The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  Out in the theater, the audience had arrived, as if by magic. I don’t know what I was expecting of a mermaid show on a cold weekday morning in March, but the place was packed with retirees in matching visors and tiny children in mermaid costumes. I suppose I’d been afraid of being the only person in the audience. I’d felt a preemptive fear for the future of this weird place; half an hour in the park, and I was already protective of it. The voiceover was careful to be sure we knew we were about to watch Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” as that other theme park in Florida with claims to The Little Mermaid is notoriously litigious and superpowered and humorlessly grasping when it comes to copyright. There was a big blast of recorded music. The curtains went up. Tears stole into my eyes.

  Because, god, the show was stunning. A huge curtain of air went up in front of the windows, like giant silver jellyfish bubbles. They cleared to show mermaid Sativa in full tail, reclining on a log, smiling and relaxed, her hand discreetly holding a pellet of bread so fish swarmed around her. The sun shot through the top of the water and set it all to shimmering with a blue and eerie light. In slow motion, other mermaids emerged, moving dreamily through the water, their hair licking in every direction. Women who are beautiful in ordinary ways become full-out gorgeous underwater. Flesh, particularly of the female sort, has an underlying lipid layer that buoys what might have sagged on land: breasts perk to hillocks, jowls lift, hair riffles and sways like its own living thing. The mermaids are impressively athletic. When they move underwater, they must take into consideration how much air they have in their lungs: too much and they float too high, too little and they sink. They have to time their breaths in and out to the music, dropping and picking up their air hoses in accordance with the choreography. They contort their bodies primarily with the use of their arms, their legs constrained in a tail. That they do all this with a smile and holding their breath, in a 5-mile-an-hour current, almost seems like too much to fathom.

  I was so overwhelmed with admiration that at first I wasn’t paying attention to the story. Then a creeping dismay stole in and the story began to shadow what I was seeing. Did the voiceover say, “Do you believe in love at first sight?” Was that a calypso song, complete with a cutesy sidekick (in this version a turtle named Chester)? Is the theme here really that love conquers all? And oh my god, is the prince fighting the sea witch to protect the mermaid?

  I’m a tremendous fan of Hans Christian Andersen, that genius masochist, and as much as it troubles me, I love his story “The Little Mermaid.” His world is seductive, all blue and gold and red. The imagery is astonishing: from the bottom of the ocean, “when the sea was perfectly calm, you could catch sight of the sun, which looked like a purple flower with light streaming from its calyx.” I read the story to be an allegory for the plight of the Victorian woman, who was asked to give up her voice in order to lure a man to marry her. It’s about sexual awakening: when the mermaid drinks the potion and her tail turns to legs, “it felt to her as if a double-edged sword was passing through her delicate body.” She sleeps on a cushion at the prince’s door, rides on horseback with him, and the prince kisses the mermaid’s red lips and plays with her hair and lays his head on her chest, which, in a world that Andersen describes as having slave girls, seems baldly unchaste. The Disney version diverges wildly from the text by allowing the love story to prevail; the prince sees the error of his ways and marries the little mermaid in the end. Andersen’s is far more interesting. It’s not about love, not really, but rather the mermaid’s yearning to attain an immortal soul by getting a human to fall in love with her. In Andersen’s tale, the mermaid watches the prince get married to someone else and knows that in the morning she’ll turn to sea foam and that will be it. That night, her sisters rise out of the ocean and give her a knife to murder the prince in his sleep. If she does so, she can be a mermaid again; like all mermaids, she won’t have a soul, but she will live for 300 years. She considers, but chooses to spare the prince. At dawn, she dives into the ocean and turns to sea foam, but because she showed mercy to the human, she rises out of the water to become a daughter of the air, an ephemeral creature who is allowed to earn a soul through good deeds done over the course of 300 years. There is hope here, but it is a hope deferred and bittersweet, not an easy love of sappy marriage bells and singing crabs. To have the prince—who is deeply unworthy of the little mermaid in all ways—be the one to fight the sea witch takes all the magic out of the story as well as all of the little mermaid’s ferocious autonomy, booting it headlong into the banal.

  Now, in the springs, as the prince in knee breeches and the sea witch fought to very loud and dramatic theme music, a little boy in a camouflage T-shirt stood and screamed with a bloody light in his eye, “Do it!” As in: Kill her!

  For what? For having a huge amount of power? For wanting the mermaid to uphold her bargain, as one who strikes a bargain should do? For not being as young and pretty as the mermaid? I’m getting old. I’ve begun identifying with the sea witch.

  Even as I was watching, I knew that I was expecting too much; there were kids in the audience, after all. But the heart wants what the head calls unlikely.

  We applauded. The lights came on. We shuffled up into the sunlight and chill air and stood like heifers at the salt lick, blinking. I ate a formerly frozen pizza at the Mermaid Galley and wondered at the albino peahens wandering around, then John brought me in to meet the mermaids while they ate lunch. I’ll admit that my hands were shaking; I was meeting the mermaids of my dreams! But they were mermaids in tracksuits and wet hair, eating fried foods from fast-food joints down the miracle mile, smiling at me with mildly overdrawn patience. The prince devoured a whole pepperoni pizza by himself. On land, in sunlight, in their puffy clothes, their hair slicked to their heads, it was eerie how much the mermaids resembled a women’s college rugby team after a match. On dry land, the mermaids were all very pretty, but some of their glamour had been left in the shimmering water.

