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- - - - HEADLINE: TALKING WITH TOM BISSELL: The Accidental Ecotourist; An aspiring fiction writer finds himself trekking to a disappearing sea in Uzbekistan BYLINE: By Peter Terzian. STAFF WRITER BODY: Tom Bissell didn't intend to become an adventure-travel writer. He wanted to write domestic fiction, he says, like Jane Smiley or Scott Spencer or Paula Fox, about "dads and boys playing basketball, family arguments by the sink." But instead, he has just published a nonfiction book titled "Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia" (Pantheon, $24.95), in which he recounts a 2001 trip to Uzbekistan, where he was chased and harassed by members of the draconian police force, tried to smuggle cash to the wife of an imprisoned Uzbek journalist, was served a plate of boiled lamb's head and trekked to the rapidly vanishing Aral Sea, the largest man-made ecological disaster area on Earth. While reporting magazine articles, he's traveled to the Arctic and to Afghanistan during the war. For his next nonfiction book, he's visiting Vietnam with his father, a war veteran who hasn't been back since. What draws Bissell to extreme places? "It's really weird," he says, "because temperamentally, I'm a gigantic wussy." We're sitting in his small studio apartment in a Battery Park high-rise a few blocks south of Ground Zero. "I get very nervous in situations that I'm not familiar with. When I was a kid, when I was playing hockey and my parents would step away to get hot chocolate, I'd have panic attacks. When I was in high school, going to a city would make me so nervous my stomach would knot up. "I realized in college I'd have to get over this problem. ... I joined the Peace Corps to just destroy that aspect of my personality. And I think I did a pretty good job." The willingness to place himself in harm's way was hard-earned, though. In the mid-'90s, the Peace Corps assigned him to Uzbekistan, but after seven months, he suffered an emotional collapse, part culture shock, part relationship troubles back home. He returned to the United States, but a fascination with Central Asia persisted; he began to write short stories set in the region. When he assembled a story collection, publishers didn't bite, but an editor was intrigued enough to ask if he had any nonfiction reporting on the subject. He was quickly offered a book contract for a two-page proposal he had written for a Harper's article on the Aral Sea. (This overnight success story has an even happier ending: Bissell's book of short fiction, "Death Defier," will finally be published in the fall of 2004.) Bissell's writing about high-risk travels in Uzbekistan isn't all just fear-conquering therapy. He's an adept tale-teller, and "Chasing the Sea" is a treasure box of history, folklore, social criticism and digressions on politics and economics. "I just like telling stories, and these places have such great stories that so few people know about. ... I love going to these places that 150 years ago were weird and isolated and abandoned-feeling, and 150 years later they're weird and isolated and abandoned-feeling. You realize what traveling has been like for 99 percent of human experience: completely cut off, no communication." Bissell, 29, grew up in Escanaba, a small city on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There were two important literary figures in his life from early on. His father served alongside both Philip Caputo, the author of "A Rumor of War," one of the first Vietnam combat memoirs, and novelist Jim Harrison ("Legends of the Fall"); every autumn, Caputo and Harrison would visit Bissell's father to go pheasant hunting. "I idolized these two guys because they'd lived such interesting lives. ... Phil was a hostage in Beirut, and he was in Ethiopia, and Harrison was hanging out with Jack Nicholson and having affairs with Jessica Lange and stuff like that. ...My little brain would catch on fire for the few weeks that they were there." Bissell started reading their books; Caputo and Harrison were charmed. When Bissell started to write, he showed Caputo his work. "He would say, 'You don't know what you're getting into, kid. Don't bother.' But I think he's just completely tickled that I've managed to at least start a writing career." ("Chasing the Sea" is dedicated in part to Caputo.) But, wait, as they say: That's not all. Bissell has a developing side career as a humor writer. The author's name is writ large across the jacket of "Chasing the Sea," but it also shyly peeks from the cover of "Speak, Commentary: The Big Little Book of Fake DVD Commentaries" (McSweeney's, $12 paper), which he describes as a "kind of science project that got out of control." Bissell and his friend Jeff Alexander, an editor at the New York Review of Books, were "sitting around," he says - he puts his hand over the microphone as he mentions a specific substance they were ingesting - "and watching 'Lord of the Rings,' and we just started pretending to be Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and doing this incredibly off-the-wall left-wing commentary." Soon, they tried other movies, other pundits: Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza on "Aliens," Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on the original "Planet of the Apes." "I think I discovered that I have a real hammy kind of comedy writer inside of me trying to get out...there's the serious writer part of me, and there's also the part of me that wishes I were a writer for 'The Simpsons' or something." October 19, 2003 - - - -
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