The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (27 page)

The play ended how it always ends: Scopes guilty, Bryan dead. After taking their bows the cast disappeared into a mob of handshakes and bouquets. Outside, no pitchforks—just the lingering scent of Scopes Trial Specials and the stammer of camera flashes as playgoers posed with the stately bronze Bryan in the dark.

Saturday morning, the festival's second and final day, I sardined into a first-floor courtroom where signs said
PLEASE DO NOT SIT ON THE A/C UNITS OR APPROACH THE BENCH UNLESS DIRECTED BY THE JUDGE OR PASS TOBACCO PRODUCTS TO THE INMATES
. A procession of locals had gathered to talk about their connections to the trial, each taking turns on the witness stand. Ninety-five-year-old Beverly Wilson was the only one who had been alive during the trial, though she didn't remember much about 1925 except her parents arguing—not about theology or science but whether to name her baby brother “Evolution.” Jeff Stewart, grandson of Tom Stewart, one of Scopes's prosecutors, confessed that his grandmother went to her grave feeling responsible for Bryan's death; the diabetic had eaten his penultimate meal at her dinner table, including an entire platterful of sliced, salted tomatoes. Pat Guffey, Rhea County's historian, piped up to reassure Stewart that Bryan's death probably had more to do with his final meal, taken at the Rogers family home, during which he consumed two whole chickens.

Most stories followed this pattern of ramble and swerve; what seemed remarkable was that they were being told at all. When Tom Davis, the Scopes festival's chairman, moved to Dayton for a newspaper job in 1976, he was surprised to find the trial's history languishing. “We just ought to forget that it ever happened,” he was told. But over the next decade, the stranglehold loosened, and in the early 1990s, Davis was hired as a Bryan College public information officer and tasked with organizing the nascent festival—an effort, in part, to coax the town further out of its passive quagmire. “We have not lived down the stigma that came with
Inherit
, and I really do blame us for a lot of that,” said Davis, who's now Rhea County's administrator of elections. “We haven't made a real good effort, first of all, to tell the story—just to simply say, ‘Look folks, here's what really happened.' We have let the caricature of a narrow-minded, terribly unthinking fundamentalist mentality ride.”

Dayton's tuck-tailed silence has had certain aesthetic repercussions, too. Saturday afternoon I boarded a squat school bus for what amounted to a tour of former Scopes-related sites. In place of Robinson's drugstore, there's a postage-stamp park, a swath of asphalt, a cinder-block office building for rent. A different house stands in place of the one where Bryan died. Rhea County Central High School, where Scopes taught, closed in 1930 and soon reopened as the first location of what was then called William Jennings Bryan University. It was a handsome school, stout dark brick with a mansard roof. Now it's gone, too.

If Bryan hadn't died here and made way for the school, the town might have unraveled completely—the mines closed in 1930, just before the Great Depression rolled in. Dayton eventually came back as a manufacturing town, which it remains today, lately cultivating a sprawl of strip malls and chain stores. Bryan College hosts 1,300 students every year, or retains them—many are local and many more settle in Dayton after graduation to raise their own kids here. There are lakes and hills and woods all around, old coke ovens turned into nature preserves. Niche tourism is on the rise, so there's even a chance the old boosters' scheme might finally pay off. Coal isn't the best source of metaphors for sustainable industry, but some things do need time to sit under great pressure before they can be of use. The Scopes Trial Museum, housed in the courthouse basement, brings in a few thousand visitors each year; in 2013, a few hundred attended the festival. Not quite Disney World, but it's more appealing than blinkered silence. “We're beginning to think, ‘OK, everybody along the Tennessee River has a lake and a fishing spot. Not everybody has the Scopes trial courthouse,'” Davis told me. “We don't have to agree that we are ignorant bumpkins just because somebody thinks that—we can show them who we really are and what we're all about if we can get them here.”

Saturday evening, taking Highway 27 out of town, I finally saw the Hitler billboard. I pulled into an auto parts store parking lot and stared up.
WAKE UP AMERICA
, it demanded—the
I
a clip-art shotgun—above the Führer's sour mug. I snapped a photo, posted it online. Soon friends began administering their rueful hearts and stars and thumbs-ups, just like I knew they would. Back at home, I showed my parents the photo and we shook our heads and laughed, just like I knew we would. It was so easy, sinking my fist back into that old punching bag—I didn't even think about it at first, but then I did, and I felt bad. Because I thought I knew better. And I'd come to think maybe Dayton did, too.

PATRICIA MARX

FROM
The New Yorker

C
ALL HIM ISHMAEL
. Call
me
Insane. Some time ago, I had a hankering: Wouldn't it be lovely to take a break from the hurly-burly of landlubber life and the oppressive, never-ending connecting with everybody and everything? What could be more restorative than to voyage across the Atlantic aboard a merchant vessel, and, as Melville said, see the watery part of the world? How great would it be to have the time to read
Moby-Dick
instead of just talking about it? Oh, really? Now that I am about to board the
Rickmers Seoul
freighter (Chinese-built, German-managed, Marshall Islands–registered), being a passenger on a cargo ship seems a lot like being an inmate in a prison, except that on a ship you can't tunnel yourself out. Please try to imagine the privations I will brave for three weeks on this 632-foot-long, 30,000-ton hunk of steel as it galumphs across the sea from Philadelphia to Hamburg, with brief stops in Norfolk (Virginia) and Antwerp. There will be no Internet, no e-mail, no telephones, no organized entertainments, no Stewart or Colbert, no doctor, no anyone-I-know, and no Diet Coke. There will be 27 crew members, most from the Philippines, including a captain and a handful of officers from Romania, and, piled high on deck and deep in the holds, an assortment of cargo consignments from the world over that might include yachts, submarines, airplane fuselages, generators, turbines—everything, in short, that would elate a boy of five. There are no freighters that haul vats of sushi or Yonah Schimmel knishes, but somewhere out there is a vessel that carries La Mer face cream, and I hope the
Rickmers Seoul
collides with it.

After checking in at the Philadelphia Tioga Marine Terminal with a stevedore named Rhino, I teetered up a steep gangway to the main deck, where I was greeted by a broad-shouldered, doughy Romanian (age 32) with a handsome face and a clipboard. In his orange jumpsuit, he looked like a giant Teletubby. “I am Paul,” he said. “I am chief man.”

“What does the chief man do?” I asked.

“Chief
mate
,” said the Romanian fellow (age 29) by his side, a Sean Penn look-alike with a ponytail and false front teeth, the consequence of tripping on the ship last year, not far from where we were standing. “Chief mate is first mate. I am third mate. I am Raul. You could say I am safety officer.”

“Can I look at the cargo sometime?” I asked.

“You must get permission of captain, which is dangerous, of course,” Raul said.

“The captain is dangerous, or the cargo?” I said. We laughed, and I still don't know the answer. Before disappearing into one of the many recesses on deck, Raul handed me a list of rules. (“It is absolutely forbidden to bring any weapons on board of the vessel”; “In Islamic countries possession of alcohol and/or sex magazines could lead to heavy fines”; “Do not drink excessively, neither on board nor ashore.”) A couple of OSes (ordinary seamen, or entry-level mariners) showed up and wordlessly ushered me and my cumbersome luggage up four flights of stairs to my cabin. In the fluorescent-lit hallway, a merry Filipino AB (able-bodied seaman, one rung up from OS) passed us and enthusiastically informed me, “We are going to have a party with a band and we all dance to Beatles music!”

“OK,” I said, because what do you say?

I was pretty sure I had an outfit for the occasion. Here is some of what I brought: a poncho for rain, a down vest for snow, dental putty in case a crown fell out, art supplies in the event that I acquired talent, a shortwave radio for lonely nights, and hair dye for the other nights. Other supplies included 1,000 packets of Splenda, 50 protein bars, an electric kettle, powdered lemonade, tuna fish (which I don't like but was inspired to throw in upon hearing that Mike Tyson subsisted on it in jail), hundreds of books loaded onto two Kindles (one might break—Noah knew what he was doing), a USB drive with more movies than are watchable in a year, a monocular that can serve as a telescope or a microscope, and a box of 100 monitor wipes for my laptop. I ignored the advice of friends who insisted that I could not last without whey powder, incense, Mace (recommended by two people), limes to prevent scurvy, and a shark cage.

