The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  I showed plenty. The enormous difference between the American and Indian outlooks on death hit me like a lead pipe, or a bamboo stick. The idea of having to split open your father’s and mother’s skulls so that they can successfully achieve heavenly liberation was something that I had a hard time wrapping my own head around. I had to remind myself why I was here—to better understand some of the unfortunate choices I’d made (or almost made). But I was still having a hard time making sense of what was taking place in front of me. I didn’t yet fully grasp the power of Varanasi, how the people here could be so accepting of death.

  Then I met S. B. Patel. A 25-year-old college student in a nearby town, S.B. happened to sit next to me on the viewing platform at Harishchandra ghat the next day. We began chatting while an older man and a middle-aged woman were being cremated in separate pyres. The man’s head was burned to a blackened crisp. The woman was almost all ashes. A man who had been swimming in the Ganges walked over to one of the pyres and held up his wet towel to dry a bit in the heat. A dog was sniffing around the other pyre.

  “So what are you doing here?” I asked.

  “You see that woman burning over there,” S.B. said. I looked over and nodded. “That’s my sister.”

  “Are you sad?” I asked, realizing this was about the dumbest question of all time.

  “Yes,” he said. “But I can’t show it. It’s bad karma for the soul of the dead if mourners show grief during the cremation.” Forty-four years old and married, his sister had died of a heart attack. This was her funeral. I asked if it was strange that I and other people who didn’t know his sister were watching this.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “In Hinduism we try to let go of our ego. I’m appreciative that you’re taking an interest. My sister would have liked it.”

  Just then, someone crashed our death party. He was introduced to me as Nehna. He was one of the five Dom Raja brothers.

  This Dom Raja of Varanasi was wearing gold chains and a tank top. His beach ball–sized belly protruded from under his shirt.

  Nehna Choudhary, 32 years old, said he worked at Harishchandra ghat. (His brothers controlled Manikarnika.) He couldn’t stay to talk; he had business to do, but he asked me to meet him here tomorrow.

  The following day I met Dom Raja Nehna along the river at Harishchandra ghat. “We take a boat,” he said. Minutes later we were in the middle of the Ganges River. Smoke from three different cremations wafted toward the sky. Nehna explained the intricacies of splitting what had been one job several ways. He works about 105 days a year, he told me, as he rowed the boat toward the other side of the river. “I’m no longer fazed by what I see,” he said.

  When Nehna spoke, he did so through his lower teeth, because he always had a chunk of betel nut stuffed in his lower lip. It made him sound like a subcontinental version of Marlon Brando’s Godfather character. Which was fitting, since Nehna was pretty much an analogous godfather to the dead and their mourners.

  “My idea of life and death hasn’t changed,” Nehna said, interrupting my thoughts. “But I do get a sense of happiness when I’m on the cremation grounds.”

  My ears pricked up when he said this. What would I learn from the Dom Raja, who has been around death all his life, where the acceptance of mortality is probably deep in his genes? “Because of moksha?” I asked. “Because it has made you see the important things in life, or it makes you feel redeemed about life on a daily basis? Because it reminds you of the impermanence of all things and that you have to live in the moment?”

  In my excitement I was speaking too quickly for Nehna, who I suspected wasn’t even listening to me anyway.

  “I feel happiness when I’m there,” he said, “because I can see all the money I’m making.”

  I sighed and focused on a nearby pilgrim who was leaning down from his boat, throwing water over his head and repeating, “Shiva, Mother Ganges.”

  We bumped up to the riverbank, and Nehna pulled in the oars. I’d been looking across to this side of the Ganges, and its emptiness, ever since I arrived. This side of the river is completely uninhabited, with absolutely no signs of human handiwork—Varanasi’s antipode, a barren yin landscape to Varanasi’s baroque yang. It makes the habitable side of the river, the one crammed with crumbling palaces and crawling with living beings, feel like the beginning of the world, the place where civilization starts, the spot that, five days earlier, I was told is the epicenter of creation. Or, depending on how you look at it, the place where civilization ends, and thus begins all over again. Which was suddenly all starting to make sense, since a sadhu or a pilgrim or even an auto-rickshaw driver will remind you, as they did me, that in Varanasi there are no beginnings and endings, only passages and transformations.

  Here I was, being rowed across the Ganges by the Dom Raja himself. It almost felt like I was physically making the postcremation journey to moksha. Perhaps I was nearing ananda, just as Seatia Nararyna, the 85-year-old man I met at Moksha Bhavan on my first day in town, had advised me: bliss through nothingness, the kind of state a Hindu (or a Buddhist) tries to attain during meditation. Symbolically, the far side of the Ganges is devoid of desire and ego and grasping, because, well, there’s really nothing there.

  I’m a long way from the bliss that Mr. Nararyna charged me to go and seek. But this I learned in Varanasi: I had walked through the fire during those unlit days a couple of years ago. I did it just after stepping away from that ledge. But it took coming here, talking to the doms and the mourners about death, feeling the vast blankness across the most holy river in Hinduism, to see that I only needed to let go, to realize that in nothingness is clarity and in clarity is peace. For nothingness isn’t empty; it is the beginning of a hitherto unknown spirit we have the ability to tap into.

  If we just choose to.

  Once we rowed back to the habitable side of the river and got off the boat, the Dom Raja invited me over to his house for dinner that night. I said thank you, but no. I think, until my own time comes, I’m done with death for a while. I shook his hand and walked away, ready to make my exit, fully alive, from Varanasi.

  LAUREN GROFF

  Daughters of the Springs

  FROM Oxford American

  A FEW MILES southwest of Gainesville, the arching oaks of central Florida loosen into long fields full of beef steer. They tighten up again into the Goethe State Forest (pronounced, hereabouts, as Go-thee), and finally peter out into US 19, a soulless and endless miracle mile of corporate chains from Applebee’s to Zaxby’s, hitting nearly every letter in between. In the town of Homosassa, I saw a smiling gray manatee the size of a VW van on the side of the road, surrounded by a sea of yard-sign valentines that someone had left to fade in the March sun. Homosassa is famous for being one of the best places in Florida to view West Indian manatees, those gentle thousand-pound sea cows that are routinely torn up by Jet Skis and motorboats. Skeptics believe that sailors mistook sea mammals like manatees and dugongs for women, giving rise to the myth of the mermaid. After a few months at sea, one starts to see what one expects to see, and long ago, sirens were a matter of fact, not myth. Henry Hudson reported a sighting of a mermaid, and Christopher Columbus saw a manatee surfacing somewhere near the Dominican Republic on January 9, 1493, and noted in his diary that mermaids were not nearly as beautiful as they were painted. True. Manatees are pewter-colored and have faintly hound-doggish heads and platters for fins; they don’t look much like Daryl Hannah. Still, the word manatee comes from the Taíno word for “breast,” and a manatee on her back, with her forefins folded on her chest, can appear to have a goodly bosom. It’s not hard to see how, after months of male company, the sight of one rising from the waves like a massive and fleshy woman could evoke intense erotic yearnings.

  Mermaids—which I’m using here as shorthand for uncanny female water spirits—are common wherever human beings rub up against bodies of water. In Japan, there are ningyo, strange woman-faced semi-immortal fish figures; in ancient
Syria, the goddess Derceto was described by Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca historica as having a fish tail. There are margyr in Scandinavia and sabawaelnu in the Mi’kmaq culture of North America. There are Celtic morgens, aboriginal Australian yawkyawks, Russian rusalki. The Greeks had whole taxonomies of water spirits, from the Oceanids of the salt water and the Nereids of the Mediterranean to the Naiads, the spirits of fresh water. The most famous mermaids in myth—Odysseus’s singing sirens, whom he resisted by stoppering his sailors’ ears with wax and tying himself to the mast—were not mermaids at all but immortal bird-women, with wings, who once sang against the Muses in a competition (they lost and in punishment were plucked). That these creatures have slid from avian to piscine over the years speaks to the sexual appeal of mermaids. The sirens call men with their voices and bodies, water is voluptuous, and there’s nothing sexy about a woman with a chicken’s netherparts.

  I think the widespread ubiquity of these dangerous, capricious female figures has less to do with lust and mistaken sea creatures than with a stunning human capacity for metaphor. Water is necessary, urgent, everywhere; it gives rise to life. It is also perilous, subject to its own laws, and contains dark and hidden depths. The makers of myths are the victors, the ones allowed the leisure and education to write (men, in other words, for most of human history). The myth of mermaids both explains and distances woman, that great and confounding mystery. And the appeal isn’t just for men; girls are drawn to mermaids’ wildness and beauty and power. After all, the sea creatures are the ones who get to decide if people who fall overboard will swim or sink.

