The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  The wrong footwear can quickly lead to agony. Before arriving in Selma, Thomas accidentally selected a pair of Altra Olympus trail runners that were light but too small for her feet. By the time she reached Montgomery, most of her toenails had turned black in protest after 50 miles of slamming into the front of her shoe. I, on the other hand, chose a pair of low-cut Oboz Sawtooth hiking boots for my walk—overkill for the road, and twice as heavy as the trail runners I should have brought instead. “Still,” emphasized Thomas toward the end of our conversation, “I wore shoes that were actually made for walking long distances. To think of the people who marched from Selma to Montgomery in their Sunday best, in fancy [footwear]—it just blew my mind. To have grandmothers and people of all ages doing that.”

  Thomas wasn’t wrong. I had the privilege of dressing comfortably on my first day on the road, in an airy, navy-blue cotton T-shirt with a fake pocket on the left breast and a pair of khaki-colored convertible hiking pants zipped into shorts, the same ones I’d worn on the Appalachian Trail. A few snacks, some sunscreen, and a tube of ChapStick were stashed into one hip-belt pocket of my pack, a knife and a small coil of Leukotape (in case of blisters) were tucked away in the other. A rain jacket and a liter of water rounded out the remaining contents of my bag, while a lemon-lime Gatorade dangled from a shoulder strap’s bungee cord positioned over my chest for easy access.

  I cannot begin to imagine what drivers must have made of me during my five days along US 80, as I repeatedly stopped to sob on the shoulder of the highway to the songs on a playlist my friend, the music critic Chris O’Leary, compiled for me. Many of the usual suspects for a walk from Selma to Montgomery were present. Mahalia. Odetta. Nina. But it was Dorothy Love Coates’s “Ninety-Nine and a Half” that brought me to my knees less than seven miles in.

  Earlier that day, I’d stopped at the Selma Interpretive Center after visiting Brown Chapel AME, where the final march to Montgomery began in 1965. I spoke briefly with the National Park Service employees at the center, snagged a “Selma to Montgomery” patch to sew onto my pack after completing the trail, and stepped outside, bracing myself for the humidity. A tornado warning had been in effect less than an hour before, and the high for the day was 86°F. I was nervous enough to forget not to smile when my father photographed me on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Despite my late start at 3 p.m., I wanted to make it to the campground where the marchers stayed on their first night. Today, camping is not permitted, and a large sign marking the historic occasion stands in what is essentially the front yard of someone’s private property.

  It is difficult for those who have not walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to fully understand just how high it sits above the Alabama River. Looking down into the distant, muddy waters brings a devastating, visceral understanding of the marchers’ vulnerability on that expanse of concrete and steel—what they were willing to risk to reach the other side of freedom.

  Shortly after crossing, I spotted four monuments arranged in a row, dedicated to heroes of the march. One honoring Representative John Lewis, his likeness floating above the words GET IN THE WAY; another dedicated to Amelia Boynton Robinson and Marie Foster, MOTHERS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT BEFORE AND BEYOND THE BRIDGE. These monuments and others like them, presented by the Evelyn Gibson Lowery Heritage Tour and SCLC/WOMEN, Inc., would serve as some of the high points of my 54-mile walk, the majority of which felt like a testament to infrastructure’s power to—at times literally—cement racism into the lives of black communities, regardless of evolving legislation.

  In some ways, the subsequent three days of walking were similar to the first. Guzzling water for miles before running into any building, school, or gas station that would let me use its bathroom. Wrapping my pylon-print bandanna around my nose and mouth while walking through endless clouds of gnats. I’d treated my shoes and socks with permethrin, an effective tick, chigger, and mosquito repellent, in order to minimize my risk of infection while shuffling through stretches of tall grass. I quickly fell into a rhythm during the non-paved sections, scanning the sloping green footpath ahead of me as best I could for snakes, ant mounds, and freshly rotting carcasses. In the beginning, I shut my eyes every time a semitruck seemed as though it was seconds away from plowing into me. By Montgomery, I barely blinked at terror.

