The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  I had no one to ask, no GPS to orient me. A stone path lay across the shallowest end of the lake and I took it, convinced it would lead to the jeep track, and hence to Inverie. And sure enough, I found a trail on the other side. I followed it until it disappeared at the edge of a fast-moving river, beyond which lay another loch. The prospect of going back seemed so horrible that I persuaded myself that if I just kept going, I would soon come across that track.

  I followed what I took to be a trail, then lost it again amid the bog and grass and sheep droppings. I walked for another hour, trying to make sense of my location. Finally I came to the far shore of the loch. I saw no trail. It was after 3 p.m.

  I gazed at the sun, trying to determine where it would set, but the days were so long in July that it was still straight overhead. Without a mobile connection, I knew the compass on my phone wouldn’t work, but I pulled it out and clicked the compass anyway. Amazingly, the needle began to spin. I lay the compass on the map and watched as it hit north—exactly opposite of where I thought it should be.

  In that moment, with horrible clarity, I realized that I had taken a wrong turn at the beginning of the trail that morning. The right-hand path I had judged to be the one that led off to the highest mountain was, in fact, the path to Inverie. My current location wasn’t even on the map.

  In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway famously describes how fear, real fear, eradicates your ability to spit. It turns out to be true. In that moment, as I realized that I was lost, I felt a physical terror I hadn’t known before, and my mouth went bone-dry. No one knew where I was. This is how people die in the wilderness, I thought: out of reach, ill prepared, and utterly alone.

  I considered my options, and slowly I accepted that I had to quickly retrace my steps, all 10 miles of them, to make it to Barisdale before dark. I managed to overcome my panic enough to hustle back up the devilish incline, my feet again mud-soaked, my muscles aching. I found myself propelled by the thought that each step erased a small piece of my mistake, and I hiked with tunnel vision. I made it to Barisdale just as the sun was going down and knocked on the estate manager’s door, embarrassed, but perhaps never in my life so glad to see another person. In the cottage, as I cleaned my bleeding, blistered feet, I wondered whether I could catch a boat to Inverie.

  But, motivated mainly by shame, I had my feet bandaged and my pack on at seven the next morning. I walked out along the same trail I had the day before, but this time stayed to the right. The trail turned steeper than the previous day’s. I didn’t even try for 100 steps; I barely managed 20 at a time. The climb seemed endless. If I hadn’t just learned that I could get myself out of a bad situation—even if it meant trekking 20 miles out of my way—I might well have given up. But I kept going.

  Finally I reached the summit. There, as promised, was the pass, and down below, on the other side, a loch. I nearly ran down the hill. Sure enough, the trail came in at the right side. Sure enough, it turned into a wide, flat track. Ninety minutes later, I faced another bay surrounded by peaks. To the right, the white houses of Inverie hugged the shore.

  I went first to the Gathering, a bed-and-breakfast where the owner, Cara Gray, welcomed me with a glass of wine. This, I remembered as I sank into her sofa, was one of the benefits of humans: frequently they will give you alcohol. Gray told me a bit of the town’s tragic history. It was never an easy place to live. “People used to bleed their animals and mix the blood with oatmeal for protein, then sew them back up,” Gray said. During the Highland Clearances in the nineteenth century, Knoydart’s population was obliterated. Landowners decided it was more profitable to turn the land over to grazing sheep than to let crofters (tenant farmers) continue to work on it. All of the peninsula’s nearly 1,000 residents were evicted; some were sent to Canada, and others were left to fend for themselves.

  Gray, like most of today’s 100 or so Inverie residents, was drawn to the spectacular scenery and found the town’s remoteness a lure, not a disadvantage. She saw the lack of cell-phone towers as a good thing.

  There isn’t a grocery store or a doctor in Inverie. To get to those requires a trip by ferry. But Gray can depend on a hundred other souls when the cupboard gets low. “It’s ironic, though, isn’t it?” she said. “Here I was drawn to the isolation, and I end up getting a stronger community than I would have had in the city.”

