My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere
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Authors: Susan Orlean
Tags: #Fiction
Susan Orlean
MY KIND OF PLACE
Travel Stories from a Woman
Who’s Been Everywhere
RANDOM HOUSE 
NEW YORK
Contents
A Place Called Midland
[
MIDLAND, TX
]
Beautiful Girls
[
PRATTVILLE, AL
]
Madame President
[
NEW YORK CITY, NY
]
The Lady and the Tigers
[
JACKSON, NJ
]
The Homesick Restaurant
[
MIAMI, FL, AND HAVANA, CUBA
]
The Congo Sound
[
PARIS, FRANCE
]
Like Waters and Chocolate Pancakes
[
HEVIZ, HUNGARY
]
Shooting Party
[
BIGGAR, SCOTLAND
]
Do We Transcend Before or After We Purchase
the Commemorative Eel Cakes?
[
MOUNT FUJI, JAPAN
]
The Place to Disappear
[
BANGKOK, THAILAND
]
My Life: A Series of Performance Art Pieces
For John
Introduction
I travel heavy. This is probably something of a surprise, since you might well assume that someone who travels as much as I do would be the sort to throw a T-shirt and a toothbrush into a paper bag and go. Unfortunately, this is not the case. I deliberate endlessly before I travel; I pack and repack; I am shamed by how much I’ve packed, and then, as penance, I force myself to remove a few items; then I capitulate, put everything back in, add one or two more things just to be safe, and at last, burdened and beaten, limp to the airport or the train station or the parking garage with my gross overload. Why do I do it? I’ve decided that it is a sort of passage I have to make before making my true passage—it’s my ritual of clinging to the familiar before entering the unfamiliar, my resistance to leaving the comforts of home for the displacement of travel, of being a stranger embarking on exploration.
This might make me sound like a reluctant traveler, but I’m not at all; I’m only a reluctant packer. I’m a passionate voyager, and as soon as I can force the locks shut on my overstuffed suitcase, I’m eager to head out the door. I love the jolt you get from travel. I love the freshness and surprise of being in a new place, the way it makes even the most ordinary things seem extraordinary and strange. It makes me feel extra-alive. The things that are routine in a familiar place are thrilling somewhere new; things I don’t notice at home jump out at me when I’m traveling. As soon as I get out of town, I love stopping for gas so I can poke around the gas station minimarket; besides the usual, ubiquitous junk food and cigarettes, there are always odds and ends that reveal the character of the place. Those serendipitous discoveries are my addiction. I found a real raccoon-skin Davy Crockett hat for sale in a gas station in Tennessee; a hand-printed pamphlet—the biography of a famous local giant—among the mass-market magazines in a convenience store in Florida; homemade barbecue beside the Doritos and Slim Jims in a minimart in Missouri. These are little tokens of what make all journeys seem so promising, so loaded with possibility—full of the yet unseen, the impossible to imagine, the still unknown.
I’m a sucker for going places that sound wonderful, of course, but I’m even enthusiastic about places that don’t. This quality sometimes vexes the people around me. Years ago, I had some reporting to do in Houston. I was, as usual, excited about the trip. I mentioned it to a friend of mine who had lived in Texas for a few years, and he warned me that Houston was a drag. I said that I couldn’t imagine how it could be, since it was a major city in an interesting state full of interesting industries like oil and gas, and in my opinion that guaranteed that it would be a great place to explore. My friend was disgusted. “Believe it or not,” he said, “there
are
places in the world that even you wouldn’t find interesting.” I will confess that he was almost right: Of all the places I’ve been, Houston was one of the hardest to love, but its blankness and shapelessness fascinated me and made a great backdrop to the story I had gone there to see.
