The Best American Travel Writing 2020

Jason Wilson

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780358362043
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

The year's best travel writing, as chosen by series editor Jason Wilson and guest editor Robert Macfarlane. Writing, reading, and dreaming about travel have surged, writes Robert MacFarlane in his introduction to the Best American Travel Writing 2020. From an existential reckoning in avalanche school, to an act of kindness at the Mexican-American border, to a moral dilemma at a Kenyan orphanage, the journeys showcased in this collection are as spiritual as they are physical. These stories provide not just remarkable entertainment, but also, as MacFarlane says, deep comfort, "carrying hope, creating connections, transporting readers to other-worlds, and imagining alternative presents and alternative futures."
The Best American Travel 2020 includes
HEIDI JULAVITS • YIYUN LI • PAUL SALOPEK • LACY JOHNSON •
EMMANUEL IDUMA • JON MOOALLEM • EMILY RABOTEAU and others

EMILY RABOTEAU

Climate Signs

FROM The New York Review of Books

For Mik

Our son’s love of trains was once so absolute I never foresaw it could be replaced. New York City is a marvelous place to live for train-obsessed boys. When he was three and four, we spent many a rainy day with no particular destination, riding the rails for the aimless pleasure of it, studying the branching multicolored lines of the subway map, which he’d memorized like a second alphabet. I’d hoist him up to watch the dimly lit tunnel unfurl through the grimy front window of the A train’s first car as it plunged us jerkily along the seemingly endless and intersecting tracks. Some rainy mornings, our destination was 81st Street, where we exited the B or C with dripping umbrellas and his little sister in tow to enter the American Museum of Natural History.

There, at a special exhibition called Nature’s Fury, our son’s attention turned like a whiplash from trains to violent weather. Even before this show, the museum demanded a certain reckoning with the violence of the Anthropocene. What grown-up wouldn’t feel a sense of profound regret confronting the diorama of the northern white rhinoceros in the Hall of African Mammals, or the Hall of Ocean Life’s psychedelic display of the Andros Coral Reef as it looked in the Bahamas a century ago? Meandering the marble halls of the Natural History Museum is like reading an essay on losing the earth through human folly. Yet none of its taxonomies of threatened biodiversity, not even the big blue whale, moved my kindergartner like Nature’s Fury.

The focus of the immersive exhibition was on the science of the worst natural disasters of the last 50 years—their awesome destructive power and their increasing frequency and force. Accompanied by a dramatic score of diminished chords and fast chromatic descents, the exhibit meant to show how people adapt and cope in the aftermath of these events, and how scientists are helping to plan responses and reduce hazards in preparation for disasters to come.

“Are they too young for this?” my husband questioned, too late. Our impulsive boy had darted ahead and cut the line to erupt a virtual volcano. I supposed it made him feel less doomed than like a small god that, in addition to making lava spout at the push of a button, the kid could manipulate the fault lines of a model earthquake, set off a tsunami, and stand in the eye of a raging tornado.

In the section on hurricanes at a table map of New York, the boy was also able to survey the sucker punch that Hurricane Sandy delivered to the five boroughs. This interactive cartography was a darker version of the subway map he’d memorized, detailing the floodplains along our city’s 520 miles of coast. I can still see my boy there, his chin just clearing the table’s touchscreen so that his face was eerily underlit by the glow of information while my girl crawled beneath. Seventeen percent of the city’s landmass flooded, leaving 2 million people without power, 17,000 homes damaged, and 43 people dead. On the map, the water was rising to overtake the shorelines at Red Hook, Battery Park, Coney Island . . . All across the Big Apple, the lights were going out.

“Come away from there,” one or the other of us called uneasily, because we weren’t prepared to confront what climate change would mean for our children, to say nothing of our children’s children. The boy was five at the time. The girl was three. In their lifetimes, according to a conservative estimate in a recent report by the New York City Panel on Climate Change, they could see the water surrounding Manhattan rise six feet. We pulled them away from that terrifying map of our habitat to go look at dinosaur bones—an easier mass extinction to consider because it lay in the distant past.