  Her words resonated with me. Maybe, I thought, what I had been craving wasn’t escape from all human contact—only from certain types. I went into town, such as it was, to test the theory.

  The center of Inverie, both physically and metaphorically, is the Old Forge pub. J. P. Robinet recently bought the place, having first come to Inverie on a stalking holiday, as a hunting trip is called in these parts.

  Determined to maintain the pub’s reputation for sociability, he turns off the Wi-Fi every night. “I want people to talk to each other,” he says. And talk they do. I spent the early part of my dinner gazing out at the bay, but soon conversation was unavoidable. Locals, for whom the pub is the source of all social life, mixed with a few visitors. They drank pints, laughed loudly, and shared plates of fish and chips and steamed mussels.

  A pair in their sixties, a couple of self-proclaimed Munro-baggers (adorable Scottishism No. 3: Munro-bagger = hiker who likes to knock mountains off his/her list), struck up a conversation from the table next to me. “We’ve been coming since 1983,” said Peter. They asked what I was doing there, and, with more than a little embarrassment, I recounted what had happened. They laughed but didn’t make fun of me. Instead, they urged me to try one of the pub’s dozen or so scotches. I asked for guidance, and Peter suggested Talisker, made on the nearby Isle of Skye.

  “Not that one!” his wife, Helen, chided, swatting him. “It’s too smoky.”

  Soon every person within a three-table radius was weighing in on which scotch I should drink. So passionate did the conversation grow that we barely noticed when a few bars of fiddle sawed the air. One by one, diners stood up and assembled at a nearby table. Two guys with guitars joined the fiddle player, and someone else grabbed a banjo off the wall, where the pub keeps instruments for anyone who wants to play. As the musicians picked up speed, a chorus of voices joined them, first on “Irish Rover,” then on Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.”

  It had been three days since I started my trip, three days since the mere presence of others had set me on edge. But my wrong turn in the wilderness had forced me to confront true solitude and, in the process, clarified the source of my previous irritation. It wasn’t all human interaction that was the problem; it was the virtual stuff, the kind of running commentary that comes at you every time you turn on your computer or pick up your phone: a constant flood of irony-tinged banality that is always on. Companionship, help, easy cheer—the interaction I found in the pub—was something altogether different, and altogether welcome. I found myself telling a few stories of my own, eager to keep this passing but real engagement going long into the night.

  The next morning, I took the first ferry out to the village of Mallaig. There were about 10 others onboard, and all but one of them pulled out their phones as soon as the boat crossed back into range. I wasn’t ready for that, however. Spotting the only other person who wasn’t busy scrolling through missed text messages, I sidled up. It was nothing but small talk, but I was glad for the conversation.

  SCOTT ANDERSON

  Lawrence’s Arabia

  FROM Smithsonian

  SIPPING TEA and chain-smoking L&M cigarettes in his reception tent in Mudowarra, Sheik Khaled Suleiman al-Atoun waves a hand to the outside, in a generally northern direction. “Lawrence came here, you know?” he says. “Several times. The biggest time was in January of 1918. He and other British soldiers came in armored cars and attacked the Turkish garrison here, but the Turks were too strong and they had to retreat.” He pulls on his cigarette before adding with a tinge of civic pride: “Yes, the British had a very hard time here.”

  While the sheik
was quite correct about the resiliency of the Turkish garrison in Mudowarra—the isolated outpost held out until the final days of World War I—the legendary T. E. Lawrence’s “biggest time” there was open to debate. In Lawrence’s own telling, that incident occurred in September 1917, when he and his Arab followers attacked a troop train just south of town, destroying a locomotive and killing some 70 Turkish soldiers.

  The southernmost town in Jordan, Mudowarra was once connected to the outside world by means of that railroad. One of the great civil-engineering projects of the early twentieth century, the Hejaz Railway was an attempt by the Ottoman sultan to propel his empire into modernity and knit together his far-flung realm.

