My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Susan Orlean

  Susan Orlean

  MY KIND OF PLACE

  Travel Stories from a Woman

  Who’s Been Everywhere

  RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART ONE: HERE

  Lifelike [SPRINGFIELD, IL]

  A Place Called Midland [MIDLAND, TX]

  Beautiful Girls [PRATTVILLE, AL]

  Party Line [DIMONDALE, MI]

  Madame President [NEW YORK CITY, NY]

  All Mixed Up [QUEENS, NY]

  The Lady and the Tigers [JACKSON, NJ]

  Super-Duper [MIAMI, FL]

  PART TWO: THERE

  The Homesick Restaurant [MIAMI, FL, AND HAVANA, CUBA]

  Rough Diamonds [HAVANA, CUBA]

  The Congo Sound [PARIS, FRANCE]

  Like Waters and Chocolate Pancakes [HEVIZ, HUNGARY]

  Shooting Party [BIGGAR, SCOTLAND]

  Fertile Ground [BHUTAN]

  Do We Transcend Before or After We Purchase

  the Commemorative Eel Cakes? [MOUNT FUJI, JAPAN]

  Game Plan [SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA]

  The Place to Disappear [BANGKOK, THAILAND]

  PART THREE: EVERYWHERE

  Homewrecker

  The World

  Skymalling

  We Just Up and Left

  Art for Everybody

  Intensive Care

  Royalty

  Uplifting

  My Life: A Series of Performance Art Pieces

  Shiftless Little Loafers

  Where’s Willy?

  Shadow Memory

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Susan Orlean

  Praise for My Kind of Place

  Copyright Page

  For John

  Introduction

  I travel heavy. This is probably something of a surprise, since you might well assume that someone who travels as much as I do would be the sort to throw a T-shirt and a toothbrush into a paper bag and go. Unfortunately, this is not the case. I deliberate endlessly before I travel; I pack and repack; I am shamed by how much I’ve packed, and then, as penance, I force myself to remove a few items; then I capitulate, put everything back in, add one or two more things just to be safe, and at last, burdened and beaten, limp to the airport or the train station or the parking garage with my gross overload. Why do I do it? I’ve decided that it is a sort of passage I have to make before making my true passage—it’s my ritual of clinging to the familiar before entering the unfamiliar, my resistance to leaving the comforts of home for the displacement of travel, of being a stranger embarking on exploration.

  This might make me sound like a reluctant traveler, but I’m not at all; I’m only a reluctant packer. I’m a passionate voyager, and as soon as I can force the locks shut on my overstuffed suitcase, I’m eager to head out the door. I love the jolt you get from travel. I love the freshness and surprise of being in a new place, the way it makes even the most ordinary things seem extraordinary and strange. It makes me feel extra-alive. The things that are routine in a familiar place are thrilling somewhere new; things I don’t notice at home jump out at me when I’m traveling. As soon as I get out of town, I love stopping for gas so I can poke around the gas station minimarket; besides the usual, ubiquitous junk food and cigarettes, there are always odds and ends that reveal the character of the place. Those serendipitous discoveries are my addiction. I found a real raccoon-skin Davy Crockett hat for sale in a gas station in Tennessee; a hand-printed pamphlet—the biography of a famous local giant—among the mass-market magazines in a convenience store in Florida; homemade barbecue beside the Doritos and Slim Jims in a minimart in Missouri. These are little tokens of what make all journeys seem so promising, so loaded with possibility—full of the yet unseen, the impossible to imagine, the still unknown.

  I’m a sucker for going places that sound wonderful, of course, but I’m even enthusiastic about places that don’t. This quality sometimes vexes the people around me. Years ago, I had some reporting to do in Houston. I was, as usual, excited about the trip. I mentioned it to a friend of mine who had lived in Texas for a few years, and he warned me that Houston was a drag. I said that I couldn’t imagine how it could be, since it was a major city in an interesting state full of interesting industries like oil and gas, and in my opinion that guaranteed that it would be a great place to explore. My friend was disgusted. “Believe it or not,” he said, “there are places in the world that even you wouldn’t find interesting.” I will confess that he was almost right: Of all the places I’ve been, Houston was one of the hardest to love, but its blankness and shapelessness fascinated me and made a great backdrop to the story I had gone there to see.

  THIS IS A COLLECTION of pieces about journeys. With one or two exceptions, they aren’t what are ordinarily described as “travel writing”; they are not prescriptive or advice giving, and they don’t review whether or not you get your dollar’s worth out of the local hotels. In some cases, these are stories that came about because I was interested in the place itself. For instance, I got the idea to write about Khao San Road in Bangkok—the street where all the backpackers and hitchhikers and hair braiders in the world converge—because I was in Bangkok changing planes (coincidentally, I happened to be on my way back from reporting another one of these pieces, “Fertile Ground,” in Bhutan) and had some time to kill. A young couple I had met on the plane had told me a little bit about Khao San, and on a whim I hopped in a cab to take a look. I found it such an amazing scene that as soon as I got home and emptied my suitcase, I packed again and returned to Bangkok to spend a week walking up and down the road. I decided to write about Midland, Texas, because it was being mentioned so often—and so significantly—as a building block in George W. Bush’s personality that it seemed like a place worth understanding and describing in order to have an idea of what sort of building block a place like Midland might be. Likewise, Mt. Fuji loomed: It is so embedded in Japanese semiotics and symbolism that it has always struck me as being less a place than an almost living thing, yet I had no real idea of what it was like as a physical place. When my editors at Outside asked me where in the world I’d like to go, Mt. Fuji was the first thing that came to mind. It was also nice to climb a mountain that sounds a lot bigger and more challenging than it really is; of all my travels, it is the one that has afforded me the most extravagant and undeserved bragging rights.

