The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  Green Hill, a company that organizes jungle treks and runs the village guesthouse where we stayed, doesn’t go in for that kind of thing. Andrea Molyneaux, who manages Green Hill with her husband, is an Englishwoman with a master’s in primate conservation who did her fieldwork at Camp Leakey, on Borneo. The camp was established by the pioneering Lithuanian Canadian conservationist Birute˙ Mary Galdikas, who is to orangutans what Jane Goodall is to chimps. Andrea’s motto is painted on a big sign out front: KEEP WILDLIFE WILD.

  For the most part, Bukit Lawang resembles the other towns in the region—humble concrete buildings with rusty corrugated metal roofs. But at its far end, the road gives way to a footpath that meanders through the trees, and if you follow the path along the river, past the shops selling orangutan T-shirts and orangutan carvings, you’ll find yourself in the hotel district, a sort of fantasy of an Indonesian village filled with guesthouses made with bamboo, jungle logs, and branches.

  That night, Stefan and I slept in rustic rooms overlooking the jungle. The next day, we planned to march right into that seething mass of green. We were to spend the morning close to the village looking for semi-wild orangutans, which we were practically guaranteed to see. Then our guides would take us deeper into the forest, to an area rarely visited by people where the foliage would be thicker, the trails rougher, and the wildlife truly wild. We planned to camp there for two nights. If we saw an orangutan in the deep forest, we’d be among the very few people who ever have.

  Early the next morning, as the sun rose above trees across the river, we went into the forest. Stefan and I were joined by our head guide, Anto Cebol; his assistant, Ipan; and a pair of college students from Colorado. Anto, a native of Bukit Lawang, is 38, with the long hair and philosophical outlook of someone who has been exposed from an early age to the beliefs and customs of stoned Australian backpackers. Sitting on a boulder, he said, “No one knows how much longer the earth will be.” He smiled defiantly. “Maybe we go to the moon.”

  We’d been following him for only a few minutes when he pointed out a troop of black-Mohawked Thomas’s leaf monkeys in the trees. Though we were still on easy, well-worn paths, sweat started pouring out of me at a rate I’d never imagined possible. Then we saw it: our first orangutan. This was exciting, of course, that flash of orange in the trees, but she clearly wasn’t wild. She was stretched out on a limb, unafraid and unimpressed. Anto recognized her; he said he knew her mother. As we stood there staring, a long-tailed macaque walked right past us, not even bothering to glance in our direction. Then a group of Homo sapiens approached in flip-flops, taking selfies.

  So by the time we got on the motorbikes and headed down the road toward a more remote area, I was ready to go a little deeper. After a bumpy ride through palm plantations, we arrived at Bukit Kencur, a hamlet on the edge of the part of the jungle that the Green Hill staff had described as untouched. It was clear that this place didn’t get many foreign visitors. Clusters of reddish palm fruit sat in the dirt outside the sun-bleached wooden huts. The villagers who came over to look at us didn’t attempt to speak English, and no one tried to sell us orangutan carvings or anything else.

  One of the villagers approached with a basket of supplies. His name was Chilik, and he was going to serve as an extra guide for the rest of our trip. His training, as I’d later learn, had been unconventional. Some years ago, he got lost in the forest while gathering medicinal plants and sustained himself for five days by watching the orangutans to see which fruits they ate. Chilik didn’t speak any English. Unlike Anto, he wore his hair short, and did not bother with the rubber trekking shoes worn by the guides in Bukit Lawang. He led us through the jungle barefoot, scraping leeches off his ankles with a rusty machete, and he carried most of our supplies on his back in a basket made from rattan vines, which the Bukit Lawang guides had long since abandoned for Western-style backpacks. During snack breaks, he would go off by himself and squat on the forest floor, chain-smoking until it was time to leave.

  That first day, we hiked only a short distance, maybe a quarter mile. Still, it was tough going, as the rest of the trip would be. The trail rose and fell at such a steep incline that we often had to grab at roots and vines just to stay upright. At times it disappeared completely, at which point Chilik would move to the front of the pack and hack a path through the bush with his machete. At last we came to the campsite. It sat on a slope overlooking a picturesque river. As we rinsed off in the cool, clear water, a pair of cooks showed up out of nowhere and built a fire. They boiled a pot of rice, fried some tempeh, sautéed a sackful of tapioca leaves, and whipped up a delicious dish of dried anchovies with wild ginger and chile.