  The Viola Liuzzo Memorial sits just five miles east of the Lowndes County Interpretive Center, in what is one of the poorest districts in America. The interpretive center, to its credit, does not mince words, spelling out what many of the black tenant farmers in the South lost after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. White landowners punished their newly liberated occupants by rendering them homeless, resulting in the rise of tent cities that would house black families for years at a time.

  I found that the ritual of walking gave me an opportunity to move meaningfully in the present through a place whose importance was so deeply tied to its past. At my pace, I had time to discover how the Selma to Montgomery NHT continues to be shaped by those whose lives run along its borders. In contrast, many careless drivers treat the highway as their garbage dump, and much of the roadside is littered with the detritus of those hurtling through the state at 60-plus miles per hour. A discarded construction glove, an oil canister, several diapers, a peeling bootleg Yo Gotti CD, Heart’s greatest hits, a blue ice cube tray, one decapitated broom. More bottles and cans of beer than I consume in a year, with Budweiser empties the most common offenders.

  I repeatedly ran into signs on or near the road that offered no explanation as to their meaning but clearly signified something to locals. A green mile marker sported a white rectangle beneath it that read “Prayer Mile.” And in the patch of grass opposite the designator for campsite number three, a large sign with a dramatic orange arrow above it stated: ANNIE MAE’S PLACE. BLACK LIVES MATTER. BLACK HISTORY MATTERS. STOP RACISM AND SEXISM. My father and I followed the arrow in search of Annie Mae’s Place, to no avail, down a grid of black excellence. A turn onto Frederick Douglass Road. Another onto Langston Hughes Drive. Some backtracking and another turn onto Harriet Tubman Road. A sharp right onto Ida Wells Way. We would later discover we’d driven right past it. A heat wave in 2000 had killed most of the crops grown in nearby residents’ gardens, except for okra, so neighbors Alice Stewart and Barbara Evans started an annual Okra Festival for the community. Evans named the small house containing the art she’d collected from around the country Annie Mae’s Place. Many of the works highlight the struggle for civil rights, and the Okra Festival still takes place today.

  My last day on the Selma to Montgomery NHT would also be my hardest. If you think walking a highway for 50 miles is difficult, try walking against traffic onto an on-ramp for that highway on the day of an air show. I shook for 10 minutes in the chips aisle of a gas station afterward and tried to remind myself of how close I was to completing my walk. I’d left the smell of cow dung from the farms along US 80 behind and properly entered the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama. An egret in Catoma Creek watched as I ran screaming across the last bridge I’d brave without a walkway.

  Less than a mile from the City of St. Jude, the fourth of the marchers’ campsites, I approached a tall, gray slab on the sidewalk that resembled a headstone. The monument read: ENTRANCE TO CRADLE OF THE CONFEDERACY. PLACED BY SOPHIE BIBB CHAPTER U.D.C. 1928. Its location next to a local bus stop—the normalcy of it all—left me shaking with anger. Months later, as Confederate monuments were removed in New Orleans and North Carolina, this ominous slab was the one my mind drifted to. Even in 2017, the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail still had to put up with this shit.

  Interpretive signs placed by the City of Montgomery lead walkers along the remaining miles toward the state capitol. One sign describes how highway construction destroyed historic black neighborhoods in the area, as it did black communities around the country. The intersection of Mildred and Moore Streets, one of Montgomery’s former black business hubs, stood deserted. In a walk predicated on all that th
e civil rights marchers had gained, everything black communities had lost in the years afterward lay equally apparent.

  The Rosa Parks Museum was closed when I walked past. One block separated it from the Jefferson Davis Apartments, a low-income-housing complex for seniors in a city that is more than 55 percent black. Black footsteps had been painted upon the wide, gray crosswalk facing the Alabama State Capitol to honor those who walked from Selma over 50 years ago. Sitting opposite the crosswalk was another monument, built in 1942 and paid for by the Sophie Bibb Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It commemorated Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as president of the Confederacy. All around me, the distant past fought the near past for dominance. A reckoning was nowhere to be found.

