Free The Best American Travel Writing 2013 by Elizabeth Gilbert Page A

stadium.
    If you see one alone, escape.
    I don’t go over, I cringe, and it goes by.
    It passes me and runs toward the stadium door and I don’t know if I should follow it but I do, I fucking sprint, I’m making it into that stadium, that stadium is fucking mine. I pump my arms and my legs, I pass people and pass people, I am making it into that stadium—that fucking stadium is mine. I see one of the huge red doors start to close and I sprint toward it. The gap of light inside is closing, but the closer I get, the higher up in the stands I can see oh my god a sea of white noise. I see people on the sides as the bull passes through and is guided out the other end. There is a jam of people at the closing door and I run right up to them. I keep pushing forward and squeeze through the door and fucking sprint into the tunnel. I gain speed and the stadium reveals itself—full of screaming fans—everyone in white with their red neckerchiefs. I feel the dirt below my feet so soft and forgiving and I am displacing it all and I am in the Plaza de Toros, the motherfucking Plaza de Toros de Pamplona. I start yelling as I run—I fucking scream and let it out. I let it all out and it flows out of me like a release of pressure that shouldn’t build in a person. I scream and in the very middle of the circle—I’m in a fucking bullfighting ring—I’m in the Plaza de Toros de Pamplona on July 7 and people are screaming for me and I am letting it all out, it’s flowing from me. I stop in the middle and start jumping with the others. I jump and I scream and we chant and I jump, I fucking jump higher and higher and release it all. I know Dan is here with me. I can’t see him but I know it. I raise my hands above my head and jump so I am facing different directions—all these people—all these people in white standing, waiting for me to get here, all these people—20,000, 25,000, a million—cheering me on.
    I look up at them, they look down at me, and we let it out and release it—and it all makes sense—
    This is why—
    This is who I am, maybe it will change, maybe it—
    Maybe there is a moderate amount of self-preservation revealed through a self-destructive—shut the fuck up and
jump!
    I’m connected to people I don’t know. I jump I fucking jump. A part of a culture so foreign—immersion I’ve never known. Acceptance and capability—fucking whatever just jump! And I don’t feel proud, I don’t feel brave, and I don’t feel manly or deserving or fortunate—just yell and jump and turn in the air and see the white, the cylindrical wall of white bodies enclosing me, centering me, thousands of white bodies building up and out above me in this stadium, this bullring—hear the volume and jump and yell and it flows back and forth, me to them and back again, and I feel—
    I just feel—oh my oh my do I feel.

JUDY COPELAND
The Way I’ve Come
    FROM
Legal Studies Forum
     
    A LONE ON THE grassy airstrip, I empty my backpack and kneel to sort my supplies for the climb up the mountain wall. I’ve landed in a tight little valley called Tekin, in Sandaun Province, whose massive ranges straddle Papua New Guinea’s border with Indonesia. The plane, still droning faintly somewhere above the fog, will soon be gone. The grass is wet and cold under my knees.
    As I sort, a crowd of men gather to watch me, murmuring in Pidgin, “Very fat woman!” and “Em fall down, true!” They are all very short, less than five feet tall, thin and wiry, wearing baseball caps and ragged T-shirts and scowling the same fierce scowls that startled me two weeks ago when I boarded the flight from Manila to Port Moresby and looked into the faces of the flight attendants. I’ve noticed that the expression doesn’t necessarily signify anger. Some New Guineans continue to knit their brows even when they smile.
    Luckily, some of the men speak English. When I ask them about the last backpacker to leave from Tekin, they aren’t sure when he