  We slept beneath a tarp stretched over a frame of lashed-together bamboo poles. The soundscape was a layered mix of cicada, bird, stream, and rain, with a smattering of monkey howls thrown in. We awoke early the next morning, at the first hint of daylight. Toast, eggs, strong Sumatran coffee, then back on the trail, pausing every 15 minutes so that Anto could pass out pieces of leaves and bark, schooling us on the names and medicinal or culinary uses of each species. There was the hot-pink flower of a tree he called assam kimchin. (A lemony herb; goes well with curry.) The woody stalk of pasak bumi. (Bitter; defends against malaria.) The glossy leaf of the satykop bush. (Per Anto: “To make not broken the first baby when baby is still drinking from mama and mama pregnant.”) On we hiked, our eyes lifted to the treetops, when suddenly Anto saw something that made him break into a sprint. “Mawa!” he shouted, crashing through the foliage. “Lucky!”

  Mawa, I knew by then, is the local word for orangutan.

  Seeing a truly wild orangutan does feel different from seeing one that has grown up around humans. You see in his eyes that he is frightened, and in his innocence and awe, he reminds you of a child. You feel a rush of nostalgia for your own childhood, when all the world felt like this corner of the forest, mysterious and full of wonder. At the same time, you can’t help suspecting you feel this way primarily because you come from the West, where you and your compatriots, having benefited from centuries of environmentally destructive agricultural and industrial practices, have forgotten the hardships of forest life. This is one of the reasons you can afford to look back at that bygone existence through a romantic lens, much in the way you can afford to romanticize your childhood only after the pain of growing up has receded. You think these things, and you wonder what the orangutan is thinking. And then the screeching ape demonstrates his mastery of simple tools by breaking off a stick and throwing it at you. Knowing what you know about humans, can you blame him?

  Eventually the orangutan calmed down and just hung there from the branches staring back at us. Then we heard a rustling of leaves a little way off. “Another one!” Anto cried. Two, in fact—a mother and baby. So that’s why the first one hadn’t fled at the sight of us: he was protecting his family. The mom and baby were moving slowly through the treetops, not leaping like monkeys but plotting a careful course, shifting their weight from foot to foot, and hand to hand.

  My last few days in North Sumatra unfolded at a rambling hotel on the shore of Lake Toba, eight hours southeast of Bukit Lawang. At 436 square miles—about the size of Los Angeles—Lake Toba is the largest volcanic lake in the world, and maybe the nicest. The water is sparkling and calm. Soft green mountains rise all around it. The hotel, Carolina Cottages, is a collection of bungalows with sharply peaked roofs and ornately carved wooden façades, a tribute to the traditional building style of the local people. A breeze blew onto the hotel veranda, ruffling the edges of the batik tablecloths. On the beaches, the Coke came in glass bottles and the coconuts came with straws.

  At the center of the lake lies Samosir Island, the heartland of the Batak, an indigenous group known for their love of singing. One night, we partied with a crowd of Batak schoolteachers on their summer break. They fed us boiled eggs with chile paste and passed out cups of herbal liquor and brought out a guitar and sang for us and begged us to dance with them and laug
hed hysterically when we did. Even Stefan, who has been everywhere and isn’t easily impressed, conceded that one of the guests had a solid case when he called Lake Toba “heaven on this earth.”

  On my way back to Medan, as I boarded a ferry headed across the lake, a stranger handed me a pocket map. He turned out to be a mapmaker from Java who had traveled all over Indonesia for his work. He told me Toba held a special place in his heart. For years, he said, the Indonesian government had done too little to develop the tourism industry in this provincial outpost, but that was beginning to change. An airport had been built nearby, and there were plans to extend the highway from Medan to the lake. “We want people to know the story of Toba,” he said.

  The story of Toba is one worth knowing. The massive volcanic eruption that created the lake some 70,000 years ago nearly wiped out the entire human species—and may have made us who we are today. According to the “Toba catastrophe theory,” originally posited by the science writer Ann Gibbons, the blast plunged the earth into a six-year winter, leaving as few as 3,000 people alive on the planet. Those survivors were the most resourceful of our kind, and they passed on those qualities to their descendants, our ancestors, planting the seeds of human civilization.

  It was perhaps because of Toba that our ancestors learned to make fire, and grow crops, and cure diseases, and come up with clever theories about human civilization. And it was perhaps because of Toba that we learned to clear forests, and developed a habit of wiping other species off the face of the earth.

  As the ferry pulled into the dock, I said goodbye to the mapmaker and hauled my bags to the driver waiting onshore. Then we began the journey back to Medan, with its truck-clogged streets, passing palm plantations where there used to be forest. With luck, you’ll get to visit one of the forests that remain. If you do, keep your eyes raised to the treetops. You might see someone you used to know.

  LUCAS LOREDO

  Mother Tongue

  from Oxford American

  My family is no longer speaking because of a disagreement over a heap of jewelry, which my grandmother left behind when she died four years ago. My two aunts were given the jewels—in my mind’s eye, the great glittering gold cache guarded by the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit—as stipulated in my grandmother’s will. The will said everything should be split among the five children evenly, save these extra jewels, which the sisters could divide as they saw fit. That didn’t go over well; my dad and his two brothers said it wasn’t fair, that it wasn’t in the spirit of our family to parse Tata’s heirlooms so cynically. My two aunts had a will signed by my grandmother telling them exactly what she wanted done—how could they do any different? By now it’s all hazy, calcified by the ensuing silence. I only have my dad’s account to go on; my aunts, certainly, would have another take. But the result remains: my dad and his siblings can no longer be in the same room, not easily, and we the grandchildren and great-grandchildren have not gotten together with all our aunts and uncles for four years.

  Tata would be ashamed of us if she knew our family had clammed up over some shiny objects, considering all we’ve been through. My father, his four brothers and sisters, and their parents fled the small coastal town of Nicaro, Cuba, during the revolution. The war had come literally to their door, guerrilla fighters braced against the porch columns firing up at President Batista’s single-prop planes, and Dad remembers the driveway heavy with spent bullet casings the next morning. Neighbors who spoke out against the government had been spirited away in the night; boys as young as 12 were being conscripted into the army. Out of fear, the Loredos escaped in the summer of 1960 on the second-to-last ferry from Havana to Key West before Fidel Castro choked the border permanently.

  In the United States, my grandfather, the assistant director of the hospital in Nicaro, wasn’t allowed to practice medicine until he passed the American board exams. He worked as a mortician’s assistant in Miami, studying every night for a test riddled with English jargon until he passed. Then he completed a residency meant for new graduates—not assistant directors of hospitals—and earned the right to practice medicine in the States.

  Nicaro to Havana to Key West to Miami, motel vacancy signs reading NO PETS, FAMILIES, OR CUBANS. Meridian, Mississippi. Then Texas: El Paso, Waco, Hallettsville, San Antonio, my grandfather chasing work, the family following. Dad threw newspapers to help support the family and has not stopped working—save the year after my mother died unexpectedly in 2002—for all 58 years since he immigrated. Dad got into fistfights: once after he let a black boy go ahead of him in line at a bakery in Mississippi, which the white kids outside didn’t like; other times to protect his younger sisters from boys who attempted sexual assault. As a teenager, girls wouldn’t date him because he was Cuban—too dark. His principal told him he’d be lucky to get Cs in college. In graduate school, a professor in the University of Texas psychology department refused to approve his dissertation for increasingly absurd reasons (including the criticism that the paper had too many instances of the word “the”); Dad eventually had to threaten the man with legal action and a story in the Statesman before the professor begrudgingly stamped his approval.

  My grandfather came to be a respected physician in Texas and worked until his dying day in 1994. He saw the birth of half a dozen grandchildren, and after he passed, Tata became our family’s sole steward. Under her watch, our numbers grew past 30. Aunts and uncles, cousins, children, all of us a dash of salt across the map of Texas: Austin and Houston, San Antonio and Victoria, Sealy, Hallettsville, Plano. And the key feature of our family, for half a century, has been the ubiquitous Loredo Family Reunions: the annual Gulf Coast beach trip and Christmas and Thanksgiving, Easter and Tata’s birthday, baby showers and first communions and beauty contests and middle school graduations. Baseball games, even, can merit a two-hour drive and a glass bowl of pink ambrosia.

  Of the original siblings, Dad’s the oldest and remembers the most of Cuba. The second-oldest, my aunt, speaks Spanish and is the resident Cuban black beans expert. But the other three barely remember Cuba at all. One mustachioed uncle studied to be a nurse but now repairs power lines, hunts deer on the weekends, and bequeaths mountains of sausage unto us. All—including my dad—have deep Texan drawls.

  Picture, in our heyday: a whole Thanksgiving bird, injected with spices via a five-inch syringe, sizzling in a deep fryer; the Cowboys on the tube; Spanish wafting over the scent of black beans and lechón asado; gleaming belt buckles and Stetsons; and stories of Nicaro traded across the table. The one time Dad’s horse snapped its lead and chased him into the ocean. The other time one of his cousins, just a toddler, released the emergency brake on the Chevy, which began rolling down the hill, and Tata, in the middle of getting dressed, sprinted half-naked into the yard and dove through the open car window. The royal palms, the one-room church on the hilltop Papa paid to have constructed. The pothos on the children’s table my Dad hid nasty foods beneath—and how ferociously that plant grew, Tata not learning why until decades later. In this way, Nicaro had been kept alive; our family had been kept whole through the power of memory and communion.

  Know that this is what has been lost with our family’s cleaving. The reunions, yes, but all of it—the memory of our family’s epic saga at the bottom of a deep well. The family is divided in neat camps: the aunts and their children on one side with Tata’s will and a stack of jewels; my dad and his brothers on the other side with their own children and their bitterness. The revolution forgotten, the ferry forgotten, the landing, the assimilation. The family.

  Compared to my father’s childhood in Nicaro, I felt my own upbringing lacked wonder. He’d tell me about Cuba, and I’d imagine hunting rose-throated parrots in pine forests with a BB gun, or haunting Las Palmas—the club attended by the local American nickel factory workers—until they let me into their fabled chlorinated pool. When I began to write as a teenager, my stories were populated with the broad palms of plantain leaves and the mischief of tobiano colts, and over t
he years I accumulated a healthy body of work set in revolution-era Cuba. In 2015, I began writing a novel that would tell two stories: the story of a boy’s childhood in 1950s Cuba—the magic of it, the violence—and the story of him as an adult in Texas in 2002, trying to find a relationship with his son after the death of the mother.

  I’d often thought of going to Cuba, but in the summer of 2017 I was nearing the end of the first draft of the novel, and it became clear I needed to visit the island for research, to see Nicaro for myself. And, though I told no one, I began to dream of the events that might lead to my family’s reconciliation, a fantasy in which I was the hero. Lucas returns to Cuba, the first in his family to do so in six decades. He collects interviews, memories, sucks the marrow of the place. Upon return, he convinces his aunts and uncles to tolerate each other for one hour to view photos and videos of Nicaro. And in his stories of home they remember the importance of family, they arrange the next Christmas reunion, they fall into a sobbing heap of apologies and forgiveness.

  And so, four years after Tata’s death, four years after our family stopped speaking, I decided to go to Cuba. The stated goal: to research my novel. The unstated hope: The Great Loredo Salvage Mission.

  In May, I called Dad to tell him what I was up to. For so long, Cubans like us could only stare 90 miles across a spit of water wondering why ours was one of only two countries on planet Earth that we could not visit. But in the years since President Obama had relaxed travel restrictions to Cuba in 2011, making possible the prospect of traveling there legally, I’d asked Dad whether or not he was interested in returning to his homeland. He’d always said no, that he’d heard from others who’d made the pilgrimage back home that the country’s extreme disrepair did nothing to mend their own hearts; instead, the country they remembered had retreated farther into the murky waters of the long-ago.