Amazon Awakening
NEW YORK TIMES | Ayahuasca visions and cultural tourism in Ecuador's rain forest.
Photos by: Andy Isaacson
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, OCT. 13, 2010
ILLUMINATED by a single candle, the shaman’s weathered face appeared kindly, like that of a sympathetic doctor, with painted red marks also suggesting a calm, fierce authority — both qualities that I would rely on during the dark and uncertain hours ahead. He sat on a wooden stool carved into a tortoise, and wore turquoise beads around his neck and a crown of crimson feathers. A table beside him displayed the modest tools of the ceremony: a fan of leaves, jungle tobacco, a gourd bowl and a clear plastic soda bottle containing an opaque, brown liquid.
“You will start to feel a reaction in about half an hour,” the shaman, Tsumpa, said, as my guide translated. “When the effects come, you must concentrate on what the medicine is trying to communicate.”
The open air of the hut, animated with night sounds, grew still with expectation. Tsumpa grimaced as he drank the brew. After pouring a bowl for me, he cupped the gourd in his hands and for several minutes whistled a sweet melody into it — the high key of a tin whistle or courting bird, seducing the plant spirits to aid me. The potion tasted acrid and bitter. I rinsed my mouth with water before rolling tobacco into a plantain leaf cigarette.
And then I waited.
It was the final night of my weeklong trip to explore the Ecuadorean rain forest and an indigenous people, the Achuar, who, for more than a decade, have been using limited tourism as a means to preserve and protect their land and way of life. I had traveled by car, plane, boat and foot — more than 100 miles from conventional civilization — to reach a place where the old ways have not been forgotten, where local people interpret the world through their dreams and the forest spirit known as arutam is said to inhabit the mighty kapok tree, and where healing and insight is sought from a hallucinogenic plant brew the Achuar call natem, known elsewhere as ayahuasca, or “vine of the soul.”
The trip was to be a departure from the typical Amazon tourism, which tends to package wildlife viewing with a certain cultural voyeurism. I wanted something more immersive and participatory: an experience with Ecuador’s indigenous people that would expose me to a different orientation altogether. Casting myself into a world that was utterly foreign, I hoped to return with new insight into the familiar.
Earlier in the week — an evening in late spring — I had landed in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, which sprawls at 9,350 feet along the base of an active volcano in a distinctive atmosphere of thin air and diesel fumes that aroused dormant memories of the semester I had spent there during college. With me was David Tucker of the Pachamama Alliance, a San Francisco-based nongovernmental organization that supports the cultural and territorial rights of Ecuador’s indigenous people and operates specialized tours into their homeland.
David had arranged for us to drive early the next morning to the Amazon basin, fly to a remote community that had recently built a small tourist camp in the forest, and then travel by foot and river to a more established lodge. Only despite a long layover, our bags were delayed from Miami — an inauspicious start that would waylay us a day. David thought I might want to experience a “cleansing” from an indigenous Quichua shaman he knew living in the highlands two hours north of Quito, and the next morning hired a car to take us there.
The shaman’s two-floor yellow cement home was modest but the stateliest around. A square altar to Jesus, crammed with crosses and tiny portraits, stood in the waiting room. The shaman, named Don Esteban, emerged wearing a knit V-neck sweater and slacks, beaded necklaces and a yellow-feathered headdress. He beckoned us into the adjacent treatment room, which was sparse and dim and smelled of burnt sugar cane alcohol. I was directed to sit in the corner beside a desk cluttered with melted wax, glass balls, brown eggs and various other mystical paraphernalia.
Don Esteban sat opposite me, next to his wife, a smiling woman with an array of gold teeth. “Here, rub this over your body,” he said, handing me an unlighted candle.
After I did so, he sparked the flame and gazed into it intently. “Andres espiritu, Andres espiritu,” the shaman incanted. “Your spirit is not tranquil. It is sad, and longs for a new energy and path. It is struggling to balance your health, work and body.”
I told him that my father had died two months earlier. “That is why there is sadness and disequilibrium,” he said. “This ceremony, and spending time in the mountains with Pachamama” — Mother Earth — “will help make your spirit whole.”
Don Esteban had me stand naked in the center of the room. Beating a drum and chanting around me, he summoned the ancestral spirits before instructing me to face the four directions of nearby volcanoes in turn, with arms raised, as he blew tobacco smoke on my skin and slapped me with nettle leaves. Then, with his cheeks engorged with alcohol, he held a candle flame to his lips and unleashed spectacular balls of fire that dissipated across my chest.
I looked on these ministrations with skepticism but was left feeling serene, and believing that my visit there had been serendipitous. Whether by intuition or sheer speculation Don Esteban had recognized my grief, and made it a central theme for the journey forward.
Riding back to Quito, I reflected on what the shaman had gone on to say. Three times, he had placed rose petals sprinkled with floral water into my palms, and told me to rub them all over from head to toe. “Andres,” he said all the while, “open your heart.” When we arrived at the hotel that night, our bags from Miami were awaiting.
The five-hour drive east from Quito into the Amazon basin passes through a highland corridor known as the Avenue of the Volcanoes. Pichincha, Cotopaxi, Antisana, Illiniza — their snow-white peaks rise above Ecuador’s fertile central valley like giants, and Andean indigenous people humanize them as such, relating to them as elder family members who hold great influence. This can sometimes be very handy: I was told of a pregnant young girl who dealt with her father’s disapproval by blaming the cause on the Imbabura volcano. Who was he to argue?
Our flight into the jungle was to leave from Shell, a one-street frontier town on the edge of the Amazon basin that was established by the Shell oil company in the 1930s as a base for prospecting. After 20 years, Shell left and evangelical Christians moved in — embarking on their own kind of prospecting from the town’s small airport. (They’re still there.) But when we arrived, flights were grounded because of rain. We were told to return the next day; David suggested we drive to nearby Puyo, the provincial capital, and meet some Achuar leaders.
Numbering around 6,000 on an ancestral territory of nearly two million acres in southeastern Ecuador, the Achuar people were among the last of the country’s rain forest tribes to be contacted by outsiders, when some Salesian Catholic missionaries arrived in the 1960s. Elders say that in the early ‘90s they began having dreams about an imminent threat coming from the external world. Soon after, they learned that the western edge of their homeland had been given over to Arco as an oil concession.
Most of Ecuador’s estimated 4.7 billion barrels in crude oil reserves — the third largest in South America — lie under the northeast Amazon region, where foreign corporations have left a legacy of pollution and displacement that has been widely decried.
But the Achuar had watched watching northern tribes struggle against oil companies, and beginning in 1991 were able to organize their scattered — and historically warring — communities into a political entity that has so far saved them from a similar fate.
Recognizing a need for outside allies, they met with a group of Americans to form the Pachamama Alliance, which for the last 15 years has helped the Achuar and other Amazonian indigenous groups from its Quito office with land titling, skills training, economic development and policy advocacy.
With proponents of oil development — including Ecuador’s president — continuing to press for exploration on their land, the Achuar now find themselves embroiled in a classic struggle for power and resources that native people have almost always lost.
We found Chumpi Tsamarin (also known as Luis Vargas) who had been the Achuar’s first president, seated inside the restaurant he opened on a side street in Puyo. Mr. Tsamarin, who has also led the political organization representing all nine of Ecuador’s Amazonian indigenous groups, described the current territorial struggle in terms of psychological warfare (he saw “Avatar” as an affirmation of their cause, but thought the violent tactics depicted in the film were not inevitable); the Achuar, he said, feel staunchly resolute about their right to defend what is theirs. As they see it, our collective survival is imperiled by the modern “dream,” as he put it, that sees nature as an endless fount of resources.
So far, Mr. Tsamarin said, tourism has presented the most viable, nonpolluting source of economic security. In 1996, the Achuar opened Kapawi Lodge & Reserve, which receives an average of 1,000 visitors a year. Last month the United Nations named it one of the top five outstanding environmental conservation and community development projects in the world. Though the lodge was initially set up in joint partnership with an Ecuadorean tour company, the Achuar have assumed full ownership. Most of its 30 staff members are natives, and some received hotel management training in Quito.
But the benefits of tourism have a corollary, and Mr. Tsamarin lamented them: the loss of communal values and a new market mentality, alcohol abuse, litter, men cutting off their traditional ponytails. The Achuar now want to expand a controlled form of tourism farther into their territory, and have built a camp in the forest near the remote community of Tiinkias to offer visitors a more rustic experience than Kapawi. I would be the first tourist there.
After spending a night at the luxuriant El Jardín Hotel in Puyo, we were cleared for takeoff the next afternoon in a small Cessna operated by Aerotsentsak, the Achuar’s aviation service. From on high the metaphor of the Amazon as earth’s lung came to life: below us, wispy clouds lingered over the virgin forest as vaporous exhalations while mocha-colored rivers coursed through it like capillaries.
After an hour, we landed at a dirt airstrip beside Chichirat, a forested settlement of 10 families north of Tiinkias.
I immediately felt transported by the absence of mechanical ambience, as though the soothing sounds of nature were reaching me through noise-canceling headphones. David and I stepped off the plane as dozens of villagers stared at us quizzically, and a man with a round face and thin mustache walked forward, introducing himself warmly as Shakai. He would be our guide. As children carried off our bags, Shakai led us into the elliptical communal house built over the dirt with a high palm-thatched roof and open walls, and divided along gender lines. Males sat on benches around the perimeter; women clustered in the back.
In short order, I was handed a red clay bowl painted with blackand-white shapes, filled with the staple brew of sweet fermented manioc called nijiamanch. A performance began: a woman walked up to me and sang shyly in Achuar about a sunny day alone in the forest, when she missed her husband, but was comforted knowing that he was somewhere witnessing the same sun. In a fragile falsetto, a young man with a long ponytail voiced words meant to ward off a bad omen he received. I was handed a drum and told to meander around beating it, to the amusement of all, while a girl hopped erratically beside me in a kind of courtship dance.
Their unpolished performance was touching, and being the first ever for a tourist gave it the feeling of historical significance. But this also troubled me, as I considered how my arrival marked the ushering of changes that Mr. Tsamarin had described. And yet there’s this unexpected upside. Such quaint cultural displays meant to satisfy tourists expecting something “authentic” and exotic can also resuscitate and revive aspects of traditional culture. “It makes us see how we’re admired and validates the importance of our traditions,” Mr. Tsamarin had told me, adding that the Achuar now consider the value of their cultural heritage as a useful leverage against oil development.
It became too late to travel on to Tiinkias, so we ate dinner — a crispy heliconia leaf stuffed with steaming wild turkey, palm hearts and green onion — in the thatched house of the local shaman, and pitched tents on the wooden floor of the schoolhouse.
That night I dreamed of my mother and father defending the rain forest, and later, of Ben Stiller announcing a televised ski race in an Afro wig. When I awoke at 4 a.m., roosters were already declaring it daytime through the pitch darkness. The Achuar typically rise at this transitional hour to drink guayusa, a caffeinated tea grown in the forest. It is a time when fathers pass on values to their children, mothers teach skills to their daughters and dreams are interpreted.
The local shaman, Jippeikit, told me that my first dream was about my father wanting to reunite with my mother — “Even when we die, our souls still exist,” he said. The skiing dream, he sensed, was a story of competition, which boded well. “When you visit another area,” he said, “you will not have any problems.”
We reached Tiinkias after a short trek through the muggy forest and a motorized canoe ride downriver. Its two dozen inhabitants were awaiting us in the communal house, beside a dirt clearing with a volleyball net woven from plant fibers. Laundry hung to dry between thatched-roof dwellings. An uneven footbridge spanned part of a small lagoon where a caiman rested on a log.
Over two idyllic days I found myself content simply in the Achuar’s mellow presence. We spent hours in the communal house drinking nijiamanch, tended by women constantly squeezing the pulp by hand. Often, some story I couldn’t understand provoked fits of laughter. I sang a bluegrass gospel number for the Achuar; David played guitar. Each morning, I had my dreams read by an elder.
We slept in the new tourist camp, built on a forested knoll just outside the settlement, with a simple layout of elevated wooden platforms covered by thatched roofs that extend into eating and sleeping areas meant to accommodate the groups of up to 16 visitors they anticipate.
Shakai became not just my guide to the forest but also its interpreter. In a nondescript leafy plant he saw a remedy for gastritis; in an electric blue morpho butterfly that fluttered erratically past, he saw the ears of a deceased ancestor. “What does a stick bug represent?” I wondered aloud. Shakai said it was just a stick bug.
One afternoon we passed a kapok tree, 150 feet tall with splayed buttresses and thick, weeping vines, which Shakai explained as a home of arutam: the spirit of the forest, and ancestors.
When Shakai was 13, he said, like all Achuar boys, he ventured into the forest alone to find arutam. For three days prior he fasted. He then laid a seat of palm leaves beneath a kapok tree and prepared the sacred forest medicines: datura and natem, hallucinogens that produce potent visions. Arutam first arrived, the Achuar believe, in a form of strength: a jaguar, or sometimes an anaconda, or lightning. If one becomes afraid, it is said, arutam disappears. But move toward it courageously, and the vision is supposed to transform into an elder ancestor, who reveals one’s life calling.
During this rite of passage, Shakai saw himself working with outsiders he’d never seen before. When Kapawi Lodge was built many years later, Shakai would become one of its first guides.
We reached Kapawi by motoring down the Bobonaza River, up the wide Pastaza, to the Capahuari — a four-hour journey that dipped us briefly into Peruvian territory. The lodge is set on a sheltered lagoon; 18 palm-thatched bungalows, built on stilts above the shallow water in traditional Achuar style — without nails, but with modern comforts like solar-heated showers and eco-friendly flush toilets — are connected with airy dining and lounging areas by an elevated boardwalk. The lagoon behaves as a town plaza for bird life, and screened back walls and shaded balconies ensure that guests are always well positioned, from bed or hammock, to observe its lively happenings.
It was the low season, and we and a German couple were Kapawi’s only guests. Visitors typically fly in from Shell on four-, five- or eight day packages of standard jungle lodge fare: dugout canoe rides, guided forest walks, and spotting animals (Kapawi’s remote location within a protected reserve offers a particularly excellent chance of that). Riding back the next morning from a clay lick enjoyed by chestnut-fronted macaws, we came across pink river dolphins. Later we paddled a canoe looking for anaconda but returned satisfied by yellow-rumped caciques nesting beside hoatzins, a prehistoric-looking, pheasant-sized bird with a spiky mohawk. Alone on Kapawi’s self-guided trail one afternoon, I startled (I should say the reaction was mutual) 30 ring-tailed coatis, which leaped onto tree limbs and then fixed me with beady stares.