  By 1914, the only remaining gap in the line was located in the mountains of southern Turkey. When that tunneling work was finished, it would have been theoretically possible to travel from the Ottoman capital of Constantinople all the way to the Arabian city of Medina, 1,800 miles distant, without ever touching the ground. Instead, the Hejaz Railway fell victim to World War I. For nearly two years, British demolition teams, working with their Arab rebel allies, methodically attacked its bridges and isolated depots, quite rightly perceiving the railroad as the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman enemy, the supply line linking its isolated garrisons to the Turkish heartland.

  One of the most prolific of the British attackers was a young army officer named T. E. Lawrence. By his count, Lawrence personally blew up 79 bridges along the railway, becoming so adept that he perfected a technique of leaving a bridge “scientifically shattered”—ruined but still standing. Turkish crews then faced the time-consuming task of dismantling the wreckage before repairs could begin.

  By war’s end, damage to the railway was so extensive that much of it was abandoned. In Jordan today, the line runs only from the capital city of Amman to a point 40 miles north of Mudowarra, where a modern spur veers off to the west. Around Mudowarra, all that is left is the raised berm and gravel of the rail bed, along with remnants of culverts and station houses destroyed nearly a century ago. This trail of desolation stretches south 600 miles to the Saudi Arabian city of Medina; in the Arabian Desert there still sit several of the war-mangled train cars, stranded and slowly rusting away.

  One who laments the loss is Sheik al-Atoun, Mudowarra’s leading citizen and a tribal leader in southern Jordan. As one of his sons, a boy of about 10, constantly refills our teacups in the reception tent, the sheik describes Mudowarra as a poor and remote area. “If the railway still existed,” he says, “it would be very different. We would be connected, both economically and politically, to north and south. Instead, there is no development here, and Mudowarra has always stayed a small place.”

  The sheik was aware of a certain irony in his complaint, given that his grandfather worked alongside T. E. Lawrence in sabotaging the railroad. “Of course, at that time,” al-Atoun says ruefully, “my grandfather thought that these destructions were a temporary matter because of the war. But they actually became permanent.”

  Today, T. E. Lawrence remains one of the most iconic figures of the early twentieth century. His life has been the subject of at least three movies—including one considered a masterpiece—over 70 biographies, several plays, and innumerable articles, monographs, and dissertations. His wartime memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, translated into more than a dozen languages, remains in print nearly a full century after its first publication. As General Edmund Allenby, chief British commander in the Middle East during World War I, noted, Lawrence was first among equals: “There is no other man I know,” he asserted, “who could have achieved what Lawrence did.”

  Part of the enduring fascination has to do with the sheer improbability of Lawrence’s tale, of an unassuming young Briton who found himself the champion of a downtrodden people, thrust into events that changed the course of history. Added to this is the poignancy of his journey, so masterfully rendered in David Lean’s 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, of a man trapped by divided loyalties, torn between serving the empire whose uniform he wore and being true to those fighting and dying alongside him. It is this struggle that raises the Lawrence saga to the level of Shakespearean tragedy, as it ultimately ended badly for all concerned: for Lawrence, for the Arabs, for Britain, in the slow uncoiling of history, for the Western world at large. Loosely cloaked about the figure of T. E. Lawrence there lingers the wistful specter of what might have been if only he had been listened to.

  For the past several years, Sheik al-Atoun has assisted archaeologists from Bristol University in England who are conducting an extensive survey of the war in Jordan, the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP). One of the Bristol researchers, John Winterburn, recently discovered a forgotten British Army camp in the desert 18 miles from Mudowarra; untouched for nearly a century—Winterburn even collected old gin bottles—the find was touted in the British press as the discovery of “Lawrence’s Lost Camp.”

  “We do know that Lawrence was at that camp,” Winterburn says, sitting at a Bristol University café. “But, as best we can tell, he probably stayed only a day or two. But all the men who were there much longer, none of them were Lawrence, so it becomes ‘Lawrence’s camp.’”

  For most travelers, Highway 15, Jordan’s main north-south thoroughfare, offers a dull drive through a largely featureless desert connecting Amman to more interesting places: the ruins at Petra, the Red Sea beaches of Aqaba.

