The Best American Travel Writing 2021

Padma Lakshmi, Jason Wilson

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780358361848
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

"The beauty of good writing is that it transports the reader inside another person's experience in some other physical place and culture, " writes Padma Lakshmi in her introduction, "and, at its best, evokes a palpable feeling of being in a specific moment in time and space." The essays in this year's Best American Travel Writing are an antidote to the isolation of the year 2020, giving us views into experiences unlike our own and taking us on journeys we could not take ourselves. From the lively music of West Africa, to the rich culinary traditions of Muslims in Northwest China, to the thrill of a hunt in Alaska, this collection is a treasure trove of diverse places and cultures, providing the comfort, excitement, and joy of feeling elsewhere.

THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2021 INCLUDES KIESE MAKEBA LAYMON • LESLIE JAMISON • BILL BUFORD • JON LEE ANDERSON • MEGHAN DAUM LIGAYA MISHAN • PAUL THEROUX and others

BEN TAUB

Five Oceans, Five Deeps

FROM The New Yorker

Sea level—perpetual flux. There is a micromillimeter on the surface of the ocean that moves between sea and sky and is simultaneously both and neither. Every known life-form exists in relation to this layer. Above it, the world of land, air, sunlight, and lungs. Below it, the world of water, depth, and pressure. The deeper you go, the darker, the more hostile, the less familiar, the less measured, the less known.

A splash in the South Pacific, last June, marked a historic breach of that world. A crane lowered a small white submersible off the back of a ship and plonked it in the water. For a moment, it bobbed quietly on the surface, its buoyancy calibrated to the weight of the pilot, its only occupant. Then he flipped a switch, and the submarine emitted a frantic, high-pitched whirr. Electric pumps sucked seawater into an empty chamber, weighing the vessel down. The surface frothed as the water poured in—then silence, as the top of the submersible dipped below the waterline, and the ocean absorbed it.

Most submarines go down several hundred meters, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone. It was the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom. This was the pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet in diameter, which was sealed off from the rest of the submersible and housed the pilot and all his controls. Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom.

Sunlight cuts through the first thousand feet of water. This is the epipelagic zone, the layer of plankton, kelp, and reefs. It contains the entire ecosystem of marine plants, as well as the mammals and the fish that eat them. An Egyptian diver once descended to the limits of this layer. The feat required a lifetime of training, four years of planning, a team of support divers, an array of specialized air tanks, and a tedious, 13-hour ascent, with constant decompression stops, so that his blood would not be poisoned and his lungs would not explode.

The submersible dropped at a rate of about two and a half feet per second. Twenty minutes into the dive, the pilot reached the midnight zone, where dark waters turn black. The only light is the dim glow of bioluminescence—from electric jellies, camouflaged shrimp, and toothy predators with natural lanterns to attract unwitting prey. Some fish in these depths have no eyes—what use are they? There is little to eat. Conditions in the midnight zone favor fish with slow metabolic rates, weak muscles, and slimy, gelatinous bodies.

An hour into the descent, the pilot reached 10,000 feet—the beginning of the abyssal zone. The temperature is always a few degrees above freezing, and is unaffected by the weather at the surface. Animals feed on “marine snow”: scraps of dead fish and plants from the upper layers, falling gently through the water column. The abyssal zone, which extends to 20,000 feet, encompasses 97 percent of the ocean floor.

After two hours in free fall, the pilot entered the hadal zone, named for the Greek god of the underworld. It is made up of trenches—geological scars at the edges of the earth’s tectonic plates—and although it composes only a tiny fraction of the ocean floor, it accounts for nearly 50 percent of the depth.

Past 27,000 feet, the pilot had gone beyond the theoretical limit for any kind of fish. (Their cells collapse at greater depths.) After 35,000 feet, he began releasing a series of weights, to slow his descent. Nearly seven miles of water was pressing on the titanium sphere. If there were any imperfections, it could instantly implode.

The submarine touched the silty bottom, and the pilot, a 53-year-old Texan named Victor Vescovo, became the first living creature with blood and bones to reach the deepest point in the Tonga Trench. He was piloting the only submersible that can bring a human to that depth: his own.