But Kapawi places an emphasis on cultural activities, and guests can learn how women make nijiamanch or spend a night in a local Achuar community. Lodge staff members can also arrange participation in a dream-sharing ceremony with guayusa tea. But through a local shaman who knew and trusted David and Shakai, I received a special invitation to drink natem, which is how I landed, on that final evening, in Tsumpa’s house.
Tsumpa and his wife, along with a dozen children and grandchildren, live by themselves high above the Pastaza River on a tidy clearing ringed by coconut palms, manioc plants, fruit trees and a garden of various plant medicines. It was dusk when we arrived; in the distance, isolated cumulonimbus thunderclouds were set aflame by the pink-orange sun. Tsumpa was seated within a bucolic tableau: his sturdy wife prepared bowls of nijiamanch and tended to chores, while one daughter sat on a bamboo platform breast-feeding and another wove a headband. Dogs napped on cold ashes; an orphaned, saddlebacked tamarind monkey hopped onto a bunch of plantains; a toucan perched on a nearby log.
Tsumpa served me the natem in an adjacent hut. All appeared normal, until after what seemed like 20 minutes it no longer did. A montage of images emerged from the darkness — neon crystals, a lion. Soon my body dissolved into the surroundings, swallowed by a sea of energy. Unmoored and disoriented, I was adrift in a more expansive reality.
This brought a greater awareness, and I began to perceive things that had been imperceptible, like a low-frequency vibration permeating the environment. The hum of the universe? My thoughts drifted between visions. I imagined myself basking in the sun on the flanks of the volcano Chimborazo. I saw images from childhood and of random friends back home, all presented like scenes from the narrative of my life. Then my father appeared, seated in a chair before me, like a ghost. For several minutes we exchanged the sentiments that I had regretted not expressing before he died: What a life we shared, we both seemed to say. I looked down and noticed I was sobbing, and when I looked back up, he was gone.
Tsumpa was whistling and shaking leaves around a sick baby that had been brought to him for a cleansing, and Shakai asked if I’d like the same. I sat before Tsumpa and felt his hands on the crown of my head. His whistling seemed to conjure a protective field; in the leaves fanning my shoulders, I sensed a dusting of energy.
“Look at the stars,” Shakai said. The night was alive and glorious. Stepping outside felt like entering a larger room, the constellations stretching overhead as a low-hanging ceiling. David noticed my lingering sniffles and offered a bowl of tobacco-infused water, a traditional remedy, to clear my nose. Snorting it triggered a surge of intense sensation and then violent waves of vomiting unlike any I had ever experienced. More bizarre were the accompanying sounds: primeval bellows so loud and resonant they seemed to echo for miles. After, I could hear Tsumpa’s daughters giggling, and soon we were all laughing.
I laid myself down on a palm leaf, spent and contented. David and I chatted into the night. The Achuar conversed in their huts. Babies cried and were hushed. A gunshot went off in the forest, the sound of a lone man hunting. Within this dynamic nightscape, the boundaries between waking and sleeping, between inside and outside — indeed between humans and nature — blurred to nothing.
I awoke refreshed after a few hours of sleep, no longer feeling the queasiness that had been bothering me for two days. Sipping a coconut from Tsumpa’s tree, I asked the shaman what he had noticed in me.
“Andres,” he said simply, “You came here to learn about the culture, the rain forest and reality of the Achuar people. Now you’ve seen that.”
David and I returned to Quito later that morning and parted ways. I had given myself a few more days in Ecuador without a plan, but now I knew where to go. I traveled south through the highlands to Riobamba, and then ascended to Estrellas de Chimborazo, a cozy mountain lodge set beneath Ecuador’s highest peak, “Father” Chimborazo — some say that elevated by the equatorial bulge, it reaches closer to the stars than any spot on Earth.
I took walks alone through the surrounding páramo, the bushy, blond grassland carpeting the volcano’s flanks, past grazing alpacas, and lay for hours on my back.
It was precisely the time with Pachamama that Don Esteban had prescribed for me. And as I had envisioned myself.
Tristan da Cunha: Island at the End of the World
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER | Everything is off the beaten track on the world’s most remote inhabited island.
Photos by: Andy Isaacson
FIRST PUBLISHED IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2014
IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT on arguably the most far-flung inhabited island on Earth, and I’m nursing a South African beer at the Albatross, a pub that wouldn’t seem out of place in England or even, say, America’s Gulf Coast. A portly man croons to a country-and-western ballad playing on the jukebox. Local fishermen carouse. A football game—the British kind—is flickering on a TV set in the corner. The irony couldn’t be more obvious: I’ve journeyed to one of the planet’s remotest places and find myself in a scene resembling one from home. But there is, I’m learning, a distinction.
“You can get piss drunk here, fall down on your way home, and somebody will pick you up,” an Albatross patron tells me between quaffs from his drink. “You don’t have to worry about being mugged.”
I’m on Tristan da Cunha, a British outpost in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, roughly halfway between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Cape Town, South Africa. There is no airport. There is no deep harbor. I reached the island aboard a South African polar research vessel, the S.A. Agulhas II, on one of only nine passages scheduled annually from Cape Town. The same ship will pick me up a month from now. Time at sea is seven days, each way.
Why travel to Tristan? Simple: to escape to a place that has eluded even like-minded escapists.
Certainly, no one could have prepared me for the arrival at the island. Though part of a small volcanic archipelago, Tristan da Cunha, upon our approach, looked solitary and lost, like an iceberg adrift. The island, essentially a 6,760-foot-high volcanic cone, is given shape by the vast negative space around it.
Today, stories and photos reach us from all corners of the globe, diminishing opportunities for true discovery. Even if we’ve never been to Timbuktu, most of us have acquired a vague notion of the place. Not Tristan. The name conjured nothing for me, except questions. Did tribal natives populate the island? What did they eat for dinner? What kind of trees grew there? A handful of other passengers on the S.A. Agulhas II were seized by the same curiosity. Some had business on the island—a Scottish dentist, a British priest, an American scientist planning to install a magnetometer to measure shifts in Earth’s magnetic field. But there were a few tourists too. Two German men hoped to summit the volcano, Queen Mary’s Peak. A Brit wanted to scuba dive where no one he knew ever had.
Standing on deck, I watched as our vessel approached the northwest side of the island. Soon, beneath the volcano’s towering flanks, a cluster of low-slung structures with red and blue tin roofs appeared above a narrow grass plateau overlooking the ocean. This human settlement with 262 full-time residents seemed most improbable, a community afloat in emptiness.
“People imagine us with grass skirts on,” dark-haired Iris Green, Tristan’s postmistress, tells me in a lilting English accent. I’m at the window of the post office, which shares a building with the tourism office at the center of the settlement. A lobby displays hand-knit wool sweaters, postcards of seabirds, and commemorative postage stamps depicting such island traditions as potato planting, sheep shearing, and “giving out the mail.” Tristan’s cheerful tourism coordinator, Dawn Repetto, greets me. (Repetto is one of the island’s seven surnames.) She had left a flyer at the private home where I’m staying—Tristan has no hotels or inns—promising to help fulfill my “Tristan ambitions.” I’d wondered how I would fill four weeks on an island with no real tourist activities.
“I’d like to hike the peak,” I say after introductions.
“It takes at least six hours,” Repetto replies, “and we require you to go with two guides. I’m happy to arrange that. But there are other excursions you might like too.” Among them: a fishing trip and a bird-watching outing to the nearby isle of Nightingale, home to rockhopper penguins and the endemic Tristan albatross. I ask about the island’s nine-hole golf course, where hazards include chicken coops and gale-force winds that have been known to destroy large ships.
Repetto smiles. “Tristan people don’t really play golf,” she says, explaining the course was built for a homesick British administrator. She ends with a caveat I’ll hear many islanders echo: “Everything here depends on the weather.”
I decide to begin with an exploratory walk and head to the island’s only road, a two-mile-long ribbon of gravel and broken pavement. The pastoral tableau of mountain and ocean before me evokes a blend of Scotland and Big Sur. I pass the golf course and, just beyond it, come upon Hottentot Gulch, named after African soldiers who pitched their tents here in 1816, part of a British garrison that was dispatched to ward off American privateers and any Frenchmen bent on using Tristan as a staging post to rescue France’s exiled emperor, Napoleon, who was imprisoned 1,343 miles north, on St. Helena Island.
I pass cows grazing beside Jenny’s Watron (Jenny’s stream), where a widow once dwelled, then stroll by Knockfolly Ridge, Bugsby Hole, and an eroded sea cliff called Hillpiece. I pledge to see Ridge-Where-the-Goat-Jump-Off and Pig Bite—landmarks commemorating notable local events—before I leave.
The road peters out at a mosaic of stonewalled plots overlooking the ocean, an area known as the Patches. Scattered about the farming plots are small cabins; during Christmas, Tristanians pack up and travel all of two miles from the settlement to enjoy a weeklong holiday here.
“Need a hand?” I call out to an older gentlemen standing with a pitchfork in the moist dirt of his potato patch.
“Suuuure,” Anthony Green replies. “Just waitin’ for the missus to get back.”
When the British military left Tristan in 1817—the attempt to rescue Napoleon never materialized—a Scottish corporal, William Glass, and two English stonemasons stayed behind. They built homes and boats from salvaged driftwood, then drafted a constitution decreeing a new community based on equality and cooperation. The collective spirit that sustained the island during years of almost complete isolation still exists.
I clamber over the volcanic rock wall that lines Green’s plot, and he hands me a spare pitchfork. We dig shallow rows, then lay in spuds from a plastic bucket, along with fertilizer pellets. At surrounding plots, I see other families hard at work, laying crushed lobster shells and sheep’s wool over their potatoes (everyone has a proven method). Some smile over at me with an approving nod.
“Tristanians consider potatoes as insurance,” says Conrad Glass, a descendant of William Glass and the island’s chief constable, a few days later. “If suddenly the world went crazy and money had no value, we’d still have our staple vegetable.”
I’d eaten potatoes every night, boiled, baked, mashed, stuffed into a lamb shoulder and roasted, or made into “snislens,” fried dough served with jams or combined with raisins to make a sweet pudding.
“Do you ever tire of potatoes?” I ask Green.
“No,” he replies. “Thing about Tristan is, you always have enough potatoes.”
THAT NIGHT AT THE ALBATROSS I discover that word has traveled about the tourist who helped Anthony Green plant potatoes. This earns me points, and at least one South African lager. I strain to pick up the Tristanian-English patois—an amalgam of languages that includes Afrikaans, Italian, and Americanisms such as “hey, buddy.” One young man is “heyen on” in a singsong cadence with his “fardi” (godfather) about collecting “jadda boys” (penguin eggs), his accent thickening as he becomes “half touch up” (wasted) after a few rounds.
“Come an’ dance!” Desiree Repetto urges me, adding with a sly grin, “Someone’s been askin’ about you.” The Saturday night dance is in full swing at one-story Prince Philip Hall, next to the Albatross. An 18-year-old deejay is serving up pop hits from the 1990s, but the dance floor is awkwardly empty, like at a junior high prom. Young men cluster around a gin bottle they smuggled out of the Albatross; the women are seated on a bench. The deejay begins spinning a pop song, then abruptly changes to a country-and-western tune. I watch the guys put down their drinks, swoop across the floor, and extend their hands to the ladies. Looking at me, Desiree nods toward a shy young woman, and I walk over to invite her to dance. She smiles, and soon we’re shuffling along with the other couples. When the song ends, the floor clears once more. Later, as I head home under a starry sky, the music slowly fades to just the lonely rhythm of breaking surf—a reminder that Tristan exists all by itself.
“ENTER, ENTER,” Gladys Lavarello urges as she waves to me from her front door. She lives down a curvy paved road with no signs, traffic lights, mailboxes, or even house numbers.
White-haired and squinting from behind thick glasses, she smiles warmly as she leads me into her living room, furnished with lace-draped armchairs and family photos. Like nearly every Tristanian, Lavarello descends from a settler who washed ashore, in her case Gaetano Lavarello, her Italian grandfather, who shipwrecked on Tristan in 1892 with crewmate Andrea Repetto and stayed, coming to love the island’s remoteness.
I’d been told that Lavarello knew all about the old times, and I wanted to hear how life on Tristan was before World War II, when islanders would row out into the ocean to wave down passing ships and barter for supplies.
“There wasn’t any money,” she says. “We didn’t really know what it was! We depended on cattle and sheep and fishing.”
Lavarello proceeds to speak warmly of island traditions that still exist—Old Year’s Night, a year-end celebration when men dress in masks and scare the women; Ratting Day, a pest-control competition—and wistfully about ones that no longer take place, such as Happling Day, an annual outing to fetch apples at a now defunct orchard. She then tells me about the day in 1961 when boulders suddenly began tumbling down Queen Mary’s Peak—and the ground split just beyond her house. For the first time, islanders learned that their mountain was an active volcano. Its eruption on October 8 caused the British government to evacuate all Tristanians to Southampton, England, for two years, where they quickly became media sensations and were subjected to all manner of medical tests.
“How was that for you?” I ask.
“We all—well, nearly everybody—wanted to return to our own hisland,” she exclaims, adding the Tristanian h.
Every day I find myself gazing up at Queen Mary’s Peak, hoping for good weather; every day thick, ominous clouds glower back at me. Then it happens: One morning I awake to a calm sea, partly cloudy skies, and light winds.
“Looks like a great day,” I say to Peter Repetto, Desiree’s father and my homestay host, a retiree who right now is padding about the front flower garden in his slippers.
“It’s the lee that you’re seeing,” he says, nodding toward the flat water. Opposing winds have produced calm conditions, but they are temporary. Like most islanders, Repetto is a keen forecaster by necessity. Locals make their living from farming and fishing. Before he retired, Repetto ran the general store and trapped lobsters, the island’s main export. He doesn’t count on the good weather staying put.