What strikes me now as irrational about our response isn’t our ordinary parental instinct to protect our kids from scary stuff. It was our denial. Their father and I treated that display as a vision we could put off until later when it clearly conveyed what had already transpired. “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now,” preached Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 in one of his lesser-known sermons, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” He may as well have been speaking on climate change. Sandy made landfall in 2012, the year after the boy was born, while I was pregnant with the girl. It gave a preview of what the city faces in the next century and beyond, as sea levels continue to rise with melting ice sheets. The storm exposed our weaknesses, and not just to flooding. I remember that when the bodegas in our hood ran out of food, some folks shared with their neighbors. But when the gas station started running out of fuel, some folks pulled out their guns.

As much as we may worry about our kids’ future, it’s already here.

Avoiding the map didn’t annul its impact on our son. The subject of storms had gripped his consciousness as surely as his author-father’s had been gripped by horror films. That part of the boy’s brain that previously needed to know the relative speed of a Big Boy steam engine to a Shinkansen bullet train now needed to know what wind speed differentiated a category 4 hurricane from a category 5. Soon enough, and for months afterward, Mr. Wayne, the friendly librarian at the Fort Washington branch of the New York Public Library, would greet our boy with an apology. There were no more books in the children’s section on the subject of violent weather than those he’d already consumed.

At bedtime, while his sister sucked her thumb to sleep, I offered my son reassurance that we weren’t in a flood zone; that up in Washington Heights—as the name suggests—we live on higher ground. “You’re safe,” I told him.

“But the A was flooded during Sandy,” he reminded me, matter-of-factly. “The trains stopped running and the mayor canceled Halloween.” Then he’d go on rapturously about the disastrous confluence of the high tide and the full moon that created the surge, while I tried to sing him a lullaby.

Eventually, a different fixation overtook extreme weather, and another after that. Such is the pattern of categorical learners. It may have been sharks before the Titanic, or the other way around—I’ve forgotten. Two years have passed since we saw Nature’s Fury; a year and a half since our president led the United States to withdraw from the Paris climate accords. The boy is 7 now, what Jesuits call “the age of reason.” The girl is 5 and learning to read. If current trends continue, the world is projected to be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels by the time they reach their late 20s. The scientific community has long held 2 degrees Celsius to be an irreversible tipping-point. Two degrees of global warming, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), marks climate catastrophe.

At 2 degrees, which is our best-case climate scenario if we make seismic global efforts to end carbon emissions, which we are not on course to do, melting ice sheets will still pass a point of no return, flooding New York City and dozens of other major world cities; annual heat waves and wildfires will scrub the planet; drought, flood, and fluctuations in temperature will shrink our food supply; water scarcity will hurt 400 million more people than it already does. Statistical analysis indicates only a 5 percent chance of limiting warming to less than 2 degrees. Two degrees has been described as “genocide.”

In fact, we’re on track for over 4 degrees of warming and an unfathomable scale of suffering by century’s end. By that time, if they’re lucky, our children will be old. It’s pointless to question whether or not it was ethical to have them in the first place since, in any case, they are here. Their father writes about imaginary horrors. For my part, I’m only beginning to see that the question of how to prepare our kids for the real horrors to come is collateral to the problem of how to deal as adults with the damage we’ve stewarded them into.

What helped me to see this was a road sign. I came across it this fall in Harlem’s St. Nicholas Park two weeks before the release of the UN’s Climate Report that concluded we must reduce greenhouse gases to limit global warming to the 1.5-degree threshold. The sign was part of another exhibit, but I didn’t know that when it stopped me in my tracks on my way to work. It was one of those LED billboards you normally spot on a highway, alerting drivers to icy conditions, lane closures, or other safety threats ahead. Oddly enough, the sign was parked in the grass two-thirds up the vertiginously steep slope to City College. How did that get there? I wondered. More surprising than the traffic sign’s misplacement was its message:

CLIMATE DENIAL KILLS

St. Nicholas Park recently ranked among New York City’s top five most violent parks, as measured by high rates of crime. I was assaulted there once by a girl in a gang who coldcocked me in the face. This sign hit me almost as hard. I felt like someone had punched through from another dimension to shock me awake. Was I seeing the sign correctly? Yes. It repeated its declaration in Spanish:

LA NEGACIóN CLIMáTICA MATA

Every couple seconds the sign refreshed, unspooling a disquieting, if strangely droll, string of warnings:

NO ICEBERGS AHEAD

50,000,000 CLIMATE REFUGEES

CAUTION

CLIMATE CHANGE AT WORK

ABOLISH COAL-ONIALISM

and so on.

The familiar equipment of the highway sign gave authority to the text. Because it was parked in the wrong place, the sign appeared hijacked—as in a prank. I understood myself to be the willing target of a public artwork but not who was behind it. The voice was creepily disembodied. I admired its combination of didacticism and whimsy. But even with its puns, the sign was more chilling than funny. The butt of the prank was our complacence, our lousy failure to think one generation ahead, let alone seven, as is the edict of the Iroquois’ Great Law.

For several minutes, I paid humble attention to the sign, unsure how to react. The only practical guidance it offered was VOTE ECO-LOGICALLY—something achievable given the upcoming midterm elections. But what else was the sign telling us to do? My individual practice of composting and giving up plastic bags felt lame when the headlines were warning of genocide and civilization’s end. I began to feel exposed, standing there, and briefly considered that I might be on Candid Camera.

I looked around the park for help, half-hoping the artist might pop out from behind a tree to explain him- or herself. I wanted to process the work’s messaging with somebody else. It signaled the tip of a melting iceberg whose magnitude surpassed my cognition. How to move past the paralyzing fear that whatever we do is too little, too late? The trouble here was one of scale. Sadly enough, no one else in the park that morning seemed engaged by the sign at all. And so I snapped a picture of it with my iPhone and shared it on Twitter.

Almost immediately, a stranger with the handle @AwakeMik replied with a photo of an identical sign he’d just discovered in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, while walking his dog, Chester, named after Himes. VOTA ECO-LOGICALMENTE, it said. His wide-angle photo was better than my close-up shot because he’d framed the sign at dusk in the broader context of the cityscape.

I felt a sudden kinship with this man, Mik Awake, who’d noticed the same thing I had, from a broader perspective. The two signs were clearly of a piece. Intrigued, I did some internet sleuthing and discovered that they were part of a larger series by environmental artist Justin Guariglia, in partnership with the three-year-old Climate Museum and the Mayor’s Office. All in all, there were 10 climate signs staged in public parks across the city’s five boroughs—many of these in low-lying neighborhoods near the water, most vulnerable to flooding.

The Climate Museum’s website described Guariglia’s project as an effort to confront New Yorkers with how global warming affects our city now; to “break the climate silence and encourage thought, dialogue and action to address the greatest challenge of our time.” To that end, the signs’ messages were programmed with translations in languages spoken in the various neighborhoods in which they appeared: Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese. Thus embedded in the diverse cultural landscape of New York City, the billboards projected a forecast of what we stand to lose with the rising sea. The Climate Museum’s website also offered a city map indicating the locations of the 10 signs, with clear directions via public transportation to each. Finally, it introduced an adventure: anyone who could prove they’d visited all 10 signs would receive a prize.

I studied the map with a mix of obligation and gratitude. It reminded me of my earlier failure to process reality at the American Museum of Natural History. Here was an opportunity, perhaps, to do better—if not with my kids yet, then at least with another concerned citizen. I decided to take the artist’s invitation to heart. On a lark, I asked Mik Awake if he’d be willing to navigate Guariglia’s climate signs with me. Amazingly, given the time commitment, the soberness of the topic, the complicated semiotics, and the distance the pilgrimage would carry us, he said yes.

We had until midterm Election Day when the signs were scheduled to come down. By visiting one or two a week, between September and November of this unseasonably warm fall, we managed to witness them all. I’ve come to think of this period of my life—part scavenger hunt, part stations of the cross—as “Thursdays with Mik.” By now we are no longer strangers, but friends. What follows is an account of our journey to grasp the effects of global warming on the place where we live.

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The first sign Mik and I saw together sat at the end of Pier 84 in Hudson River Park, halfway between his neighborhood and mine in what was commonly known as Hell’s Kitchen. Thanks to real estate development, it’s now often referred to by the tonier names of Clinton and Midtown West. To get there, I took the downtown A to 42nd Street and pushed west through the crush of tourists gazing up at the digital billboards of Times Square, wondering if those poor suckers knew they were looking at the wrong signs.

