Road Trips: Becoming an American in the vapor trail of The Sixties Paperback – June 22, 2019

"If I play my cards right, I can turn all this s*** into compost."Amazing that a young man would write that in his last letter of renunciation to his lost love, and then use all that hero's journey experience to write this memoir.The author drops us in the heart of a very strange and fascinating time when a small group of dedicated idealists were convinced the Old World was collapsing and they had to start building the New World based on communal ideals. They appear to try their damnedest with the best of intentions. Does it work out as planned?The wisdom of the author conveys on every page is hard-won and can only be acquired by being young and foolish in completely unique circumstances. Every three pages I found myself nodding, "Yep, that's true. Wish I had known that when I was young and foolish. Wait, maybe I didn't know it until just now."Most counter-culture boomers actively rejected mainstream American society. This author, being from Afghanistan, didn't even know what it was, except as he had experienced it as an Afghan child among American expatriates. We meet him a few years after he comes to the USA, and you get the sense the hippie counterculture was the closest simulacrum of what he wasn't even permitted to completely know in Afghanistan.So you have a completely unique rare moment in history in an unlikely location, Portland. And you have a completely unique experience that won't even come close to being repeated twice. It leads to some very interesting storytelling and perspective, and I want more. The author contrasts his memoir to a novelization of these experiences called "Sinking the Ark," and describes the characters and some of their humorous doings. I would very much like to read that novel.Illustrations appear throughout this book. I recommend reading the artist's statement on the last page first, and then reading the memoir. It reveals how the drawings and text serve each other.Consider the gulf between the statements, "We were living the dream," and, as the author puts it, devastatingly, "We were living a dream."Everybody wants to live the dream, and these young people did, as best they could, but they ended up living a dream, and I've never heard the story told quite like this.It's very wise, and very funny.

If you want to make sense of the world following the recent election, read Tamim Ansary’s new memoir, Road Trips, Becoming an American in the Vapor Trail of the 60s. How did we get from those optimistic days to these? As an Afghan American, Tamim is uniquely positioned to see America, his own youth and the many roads between with impressive objectivity. I especially enjoyed his ever-ironic view of his youthful adventures and how he connected them to mature insights. A disclosure: I heard bits of Tamim's memoir while attending the San Francisco Writer's Workshop, and have known the author since 1999. This fact does not diminish, but only increases my absorption in his story, his lucid descriptions and revealing imagery, and the illuminating connections he makes between his personal, philosophical and political experiences. Tamim’s memoir telegraphs a perspective that evolved for me and many of my community over a thirty year period, from civil rights days through the rise of the new right to the fall of Communism. During those years, we found ourselves alternately working for “the end of civilization as we knew it” as the author calls it, or especially while raising young children, simply expecting it to happen. Our children would live in a world with no more wars, poverty, environmental degradation, restrictions, borders and rules, except those necessary to keep us safe – nirvana. Most especially, or at least (!) a world with mutual respect for all, without gender, religious or racial bigotry. A very warm and glowing vision, and even more recognizable by its distinct texture: fuzzy. My favorite line in this book was, “We knew we were the future, if only we could become better people. But becoming better people—ah! That turned out to be so hard!” I’ve never read a line that so epitomizes the late 60s and early 70s! Read this book for insights, laughs, pure pleasure – and as a way to take your own journey back in time, and then to move forward.

We often hear an old chestnut about the 1960's: it goes like this. "If you remember the 60's, you weren't really there." Or it might be the '70's - maybe 80's? Which would you prefer? No matter, it's a total lie. Tamim was really there, and he really remembers it. He writes from inside, not outside. Each reader can view his own protracted adolescence while reading about Tamim's. His philosophical excursions are things I never could have written myself, but I well remember thinking related thoughts at the same age. He unapologetically reveals a few false memories in the final chapter. Right or wrong, though, we cannot fault Tamim's honesty. Similarly, he is thorough: we cannot take him to task for failing to include something we'd consider vital. It's all there, and our life is his life. He has not suppressed a particle of it. These road trips take place in the intellectual phase of westcoast hippiedom, in the time of the VW beetle, when we still had hitchhiking, ... and when we also had the Draft, Vietnam, Nixon - Oh, god those memories. Tamim revives their menace, but of course they no longer endanger us. He closes with a few wide ranging thoughts on reality, existence and time. After he is done with that part, he hands off the work to his daughter - something we all do in real life, don't we?