Granta’s first travel issue

In 1983, Granta’s editor Bill Buford fulfilled a personal ambition by publishing his first travel issue. It included writing by Bruce Chatwin, Gabriel García Márquez and Saul Bellow – pieces that were, according to Buford, ‘all informed by the sheer glee of storytelling, a narrative eloquence that situates them somewhere between fiction and fact.’ The issue opened with a series of shorts, called ‘Observations’, two of which are free to read for a month from today. First is Todd McEwen changing planes in Chicago, or ‘Big People Land’, where he is a ‘tiny under-nourished New York worrier’, in an airport ‘hugely hot with Big-People warmth’. Then we find Russell Hoban as he watches a girl spear an octopus in Paxos, and wanders what sort of preparations she made for her journey.

They Tell Me You Are Big

by Todd McEwen

The technological parade of welcome: I was already dead with fatigue. Thank you for flying with us today, here is your ticket, change planes in Chicago, you'll have to change planes in Chicago, change in Chicago. They said it so often I began to get the idea I should change planes in Chicago. Change planes: the phrase began to lose any reference to travel; it acquired a dread phenomenological taint. But I did not change those sorts of planes in Chicago. Rather, in Chicago I changed size. For when I deplaned (more tech-talk) I walked into Big People Land.

I was obliged to go a short distance through a glass tube, the story of a life, from one gate to another. I then had an hour, a whole, giant hour to myself. In Big People Land. And there they were. They were all about me: large surely moving salesmen and mammoth middle managers, corn-fed beef-fed farm-bred monuments to metabolism. Flying from dairy states to beef capitals to commodities centres. From Fon-du-Lac to Dubuque, their huge briefcases stuffed with meat. Clinching beefy deals with muscular handshakes. Their faces were florid Mt Rushmores with aviator spectacles and sideburns uniformly metallic; their eyes, bovine, the size of Dutch plates, reflected their Low Country ancestries. Their hands were steam-shovels, their shoes big as our tiny neurotic New York family car. I'm not talking fat, although flesh is essential in Chicago. I'm talking big-boned, as the apologists say. I, a tiny undernourished New York worrier, had been injected into the enlarged heart of America.

Airports like abattoirs are white. All this moving meat, these great bodies laughing, phoning, making valuable contacts, astonished me. I was overwhelmed by the size of everything and everybody, their huge bigness! I had to sit down. But where? Everything I sat in dwarfed, engulfed me. I was a baby opossum, writhing in a tablespoon in a Golden Nature Guide. I felt fear, tininess and hunger. I decided the only way to become as big as the Big People was to begin eating.

In the infinite coffee shop, my eyes struggled to take in the polyptych menu and its thousand offerings. Eggs with legs, friendly forks and spoons marched across it. GOOD MORNING! Barnyard Suggestions... What! I thought. Wanna meet this chicken in the hayloft in half an hour, fella? But these were not that kind of barnyard suggestion. Here in Big People Land, land-o-lotsa wholesomeness, they were suggesting I eat the following: (1) 3 strips of bacon, 2 pancakes, 2 eggs (any style), 2 sausages, juice, toast and coffee; (2) 6 strips of bacon, 5 pancakes, 4 eggs (any style), 3 sausages, juice, toast and coffee; or (3) 12 strips ofbacon, 9 pancakes, 7 eggs (any style), 1 ½ gallons of juice, 3 lbs of toast and a 'Bottomless Pit' (which I took to be a typographical error for 'Pot') of coffee. Thus emptying any barnyard I could imagine of all life. Again I was lost. I felt I was visiting Karnak. I pleaded for half an order of toast, eight pieces.

Outside the window, far away, Chicago was dawning. Obsidian towers, an art deco pipe-organ sprouting from the gold prairie, Lake Michigan still dark beyond. A brachycephalic woman was seated opposite me, biting big things. Her teeth were the size of horse teeth. She said we could see into the next state. She was eating such big things and so quickly a wind was blowing at our table. I turned from this and peered out through the clear air, into the next state. In the far distance I saw great shapes which I knew weren't mountains but my giant Midwestern relatives I am too small ever to visit.

Now I was filled with huge toast. I crawled, miniscule, back through the tubes to the gate. I bought a newspaper and my money looked puny and foreign in the vendor's big paw. In the chairs of Big People Land, my feet never touched the floor. I began to open the Sun-Times. But. It was big. Here it wasn't even Sunday and I was suddenly engaged in a desperate battle with what seemed to be a colossal duvet, a mural made of incredibly stiff paper. It unfolded and unfolded. It was a whale passing by, it covered me and all my possessions. It surged over the pillar ashtray and began to creep like fog over the gentleman next to me. Help I said. Scuse me, watch your paper there he said. His tongue was the size of my dog.

I was exhausted. I could do nothing but wait for my plane to be announced. I watched the Big People. What is it like to move about the world, to travel, free of the fears of the tiny: the fear of being crushed by all the big things Big People make and use? Not just newspapers and barnyard suggestions and airplanes but their Big Companies and their Eternal Truths and the endless statistics of baseball.

The airport was hugely hot with Big-People warmth. Warmth from the roaring heaters of their big roaring cars, from the blazing campfires of their substantial vacations. And I thought perhaps a few of these Big People were glowing not only from tremendous breakfasts and the excitement and reward of business but from their still-warm still-tousled beds of large love.

One Less Octopus at Paxos

by Russell Hoban

We were at our regular swimming place which is partly pebbly beach and partly big flat rocks when there came along in the shallows among the rocks by the shore a stocky young woman in a hooded wetsuit top with a diving mask and a snorkel and flippers and a speargun and a big sheath-knife strapped to her right leg. She was nosing among the underwater rocks in an ardent and serious way like a dog at a rabbit hole. She fired the speargun, then held up the spear with an octopus writhing on it. It was a mottled pinky-brown and its head was about as big as two clasped hands.

She slid it off the spear, grabbed it by a couple of tentacles, and beat it again and again on a flat rock, spattering briny drops each time. The octopus clung to the rock with its free tentacles; they came away with sounds like kisses as she peeled it off the rock and put it into a plastic bag.

She had pushed up her mask and pushed back her hood. She had a dark face, a serious look and a heavy frown. She had short dark curling hair. She had a squeeze-bottle of detergent; a bystander explained that she'd squirted it into the octopus's hiding-place in the rocks to make it come out (not being able to breathe) and be speared by her.

Later I found myself imagining that young woman's preparations for her trip to Paxos. I saw her at the windows of travel agents, I saw her turning the pages of brochures, I saw her looking at octopus pictures in books. I saw her marking off days on a calendar. I saw her at the supermarket, picking up bottles of detergent and reading their labels. I saw her packing her wetsuit, her mask and snorkel, her flippers, her speargun, her knife, her bottle of detergent. I saw her in the underground, sitting up straight with a serious face, going to Victoria. Her luggage was a rucksack and a diver's bag made of heavy PVC. I saw her on the train to Gatwick. I saw her checking in at the airline counter. I saw her on the plane to Corfu eating breakfast with a serious face, perhaps reading a diving magazine.

I saw her on the boat from Corfu to Paxos looking steadfastly at the sun-points on the water and watching for the shape of the island.

I saw her in her room unpacking the wetsuit, the mask and snorkel, the flippers, the speargun, the knife, the bottle of detergent. I saw her sitting on the bed looking down at her naked feet.

See also... ‘West African Sketchbook’ (right), with new drawings by artist George Butler, whose work has appeared in four issues of Granta.

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