The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Part 1

The Best American Travel Writing 2011.

Sloane Crosley.

Foreword.

Find a place. Write about it. It's the fundamental premise of all travel writing-the most basic of writing exercises, and yet arguably one of the most important. Unfortunately, many readers' introduction to travel writing begins and ends with guidebooks or service-oriented, what-to-see, what-to-do, how-much-will-it-cost articles. While these forms of writing are certainly useful and have their place, great travel writing aspires to be more than just rote information and a list of bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants. "When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens," writes Paul Theroux. Hopefully, you too will aspire to this maxim, and work to improve your powers of observation, description, and storytelling along the way.

This rather dogmatic pa.s.sage is taken from the syllabus of the travel writing workshop that I teach each year at my university. As you might imagine, Travel Writing is a popular course-competing with Ballroom Dancing or Wine Tasting-and it attracts a mix of undergraduates of various majors, some who've spent intense periods of study abroad, and others who rarely leave their neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Whether they've traveled widely or not, none of the students have read very much travel writing outside of perhaps a Lonely Planet guidebook. None of them usually have heard of Paul Theroux or Pico Iyer or Simon Winchester or Bill Buford-all of whom I make them read, sometimes to their chagrin. The students who may have heard of Eat Pray Love or Under the Tuscan Sun usually know them as movies rather than books, and only a handful nod in vague recognition when I mention On the Road.

Most students don't take my travel writing cla.s.s, then, because of the writing or because they want to be Jack Kerouac; they take it because their first travels, alone and away from home and school, just may be the most visceral experiences of their young lives so far. Writing might be one way to make sense of it. College students, lest we forget, aren't all that far removed from the "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" essays of middle school.

As we gather around the seminar table with their essays, the study-abroad students are always the boldest, sharing (often with TMI) the very recent experiences they've just returned from (only weeks ago in some cases). These are often ribald tales of hostels and drinking and romantic trysts. Often enough, though, a flicker of insight or an eye-opening moment of reflection appears. I always encourage them to think about their youthful adventures with as much distance as possible, and to fit their personal stories into the context of the place. "Why are you telling me this story?" I ask them. "What makes this your trip and no one else's?" The best of my students have a winning voice, one that makes the whole cla.s.s take notice. What I ask in cla.s.s, then, are the same things I ask of the essays each year as I read for this anthology.

The other students, the ones who've usually never traveled much farther than the Jersey sh.o.r.e, or Florida, or perhaps Cancun, usually begin with more reticence and apprehension, prefacing their essays by saying, "Well, I've never really traveled anywhere." I always try to quell their fears by saying, "Good travel writing can be about anywhere. You can write a great essay about your own neighborhood. It all depends on your approach." This, of course, is another truth I learn every year in compiling my selections of notable travel writing for the year.

So can travel writing actually be taught? Perhaps, and perhaps not.

Surprisingly, few of my students have any expectations of publishing what they write, which makes this course very different from the fiction or poetry workshops or journalism cla.s.ses I've been involved with. Certainly, some do begin cla.s.s by asking, "How can I get a job as a travel writer?" I quickly answer this question by explaining the shiftless, nomadic, seat-of-the-pants life that many travel writers lead (which predictably holds little appeal for this achievement-driven generation). Then I follow with the true and sad tale of how magazines are publishing less and less quality travel writing (something that makes the job of putting together this anthology harder every year). With issues of commerce out of the way, we simply write and read about one another's travels.

So why teach travel writing, then, in this age when travel writing has a declining presence? And why do students continue to take the course? Perhaps the real measure of success is whether or not these students sharpen their critical eye, learning to look for the sorts of fascinating or idiosyncratic or unexpected or profound moments and experiences that make travel (and life) more meaningful. Meaningful travel (as well as a meaningful life) is, of course, open to all of us. Writing about that travel in a way that resonates with readers? Well, that's something else altogether. But that's what we aim for in travel writing cla.s.s.

And that's what this collection of fabulous writing aims for, and delivers.

The stories included here are, as always, selected from among hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications-from mainstream and specialty magazines to Sunday newspaper travel sections to literary journals to travel websites. I've done my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion the best travel stories from 2010 were forwarded to Sloane Crosley, who made our final selections.

I now begin anew by reading the hundreds of stories published in 2011. I am once again asking editors and writers to submit the best of whatever it is they define as travel writing. These submissions must be nonfiction, published in the United States during the 2011 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author's name, date of publication, and publication name, and must be tear sheets, the complete publication, or a clear photocopy of the piece as it originally appeared. I must receive all submissions by January 1, 2012, in order to ensure their full consideration for the next collection.

Further, publications that want to make certain their contributions will be considered for the next edition should be sure to include this anthology on their subscription list. Submissions or subscriptions should be sent to Jason Wilson, Drexel University, 3210 Cherry Street, 2nd floor, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Working with the talented Sloane Crosley this year was wonderful and refreshing. Her choices make a unique book that will take fans of the series down fascinating new paths. I am also grateful to Nicole Angeloro and Jesse Smith for their help on this, our twelfth edition of The Best American Travel Writing.

JASON WILSON.

Introduction.