For Tristanians, a great day means a fishing day. So when indicators look good one morning in the faint light before dawn, a man begins hammering on an empty propane canister next to Prince Philip Hall—the alert that, after two weeks of dangerous seas, it’s fishing time. Lights flick on inside houses as the settlement stirs. Soon men stream down to the harbor with rain slickers slung over shoulders and lunch pails in hand. In pairs, they board fishing boats loaded with lobster traps. It’s business as usual, but watching them, I get a sense that this is what these men live for. The women, including my hostess, Patricia Repetto, will process the bounty in a new factory beside the harbor—whole lobsters for Japan, tails for the U.S. Of course, they keep some: I’ll enjoy a delicious lobster curry for dinner that night.
Next door to the Repettos lives retired fisherman Ches Lavarello, for many years the island’s top lobsterman. I ask him to take me fishing; he doesn’t require much arm-twisting.
“Even if I don’t catch a single fish, I stay out on the water for hours,” he tells me as we reach an empty beach below Hottentot Gulch. “See these rocks?” he asks, gesturing offshore. “We’d come at night and catch sacks of spiny lobster here with a hand line and a scoop.”
Lavarello is large framed, with a silver chain around his neck and tattoos on his arms. He hooks a bit of squid onto his line as bait and, with a well-practiced twist of his body, lobs the line into the water. He doesn’t catch anything for a good while. Finally he feels a small tug—and ends up accumulating a respectable bucket of fish known as five fingers.
TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS after it transported me to Tristan, the S.A. Agulhas IIreturns. Not all of my Tristan ambitions have been fulfilled. I never bagged Queen Mary’s Peak, though I did spend a day hiking a lush landscape of mosses, ferns, and nesting yellow-nosed albatrosses halfway up the mountain. I also attended two baptisms, a wedding reception, two birthday potlucks, a lamb-marking, and a distribution of the mail. But holding to a tourist checklist on Tristan was never the point.
On my last afternoon on the island, I visit the Café, next to Prince Philip Hall, which opens briefly in the afternoon. A handful of Tristanians sit around tables drinking white wine and soda. The talk focuses on the weather, fishing, the potato crop, and local gossip. Life here may not be free from care—the island now is more connected to the world—but it is simpler. Yes, I’ve had Internet chats with friends back home. And Tristan’s lobsters are appearing on dinner plates in Las Vegas and Tokyo. Yet my time here has transpired in some kind of bubble. On Tristan, your camera won’t be stolen. You won’t hear a cellphone ring. And if you fall down drunk or, say, get hurt crashing your bike, someone will help you get home; everyone will know where you live.
Desiree Repetto walks me down to a grassy patch by the schoolhouse. Much of Tristan has gathered here to see off friends and visitors. A 21-year-old is departing the island for the first time, to take a scuba course in Cape Town (his mother has never set foot off Tristan); Conrad Glass, the constable, is headed to England for training.
“I’ve left Tristan five times in my life,” he says, “and it’s just as emotional now as the first time. You suddenly realize what you’re leaving behind.”
I think I know what he means. Tristan may no longer be isolated—cruise ships have discovered it—but it’s still insulated. To travel to a place like this today, even with nary a palm tree in sight, is to experience a vanishing kind of paradise.
Pamir Mountains, the Crossroads of History
NEW YORK TIMES | Retracing the Silk Road through Tajikistan.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, DEC. 17, 2009
BY 9 IN THE MORNING, the bazaar on a rocky island in the Panj River was a frenetic scene of haggling and theatrics. Afghan traders in long tunics and vests hawked teas, toiletries and rubber slippers. Turbaned fortune tellers bent over ornate Persian texts, predicting futures for the price of a dollar. Tajik women bargained over resplendent bolts of fabric. All were mingling this bright Saturday at a weekly market held throughout the year and, in one form or another, for thousands of years here in the Wakhan Valley, which divides Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
“Mousetraps, mousetraps, mousetraps, oooowww!” crooned a white-bearded Afghan in the Iranian language spoken by locals from both sides of the border.
“They don’t buy!” complained a high-heeled shoe salesman from Kabul to me, in English.
“They always start the price too high,” a Tajik woman in a blue patterned dress and headscarf whispered as she stood before bright red carpets, appearing seductive against a monochrome mountain backdrop.
As the sun rose higher, I joined the crowds — young Tajik men in sporty shirts and jeans, uniformed border guards, families — seeking shade under rainbow umbrellas to eat rice palov, served from large cauldrons. Across the market grounds, I could see three lipsticked Korean women in straw hats dispensing balloon animals to a captivated group of men and boys.
East meeting West, North meeting South: since time immemorial, the Wakhan Valley, in the Pamir Mountains, has existed at the intersection of trails trodden by nomads, peddlers, pilgrims and, at times, the soldiers and emissaries of great powers. When I’d thought about traveling to see this rugged branch of the ancient Silk Road, it had seemed like an adventure to the far-flung periphery of the world. Now, as I looked around the market, taking the long view of history, it felt more like the center.
During the last century, this long-strategic nexus of Asia, earlier crossed by Scythians, Persians, Greeks, Kushans, Hephtalites, Gokturks, Huns, Arabs and Mongol hordes, became a cul-de-sac at the command of the Russians. In 1929 Stalin’s mapmakers created the Soviet Socialist Republic of Tajikistan, a territory about the same size as New York State, 93 percent mountainous, given shape in the artificial (though politically expedient) manner in which all the Central Asian republics were drawn. A Soviet vision of a model Oriental capital was built around the market village of Dushanbe — pleasant and leafy, if dull, with a wide central avenue, pastel-colored buildings, the standard apartment blocks and some grand monuments meant to be honored from afar. (Make the innocent mistake of approaching one, as I did, and you give an underpaid policeman an excuse to seek a bribe to overlook the offense.)
The Soviets brought universal education and health care, but banned the Persian alphabet, erasing Tajiks’ literary history, and outlawed the practice of Islam. At independence in 1991, Moscow left behind an impoverished and fractured country that soon plunged into a bloody civil war. Tajikistan emerged in 1997 corrupt but safe, ailing but reasonably stable. Before long, foreign tourists began to trickle in.
After the three legs of my flight from New York, armed with a visa and special permit to visit the Pamir region, I arrived in Dushanbe during a stifling week last July. The Russians gave the city a rail link west to Uzbekistan, and they paved a road east, toward Kyrgyzstan, that is known today as the Pamir Highway and increasingly draws foreign mountain bikers and motorcyclists.
“Highway” is a generous classification for it. It took me 20 hours to travel the dusty 325-mile stretch from Dushanbe to the provincial center of Khorog in a shared taxi, flat-tire breaks included. The road climbs over craggy, treeless mountains and falls into tidy villages with apricot trees. It is interrupted by several checkpoints, including one in a valley through which heroin and opium are trafficked — and to which, news reports say, militants have begun returning — north from Afghanistan.
At this checkpoint, a burly man wearing fatigues and a Harley-Davidson hat introduced himself as Muhammad Ali, asked for my bag, and called for the dog. Out came a small, floppy-eared lapdog that agents practically had to drag over to sniff my backpack. “He must be starving,” Muhammad Ali joked. “Just open the bag.” I was sent on my way, wondering if those were my tax dollars at work. Last year the United States spent $1.7 million to counter narcotics in Tajikistan.
KHOROG, a relaxed town of 28,000 in the heart of the western Pamirs, sits across the Panj River from Afghanistan. Its isolation largely spared it from the civil war of the 1990s, but a humanitarian crisis crippled the area after Soviet handouts came to an end. A savior came in the form of a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad himself, the Aga Khan, a Swiss-born businessman who owns racehorses and a yacht club on Sardinia and is the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslim sect to which most Pamiri people have belonged for a thousand years. The community-supported charitable organization over which he presides, the Aga Khan Development Network, resuscitated Khorog, which now has two universities, new construction and a young, optimistic population.
Winters can be long and raw, but in summer the balmy air, rustling fruit trees and pedestrian bridges spanning a jade river make Khorog a nice base for exploring the Pamirs. Through an agency, I had arranged to meet a driver and translator there to guide me for a week, first south to the Wakhan Valley and then through it to Murghab, a town in the eastern Pamirs. We would sleep at a network of homestays.
The next morning we set out in a former Russian Army jeep, leaving the Pamir Highway to head south on a paved road along the Panj River, which defines much of Tajikistan’s 830-mile border with Afghanistan. Brown, gravelly slopes rise steeply from the river toward snow-capped peaks beyond view. The rustic adobe homes and donkey trails that I could see on the opposite, Afghan bank seemed suspended in a different time.
The Pamir region was renowned in antiquity for its rubies (technically, spinel) and lapis lazuli. The most famous mine, Kuh-i-Lal — though closed to the public — came into view above the road. It was the source, I later learned, of the 170-carat Black Prince’s Ruby now in the Imperial State Crown of Britain.
At a turn, the white crowns of the Hindu Kush appeared, and we entered the 85-mile-long Wakhan Valley, a fertile quilt of wheat fields along the Panj River, “situated among the snowy mountains,” as the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang described it.
I arrived at the Saturday bazaar, with its mousetraps and fortune-telling, by 9 a.m. and stayed until the island began to empty, in early afternoon. I talked with a blue-eyed Afghan policeman sporting Bushnell binoculars and a Leatherman toolkit and later passed a Tajik boy wearing a cap that read “Berkeley, Califopnia.” He reacted indifferently after I explained that I actually came from there. I realized that such sights are probably no more remarkable today than, say, a Chinese visitor here in the sixth century encountering Italians in silk shirts, or a Sogdian seen with the latest gadgets from the army of Alexander the Great, who crossed the Panj River in 329 B.C. At this ancient intersection, surreal juxtapositions of globalization date back for millenniums.
In the town of Ishkashim, adjacent to the market, we visited the crumbling remains of a sixth-century caravansary — an ancient motel for Silk Road travelers. Then we drove on eastward in the Wakhan Valley, passing roadside shelters decorated in pebbled mosaics conveying messages of Soviet propaganda, until we reached the remnants of a sprawling stone fortress occupying a prominent rock above the Panj. A plaque in Tajik and English explained that this was the King’s Castle, constructed in the third century B.C. by the Siah-Posh, a tribe of black-robed fire-worshipers (probably Zoroastrian), to defend the Wakhan from intruders.
I followed the small footpaths meandering among the ruins and thought of Samarkand, the fabled Silk Road oasis in Uzbekistan whose restoration has stripped much of its character, and Kashgar, China, overrun by modern Han society. The contrasting authenticity — and fragility — around me here was reflected on a plaque: “Your responsible treatment of the sites during your visiting them is appreciated as your contribution to the preservation of historical monuments.”
I spent two days exploring the detritus of history littered across the Wakhan Valley: rocks with Arabic inscriptions, petroglyphs, imposing fortresses, stones that were once arranged to determine the spring solstice and hot springs rumored to boost female fertility (I was the only man visiting these).
Small shrines to Ismaili holy men line the roadside. Each has its own legend, and is ornamented with special stones and curled ibex and sheep horns, symbols of purity under Aryan and Zoroastrian religious traditions, which predate Islam in the region.
Men, women and children strolled up and down the road between their villages and wheat fields. I offered lifts to old ladies in colorful embroidered skullcaps who showed gratitude by touching my chin and kissing their hands.
In a village called Yamg, we turned in where a sign announced a museum, and a teenager named Nasim opened the building with a key. The museum is in the home of his distant ancestor Muboraki Wakhani, Nasim explained, a little-known mystic poet, musician, astronomer and prolific Ismaili scholar of the late 19th century. Inside, artifacts from the ages were displayed, none behind glass: a tattered gold-and-blue imam’s robe, purportedly from the 12th century; 15th-century Chinese copper kettles; clay jugs from the storied Uzbek city of Bukhara; pipes, knives and yak horn cups; Stone Age beads; wooden stringed instruments carved into crude human figures.
Nasim invited me to his family’s house for lunch, and we followed him down a dirt pathway. Wheat, apricots, mulberries and dung lay on the flat roof to dry. The stone-and-plaster architecture was typical of traditional homes throughout the Pamirs, rich in symbolism that includes elements of ancient Aryan and Buddhist philosophy. For Ismailis living here, the home is itself a symbol of the universe and serves instead of a mosque as a place for prayer.
Nasim’s father, Aydar, mustached and wearing a track suit, led me into a main room divided, according to tradition, into three areas signifying the kingdoms of nature: animal, vegetable and mineral. Five supporting pillars represented the five members of the family of the prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali: the one for Muhammad, left of the entrance, is traditionally where a newborn’s cradle is placed and where newly married couples sleep.
Light beamed in through a skylight framed by four concentric square wood layers, representing earth, water, air and fire. Under it Aydar’s daughter laid a spread of raisins, peanuts and berries, potato and corn soup, fresh round flatbread and salty milk tea, which is passed and received with one hand to the heart. As Marco Polo noted, the language in the Wakhan Valley is different even from the Iranian dialects spoken in other Pamir valleys. But Aydar spoke some English and Russian, which was translated for me. I asked him how long his family had lived here.
Aydar told of a legend about a hotheaded emir in the 15th century who killed an entire family save one boy, who fled north, married and had three sons. One son returned to the valley years later, and eventually the two others followed with their families; these were Aydar’s ancestors. The dates were vague, but I was awed by a family story that began 600 years ago.
After lunch, we continued on to the nearby village of Vrang, where children were tending sheep below a tiered stone stupa built on a rocky perch by sixth-century Buddhists. “Buddha, Buddha,” Somon, a local boy, said, cupping his hands in a pantomime of meditation. He volunteered to guide me up to the stupa’s ancient rocks. I sat there looking at sunset over the Pamir crest, coloring the valley from on high like light slanting through clerestory windows, at moonrise above the Hindu Kush — and at Somon, who was eager to climb down. “Homestay?” he asked sweetly, pointing to a faintly lighted house in the birches below. I followed him there.
“Having left this place, and traveled three days, always among mountains,” a man “ascends to a district which is said to be the highest in the world,” Marco Polo reported 700 years ago, describing the climb north from the Wakhan Valley to the 13,000-foot-high desert plateau in the eastern Pamir from which several major ranges — the Himalaya, Karakorum, Hindu Kush, Kunlun and Tien Shan — fan out across Asia. The same journey took us three hours in our temperamental jeep, passing Stone Age petroglyphs, a lone Soviet watchtower, two Swiss mountain bikers and (across a tributary of the Panj, demarcating the border) Afghan traders leading a caravan of double-humped Bactrian camels.
