herd was still out there, somewhere, but I saw them rarely. A neighbor a few miles down the road was able to get reimbursed for buying a truckload of hay to feed the strays and I had heard they’d been hanging out over there, amassed together on the leeward side of a few sheets of plywood, bunched against the wind.

  Nobody has any easy solutions for what to do with the horses come spring. Every now and then, especially on nice days, I catch myself daydreaming about keeping one or two for myself, taming them to carry me bitless and bareback, but I know that plan is best left a fantasy. For the winter they’ll be warmer as a herd and come spring, I’ll be leaving New Mexico and I can’t take them with me.

  More than anything, I want the horses to stay on the land. Out here, the desert stretches to the horizons, unbroken by fences. If feral horses don’t belong here, in all this space, they don’t belong anywhere and I don’t want to live in an America without wild horses. Some people say there are no such things as wild horses in this country. That even those born free are mere descendents of ranch stock, pioneer horses or Spanish cavalry. Those people have never watched horses run through open space or faced down oncoming hooves while out on a hike. These horses, born captive and set free, may not be truly wild, but this desert is a wilder place with them in it.

  Mary Caperton Morton is a freelance science and travel writer, photographer, and professional housesitter. In the past five years she has lived in nine states—PA, OR, MD, VA, NM, MT, MI, WV, and ME—and hiked in forty-nine out of fifty. Everything she owns, including her two border collie mixes Bowie and D.O.G., fits in a little Volkswagen, and everything she really needs fits in a backpack. Follow her travels at www.marycapertonmorton.com.

  JOEL CARILLET

  In the Fields of My Lai

  “Maybe we can start again…. We’ll start over. But you can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me—why, we’re all that’s been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that’s us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years, and the droughts are us. We can’t start again.”

  —John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

  MS. QUY, HER FACE WRINKLED AND EYES TIRED, sat five feet away. She held her hat in one hand and ran her fingers over the chin strap with the other, fidgeting with it in a way that suggested a mind throwing up memories that needed an outlet. I had never looked into eyes like hers and I had never felt so compelled to say “I’m sorry” for something I didn’t do. But each time our eyes met they became a mirror, and I saw my nationality sitting squarely on my shoulders.

  Just a minute before we shook hands, Ms. Quy had been gathering food for her pigs. Seeing me, a lone visitor across the small stretch of grass, she walked over to take a break from the sun. We were now on the steps of a tiny museum of photographs, but these grounds used to be the hamlet she called home until it was destroyed and her neighbors murdered on the morning of March 16, 1968. I looked toward a ditch less than a hundred meters away and then back at her. I knew that she had once been in that ditch for hours, covered by the corpses of her friends and neighbors, and was one of the very few to survive. Hesitant to ask the question now on my mind, fearing what raw emotions it could stir and how it would affect the seventy-eight-year-old woman hunched over before me, I asked anyway: “How do you feel about Americans today, Ms. Quy?”

  The reflection in her worn-out eyes showed the faces of my countrymen who had once been here, most just a couple years out of high school. They wore uniforms, and t
hey brandished guns and grenades that left scars still visible today on the trunks of palms and in the eyes of Ms. Quy. Most of these former soldiers—about one hundred fifty were involved in the operation—are now in their early sixties and have jobs and families in towns across America. Yet their shadowy forms still linger in the soul of Ms. Quy. At the nearby ditch 170 men, women, and children were cut down, according to the museum, and their blood and last gasps surrounded Ms. Quy as she lay with them, waiting for the Americans to leave before she dared crawl out. Somehow she survived. She was forty-two years old.

  Having cast her stare into the grass, Ms. Quy answered: “I am still very angry. Very angry.” Shifting her stare to the bare wall next to us, she continued softly: “I feel angry, but I don’t know what to do with it.”

  My Lai (pronounced “Me Lie”) is in the history books now, something American students may read about for a few minutes as they rush through their studies. For these distant readers, My Lai is an insignificant and perhaps irrelevant fact of history. It was an event long ago, far away, and having nothing to do with them. For Ms. Quy, however, My Lai was two children, her mother, her neighbors, her home. It was her innocence—or whatever she had left of it after living so long in a land convulsed by war. Like the Oklahoma characters in John Steinbeck’s novel, forced by brutal reality to say goodbye to the only life they knew, Ms. Quy was deeply scarred by her world’s collapse. There is no fresh start when you are forty-two years old and your neighbors and relatives are murdered around you. No wonder she stared at the wall.

  At ten o’clock the previous night a bus had dropped me off in a dark dirt lot on the northern edge of the provincial capital Quang Ngai. A motorcycle taxi then brought me to the center of town, where I checked into a dank hotel room and settled in for a night’s sleep.

  I had come to this part of Vietnam for one reason: to visit My Lai, thirteen kilometers away. I wanted to do this alone and on a motorbike; this way I would be free to explore the countryside at my own pace, wander down dirt paths to meet locals, and have ample time with my thoughts.

  At 9:30 A.M.—after a long search for a place that would rent a motorbike—I pulled out of town. The road was paved and one stretch passed through the shade of pine and eucalyptus trees. Rice paddies and palms, homes and businesses lined it elsewhere. I passed bicycles and exchanged many smiles with the folks on them.

  After half an hour I slowed and turned into a grassy yard, parking the bike in the shade of a tree. I cut the engine and gazed around. So this is the place, I thought. The grounds brought to mind a botanical garden. I thought of other places of slaughter that I had visited and how they have been preserved: Auschwitz, where Germans murdered Jews, has kept its buildings, railroad bed, and fence to remind the world “Never Again.” Deir Yassin, the Palestinian village on the edge of Jerusalem where Jewish forces murdered over one hundred people in April 1948, is not so well remembered and today, rather than being a memorial, is home to a mental hospital and fuel storage depot. I’ve seen other places as well, but I cannot recall ever being in one that both “remembered” and took pains to make the area beautiful. It was a wonderful combination.

  I was alone for only a few moments when a bus of fifteen German tourists arrived. I sat near a coconut palm, waiting for the Germans to leave, and watched them blitz through the museum in an astonishing twenty minutes. Germans, with their own dark history, shook their heads at the photos of Americans making their dark history, and were being led by a Vietnamese guide who certainly wasn’t going to share any of the communists’ dark history. A part of me wished that the museum had devoted a section to remember Vietnam’s own war crimes. But I knew full well that this was, after all, My Lai. It was appropriate to remember the story of the people who lived and died here, and it was the American side that committed the atrocity. I would spend three and a half hours here, and once the Germans were gone I would remain the only visitor.

  Most of the memorial is outdoors, but a small building displays photographs and artifacts. Photo captions read like this:

  “US soldiers looking for air raid shelter of villagers to murder them.”

  “The US soldiers reaching up every house of the villagers to murder.”

  “US soldiers shooting farmers on the way from the village to the rice field.”

  “American People holding demonstration to protest against Johnson’s government for the latter’s directing the aggressive war against Vietnam.”

  I doubted the accuracy of some of the descriptions. The caption stating that Americans were protesting Johnson, for example, was beneath a picture of Americans calling on Nixon to stop bombing Cambodia. Most Americans would expect these captions to describe the military of an authoritarian regime, not their own army, but despite the inaccuracies and occasional overstatement, the photos described a true story. The Vietnamese say that 504 villagers, ranging in age from one to eighty-two, were killed here; some U.S. sources put the figure lower, but not by much. Whatever the number, the photos of the dead are sometimes incredibly graphic. You can imagine what a high velocity bullet does to a woman’s head at close range, or what bodies look like after they have been burned. Perhaps even more difficult is to see a picture of terrified women and children moments before their executions. The last faces they saw were not those of some vague “evildoers;” they were the faces of American men, many of whom probably loved their country, ate apple pie and steak, and watched the NFL. The faces they saw teach Americans that barbarism, far from being something found only in the dungeons of Baghdad or in the mountains near Kandahar, can come from Anytown, USA, too. Ask Ms. Quy and she’ll tell you.