  To GARP codirector Nicholas Saunders, however, Highway 15 is a treasure trove. “Most people have no idea that they’re traveling through one of the best-preserved battlefields in the world,” he explains, “that all around them are reminders of the pivotal role this region played in World War I.”

  Saunders is at his desk in his cluttered office at Bristol, where scattered amid the stacks of papers and books are relics from his own explorations along Highway 15: bullet casings, cast-iron tent rings. Since 2006, Saunders has headed up some 20 GARP digs in southern Jordan, excavating everything from Turkish Army encampments and trenchworks to Arab rebel campsites and old British Royal Flying Corps airstrips. What unites these disparate sites—indeed what led to their creation—is the single-track railway that runs alongside Highway 15 for some 250 miles: the old Hejaz Railway.

  As first articulated by T. E. Lawrence, the goal wasn’t to permanently sever the Turks’ southern lifeline, but rather to keep it barely functioning. The Turks would have to constantly devote resources to its repair, while their garrisons, receiving just enough supplies to survive, would be stranded. Indications of this strategy are everywhere evident along Highway 15; while many of the original small bridges and culverts that the Ottomans constructed to navigate the region’s seasonal waterways are still in place—instantly recognizable by their ornate stonework arches—many more are of modern, steel-beam construction, denoting where the originals were blown up during the war.

  The GARP expeditions have produced an unintended consequence. Jordan’s archaeological sites have long been plundered by looters—and this has now extended to World War I sites. Fueled by the folkloric memory of how Turkish forces and Arab rebels often traveled with large amounts of gold coins—Lawrence himself doled out tens of thousands of English pounds’ worth of gold in payments to his followers—locals quickly descend on any newly discovered Arab Revolt site with spades in hand to start digging.

  “So of course, we’re part of the problem,” Saunders says. “The locals see all these rich foreigners digging away,” he adds wryly, “on our hands and knees all day in the hot sun, and they think to themselves, ‘No way. No way are they doing this for some old bits of metal; they’re here to find the gold.’”

  As a result, GARP archaeologists remain on a site until satisfied that they’ve found everything of interest, and then, with the Jordanian government’s permission, take everything with them when closing down the site. From past experience, they know they’re likely to discover only mounds of turned earth upon their return.

  Set amid rolling brown hills given over to groves o
f orange and pistachio trees, the village of Karkamis has the soporific feel of many rural towns in southern Turkey. On its slightly rundown main street, shopkeepers gaze vacantly out at deserted sidewalks, while in a tiny, tree-shaded plaza, idle men play dominoes or cards.

  If this seems a peculiar setting for the place where a young Lawrence first came to his appreciation of the Arab world, the answer actually lies about a mile east of the village. There, on a promontory above a ford of the Euphrates, sits the ruins of the ancient city of Carchemish. While human habitation on that hilltop dates back at least 5,000 years, it was a desire to unlock the secrets of the Hittites, a civilization that reached its apogee in the eleventh century B.C., that first brought a 22-year-old Lawrence here in 1911.

  Even before Carchemish, there were signs that the world might well hear of T. E. Lawrence in some capacity. Born in 1888, the second of five boys in an upper-middle-class British family, his almost paralyzing shyness masked a brilliant mind and a ferocious independent streak.

  For his history thesis at Oxford, Lawrence resolved to study the Crusader castles of Syria, alone and on foot and at the height of the brutal Middle East summer. It was a 1,200-mile walk that carried him into villages that had never seen a European before—certainly not an unaccompanied European who, at 5-foot-4, looked to be all of 15—and it marked the beginning of his fascination with the East. “I will have such difficulty in becoming English again,” Lawrence wrote home amid his journey, sounding much like any modern college student on a junior year abroad; the difference in Lawrence’s case was that this appraisal proved quite accurate.

  The transformation was confirmed when, after graduating from Oxford, he wheedled his way onto a British Museum–sponsored archaeological expedition decamping for Carchemish. As the junior assistant on that dig, and one of only two Westerners permanently on-site, Lawrence saw to his scientific duties—primarily photographing and inventorying the finds—but developed an even keener interest in understanding how Arab society worked.