“Along this high plain, which is called Pamier, he sees neither habitation nor verdure,” Polo went on, and until late in the Soviet period, the majority Kyrgyz population that endures this extreme realm known to early Persians as the Roof of the World remained mostly nomadic. The few permanent settlements today have a weathered, frontier character: tin roofs, rusty vehicle parts, satellite dishes.
We rejoined the Pamir Highway in the Alichur Valley, a 40-mile-long thin grass steppe ringed by low, rounded mountains, where Kyrgyz families come to graze their animals, setting up summer yurt camps. “Authentic” would only lamely describe the timeless, pastoral serenity of this place, or suggest the bliss I felt on my first star-filled night there reclining on hand-woven carpets by a warm iron stove inside a yurt, dipping bread into freshly churned yak butter, listening to Kyrgyz spoken in hushed tones.
Farther east, at Besh Gumbez, we visited the domed ruins of a caravansary and later passed a caravan of Chinese trucks laden with inexpensive household goods, parked beside the road. The drivers, Uighurs from Kashgar bound for Dushanbe, crouched in the shade beside the tires with a propane tank and a box of peppers, preparing lunch. In antiquity the caravans carried exotic luxuries like silk, jade, porcelain, furs, dyes, tea and spices; what a different sense the phrase “made in China” evokes today.
We split off the Pamir Highway and spent the next four days bouncing across a stark moonscape on jeep tracks that connect remote shepherd camps. One morning we saw a family out in the open air near their adobe home, rolling damp, matted wool into felt for the walls of a yurt. Curd balls lay drying on the roof. The grandfather, Mamajan, wearing a cardigan sweater and knitted skullcap, invited me for steamed meat dumplings and tea.
“Are there places like this in America?” he asked in Russian, waving around at the craggy, mineral-stained earth.
“Yes, a place called Nevada,” I replied.
“Come inside.”
Mamajan filled and refilled cups of green tea as we dabbed warm flatbread into bowls of butter and fresh yogurt. His grandparents were from present-day Kyrgyzstan. They were rich, he said, before the Soviets took their sheep. Mamajan was a bookkeeper during the Soviet period. He switched back to farming after independence and sells wool and meat, and dung for winter fuel.
By the age of 19, Mamajan claimed, he already had nine children. “You’re 32?” he asked me. “Why aren’t you married?” No explanation I could offer would suffice.
“ALL kinds of animals abound,” Marco Polo noted here, “in particular, a species of sheep with horns of three, four, and even six palms long. The horns are heaped up in large quantities along the road, for the purpose of guiding travelers during winter.” They still are, but the world’s largest sheep — named after Polo — is now endangered. I encounter only traces: their footpaths and magnificent skulls, strewn eerily across the barren landscape. Foreign hunters, mostly American, pay $25,000 to bag one. We passed a hunting camp that is temporarily closed so that sheep numbers can rebound.
My last homestay, on the far side of Tajikistan, was at an isolated yurt pitched on the edge of an expansive valley facing a spectacular panorama of the serrated Wakhan Range, in Afghanistan. Beyond lay Pakistan and just east of me, over a lofty pass, China. There, six years earlier, on a trip across that country, I had stayed in a similar yurt with Kyrgyz hosts and was left to imagine what existed across the border. I now stitched the two experiences, years apart, into a single panoramic image.
It was here in the Pamirs where Russia’s territorial expansion confronted Britain’s defense of India during the 19th-century geopolitical rivalry known as the Great Game. Both sides dispatched players — maverick officers and ambitious explorers, often in disguise — to chart Central Asia’s wild terrain and win influence. A final flashpoint occurred over the mountain in front of me, where in August 1891 a British agent crossed paths with his Russian counterpart, who claimed it as the czar’s and threatened arrest. Four years later the powers agreed to make that narrow valley between their empires — the Wakhan Corridor — a buffer belonging to neither, and it is still part of Afghanistan, a panhandlelike eastward salient of little importance.
The Great Game came and went, part of the historical tides weathered forever here, in the romantic heart of Asia. I could hear the enduring pulse of that heart around me in the whistling wind and the calls of children corralling the sheep for the evening.
“Andy, come,” my host hollered from the yurt. “Dinner is ready.”
Bartang Valley, Tajikistan. Credit: Andy Isaacson
Just Me and My RV
NEW YORK TIMES | A western road trip to the world's largest RV rally.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 18, 2012
I HAVE SPENT THE NIGHT in a Walmart parking lot. I have driven through a national park with a trail of cars in my rearview mirror. I have learned how to dispose of my waste through a plastic hose, and I have filled my gas tank more times in one week than I thought was possible.
But this is to be expected when you’re driving a small studio apartment, or, as I began to call it, my “rig.” One man in a rural California border town even called it cute. He said it reminded him of a Doritos delivery truck.
The rig was a 19-foot-long, gleaming white, class-C motor home — an RV that I rented from Cruise America, the country’s largest recreational vehicle rental company; 800-RV-4RENT was prominently emblazoned across the exterior, as were colorful images of America’s national parks and natural patrimony.
It was a proverbial flag patch sewn on a backpack, and as someone who makes an effort to downplay the fact that I’m a tourist when I travel, this granted no disguise. And just as well: I had never driven an RV before, and for this I could say I had never experienced my own country as millions do every summer, and have for more than a century.
When I booked the RV online a couple of months earlier, I found myself signing up for not so much a mode of transportation as a set of desirable feelings. “With a Cruise America RV,” the Web site said, “you can roam wherever your spirit takes you, throughout the US and Canada. And with a full kitchen in your RV, you can skip out on endless drive-through menus and enjoy more satisfying meals and snacks.” Roam, spirit, satisfying meals: these are not the sort of words used to tout a rental car or an airplane seat. An RV road trip promised the distinction of freedom and flexibility, comfort and convenience: a travel experience unencumbered by the need for reservations.
I enlisted my friends Tyson and Angelina, and we mapped a vague plan: Oakland, Calif., to Oregon and back, in eight days. We’d go where we wanted to go, when we wanted to go. We’d tour less-visited national parks and rural towns and sleep wherever it suited us.
RVers constitute a certain tribe on the road, and I learned that thousands were converging in central Oregon for what was billed as the Greatest RV Rally in the World. On a July afternoon, after receiving instructions in the Cruise America parking lot on how to check the RV’s water levels and empty the waste tank, we headed off on Interstate 80.
Packing for an RV road trip is like preparing for a weekend at a cozy cabin. The luxury of space and the semblance of domestic life inspired me to carry things like candles and paprika, soft cotton sheets and extra pillows. I took sharp knives, folding chairs and musical instruments and put avocados and lemons in a bowl on the kitchenette counter. We hung up our coats in the closet, with hangers. As I drove the rig, Tyson and Angelina put away groceries.
A compact RV drives like a van, but its bulky size soon altered my personality behind the wheel. I paid close attention to the yellow speed advisory signs for a change, and I rarely switched lanes, feeling unusually content to cruise in a patient, linear fashion. (Abrupt turns would cause the drawers and cabinets to fly open, anyway, prompting a scramble for rolling onions.) From a higher perch the landscape appeared wider, more available. Once we joined Interstate 5 in California’s Central Valley I began to feel a closer kinship with the truckers on the road, especially that first evening, after we pulled into a Walmart.
OF all the things Walmart is best known for (low prices, litigation, the demise of mom-and-pop stores), an overnight stopping place for RVers is not among them. But drive any evening into a Walmart lot along a busy highway, and you’ll probably find parked motor homes.
RVers often spend weeks on the road: that road is long, and there are many Walmarts along the way. As the company sees it, RVs arrive with their own bathrooms, and their drivers are well positioned to shop: everybody’s happy. Searching online from my phone I learned there were three Walmarts staggered along 30 miles of Interstate 5 in Northern California.
Around sunset, I checked in, so to speak, at the store in Red Bluff. There was plenty of vacancy. Another motor home rolled into the lot after me; its driver, a middle-aged man, placed a footstool outside the side door and made himself at home. He told me he was a semipermanent resident there and commuted to a local community college. “I just came from the gym,” he said.
It was still early, so my friends and I patronized our host: I bought a power inverter while they picked up flip-flops and bottled water. We cooked dinner on the RV’s gas burners, and set up lawn chairs on the asphalt. All night long, the glowing Walmart sign flooded the motor home like pale rays of moonlight.
In the morning we branched east on Highway 44 into the volcanic foothills of the southern Cascade Range. The fertile single-crop fields of the Central Valley transitioned to a forest of spindly firs and pines and pumice rock. In Shingletown, Calif., I spotted a hand-painted sign: “Great Food. Bakery. RVs OK.” It began to dawn on me how the world not only looks different from the seat of a big vehicle, it also treats you differently because of this.
We also needed less from the world. Traveling with our own toilet, mini-mart and motel room left us open to make unessential pit stops with little concern for time. We could roam.
Down the road an eccentric roadside carpentry workshop caught my attention: “Paul Bunyan. Holiday Log Style Gifts, World’s Best Bird Houses, Benches, Teepees and More.” I pulled over and found a tall man holding a chain saw, wearing a hard hat and overalls with an American flag lapel pin on the strap. He introduced himself as Steven Pelloza, “a k a Paul Bunyan, and I certainly live up to that. We’re the Paul Bunyan Conservation Society.”
This was a pro-timber environmental group, Mr. Pelloza explained. “We clean the forest and build products, like the world’s greatest birdhouse, which that is,” he said, pointing to one carved out of pine, with two little holes. We chatted a bit longer about the area, and he told me stories about being a logger in southeast Alaska, after the Exxon Valdez spill. (“Truckloads of money. Total bonanza.”) As I made to leave, he reached for a birdhouse. “Here,” he said. “You take this one.”
The native Modoc people once called California’s sparse northeast corner “the Smiles of God.” Then in 1915, the area seemed to incur God’s wrath with the eruption of Lassen Peak, which blanketed the surrounding high desert in volcanic ash. One county’s official slogan today is “Where the West still lives,” although the area’s history is laid bare in boarded-up places like Uncle Runts Watering Hole, in Old Station, and abandoned homesteads.
Hardscrabble frontier life seems not to have eroded a sense of whimsy; the sidewalks in Alturas, a town near the Oregon border, are lined with stores like the Belligerent Duck (an outdoor outfitter); Skirts N Spurs (a hair salon); and Classy Lassie (an apparel shop). We passed signs on front lawns that read: “Land of the Free Because of the Brave.” Outside the Adin Supply Company (since 1906), in the town of Adin, we were advised: “Starbucks is 70 Miles Away. Our Coffee Will Get You There.”
Nearly every town seemed to have its resident hoarder with an antiques and collectibles shop. “Some people can’t come in,” said Sally B, a self-described “hard-core junkie” who owned Just Stuff, in New Pine Creek, Ore. “They just stick their head in and walk out. But others just get consumed by it.” As did my friends: Tyson, a musician, found an antique toy piano; Angelina walked out with a black leather jacket and beret.
Just Stuff in New Pine Creek, Ore. Credit: Andy Isaacson
Our meandering had taken us past dark, so we parked for the night by a stream a few miles up a national forest road.
RVs have long been bound up in the American myth of freedom and mobility and independence, with allusions to the covered wagon, that symbol of the Western frontier.
Recreational vehicles (which include motor homes, fifth-wheel trailers, folding camping trailers, travel trailers, truck campers and sports utility RVs) date back to the Model T. In 1922, The New York Times estimated that of 10.8 million cars then on the road, 5 million would be used for motor camping. Initially these “auto campers” just attached tents and other supplies to the outside of their vehicles, but eventually a few craftier individuals were affixing platforms to support canvas tents.
Solid-sided tents were built with cabinetry and wardrobes and also kitchens. Later, in the 1920s, commercial manufacturers began mounting “camp bodies” over auto chassis. During the dry years of Prohibition, even Anheuser-Busch built RVs, advertising in the pages of Field & Stream magazine.
As the towing capacity of automobiles increased, so did the size of house trailers, which by the late 1930s contained built-in iceboxes, kitchen ranges and flushing toilets. Some even had front-mounted airplane-style propellers to drive a wind-powered generator.
Courtesy of AAA California
Recreational vehicles promised to make vacations easier and cheaper. “ ‘Home Sweet Home’ Wherever You Roam,” claimed a 1936 brochure for the Kozy Coach trailer. “Is there anything finer than ‘to get away from it all’ now and then? Out on the water. Hunting through the woods. Tramping over the hills, or just lolling under the open sky. That’s the life!”
Early auto campers were derided as “Gypsies,” “trailer trash” or “tin-can tourists.” In the winter of 1919, a group of 22 families parked their jerry-built mobile shelters at Desoto Auto Park, near Tampa, the first public campground in Florida, and founded the Tin Can Tourists of America, a fraternity of RVers that by 1935 had swelled to some 300,000 members.
Today there are many RV clubs and, of course, blogs. Some cater to specific RV brands, like the Wally Byam Caravan Club, for Airstream owners, founded in 1955, with 5,600 loyal members today. Others are for certain RV lifestyles, like Escapees, a club for “full timers.”
The Greatest RV Rally in the World, which is held three times a year in different parts of the country, was taking place on expo grounds on the outskirts of Redmond, Ore., and was put on by the Good Sam Club, the world’s largest RV club, with 870,000 member families. My friends and I arrived just as the 1960s crooner Bobby Vinton took to the main stage as the evening’s entertainment.
In the registration building, attendees had decorated a map of the United States with pins over their hometowns, which spanned from Hawaii and Alaska to the border town of Pharr, Tex. One RV came from Homestead, at the southern tip of Florida, a 3,191-mile drive away. A yellow Post-it affixed off the Eastern Seaboard read: Germany.
I splurged on a parking site with full electrical and sewage hookup. Many of the 2,500 rigs, sprawled across the sagebrush like a marina of yachts, had American and state flags flapping overhead, or fake flowers in vases that rested on artificial grass rugs beside the front door. Address placards hung in the windows, like “Grammy and Grumpy’s Motorhome.” One motor home in particular caught my eye, possibly the most gaudy vehicle in the lot — or the most awesome: a 45-foot, black-and-tan Country Coach Veranda 400, tricked out with a glass-walled outdoor deck that came off the side of the living room.
