The Best Travel Writing 2011: True Stories from Around the World
Language: English
Pages: 338
ISBN: B005Z1USD8
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
officer’s cap and gloves stood in front of a bulky red funeral arrangement. He held a framed black and white photograph, and I recognized the image as that of the poet Andrei Voznesensky, who had died earlier in the week at age seventy-seven. I had stumbled upon his burial procession. Though I was drenched from the downpour, I decided to join it. He was one of the great poets of the Soviet era, introduced to me by my college professors, who had the wisdom to convey that a literary tradition
immigrated “backtrack” to the States, illegally; you had heard he was in jail. Cordell had tried to kill himself and then disappeared; you assumed he was dead. Hilrod always had a new business idea; you lost money believing in him. It was only through your siblings that I could imagine your childhood. They showed its liabilities, while you showed almost nothing. You showed only what you wanted to show. I met Aloma once in your living room. She was as soft and plump as you were sinewy and strong.
Ajit. How misplaced my pity had been for him that night, thinking that because he could not read, his education had been lesser than my own. That was his Camel College, the lesson of the desert that he had smiled about so enigmatically that night: that the desert brings to you exactly what you need to learn. Seeing his face grinning at me in my memory, a little smile passed my lips. He had been the perfect tutor, instructing without effort, the embodiment of his life’s lesson. Smiling, I walked
this one night. And we sing songs like The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and Bob Dylan’s “Wagon Wheel,” tunes that would have been as timely and at home in the nineteenth century as they are in the twenty-first. Our voices are leavened by Lynsey’s plaintive flute and Kevin’s acoustic guitar, toted on the river in watertight cases. Kevin, who just completed college, is considering a career in outdoor education, like his older brother Steve, a trip leader for Outward Bound and one
of wild rosemary, lavender and thyme that clung to the cliff side. When we reached the sea’s edge, salt bream filled our nostrils. It was enlivening to be awake and outside during the daylight after so many all-night dance extravaganzas in Ibiza’s uber-clubs and mega mansions. As we leaned against the smooth, sun-bleached limestone boulders in this quarry on the sea’s lapping edge, Sana handed each of us a ritualistic tab of ecstasy. Sana was our group leader and instigator of all things