  I wanted to suss out the mystery of the mythical mermaids, find some of their bone-deep danger, but John wouldn’t let me talk one-on-one with any of the performers. “It’s not that I don’t trust the girls, but . . . ,” he said, shrugging, fiddling with his e-cigarette. So I spoke with the lot of them. They answered my questions but did not find them very good. They sighed. They love being mermaids because it is like a sorority; they love each other and are always delighted when former mermaids come back to do shows (in John’s terminology, retired mermaids graduated from “girls” to “ladies”). There was no danger, really, they said: they all looked out for one another down there. They had to go through extensive physical testing, be certified in scuba diving, and have a year’s worth of training before they were allowed to perform in major roles. There were air hoses and airlocks nearly everywhere in the deep; there was no real worry about running out of air. John peered at me with increasing suspicion every time I asked another question about danger, sex, or myth. In desperation, having come to the end of my questions, I asked if they believe in mermaids. There was an embarrassed silence; they looked at their food as if hoping it would speak for them. One woman threw me a bone. “I mean, I do,” she said. “We kind of have to. Like, we are mermaids. Right?” Right.

  They are mermaids. They’re also extremely hardworking hourly employees of the State of Florida. The state publishes its employees’ wages online; it was easy to discover that one of the senior mermaids makes $13 an hour, and none of them receive benefits. They work long days, responsible for training newer mermaids, running various mermaid camps, scrubbing the algae, which they call “scrunge,” off the spring side of the windows, making sure the theater is clean and the costumes are in order, ensuring the other performers’ safety, choreographing routines, and directing the shows and in-water practices from a little podlike booth off the theater. They get to dolphin-kick and smile and make pretty shapes with their bodies underwater, but the rest of the time it’s a job, and it’s a job that requires freezin
g in icy water multiple times a day. It’s far more difficult than it looks. Their magic is in making it all look easy.

  I went back, face burning, to the theater where the afternoon crowd poured in. The children had been replaced by late-middle-aged tourists with sunburned shins and ball caps and bewildered looks on their faces. The next show was called Fish Tails. It began with a video on high-mounted televisions that showed the history of Weeki Wachee, with still photographs from the past; all very informative and clear. I believe the prince from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” was the announcer for this one, but I could be wrong. There was a calypso version of “Red Red Wine.” There was an Enya song I hadn’t heard since middle school, when I was going through a crystals-and-Arthurian-legends phase. Some man behind me complained about his psoriasis acting up. The curtain rose.

  And there, again, was the frisson of joy: how beautiful they were, those women in the blue light with their shining tails. My disbelief suspended itself, floated off to the stained acoustic tiles overhead. The mermaids ate bananas underwater; they drank some brownish drink from a glass bottle. They showed us the human elevator move, where they can regulate how high they rise or how low they sink by how much air they take in or let out from the air hoses. A yellow-bellied slider turtle the size of a steering wheel mimicked the mermaids’ ballet moves and tried to nibble on their undulating hair. The mermaids bent themselves into a circle, grasping one another’s tails, and spun. They shimmied and lip-synched.

  During the Little Mermaid show, they had lip-synched a song called “We’ve Got the World by the Tail.” It goes:

  We’re not like other women

  We don’t have to clean an oven.

  And we never will grow old,

  We’ve got the world by the tail.

  And all I could think was, well, Christ, I don’t have to clean the oven. I resisted the song when they sang it that morning, but the old-timey feel of Fish Tails made me think harder about the young women in 1940s Florida who had few career options beyond marriage and low-level service jobs. How glorious it must have been to be given the chance to shake their stuff in the water and live independently and hobnob with bona fide movie stars like Johnny Weissmuller (who played Tarzan) and Esther Williams, to become celebrities themselves, even though they were from the middle of Podunk nowhere and had little more than beauty and youth and willingness on their side. How seductive such a life would have been; it must have threatened men unused to women living independently. It must have been infuriating to see such lissome, smiling exemplars of feminine beauty through the glass—and to be unable to touch them. The women, knowing they were watched, would have felt their own terrific power. I was falling for the history of the show, for all the many mermaids who’d swum here and made it look glamorous.

  The penultimate act in Fish Tails was advertised as a deep dive of about 120 feet into the mouth of the chasm. Water pours out of the spring at such a speed that one former mermaid described the dive as trying to swim up a waterfall. There used to be enormous catfish that lived down there and an eel that would threaten the mermaids when they hooked their heels into the bar that held them in place. The mermaid disappeared below the lip of the stage; the announcer cannily built suspense by describing what she was feeling as she dove deeper and deeper; at one point she sent up a breath that expanded hugely as it rose, from shower cap to bread loaf to pillowcase. Time ticked and ticked. I nearly passed out by the time she came up, grinning and waving. I’d been holding my breath with her the whole time.

