The Turk Who Loved Apples (38 page)

Money saved by not visiting the Colosseum or the Forum: €25.50. Finding literary justification for my personal predilections: priceless.

So maybe that's what really separates the so-called traveler from the stereotypical tourist—the former's sense of being unbound by expectation. Travelers go where they want because they want to, and do what they want simply because they like to. (Although we mustn't forget that they, too, are bound, by other, less obvious forces.) And so, for temporary rhetorical purposes, I suppose that's how I have to identify myself. Why else would I go to some of the places I've been?

Take Pailin, a small Cambodian province on the western border with Thailand. If you've heard of it, it's likely because for nearly twenty years it was the home base of the Khmer Rouge. Forced from power by the Vietnamese in 1979, Pol Pot, his associates, and their soldiers retreated to Pailin's jungle-covered hills, where, in desperate need of cash, they began cutting down valuable hardwood trees and mining the earth for rubies and other precious stones. That was about all I knew of Pailin when, in 2003, I decided it would make a good setting for
The Jungle Always Wins
. What did it look like in the 1950s? Who lived there? How did it operate? It didn't matter. I'd write the scenes first, then, when I had the opportunity, I'd find out firsthand.

In the spring of 2005, I found out firsthand. My forays into Cambodia's National Archives had been surprisingly successful—emphasis on surprisingly. As I read dusty, disintegrating newspapers and reports from the French colonial Resident in Pailin, I learned that the Cambodians living in Pailin were not actually primarily, you know,
Cambodian
. Instead, they were Burmese, brought to the region, it appeared, by a Thai-British mining concern to excavate rubies at the end of the nineteenth century. This would require some rewriting of the novel, but that was the point—this was what I'd come here to learn.

What I didn't find in the archives was information about what life was like in Pailin. I'd imagined something along the lines of an actual town, organized somehow, with residents trying to create lives for themselves and their children—a very American sort of place, I
now understand. But I barely even had a sense of the layout of Pailin, let alone what sort of legal and social forces governed it. I had to get out there.

Getting out there was a schlep. From Phnom Penh, I took a bus several hours to Battambang, a medium-size town about fifty miles east of Pailin. For that final leg, however, I had to squeeze into a taxi—technically, an aged Toyota Camry—along with seven other people and endure a three-hour journey across roads so wrecked and rutted they barely qualified as roads at all. Not comfortable, but I guess I'd suffered worse.

As we neared Pailin, I noticed a shift in the landscape. The dense jungle that had covered the hills thinned, then disappeared; the slopes appeared naked and gray, almost alien—the result of decades of indiscriminate logging. When the taxi deposited me in the center of Pailin, my mood collapsed even further. I'd been in Cambodia long enough to know that urban planning was lacking in most towns, but even so Pailin was a shithole. Damp, muddy, broken-down, with a haphazard market in the middle and hastily assembled concrete buildings surrounding them. I checked in to the Pailin Ruby Guest House, a four-story yellowish hulk described today in an online review as “your only reasonable downtown option.”

Somehow, I had arranged a guide for my visit, and that afternoon he took me around. First, he brought me to a mine—which was, again, not as I'd pictured the ruby mines of Pailin. No huge tunnel descending into the darkness, no signs of heavy industry. Basically, it looked as if some guys with a Home Depot account had rented a personal backhoe, bought a case of beer, and gone to town on the backyard—every weekend for thirty years. They would dig deep into the red earth, spray the soil with gallons of water, and then an enormous, rickety machine would suck up this slurry and sort the solid pieces, which were hand-inspected for possible gems. The owners of this particular mine hadn't found much, my guide told me, and many people worried that Pailin might have run out of stones.