I found its owner, Steve Collins of Atkins, Iowa, perched on a leather bar stool on the deck wearing fuzzy bear-paw slippers and sipping a beer. A baseball game played on a 42-inch flat-screen television. The rig was a stunning McMansion on wheels. On the ground beside the motor home lay three electric skateboards, a golf cart, a remote-controlled toy helicopter and a plastic Nascar racer, all of which fit into spacious storage bays below the RV. “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world,” he said, offering me a bottle of Bud. “I’m in awe every time I look at it.”
Mr. Collins said he and his wife leave their RV parked beside their home, behind its own remote-controlled gate. Every so often they take to the road, packing their two Great Danes and a flock of parakeets, which Mrs. Collins had advertised for sale on a lawn chair. When they drive up to a convenience store, kids will ask Mr. Collins if he’s a musician on tour, which flatters him. The RV had a vanity license plate that spelled TOYZILLA. Mr. Collins explained that his wife wanted IGOTMINE, but he didn’t want people hating on him. “My first choice was PRIAPISM,” he said.
The rally featured nightly entertainment, including the country singer Vince Gill (“Howdy campers! Although RVing isn’t really camping.”) and Herman’s Hermits, the 1960s British invasion rock group. Before that show, I joined 1,798 of the rally’s 6,500 attendees in attempting — and, we believed, setting — the Guinness World Record for most simultaneous high-fives (it turns out that a group in Norway had bested the record a couple of weeks earlier).
I also attended a dog show one morning in a tent on the expo grounds. “The doggie swimsuit competition is up first, so get those suits on,” the M.C. announced to kick it off. “If anyone needs a cleanup bag, they’re behind the stage.” More than a dozen RV owners trotted out their pooches, colorfully outfitted in swim caps, plastic sunglasses, bikini bottoms and, in one case, nothing save a red paper crown and sign that read: Nude Beach Queen 2011.
“We’ve got some real canine bathing beauties here, let me tell you,” the M.C. noted. To a soundtrack of Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love,” a black Labrador passed before me in a pink polka-dot one-piece and swimming goggles, followed by a bichon wearing the retired Speedos of his master. There was a fluffy black poodle with pink toenails. Giggles filled the tent after one contestant in the “Double Vision” category (a dog/owner look-alike contest) introduced his pet Chihuahua shepherd. “I know what you all are thinking,” the M.C. said. “Chihuahua-shepherd sex is pretty funny.”
RV rallies have always been about both camaraderie and merchandising, and there were serious deals to be made at the Greatest RV Rally in the World. Vendors hawked RVs, RV awnings, satellite TV packages and concealed-weapons permits, and there were seminars, too, like “Green RVing” (not an oxymoron) and “Feel Better and Keep Energized While on Road” (drink green tea and exercise).
I met a retired couple from Maryland who were heading north to the Columbia River Gorge in Washington after the event. From there, they said, they would just head “wherever the wind blew.” A full-timer from Michigan told me how friends often ask how she could sell her house for a life on the road. “It’s just stuff,” she said. “The way we look at it, we’re home wherever we are.” I may have been one of the younger attendees at the rally, by about 30 years, and probably the only RV driver with a rental, but all this made sense to me. These were travelers inclined to roam, in the words of Cruise America, wherever their spirits took them.
AFTER three days at the rally, my friends and I blew westerly into the Cascades, passing by Crater Lake National Park, which was the magnificent blue hole in the earth that I’d always imagined. Friends had told me about undeveloped hot springs on national forest land down the road. I pulled into a gravel parking lot, beside an outhouse, with the sign: “NUDITY. Nude bathing is common at Umpqua Hot Springs. If this makes you uncomfortable, we recommend you not go into the area.”
Next to my rig was parked a 1966 cream-colored, vegetable-oil-powered Gillis school bus, towing a yellow VW van. Its passengers were milling about. One woman, with yellow dreadlocks, wore a quilted skirt made of leather scraps and a coyote tail. I asked the group where they were headed.
“We’re all Gypsies,” replied one man. “We don’t move on until we get moved on.” Another, who had “I may be lost but I’m Makin good time” scrawled on his pants, said he’d “been from where the wind blows since 1998.”
Their driver was a longhair named Manny, who told me that he’d just picked the others up at the annual Rainbow Gathering, in Washington State. Manny wore frayed overalls and a Grateful Dead shirt under a brown hoodie. His bus had a Family Coach Motorhome Association placard affixed to it, which I’d seen on many RVs at the rally. Just as my mind began to grapple with the cognitive dissonance of holding Manny in the same company as retirees at a Bobby Vinton concert, he said he was also a life member of the Good Sam Club.
“But they kicked me out of one of their campgrounds,” he said nonchalantly. “They said: ‘Your bus is too old. Other campers won’t want to camp beside it.’ Whatever.”
Umpqua attracted the kind of people prone to detour down the side road. Tubs were carved from the rock on a steep riverbank overlooking the misty hemlock forest. In one sat a Japanese family, wearing modest bathing suits. In another tub I chatted with a couple on their way home from a Kinetic Sculpture Race (a contest of human-powered amphibious sculptures) on the Oregon coast. As night fell, a group of neo-pagan women nearby, who had just met at a “summer witch camp” in southern Oregon, sang hymns.
HARVEST HOSTS is the name of a new program that allows RVers to stay free overnight at wineries and farms across the country. (As at the bakery in Shingletown, RVs are O.K., but cars in this case are not.) The annual membership fee is $35, and joining gave me access to a network of hosts, which is how I arrived the next evening at Hillcrest Bonded Winery 44, in nearby Roseburg.
The proprietor and winemaker Dyson DeMara was casual and welcoming. He poured us lovely wines; Hillcrest is one of Oregon’s oldest estate wineries, home to the state’s first pinot noir vines.
He then pointed out a grassy patch beside the tasting room where we could park the rig for the night. Next to it was a stone fire pit stocked with wood. “It’s in the spirit of wine,” Mr. DeMara told me when I asked how he’d become a volunteer host. “In the New World it’s a business, but in the Old World, wine is an open-your-doors kind of thing.”
We drove back across the California border and joined Highway 101 in Crescent City. There I spotted a man on a street corner slumped against a stop sign with a cane, thumbing it. The rig had room and he looked harmless, so I offered him a ride.
His name was Dan. He was 61, a former trucker from North Carolina, and spoke with a polite drawl. He was hitching his way down the coast, taking it as it came. A year earlier, Dan said, he was hospitalized after striking a deer on his Harley. Doctors gave him a short time to live, but he kept living, and figured he’d been dealt a second life. He jumped on a bus going west to Seattle.
Dan was roaming in the manner of Manny and his band of neo-hippie “Gypsies,” just like the Good Sam Club RVers and the Tin Can Tourists a century before them. My rig had brought me a similar freedom: something in which to wander “wherever your spirit takes you,” without reservations. An endless drive-through menu, after all.
Riding the Rails
NEW YORK TIMES | From New York to California by Amtrak.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 8, 2009
SOMEWHERE on the west side of Illinois, the Amish men broke out a deck of Skip-Bo cards and I joined them as the cafe car attendant, using an iPod and a set of portable speakers, broadcast Eckhart Tolle, author of “A New Earth,” discoursing on the virtues of stillness.
“Life gets discombobulating,” the attendant said, calmly. “This helps.”
On both sides of the train window, American scenery unfolded. A dirty layer of ice and snow subdued the still cropland to the distant horizon. At the next table a woman stuck her nose in a novel; a college kid pecked at a laptop. Overlaying all this, a soundtrack: choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k — the metronomic rhythm of an Amtrak train rolling down the line to California, a sound that called to mind an old camera reel moving frames of images along a linear track, telling a story.
The six Amish men were in their mid-20s, and they were returning home to Kalona, Iowa, after a three-week cross-country tour. They had especially liked the Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Ky., and Niagara Falls. As we rolled across white plains, they pointed out which plots grew beans and which grew corn. To my eye, the dormant land revealed few clues.
Around the train car lounged Americans traveling for work and others for family, people for whom train travel is a necessity and those for whom it’s merely quaint, first-time riders and probably even a few “foamers” — the nickname that train workers privately give the buffs who salivate over the sight of a locomotive.
I had ridden long-distance trains in India and China but never across my own country. I suppose that after two years of receiving images saturated in red, white and blue from all corners of the nation, I wanted to make my own. The fading glow of the Inauguration, I thought — a moment for national unity and new beginning, both imagined and real — would be a good light in which to meet the country again. And it was winter, after all; I didn’t feel like driving.
With every uptick in gas prices, Americans in general are thinking less about driving. With each degree of global warming, trains become even more sensible. And with each new surcharge and each new item of clothing one is required to remove to board an airplane — and with every small-town commercial airport and cabin amenity that vanishes forever — the rails beckon. Last year, Amtrak set all-time ridership records.
Traveling cross-country by train takes time, but less than I expected: within four days, one crosses the Hudson River and reaches San Francisco Bay at Emeryville, Calif. I gave myself a week, stopping in Chicago, Denver and, for variety, a remote town in Nevada that had a nice ring to its name.
THE Amtrak Cardinal rolled out of New York’s Pennsylvania Station slightly before dawn on a frigid January morning. I had booked a roomette — a cozy compartment just larger than a Japanese capsule that converts from two facing seats into bunk beds. The attendant asked if I wanted a wake-up call the next morning, pointed out the showers down the hall and said that breakfast would be served after Trenton.
The roomette’s décor — blue curtains, a (sealed) metal ashtray on the armrest — evoked the era of Pan Am. On the upholstered seats rested two hangers, two pillows and a crisp copy of The New York Times, which on that morning featured a photo of the ex-Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, projecting an image of false calm. Chicago, all aboard.
On a two-dimensional map, the crosshatched lines that represent railroad tracks resemble stitches binding patches of textured fabric. Essentially, these remnants of America’s rail network predate 1910, and unless you’re on it, you scarcely notice it — crossing under our freeways, passing through once-thriving rural towns that today’s highways avoid. We consider train tracks indifferently, the way we do electricity wires: as behind-the-scenes infrastructure, a ubiquitous but background feature of our landscape.
At least this is how it seemed en route to Washington, as the train rolled past unkempt backyards and graffitied factory walls, icy ball fields and the back doors of crumbling buildings. America presents itself to the streets; the tracks take in a less manicured backside. How refreshing a sight.
Our consumer society may still rely on trains to transport things, but those things are pitched to drivers in cars, not to passengers on trains. And so, as early as New Jersey, I realized something that would only feel remarkable a few days later, in the Nevada desert: it’s still possible to travel 3,585 miles across the United States without being the target of billboards, golden arches or absurdly large twine balls. The rails offer a view onto Unbranded America — the land as it was.
The Cardinal makes 31 stops in 27 hours on a southerly, U-shaped path from New York to Chicago. It’s not the most direct of Amtrak’s routes, but it charts a course through textbook American history: Baltimore; Washington; Manassas, Va.; Cincinnati.
At Philadelphia, a woman named Mary Ellen Phillips Belcher and her grown daughter Ladonna settled into the roomette across from mine. They were returning home to Kentucky after visiting a relative in suburban Pennsylvania. They usually drive; the train ride was satisfying a long-held curiosity.
Life stories and first names have a way of surfacing between strangers. Mary Ellen lived her girlhood days in Junction City, Ky., with four brothers and a single mom, along the old Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks.
“We didn’t have money to buy cigarettes, so we’d get us a coffee can and collect the butts thrown off the train,” she said. “Mother would always leave a skillet of cornbread and brown beans outside the house for the hobos coming through. Evidently, they had passed word on to their friends that Mother was a kind lady. She’d never have enough food for us, but she’d always have something for somebody.”
“I said, ‘One of these days I’m going to ride a train to remember Mother and those hobos’ ” she told me, in way that moved me. “I guess I had to be 65 before I took that ’venture.”
Behind her, Washington’s monuments drifted slowly across the glass, and as we passed the Capitol, I imagined a bureaucrat inside considering what to do about Amtrak. As a quasi-public rail service, Amtrak stays afloat with a little more than $1 billion a year from the federal government. Last September, for the first time since 1997, Congress approved an Amtrak authorization bill that could nearly double it. The stimulus package President Obama signed in February includes $8 billion for high-speed and intercity rail projects, and one would think that so long as “Amtrak Joe” Biden holds high office, trains will continue to get some love.
After Charlottesville, Va., I planted myself in the lounge car, which divides the coach and sleeper cars and serves the social function of the train’s town square or neighborhood pub — an egalitarian place for conversation and chips.
“D’ya see that doe?” a man from Virginia asked me, pointing outside. “Still as can be.”
I was curious about whether he hunted. He laughed and said, “Don’t need to now; my boy does it for me.”
A man nearby overheard and chuckled. “I used to,” he said, “before I started huntin’ the two-legged kind.”
“I wish they had a gambling car.”
“At least they got beer.”
“Uh-huh.”
Along the tracks, a tranquil scene of rolling farmland speckled with horses eventually became steep slopes of forest in a haze of swirling flurries. I asked the two men if these were the Allegheny Mountains.
“Outside of here, they call them the Appalaychians,” one of the men told me. “We call them the Appalaachians. Hell, I just call them swampy, wooded-ass areas.”
Meals on board are white-tableclothed affairs; however, these days the $22 flat iron steaks are served on plastic replicas of Amtrak’s former china. Passengers are seated together. For dinner, I enjoyed my cheese ravioli across from an Amish man from Minnesota who was escorting his wife home from hernia surgery in South Carolina. (Many Amish are uninsured, he told me, and some take trains to Mexico for less costly medical care.)
After he finished, one of the attendants — not the 27-year veteran with eyebrows painted red-and-blue Amtrak stripes and a customized “Amtrak” belt buckle sparkling with bling, but the other — seated a couple from suburbanColorado. He was a retired defense contractor; she, a former Delta flight attendant.
“The food’s better here,” she said, a remark I took as authoritative. Cutting into her baked potato, she added, “You couldn’t get this on a plane.”
By the time we rolled into Ashland, Ky., at 11 p.m., the temperature had plummeted enough to freeze the track switch, waylaying us at the platform for two hours. I passed the time in the lounge car with four other travelers, all quick to make acquaintance. One, from the Bronx, was seeking a football coaching job in Arizona; another, from Indiana, had just visited relatives in Virginia.
Every so often, someone would look at a watch and feign complaint. But really, it was half-hearted; on a long-distance train, it seems, the fluid movement across space induces a surrender to the natural unfolding of time.
At some hour during a fitful sleep, the heat in my roomette stopped working. The attendant call button didn’t work, either. I froze until morning. Even if mine was an aging, government-subsidized room on wheels, I wondered whether after paying more than $200 for that night, it wasn’t reasonable to have certain expectations.
Before it was possible to travel across the troposphere, nearly all cross-country journeys passed through Chicago. I spent a night in the city, and the next afternoon boarded the California Zephyr.
New relationships quickly formed in the observation car, which on the double-decker, Airstream-like Zephyr was outfitted with curved glass walls and padded chairs. Passengers lounged together, sharing snacks or packed beverages, and making commentary as the landscape — cold metal silos, lonely farmhouses on windswept plots — passed across the great picture window in high definition.
Under streaks of pink and orange, we crossed the icy Mississippi River on an old steel bridge. Dozens of bald eagles, pointed out by the conductor in an announcement, perched on the western bank, presumably fishing. We rumbled along the main streets of small but once prosperous Iowa towns and glimpsed architectural treasures like Omaha’s former Union and Burlington train stations, which are now, sadly but symbolically, a museum and a condo development.
We were making good time, which is not a reputation Amtrak usually enjoys. Seventy percent of Amtrak’s service — basically everywhere but in the Northeast — operates on freight railroad tracks, where inefficiencies cause frequent delays. According to federal law, but not always in practice, passenger trains have priority. Two years ago, Union Pacific agreed to reduce the speed restrictions it imposes on Amtrak trains while it does track maintenance, but a Department of Transportation report last September said that little had changed.
Conductors told me it has, some. But for now, the crippling economy has significantly lessened freight traffic across the country. One conductor told me that he trades stocks based on looking out the window; when he sees less freight, he sells.
So owing in part to the recession, we coasted at dawn — ahead of schedule — into Union Station in Denver, where a friend picked me up for a quick drive into the mountains for a day of skiing. It felt good to jump off the train: even with utter freedom to move about the cabin and an onboard minimart, the mind and body, before long, yearn for solid ground.
After riding my own set of metal edges through ankle-high powder, I slept across from the station at the upscale Oxford Hotel. In this 1891 institution, I could briefly reimagine the romance of cross-country rail travel (and where, as an Amtrak passenger, I got a special $150 rate, compared with $210).
In the morning, I boarded another westbound Zephyr. Leaving Denver, the rails snake through 29 tunnels on their ascent into the Rockies. In a single bend, we turned from the great brown plains, and the dominant impression of America — which 2,000 miles east had been industrial and, later, agricultural — suddenly turned geological.
We passed old mines and mountain ranges, red rock canyons and ranches blanketed by snow, glistening under the winter sun. For hundreds of miles, the train coursed along icy green stretches of the Colorado River accessible only by raft or rail.
Vacationers heading for resorts debarked at the Glenwood Springs and Fraser-Winter Park stations, and a man who had introduced himself as Oscar — a Mexican migrant from North Carolina — got off at Grand Junction to pursue a restaurant job.
I sat with Steve Nykorchuk, a man from Pittsfield, Mass., with a scraggly gray beard and cane, who rides from Albany to Reno five times a year to play the penny slots. Before every trip, his 90-year-old mother slips him an envelope with spending money, and every time he feels bad about taking it. When he arrives in Reno, people say, “Here comes the Train Man.”
“I come so often they know exactly what beer I’m drinking,” he said. “That’s funny, to come 3,000 miles and people know what you’re drinking.”
As Colorado’s majesty faded into the Utah night, I drank coffee with Ben Kinsinger, a kindly, 63-year-old Amish butcher from Lancaster, Pa. Every February, he and his wife ride to the country’s warmer climes. In Phoenix, they visit the airport to watch planes take off and land, and on the train he likes to chat with passengers, like me, who never visit Lancaster. I was touched watching him connect with a young couple from Nepal.
Credit: Andy Isaacson
“No electricity, stitching clothes — wow!” the Nepalese girl said. “That would be like giving up everything, like a nun.”
On the way to the dining car the next morning, Ben patted me. “The cows are milked, the horses are fed,” he said, jokingly. “It’s time for breakfast!”
But instead, I got off the train in Winnemucca, Nev., a small town dwarfed by big sky and high mountain desert. And for no particular reason, really. (“We don’t usually get many Winnemuccas,” the conductor said as I got off.) But train routes are about connecting — and appreciating — the points in between, the country’s negative spaces, those places that urban dwellers might deride as “middle of nowhere.”
A century ago, Basque sheepherders jumped off at Winnemucca by the hundreds, and that evening, I had Picon Punches and lamb shank with their descendants at the 110-year-old Martin Hotel, a wooden bar and restaurant beside the tracks with scrapbook-lined walls and a small claim to still being a boardinghouse — a retired man named Phil occupied a room upstairs.
Today, many of the Basque work for gold mines outside town. The flow of Picon Punches follows the price of gold, and these days, both are up. I slept the night at a cheap motel after playing a penny slot at Winners Casino, and caught the next Zephyr rolling through.
In dawn’s light, the train streaked across the Great Basin Desert, blurring the view of tufted yellow shrubs flanking the rails but framing the white-dusted, mineral-stained mountains beyond in an unfolding panorama across the observation car windows. Choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k: that hypnotic rhythm and empty Nevada landscape stilled the mind to a slow, meandering drift. I looked around the observation car to see four other passengers sitting silently; a fifth gazed out the window, picking his guitar.
In Reno, a dozen gamblers boarded, and we climbed to the Sierra Nevada pass named after the hapless westbound journeyers who ate some of their own to last the winter of 1846. Forty years later, the Donner Party would have had a transcontinental train. The Zephyr’s engineer made steady, giant slalom turns along that original route, weaving through the snowy backcountry on a 7,000-foot descent toward the shining sea.
Docents from the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, who regularly ride the train back and forth to Reno, filled in the passing scenery with history. Chinese laborers, they told us, forged much of this mountain route.
AS the train bisected California, the impressions mirrored the country east of the Continental Divide: craggy mountains and the ghosts of gold mines became fertile cropland until once again we rolled through industrial yards, these lining San Francisco Bay.
Almost every veteran conductor I talked with on the trip lamented that something of train travel’s former magic had slipped away. Yet I witnessed something very precious that remains.
Mr. Kinsinger, the Amish butcher, had remarked in astonishment: “I met a man who said he spent 12 hours on an airplane, sitting right next to someone, and they never said a word to each other!” A former New York City cop-turned-massage-therapist from Oregon, who had ridden the Zephyr with her husband, carried cards printed with their contact information, and the headline: “There Are No Strangers on a Train.”
Abraham Lincoln’s idealism about the first transcontinental railroad’s forging national unity may have been bound up in political pragmatism and economic ambition, but a core sentiment remains true: as a train crosses borders, the boundaries between its riders dissolve. Those crosshatched lines on the map stitching the country together are also a metaphor. I witnessed community and saw everybody cherishing it.
At least for now, train travel remains in what the former flight attendant I met called an “age of innocence,” by which she meant that you can keep your shoes on to board. It is a relapse into a simpler time.
With some cash, Amtrak could add modern amenities like Wi-Fi and still preserve that slower pace that makes train travel a salve for our modern psyche, the perpetual motion lulling the rider to stillness, like a rocking cradle, and that hushing sound: choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k.
My Starring Roll in Laos
AFAR | While backpacking through a village in Laos, I invented a dessert sushi at a small restaurant. 7 years later, it had become a sensation.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN AFAR, MARCH/APRIL 2010
I ONCE INVENTED A DESSERT SUSHI, in Laos. It was made of bananas, peanut butter, sticky rice, sesame seeds, and honey. My then-girlfriend Lauren and I created it spontaneously one December afternoon in 2002, while dining on the deck of a restaurant in Muang Ngoi, a rural fishing village on the Nam Ou River in northern Laos. Scores of backpackers lay up in Muang Ngoi, so we called it the Falang Roll, using the Lao word for “foreigner.” The owners indulged us by providing the ingredients, and we promised them that the roll would be a sensation. They added it to their menu.
One evening, two years after that visit, I sat at my desk in California and wondered about the fate of the roll. Google pulled up a blog entry by a German backpacker about “an interesting dish called the ‘Falang Roll’ made by some falang who stayed for weeks in Muang Ngoi and taught them how to make this sort of dessert sushi.”
The roll lived! And it had even acquired an imprecise lore: We had stayed in Muang Ngoi for only three days. Over the years I sought updates from backpackers. In 2007, I posted to Thorn Tree, Lonely Planet’s online forum, asking if anyone had tried the roll. One reply: “YES I SAW THIS!… We thought it was hilarious but didn’t give it a try!” From another: “I actually have a picture of the sign!” The next year, I asked again. “Virtually every restaurant in Muang Ngoi has the Falang Roll,” said one. “Not sure how many people order, I certainly did not. Last thing I want is falang food in Laos.” And another: “Andy—you posted this same script last year. Yawn.”
I let it be.
In 2009, I found myself thumbing through a Lonely Planet guidebook on Laos at a friend’s house, and flipped to the “Eating” section for Muang Ngoi:
Nang Phone Keo Restaurant
(Meals, US $0.50–$1.50)
The ‘Falang Roll’ of peanut butter, sticky rice and veggies lures ravenous travelers to the open-air deck of this restaurant on the main street. Also whips up good foe.
I felt both honored by the Falang Roll’s immortalization and offended. Veggies? Evolution is natural, but this was metamorphosis. I felt like my legacy—let’s face it, at 32, the only one I could claim—was being hijacked.
I had to return to Laos.
Backpacker trail—a beaten path from Cuzco to Kathmandu filled with dog-eared Lonely Planet guides, Canadian flag patches, and discharged Israeli soldiers growing out their hair—is saturated with Western comfort foods. Banana pancakes are a guesthouse standard. Israelis have successfully transplanted shakshuka, a Middle Eastern egg-and-tomato breakfast, to backpacker haunts worldwide. And then there’s the phenomenal, spreadable, not-quite-chocolate Nutella, which now reaches far beyond the Eurail network.
The Falang Roll came from the same spirit of transplanted food: If Lauren and I created our own dish in Laos, could it catch on, even travel to Thailand or Malaysia or Goa? This was the thought that arose that afternoon from hammocks above the Nam Ou River. We had left careers in San Francisco, discovered a shared spirit for adventure, and set off for six months in Southeast Asia. The first month in Thailand we learned how to scuba dive and consumed street food with abandon. We crossed into Laos, trekked into hill tribe villages, and journeyed long days on bad roads with cheerful locals. We boated south down the Nam Ou to Muang Ngoi, eager to kick back for a few days and do laundry.
Rugged karst formations surrounding Muang Ngoi have kept the village isolated from roads, cars, motorbikes, and power lines—but not from Nutella. Some time after Laos opened up to foreigners in 1989, backpackers got word of Muang Ngoi’s relaxed pace and quiet, and the village’s single dirt road was transformed into a modest strip of guesthouses and restaurants.
Nang Phone Keo, the restaurant we went to, was run by a friendly couple with a cute 5-year-old son. The menu included peanut butter and honey sandwiches, French toast, waffles, and, of course, shakshuka. Lauren and I still argue about which one of us received the touch of inspiration for the Falang Roll after an afternoon meal there. Riffing on ingredients we knew the proprietors already had, we asked for a hunk of sticky rice, a banana, and peanut butter, which had to be ground fresh at the table with a wooden mortar and pestle. We used a water glass to flatten the rice, then spread a line of peanut butter and banana across it, and rolled the whole thing into the cylindrical shape of sushi.
The original Falang Roll, circa 2002. Credit: Andy Isaacson
The owners looked on, bemused, while we conducted our experiment. I asked to have a look around in the kitchen, where I found sesame seeds, which are used in Laos as a topping for dried river seaweed. We sprinkled seeds over the rice (in a nod to the Japanese original), cut the roll into bite-size pieces, and poured honey into a bowl to use as a dipping sauce. This one dish packed the nostalgia of an after-school snack, the density to stop the runs, and enough familiarity to sate culinary homesickness: a perfect backpacker food, we said. The price of 10,000 kip (less than $1) seemed about right—the same as shakshuka. Pleased with our creation, we left the village the next day.
When I arrive in Muang Ngoi in July to defend my legacy, the Nam Ou is swollen from monsoon rains. I disembark and walk up the new cement steps that ascend the embankment—on my last visit the steps were mud—to the main drag. Locals stand under doorways and ask, in their nonpushy way, if I’m looking for a guesthouse. I want to say, “No, I’m looking for the Falang Roll.” I walk the whole strip, to the end, surveying the left side of the road, where I remember Nang Phone Keo to be. There’s no trace of the place. I begin to worry that the Falang Roll might be extinct.
Deciding to wait until the rain lets up before panicking, I head toward my old guesthouse. That’s gone, too. I ask two younger backpackers from Canada and the U.K. if they can recommend somewhere to stay. The place they’re at is decent enough, they say, and cheap—$2 per night. But back near the boat landing is Ning Ning Guesthouse, which for $5 a night offers sturdy bamboo walls, glass windows, and a bar of soap. It occurs to me that despite shouldering the same blue backpack I had with me in 2002, I am no longer the frugal traveler I was then, because without much hesitation I spring for the Ning Ning.
The next morning I head back down the strip. A worker at Ning Ning has told me that Nang Phone Keo moved across the street, which is why I didn’t see it the day before. In the light of day, toward the end of the road I spot a familiar yellow sign hanging off a thatched roof. In red lettering, it reads:
ONLYPLACE BAGUETTE
AVAILABLE EVERY DAY!
WELCOME FOR YOUR BREAKFAST SANDWICH
BAGUETTE WITH PENUT BUTTER
WAFFLE – FALANG ROLLS
Nang Phone Keo still exists, and from the looks of it, so does the Falang Roll. I peer in but the only sign of life is someone sleeping on the floor in the back of the dining room. I head into a restaurant a few doors down, where I find a local guy named Hompan talking with a British traveler.
