CHAPTER 1

I trudged along on foot, slowly counting out ten agonizing steps, then stopping to let the pain subside from my lungs and feet.  Ten more steps, then I stopped again.  Each step took me higher into thinner air, and deepened the gashes on my heels.  My horse gave up first.  I hadn't ridden him for days, thinking each of us were better off on foot.  He didn't collapse again, but I couldn't get him to move, and I couldn't go any farther alone.  I lay down on a boulder that was warm from the sun, and if I'd had the energy, I would have cried.  I hadn't eaten for two days, I'd suffered from dysentery for weeks and the five thousand-foot climb into the vaulted mountains and rugged granite 15,000 feet into the Hindu Kush mountains north of the Anjuman Valley in North Eastern Afghanistan had sapped any reserves that remained.  I lay on the side of the path, not moving even when the sun was replaced by rain showers that ebbed and flowed like waves.  The sun scarcely warmed my body before the forces 

drew back to unleash another wave of rain.     

I knew that I was dead.  I couldn't go on without my gear or I would freeze.  I couldn't carry it; I could scarcely walk by myself.  I couldn't turn around; the villagers would love to see me come crawling back, especially that guy I had hit over the head with my wooden staff two days ago.  Even if the others made it over the pass, it would take days for them to return.  I wasn't sure I could even make it through one night.  As I contemplated my approaching death, I began to hear screams.  The sound echoed off the granite walls of the valley, resonating in all directions.

The screams might have been an eagle, but I suspected it was a woman.  Even if I could have figured out where the screams were coming from, I had no ability to do anything about it!  At that moment, I perceived the sound simply as a distraction from my musings on life and death.  I considered that I was preparing to cross yet another border, one of many on this journey.  However, this border was shaping up to be the ultimate crossing between life and death.  I made peace with that.

Death was always part of my inner musings, ever since I could recall.  One of my earliest childhood memories was of my mother taking me to see my grandfather in his casket.  I was only five or six years old, but I remember touching his cold body and knowing this was no longer my grandfather, just an empty shell left behind.  My brother must have been there also, but I don't have a sense of him, or of anyone else.  Just me standing next to what was left of my grandfather who had been an icon in my early childhood.  He was a robust eighty-year-old who played with my cousins and friends every summer at Torch Lake in northern Michigan.  In the winter my mother, brother and I lived with him and my grandmother in Battle Creek Michigan.  Even at that early age, I wasn't frightened by death, but I was deeply intrigued with the notion that there was more to life than that which appeared on the surface.  This cold and still body in the coffin wasn't my grandfather -- his spark had left, but  wasn't gone.  To the question of the meaning of life, I considered death to be only the beginning of the answer. 

Despite any intellectual understanding, I was only eighteen years old as I faced my own mortality.  My last border crossing was three months earlier, the one that delivered me into Afghanistan, and I had not intended that the next border would be my final one.  I wholly expected an orderly procession into Pakistan, and then India. 

Entering Afghanistan from Iran had been relatively simple.  The chief concern in Meshad, the last major Iranian town, was changing enough money to cross the border.  My brother and I went to eight different banks, but at each we were turned away and directed down the street.  Finally, Andy changed money with a hustler, then counted out enough rials for fuel and an oil change -- a feeble attempt to prevent the pervasive dust that settled in the oil filter from inflicting more damage to the engine of our fifteen-year-old Volkswagen van.  The road leading out of Meshad was paved -- a wonder seldom seen on our route -- but after about thirty-seven miles the pavement ended and we were back to dust.  After two more hours of driving we passed poppy fields.  I saw Andy's eyes widen, but I was driving and didn't intend to stop until we reached Herat where we would spend our first night in Afghanistan. 

After clearing Iranian customs in a small border town we drove at least five miles through open barren desert.  It was sort of a no man’s land before you entered Afghanistan.  Somewhere out in that desert that they called dasht was a line of demarcation.  Generations earlier a diligent cartographer had deliberately drawn this line on a map to define the end of Iran and the beginning of Afghanistan.  Driving across the dasht, the placement appeared arbitrary.  As in so many political borders, there was no intrinsic physical existence of Iran to one side, and Afghanistan on the other.  The same sort of line runs through the Sonoran desert in the North American southwest that divides the U.S. from Mexico.

The line in the dasht was the same, only more so, in terms of time as well.  As the odometer counted off our progress into Afghanistan, the time period seemed to telescopically retreat by hundreds of years.  Even the light became different as I drove through the vast, flat wasteland that was the desert border between Iran and Afghanistan.  The light held every rarified quality imaginable -- clarity, purity, intensity, luminescence -- as if clearly of another world.  Changes were on the way, starting with the herds of sheep I was driving past.  Unlike the usual flocks, this crowd was mostly black, with only a few white sheep sprinkled in for counter-point. 

Seeing these herds of black sheep made me feel right at home, because as far back as I can remember I was a black sheep.  It wasn't only me; it was a designation shared by my mother and brother compared to the greater, extended family.  My mother, Dorothy, was the youngest of four sisters from a proud family of Michigan pioneers.  Her father was forty-five years old when she was born.  Norton was an early park ranger in the fledgling days of Glacier National Park;  he served in World War I; and met his wife in the hospital while recuperating from an combat injury.  Later he became a respected educator in Detroit. 

My mother and her sisters were attractive young women who reaped the benefits of education and travel and then customarily wed the most promising young suitor.  My mother broke the pattern by asking for a divorce from my father when I was four years old, initiating a habit of crossing borders wherever and whenever they existed -- socially, culturally and physically.  Imprinted as such, I learned to see borders as zones of transition from one type of culture or experience to another. 

I have one brother, Andy, who is precisely -- to the day -- eighteen months older than me.  We were born in Michigan in the early 1950s, products of the post-WWII baby boom.  The three of us were a family constantly in transit, moving restlessly from one town to another, one house to another.  In order to support my brother and me, our mother persevered to complete her masters' degree in library science while working full-time and caring for two small boys.  However, Dorothy did not fit the staid librarian stereotype, and to prove it, she moved us out of Michigan and straight to Palo Alto, California in 1961 when I was ten years old. 

For my mother, it was a return to her first adventure as a young woman just out of high school in the early 1940s, when she embraced the war effort by working in an airplane factory in southern California.  Twenty years later, Dorothy became active in local Democratic politics, doing door-to-door polling.  She also became a first-time homeowner in Palo Alto in 1964.  The house wasn't new, but it was an Eichler, a California-bred design well ahead of its time with vaulted ceiling, exposed beams, radiant heating built into the floors, and plenty of windows.  It was a spacious house with four bedrooms, one for each of us, plus a guestroom. 

By age thirteen, I had lived in thirteen different houses.  Now we were in the thirteenth house and there was finally room for all.  One large wall in my room was unbroken by windows, creating a convenient canvas for my imagination.  I completely covered it with the trappings of adolescent life -- the psychedelic rock concert posters, school art projects, broken guitar strings, twigs, and the ultimate iconoclastic poster of the late sixties, the single yellow daisy with the words, "War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things."

 The wall across from the bed had a large window, approximately ten feet long, which looked into the side yard.  From the inside, I had covered the window glass with notebook-sized sheets of multi-colored translucent paper.  The bedroom had white curtains, and when the curtains were drawn in the day, with the bright sun shining on the window, the effect was to create a rainbow curtain of light.  

My brother, Andy, and I were diametrically opposed to each other both in appearance and temperament.  He took after our father with black curly hair, and freckles.  We were both nearly the same height, but he had our father's sturdy build, and always outweighed me by ten to twenty pounds.  I took after our mother with straight, light brown hair, fair complexion and a wiry physique.  I also inherited my mother's Nail Patella Syndrome, which accounted for our slight build, and irregular knees and elbows.  My brother and I were close enough in age to have much in common, despite our differences.  Usually these differences complemented each other, allowing us to work well together, although there was an underlying tension in our relationship.  When we did fight, we fought hard.  In these fights and all my physical struggles, I was forced to use my head.  I was no match physically for my brother, or most others.  My view of violence was that it seemed a poor way to resolve a problem. 

Although Michigan was the only state we had lived in before moving to California, we had traveled to thirty-four states on family vacations or visits to far-flung relatives.  Instigated by our mother, we were a family with a persistent dream of travel.  Hers was an over-whelming curiosity that served her intellectually as a research librarian, and whetted her appetite to go new places -- to see the world.  Our house served as a catalyst for that dream when Dorothy found a buyer that made a trip abroad a reality. 

We planned to leave Palo Alto in February of 1968.  That summer in the San Francisco Bay area would become the summer of love, but the war in Vietnam was raging, and Andy would be 18 before the year was over.  All during the fall of 1967 while the three of us marched in peace rallies in San Francisco and Oakland, Dorothy met with draft counselors to determine how being overseas would affect our draft status.  To her joy, she was told that we couldn't be making a better choice.  There existed a little-known loophole in the draft law which allowed that if one turned 18 overseas and registered with the American Embassy as a resident of that country, a special draft board based in Washington, DC was assigned -- Draft Board #100.  No one had ever been drafted from this draft board.  This loophole was well positioned for the wealthy and connected to take advantage of if they wanted their sons to avoid the draft-- just send your son overseas to go to school before turning eighteen.

In addition to selling the house, we sold most of our belongings.  We hedged a little, though, since we didn't know precisely where we were going, what we would find, nor when we might return, so we left some items in storage in California.  I was sixteen and in the tenth grade.  My most treasured items went into storage -- a telescope, a slalom water ski that I made in junior high woodshop, and my collection of rock and roll posters.  

I inherited Dorothy’s strong wanderlust, along with her attitude to challenge borders.  For me, one of the attractions of travel is the seduction inherent in crossing borders, moving rapidly from a known set of conditions to an unknown, where people and places can be as different as day and night.  

The three of us went first to Mexico where we made arrangements for a leisurely Atlantic crossing on a passenger freighter that would provide ample time to weigh plans or regrets.  The differences in temperament between my brother and I were reflected as the freighter, filled with agricultural products, lumbered away from port.   Andy rode in the stern of the ship, gazing back at the receding lights of Veracruz.  I made my way to the bow, eager to face the open seas and my great, unknown future ahead.  Not that I didn't have close friends that I would miss, but the borders ahead excited me more than the life I was leaving behind.