Feeling as neglected as a stowed anchor, I surveyed my cabin. It was 14 feet square, including a small bathroom with a tiny shower stall. A college freshman would regard it as a plum room assignment, especially since the metal walls, which were varnished to look like beige oilcloth, seemed indestructible. In an alcove, there was a built-in queen-sized bed on which had been placed a small towel folded into the shape of a peacock. A madras curtain could be drawn to separate this berth from the sitting area (or to put on a marionette play). There was a wooden desk containing a multilingual Bible, a coffee table bolted to the blue floral carpet, an L-shaped sofa in a mauve-and-blue tweed, a nonfunctioning mini-refrigerator, and a clunky TV, which, along with CD and DVD players, was strapped to the credenza—for an understandable reason, but still, it didn't make one feel like family.

From my dirt-speckled porthole, I could see the water and a fire-hose box (location, location, location!). Hanging near a print of Renoir's
Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette
was a placard indicating that the signal for “Abandon ship” is a repeating sequence on the ship's horn of one short blast and one long blast. According to an accompanying chart, in the event of a disaster I was designated to be in Seat 24, next to the steward, in the free-fall boat. This is a neon-orange enclosed lifeboat that looks like a ride at a Soviet-era water park. Lodged on precipitately slanted tracks for easy launch into the water, the boat contains flares, rations, and tools for fishing, but no Netflix streaming.

As I took in the aroma of my room, which can best be described as a base of
l'eau de diesel
and cigarette smoke, with top notes of rotten nectarine and hamster (perhaps a result of Rule No. 4: always keep your windows closed in port and at sea), an alarm sounded—a loud, unbroken tone. “Attention, attention, attention!” a man's voice boomed over the PA. “Crew proceed to the Muster Station. Passengers remain in cabins.” I dutifully stayed put for what seemed like hours and then, failing to hear any all-clear signal, ventured out to explore. My cabin was in the Accommodation, a seven-story, elevatorless box that juts up like a billboard from the main deck of the ship's stern. It was the color of provolone cheese, and pockmarked with rust. The Accommodation houses the living quarters, which include not only the cabins but the kitchen, two mess halls (one for the officers and passengers, the other for the crew), laundry facilities, a rec room (with a drum kit, some guitars, a dartboard, and two old Nautilus exercise machines), a passenger lounge containing a lot of Louis L'Amour paperbacks and scratched DVDs, an unfilled swimming pool not roomy enough to satisfy even a trout, and, next to it, a place called the Blue Bar. This pine-planked party room featured a Ping-Pong table, Christmas lights, and a curved wooden bar with sides of sea-foam-green leather. Perched at the very top of the Accommodation is the bridge, a large control room with panoramic windows from which the captain and the officers helm the ship (I hoped).

On a lower deck, there is a “hospital,” a white room with a hospital bed and a bathroom worth getting sick for (porcelain tub). The hospital is stocked with everything from prednisone to tetanus immunoglobulin, from oil of cloves (for toothaches) to condoms (don't ask me). Morphine is locked in the captain's room. The second mate, who took a one-week first-aid course in the Philippines, serves as doctor. I didn't see any of this until later, however, because in the stairwell I ran into Raul. “No, you did not ever have to stay in your room, of course,” he said with amusement. “Now we have Familiarization in five minutes with other passengers.”

You (though not I) can skip Familiarization, unless you care to put on your life preserver, grab your immersion suit, and dash over to the Muster Station—the gathering site in case of emergency—to hear more about the free-fall boat. How about we advance the clock slightly and repair to the officers' dining room, where, on this inaugural night, my three fellow passengers and I became acquainted over a meal of, well, let's call it meat simulacrum camouflaged by mucilaginous faux gravy and accompanied by a hillock of rice and a diced vegetable that was to turn up frequently and which we passengers labeled kohlrabi because we knew it was nothing else. The dining room has green industrial flooring and fake wood paneling, like the other public rooms. Each of two round tables—one reserved for the officers and the other for us passengers—was set for six with Christmas-tree place mats. Intertable chat was generally restricted to this:

OFFICER
(
entering
):
Bon appétit
.