  Other stories included here started with narratives, and the places emerged as characters only after my reporting began. When I set out to write about a woman in New Jersey who had twenty-seven or so tigers in her backyard, the operative concept seemed to be “tiger,” not “New Jersey.” The tigers were certainly the centerpiece of the story, but I found myself equally interested in the setting and in the idea that when the Tiger Lady had first moved in, her corner of southern New Jersey was wild and empty and remote—in other words, the sort of place where you might indeed have a few dozen tigers in your backyard without anyone noticing—and that the arc of her troubles followed the arc of the area’s development, drawing an almost perfect picture of how rapidly and dramatically a rural place can change. I’m not good at fitting my stories into categories, and many of them can be described as any number of things—profiles, essays, reporter-at-large, whatever—but these are stories that I think of most in the context of place. When I wrote these pieces, the sense of where I was—of where the stories were
unfolding—seemed to saturate every element of the experience, to inform it and shape it, and to be what made the story whole.

  TO BE HONEST, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the Odyssey, Chaucer, Ulysses—that isn’t explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don’t actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I’ve seen. I picture my readers having the same expedition, in an armchair, as they begin reading one of my pieces and work their way through it, ending up with the distinct feeling of having been somewhere else, whether it’s somewhere physically exotic or just the “somewhere else” of being inside someone else’s life.

  The farthest I’ve ever gone for a story was Bhutan, which is on the other side of the world. In fact, since it is literally on the other side of the world, I used one of my trips there to satisfy a lifelong desire: Instead of doing a round trip there and back, I flew around the entire world, stopping in Bhutan in between. The closest “travel” story I’ve ever done is the piece called “Homewrecker,” in which the roles of visitor and visitee were reversed—it is a story about how someone (almost) made a journey into my own home, which was a peculiar experience for someone like me, whose professional life involves going into other people’s houses. The most difficult trip I’ve ever taken for a story was probably one that was just a few blocks from home, to Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Manhattan. Even though the person I wrote about—the president of the student body—was a buoyant and witty young woman, the school struck me as a harsh, hard place, ground down and depleted, and what made it difficult was reconciling this with the fact that it was just a few blocks from my very comfortable apartment. The easiest trip I’ve taken for a story, hands down, was the one I took to visit three lavish spas in Thailand. I prefer going on my reporting trips alone, and since I often go to unglamorous places like Midland, Texas, and Jackson, New Jersey, I rarely have to fend off friends and family who want to keep me company. In the case of the spa trip to Thailand, though, I had a waiting list of volunteers who told me they were very, very concerned about my taking such a long, difficult trip all alone.

  A FEW YEARS AGO I was asked to speak on a panel about travel writing. A week or two before the panel, the catastrophic attacks on the World Trade Center took place. During the weeks and months that followed the attacks, nothing seemed to matter—or at least nothing except those things that could be shown to matter even through the heavy shroud of that event. The panel on travel writing went on as scheduled, and one of the first questions we were asked was what we thought would happen to travel writing in the new world that 9/11 seemed to have brought forth. I thought it was a legitimate question. Should anyone write about—or read about—what it’s like to snowshoe through Alaska or raft in Costa Rica when the world seemed to be falling apart? Would anyone in his or her right mind have any interest in leaving home when the universe seemed so threatening? What I said then, and still believe, is that human beings are stubbornly and persistently curious and that I can’t imagine we will ever lose our desire to know about what lies beyond our immediate horizon. At a time when the world feels chaotic and frightening, writers who go out to see it and describe it seem more important, not less. Even fluffy, expository stories about pretty places matter if people are less inclined to travel, since then the writer acts as the reader’s proxy, bringing back the world that most people might be reluctant to go out and see for themselves. At the most elemental level, the world’s troubles are the result of people turning inward and turning away from whatever and whoever is different and unfamiliar. If a writer can make even one reader feel more open to someone or someplace new, I think he or she has accomplished something well worth doing.

  What do you get for all this travel? Lots of frequent-flier miles, of course. I’ve ended up with a passport that is stamped, ink stained, dog-eared, creased, and in need of supplemental pages to accommodate the piling on of seals and visas. Also, I am seized repeatedly by epiphanies (or what I mistake for epiphanies) about how to travel well: how to conquer jet lag (stay up until the proper time to sleep, no matter how bad you feel); how to master suitcase selection (I’m now very big on wheelie bags and down on soft luggage); how to pack (never go anywhere without a sweatshirt, a string of pearls, and a big, elegant scarf, which can be used as a dress, a shawl, a skirt, a shrug, a blanket, or a tent, and try, try, try not to overpack); and how to find my bearings in a new place (hang out in a coffee shop, strike up a conversation with anyone willing to talk, read the local papers, spend a day walking around downtown, stop in at garage sales and open houses and flea markets and fairs). Travel quietly.