For the next hour, he explored the featureless beige sediment, and tried to find and collect a rock sample. Then the lights flickered, and an alarm went off. Vescovo checked his systems—there was a catastrophic failure in battery one. Water had seeped into the electronics, bringing about a less welcome superlative: the deepest-ever artificial explosion was taking place a few feet from his head.

If there were oxygen at that depth, there could have been a raging fire. Instead, a battery junction box melted, burning a hole through its external shell without ever showing a flame. Any instinct to panic was suppressed by the impossibility of rescue. Vescovo would have to come up on his own.

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Seven miles overhead, a white ship bobbed in Polynesian waters. It had been built by the US Navy to hunt Soviet military submarines, and recently repurposed to transport and launch Vescovo’s private one. There were a couple of dozen crew members on board, all of whom were hired by Vescovo. He was midway through an attempt to become the first person to reach the deepest point in each ocean, an expedition he called the Five Deeps. He had made a fortune in private equity, but he could not buy success in this—a richer man had tried and failed. When the idea first crossed his mind, there was no vehicle to rent, not even from a government. No scientist or military had the capacity to go within two miles of the depths he sought to visit. Geologists weren’t even sure where he should dive.

Vescovo’s crew was an unlikely assemblage—“a proper band of thieves,” as the expedition’s chief scientist put it—with backgrounds in logistics, engineering, academia, and petty crime. Some on board had spent decades at sea; others were landlubbers. For more than a year, they faced challenges as timeless as bad weather and as novel as the equipment they had invented for the job. They discovered undersea mountain ranges, collected thousands of biological samples that revealed scores of new species, and burned through tens of thousands of gallons of fuel and alcohol.

In 1969, when Vescovo was three years old, he climbed into the front seat of his mother’s car, which was parked on a hill outside their house. He was small and blond, the precocious, blue-eyed grandson of Italian immigrants who had come to the United States in the late nineteenth century and made a life selling gelato in the South. Vescovo put the car in neutral. It rolled backward into a tree, and he spent the next six weeks in an intensive care unit. There were lasting effects: nerve damage to his right hand, an interest in piloting complex vehicles, and the “torturous compulsion,” he said, to experience everything he could before he died.

He grew up reading science fiction, and aspired to be an astronaut; he had the grades but not the eyesight. As an undergraduate, at Stanford, he learned to fly planes. Afterward, he went to MIT, for a master’s degree in defense and arms-control studies, where he modeled decision-making and risk—interests that later converged in overlapping careers as a reserve naval intelligence officer and a businessman. Vescovo was deployed as a targeting officer for the NATO bombing of Kosovo, and, as a counterterrorism officer, he was involved in a hostage rescue in the Philippines. He learned Arabic and became rich through finance and consulting jobs, and, later, through a private equity firm, Insight Equity, in the suburbs of Dallas, where he lives.

Vescovo started going on increasingly elaborate mountaineering expeditions, and by 2014 he had skied the last hundred kilometers to the North and South Poles and summited the highest peak on every continent. He had narrowly survived a rock slide near the top of Mount Aconcagua, in the Argentinean Andes, and had come to embrace a philosophy that centered on calculated risk. Control what you can; be aware of what you cannot. Death, at some point, is a given—“You have to accept it,” he said—and he reasoned that the gravest risk a person could take was to waste time on earth, to reach the end without having maximally lived. “This is the only way to fight against mortality,” he said. “My social life was pretty nonexistent, but it just wasn’t a priority. Life was too interesting.” He grew his hair down to his shoulders, and touched up the color, even as his beard turned white. On weekends, he used his private jet to shuttle rescue dogs to prospective owners all over the US. At sea, according to members of his expedition team, he spent hours in his cabin alone, playing Call of Duty and eating microwaved macaroni and cheese.

But every age of exploration runs its course. “When Shackleton sailed for the Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero. When he returned in 1917 he could not,” Fergus Fleming writes, in his introduction to South, Ernest Shackleton’s diary. “The concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches of the First World War.” While Shackleton was missing in Antarctica, a member of his expedition cabled for help. Winston Churchill responded, “When all the sick and wounded have been tended, when all their impoverished & broken hearted homes have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, & every charitable subscription is closed, then & not till then wd. I concern myself with these penguins.”

A century later, adventurers tend to accumulate ever more meaningless firsts: a Snapchat from the top of Mount Everest; in Antarctica, the fastest mile ever traveled on a pogo stick. But to open the oceans for exploration without limit—here was a meaningful record, Vescovo thought, perhaps the last on earth. In 1961, John F. Kennedy said that “knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it.” Yet, in the following decades, the hadal trench nearest to the US became a dumping ground for pharmaceutical waste.

In September 2014, Vescovo sent an inquiry to Triton Submarines, a small manufacturer in Vero Beach, Florida. He noted that he was a jet and helicopter pilot familiar with the “procedure-driven piloting of complex craft,” and outlined what became the Five Deeps Expedition.

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Patrick Lahey, the president of Triton, took up scuba diving when he was 13 years old, and discovered that he felt more at home underwater than he did on land. The muted silence, the slow, deep breaths—diving forced him into a kind of meditative state. “I love the feeling of weightlessness,” he told me. “I love moving around in three dimensions, instead of two.” Lahey attended commercial diving school, to learn underwater welding and construction for dams, bridges, and oil-and-gas installations. “Just about anything you might do out of the water you could do underwater,” he said. “You bolt things, you cut things, you weld things together, you move things, you recover things.” Water conducts electricity, and sometimes, he added, “you can feel it fizzing in your teeth.”

In 1983, when he was 21, he carried out his first submarine dive, to 1,400 feet, to inspect an oil rig off the coast of Northern California. He was profoundly affected by the experience—to go deep one hour and surface the next, with “none of the punitive decompression,” he said. By the time Vescovo contacted him, Lahey had piloted more than 60 submersibles on several thousand dives. An expedition leader who has worked with him for decades told me that he is, “without question, the best submarine pilot in the world.”

Lahey cofounded Triton in 2007. The business model was to build private submersibles for billionaires, including a Russian oligarch and a member of a Middle Eastern royal family. (In the years leading up to the first order, Lahey used to be laughed at when he attended boat shows; now there are companies that build support vessels for yachts, to carry helicopters, submarines, and other expensive toys.) But his deeper aspiration was to make other people comprehend, as Herman Melville wrote, in Moby-Dick, that in rivers and oceans we see “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” After a few dives, many of Lahey’s clients started allowing their vehicles to be used for science and filming.

Vescovo didn’t care if Lahey sent him to the bottom of the ocean in a windowless steel ball; he just wanted to get there. But Lahey declined to build anything that didn’t have a passenger seat, for a scientist; a manipulator arm, for collecting samples; and viewports, so that the occupants could appreciate the sensation of submergence. Such features would complicate the build, possibly to the point of failure. But Lahey has a tendency to promise the reality he wants before he’s sure how to deliver it. “It wasn’t really a business decision,” a Triton engineer told me. “He wanted to build this. Giving up was not an option.” Lahey saw Vescovo’s mission as a way to develop and test the world’s first unlimited hadal exploration system—one that could then be replicated and improved, for scientists.

Vescovo flew to the Bahamas, and Lahey took him for a test dive in Triton’s flagship submersible, which has three seats and is rated to a depth of 3,300 feet. The third seat was occupied by an eccentric British man in his 30s, named John Ramsay, who didn’t seem to enjoy the dive; he was preoccupied with what he didn’t like about the submersible—which he had designed.

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“I never really had a particular passion for submarines,” Ramsay, who is Triton’s chief submarine designer, told me. “I still don’t, really.” What he does love is that he gets to design every aspect of each machine, from the central frame to the elegant handle on the back of the hatch. Car manufacturers have entire teams design a seat or a fender, and then produce it at scale. But nearly every Triton submarine is unique; Ramsay determines how he wants things to be, and a dozen or so men in Florida start building.