TEN YEARS AGO, This American Life devoted an entire episode to "kid logic." From start to finish, it featured more adorable moments per square inch than the state of Wisconsin has cheese wheels. A spiffed-up-for-the-NPR-audience version of Kids Say the Darndest Things, the episode went a bit deeper in exploring how children view and process the world around them. Included is a brief interview with a child psychologist that doesn't amount to more than a minute of airtime, but you can see why Ira Gla.s.s included it then and, I hope, why I include it here now. See, there's this four-year-old girl on her first flight ever. As the plane takes off, she turns to the woman next to her and says, with the utmost sincerity: When do we get smaller? Until that moment, her only experience of airplanes was watching them disappear into the sky. I remember listening to this in my car as I pulled up to visit my parents, who still inhabit my childhood home. I turned the radio off and cut the engine. I looked out over our modest square suburban yard, recalling how unexotic I found Westchester to be as a child. Most of me was charmed by the This American Life story as I was meant to be charmed-but I felt a twinge of melancholy upon hearing it as well. Not because of the poignant moments in which children learn about the world, moments that come barreling at them through s.p.a.ce like meteors of reality. But because sometimes imagination comes from a place not of pure delight but of pure boredom. At least that's what suburbia was for me. People with oceans and deserts and wild streams for backyards were surely better off. They had the luxury of spending less time conjuring and more time befriending actual whales.

Furthermore, I a.s.sumed that Westchester dully pulsated with this blandness for everyone, visitor or native. Then one day during high school an old camp friend from New Zealand paid me a visit. She pointed to the perfectly boring tree under which I had just parked my car, alongside our perfectly boring driveway, and screamed at the top of her lungs, "Oh my G.o.d, what is that thing?"

Surely, I remember thinking, they have trees in New Zealand.

"That!" She pushed her finger harder into the air.

There was a squirrel pinned, mid-chase with another squirrel, to the side of an oak tree. Its squirrel talons clung to the bark, its black tail fluffed up and protruded at a right angle toward the two of us. The thing of it is, she actually was witnessing something rare: black squirrels exist in limited pockets in the Northeast and Midwest. My parents' front yard happens to be located in one of those pockets. But it was this whole new animal that awed her. She had never seen anything like it, and yet it certainly wasn't on her list of "things to explore in America." She stealthily exited the car and began taking pictures.

This is why we travel. Oh yes, that's right: to see rats with fluffy tails. We travel to discover what we don't know, to get away from what we know too well. We seek out the unexpected. That's the deal we made when we asked our neighbors to take in the mail and headed for the airport. These days we also travel with the hope of leaving our phones unanswered and our e-mail logged out of. With so much thorough planning, so many suggested trip highlights and firsthand accounts available at our fingertips, the unexpected is of greater value than ever. It's a pure shot of experience.

As we grow up, most real experience is increasingly hindered by two factors. One is the infamous prism of our own perspective (the real terrain of exploration is seldom external). I would argue that the second, equally intuitive but less discussed obstacle has to do with a kind of virginity of the mind. We can only learn something-I mean really be introduced to it-once. Hence the incredible shrinking airplanes and the black squirrels. Hence the explorers and the travel guides and the carefully allotted weeks of vacations to places we've never been and likely will never go again. I will say now that I have been to Puerto Rico three times in my life and won't be returning. Because Puerto Rico is a terrible place? Well, it ain't Bali, but no, that's not why. It's because of the other 30 percent of the planet Earth covered in landma.s.s. I have the one life and the one brain to match it, and I'd rather not waste either on knowing a foreign locale like the back of my hand unless the front of my hand is signing a lease there.

Perhaps this seems fickle or limiting or just rings false. If we were discussing people instead of places, no one in their right mind would suggest that a series of casual friendships are more ideal than a handful of deep relationships. To get the most out of any relationship, I have to take off my coat and stay a while. But travel is different. I have seen other humans before. I get the general idea of what one might look like. But I have never spent a year at sea like Christopher Buckley (coat required, a warm one) or journeyed to the wild and endangered terrain of Australia's "Top End" like Verlyn Klinkenborg. And I have really never gone on a bowhead whale hunt in Quebec with Justin n.o.bel. That I think I would have remembered.

In reading the nearly one hundred essays narrowed from the numerous excellent pieces of travel writing published last year, I found myself most drawn to those whose authors, simply put, went because I couldn't. This is not a prerequisite for the foreign or the expensive-I suppose if I really wanted to visit Bristol Motor Speedway and try to explore the decline of NASCAR like Ben Austen in "Southern Culture on the Skids," I could give it a shot. But there's no way I'd make it around the track with the same brand of skillful insight unique to Austen. So there I sat in my armchair (no, really, it's blue and has a throw pillow), where I relied on him and seventeen other literary witnesses to be my eyes and ears. The tales of their experiences were so intoxicating because I felt as if I were with them, along for the ride as they employed a combination of cultural absorption and opinion. They opened up new means of thinking in their own brains and dragged me through the portal with them. There is much to be said for staking out a foreign spot as your own, but like I said: the nature of the world is that it will provide that valuable introductory course only once. Each of these essays reads like a remarkably successful social experiment, an answer to the question of what happens when you take a handful of the country's most talented writers and show them something they don't know.

It is to the original a.s.signing editors' credit that many of these explorers were perfectly matched to their destinations from the start. Many of the accounts featured here are less unknown chemistry experiments and more cases of hydrogen + fire = explosion. Harper's Magazine is no dummy. It knew what it was doing when it sent William T. Vollmann to Kurdistan, just as Vanity Fair knew what it was doing when it sent Maureen Dowd to Saudi Arabia, just as Travel + Leisure knew what it was doing when it sent the instinctively funny Gary Shteyngart to eat and drink his way through a Russian neighborhood in Tel Aviv. The results are predictably, transportingly phenomenal. In Vollmann's case, they are eye-opening as well. In "A Head for the Emir," a t.i.tle that becomes quickly and disturbingly relevant in Vollmann's narrative of traveling across checkpoints within Kurdistan, the "air smelled of manure from the cattle that came grazing there, human urine, and sweat: of the many people all around, the closest man, in sandals and striped shirt, squatting."

Other selections are no less rewarding-some might say even more so-for the gamble their publications took on an unknown kid. Emily Witt's account of two very neon years in Miami, chronicling her struggle between gluttony witness and gluttony partic.i.p.ant for N + 1, is so artfully crafted one wonders how anyone else could dare to write about the city after she's through with it.

There seems to be a stylistic choice among travel writers: Do they become the doctors making their rounds or the patients being experimented on? The point of travel writing is not always to exhaust a subject, to record everything so that the next person won't have to. The writer runs the risk of sucking the life out of a place. But it's a risk that pays off wonderfully for Witt, and she is actually part of a two-woman cleanup crew. I a.s.sume she won't mind terribly if I suggest that she has a kindred spirit here in Annie Proulx. "A Year of Birds," about Proulx's summer spent meticulously doc.u.menting Wyoming eagle nests, is a rare bird itself. True, it's hard not to include an essay on bald eagles in a book with American printed on the cover. But you really have to be as grossly talented as Annie Proulx to write thirteen thousand words on birds-and birds only. It's like saying, "I'm going to do this and you're going to sit there and enjoy it because it's just that good." And of course she's right. I imagine that reading her piece is not unlike being an actual bald eagle, dipping up and down and playing in the wind. Behold: "Days of flailing west wind, strong enough to push its snout under the crust of the fallen snow wherever hares or I had left footprints, strong enough to then flip up big pancakes of crust and send them cartwheeling east until they disintegrated in puffs. Eagles love strong wind. It is impossible to miss the joy they take in exhibition flying. The bald pair were out playing in the gusts, mounting higher and higher until they were specks, then splitting apart. After a few minutes of empty sky the unknown big dark bird flapped briefly into view before disappearing in a snow squall."

Proulx also quotes from Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, which points out that "books on nature seldom mention wind; they are written behind stoves." Leopold makes a solid point: 2010 was not without its dramas, but the more perennial unsung adventures of travel rarely get, well, sung. There is so much world to see, why dwell on the minutiae of how we get from point A to point B? After all, the play's the thing. Not the drive to the theater. Which is precisely why, in our GPS-reliant reality, Jessica McCaughey's "Aligning the Internal Compa.s.s" is of note. In what sounds like a personal nightmare for most travelers, McCaughey intentionally engages in the lesser-known sport of "orienteering." See also: getting lost in the woods on purpose. With unexpected twists and turns, literal and metaphorical alike, it's an endearing but never precious exploration of an otherwise unglamorous subject-getting there. When one is publishing one's travel writing in a periodical, there is an unspoken compet.i.tion for relevancy. The essay that opens with the traveler being catapulted into a secret bay by a lost tribe of Mongolian shamans wins, right? An essay such as McCaughey's is not flashy. It may not be a frontrunner for Most Newsworthy Travel, but it has a happy home in the Most Eternal Travel category.

Actually, "getting there" was a general problem all over the globe in 2010. Even when a writer was already stationed at the "there" in question. To sit with Keith Gessen, sipping on overpriced coffee at a cafe, watching his sister sit in traffic just feet away, trapped in Moscow's infamous gridlock, is to be frustrated along with him. "Stuck" is a cultural history of Moscow via its abysmal traffic loops. Thanks to Gessen, we see a gridlock so persistent that it presents an alternate form of human contact. There's the voice, the touch, the written word, and now the hostile merging of lanes. It is a frustration known only too well in America to those who have foolishly attempted to drive from New York City to Long Island on a summer weekend. "To get to the Hamptons, just east of Manhattan," explains Ariel Levy in "Reservations," "you must sit on the Long Island Expressway-the biggest parking lot in the world, as they say-for hour upon hour of overheated immobility." But of course tourism and travel can (and probably should, if at all possible) be two different things. Levy's exploration of the Shinnec.o.c.k tribe's financial and cultural survival goes deeper than the question of outsider traffic in a way that is, ironically, transporting. And who can resist its featured star, the memorable Lancelot Gumbs? He is a character reminiscent of The Orchid Thief's John Laroche.

The mix of exotic drama and good old-fashioned human drama is what makes many of these essays sparkle. As I read, I found that both qualities could be traced to the initial impetus for writing the essay. Having gone through the same process myself, I will cop to its being a bit formulaic. The magazine pitch goes something like this: (1) writer has the notion of a location in his or her head, (2) writer travels to said location, where upon arrival the notion is (2a) corrected or (2b) confirmed, (3) magazine, hopefully, prints piece. The result is many travel pieces that revolve around falling in love with the idea of a place prior to arrival. Thankfully, in this year's selections the ideas themselves are anything but formulaic. Sometimes the idea manifests itself literally. (See, for example, Porter Fox's essay, "The Last Stand of Free Town," about the micro-nation of Christiania, a state within a state in Copenhagen and a temporary autonomous zone built on utopian ideals.) Sometimes the idea is more of a fixation. In Tom Ireland's "Famous," the author develops an almost Capote-like obsession with the two terrorists responsible for the 2008 killing spree at Mumbai's Victoria Terminus. And sometimes it's just a beautiful thought. In Andre Aciman's "My Monet Moment," the author travels to Bordighera, Italy, to track down the exact spot where his favorite painting was painted.

"I like not knowing," admits Aciman. "Knowing anything about the painting would most likely undo its spell. But I can't help myself."

Though one of the lighter pieces here, Aciman's account does touch on another theme in travel writing, and that is the idea of taking our world for granted. Of recognizing common misimpressions and issuing correctives through writing. Aciman had casually ogled a print of Monet's painting for years before he decided to do something about it. It's always fascinating to watch gifted writers leave town to explore the lives they're already living. Tea Obreht's "Twilight of the Vampires" starts with the much-heeded superst.i.tions of her native land, which did not strike her as unusual as a child. But her essay soon becomes an eerie account to end all eerie accounts when she returns to Serbia to hunt for real-life vampires.

Here is a place where people do not so much fall in love with ideas as obey their every whim. A road trip outside Belgrade drives us through a country where ritual reigns high above religion. Though it's not all menacing descriptions of open graves, 1970s horror films, and dried goat meat. Obreht's piece also contains the single most amusing image in the pages of this book: "Among numerous indignities through history, the Roma suffered the obscure nuisance of vampire watermelons."

If the superst.i.tions of Serbia overwhelm any religion, so does Haitian folklore overwhelm any earthquake. Mischa Berlinski's love letter to a devastated country is something special indeed. In "Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead" there are enough descriptions of a Haiti you've never seen to correct the images you might have if you have been mainlining CNN only. When the January 2010 earthquake hits, Berlinski and his wife are stationed "only about 125 miles from Port-au-Prince but remote, like an island off the coast of Haiti ... There were more coffin makers in Jeremie than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the paved roads petered out at the edge of town ... In the mornings, merchants came down from the hills past our front gate with baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, and at night in bed under the mosquito net when the moon was silver and big, we heard voodoo drums and strange, spooky singing. I don't know if I've ever liked a place more in my life." It is an epic, heart-wrenching essay about hope, and these emotions are delivered in such a way that I don't feel the least bit silly in using cliched adjectives to describe them. I became so immersed in the narrative and was so wracked with worry about the fate of Berlinski's friend Venance, I nearly forgot the t.i.tle of the essay.

I've noticed that the best travel writing doesn't have real resolutions. Instead of providing a sense of closure, which normally comes when the last word is typed and the writer and reader agree to part ways, the most memorable essays here feel like a beautiful mess at the end. This is because it's impossible to tie them up neatly. The places and the people who inhabit them still exist. Their stories go on. It's what makes travel writing so unusually difficult. All writing revolves around choices, around killing your darlings and the like. But if that's true, it means that travel writers have it harder than anyone else. How do you choose what goes and what stays when everything is new and of note? What about when it's a.s.saulting all of your senses simultaneously? Some adventures would register to anyone as more significant than others, but the moment the writer takes leave of his or her normal life, everything falls under the purview of new experience. Nothing is safe from examination, including the writer. "It was quite fair," says Annie Proulx of the eagles that watched her like, well, hawks. "I peered at them through binoculars, they peered back."

The This American Life broadcast moved on to the next adorable story after the interview with the psychologist. It made no mention of the woman's response to the little girl on the airplane. Endeared as this woman must have been, there was a pair of wide eyes staring back at her, waiting for a reply to a perfectly reasonable question. No, really: When do we get smaller? I wonder what she said. Perhaps the little girl was encouraged to look out the window and down at the landscape below. Look at all those new places! Imagine how many kinds of lives are being lived down there right this minute. And how incongruous for the human brain that it all fits in a tiny rounded window. Whole cities! Whole oceans! Whole countries! And it's all right there, laid out for our viewing. Ready to be examined. Of course, therein lies the little girl's answer. We never do get smaller. It's just that the world gets bigger.

SLOANE CROSLEY.

My Monet Moment.

Andre Aciman.

FROM Conde Nast Traveler.

THE ROMANCE BEGINS FOR ME with a picture of a house by Claude Monet on my wall calendar. More than half the house is missing and the roof is entirely cropped. All one can see is an arched balcony with hints of another balcony on the floor above. Outside, wild growth and fronds everywhere, a few slim trees-palms mostly, but one agave plant stands out-and beyond, along a wide, unpaved road, four large villas and a dappled sky. Farther out in the distance is a chain of mountains capped with what could be snow. My instincts tell me there is a beach nearby.

I like not knowing anything about the house or the painting. I like speculating about the setting and imagining that it could easily be France, Italy, possibly elsewhere. I like thinking that I'm right about the wide expanse of seawater behind the house. I stare at the picture and fantasize about the torpor hanging over old beach towns on early July days, when the squares and roads empty and everyone stays out of the sun.

The caption, when I finally cheat and find it at the bottom of the calendar, reads "Villas in Bordighera." I've never heard of Bordighera before. Where is it? Near Lake Como? In Morocco? On Corfu? Somewhere in Asia Minor? I like not knowing. Knowing anything about the painting would most likely undo its spell. But I can't help myself, and soon I look up more things, and sure enough, Bordighera, I discover, lies on the water, on the Riviera di Ponente in Italy, within sight of Monaco. Further research reveals the villa's architect: Charles Garnier, famed for building the Opera de Paris. Finally, the year of the painting: 1884. Monet, I realize, was still a few years away from painting his thirty views of Rouen Cathedral.

I know I'm bit by bit demystifying the house. As it turns out, the Internet reveals more paintings of gardens and palm trees in Bordighera, plus one of the very same house. It is a copy of the image on my wall calendar, painted by Monet, not in Bordighera but later that same year in Giverny and meant as a gift for his friend the painter Berthe Morisot. As always, Monet liked to paint the same scene again and again. Sometimes nothing at all changes-just the transit of light spells the difference between impressions of morning and noon.

Monet went to visit Bordighera for the light. His intended visit of a couple of weeks ended up lasting three laborious months in the winter of 1884. He had come the previous year with the painter Renoir for a brief stay. This time he was determined to come alone and capture Bordighera's seascapes and lush vegetation. His letters were filled with accounts of his struggles to paint Bordighera. They were also littered with references to the colony of British residents who flocked here from fall to early spring each year and who transformed this fishing and agrarian sea town famed for its lemons and olive presses into an enchanted turn-of-the-century station for the privileged and happy few. The Brits ended up building a private library, an Anglican church, and Italy's first tennis courts, to say nothing of grand luxury hotels, precursors of those yet to be built on the Venice Lido. Monet felt adrift in Bordighera. He missed his home in Giverny and Alice Hoschede, his mistress and later wife; and he missed their children.

As far as he was concerned, Bordighera promised three things: Francesco Moreno's estate, containing one of Europe's most exotic botanical gardens; breathtaking sea vistas; and that one unavoidable belfry with its dimpled, onion cupola towering over everything. Monet couldn't touch one of these without invoking the other two. Lush vegetation, seascapes, towering belfry-he kept coming back to them, painting them separately or together, shifting them around as a photographer would members of a family who were not cooperating for a group portrait.

If he was forever complaining, it may have been because the subject matter was near impossible to capture on canvas, or because the colors were, as Monet liked to say in his letters, terribly difficult-he felt at once entranced, challenged, and stymied by them. But it was also because Monet was less interested in subject matter and colors than he was in the atmosphere and in the intangible and, as he called it, the "fairylike" quality of Bordighera. "The motif is of secondary importance to me," he wrote elsewhere. "What I want to reproduce is what lies between the subject and me." What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere. Earth, light, water are a clutter of endless, meaningless things; art is about discovery and design and a reasoning with chaos.

Many years after seeing the reproduction on my wall calendar, I finally happen upon Monet's third painting of that very same house at an exhibition in the Wildenstein gallery in New York. Same missing back of the house, same vegetation, same sky, same suggestion of a beach just steps away, except that the third floor, which is absent in the first two canvases, is quite visible here; one can almost spot the bal.u.s.ters lining the balcony. And there is another variation: in the background looms not the snowcapped mountains but Bordighera Alta-the citta alta, the oldest part of the city-which like so many old towns in Italy is perched on top of a hill and predates the Borgo Marino on the sh.o.r.e. This inversion is also typical of Monet. He wanted to see how the scene looked from the other side.

I want to be in that house, own that house. I begin to people it with imaginary faces. A plotline suggests itself, the beach beckons ever more fiercely. Like a fleeing cartoon character painting escape routes on a wall, I find my own way into this villa and am already picturing dull routines that come with ownership.

Then one day, by chance, I finally find the opportunity to visit Bordighera and to see it for myself. I have to give a talk on Lake Como, so rather than fly directly from New York to Milan, I decide to fly to Nice instead and there board a train to Italy. The bus from the airport to the train station in Nice takes twenty minutes, purchasing the train ticket another fifteen, and as luck would have it, the train to Italy leaves in another fifteen. Within an hour I am in Bordighera. The train stops. I hear voices on the platform. The door opens and I step down. This is exactly what I expected. Part of me is reluctant to accept that art and reality can make such good partners.

I don't want a taxi, I want to linger, I want to walk to my hotel. Before me, leading straight from the small train station and cutting its way through the heart of the town, is a palm-lined avenue called the Corso Italia, once known as the Via Regina Elena. I've arrived, as I always knew I would, in the very early afternoon. The town is quiet, the light dazzling, the turquoise sea intensely placid. This is my Monet moment.

I've come to Bordighera for Monet, not Bordighera-the way some go to Nice to see what Matisse saw, or to Arles and St.-Remy to see the world through the eyes of Van Gogh. I've come for something I know doesn't exist. For artists seldom teach us to see better. They teach us to see other than what's there to be seen. I want to see Bordighera with Monet's eyes. I want to see both what lies before me and what else he saw that wasn't quite there, and which hovers over his paintings like the ghost of an unremembered landscape. Monet was probably drawing from something that was more in him than out here in Bordighera, but whose inflection we recognize as though it's always been in us as well. In art we do not see, we recognize. Monet needed Bordighera to help him see something he'd spot the moment he captured it, not before; we need Monet to recognize what we've long sought but know we've never seen.

My first stop, I tell myself, will be the house on the Via Romana, my second the belfry, and my third the Moreno gardens. Luckily, my hotel is on the Via Romana too.

As I walk, I cannot believe what I am seeing: plants and trees everywhere. The scents are powerful and the air pure, clean, tropical. Right before me is a mandarin tree. Something tells me the potted lemons are false. I reach out through a fence and touch them. They are real.

I force myself to think positively of the hotel I booked on-line. I even like the silence that greets me as I arrive and step up to the front desk. Upstairs, I am happy to find I have a good room, with a good-enough balcony view of the distant water, though the s.p.a.ce between the hotel and the sea is totally obstructed by a litter of tiny brick houses of recent vintage. I take out clean clothes, shower, and, camera in hand, head downstairs to ask the attendant where I can find the Moreno gardens. The man at the desk looks puzzled and says he's never heard of the Moreno gardens. He steps into the back office and comes out accompanied by a woman who is probably the proprietress. She has never heard of the Moreno gardens either.

My second question, regarding the house painted by Monet, brings me no closer to the truth. Neither has heard of such a house. The house is on the Via Romana, I say. Once again, the two exchange bewildered looks. As far as they know, none of the houses here were painted by Monet.

Monet's Bordighera is gone, and with it, most likely, the house by the sea. On the Via Romana, I stop someone and ask if she could point me in the direction of the town's belfry. Belfry? There is no belfry. My heart sinks. Minutes later I run into an older gentleman and ask him the same question. Shaking his head, the man apologizes; he was born and raised here but knows of no campanile. I feel like a Kafkaesque tourist asking average Alexandrians where the ancient lighthouse stands, not realizing that nothing remains of the ancient Greek city.

From the Via Romana, I make my way back to the train station, where earlier I had spotted a few restaurants on the long seaside promenade called Lungomare Argentina, probably because Eva Peron loved it. Yet along the way-and I barely have time to realize it-there it is: the belfry I've been searching for. It looks exactly as in Monet's paintings, with its glistening, mottled, enamel rococo cupola. The name of the church is Chiesa dell'Immacolata Concezione, built by none other than Charles Garnier. It's probably the tallest structure in town. How could anyone not know what I was referring to when I kept asking about a campanile? I snap pictures, more pictures, trying to make the photos look like Monets, exactly as I did twenty minutes earlier when I stumbled upon a public garden with leafy dwarf palms that resemble those Monet painted in Moreno's garden. An old lady who stops and stares at me suggests that I visit the citta alta, the town's historic center. It's not too far from here, she says, impossible to miss if I keep bearing left.

Half an hour later, I'm on the verge of giving up on the citta alta when something else suddenly comes into view: a small hill town and, towering above it, another belfry with a bulbous cupola almost identical to the one I spotted on the chiesa by the sh.o.r.e. I can't believe my luck. Bordighera, I realize, has not one but two steeples. The steeple in Monet's paintings is not necessarily that of Garnier's church by the marina but probably another one that I didn't even know existed. Coastal towns always needed towers to warn of approaching pirate ships; Bordighera was no exception. A steep, paved walkway flanked by old buildings opens before me; I'll put off my visit to the historic center and walk up to the top of this minuscule town instead. But this, it takes me yet another delayed moment to realize, is the citta alta I came looking for. My entire journey, it appears, is made of uninformed double takes and inadvertent steps.

Bordighera Alta is a fortified, pentagon-shaped medieval town full of narrow, seemingly circuitous alleys whose buildings are frequently b.u.t.tressed by arches running from one side of an alley to the other, sometimes creating vaulted structures linking both sides. Laundry hangs from so many windows that you can scarcely see the sky from below. The town is exceptionally clean-the gutters have been covered with stones, and the clay-tiled paving is tastefully inconspicuous. Except for a televised news report emanating from more than one window lining the narrow Via Dritta, everything here is emphatically quiet for so packed a warren of homes. As I make my way around the square, I see the Santa Maria Maddalena's clock tower again, and to my complete surprise, once I step into a large courtyard that might as well be a square behind the main square, another belfry comes into view. Then a post office. A church. A barber. A baker. A high-end but tiny restaurant, a bar, an enoteca, all tucked away serendipitously so as not to intrude on this ancient but glitzified town. A few local boys are playing calcetto, or pickup soccer. Others are chatting and leaning against a wall, all smoking. A girl, also smoking, is sitting on a scooter. I can't decide whether this town is inhabited by working-cla.s.s people stuck on this small hill all year or whether the whole place has been refurbished to look faux-rundown and posh-medieval. Either way, I could live here, summer and winter, forever.

Once again, through an unforeseen ascent of a hill, I've stumbled upon something perhaps far better than what I came looking for. I find myself suspecting that the humbling, intrusive hand of Providence is arranging events which couldn't seem more random. I like the idea of a design behind my desultory wanderings around Bordighera. I like thinking that perhaps this is how we should always travel, without foresight or answers, advent.i.tiously, with faith as our compa.s.s.

As I'm making my way through a maze of narrow lanes, I finally come to an open spot that looks out toward a huge expanse of aquamarine. Straight below me is a marina. I decide to head back down to the Lungomare Argentina and am beginning to leave Bordighera Alta. Because I am already planning my return trip to Bordighera in six months, I stop at what looks like a picturesque two-star hotel. I walk inside and start by asking the man at the desk for the price of a double. Then, as though my next question follows up on the previous one, I ask if he can tell me something about the Moreno gardens. Once again I am given the same story. There are no Moreno gardens. "But Monet-" I am about to interrupt. "Moreno's land was broken up more than a century ago," says a portly man who had been chatting with the hotel's owner and was sitting in the shade. Francesco Moreno, he continues, came from Ma.r.s.eille and, like his father before him, was a French consul in Italy-he owned almost all of Bordighera and was in the olive and the lemon trade. He imported all manner of plants from around the world, which is why Monet tried everything he could to be allowed inside the garden. The estate, however, was sacrificed to build the Via Romana.

Moreno, it appears, did not put up a fight with the city planners, even though he was the wealthiest landowner in sight. He died, probably a broken man, in 1885, one year after Monet's visit. The family sold their land, gave the rest away, then his widow moved to Ma.r.s.eille. The Morenos never returned. There is scarcely a trace of the Moreno mansion or its grounds-or, for that matter, the Moreno family. For some reason no one wants to talk about them.

It's only then, as I leave the hotel and take a steep path to the Church of Sant' Ampelio by the sea, that I finally spot a white house that might very well be the house, or something that looks just like it, though I could, of course, be wrong. A rush of excitement tells me that I have found it all on my own-yes, advent.i.tiously. Still, I could be wrong. It is a gleaming-white construction; Monet's house is not so white nor does it have a turret. But then, I've seen only cropped versions of it. I walk down the path and head right to the house. There is no doubt: same balconies, same stack of floors, same bal.u.s.ters. I approach the villa with my usual misgivings, fearing dogs or a mean guardian or, worse yet, being wrong.

I brace myself and ring the buzzer by the metal gate. "Who is it?" asks a woman's voice. I tell her that I am a visitor from New York who would give anything to see the house. " Attenda, wait," she interrupts. Before I can compose an appropriately beseeching tone in my voice, I hear a buzzer and the click of the electric latch being released. I step inside. A gla.s.s door to the house opens and out steps a nun.

She must have heard my story a thousand times. "Would you like to see the house?" The question baffles me. I would love to, I say, still trying to muster earnest apology in my voice. She asks me to follow and leads me into the house. She shows me the office, then the living room, then what she calls the television room, where three old women are sitting in the dark watching the news. Is this a nunnery? Or a nursing home? I don't dare ask. She shows me into the pantry, where today's menu is written in large blue script. I can't resist snapping a picture. She giggles as she watches me fiddle with my camera, then shows me to the dining room, which is the most serene, sunlit dining room I have seen in ages. It is furnished with separate tables that could easily seat thirty people; they must be the happiest thirty I know. The room is impeccably restored to look its age, its century-old paintings and heavy curtains bunched against the lintel of each French window. The house must cost a fortune in upkeep.

Would I like to take a look at the rooms upstairs? asks the nun. Seriously? She apologizes that her legs don't always permit her to go up and down the stairway but tells me I should feel free to go upstairs and look around, and must not forget to unlock the door leading to the top floor on the turret. The view, she says, is stupendous. We speak about Monet. She does not think Monet ever stepped inside this villa, but he must have spent many, many hours outside.

I walk up the stairs gingerly, amazed by the cleanliness of the shining wooden staircase. I admire the newly corniced wallpaper on each floor. The banister itself is buffed smooth, and the doors are a glistening enamel white. What timeless peace these people must live in. When I arrive at the top floor, I know I am about to step into a view I never thought existed, and will never forget. And yet there I was, minutes earlier, persuaded that the house was turned to rubble or that they weren't going to let me in. I unlock the wooden door. I am finally on the veranda, staring at the very same bal.u.s.ters I saw in Monet's painting in the New York gallery, and all around me is ... the sea, the world, infinity itself. Inside the turret is a coiling metal staircase that leads to the summit. I cannot resist. I have found the house, I have seen the house, I am in the house. This is where running, where searching, where stumbling, where everything stops. I try to imagine the balcony a hundred years ago and the house a century from now. I am speechless.

Later, I come down and find the nun in the kitchen with a Filipina helper. Together, the nun and I stroll into the exotic garden. She points to a place somewhere in the far distance. "There are days when you can see the very tip of Monte Carlo from here. But today is not a good day. It might rain," she says, indicating gathering clouds.