  I climbed the steps of the Alabama State Capitol on April 9, 2017, the day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in 1865—roughly 100 years before Martin Luther King Jr. asked, “How long? Not long”—and blinked back tears. Walking, even when challenging, had been the easy part: I had no idea how we’d endure the rest of the year.

  Ultimately, the line between hiking and walking is thinner than most would imagine. Both activities can empower, but only one is accessible to the majority of the American population. We walk to protest. We walk to remember. We walk to demand better. Despite what outdoor magazine covers emphasize, our intentions always matter more than the nature of the terrain that carries them.

  When I first told friends of my plan to walk from Selma to Montgomery, most thought I’d lost my mind. It made less sense to them than my desire to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. A roadwalk along a highway in rural Alabama months into our fresh hell—why? When several of them asked if I was afraid, I did my best to explain the fear was the point. That their fear for me was the fear I lived with every day.

  I did not tell anyone that maybe I needed to walk into oncoming traffic for 54 miles—those 54 miles—to see people choosing not to kill me each day. That perhaps I could walk my way to reclaiming enough of an illusion of safety to survive the next four years in this country. And that it would have to be enough for now.

  PETER HESSLER

  Morsi the Cat

  from The New Yorker

  Natasha was the first of our daughters to get bitten by a rodent. It probably happened while she was sleeping, but she was too small to communicate anything. As with Ariel, her identical twin sister, Natasha’s early vocabulary was mostly English, but the girls used Egyptian Arabic for certain things—colors, animals, basic sustenance. Aish for “bread,” maya for “water.” If I twirled one of them around, she would laugh and shriek, “Tani!”: “Again!” And then her sister would pick up the refrain, because anything that was done to one twin had to be repeated with the other. Tani, tani, tani. They weren’t yet two years old.

  I noticed the mark while changing Natasha. To the right of her navel, there were two pairs of ugly red puncture holes: incisors. Perhaps the animal had been nosing around the top of her diaper. If Natasha had cried out, neither I nor my wife, Leslie, heard.

  We had moved to Cairo in October 2011, during the first year of the Arab Spring. We lived in Zamalek, a neighborhood on a long, thin island in the Nile River. Zamalek has traditionally been home to middle- and upper-class Cairenes, and we rented an apartment on the ground floor of an old building that, like many structures on our street, was beautiful but fading. Out in front of the Art Deco façade, the bars of a wrought-iron fence were shaped like spiderwebs.

  The spiderweb motif was repeated throughout the building. Little black webs decorated our front door, and the balconies and porches had webbed railings. The elevator was accessed through iron spiderweb gates. Behind the gates, rising and falling in the darkness of an open shaft, was the old-fashioned elevator box, made of heavy carved wood, like some Byzantine sarcophagus. The gaps in the webbed gates were as large as a person’s head, and it was possible to reach through and touch the elevator as it drifted past. Not long after we moved in, a child on an upper floor got his leg caught in the elevator, and the limb was broken so badly that he was evacuated to Europe for treatment.

  Safety had never been a high priority in old Cairo neighborhoods, but things were especially lax during the revolution. Electricity blackouts were common, and every now and then we had a day without running water. A pile of garbage next to the building attracted mice and rats. Below the windows of my daughters’ room, I had seen weasels scurrying into a hole in the building’s foundation.

  At a medical clinic, a pediatrician examined the marks on Natasha’s stomach. “Insect,” she said.

  I was incredulous. “That’s an insect bite?”

  “Maybe it was a flea,” she said.

  I sent a photograph to a family friend at a dermatology clinic in the United States. The response made me nostalgic for the American ability to apply cheerful language to any situation:

  Hi! We discussed in case conference today—all agreed . . . bite as fang by snake/rodent—hope this helps. Hope both are doing well. Hugs, Susie.

  Leslie and I took a cab to the west bank of the Nile, where a vaccination center called Vacsera sold us a rabies vaccine. Then we found a new pediatrician. I also bought about a dozen glue traps.

