THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING, toro county park

While visiting my brother in Seattle on his birthday last month I bought The Best American Travel Writing 2011 at the lovely literally-brick-and-mortar Elliot Bay Book Company on 10th in Capitol Hill where my brother lives. The whirlwind of birthday events, of which this foray to the bookstore was a part—my father actually insisted on buying the book for me—and a piñata was another, afforded little reading time and I did not begin it until we were at the airport between Seattle and Tacoma, over two hours early, on our way home. The book begins with the heavy-handed introduction that academic writers tend to produce (with phrases like “This rather dogmatic passage is taken from the syllabus of the travel writing workshop that I teach each year at my university”) which begins with the aforementioned dogmatic passage which begins with a simple credo:

Find a place. Write about it.

If I were doing that, having found the airport, I could suggest finding the Caffé Vita in Concourse C, if you find yourself at SeaTac and have the time and, if you have the money, the adjacent Beecher’s Handmade Cheese location, another local institution originating in historic Pike’s Place Market, for a block of mind-blowing cheddar or hot mac and cheese, sandwiches, etc.

Or I could tell you that SeaTac flirts with being a real place as much as an airport possibly can, that there are expansive windows that reveal daylight and, passed the token jets and tarmac, mountains, and that it just feels like a (dare I say) natural extension of the airplane industries that partly define the area.

Or I could tell you that on day 1 of the sequester’s FAA cuts (hence arriving over two hours early) SeaTac was surviving just fine, that this man on the ground (well, one’s really not on the ground at an international American airport, but you know what I mean) reports little effect from reduced air traffic controller hours.

Or I could tell you that an airport in the United States in the first quarter of the 21st century is pretty identical to every other airport in the United States in its amalgam of boredom, hurry, fear and annoyance and the way that the nearly identical commerce both caters to and takes incredible advantage of the mentality created by the kafkaesque process of herding and intimidation—but find the Caffé Vita/Beecher’s location in Concourse C to feel like a human!

Or, as I intend to do, I could use this confluence of events to begin this blog with its ars poetica statement of purpose or, like the piece of writing it acknowledged at the beginning, its introduction.  What interests me about the maxim is the word “it” that we are writing about, that there is no limit to what “it” can mean, and thus no limit to travel writing:

Find a place. Write about it.

Write about finding the place (deciding on that place, literally finding it, or getting lost, perceiving it [“did you find it as romantic as they say it is?”], etc.), about the place itself, obviously, and about the writing about it, etc.

More often than not, however, the place finds you, and that, really, is ideal. So I would change the syllabus for this hypothetical course in travel writing to

Find yourself in a place. Write about it.

And, of course, once you are in this place don’t actually start writing, for god’s sakes! Buy a coffee (one may walk to Concourse C from the Central Terminal or take the Satelite [sic] Transit System from Concourse D or the North Satelite [again, for some reason, sic], chat with someone, sketch the mountains out the windows, chat with someone, buy a newspaper, read a book you recently purchased about travel writing to feel comfortable in your unfamiliar setting, take a picture, for god’s sake: chat with someone!, or, if you must, write a postcard or some quick sketches of your perceptions, details, etc. And so:

Find yourself in a place. Soak it up, participate in it, be present, even if it is just an airport. Go somewhere else, think about something else, do something else in this different place. Write, at a time appropriate to your own process, about everything that has anything to do with any insight you’ve ever had or whatever story about whatever place for whatever reason you think might be interesting. In other words continually find yourself in places after unselfconsciously being in that place and write about this continual process of being somewhere, interchangeably present and self-aware.

My notion of what one may call deconstructed or expanded or non-reductionist travel writing is not new. It includes just about everything Hemingway and Kerouac wrote, works by Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Hermann Hesse. It is Death in Venice and Trout Fishing in America, Tin Tin and Walden. And it is the greatest epic ever told, The Odyssey, retold over and over with the travelers, places and locals interchangeably playing their parts. It may seem I am creating a false dichotomy between masculine travel-based literature and feminine literary travel writing, but I am not, I just haven’t read as much as I would like—including Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun—and most of what I have read was in my adolescence when I consumed more Bukowski alone than female writers. However, I did read the diaries of Anaïs Nin as a teenager and I remember that her sense of place—the choice of detail and personalized account of the feeling evoked by surroundings—is unsurpassed.  And when you google her name with the word “travel” her legacy as poetic conduit of real life situation (my working definition of “travel writer”) is solidified by this quote from volume 7 of her diary:

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

and this:

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectation of miracles.

And so does the travel writer figuratively walk, letting one hyper-present self naïvely explore out front, without expectations (other than, of course, that miracles will transpire), without solidified plans, with as little preconceptions and biases as possible, and the hyper-aware writer follows at the heels transcribing the look on the face, the feelings evoked, the flavors imbibed, the conversations had, the miracles, hopefully, experienced.

While I did travel while reading this book, it was only to places I had been before.

On the flight back to California I read Mischa Berlinski’s “Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead,” an account of befriending a man while living in Haiti in the months before the 2010 earthquake, and the fates of all involved in the months after.

On a bench in Toro County Park, the area of Monterey County where I grew up, which I photographed for the first blog post, I read Tom Ireland’s “Famous” about visiting Mumbai right after the horrific railway station attack in 2008. Again the heaviness of suffering and socioeconomic differences informs a privileged narrative of writer passing through for some casual truth.

In Burbank, California when my girlfriend and I visited her mom last weekend, I read Maureen Dowd’s “A Girl’s Guide to Saudi Arabia,” in which she finds a place (Saudi Arabia) and  the “it” she writes about is what it means, simply, to be there as a woman, a fairly complex and dizzying subject.

While there I also read Porter Fox’s “The Last Stand of Freetown,” an incredible description of Copenhagen’s bohemian drug-infused remnant of ’60s utopianism, about which I had previously known nothing.

I read Tom Ireland’s “Stuck” in my parents’ bathtub, a tour of Moscow from its gridlocked streets.

The book avoids travel writing clichés—epiphanies, generalizations, patronizing and chauvinist notions of conquest—and manages to be what a good collection of travel writing should be: a diverse blend of everything from journalism, memoir, food writing, sports writing, sociology, and, in the case of Jessica McCaughey’s “Aligning the Internal Compass,” what it means to orient yourself, literally traversing an orienteering course with her dad, in a place you’ve never been before.

To be a travel writer, the book asserts without saying, one needs to be an amateur gourmand, traffic expert, sociologist, geographer, sports journalist, art historian and novelist, but one needs to be humble and naïve at the same time, an unassuming blank version of his or her nationality, profession or however else the context decides to see the writer.

As I happen to be a lover and amateur expert of parks, allow me to return to my visit to Toro County Park, a place that hosted half a dozen field trips and end of the year celebrations in elementary school, hikes, barbeques, baseball games and climactic moments where everyone in my class lined up facing each other and stepped back before tossing a water balloon to the person standing across until one pair stands several dozen yards apart with a balloon in tact (I now read on the website that water balloons are banned, though “dunk tanks are allowed” [“Prior arrangement with Park Ranger required 1 week prior to event”]). After I finished Tom Ireland’s piece I rode my bike further into the park, up a steep paved road to the Nature Center (closed, not even on the website [I did learn, also, that petting zoos are also allowed with a permit and week’s notice]) and the last parking lot before infrastructure becomes nothing but dirt trails meandering into the northern foothills of the Santa Lucia range and its apogee Mount Toro. I locked my bike and trustingly left my book in my bag in my bike basket ‘fore (one always feels tempted, if you’ll continue to indulge me, to wax Wordsworth at these moments) setting off.

I also used the restroom and took a picture of the best graffiti I’ve seen this year:

I had no map, just my childhood memories of the place, and a more recent adventure when my girlfriend and I ate pot brownies and purposefully got lost in the park. I followed a path to a vista of the little valley of the park, and beyond that the Salinas Valley and on to the Monterey Bay with the power station stacks of Moss Landing vaguely visible on the horizon,

and I decided to continue on into the ravine of another creek instead of heading back. I recognized the summer camp my brother and some other friends worked for as teenagers as cooks and counselors and the old windmill whose metallic creak echoed through the ravine.  The lupins were in full force, a blanket of periwinkle wildflowers reproducing on top of each other, it seemed. The meadows of what Steinbeck called the Pastures of Heaven hadn’t been this lush with flower for years it felt like, and the grasses among them maintained their greens longer into the spring than usual, the life lingering before the golden grassy death that overwhelms these hills every April.  I took several pictures with my phone.

I wondered if I would be able to loop back on another path to the Nature Center or if I would just have to turn around. I was, after all, a little worried about my book, losing it just as I was getting into it. So, a week into getting my smart phone, I was already, not only taking pictures with my cell phone while out in nature, but also accessing the internet on it to pull up a map. And I could, as it turned out, keep going on this trail, come out of the ravine and hike along a ridge, that I was now remembering, cross through a cattle guard, and descend into a meadow with a unbelievably massive oak and a bathtub-looking drinking apparatus for the cows, where my girlfriend and I had been a few years before. From there I could meet another trail and hike back along another creek.

Atop the ridge I could see in all directions, further along the ridge straight ahead, up the slope to Mount Toro to the left, the oaky ravine behind and below me, and the gentle valley and rolling hills beyond it to my right.

I was truly alone for the first time in awhile, accompanied only by the hawks and vultures that drifted above me in the sky.

I was in the middle of acres of population-less land, I could see for myself, a liberating feeling that can be, in certain contexts, frightening, but, in this one, just lovely. I walked with a visible happiness that I might employ all the time if I knew nobody was watching, and I found the path that led back, thanks to the map on my phone, descending through the golden grass, skipping with the help of gravity. At some earlier point I had taken my shirt off as an expression of my nature-inspired freedom and, also, because it was hot. Also being back in California makes me think about my tan, there’s no sense in hiding this fact. I had then decided at some point to stop again, take in the surroundings and use the shirt in my hand as an improvised picnic blanket, perhaps reading another of America’s finest 2011 travel writing.

When I sat down, however, I became fixated on the idea of taking off all of my clothes, removing myself fully from civilization to actualize this communion as I had a month before (this is another story) when I literally hugged a redwood tree in Big Basin State Park. Forgoing self-consciousness—self-consciously—has become a recent goal of mine, in other words, shedding the expectations of a society that, in many ways, does not share my values, hence the literal shedding of the literal garments, literal products of the so-called system, though these clothes, minus socks and underwear, are from thrift stores, a post-industrial, generally non-profit system I totally support and think is, to quote a popular song, “fuckin’ awesome.”

At the end of last year, celebrating my cousin’s 30th birthday in Bristol, a Welsh man spoke to me of his enthusiasm for what he referred to as “naturism.” He really only felt comfortable with his clothes off, and when he was in the city with people he generally felt stifled and the clothes were symbolic of that, and actually stifling, however cold it may have been. Besides for the family that I already knew he was probably the nicest person I met during my visit to England. That night I saw a graffiti that read “You’re going to die / so you might as well live.”

It speaks to the metaphor broached above, of a self that walks in front unselfconsciously with only the anticipation of miracles in one’s heart. To experience a situation as fully as an outsider may, that which makes you an outsider must be shed like articles of clothing if you are to submerge yourself in the veritable hot tub of the nudist resort that is the capital-P Place in question. You are your essential self when you travel and, if you let it, all of the bullshit falls away and is replaced by the ravenous symbiotic consumption of and by your surroundings.

I ran up from where I briefly sat to the lookout from where I had just come to make sure no one was coming and then I shuffled around the bend down to path to see that no one was coming that way, and of course it was clear, nobody was there either, for miles in any direction. It was a Tuesday afternoon in a neglected back region of a park that is generally not heavily used. I went back to my spot, took off my shoes and socks, etc. and then sat naked on my shirt, looking out into the naked nature that I was now one with, as they say, for a single moment relaxed, before scrambling once again to put on my clothes, socks and shoes, tying the laces and skipping down the path, checking again in all directions to make sure no one had seen, which, of course, they hadn’t. The self that follows the one naïvely stumbling upon miracles swooped in and spirited me back to rational society, and who I was in that society, what words I had by which to further arrange and describe it, what expectations remained for my behavior.

It was a quick 15 minutes back, passing cows, a mountain biker and two teenage boys out for a run. I felt lucky to happen upon them—more to have them happen upon me—while I was wearing clothes, but I still felt silly for abandoning my experiment with naturism so quickly.  So it goes. The contents of my basket were undisturbed and I was able to read the rest of the book and develop certain ideas about what it means to be a travel writer.

Find yourself in a place. Soak it up, participate in it, be present, take off your clothes if appropriate. Go somewhere else, think about something else, do something else in this different place. Write, at a time appropriate to your own process, about everything that has anything to do with any insight you’ve ever had or whatever story about whatever place for whatever reason you think might be interesting. In other words continually find yourself in places after unselfconsciously being in that place and write about this continual process of being somewhere, interchangeably present and self-aware.