  I grew up as a very serious competitive swimmer on a boys’ swim team and dreamed at night of being a mermaid, of flying in water and breathing as if it were air, and of luxuriating among the sea grasses and seeing the boats pass overhead like clouds over the sun. There was something about mermaids’ ferocity, their danger, their uncompromising strangeness and power, that spoke to a truth deep in me. Every once in a while, even decades later, I still hear an echo of their song and feel compelled to listen.

  During my drive to Weeki Wachee, I held the Starbucks siren hot in my hand. The coffee company’s logo is a smirker. (I’ll cop to my dislike.) She’s bicaudal and holds her split tail beside her head with both fists in a frankly pornographic manner, teasing us with the answer to the age-old mystery of how all those seamen and fish-bottomed women were physiologically able to get it on.

  No matter; I was on the hunt for far better mermaids, for high-grade Americana. Weeki Wachee is one of many natural springs that run through the state of Florida. They are its best-kept secret: people think of swampland when they think of Florida, or oranges or theme parks or skittery dance music in some Miami nightclub, not cold, clear rivers on which you can float for miles and never come across a single alligator. From underwater, Weeki Wachee appears to be a cragged mountainside, astonishingly steep. Once the site of Timucua, or aboriginal, burial grounds, it served as a swimming and laundry pool for locals in the 1930s and early 1940s as well as their trash heap.

  Walton Hall Smith was a writer (coauthoring a book titled Liquor, Servant of Man) and founder of the Syfo beverage company, and he had long dreamed of developing Weeki Wachee into an underground theater. In June 1946, he paired up with Newt Perry, who was famous for wrestling alligators at Silver Springs, training Navy SEALs, and pioneering the underwater film industry in Florida; Grantland Rice called him “The Human Fish.” With a group of investors, they purchased the site from the city of St. Petersburg and began constructing the theater sunk deep into the side of the springs.

  The park was first opened to the public on October 12, 1947. The theater was a low building with twinned ramps that led underground, where a curved auditorium looked out into the springs from 16 feet below the surface, so that one could see much of the chasm and all attendant wildlife: turtles, ducks, alligators, and sometimes even a stray manatee. By the time of the opening, Perry had come up with the idea of bringing in young women in bathing suits to do an underwater ballet for the tourists. In the beginning, the Weeki Wachee mermaids were local teenagers, paid in hot dogs and hamburgers and bathing suits. There were so few cars on Route 19 that every time they heard one coming, the mermaids scampered to the side of the road to lure the drivers in for a show. How startling it must have been to be driving along the scrubby brown fields in the bright and sleepy sunlight, and then, out of nowhere, a line of young beauties in bathing suits. I wonder if anyone resisted them.

  At last, Weeki Wachee hove up on the west side of the highway, a strange repository for such an ancient and resonant myth. Even at nine in the morning on a chilly March day, the parking lot was filled with cars and buses. The park itself was half hidden like an afterthought, low-set in the lot’s northeast corner. The overall aesthetic was one of midcentury painted concrete, graced here and there with nippleless female busts. Before the entrance there’s a huge fountain, and in the middle of the fountain there’s an erect pillar topped by female swimmers engaged in a move I’d come to learn is called an adagio. Picture one swimmer vertical, fist extended, lifting another swimmer who is arched on her back toward the surface of the water. I was a little surprised by the statue’s lack of tails. It turns out tails on the Weeki Wachee mermaids didn’t appear until 1962: the earliest prototype was a very heavy rubber tail made for movie star Ann Blythe in the 1948 movie Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. It wasn’t practical: it cost $20,000 and was nearly impossible to squeeze into. These days, park employees or the mermaids themselves make the swimming tails out of stretchy fabric, with zippers on the side. There are also posing tails, with sequins and with zippers on the back, for verisimilitude, I suppose.

  John Athanason, the park’s genial, ruddy public relations manager, met me at the gate. John told me he’d been an employee at Weeki Wachee during its lowest moment, before it became a state park, when the private owners neglected the place to the point where there were serious safety issues, some involving fire exits and sewage. The mermaids had to launch a campaign, Save Our Tails, to keep the park from closing down. The small park is bare-bones, though there is evidence of recent sprucing: new plantings of sago palm and bougainvillea, new paint. We walked through a clump of high-schoolers to view the springs from above. Sapphire blue in places, the source is fairly small, the hole itself not especially impressive from our vantage and angle. It looked not unlike a pond, with a wee water park called Buccaneer Bay at its far end. John told me some fascinating information—Weeki Wachee was a first-magnitude spring directly fed from the Florida aquifer; divers know that it goes at least 413 feet deep; 117 million gallons pump out of it every day; the current in the water is 5 miles per hour, the temperature a constant 74.2 degrees—but I was also distracted by the teenage boy surreptitiously copping a feel of the tiny teenage girl on my other side. There was a man blowing leaves off the far bank. There were indolent fish.

  John led me down a ramp and into the underwater theater, a large curved space with acoustic tiles and a cement floor. It was dark and empty and smelled a little of moldering eelgrass and feet. The audience sits on battered wooden benches. There is a curtain that automatically slides up to show the strange green subaqueous world where the mermaids perform, emerging from underneath shells that flip up on the large flat stage. The distant domed airlock on the far side of the chasm looks like a 1940s dream of the future. Over everything is a layer of green-brown lyngbya algae, even though, once upon a time, Weeki Wachee water was so clear people assumed a trick—that the mermaids were suspended on wires. This is Florida. People here gleefully cake their lawns and golf courses in nitrogen, then wax nostalgic for a time when the springs weren’t clouded over.

  In the dim blue theater with only fish and turtles sliding by, I heard the weariness in John’s voice. Surely he has answered the same inane questions over and over for years, and it must be difficult to maintain a high-burn enthusiasm for a place that’s equally worn down and kitschy. Still, he seemed to regard the park and the
mermaids with avuncular pride. I asked if he’d ever considered inviting in a reality television show to bring some money to Weeki Wachee. He said he’s had dozens of proposals, but reality television feeds on interpersonal drama, and the mermaids are employees of the State of Florida, which is not delighted about employees’ interpersonal drama being sprayed about on national television. “And girls are . . . complicated,” he said knowingly. I nodded and smiled, but because I’m complicated, I winced every time John called the performers girls. I’m a product of the politically correct ’90s. When I was a belligerent 14-year-old actual girl, with a copy of The Second Sex in hand, I was taught to insist on being called a woman. Some of the mermaids may be very young, true, but many are in their twenties. Some are teachers, some are mothers; all are women. We were rousted from the theater by a white-blond woman in a tracksuit, whom I’d later discover is a mermaid, who came into the theater and lowered the curtains over the windows to the springs. It was almost time for the first show of the day: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”

  John led me into a small room so hot I nearly fell down. This was the tube room, named for the dark 64-foot underwater pipe that the mermaids have to swim through to make their way to and from the theater. The tube room has to be boiling hot because spending half an hour in 74-degree water can make one rapidly hypothermic. The mermaids came down the spiral staircase from their dressing rooms to finish their preparations for the show. The women wore cake makeup and bikini tops, tights and bloomers. They sat at the edge of a 14-foot well to put on water shoes and flippers and roll their tails on over it all, then zipped the tails up the side. Dry and off, the tails were a little dingy and looked like T-shirts; when they were on the tails looked pretty realistic, if I squinted. The mermaids chatted and answered my questions when I dared to say something, but after a while it was clear that they were being painfully polite so I let them be. Here is what I learned: Karri is a crabber on her off-days and has a one-year-old daughter. Stayce, who was playing the sea witch, is a bartender at Applebee’s. Tara, who was managing the safety of the mermaids from the tube, is a chipper, very beautiful mother with the kind of wavy blond hair you think mermaids should have. One by one, they put on facemasks to see their way through the tube, which they’d take off before the performance. Then they fell into the water, took the last sip of air that wasn’t going to come from a hose or airlock, did a little half flip with their tails, and disappeared into the tube. There are air hoses every few feet, but the mere thought of having to swim down an enclosed space with no scuba equipment gave me a case of the sympathetic horripilations.