Ramsay, who works out of a spare bedroom in the wilds of southwest England, has never read a book about submarines. “You would just end up totally tainted in the way you think,” he said. “I just work out what it’s got to do, and then come up with a solution to it.” The success or the failure of Vescovo’s mission would rest largely in his hands.

“If Victor dies, and it’s your fault, you’ve got to kill yourself,” he told his wife, Caroline.

“Would you, though?” she replied.

“Of course!”

A submariner thinks of space and materials in terms of pressure, buoyancy, and weight. Air rises, batteries sink; in order to achieve neutral buoyancy—the ability to remain suspended underwater, without rising or falling—each component must be offset against the others. The same is true of fish, which regulate their buoyancy through the inflation and deflation of swim bladders.

Ramsay’s submarines typically center on a thick acrylic sphere, essentially a bubble; release it underwater and it will pop right up to the surface. But acrylic was not strong enough for Vescovo’s submersible. At the bottom of the deepest trench, every square inch would have to hold back 16,000 pounds of water—an elephant standing on a stiletto heel.

Ramsay settled on titanium: malleable and resistant to corrosion, with a high ratio of strength to density. The pressure hull would weigh nearly 8,000 pounds. It would have to be counterbalanced by syntactic foam, a buoyant filler comprising millions of hollow glass spheres. For the submarine to stay upright, the foam would have to go above the hull, providing upward lift—like a hot-air balloon, for water. “As long as the heavy stuff hangs in balance below the buoyant stuff, the sub will always stay upright,” Ramsay explained.

The hull required the forging of two slabs of titanium into perfect hemispheres. Only one facility in the world had a chamber that was sufficiently large and powerful to subject the hull to pressures equivalent to those found at full ocean depth: the Krylov State Research Center, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Lahey attended the pressure test. There was no backup hull; an implosion would end the project. “But it worked—it validated what we were doing,” Lahey told me.

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It was the middle of summer, 2018, in South Florida, and Triton’s technicians were working 15 hours a day, in a space with no air-conditioning. Lahey paced the workshop, sweating, trying to encourage his team. The men who were building the world’s most advanced deep-diving submersible had not attended Stanford or MIT; they were former car mechanics, scuba instructors, and underwater welders, hired for their work ethic and their practical experience. The shop foreman used to be a truck driver. The hydraulics expert had a bullet in his abdomen, from his days running cocaine out of Fort Lauderdale, in the ’80s. One of the electricians honed his craft by stealing car radios, as a teenager. (“I was really good at it,” he told me.) Lahey, for his part, said that he was named—and later exonerated—by the federal government as an unindicted co-conspirator in a narcotics-trafficking operation involving a Soviet military submarine and a Colombian cartel.

Every major component of Vescovo’s submarine had to be developed from scratch. The oil-and-gas industry had established a supply chain of components that are pressure rated to around 6,000 meters—but that was only half the required depth. Before assembling the submarine, the Triton team spent months imploding parts in a pressure chamber, and sending feedback to the manufacturers. “You’re solving problems that have never existed before, with parts that have never existed before, from venders who don’t know how to make them,” Ramsay said.

The rest of the expedition team was on a ship docked in the harbor at Vero Beach, waiting. Vescovo remained at home in Dallas, training on a simulator that Triton had rigged up in his garage. On Lahey’s recommendation, he had hired Rob McCallum, an expedition leader and a cofounder of EYOS Expeditions, to inject realism into a project that might otherwise die a dream.

For every Vescovo who goes to the South Pole, there is a McCallum making sure he stays alive. (McCallum has been to Antarctica 128 times.) “I love it when clients come through the door and say, ‘I’ve been told this is impossible, but what do you think?’” he said to me. “Well, I think you’ve just given away your negotiating position. Let’s have a glass of wine and talk about it.”

McCallum—who is trim but barrel-chested, with a soft voice and a Kiwi accent—grew up in the tropics of Papua New Guinea, and became a polar guide. He is a trained medic, dive master, firefighter, aircraft pilot, and boat operator, a former New Zealand park ranger who has served as an adviser to the Norwegian navy. He speaks three Neo-Melanesian lan...