Vermont is paradoxical. Most people elsewhere in the country think of Vermont as a bastion of tree hugging, gay loving, war protesting Liberals. Yet for three terms in a row the state has elected a conservative Republican governor. It was first to outlaw slavery (1777), yet a visitor is hard pressed to find one person of color out of a hundred. Vermont was the last state in the union to get a Walmart, yet it has a nuclear plant and receives the remaining bulk of its power from Quebec. On average it is two hours to Albany, three to Boston, four to New York and two to Montreal, yet Vermont is by all measurements the most rural state. Maybe this dichotomic nature has something to do with the fact you are not considered a true Vermonter unless your family goes back five generations stacking six cords of firewood in October, digging out in waist-high January snow, pulling a car (or cart) from the mud in March, and eating black flies in June. There is a profound attachment to the land that is becoming scarce beyond its borders. Such attachment breeds a different temperament than liberal or conservative; it is slate, it is marble, it is pine, it is hay. It is snow geese flying south; it is what it means to stay.
The place where I spoke this week, Middlebury College, has been around since 1800. In many ways it is a microcosm of Vermont, far enough from the interstate to pause, absorb the swelling farmland littered with seven-foot rolled bales like earthen dot candy, behold the timorous sugar maple as it clings to its remaining leaves, and stand on a high enough bluff to peripherally admire the ancient worn Green Mountains to one side, the still uplifting youthful Adirondacks to the other. Middlebury is the breeding ground for Harvard MBAs, Wall Street brokers and CEOs. Yet it has the knack to matriculate someone capable of writing The Vagina Monologues. The locals criticize the sense of elitism that permeates the campus, yet they froth over the 6 million dollars the college pumps into the economy each year. This has been my home since 1993. Though I have given my presentation thirty times in thirty different ways, I was tremendously nervous, trembling even before I stood at the lectern. This was about so much more than my message. Beneath it something inevitable stirred. I hadn’t felt this way since stepping onto the Kam Air flight from Delhi to Kabul. Time to let go. Time to act in accordance with the truism that I am, in the most honest sense, beside the point. I struggle once again with the question of whether or not what I do is more important than who I am.
Did you ever notice how after you buy a car you suddenly see it everywhere on the road? It is like walking through the forest never once seeing a mushroom until you go back and actually look. See? Dozens of chanterelles, chicken of the woods, pink ones white ones and lone brutes that are blood-red. So it has been for me as I fulfill invitations around the country to stand and speak about Afghanistan. Afghans in every crowd. A woman in her thirties from Kabul, living in Portland, Maine. Two juniors in a San Diego high school. Zoya, representing RAWA, touring the states in her attempt to alert Americans to the actualities of the war, and here, Middlebury College, two students among the crowd rooting for me to gift to them a piece of home, but wary that I might as easily as a kite that has lost its string, fail.
The two Middlebury students came up to me and spoke Dari. I answered. It was a verbal hug, a piece of khawk in a sea of first-world mirages. There were people in the room who have known me twelve years, some almost twenty-five. Very smart people, thoughtful people not easily hypnotized by a dancing voice of little substance. Add into the mix native Afghans and the effect was unsettling. I shook hands I could not match with faces. I fumbled with the projection system and hardly sipped the tea my host had steeped for me. In my life I had never been introduced the way real scholars and authors are introduced. “Ian Pounds this and that, Semester at Sea, Oxford, Bread Loaf, memoir…” I was flattered as hell and enjoyed my moment of validity and honor, but the real introduction should have gone like this: Mister Pounds gained his education traveling 10,000 miles on the angle of a genetically transmitted hitchhiker’s thumb. He is lucky. He should be dead, not of bravery or some sense of adventure but from his own stupidity. As a youngster he drove cars at night drunk. He jumped from bridges and he slept on park benches. He drank venom on snake alley in Manila. Time went by, but it is difficult to say where it went. Naturally, he traveled to Kabul. Here he is, as far as we know, still alive.