  And then it was the final act. A super-patriotic country song boomed loud and the mermaids wore red-white-and-blue costumes and held an American flag between them. My patriotism is manifested in finding it a privilege to pay taxes, in voting, and in turning a critical eye on my government. Nationalistic bombast makes me ill. I closed my eyes to this last part of the show until the audience erupted in roars, and we all filed out, glad to be aboveground in the sunlight again. I thanked John for his real kindness and fled.

  I came to Weeki Wachee to sound the mystery of the mermaid, to find danger and sex and darkness and maybe hear my own deeps echoed back. Instead I found a polite performance and excellent work ethic and real people who do what they do out of sisterhood and love for the cold springs. This is what happens when you are given a plateful of hot Americana à la mode and expect to taste profundity; my disappointment was a result of my failure of expectations, not their show. I’d brought a bathing suit, but it sat dry at the bottom of my purse. I think I’d hoped the mermaids would recognize me as one of their own and invite me in for a swim. Oh well. I did spend a day looking at beautiful women, a spectacular way to pass the time.

  As I drove back to Gainesville, I thought of the Rhinemaidens. The freshwater Weeki Wachee mermaids are closer to nixies than actual mermaids, who supposedly live in the ocean; the saltwater Gulf, the mer of the maids, is miles away from the springs. In Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, the Rhinemaidens are nixies of the River Rhine and keepers of the gold that, when seized, leads to world power. They’re seductive and morally ambiguous and elusive and playful. The gold is stolen from them in the first opera of the three, and at one point later they sing angrily:

  Traulich und treu

  ist’s nur in der Tiefe:

  falsch und feig

  ist, was dort oben sich freut!

  According to my dictionary and my shaky memory of college German, this means: Only the deeps hold intimacy and truth; false and cowardly is the surface’s rejoicing.

  But the surface is often beautiful; it is often good enough. I drove home in silence, letting my brain decompress. Two weeks later, I’d spend a week at Crescent Beach on the Atlantic coast of Florida, where high-school students rent condos and pack them with dozens of hormonal bodies. I’d watch these teenage girls in their bikinis braving the cold March wind, perhaps—probably—drunk in the middle of the day, delighting in their new, gorgeous, dangerous bodies, flirting with the boys who eyed them with shielded delight, and I’d think, Aha. Here be sirens. But on the drive home from Weeki Wachee, the long brown fields were tender in the early-afternoon light. The blue sky appeared out of the tunnels of water oak and palmetto scrub, the air calm and cool in these last months before the heat descends like a solid fabric. I cracked the window to let in the wind. The daughters of the air were doing one good deed to earn their souls that afternoon. Sometimes it’s lovely to float on the surface of things.

  PETER HESSLER

  Tales of the Trash

  FROM The New Yorker

  IN CAIRO, my family lives on the ground floor of an old building, in a sprawling, high-ceilinged apartment with three doors to the outside. One door opens onto the building’s lobby, another leads to a small garden, and the third is solely for the use of the zabal, or garbageman, who is named Sayyid Ahmed. It’s in the kitchen, and when we first moved to the apartment, at the beginning of 2012, the landlady told me to deposit my trash on the fire escape outside the door at any time. There was no pickup schedule, and no preferred container; I could use bags or boxes, or I could simply toss loose garbage outside. Sayyid’s services had no set fee. He wasn’t a government employee, and he had no contract or formal job. I was instructed to pay him whatever I believed to be fair, and if I pleased I could pay him nothing at all.

  Many things in Egypt don’t work very well. Traffic is bad, and trains get canceled; during the summer, it’s not unusual to have five electricity blackouts in a single day. One year, we couldn’t buy bottled water for months, because the plant that produced the water somehow caught fire. Since we moved into the apartment, the country has cycled through three constitutions, three presidents, four prime ministers, and more than 700 members of parliament. But there hasn’t been a single day when the trash wasn’t cleared outside my kitchen door. As a whole, Cairo’s waste-collection system is surprisingly functional, considering that it’s largely informal. In a sprawling, chaotic city of more than 17 million, zabaleen like Sayyid ha
ve managed to develop one of the most efficient municipal recycling networks in the world.

  At first, I never saw Sayyid working, because he cleared my fire escape before dawn. After three months of this invisible service, he approached me one day on the street and asked if I had previously lived in China. I wasn’t sure how he knew this—we had chatted a few times, but never for long. He said that he had an important question about Chinese medicine.

  That evening, he arrived at eight o’clock sharp, dressed in his work clothes. He’s not much taller than 5 feet, but his shoulders are broad and his legs are bowed from hauling weight. Usually his clothes are several sizes too large, and his shoes flap like those of a clown, because he harvests them from the garbage of bigger men. At my apartment, he produced a small red box decorated with gold calligraphy. The Chinese labeling was elegant but evasive: the pills were described as “health protection products” that “promoted development and power.” Inside the box, a sheet of instructions reminded me how sometimes the Chinese can be much more expressive when they use English badly: