The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  This was not a topic for discussion, however, during the morning coffee conversations initiated by Reicher. The barracks banter typical of other river trips was replaced by a mediated discussion about the Rio Grande and its discontents, chief among them the wall. In the shade of the canyon, as the sunlight gradually made its way down the cliffs on the American side—There’s your wall!—Reicher asked Austin Alvarado to say a few words to the group, which was seated in a circle of folding chairs.

  “The idea of a wall is so un-American to me,” Alvarado said. “Is this America first, or America only?” Alvarado, 25, described how his mother, and later his father and brother—all of them Guatemalans—had crossed the river near Brownsville. Udall asked, “Austin, are you a Dreamer?”

  “No, I was born here.”

  Someone joked, “You say ‘here,’ but we’re in Mexico now.”

  “I was born in Austin, Texas, which is how I got my name,” Alvarado said. “I have cousins who are Dreamers, though.”

  “You’re called an anchor baby on the other side,” Udall said wryly.

  Alvarado and Masters had spent a couple of days with Representative Will Hurd, a Republican from Texas, who strongly opposes the wall—which he has called “a third-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem.” He prefers a so-called smart wall, the deployment of camera and drone technology to trace movement on the border, especially in remote areas. You can see instances of this approach here and there in the Big Bend region; a giant unmanned blimp hovers high over the desert south of Marfa. (In the omnibus spending bill, Congress approved about $200 million that could be used for this kind of security.)

  The group began to talk about a kind of antidote to the wall, an idea that Reicher had only just heard of the month before but which has been around since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration discussed it, in the ’30s: a binational park, linking the existing Big Bend park and some adjacent public lands, on the American side, with millions of acres of wild country, both public and private, already set aside just across the river. The Mexican government has designated more than 4 million acres as protected. Cemex, the Mexican building-materials behemoth, had bought up ranches along both sides of the river, in the interest of land preservation and the reintroduction of bighorn sheep. (When Trump was elected, Cemex was assumed to be a likely provider of cement for the wall, but the company has stated that it wouldn’t be bidding on the job.) As it is, the Chihuahuan ecosystem straddles the border and exceeds the limits of any existing park. Why shouldn’t the parks and preserves be integrated somehow? One precedent is Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, along the mountainous border between Montana and Alberta. But no one had ever thought of putting up a wall to keep out the Canadians.

  The next day, we paddled 11 miles in the canyon. Several guests flipped their canoes. It doesn’t take much, once you get caught broadside against a rock in swift water. Roosevelt, in a boat with Masters, hit a submerged boulder, and into the drink they went, along with Masters’s fancy camera. Everyone had a laugh.

  Camp was on the Mexican side again, just upriver of a two-pronged tower of limestone known as Rabbit Ears. Again the rituals: the load-in, the scramble for good ground, dry shorts, groover. Bob Irvin broke out a fly rod, in the hope of catching a longnose gar, a prehistoric fish native to these waters. McDonald brought out his books. There was swimming and beer-drinking in the sun, some exploration of a slot canyon, and then later, after dinner (Dutch-oven lasagna), in the dark, more Chautauqua—more schemes and dreams. Another storm blew in, and at night’s end a group of us lingered under the kitchen tarp, telling river tales. Killer holes, unfamiliar beasts, mysterious strangers. Reicher recalled finding, in a hot springs in the Lower Canyons, a new genus of isopod crustacean, one that glowed in the dark, which is unusual for a freshwater bug. He took some pickled samples back to Dartmouth and got a grant to do more research, but by the time he returned to the hot springs a flood had washed out the pools and the bugs were gone.

  Masters and Alvarado told a story, from their Rio Grande adventure, about a mischievous friend of Masters’s who secretly served the two of them and a cat-loving friend an elaborate taco breakfast made with bobcat meat. I was thinking of laying out my paco pad under the tarp, but as the rain intensified, a phalanx of those big pale spiders came up over the sand, eyes goggling in the beams of our headlamps. They kept converging on Masters, as though to avenge the one from the night before. We pitched a tent.

  In the Grand Canyon, my friends had, after a week, got into a mode of talking to one another almost exclusively in the diction and cadence of a nineteenth-century explorer’s journals: “Cabbage stores are mostly depleted and what is left is sodden and rancid. The men grow restless.” I found myself the next morning, over pancakes and coffee, privately lapsing into it. Morale high, weather improving, Masters unbowed.

  “Hey, I have an idea,” someone said.

  “I have one, too,” Masters said.

  “Sweet!”

  “Double sweet.”

  It was a bluebird morning. A tailwind, a blessing in these parts, sped us out of the canyon and into an open desert basin—out of what was, on the American side, Big Bend National Park and into the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area. (It was amazing to consider that the Big Bend park is the southern terminus, geologically speaking, of both the Appalachians and the Rockies—that the ranges, or at least the rock that distinguishes them, almost touch here.) For hours, the river tunneled lazily through the cane and wound around until Mexico, confusingly, was to our north. We camped on that side again, along a run where Irvin spent another hour in midstream, backlit amid the riffles, as if in some fishing magazine, tossing a fly line toward the American side, to no avail—no gar. Udall passed around some Cohibas, then sat half-submerged and shirtless in an eddy, smoking one of them: a ride on the wild side. Someone put out Fritos and guacamole. A group hiked to the top of a nearby mesa just before sunset and took in hundreds of square miles of mountainous desert—a good chunk of a would-be peace park. You could also see a lot of this from the groover—of which the returning mesa hikers had an unobstructed view.

  This was the first clear night, eagerly anticipated, since the area is a so-called dark-sky preserve, advantageous for gazing at the stars. The sky was soon full. After dinner (steak), a dozen or so of the group gathered by a fire and passed around a bottle of whisky while playing what they called a drinking game, initiated by Masters: “If you were President, which fifty-mile stretch of unprotected river, anywhere in the United States, would you designate as wild and scenic?” One by one, people spoke of their favorite threatened waterways—the Pecos, the Pigeon, the Crow—until, under the spell of the whisky and the stars and the rustle of the Rio Grande, it seemed possible that each pronouncement had the force of law. I slept outside and woke up with a headache. Dover’s powder depleted. The men complain of ague.

  There’s something forlorn about the last run of a river trip, when you know it ends in a shuttle van rather than at a camp. A cold front washed in, bringing drizzle and a chilly headwind, and, as the flotilla passed through some slack water and a rapid that a guide called Eat Shit Rock, you could begin to see, along the banks, evidence of harder use. Abandoned infrastructure: an old mining tram, a pier improvised out of a rusting truck chassis. The big lode around here had been fluorspar. Dow Chemical once had an operation in La Linda, on the Mexican side, connected to the American side by a steel-and-concrete bridge, high above the river. This had been a busy crossing. But the mines shut down in the early ’90s, and then, soon afterward, the bridge did, too, after a drug smuggler killed a Mexican customs agent. Now La Linda was a ghost town, with a ghost bridge, in the middle of the longest stretch of the river with no active border crossing.

  This is where the trip came to an end, on a sandbar across from the ruins of La Linda. The vans were waiting, with trailers for the boats. Just before we got there, we passed beneath the defunct bridge, its underbelly warted up with swallows
’ nests. On the roadbed above, the array of median barriers and fences, including a reinforced-mesh overhang in the shape of a backstop, brought to mind the collection of wall prototypes that Trump had recently gone to see in San Diego—the disembodied slabs that some had likened to conceptual art. Would they work? Had these? We loaded the canoes onto the trailers. From up on the bank, the river didn’t look like much.

  ANNE HELEN PETERSEN

  How Nashville Became One Big Bachelorette Party

  from Buzzfeed

  It’s a mild, early March Saturday in Nashville: the first real weekend of bachelorette season. By 10 a.m., they’ve already descended on The Gulch, a neighborhood that looks like it was constructed in The Sims: everything built at the same time, in the same slick, clean-lined style. Fifteen years ago, it was a rail yard—an actual gulch. Today, it’s a collection of brunch spots (the most popular is Biscuit Love, included in every respectable bachelorette blog post), a Frye boots store, an Urban Outfitters, a Google office, a place called Two Old Hippies selling $200 dresses and tea towels printed with spunky messages, a blowout bar, a juice bar, and an actual bar.

  The easiest way to identify a bachelorette party is by their matching T-shirts, emblazoned with Nashville-inflected slogans in twee calligraphy (WHEN I SIP YOU SIP WE SIP; BOOTS AND BOOZE AND THE BRIDE). The attendees—bridesmaids, friends, moms, sisters-in-law, anyone who’s affiliated with the bride and willing to throw down for a weekend—wear identical tees in black or bright colors. The bride’s, of course, is white.

  Sometimes, they wear matching flannels, or jackets, or shoes (one group I encountered sported white high-top sneakers; another, pink windbreakers, like a millennial update of the Pink Ladies from Grease). I met one group from Manhattan who refused to wear matching shirts, opting instead for blue fanny packs emblazoned with BABE in fluorescent pink. “Our bride hates tacky shit,” one of the attendees told me, right before they hopped on a foot-powered Pedal Tavern, where they’d spend the next two hours pedaling around downtown and obeying the commandment to chug every time someone on the street took a picture.

  Even without the matching clothing, you can spot a likely bachelorette party from 100 yards away: a group of (almost entirely) white women, wearing nice jeans, cute tops, and fashionable boots, their hair styled in the long, beachy waves that the Blowout Co., which services dozens of bachelorette parties every weekend, says is currently their most requested look. They travel in packs, usually between 6 and 16. They always look mildly lost yet resolutely determined. They tend to be spilling out of or piling into Lyfts or Ubers. And they love murals.

  More precisely: they love taking pictures in front of murals, which, over the last decade, have come to dot every gentrifying section of the city. What started as a covertly capitalist art form (an I BELIEVE IN NASHVILLE mural designed by a merch company) has become overtly so, as business owners all over town realize the free advertising potential of Instagram location tags. During peak bachelorette season, the photo line at the most popular Nashville mural—artist Kelsey Montague’s “angel wings,” just a block away from Biscuit Love—can take 90 minutes.

  When a group reaches the mural, they snap solo shots before asking the next person in line to take a group picture. On Saturday morning, a woman in a maroon shirt that reads BRIDE’S LAST RIDE poses with one leg tucked behind her, her head cocked to the side. Then she scuttles away to join the rest of the group. “Tara, are you so happy?” one of them asks.

  They huddle together to scrutinize the photos. Someone, not Tara, finds them lacking. “Can I just squeeze back in and do it one more time?” she asks. But two Ubers have already pulled up to bring the group to their next destination. A pole dancing class, a bicycle bar, a pedicure, a wine tasting tour—and, by the end of the night, a trip to the honky-tonks on Broadway, where bachelorettes have become conspicuous, ubiquitous, and unavoidable.

  Depending on whom you ask, these groups are either a symbol of all that’s wrong with Nashville’s recent, astronomical growth, or exactly the sort of people necessary to sustain it: young, armed with disposable income, en route to the upper middle class. They are not the Nashville tourists of our parents’ generation. Most have little interest in visiting the Grand Ole Opry; if they listen to country music at all, it’s a mix of what’s become known as “classic” (read: ’90s) country and contemporary pop/hip-hop hybrids.

  The majority of these bachelorette parties are from the Midwest, but they also come from New York, Seattle, California, and Boston. Most don’t own cowboy boots and have never set foot in a honky-tonk. That’s part of the allure: the ability to try on a culture while avoiding accusations of appropriation.

  The current tourism uptick—which includes the bachelorette parties—can be dated to two different events. The first, which has become a sort of urban legend, was when the Chicago Bears came to play the Titans, and visiting fans drained the entire downtown supply of beer. The second was two articles—one in GQ in 2012, and another in the New York Times in 2013—that painted Nashville as the hip, artist-friendly home to Jack White and the Black Keys: the latest “it” city, as the Times put it.

  The overarching argument of these articles was the same: Nashville is cool now. Which is to say, there are parts of Nashville that serve and appeal to and are filled with members of the so-called creative class and promise a different “experience” than your day-to-day life. The draw isn’t major attractions, like the Opry, but attending a quaint show at the Bluebird Café. Like Austin or Portland, the draw to Nashville isn’t to go and be a tourist, but to go and spend a weekend sort of pretending that you live there—and, who knows, maybe one day make it a reality, and bring your friends and business along with you.

  “Weekend visits are key to the growth of the city,” Steven Hale, who wrote a locally beloved piece about the bachelorettes for the Nashville Scene, told me. “If you come here at twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six, and you fall in love with the city, then you can move here and put down roots.” That’s why the economic development groups in Nashville adore “bach parties,” as bachelor and bachelorette parties have become collectively known: these women are at precisely the point in their lives when a move to Nashville is possible.

  Some Nashville residents fixate on the unignorable blow-up penises, which, as one Uber driver told me, showed up in the pool at a local hotel when she was trying to celebrate her grandson’s birthday. Others are annoyed with drunk girls knocking on their doors when they can’t find their Airbnb in a residential neighborhood.

  “It’s mostly located in downtown Nashville, but it’s spreading out to other ‘hip’ neighborhoods now, which is a weird feeling, because you can’t escape it,” one longtime resident told me. “Like, you can’t go to brunch in most areas without running into a gaggle of women in matching outfits.” Servers dread the large, demanding groups and their checks split 14 ways.

  “They’ve gone from being all over downtown to all over anywhere worth getting drinks in this city on a Friday or Saturday night,” said one woman who moved to Nashville five years ago. “It’s like the bach industry ruins any ‘hot new local spot’ within a year.”

  But the larger issue with the bachelorettes is one few will articulate: What does this influx of young, moneyed women, and the web of industries that have popped up to cater to them, suggest about the town that Nashville is rapidly gentrifying into? And what might it signal about the future—and the impact—of intranational tourism throughout the US?

  Tourists always went to the honky-tonks on Broadway. They always went to the Opry. But this new type of tourism, centered on Instagram-friendly experiences—and the mobility and capital it requires—means it’s touching more areas of the city, and accelerating the already rapid transformation of a sleepy, artsy southern town into a cluster of “destinations.” As that happens, attention to the past—and the things that made and continue to make Nashville feel unique and vibrant and desirable—is swallowed by the desire to document the present. None
of these developments are novel to Nashville; at least a dozen people told me “Nashville feels like Austin, ten years ago.” But that decade is telling: Austin’s ghost has largely been bulldozed and built over with box condos. Nashville’s is still just visible enough to haunt it.

  “You’ve come to the right place,” yells Todd, a thirtysomething with a buzz cut and sports sunglasses, from across the parking lot of Losers Bar and Grill. “We’ve had more girls come through here than Bed Bath and Beyond.”

  Every weekend, Todd “captains” one of four Party Barges—an F-150 pickup truck outfitted with boat seats, a few life jackets, and the general look, if not actual capability, of a boat—from Midtown, up and around honky-tonk-lined Broadway, and back to Losers.

  Todd works for Ray Smitherman, a retired police officer who started the Party Barge four years ago after watching Pedal Taverns—the first type of “transportainment” in the area—take off. Smitherman first came to Nashville from Alabama as a singer-songwriter, and he’s found most of his drivers through the music community.

  A group of women spill out of a pair of Ubers and pass cases of beer to Smitherman, who then places them in a cooler that’ll come along for the ride (all transportainment vehicles in Nashville are currently BYOB). “On a scale of one to Randy Travis, how drunk are you now?” Todd asks the group. They’re from Fort Worth, Texas (“We do not live in Dallas!”) and slightly more classed-up than the group that came before, one of whom had made a point to show me her penis straw: “Isn’t it girthy?”