It is true I have not, out of thirty talks, given the same one twice. Though I painstakingly prepare, the instant I stand before a group of people the script goes out the window. I have to read it in their eyes. On this occasion there was no need for a getting to know you, trust me story. I launched into the harsh realities for women and children in Afghanistan. “Right now…” I prefaced each fact, because right now is non negotiable. Right now is at the same exact moment you are listening and I am talking. Right now is not a story someone told or a prediction of inevitability. Though my talks differ there are certain congruities; I usually get around to telling the story about teaching the girls how to spit watermelon seeds, and often I read the poem Farzana chose from her book of Rumi. There is the video, a hinge in the middle of the presentation that shocks people with the full summer breeze of hope. One story always gets them, the time Mahbooba and the rest of the students would not be dismissed early from class. “We want our five minutes,” she said. Most people smile and laugh, but it is laced with self-awareness, even shame, because none of us has gone through our American life having not wasted, time and again, that five minutes.
The questions that come after my presentation reflect a level of interest I have not seen in my life. I have been told the sixth most used word in all Google searches is Afghanistan. I believe it. The questions are focused, non rhetorical, earnest and almost pensive. We tend to go on for another thirty to forty minutes beyond the one-hour talk. There are the people who have decided how they feel about troop levels. I sideswipe them by simply talking about the population, the history, the evolution of an aide dollar, the landscape, the vision of inclusiveness in the orphanage, the effectiveness of working separately from institutions of government and religion and NGOs, service working face to face with those being served, and of course there are the children. I talk about everything but troop levels, until quite magically the answer becomes a foregone conclusion without ever actually answering the question. Usually there is a third way when we are all bouncing between two options. It is in a sense the way of a man nobody mentions, Ramazon Bashardost, who came in third in the presidential election behind Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah. He did not stuff any boxes with ballots. He did not buy any votes. He drove around in a beat-up Toyota to every province of Afghanistan without a single bodyguard. He got votes from thousands of Pashtuns even though he’s Hezara. They say he is crazy. But there he is.
A ten-year old girl asked why is it important for the children to stay in Afghanistan. Why not give them a good life in America? This got me to thinking. What, I wonder, is this yearning to adopt? Why this urge to fold the world in our arms? Is it greed, is it compassion? Hubris? Love? I spoke to the girl about peace coming from within, that it could not exist if all the peace loving people left Afghanistan. What I should have told her was a story, how I once built a cabin on a deserted island in southeast Alaska, how I sat for days on a rock between three giant trees, a hemlock, a spruce and a yellow cedar, how I listened to the waves crash only fifty yards away, the raven croaking like a shaman in the woods, until finally the island told me where to build.
Then the inevitable happened; the Afghan student Tabasum Wolayat raised his hand. He appreciated my meaning, and he meant no disrespect, but how can there be security letting madmen run about? In other words he wanted an answer to the ten zillion dollar question everyone has been asking for months; the one I had been avoiding. This time it was a direct hit. “Withdraw or build up?” I liken that question to asking a suicidal person whether it is better to live or to die. What, I wonder, would a real Vermonter say? I suspect he or she would summon up an anecdotal phrase. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results. Withdrawing feeds the enemy; building up feeds the enemy. Perhaps it is not the enemy that should dictate our action. Perhaps we should find the light, and protect it. I think of the Friday evening back in Mehan orphanage when Sadof pulled the chair out from under me. What would have happened if I left the party for good, or scorned her into a corner where all her friends might scorn her too? The enemy there was a naughty disrespectful girl, and my pride could see only two courses of action. What if there was a third way? What if I held the other part of her by the hand, squeezed it in my own? What if for days I invited her to be a star, the part of her that likes to perform, rather than banishing her from the show? What if I want her in the end to thrive, to be loved and to love me back? The answer is that Sadof is Afghanistan, and the only way to get a girl like that up off the ground it to give the strength that is hers a place to shine.
I think that Tabasum was satisfied with my response. It is a dangerous thing to let hope creep back under the skin when time and again it has been peeled away. He gleamed. We exchanged email addresses. His English is impeccable. He will undoubtedly go on to achieve great things. It is, after all, Middlebury. I wonder what he sees in those mountains, those fields that matches his own spirit. The native’s relationship to the land must resonate with him. How strange a reversal it was, this Afghan Vermonter shaking hands with a Vermonter from Afghanistan. I remind myself we are all in our own way orphans.
The following day I called a realtor. I visited old schoolhouse #7 one more time, put my hands against the fieldstone walls in its kitchen. My hands remembered gripping the mason’s hoe, the cold river the stones had once been home to, the throbbing poison of cement. Home is never where you are, Farzana?
Her answer is clear as my memory of her smile.
Never
