Read Online The Best American Travel Writing 2015 by Andrew McCarthy - Free Book Online

police post, off-limits to visitors, while at the base of that hill a 15-foot-high concrete wall topped with concertina wire has recently been erected. On the other side of that wall, in the Syrian town of Jarabulus, fly the black-and-white war flags of a rebel group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, an Islamic fundamentalist faction so murderous and extreme it has been disavowed by its former umbrella organization, al-Qaeda. In Karkamis’s grim little park, idle Syrian men who managed to escape tell of family and friends being butchered at the hands of ISIS, of how Jarabulus has become a ghost town.
    A Syrian refugee in his mid-forties, unwilling even to disclose his name, tells me that he had planned to escape with his family six months earlier when, on the eve of their departure, ISIS had grabbed his teenage son. “I sent my wife and younger children on to Lebanon,” he says, “but I stayed behind to try and get my son back.”
    He points to a teenager in blue jeans and a red T-shirt sitting on a brick wall a few feet away, gazing up at the canopy of trees with a placid, faraway smile. “That’s him,” he says. “After six days, I managed to get him back, but the terrorists had already destroyed him.” The father taps a forefinger against his own temple, the universal gesture to indicate a person gone mad. “That’s all he does now, smile that way.”
    From the Turkish side could be heard the call to jihad wafting from ISIS’s loudspeakers. Somewhere over that wall, a half-mile from the Carchemish ruins, sits Lawrence’s old research station, a former licorice storehouse that he lovingly repaired and converted into a comfortable home. Now it is a place that no Westerner will likely see for a very long time to come.

KEVIN BAKER
21st Century Limited
    FROM
Harper’s Magazine
    Â 
    W E START IN DARKNESS . After fighting our way through the dingy, low-ceilinged, crowded waiting room that serves as New York City’s current Pennsylvania Station, we pull out through a graffitied tunnel that follows one of the oldest roadbeds in America. Freight trains once clattered along open tracks here, spewing smoke within a few dozen yards of the mansions along Riverside Drive and attracting one of the most dangerous hobo encampments in the country, before it was finally all buried beneath a graceful park in the 1930s. Today we emerge into sunlight for the first time in Harlem, following a route up the glorious Hudson River, past Bear and Storm King Mountains and the old ruined Bannerman castle on Pollepel Island.
    A dining car is attached at Albany—a delay that takes an hour. For that matter, we are not actually in Albany but in Rensselaer, across the river, where in 2002 Amtrak completed the largest train station built in this country since 1939—a structure that has all the individuality of a shopping-mall Barnes & Noble. But we gladly seize the opportunity to stand on the open platform and stare across the Hudson at the capital. It’s a splendid early-fall evening, and we’re at the start of an adventure. We smoke and stretch our legs, and I chat with Derrick, our sleeping-car porter, who is in charge of providing for all the passengers in his five compartments and ten “roomettes.” He tells me he emigrated from Uganda and has been working for the railroad for the past two and a half years.
    Amtrak’s long-distance dining and sleeper-car crews tend to be efficient and almost indefatigably friendly, despite the long trips and the relentless demands of their jobs. A high percentage of them are people of color, an old railroad tradition. (George Pullman, searching for an uncomplaining workforce to service his new cars, began the practice of recruiting former slaves to work as porters soon after the Civil War. Yet they did not prove as pliable as Pullman would have liked; though it took them decades, they organized their