As the guide took me around Pailin, I began to notice holes everywhere—in empty lots, patches of farmland, across the naked hills. Wherever there was open space, there was a hole—a crater—as if every square inch of land had been bombed. The ground beneath my feet began to feel unstable, and the prospect of sticking around Pailin for another couple of days unappealing. The guide had introduced me to a woman who claimed to be from one of the last Burmese-descended families—the Cambodians refer to them as the Kula people—and I'd wanted to learn more of their history, but when I woke up early the next morning, I decided I couldn't take it anymore. Pailin was too depressing, too awful to bear. What more could I do here? What was the point of this visit? Trying to see the Pailin of sixty years ago in the raped-and-strafed hellscape of today was impossible, insane, nauseating. I paid my hotel bill, hailed a motorbike taxi, and rode it to the Thai border—down a road as smooth and flat as any in the West, past a shiny, well-maintained casino—where I texted my guide to say I wouldn't need him again after all.

For years, Pailin served as a personal defeat, but a humorous one. Here, at last, was a place even I couldn't stand—the town where I discovered the limits of my tolerance for grittiness, poverty, and discomfort. But underneath that joke lay a worrisome fact: I had gazed into the abyss—and blinked. What did it say about me as a traveler if I couldn't handle Pailin, which despite its ugliness was not particularly dangerous or threatening?

In 2007, while driving across America, I got a chance to relive my Pailin experience. I had just passed through the Black Hills of South Dakota—on washboarded logging roads and pine-lined highways slick with rain—and I wanted to travel no further west. I was only about halfway through the summer, and the center of the country, not to mention the Southwest, needed to be explored.

There was another thing I needed to do, too. Although the premise of the adventure was “money-saving, high-living road trip,” I had a separate principle guiding me as well. Roughly put, I wanted to
see how people live differently all across America. And as I descended the Black Hills, I knew it was time to drive into the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where diabetes, alcoholism, and despair collaborated to produce one of the poorest places in the entire country.

The sky was clear and the sun brilliant as I drove onto Oglala Lakota Sioux land. In the town of Oglala, I visited a Jesuit-run school and learned there were no banks on the reservation (and therefore no business loans), and in the larger town of Pine Ridge I ate a terrible “Indian taco,” and I tried to make sense of what I saw. The towns both looked rundown, with businesses in varying stages of collapse and far too many trailer homes, but not necessarily worse than other places I'd been, although the heat of the day perhaps made everything look extra tired and slow.

On I drove, then, to Wounded Knee, where in 1890 the U.S. cavalry killed three hundred Sioux they—mistakenly—believed were plotting against the government. At a parking lot near a memorial center, I stopped Vivian the Volvo to look at Wounded Knee Creek, site of the massacre, and there I met J.T. Kills Crow, a local with a broad face, round nose, and a blue towel hanging around his neck. J.T. offered to show me around, and since the memorial center was closed and I had no other plans, I agreed. For thirty minutes, we walked through the tall grasses, and J.T. gave a convoluted explanation of the attacks, jumping back and forth so freely from the 1890 massacre to the 1973 battle between federal agents and members of the American Indian Movement, that I didn't quite understand him when he said he'd seen a dead body at the age of seven. More bodies, he said, lay under the earth, hidden by slabs of rock, undiscovered because no one wanted to relive the nightmares of the past—which in any case were ongoing.

“The government still mistreats us,” he said.

J.T. and I got along well enough, I guess, that he invited me over to his house, a bungalow that, unlike many of its neighbors in the little neighborhood cluster, was neither covered with graffiti
nor surrounded by chicken wire. For most of the afternoon, we sat on his stoop, drinking beer from plastic cups (officially, the reservation is dry) and watching life go by. Friends popped over to ask for money—usually for medicine or gas—and when they left, it was often in cars that seemed destined for the junkyard. “Indian cars,” J.T. called them with a laugh. Myanmar, I thought, had better vehicles.

Across the way, a neighbor and his wife emerged from their house and got into their car—which, J.T. noted, didn't have a fan belt. Wherever they were going, they'd drive till the car overheated, stop to let it cool down, then carry on.

Almost as an afterthought, he added, “And he doesn't have any kidneys either!”

That was life in Wounded Knee: no money, no fan belt, no kidneys.