  At night, I set traps beneath the cribs. Sometimes I awoke to the sound of the twins’ voices: “Daddy, mouse! Daddy, mouse!” Once, something rattled in their toy kitchen, so I opened the tiny refrigerator door, and a mouse popped out. How the hell had it got in there? None of the mice I trapped seemed big enough to have made the bite marks, but they kept coming—tani, tani, tani. I drowned them one by one in a bucket of water.

  When it was Ariel’s turn to get bitten, the mark appeared on her back instead of on her stomach. Otherwise, it was identical to Natasha’s: four incisors. We took another cab to Vacsera.

  I was finished with traps. Leslie and I visited an expat who was giving away a male and a female cat. The choice was easy: the male was bigger, with a fierce expression, and he stalked lithely around the furniture. On his forehead, tiger stripes formed the shape of an M—a mark of the breed that’s known as the Egyptian Mau.

  We named him Morsi. Egypt had just held its first-ever democratic presidential election, which had been won by Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Not long after Morsi the cat arrived, he bit Leslie’s arm hard enough to leave his own set of puncture wounds. Tani—back to Vacsera. After a year in Cairo, I was the only member of the family who hadn’t received rabies shots.

  Leslie and I met in Beijing, where we worked as journalists. We came from very different backgrounds: she was born in New York, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, whereas I had grown up in mid-Missouri. But some similar restlessness had motivated both of us to go abroad, first to Europe and then to Asia. By the time we left China together, in 2007, we had lived almost our entire adult lives overseas.

  We made a plan: we would move to rural Colorado, as a break from urban life, and we hoped to have a child. Then we would go to live in the Middle East. We liked the idea of writing about another country with a deep history and a rich language, and we wanted this to be our first experience as a family.

  All of it was abstract—the kid, the country. Maybe we’d go to Egypt, maybe Syria. Maybe a boy, maybe a girl. What difference did it make? An editor in New York warned me that Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak had ruled for almost 30 years, might seem too sluggish after China. “Nothing changes in Cairo,” he said. But I liked the sound of that. I looked forward to studying Arabic in a country where nothing happened.

  The first disruption to our plan occurred when one kid turned into two. In May 2010, Ariel and Natasha were born prematurely, and we wanted to give them 12 months to grow before moving. The schedule didn’t matter—a year in a newborn’s life is a rush compared with never-changing Cairo. But, when protests broke out on Tahrir Square, our girls were 8 months old, and they were exactly 18 days older when Mubarak was overthrown.

  We delayed and reconsidered, but finally we decided to go
. We applied for life insurance, and the company carried out a medical screening but then rejected us on account of “extensive travel.” We visited a lawyer and wrote up wills. We moved out of our rental house; we put our possessions in storage; we gave away our car. We didn’t ship a thing—whatever we took on the plane was whatever we would have.

  The day before we left, we got married. Leslie and I had never bothered with formalities; neither of us had any desire to organize a wedding. But we read somewhere that if a couple has different surnames the Egyptian authorities could make it difficult to acquire joint-residence visas. We left the babies with a sitter and drove to the Ouray County Courthouse. As the deputy county clerk started the ceremony, Leslie asked when the department that handled traffic violations would close.

  “Four o’clock,” the clerk said.

  Leslie looked at her watch. “Can you hold on a minute?”

  She ran upstairs to pay one last speeding ticket. The marriage license noted that we “did join in the Holy Bonds of Matrimony” at 4:08:44 p.m. I shoved the license into our luggage. The next day, along with our 17-month-old twins, we boarded the plane. Neither Leslie nor I had ever been to Egypt.

  After Morsi arrived, the mice vanished. He ate the heads of a couple, leaving the bodies behind, and others stopped showing up. The coat markings of Egyptian Maus resemble those of cats that are portrayed on the walls of ancient tombs, and even the name is old: in pharaonic times, mau meant “cat.” Maus are agile, and they are characterized by a flap of skin that extends from the flank to the hind leg, which allows for greater extension. These house cats have been clocked at speeds of up to 30 miles per hour.