I show him two photos of Nang Phone Keo from my visit in 2002. (After all, I need some proof of creation.) One is of the Falang Roll, presented on a plate the moment after Lauren and I made it—six bite-size pieces garnished by a slice of unpeeled banana. The other picture is of the owners’ son, standing next to the menu board on which Lauren and I had written the name of the dish.
“I remember you!” Hompan says, after I show him the photos. “I worked at a restaurant next to that place, and I asked you to teach me how to make Falang Roll, and you said ‘OK, OK,’ but then the next day you go.”
“Oh, sorry, man!”
“Now many people here know Falang Roll,” he says, sweeping his hand across the village. “Seven years—long time.”
I ask him what has changed. There used to be only eight restaurants in town; now there are around 20, he says, though it seems that during this low tourist season local residents have converted many of them back to domestic use. There are certainly more signs for tourist services (“Oui Parle Francais,” “Haircut/To Shave the Beard/Shose Repairing”), including several for trekking and fishing guides. Hompan says there are more than 25 self-employed guides in town; in 2002, he had been the only one. Electricity still runs off generators, and only a few houses have telephone lines, but a cell tower is being installed over the village. There are two small temples; there used to be three. Opium is no longer sold in the weekly market. I ask about Joe, an American from Brooklyn who was visiting Muang Ngoi at the same time Lauren and I were here. It was his second visit. Villagers seemed to be fond of him—they knew his name, anyway. Of the thousands of falang who journey through Muang Ngoi never to return, he seemed to have developed a connection with this place and its people. Passing through superficially, I had been envious of Joe.
“Joe? Spiky hair and squinty eyes?” Hompan asks. “Yeah, I don’t know, he never come back.”
Hompan calls out to a woman who is walking past the restaurant. It’s Sopjian, the owner of Nang Phone Keo. I immediately recognize her warm face and smile. She doesn’t remember me, so I show her the photos. She looks at the pictures, then looks at me, and back again at the photos. We all laugh, thinking of the absurdity of the Falang Roll.
Hompan, Sopjian, and I walk to Nang Phone Keo, and I greet Khan, Sopjian’s husband, who is gentle and soft-spoken. Hompan calls him Buon Dien (Mr. Cool) because of his calm demeanor. Their son, San, walks in, now 12 but as sweet as the 5-year-old I remember. He’s wearing a pink-and-white-striped T-shirt, and the nails on his left hand are painted red. He looks at my photo of him from 2002 and laughs shyly.
I sit down at a table and, for the first time ever, order a Falang Roll.
I am relieved to see that Lonely Planet misreported. Khan delivers more or less an authentic Falang Roll. The peanut butter is now Skippy, and the higher cost of honey means it is used sparingly and only inside the roll. The Falang Roll is no longer a “dessert” sushi, but listed on a laminated, four-page menu under “breakfast,” along with waffles, pancakes, baguette sandwiches—and shakshuka, now more expensive than a Falang Roll. Elsewhere I notice “Fried Banana Flambée with lào-láo.” Lào-láo is the potent national rice whisky. Khan says the flambée was introduced by a French backpacker.
A Canadian couple sits down at the end of the table and looks over the menu. “What’s in a Falang Roll?” the woman asks Khan. I tell her she should try it and I explain that I invented it. She says that they had actually chosen this restaurant after reading about the Falang Roll in the Lonely Planet guide. “I also met a German guy in Thailand who said we had to try it if we ever reached Muang Ngoi,” she adds. Khan serves them a roll, and I observe them the way marketers scrutinize a focus group. They dip each piece in coffee, which they later explain is because the roll was a bit too dry. But otherwise, two thumbs up. My legacy feels secure.
I spend the afternoon getting to know the family I had never really met. I learn that 40 years ago, when Khan was a young boy, his family left for Luang Prabang to escape the bombs the United States was dropping on Muang Ngoi. Some villagers spent nearly a decade during the Vietnam War holed up in caves bored into the karst hills, Khan says, only venturing out at night to work their rice fields. In Luang Prabang, the U.S. Army paid Khan’s father to fight against the Pathet Lao, the homegrown Communist movement supported by North Vietnam. Most falang who visit Muang Ngoi—even those who swim in the caves, which are down a trail from the main strip—are unaware of this history. But the village is littered with remnants: Under Nang Phone Keo’s yellow sign lies a rusty, five-foot-tall bomb casing stamped with a U.S. seal. These days locals use the old casings as gateposts and planters.
One morning during my stay Sopjian invites me to her niece’s baby shower. I arrive with a case of Beerlao and join the men seated on the floor around bowls of sticky rice, spicy fishlaap, and soup. Cups of lào-láo are passed around with toasts for “good luck.” The midday buzz, the greasy hands and lips, a room full of people talking ever louder in a language I don’t understand, a stereo that pumps out a singer’s crooning backed up by a synthesizer: It’s a scene familiar to travelers in villages across the world. A local man who once spent four months in Atlanta tells the others in the room how quickly the fire department there responds to accidents, and how it’s not OK to drink on the job. More lào-láo, group dancing with twirling hands, and a woman who insistently bops her rear end into mine. I’m given a thumbs-up after being introduced as the guy who made the Falang Roll. “My wife can make it!” says Vita, who owns Vita’s Restaurant on the strip.
Visiting Muang Ngoi this second time, I begin to feel I’ve gone a little deeper than a transient falang. Being here during low season allows me to witness the village’s natural rhythm, which begins each day at dawn with the crowing of roosters and the beating of the temple drum. Boys and men set off on boats to fish. From tables along the main strip, women sell $1 bowls of noodles, lemongrass, and banana flowers to families heading off to work their rice fields. Kids carry babies and etch a local version of hopscotch into the dirt road. Dogs, chickens, and cats wander here and there. People sleep when the day is hot or rainy. They joke and gossip. Dusk arrives and the last boats return to shore. In the evenings, young and old gather around television sets to watch Thai movies. Sounds and fluorescent light spill out of open doorways onto the dark main road. Despite the year-round influx of falang who arrive with their clicking cameras, the social fabric seems in place.
I had come to Muang Ngoi thinking that with one culinary creation to my name, and maybe a bit of credibility, I might introduce another dish—perhaps another local variation of a perennial backpacker favorite. Pizza seems doable, so one day before I leave I take Khan, San, and Hompan into Nang Phone Keo’s kitchen, a tin-roofed annex behind the dining terrace, past chickens and a washing tub. Against the wall sit two open clay stoves with smoldering pieces of wood. I locate a pair of tomatoes on the floor of the vegetable pantry and hand them to San to blend with garlic, which he then cooks down in the wok to a thick marinara sauce. I work waffle flour, baking soda, and water into dough, and sauté some onion slices. Then I pound out a round, personal-size pie and lay it into the base of the wok, adding the sauce and onions and clumps of Laughing Cow cheese, a remnant of French colonialism. For the local touch I sprinkle on top pieces of kaipen (crispy Nam Ou seaweed seasoned with sesame seeds, sundried tomatoes, and garlic).
We wait 15 minutes for the dish to cook in the wok, then reconvene in the restaurant, crack a Beerlao, and share what is likely Muang Ngoi’s first pizza. Khan and Hompan chew in studious silence.
“So?” I ask. “What do we think?”
“Sep lai—delicious,” Hompan says, “but maybe more food on top like buffalo or chickenlaap.” I agree that the addition of Lao’s national dish, a marinated meat salad with fresh greens, herbs, and spices, would be an improvement. Khan voices concern about the long cooking time and impatient diners.
“Maybe some Israelis, they go away,” Khan says, waving his hand. A more pressing problem, though, is the village’s lack of a proper pizza oven. Hompan is hopeful. He is building a “jungle bar” on a plot off the main strip that he inherited from his family. There, he says, he will someday make our pizza.
I spend several more days in the village hanging out with Hompan, Khan, and San. By the time I leave Muang Ngoi it is with the understanding that sometimes travel is made rich not by what we take from the places we visit, but by what we leave behind. Even if that’s a dessert sushi or a Laughing Cow pizza, in Laos.
Hawaii’s Last Wayfinders
ISLANDS | Fewer than 20 people in the world can navigate the South Pacific using only glow sticks and instinct.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN ISLANDS, MAY 2011
ALENUIHAHA: THE CRUSHING SEAS. That’s what Hawaiians call this channel we’re crossing between the Big Island and Maui. The passage funnels prevailing northeastern breezes, turning them into ferocious winds. We’re sailing on instinct across this unpredictable water on a replica of a traditional Hawaiian voyaging canoe called Hokule’a. It’s the middle of the night. We have no radar on board. No GPS. Not even paper charts.
“They all have their own personalities,” Kalepa Baybayan says of the channels between Hawaii’s islands that for centuries have been the adversaries of the world’s best ocean sailors. “But this one has a mean streak in it.”
Kalepa, a navigator trained in Polynesian wayfinding, tapes two small glow sticks to the wood railing, illuminating a 90-degree angle. A makeshift protractor. This is our most tangible navigational aid for a night in the crushing seas.
Kalepa peers up to the celestial sky to locate a data point. He finds the northern constellation of Cassiopeia, and then follows the two end stars of its configuration to locate Hokupa’a, the North Star. Maui lies 30 miles northwest of the Big Island, Kalepa says, so we’ll need to sail on a 45-degree course from the North Star. Kalepa, who has a stout build and quietly assertive manner, sits unmoved at the back corner, eyeing the glow sticks to take a bearing.
“Steer down!” he calls out, meaning downwind, a feat requiring the full weight of three of us on the night shift leaning into the handle of a long wooden steering oar. My bare feet grip the wooden deck as the canoe pitches and rolls with jerky undulations, creaking in the darkness.
Half our crew of 16 — a mixed group of novice and veteran sailors, most of them Hawaiian — rest in cramped canvas sleeping nooks lining the deck. The night shift captain is a good-natured goateed character named Atwood Makanani (“Maka”), who mystifies me with long-winded raps on navigation and spirituality. Voyaging, Maka tells me, is “a world of magic, where the heavens come down to the earth and you actually get lifted and sail in the stars.”
“It’s like a dance,” he says. “Who’s leading and who’s following? As the canoe goes up a wave, it does a little hula, and you go with it. Elvis was never the king of rock and roll — we’ve been rockin’ and rollin’ since time immemorial.” So we’re dancing across one of Hawaii’s most notorious waterways, just as Maka’s Polynesian ancestors did. Without electronics. Reading the water’s moves. Looking skyward for help. Modern Hawaiians may have known that their Polynesian ancestors rolled across the Pacific, but until Hokule’a was built 35 years ago they had only the haziest idea of how it could have been done. Our three-day voyage from the Big Island to Oahu is a tribute to how this ancient knowledge narrowly escaped the dustbin of history. It will also prove to me the power of instinct. How it can be sharpened, even recaptured, to overcome the most distant odds.
“When I first saw Hokule’a,” Kalepa says, his voice rumbling through the sound of the wind, “it just grabbed my heart. It’s had an extraordinary power to affect people’s lives.” The canoe has made nine long-distance voyages, including to Easter Island, the Cook Islands and Japan, and has spawned a voyaging revival in other Pacific nations.
“The ocean doesn’t separate the islands,” Kalepa says of the vast sweep of Pacific. “It’s a bridge between our homes.”
The first Polynesians must have believed the same thing. They began sailing out of Taiwan 5,200 years ago, scholars estimate, reaching Fiji, Samoa and Tonga first before migrating east to the Marquesas Islands. By the end of the 13th century, they’d navigated to all corners of the 16 million-square-mile “Polynesian triangle” — Aotearoa (New Zealand), Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the Hawaiian Islands. At a time when European sailors still feared falling off the edge of the Earth if they ventured across the sea — only discovering the Canary Islands off the African coast in 1336 — Pacific peoples had already reached islands unimagined.
The question later was, did they get there on purpose?
Their methods baffled Westerners for hundreds of years. When Capt. James Cook voyaged in the late 18th century, he was impressed by the speed of Polynesian double-hulled canoes. He brought aboard a Tahitian learned in astronomy and navigation who could plot a map of every major island within a 2,500-mile range from memory. The vessel we’re in now is not unlike the ones Cook admired. And neither is our captain so different from Cook’s ocean expert.
Kalepa tells me he was 17 when a Hawaiian sailor and an anthropologist began constructing Hokule’a to take the shape and weight of a traditional Polynesian boat, or va’a. The crew would test, once and for all, whether intentional two-way voyaging could have been possible. Their idea was to sail the 62-foot-long vessel from Hawaii to Tahiti and back without maps, sextants or compasses. But the Hawaiians had one problem: None of them knew how to navigate.
Then, Kalepa says, they found out about a Micronesian named Mau Pialug, one of six living navigators in the 1970s who knew the old Polynesian methods. As an infant Mau was placed into tide pools so he could learn to sense the ocean’s subtle rhythms. At age 7, his grandfather dragged him behind the canoe to overcome seasickness. He earned star trails across the Micronesian sky from maps carved into the sand. Mau agreed to teach a new generation of Hawaiian navigators, including Kalepa and Nainoa Thompson, his methods. In May of 1976 the group completed the 30-day voyage into Pape’ete. It was a watershed moment for Hawaiians. The old way was legitimized. Fused with modern astronomy, it became the new wayfinding.
Maka nods ahead toward the slopes of Haleakala. “We’re looking at the same shoreline and mountain that our ancestors saw for the first time on their canoe,” he says. “Imagine. You actually can feel that connection.”
The early morning sun reveals a Maui with no trace of ocean-view rooms or Technicolor swimming pools. Even when Wailea’s string of beach resorts comes into view, the creaking of Hokule’a evokes the sense of an earlier journey.
“The canoe is a metaphor for a way that allows us to walk through space and time,” says Maka, sailing off on another riff. “We build a simple canoe, as if it were a time machine. Have you seen The Matrix? Are you willing to go down the rabbit hole and click your heels twice?”
Fresh faces replace the bleary eyes of the night shift. Among the replacements is Tava Taupu, a 65-year-old master tiki carver and former lightweight boxing champion originally from the Marquesas Islands. He emerges from the sleeping quarters in a pink loincloth that exposes an impressive array of traditional tattoos along his arms and legs. A bleached-blond Hawaiian who goes by the name Snake assumes the captainship at the boat’s helm. Kalepa’s daughter, Kala, lays out a breakfast of sugary crumb muffins and sautéed jerky sandwiches, prepared over a propane gas stove inside a metal box. Before eating I do something I’ve been putting off since before dawn. I clip on a safety harness to visit the open-water bathroom. (Maka: “Drop the kids off at the pool without hitting the diving board.”)
Thankfully, the waters have calmed since we left the channel. Kalepa orders one of the crimson sails tied down. We drift slowly through the strait between Maui and Kaho’olawe, where Maka lives part time. Hawaii’s smallest island is dry and denuded, a consequence of its tortured history as a battleground for warring chiefs and as a penal colony, a pasture for cattle and goats, and during the 50 years after the Pearl Harbor attack, a target for everything the U.S. Navy had in its arsenal: aerial bombs, torpedoes and 500-ton dynamite charges. (The crater one left behind is now habitat for two endemic species of shrimp.) But many believe Kaho’olawe was also where early Hawaiian navigators were trained, for good reason. For voyagers it marked a reliable directional bearing south. The channel between the island and neighbor- ing Lana’i bears the name Kealaikahiki: “path to Tahiti.”
“We’ve sailed the route so many times it’s like an old trail for us now,” Kalepa says casually, adding that danger arises when you begin to doubt. I nod affirmatively. “You have to always assume that you know where you are, because there’s nothing on the ocean to get you back on track.”
Position is determined through dead reckoning, a running mental log of speed and direction. But we have no speedom- eter or digital compass. Kalepa shows me how they calculate speed: As we move along steadily, he counts out loud the time it takes bubbles to travel the length of the canoe.
“In good wind, we can sail up to 200 miles a day,” he says. ∏he sun is a critical compass point at dusk and dawn, but at night Kalepa relies on celestial navigation. He says the Hawaiian star compass divides the sky into 32 houses. At any given location on the planet, a certain star will always rise at the same location on the eastern horizon; it will also set at the same location on the western horizon.During this exchange Kalepa mentions that he carries in memory the rising and setting positions of over 200 stars. He extends his arm to show how, by using his hand as a sextant, he can determine latitude. Around Hawai’i, the North Star is situated 20 degrees above the horizon — the same as the latitude of the island. Under the clear sky Kalepa makes each calculation quickly, easily. But, I wonder, what if there’s fog? Or cloud cover? Kalepa demonstrates by closing his eyes slightly to better feel Hokule’a’s movements.
“You have to slow your body down to the rhythm of the ocean to detect subtle changes,” he says. Hawaiians call this instinct na’au. I can see that Kalepa has it. From the stories I’ve read, Mau, the mentor, did whatever it took to achieve it. But he also possessed an exceptional eye for reading cloud patterns to forecast weather and wind direction. He taught Kalepa that an approaching squall bearing brown or low clouds usually brings strong winds; black or high clouds foretell weak winds. An isolated stack of rain clouds on the horizon can indicate land. Foraging terns, seaweed or coconut shards are also telltale signs of nearing landfall.
“He never imagined his canoe moving across the sea,” Kalepa says about Mau. “He saw it holding a stationary posi- tion, the islands coming to meet him.”
The sun is setting over Lana’i as we sail leisurely up the west coast of Maui. There’s a calm vibe on deck as it becomes a floating patio, the crew reclining and chatting easily.
“The ocean brings uncluttered distractions,” Maka says to me. “Our sense of perception is heightened. Get on a canoe and look at what is still here — and try to remember.”
We reach Lahaina after dark. We’d been on the water for 20 straight hours, dancing to the ocean’s undulating rhythm. On dry land now, the discordant vibration of vehicle traffic while driving the island’s coast road feels as if the needle has been rudely lifted off a soothing record, our dance with the sea interrupted without warning.
The next day we sail across the channel from Maui to Moloka’i, and then on to Oahu. I watch Maka schooling a young first-time crewman from Molokai on how to coil a rope along the deck. A father-and-daughter team from Kauai are sharing duty on the steering oar.
“Wayfinding is more than navigation,” Kalepa tells me. The canoe embodies a set of values, including ‘ohana, family, and aloha, respect for others. It teaches discipline and sets direction. Or, as Kalepa puts it: “It’s a model for living life.”
As we sail past Lana’i lookout, a promontory on the eastern tip of Oahu, someone tells me a story about an exchange that Mau once had with Nainoa Thompson, during Nainoa’s training. As the two men stood on the rocky headland, Mau asked Nainoa: “Can you point to the direction of Tahiti?” Nainoa pointed south. Mau then asked: “Can you see the island?”
When I meet Nainoa later in Honolulu he recalls how that question had puzzled him. He contemplated it for a while, finally responding: “I cannot see the island, but I can see an image of the island in my mind.”
“Good,” Mau replied. “Don’t lose that image or you will be lost.” Mau might well have been making a statement about navigating existence in the world through dead reckoning. A people can only know who they are, or where they are heading, after discovering where they came from.
Lost (and Found) World
HEMISPHERES | Peru's Ocucaje Desert is known as the most abundant repository of marine fossils on the planet. It's also a preferred destination for legions of sticky-fingered scavengers. Meet the man who has vowed to fight the fossil thieves.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HEMISPHERES, APRIL 2013
IT’S DUSK BY THE TIME WE REACH Marker 340 on the Pan-American Highway, where it connects with an unpaved road penetrating the Ocucaje Desert. My guide, Roberto Penny Cabrera, turns off the highway here. After several miles he stops the jeep, backs up 50 feet, drives off in another direction, stops again, then wheels the vehicle in disorderly circles over the sand. Satisfied that he’s thrown off anyone who might be trying to follow his tracks, Penny cuts the headlights and we continue on, in search of bones.
Paleontologists use a German word to describe lands like this barren stretch of Peru’s southern coast:lagerstätte, or “resting place.” A palimpsest of extinct and exotic marine animals—red-feathered mega-penguins, marine sloths, whales with legs—lies interred in a former seabed that rose when the Andes were squeezed out of the earth’s crust 140 million years ago. Encompassing more than 7,000 square miles, Peru’s southern desert contains what may be the richest trove of ocean fossils in the world, which has made it a target for rapacious collectors, unscrupulous scientists and legions of black marketeers.
Penny, who’s been exploring this desert for three decades, has an unusually detailed understanding of what’s out here (and, importantly, where it is), a knowledge that he believes brings great responsibility. “Whatever I have in my mind,” he says, “I will take to my grave.” Actually, this isn’t 100 percent true: As a professional guide, Penny makes a living taking people on fossil tours. But he insists he is selective about what he reveals, and to whom.
For this trip, Penny is taking me, along with his 16-year-old son and protégé, Nicky, to some of his more accessible discoveries. “Fossils? Oh, you’ll see thousands of fossils,” Penny says in accented English, steering us up a darkened ridge in the jeep he calls Deborah. Then he switches on the headlights, illuminating the countless chalky skeletal fragments that litter the desert floor around us. “Bones, bones, bones.”
We eventually reach a small plateau, and Penny swings the vehicle around with a flourish so that the headlights fall on a ghostly skull, over 6 feet long, half-buried and trailed by a string of vertebrae. “I’m not a scientist,” he says, killing the engine. “I’m not going to give it a name. I don’t care—it’s a whale, that’s all. But isn’t it beautiful to see, here, in the ground?”
The whale skull is an awesome sight. But in the silence and the glare of halogen lights, the spectacle also takes on a creepy feel, like that of an ancient crime scene. Penny lights a cigarette. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s set up camp.”
FOSSILS, PENNY TELLS ME, have a habit of going missing here. Part of the problem is that Peruvian conservation laws tend to be a little vague. It’s lawful to gather fossils for personal collections but not to remove them from the country, which means, in effect, that half the smuggling process can be carried out in broad daylight. After that, all you need to do is sneak them across the border. Nobody knows the rate at which the Ocucaje’s treasures are being ghosted out of Peru, but in 2010, agents at Lima’s Jorge Chávez International Airport seized almost 2,000 cultural items protected by law, most of them fossils.
In light of what Penny sees as officials’ indifference—to them, he says, “fossils are a business”—he has established himself as one of the most vocal critics of the government’s track record on protecting fossils. But he’s willing to go even further, sometimes taking matters into his own hands (he claims, for instance, to have collared a French paleontologist who’d been excavating without permission).
You get the sense that this cat-and-mouse game with fossil scavengers is something Penny rather enjoys—along with his image as a desert fox. When my bus arrived in the city of Ica the day before we set out, he approached wearing a safari shirt and fatigues, a long blade tucked into his belt and a cellphone strapped to his wrist. At 57, Penny is tan and sturdy, with blue eyes and a Burt Reynolds mustache. He shook my hand firmly and, seeing my surprise at his presence (I was supposed to call him from the station once I arrived), he explained that he’d had a hunch about what time my bus would get in, and even managed to guess the right gate. He took this as a good omen. “Look at these chicken bumps,” he said, holding up an arm.
Penny descends from Capitán Doctor Gerónimo Luis de Cabrera y Toledo, a Spanish conquistador who founded Ica in 1563. He lives alone, occupying a single room in a semi-decrepit yellow mansion built on Ica’s main square by his grandfather a century ago. His cluttered quarters resemble an archaeologist’s lair: satellite maps on the wall, dusty glass cases containing skulls and teeth, a desktop strewn with rocks. There’s also a teakettle, a mini fridge and a bedpan. On the balcony outside, he keeps a rope tied to the railing so he can make a quick escape in the event of an earthquake.
Penny doesn’t put much stock in domestic comfort—he is most at home outdoors, living simply and quietly. Our first night we dine on ramen, which Nicky prepares, and beans straight from the can. (Even in the city, Penny rarely goes anywhere without beans in his vest pocket and a spoon around his neck.) I drink water to stay hydrated; Penny has a Coke. Reclining in a lawn chair, he lights another cigarette, and—appropriately in these surroundings—starts to ponder life.
Penny explains that he used to own a mining company, earning a good living extracting minerals used in fertilizer. But in the late 1990s, a bridge he relied on to move his product washed out in a flood, wrecking his business and, ultimately, his marriage. He turned to booze. The desert had always held an appeal for him—his mother brought him here as a kid—but during this difficult period he found peace here, and eventually sobered up. The Ocucaje, he says, saved his life.
BY 9 O’CLOCK THE NEXT MORNING, the sun is already raging, giving the landscape the flat brightness of another planet. “You see the ground?” Penny says as we scour an area he knows to be rich in shark teeth. “You’re looking for a reflection. You need to see where wind has brushed. Then you look for plankton, and bones. When you find a bone, look closely. Maybe, just maybe, you find a tooth.”
As I strain my eyes in search of a glint, I try to imagine the scene that might have played out here tens of millions of years ago. Maybe a seal was frolicking in the surf one Miocene afternoon, oblivious to an approaching shark, and then—snap! In the ensuing feast, the shark loses a tooth, which drifts down and buries itself in the sediment. I spot something pointy partially covered by rock bits and broken shells, browned but perfectly intact, maybe 2 inches long. I hold it up. “Found one!”
“Good,” Penny says. “Find a few more of those little teeth, there’s a good chance you’ll find a megalodon.” He’s referring to Carcharodon megalodon, a prehistoric shark that measured 50 feet or more from snout to tail, with teeth up to 8 inches in length (though Penny claims to have uncovered a foot-long tooth once). “If I want to find a megalodon tooth, it takes me one day, two days. But I don’t give up.”
Moving deeper into the desert, Penny guides Deborah over steep dunes and into dun-colored valleys where the process of erosion has made neighbors of creatures that lived eons apart. At a burial ground dating back thousands of years, ossified human remains are strewn around the openings of looted graves. Scavengers have taken the valuable textiles, Penny says, and left the bones. “Who’s the guard here taking care of this!” he shouts, incensed, as a braid of human hair flutters in the breeze.
PENNY HAS A BIT OF A TENDENCY to romanticize the pre-Columbian natives of this desert. “They were wise people, and kind to each other,” he says that night by the campfire. His own family, he tells me, was torn apart by greed and materialism— and those traits are also driving today’s lucrative black market in fossils.
Given the clamor for these relics and the absence of hard-and-fast rules in Peru, it can be tricky to distinguish the good guys from the bad. Penny sees himself as the desert’s most ardent defender, but he isn’t above slipping a tooth into his pocket from time to time. His personal policy is to never dig for fossils, but once they are unearthed naturally, he figures, they’ll return to dust anyway—so it’s either him or the elements. He also makes clear that he never sells the stuff he finds.
One thing’s for sure, though: Penny’s stance on fossil scavenging has made him some enemies. On the final day of my visit, we drive by a whale skeleton that Penny often visits. A nearby rock face has been etched with writing that slanders Penny by name, calling him “thief” and much worse.
Penny appears rattled by these insults; he is particularly upset that Nicky had to see them. We spend the next few hours looking for shark teeth, but something feels off. Penny’s been to this area countless times, and he always comes across something. Today, after combing layer after layer of sedimentary rock, we find nothing. “Gypsum—it doesn’t belong here,” Penny says, pointing to a white powder on the ground. “[Poachers] put it around the fossils to help pull them up.”
The midday heat is unbearable, so I seek shade in Deborah’s passenger seat. But Penny insists on continuing the hunt: He’s noticed whirlwinds sucking up sand on a nearby slope, and wants to investigate. Once there he cries out, holding up a palm-size rock the color of oxidized copper. He pulls out a compass and holds it over the rock. The needle goes haywire. “A meteorite!” he exclaims, doing a celebratory shuffle.
A few minutes later, walking back to the jeep, Nicky points. “Look, Papa!” Lying in plain sight on the coarse gray sand is a 3-inch megalodon tooth. Then Penny spots something else. Not 10 feet from the tooth is a motorcycle track—the mark of the scavenger. Somebody was here before us, and missed the tooth.
“It’s perfect!” Penny cries. “It’s like Mother Earth said at the last moment, OK, guys, this one’s for you. You think it’s a coincidence? Guy should have found it—look at the motorcycle!” His eyes become intense. “This is what blows my mind about this desert world,” he says, throwing his hands to the sky. “Now, my son, compadre, you cannot take the smile off me all of the night!”
Credit: Andy Isaacson
Credit: Andy Isaacson
Penny and his son, Nicky, after spotting the Megaladon. Credit: Andy Isaacson