Is this place a museum? I finally ask. No, she replies, it's a hotel, run by Josephine nuns. A hotel for anyone? I ask, suspecting a catch somewhere. Yes, anyone.

She leads me back into an office where she pulls out a brochure and a price sheet. "We charge thirty-five euros a day." I ask what the name of this hotel is. She looks at me, stupefied. "Villa Garnier!" she says, as if to imply, what else could it possibly be called? Garnier built it, he died here, and so did his beloved son. The widow Garnier, unlike Moreno's, stayed in Bordighera.

It would be just like me to travel all the way to Bordighera from the United States and never once look up the current name of the villa. Any art book could have told me that its name was Villa Garnier. Anyone at the station could have pointed immediately to it had I asked for it by name. I would have spared myself hours of meandering about town. But then, unlike Ulysses, I would have arrived straight in Ithaca and never once encountered Circe or Calypso, never met Nausicaa or heard the enchanting strains of the Sirens' song, never gotten sufficiently lost to experience the sudden, disconcerting moment of arriving in, of all places, the right place. What luck, though, to have found the belfries and heard the sad tale of the Moreno household, or to have walked into an art gallery in New York one day and seen the other version of a painting that had become like home to me, and if not home, then the idea of home-which is good enough. I tell her I'll come back to the Villa Garnier in six months.

But the nun has one more surprise in store for me.

Since I've come this far for Monet, she suggests, I should head out to a school on the Via Romana that is run by other nuns and is called the Villa Palmizi, for the palm trees growing on what was once Moreno grounds. The school, which is totally restored, she tells me, contains part of the old manor house.

We say good-bye and I head out to the Villa Palmizi, eager to speak to one of the nuns there. The walk takes five minutes. The end of one search has suddenly given rise to another. I knock, a nun opens. I tell her why I've come. She listens to what I have to say about Monet, about the Villa Garnier, then asks me to wait. Another nun materializes and takes her place. Then another. Yes, says the third, pointing to one end of the house that has recently been restored, this was part of the Moreno house. She says she'll take me upstairs.

More climbing. Most of the schoolchildren have already gone home. Some are still waiting for their parents, who are late picking them up. Same as in New York, I say. We climb one more flight and end up in a large laundry room where one nun is ironing clothes while another folds towels. Come, come, she signals, as if to say don't be shy. She opens a door and we step onto the roof terrace. Once again, I am struck by one of the most magnificent vistas I have ever seen. "Monet used to come to paint here as a guest of Signor Moreno." I instantly recognize the scene from art books and begin to snap pictures. Then the nun corrects herself. "Actually, he used to paint from up there," she says, pointing to another floor I hadn't noticed that is perched right above the roof. " Questo e l'obl di Monet." "This is Monet's porthole." I want to climb the narrow staircase to see what Monet saw from that very porthole.

The story of Monet's obl is most likely apocryphal, but I need to see what Monet might have seen through this oblong window just as I needed to come to Bordighera to see the house for myself. A sense of finality hovers in my coming up here to see the town through Monet's window. Same belfry, same sea, same swaying palms, all staring back now as they did more than a century ago, when Monet first arrived.

I begin to nurse an eddy of feelings that cannot possibly exist together: intense grat.i.tude for having witnessed so much when I was so ready to give up, coupled with the unsettling disappointment which comes from knowing that but for luck and my own carelessness, I would never have witnessed any of this, and that, because luck played so great a part in things today, whatever I am able to garner from this experience is bound to fade. Part of me wishes to make sense of all this, only to realize in a flash of insight as I'm standing in Monet's room, that if chance-what the Greeks called tyche -trumps meaning and sense every time, then art, or what they called techne, is itself nothing more than an attempt to give a tone, a cadence, a meaning to what might otherwise be left to chance.

All I want, all I can do is retrace my steps and play the journey over again. Stumble on the image of a house on my wall calendar, spot the same house in a gallery, arrive by train, know nothing, see nothing, never sight the old citta alta until I come upon it, see the town "with" and "without" the belfry, with and without the sea, with and without the chopped-up quarter of Moreno's house, and always, always chance upon Garnier's home last. I want to restore this moment, I want to take this moment back with me.

Stepping out of Monet's tiny room, I am convinced more than ever that I have found what I came looking for. Not just the house, or the town, or the sh.o.r.eline but Monet's eyes to the world, Monet's hold on the world, Monet's gift to the world.

Southern Culture on the Skids.

Ben Austen.

FROM Harper's Magazine.

THE BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY, its silver grandstands towering 220 feet above a half-mile track, is often compared to the Roman Colosseum. Measured in seating capacity, the comparison is if anything belittling: the Colosseum could accommodate 55,000 spectators; Bristol has room for three times that number. But unlike the streets of ancient Rome, the rural byways of Sullivan County, in northeastern Tennessee, offer nothing else close in terms of scale. Arriving at the track feels like moseying up to a favorite fishing spot and seeing at the dock the Queen Mary 2. For NASCAR diehards, the speedway is a national shrine, a destination whose very specialness inspires tautological koans that are uttered there reverently and yowled there drunkenly and stenciled there on many a T-shirt and cap: "Bristol is Bristol." "That's Bristol, baby." "It's Bristol, f.u.c.k it."