THIS IS A COLLECTION
of pieces about journeys. With one or two exceptions, they aren’t what are ordinarily described as “travel writing”; they are not prescriptive or advice giving, and they don’t review whether or not you get your dollar’s worth out of the local hotels. In some cases, these are stories that came about because I was interested in the place itself. For instance, I got the idea to write about Khao San Road in Bangkok—the street where all the backpackers and hitchhikers and hair braiders in the world converge—because I was in Bangkok changing planes (coincidentally, I happened to be on my way back from reporting another one of these pieces, “Fertile Ground,” in Bhutan) and had some time to kill. A young couple I had met on the plane had told me a little bit about Khao San, and on a whim I hopped in a cab to take a look. I found it such an amazing scene that as soon as I got home and emptied my suitcase, I packed again and returned to Bangkok to spend a week walking up and down the road. I decided to write about Midland, Texas, because it was being mentioned so often—and so significantly—as a building block in George W. Bush’s personality that it seemed like a place worth understanding and describing in order to have an idea of what sort of building block a place like Midland might be. Likewise, Mt. Fuji loomed: It is so embedded in Japanese semiotics and symbolism that it has always struck me as being less a place than an almost living thing, yet I had no real idea of what it was like as a physical place. When my editors at
Outside
asked me where in the world I’d like to go, Mt. Fuji was the first thing that came to mind. It was also nice to climb a mountain that sounds a lot bigger and more challenging than it really is; of all my travels, it is the one that has afforded me the most extravagant and undeserved bragging rights.
Other stories included here started with narratives, and the places emerged as characters only after my reporting began. When I set out to write about a woman in New Jersey who had twenty-seven or so tigers in her backyard, the operative concept seemed to be “tiger,” not “New Jersey.” The tigers were certainly the centerpiece of the story, but I found myself equally interested in the setting and in the idea that when the Tiger Lady had first moved in, her corner of southern New Jersey was wild and empty and remote—in other words, the sort of place where you might indeed have a few dozen tigers in your backyard without anyone noticing—and that the arc of her troubles followed the arc of the area’s development, drawing an almost perfect picture of how rapidly and dramatically a rural place can change. I’m not good at fitting my stories into categories, and many of them can be described as any number of things—profiles, essays, reporter-at-large, whatever—but these are stories that I think of most in the context of place. When I wrote these pieces, the sense of where I was—of where the stories were unfolding—seemed to saturate every element of the experience, to inform it and shape it, and to be what made the story whole.
TO BE HONEST
,
I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the
Odyssey,
Chaucer,
Ulysses
—that isn’t explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don’t actually
go
anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I’ve seen. I picture my readers having the same expedition, in an armchair, as they begin reading one of my pieces and work their way through it, ending up with the distinct feeling of having been somewhere else, whether it’s somewhere physically exotic or just the “somewhere else” of being inside someone else’s life.
The farthest I’ve ever gone for a story was Bhutan, which is on the other side of the world. In fact, since it is literally on the other side of the world, I used one of my trips there to satisfy a lifelong desire: Instead of doing a round trip there and back, I flew around the entire world, stopping in Bhutan in between. The closest “travel” story I’ve ever done is the piece called “Homewrecker,” in which the roles of visitor and visitee were reversed—it is a story about how someone (almost) made a journey into my own home, which was a peculiar experience for someone like me, whose professional life involves going into other people’s houses. The most difficult trip I’ve ever taken for a story was probably one that was just a few blocks from home, to Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Manhattan. Even though the person I wrote about—the president of the student body—was a buoyant and witty young woman, the school struck me as a harsh, hard place, ground down and depleted, and what made it difficult was reconciling this with the fact that it was just a few blocks from my very comfortable apartment. The easiest trip I’ve taken for a story, hands down, was the one I took to visit three lavish spas in Thailand. I prefer going on my reporting trips alone, and since I often go to unglamorous places like Midland, Texas, and Jackson, New Jersey, I rarely have to fend off friends and family who want to keep me company. In the case of the spa trip to Thailand, though, I had a waiting list of volunteers who told me they were very, very concerned about my taking such a long, difficult trip all alone.