As the day waned, J.T. offered to let me pitch my tent in his yard, and to thank him I suggested we go into town and grab some pizzas for dinner. On the drive in, I noticed J.T. still had his cup of beer with him, and he warned me to be careful whenever we passed a police car. I could tell something was off, but not what, and after getting the pizzas we drove just over the Nebraska state line to a liquor store. Two cases of Hurricane malt liquor set me back $42 and had some interior alarm bells flashing, but with J.T. guiding me, everything seemed so normal—he did this all the time, right?—that I didn't quite understand that by bringing back the booze (which J.T. covered with a blanket) I was not only breaking reservation law but enabling a guy who later happened to mention he was an alcoholic.

In retrospect, on paper, it looks awful: I showed up in one of the poorest, saddest towns in American and helped an alcoholic Indian smuggle in booze. But on the ground, it was harder to see things in such harsh, statistical light. At the time, J.T. was the stranger who'd welcomed me into his home, whose life I was trying to understand,
not influence. And J.T., far from embodying the clichés of contemporary Indian life, was a complicated figure, not a lifelong loser. He'd lived off the reservation, working as a foreman in Denver, and though he was now an out-of-work alcoholic, he'd once been a police officer himself. Likewise, his son, though overweight and with high blood pressure, had lived for a year in Sweden, of all places. This family was not just a statistic.

That night, as we ate the pizza—slathered with Sriracha sauce, which I introduced to the family—we watched MTV's
Laguna Beach
, whose blondes were discussing Mercedes SUVs. The ironies were palpable, but they weren't the whole story either. Those blondes were human beings, too. Then I went outside to my tent and crawled into my sleeping bag. Outside I could hear J.T. and his friends drinking Hurricanes through the night.

When I woke up, I was alone, and the dawn was breaking over the prairie. Pale light coasted up the sky; a breeze filtered through the grasses. The corpse of a Pontiac stood in for the bulk of a dozing bison. Inside the house was my bottle of Sriracha, and I left it there—a gift for J.T.'s family—and quietly rolled up my tent. I'd been carrying a pack of Cuban cigarillos I'd bought in Turkey, and I crushed one, letting the tobacco leaves fall to the ground—a Lakota tradition, J.T. had told me.

Then I got in my Volvo and drove away.

An hour later, as I crossed into the Badlands, my cell phone rang. It was J.T., politely asking if I could send him $25 by Western Union for gas money.

“Sorry,” I told him, “I wish I could.”

Again, I knew, I was fleeing—but from what, exactly? What was I supposed to do for J.T.? Support him? Save him? Had the mistakes I'd made at Wounded Knee been predictable, or avoidable? I had wanted to go deep in my travels, and my wish had been granted, and I hadn't known what to do at all—how to act with grace and responsibility.

Guilt overwhelmed me, and I thought, for neither the first nor last time, of driving Vivian off the road into the menacing rocks of the Badlands. But guilt is the ultimate province of the thinking traveler. As a citizen of a wealthy, mostly functional country, you can't see what goes on in the poorer corners, or meet people with lives truly out of their control, without in some way feeling responsible. So what do you do?

What I did was drive to Oklahoma City, where I wrote about the vibrant Vietnamese community and, in particular, about their restaurants. But I did not try to make any new immigrant friends to lead me into the community. I spent some time at the monument to the 1995 bombing of the federal building, but I did not attempt to plumb the depths of lingering antigovernment resentment in Oklahoma. And at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, I wrote that the exhibits only seemed to perpetuate the romantic myth of the cowboy without trying to understand that myth's role in contemporary culture—but that was as far into that subject as I was willing to go. In the next paragraph, it was back to food.

In short, I retreated to the surface. In Oklahoma, and then in the hill country of Texas, I became a tourist—by choice—and I tried simply to enjoy myself at institutions that had been created for the sole purpose of pleasure. I ate barbecue and went to naval museums and horse races, and I tried to write energetically about these experiences, because they, too, were worthy of my readers' time and attention.

Tourists, I could now better understand, were not some lesser species. Like all travelers, they had earned their right to travel as they wished, and if that meant organized tours and checklist sightseeing, who was I to tell them they were wrong? Travel did not always have to be hard or deep. It could even be easy and fun, and even I could do it, guiltlessly.