The Best American Travel Writing 2013 by Elizabeth Gilbert Page B
Authors: Elizabeth Gilbert
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restrained by the others until I catch my breath.
As we climb higher, lowland shrubs give way to rhododendrons with brilliant red star-shaped flowers. Because of the perpetual shadow cast by the bushes and ferns that grow horizontally out of the mountainside, everything stays wet, even after the sun rises to midmorning strength. My leather boots feel unsteady on the slippery rocks and roots. The girls, however, never slip; the toes of their bare feet splay out to grip the tenuous footholds with the assurance of fingers. Scampering up and down the mountain wall like spiders, my guides dance around me on that nearly vertical face to position themselves where they can help. Although none of them have worked for a foreigner before, they sense what I need. To them, I must seem like an overgrown baby who has to be taught how to crawl. Below me, Dani and Ana, the tiniest of the five, sometimes catch my feet to stop them from sliding, and it startles me to feel my weight held so firmly in their delicate hands. I begin to think of my guides as possessed of superhuman strength.
We come to a very broad ledge where we sit and look back at green mountains, one after another. Above the mountains lies a thin ribbon of white sky, and above that, deep violet is turning to black. I try not to think what this might mean. A solitary casuarina tree clings to the cliffside just below where we sit, its flat-topped shape like a candelabra without the candles, reminding me of the squat, typhoon-twisted pines of Fukuoka. I gulp some water and offer Sipin my canteen, letting the girls finish it.
We resume our climb with Sipin just above me, looking down and pointing toward the next foothold like a beckoning angel in a William Blake drawing. I keep my eyes on Sipin’s face. It is calm but intent. I feel oddly detached, as though my slow progress up the slick mountainside is a minor part in some allegorical drama. Step by step, root by root, handhold by handhold, I seem to be ascending a dream-staircase, stairs so real they fuse with the mountain. “Put hand here,” Sipin says, and my hand closes over the next tree root before she finishes her sentence. “Put foot there,” she says, and my foot is already reaching for the next knob of rock. Somehow I’ve adjusted to the girls’ rhythm, or they to mine, all six of us climbing in slow motion like legs of a single spider. To my surprise, I no longer want to be anywhere other than where I am at this very moment.
I forget to be afraid. It isn’t that I’ve conquered my fear; I simply believe in my guides. In their own element, these five little girls, who seemed shy and awkward on the school ground yesterday, now seem so wise and self-possessed, so infallible, that I obey them without fear or question. Perhaps I’m learning, as if for the first time, what it means to trust and follow.
At the top, I pause for a few breaths of damp, icy air, my muscles trembling with relief, my feet balanced uncertainly on a narrow ridge of earth. I look down, but all I see is white. We’re inside a cloud. Yet I am certain of the way I’ve come.
COLLEEN KINDER
Blot Out
FROM
Creative Nonfiction
O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them [when they go abroad]. That will be better, so that they may be recognized and not annoyed.
—
Quran 33:59
Y OU CAN PRETEND you’re in a tunnel. You can make believe you have on blinders. You can stare 100 yards in the distance at a random point. You can walk with urgency or purpose. You can look prickly or preoccupied. You can wear an iPod. You can make a cell phone call. You can fake a cell phone call. You can write a text message to no one.
These are the ways foreign women get down the street in Cairo. These are the tricks they share, the ways they teach me to “beige out,” as one woman put it, to fog up the glasses, whenever outside. Outside is the sphere of Egyptian men. Men run markets,
As we climb higher, lowland shrubs give way to rhododendrons with brilliant red star-shaped flowers. Because of the perpetual shadow cast by the bushes and ferns that grow horizontally out of the mountainside, everything stays wet, even after the sun rises to midmorning strength. My leather boots feel unsteady on the slippery rocks and roots. The girls, however, never slip; the toes of their bare feet splay out to grip the tenuous footholds with the assurance of fingers. Scampering up and down the mountain wall like spiders, my guides dance around me on that nearly vertical face to position themselves where they can help. Although none of them have worked for a foreigner before, they sense what I need. To them, I must seem like an overgrown baby who has to be taught how to crawl. Below me, Dani and Ana, the tiniest of the five, sometimes catch my feet to stop them from sliding, and it startles me to feel my weight held so firmly in their delicate hands. I begin to think of my guides as possessed of superhuman strength.
We come to a very broad ledge where we sit and look back at green mountains, one after another. Above the mountains lies a thin ribbon of white sky, and above that, deep violet is turning to black. I try not to think what this might mean. A solitary casuarina tree clings to the cliffside just below where we sit, its flat-topped shape like a candelabra without the candles, reminding me of the squat, typhoon-twisted pines of Fukuoka. I gulp some water and offer Sipin my canteen, letting the girls finish it.
We resume our climb with Sipin just above me, looking down and pointing toward the next foothold like a beckoning angel in a William Blake drawing. I keep my eyes on Sipin’s face. It is calm but intent. I feel oddly detached, as though my slow progress up the slick mountainside is a minor part in some allegorical drama. Step by step, root by root, handhold by handhold, I seem to be ascending a dream-staircase, stairs so real they fuse with the mountain. “Put hand here,” Sipin says, and my hand closes over the next tree root before she finishes her sentence. “Put foot there,” she says, and my foot is already reaching for the next knob of rock. Somehow I’ve adjusted to the girls’ rhythm, or they to mine, all six of us climbing in slow motion like legs of a single spider. To my surprise, I no longer want to be anywhere other than where I am at this very moment.
I forget to be afraid. It isn’t that I’ve conquered my fear; I simply believe in my guides. In their own element, these five little girls, who seemed shy and awkward on the school ground yesterday, now seem so wise and self-possessed, so infallible, that I obey them without fear or question. Perhaps I’m learning, as if for the first time, what it means to trust and follow.
At the top, I pause for a few breaths of damp, icy air, my muscles trembling with relief, my feet balanced uncertainly on a narrow ridge of earth. I look down, but all I see is white. We’re inside a cloud. Yet I am certain of the way I’ve come.
COLLEEN KINDER
Blot Out
FROM
Creative Nonfiction
O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them [when they go abroad]. That will be better, so that they may be recognized and not annoyed.
—
Quran 33:59
Y OU CAN PRETEND you’re in a tunnel. You can make believe you have on blinders. You can stare 100 yards in the distance at a random point. You can walk with urgency or purpose. You can look prickly or preoccupied. You can wear an iPod. You can make a cell phone call. You can fake a cell phone call. You can write a text message to no one.
These are the ways foreign women get down the street in Cairo. These are the tricks they share, the ways they teach me to “beige out,” as one woman put it, to fog up the glasses, whenever outside. Outside is the sphere of Egyptian men. Men run markets,
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