  Probably the most valuable lesson I’ve learned after these years of travel is how to bear being lonely. There is nothing that has quite the dull thud of being by yourself in a place you don’t know, surrounded by people you don’t recognize and to whom you mean nothing. But that’s what being a writer requires. Writing is a wonderful life—a marvelous life, in fact—but it is also the life of a vapor, of floating in unseen, filling a space, and then vanishing. There are times when I’m traveling, when I’m far from home, that I am so forlorn that I can’t remember why I chose this particular profession. I yearn to be home so fiercely that I feel as though my heart will pop out of my chest. And then I step out and see the world spread out around me. I know where I’m heading: I am heading home. But on the way there, I see so many corners to round and doors to open, so many encounters to chance upon, so many tiny moments to stumble into that tell huge stories, that I remember exactly why I took this particular path. The journey begins again; the story starts over; I gather myself and go out to see what I can see and tell it as best I can, and the beckoning of home is always, forever, there, just over the next horizon.

  HERE

  Part One

  Lifelike

  As soon as the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships opened, the heads came rolling in the door. There were foxes and moose and freeze-dried wild turkeys; mallards and buffalo and chipmunks and wolves; weasels and buffleheads and bobcats and jackdaws; big fish and little fish and razor-backed boar. The deer came in herds, in carloads, and on pallets: dozens and dozens of whitetail and roe; half deer and whole deer and deer with deformities, sneezing and glowering and nuzzling and yawning; does chewing apples and bucks nibbling leaves. There were millions of eyes, boxes and bowls of them, some as small as a lentil and some as big as a poached egg. There were animal mannequins, blank faced and brooding, earless and eyeless and utterly bald: ghostly gray duikers and spectral pine martens and black-bellied tree ducks from some other world. An entire exhibit hall was filled with equipment, all the gear required to bring something dead back to life: replacement noses for grizzlies, false teeth for beavers, fish-fin cream, casting clay, upholstery nails.

  The championships were held in April at the Springfield, Illinois, Crowne Plaza hotel, the sort of nicely appointed place that seems more suited to regional sales conferences and rehearsal dinners than to having wolves in the corridors and people crossing the lobby shouting, “Heads up! Buffalo coming through!” A thousand taxidermists converged on Springfield to have their best pieces judged and to attend such seminars as “Mounting Flying Waterfowl,” “Whitetail Deer—From a Master!,” and “Using a Fleshing Machine.” In the Crowne Plaza lobby, across from the concierge desk, a grooming area had been set up. The taxidermists were bent over their animals, holding flashlights to check problem areas like tear ducts and nostrils and wielding toothbrushes to tidy flyaway fur. People milled around, greeting fellow taxidermists they hadn’t seen since the last world championships, held in Springfield two years ago, and talking shop:

  “Acetone rubbed on a squirrel
tail will fluff it right back up.”

  “My feeling is that it’s quite tough to do a good tongue.”

  “The toes on a real competitive piece are very important. I think Bondo works nicely, and so does Super Glue.”

  “I knew a fellow with cattle, and I told him, ‘If you ever have one stillborn, I’d really like to have it.’ I thought it would make a really nice mount.”

  That there is a taxidermy championship at all is something of an astonishment, not only to the people in the world who have no use for a Dan-D-Noser and Soft Touch Duck Degreaser, but also to taxidermists themselves. For a long time, taxidermists kept their own counsel. Taxidermy, the three-dimensional representation of animals for permanent display, has been around since the eighteenth century, but it was first brought into popular regard by the Victorians, who thrilled to all tokens of exotic travel and especially to any domesticated representations of wilderness—the glassed-in miniature rain forest on the tea table, the mounted antelope by the front door. The original taxidermists were upholsterers who tanned the hides of hunting trophies and then plumped them up with rags and cotton, so that they reassumed their original shape and size; those early poses were stiff and simple, the expressions fairly expressionless. The practice grew popular in this country, too: By 1882, there was a Society of American Taxidermists, which held annual meetings and published scholarly reports, especially on the matter of preparing animals for museum display. As long as taxidermy served to preserve wild animals and make them available for study, it was viewed as an honorable trade, but most people were still discomfited by it. How could you not be? It was the business of dealing with dead things, coupled with the questionable enterprise of making dead things look like live things. In spite of its scientific value, it was usually regarded as almost a black art, a wholly owned subsidiary of witchcraft and voodoo. By the early part of the twentieth century, taxidermists such as Carl E. Akeley, William T. Hornaday, and Leon Pray had refined techniques and begun emphasizing artistry. But the more the techniques of taxidermy improved, the more it discomfited: Instead of the lumpy moose head that was so artless that it looked fake, there were mounts of pouncing bobcats so immaculately and exactly preserved, they made you flinch.