Only someone not from New York City would describe Times Square as the heart of the metropolis. Most of us who are native to the city steer clear of it, especially on New Year’s Eve. But today, it couldn’t be avoided. Passing through the clogged commercial district on my mission, I recalled an unnerving image from the short film, two°C by French filmmaking duo Menilmonde. New York City is depicted in this movie as an Atlantis in the making, subsumed by the rising waters, with the Hudson and East Rivers converging to swallow a Times Square devoid of anyone to watch the blinking ads.

Is it possible to be haunted by the future as well as the past? The precise and intimate term for this feeling is “solastalgia,” the desolation caused by an assault on the beloved place one resides; a feeling of dislocation one gets at home. I suppose one might feel this in the case of war, domestic abuse, or dementia, but the difference with environmental upheaval is the ingredient of guilt. I walked past the bright theater marquees and the slovenly Port Authority bus station, the brownstone on 43rd Street where my friend C. had thrown me a baby shower in her rent-controlled garden apartment, past the high-rise on 10th Avenue where I’d screwed my high school boyfriend on his parents’ ratty foldout couch—past my former selves, and the ghosts of 20th-century peepshows and 19th-century slaughterhouses, to join my partner at the waterfront.

Here is Mikael Awake, a few weeks shy of his 37th birthday. He’s the kind of guy who’s at ease quoting Paul Éluard (“La terre est bleue comme une orange . . .”) and whose friends ask him to officiate their weddings—a contemplative, caring, stylish man; the hardworking son of Ethiopian immigrants. Mik’s last name is pronounced “ɑ-wə-kə,” but its meaning in English fits his character. That is, the brother is politically “woke,” stumping hard this election cycle for Stacey Abrams to become the nation’s first black female governor down in Georgia, his home state. Mik grew up as one of few kids of color in the schools of Marietta. When I asked him what that was nearby, he joked, “Racism,” before conceding, “Atlanta.”

According to the logic of social media that has shrunk the planet, we’re separated by only one degree, sharing several acquaintances and interests in common. Both of us are writers, and teach writing at CUNY—a vocation, we agree, that brings us closer to the city by putting us in touch with its strivers. We may eventually have crossed paths another way. He’d been following me on Twitter. But it was the climate signs that brought us together.

My instinct is to focus my lens on Mik, but, unwittingly, he’s already taught me to take a step back. Still, the viewfinder can’t capture it all. What I mean to show is too big. I settle for framing the tension between the human, the landscape, and the sign. This method will become our pattern.

To the right of the frame floats the former aircraft carrier USS Intrepid; to the left lies the Circle Line cruise ship departure site. The Hudson rolls by behind Mik. Beneath the river, the busy Lincoln Tunnel connects to New Jersey on the other side. Flooding of the tunnels into and out of Manhattan (along with flooding of the subway and energy infrastructure) have been identified as serious vulnerabilities in the Climate Change and a Global City: Metropolitan East Coast Report, a pre-Sandy document that examined climate-change impacts in New York.

Cyclists zip along the two-lane greenway in front of Mik. The bike path is but one perk of Hudson River Park, which was refurbished from the crumbling docks of a once grubby industrial waterfront as part of the city’s renewal wherein, over the last generation, warehouse districts have steadily transformed into luxury housing. Sandy wreaked $19 billion in damage to the city, yet the rate of development along our coastlines has only increased since that superstorm. We have more residents living in high-risk flood zones than any other city in the country, including Miami. Local city-planning experts are rightly concerned about how we’ll cope when the next great storm surge inevitably strikes.

After Sandy, Mayor Bloomberg declared that New Yorkers wouldn’t abandon our waterfront. He, and de Blasio after him, have worked to revise codes to make new buildings more climate-resilient with flood-proofing measures such as placing mechanical equipment on higher floors, but each mayor has seen real estate interests in waterfront development as too precious a political constituency to suppress. In my picture, Mik faces 12th Avenue, across which, and slightly southeast, construction on the glassy towers of the huge Hudson Yards project is topping out, surrounded by a phalanx of cranes. Hudson Yards is one of many recent projects sited within the New York City climate change panel’s projected floodplain for 2050, when sea level rise could reach 2.5 feet—meaning that all the tall buildings Mik and I behold cropping up at th...