  Driving home the tragedy of My Lai even further were several photos of individual American soldiers who participated in the killing, taken after they returned to civilian life. The museum included a photo of the only American casualty at My Lai, a private by the name of Herb Carter, who suffered what is believed to have been a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot. The final photographs drew attention to two Americans who saved lives in My Lai—Hugh Thompson, a twenty-five-year-old helicopter pilot, and Lawrence Colburn, a nineteen-year-old helicopter gunner. They are respected, honored names in the museum.

  I sat on the floor beside the photos of Thompson and Colburn and took some notes. As I wrote, a young boy, barefoot and wearing well-worn shorts and a t-shirt, squatted quietly beside me. I, too, was silent, taking just a moment to smile and nod at him before turning my attention back to my notepad. The boy stared back and forth between the words I was hurriedly scribbling and the photos of Thompson and Colburn. I was struck by his quietness, and pleased to share the muggy building with someone like him. At some point he reached over and ran one finger up and down the outside of my busy hand, feeling the veins. He then felt the hairs on my arm and tapped on my kneecaps. Still in silence, he walked behind me to feel the padding of my backpack and continued his circle to feel the bracelet on my wrist. The silence only broke when, my notes complete, I turned to ask his name. “Linh,” he replied in a whisper, as if he knew it would be in poor taste to speak loudly among the horrible photographs watching us.

  While Linh had been warming me with his gentle touch and silence, I had copied the following words that describe the moments immediately after Thompson put down his chopper between several fleeing civilians and the soldiers pursuing them:

  If the Americans began shooting villagers, Thompson said, Colburn should turn his machine gun on the Americans. “Open up on ’em—blow ’em away,” Thompson urged him. Colburn turned his gun around to face the GIs, though he was unsure whether he’d be able to open fire [on fellow Americans]. Concerned for their own safety, Colburn wasn’t sure it was a good idea to land in the middle of a combat zone. The pilot confronted the lieutenant in charge [Calley]. He said he wanted to help get the peasants out of the bunker. [Calley] told him the only way to do this was with hand grenades. Thompson shouted that he personally would get them out and told the lieutenant to stay put. With that he w
ent across to the bunker and gingerly coaxed the civilians out.

  Thompson later flew over the ditch where more than a hundred lay dead. He saw a young boy moving among the bodies and sat the chopper down to pick him up, and then flew him to the hospital in Quang Ngai. Ms. Quy would have been somewhere down in that pile as well, scared and wise enough to remain quiet and still.

  My friend Linh vanished as quietly as he had appeared, and I walked outside to the steps alone and leaned on a wall. While watching the old woman I would soon come to know as Ms. Quy, a voice as soft as Linh’s caused me to turn around. Chung, a twenty-five-year-old museum guide wearing a conical hat, a gentle expression, and speaking the English she learned so well in university, wanted to know if she could help with anything. I told her I was fine, just spending some time with my thoughts. She stood quietly for a minute, observing me watch the woman across the way. “That is Ms. Quy,” she eventually said, “one of the survivors.” Suddenly looking upon the old woman with new eyes and interest, I asked Chung some questions about her. When later Ms. Quy walked over to visit and rest, Chung would serve as our translator. Linh would also join us, popping up from behind a bush, and Chung would stun me by saying, “This is Ms. Quy’s grandson.” That simple sentence would affect me more than anything else all day, because this child who had kept me company came so close to never existing. But he exists, and I can still feel his touch on my hand.

  Chung walked with me to the ditch and then to the foundations of several destroyed homes. She said the museum receives an average of thirty visitors a day. I would meet some of them through the visitor book in the reception room as I came to the end of my visit. I took special interest in the words left by Americans, folks like Jennifer Adams of New London, Connecticut, who visited a week before me: