Delhi, India
December 26, 1984

Dear Folks,

Someone struck a match and an oil lamp's wick flickered to life. Monstrous shadows leaped and loomed with the unsteady flame. I hugged myself. Hideous alien shapes seemed to throng about me. The cold air was thick with dampness and musty smells that settled deep into the lungs.

I stared, as if mesmerized, through the diffused glow at the darkly stained mud brick walls and dirt floor. My mind momentarily hesitated to believe I was still in the twentieth century, let alone on the same planet. Several hump-backed, horned beasts tethered to iron rings set in the wall upon which the lamp glowed made me think all the more of the Middle Ages.

A tall, narrow figure wrapped in a ragged blanket pointed a long finger at me, then at five hempcord cots lined against a far wall of the stable. A dozen other similarly shaped and clothed figures clustered beside the cots, anxiously waiting for my shivering body to join their company. I sat down slowly on the middle cot. Their forms closed around me like the fingers of a giant hand.

"It is a great problem for us these days," murmured one.

I leaned forward, to more closely study Ajad's angular face. His voice had struck me as suddenly sounding much older than that of the young farmer who'd talked me away from the Grand Trunk Road two nights before, to this little farm village called Jhattipuri.

"The electricity going off, you mean?" I asked, vaguely recollecting that, as we were weaving down the dirt road to Jhattipuri on his old bicycle, Ajad had seemed especially proud that his village of 1,500 had four street lamps and four televisions.

Ajad nodded.

He lamented that anymore the village received electrical power only two or three hours each day. It was almost as if the area was possessed with a will that despised such intrusions of technology in its backyard.

Still, power failures or not, life in Jhattipuri was hardly going to be affected all that much. Basically the same habits and lifestyles that had sustained the village's ancestors of a thousand years back, or more, were going as strongly as ever. In a place like Jhattipuri, where the meals were still cooked over smoking dung or twigs on the ground outside, electricity was probably much more of a luxury than an actual necessity.

All that day had been spent with Ajad and his excited friends, touring their farm fields, their homes, and, most fascinating of all, the separate boys' and girls' schools. As in most other areas along the worldwalk's path, the detachment of the people from modern technology was almost too great to be believed. Almost all of the farming of the land was still done by oxen-pulled plows. Water for the homes was still pumped up from wells by hand or pulled up in buckets by the sinewy arms of the women. Animals, from pigs to buffalo, still wandered freely about the streets, and the school children still did their work on handheld slate boards. As with the homes, the schools had been virtually unfurnished, unheated, badly overcrowded, unlit and with almost no windows. All the children sat on the floors of the schoolrooms, just like at home, or else they sat outside on the dirt, where the weak winter sun provided some semblance of warmth.

Though a thousand Jhattipuri-like villages have come and gone before me on my walk around the world, the primitiveness of each has never failed to leave me astonished. The gap between the lifestyle and thinking of their inhabitants and those of my own homeland is so vast as to seem absolutely improbable. It just seems too incredible to think that in an age of mass media, instantaneous information dissemination, and rapid transport, people still do things like ride buffalo-pulled carts to market and wash their clothes on the rocks of rivers. And it's not just some of the world that lives like that, but most of the planet's inhabitants.

That a very small part of the world could be instantly cooking entire meals with microwaves, doing much of their problem solving on computers, and even launching themselves and their robots into the solar system, while the rest live in a shadowy world largely unchanged from centuries before, seems to be more the stuff of science fiction than reality. Yet such is how it is, with the gap growing more profound each day. So great is that difference I can't begin to see it being narrowed or its growth arrested.

At dawn, a shivering Ajad roused me from the depths of my sleeping bag. In his hands were a tin cup and a large pot of hot buffalo milk. I drank all of it, hoping it might keep some of the morning chill away when I left the stable to continue my journey eastward. While I drank the turnipy tasting liquid, dozens of village boys crowded among the cots and cud-chewing cows. Last night they had been overflowing with questions about American society, now they simply wanted to see that I had a warm send-off.

As is my custom, I asked Ajad for an address to which I could send his family a postcard whenever I reached home. He wrote it down and handed it to me along with 20 rupees.

"What's the money for?" I asked.

"Please send a gift of your country to us, when you can. We want something from America we can show to our friends," he explained in a hopeful voice.

"And," he added quickly, "I will pay any duty."

I smiled. Twenty rupees was worth just under two dollars. Nothing it could buy would fetch any duty fees.

"Sure, I'll send a gift," I said, shoving the money into my jacket.

He told the others in Hindi, their native language, and they talked excitedly among themselves.

Slipping into my pack, I worked my way through their midst and out onto a gray street of housewives with pots on their heads and children leading dull-eyed buffalo toward the nearby fields. Ajad and the others accompanied me to the Grand Trunk Road.

"What should I send you? Anything you want in particular?" I asked Ajad, upon reaching the still quiet highway.

He gripped my hand and held it firmly. "It does not matter. I only care to know that I have a friend who has made it back home."

"You have a friend," I said, "and I'll make it home. Don't worry."

Then I walked away toward the east and a future I knew could never again be ordinary.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 7:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Delhi, India
December 20, 1984

Dear Folks,

The temple stood in a slight patch of eucalyptus and mango trees, just on the edge of a small lake that reflected a blue sky and several white hump-backed sacred cows. It stood on its own and looked out over a broad spread of dormant rice paddies. Not a remarkable temple in any sense: squattish, peeling, made of cement blocks, and with a veranda wrapped around a thick, steeple-like center.

And yet, it was its utter simplicity that probably drew me away from the slow-motion bicycle riders, hopelessly lazy buffalos, and shade of the Grand Trunk Road in the first place. Places of worship, I've discovered, can be very much like cities and towns: In enormous cathedrals, like in cities, those one meets are often fidgety, rushing around with a great air of significance, their minds seemingly preoccupied more with tasks than people; In the simpler homes of God, as in little towns and villages, there is usually someone around only too willing to sit down to a cup of hot liquid and an earful of questions.

In the small courtyard around the temple, I timidly kept my distance and intently observed the strange new scene that greeted me. Several beautiful young village women, barefoot and in plain cotton pants and dresses, were taking turns pouring water over the small statue of a resting cow at the temple's entrance. During this they also bowed three or four times to the statue, then circled the temple itself, sprinkling water on its sides and on the floor of the veranda. All the while, a very frail old man sat nearby on the temple's steps, in the warmth of the morning sun's rays, deeply absorbed in a book.

Quietly I shed my pack, sat beside it, and shook my head. Inside of me a part of my soul wanted to burst into delighted laughter. The India I'd spent the past week crossing was not at all the India I'd been expecting or, perhaps I should say, "worrying about." The increasing filth and crudeness I'd passed through in eastern Pakistan had seemed to promise a
continuation of the same across the border in poorer India. And even less encouraging had been all the scenes of ugliness placed in my imagination by other travelers.

My route across northern India, through Delhi to Calcutta, is along the plains of the Ganges River, the world's most populated region. So much squalor did I envision to be packed along the 1,100 miles of the route, that it was fully my intention to walk its length quickly and sternly and to avoid much close contact with the people, and certainly not to risk my health by eating the food any of the poor should offer me.

The manner in which I'd had to cross India's first state, the Punjab, had done little to dispel my anxieties. Though closed to foreigners ever since the turmoil following Prime MInister Indira Gandhi's assassination, it is now possible to cross the Sikh-dominated Punjab overland on only three days each month, and then only by riding in a convoy escorted by heavily armed policemen. To prevent any close look at the situation in that military-controlled region, the convoy departs from the Pakistan border area at dusk and speeds through the supposedly dangerous no-man's land in the blackness of night.

It is, of course, quite against the rules to disembark from the convoy before it reaches the next state, Haryana. "To do so would be quite risky to one's peace of mind," assured the convoy's potbellied sheriff, who had thrown back his star-studded shoulders and given his over-sized turban a sharp tug for added effect.

But, as the old saying goes, rules are made to be broken. Thus, it would be that an American missionary with whom I hitched a ride across the Pakistan-India border "inadvertently" deposited me onto Punjab soil in the middle of the night some 50 kilometers shy of the Haryana welcome sign.

What transpired during the 150 kilometers, between the next morning's tentative first steps and the stroll up the dirt lane leading to the little temple, was not at all what everyone had me expecting. Rather than danger and tension, I found a great tranquility and natural beauty. For the first time since France, I felt a deep and real sense of spiritualism, of being in an almost ethereal world of holy spirits and dwellings. There was an almost uncanny manner in the way the people lived: so at peace with each other, the land, and the many wild and domestic animals, which they believe to contain the reincarnated souls of former persons.

Because so many of the people I passed depended entirely upon the animals and the land for everything they have, including the mud and reeds for many of their homes, they had a profound respect for their surroundings. So little was allowed to go to waste. Just as the forests were completely clean of any dead brush and branches, no cow or buffalo dung lay untouched for more than a few hours or, in some cases, more than a few seconds. For many women and girls, the collection and making, by hand, of dung into patties for heating and cooking fuel was a full-time chore.

A sudden, dull clang from inside the temple snapped me from the laziness into which I had been lulled by the warm sun and the fragrance of incense and roses. From the temple's dark interior emerged an older woman walking slowly backwards and bowing toward the temple door. On the side of her nose facing me gleamed a tiny gold pendant connected by a gold chain to a hairpin of gold shaped like a fan. Around her ankles, thick bangles in the shapes of snakes crowded together like the folds of droopy silver-colored sock tops. Fine steel and brass or copper bracelets covered much of her forearms.

After a final reverent bow to the cow statue, she turned and approached me. Her cupped hands extended out and down to my surprised figure. Nestled inside them were some tiny sugar candy balls. I was at a loss for what to do. Part of me wanted nothing to do with that icky mess she was offering me.

"Please to accept her prasada?" came a kindly voice from off to the side.

I turned to face a wrinkled, stick-like figure wrapped in coarse cloth and propped up by an ancient walking stick. It was the old man. I'd not seen him move from his spot in the sunlight.

"She has offered the treats to our God, Bhagawan, and now wishes to share them with all she meets. Such food blessed by God we call prasada," he explained softly, a look in his eyes hinting that it would be most unkind to turn down such an offering.

I tried my best to look quite honored and let her push several of the sticky things onto my right palm. She grinned broadly and gave the rest to the old man, who promptly passed them on to me.

"Please, you drink tea?" he asked.

I followed him to a two-room, cinder block hut that was his home. On the way he paused long enough to show me the inside of the temple. In its unlit, closet-like room stood, simply, a plain pedestal in the center. Set on top of it was a paint-streaked rock in a large bowl of flower petals and smoking incense. On the walls were several old calendars topped by faded posters of the flute-playing Hindu god Krishna and other deities, some sprouting many arms and one, an elephant trunk where his nose should have been. Resting peacefully at their sides were many of the animals familiar to India, particularly the cobra and the cow. Suspended from the ceiling, at the end of a long rope, was a small bell. The old man gave it a nudge. It made the same dull clang I'd heard earlier.

"It is for calling down God," he said, with what I'd have sworn was a touch of jest.

As it turned out, he was a monk and the religious caretaker of the temple. Hunched on the dirt floor of his hut over a tin pan of boiling tea and buffalo milk, he explained much of his lonely lifestyle. He was paid nothing to be a holy man, he said, adjusting the twigs flaming beneath the tea. He subsisted entirely on the charity of the temple's worshipers. Like monks thousands of years ago, he still spent each morning wandering from village home to village home knocking on doors and asking for food with which to prepare that day's meals. His knowledge of English came from the 37 years he'd served in the army, from which he received a small, almost negligible, pension.

"You please stay for lunch?" he asked. "It is our duty to feed and give rest for free to any monks who pass by our temple."

"But I am no monk," I replied.

He rose and placed a cup of sweet, milky tea on the bench beside me.

"Ah, but I think you are," he replied with an odd grin.

He sounded as if he'd been reading some part of my inner soul, of which even I was unaware. I stole a glance over the rim of the teacup. He was smiling more than ever.

"You can throw them into the fields if you want," he said with a nod toward my right hand, which was clenched tightly.

The prasada...groaned a voice inside me. I stared down at the sweaty lump stuck to my fingers. Now it was my turn to smile, even if it was an embarrassed one.

"What's for lunch?" I asked quickly. "Maybe more prasada?"

He laughed. "The families today had much buffalo milk to give away."

He paused, as if to think that over, then added with a sigh, "As usual. . ."

The thought of so much raw buffalo milk made me a bit hesitant, too. But just then, as if a sort of omen, the bell inside the temple rang unusually loud and sharp. I involuntarily sat up straighter.

"When do we eat?" I asked without further delay.

Then, I cast aside all my foolish worries and sat back to enjoy the sweetness of the meal's first entree: the poor woman's sugar candy.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lahore, Pakistan
December 4, 1984

Dear Folks,

As long ago as the fourteenth century B.C. the road along which I'm walking from Peshawar, Pakistan, to Calcutta, India, was known as the Royal Route. It was for thousands of years the principal route over which many of the Indian subcontinent's dynasty-makers directed their armies, and perhaps even their worshipers. Millions of pilgrims trekked over its congested potholes to pray at the sites where the Buddha had dwelt during his many reincarnations.

Today the former imperial roadway is simply known as the G.T. (Grand Trunk) Road. Yet, while the royalty and mystics, together with nearly every one of their hundreds of forts and monasteries, have crumbled back into the earth, there remains, as vibrant as ever, the masses. Rudyard Kipling, in his story Kim, perhaps best summed up that throbbing, ever growing vestige when he described this west-to-east artery of energy as a "a river of moving life, such as does not exist in any part of the world."

Since continuing my journey eastward from Islammabad over two weeks ago, I have entered into a fertile plains region known to some as "the land of five rivers." Here I have found very true the words of the many who've told me that everything I see and experience will greatly multiply the deeper I progress toward Calcutta, the very womb itself. As the land grows more productive, so too shall mankind and all its trappings, good and bad.

It is in this same area, what is now east Pakistan, that the Chinese pilgrim Hsuan Tsang wrote in 630 A.D. of one of the rivers, "The Sin-tu (Indus) is extremely clear and rapid. Poisonous dragons and evil spirits dwell beneath this river in great numbers. Those who embark carrying rare gems or celebrated flowers find their boats suddenly overwhelmed by waves."

Hsuan Tsang spoke from experience. On his return journey the Indus claimed 50 of his manuscripts and all the seeds of exotic flowers he hoped to grow in China. The pilgrim, however, was spared: He crossed over on an elephant.

Toward the end of these past 30 days I've spent crossing Pakistan, I've wished often that, like Hsuan Tsang, I had some sort of indomitable beast of my own to ride upon and keep me from the deepening poverty I am traveling through. At times like these walking can be a curse in that it brings me too close, for too long, to the elements of a lifestyle that is anything but healthy. Anymore, the dragon of overpopulation has reared amongst its litter so many things totally contrary to what my American mind considers civilized, or even sane, that I can't help feeling trepidation and much anger at times.

Accepted practices, like having the homeless old and the crippled begging on the streets for money to survive on, the overlooking of flagrant corruption among the police and civil servants, the government not providing even such basics as garbage collection and sewage facilities, the right of men to have several wives at the same time (resulting in incredibly enormous households), the division of persons into caste rankings, and the widely practiced marrying of one's cousins (to keep the family's holdings intact) make absolutely no sense to me. Yet here they are as much a part of daily life as the crows scavenging through the garbage dumped unashamedly upon the streets and walks.

As I stare incredulously at the uncontrolled pollution, the animal corpses, the millions of flies swarming over uncovered food and the people (who take no notice), I worry about my own health. There comes a point at which a society's clinging to the practices of the past goes from being exotic to being decadent and dangerous. Such has happened here.

By nature I look for the goodness in people, and I completely dislike writing of ugliness. But when the ugly has become of such magnitude as to swamp all of my senses, I can no longer remain silent. Furthermore, there has reappeared the most consistent and maddening aspect of all that I've found in every underdeveloped nation I've crossed: the continual military presence. True to form, the soldiers, their rumbling convoys, and their weapons are everywhere. Many mornings I awake to the pounding of drums and of soldiers' boots marching crisply to the beat, the soldiers' voices drifting to my ears from some nearby compound. Then, for much of the day, there is the dust choking me from all the passing trucks and jeeps piled high with battle-ready figures and various implements of death. It has struck me that there are a lot of persons roaming about in search of a war.

The main culprits, or "evil spirits," as Hsuan Tsang might have said, have been the same in Pakistan as in the many Third World nations I've journeyed through: overpopulation, illiteracy and just plain not thinking past one's own interests. I have noticed on my walk that one unmistakable characteristic of an advanced and mature nation is that its members, from the common man to the government, are always thinking ahead, always planning and building and researching, not so much for themselves as for their children and the unborn for centuries to come. That is why the controlling of such things as nuclear weapons and pollution of the environment has become so important in the policies of the developed societies.

Some of the men here have told me that if they practice restraint, or purposefully have fewer babies, Allah would be greatly displeased, might even deny them entry into paradise (where, for sure, they will have several wives!). These men's thoughts are reflective of perhaps most of the others on the streets. They are of the opinion that any changes in their lives are totally up to fate. As I look about and see the very, very poor quality of life their way of thinking has brought them and their children, I wonder if perhaps Allah hasn't already passed judgment.

What, I wonder, is to become of such societies as Pakistan's, which is a mirror image of the majority of the world's nations. Why do most still refuse to stand up and face directly the complexities of the twentieth century? Surely part of the reason behind their fear is a lack of the necessary education. Here the illiteracy rate is a shocking 70-75 percent. And yet the government, which is headed by the military, continues to allocate less than a handful of percentage points of the national budget to education, while over half goes to armaments. Even worse, General Mohammed Zia, the president since 1977 when he assumed power through a coup, is trying hard to gain ownership of a force even more unpredictable than his own subjects: nuclear weapons.

Bad governments, poverty, and overpopulation are nothing new, of course. Undoubtedly these faults of mankind will always be around, for as we are imperfect so must be our societies. Still, I can't quite understand why in some parts of the world those things are allowed such free rein. I suppose some things are never meant to be solved entirely.

Sometime ago, a housewife from deep in the Midwest wrote to me to tell me that the more I saw of the rest of the world, the greater my appreciation of being born in America would become. You know, I think she knew life pretty darn well.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lala Musa, Pakistan
November 25, 1984

Dear Folks,

The words of a stranger. How often I hear those, and yet how few I can still recall by day's end. Most are of the simple and ordinary things in life, like how the weather is, or praise for someone's work. While other times those words from an unfamiliar voice are too important to ignore, and to forget them, to not pass on their message, may mean all the difference between living and dying for others.

A lot of tragedy, oppression, and need reaches the ears of one willing to listen earnestly to the voices of the public. This is especially true when, as I sometimes do, you let the others know you are an actual journalist searching for their view on life. So, how do I decide which of those stories or messages is retained and shared with others in my writing, and which are to be condemned to silence? It's never an easy choice. Sometimes, something as innocuous as the look in the other's eyes, when they tell me their words, can be the key to my taking any action after we have parted and gone on to new distractions.

For almost two weeks now, I have had just such a pair of eyes tormenting the back of my mind. Ironically, they belonged to another journalist about the same age as I am. He was an Australian, and when I met him in Peshawar he had just returned from one month with the mujahadeen (freedom fighters) in Afghanistan's battle-blackened Panjshir ("Five Lions") Valley, just north of that occupied nation's capital city, Kabul.

Peshawar, where journalist Anthony Davis and I met in the dining room of the Green's Hotel, has always been more than just another town. Built at the spot where the infamous Khyber Pass spills down from the barren ranges of Afghanistan's Hindu Kush, Peshawar was directly on the path of most of the trading caravans, nomads, and conquering armies that swept down from the vast expanses of central Asia to the Indian subcontinent. As in the past, the greatest riches to pass through its shadowy narrow streets of hashish smoke and overhanging balconies are its people--especially the hardy, enterprising Pathans, the ever-changing tiny crowd of adventurous foreigners, and, lately, the steady stream of refugees from the war in Afghanistan.

It is the plight of those three million refugees who have crossed into Pakistan since Moscow's December 1979 invasion which Tony loves to cover the most. A Bangkok-based correspondent for the highly-regarded newsmagazine Asiaweek and The Washington Post, the short and stocky writer speaks the Afghans' language fluently and is well-known to the mujahadeen's leaders. Three times he has risked his life to illegally cross the closed Pakistan-Afghanistan border and travel firsthand with the guerrillas to get the complete story of the fighting there. This latest trip was prompted by reports of a massive Soviet offensive on the Panjshir valley last April, the seventh of eight offensives since 1979.

"We wanted to see just what was left," he said.

Very much a "people's journalist," rather than one who just stays in an office and gets everything over the telephone or from bureaucratic spokespersons, Tony can truly feel for common, everyday people whose lives are affected by the wars he covers. Which is why he found the latest scene awaiting him inside Afghanistan to be "thoroughly depressing." As well as why he believes sharing their plight so important that he risks his own life.

The destruction in the valley, now deserted by its former 100,000 inhabitants, was total, he said. Its villages stood as empty blackened shells. The once lush farm fields were reduced to scorched earth, torn apart by tank tracks. What had once been picturesque orchards and dirt cart lanes were little more than junkyards for destroyed tanks and armored personnel carriers. Where in the past there had stood grazing goats and sheep, there now lay endless spent cartridge cases and craters.

The 100-kilometer-long valley's tranquility was but a memory, he added sadly. To more easily control the people, their rural livelihood had been taken away so they would have to move to the city to survive. Crowded together like sheep in a pen, the Afghans could then be kept in order by fewer of their Russian masters. Anymore, the valley was a killing field populated by the fighters of both sides. The songs of birds and the voices of children had turned to the screeching of shells, into the explosions of bombs. Or worse, screams.

About the only ray of hope in the valley was the estimated 7,000 to 8,000 freedom fighters. In spite of having mostly old carbines for weapons and horses for transportation, the mujahadeen still controlled most of the area. The Soviet led force of over 20,000, with its hundreds of tanks and helicopter gunships, still hadn't figured out how to win that confounding valley.

"It was the lesson of Vietnam all over again," Tony had said in a soft voice.

Evidently the lessons of war do not seem as apparent to many others, as they do to persons like Tony. I haven't crossed a nation yet that hasn't had its share of such bloody lessons spilt onto its soil and streets, only to see them repeated again and again.

If only more strangers would let their words be heard, perhaps those lessons would come fewer and further apart. At least Tony can say he tried.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wah Village, Pakistan
November 15, 1984

Dear Folks,

The road explodes into dust with each step. Every morning my tent is frosted with brown. Winter's rains have yet to venture down from their Himalayan nests. Each leaf is thirsty, each face needs a bath.

The towns are flash floods of faces, colors, sound, and movement. Mankind has become like an ant colony: always moving and going somewhere. Nothing rests, not even the invisible. Never would I have thought the air able to bear the weight of so many smells and sounds. Surely I am fallen into the orchestra pit of the very universe itself. An orchestra conducted by not one, but a million mad conductors!

These musicians don't play violins or clarinets. Rather, they toot auto horns, buzz scooter engines, ting-ting-ting bicycle bells, clang hammers against glowing iron, crack horse whips, bubble curry over crackling wood fires, and thump bare soles over packed dirt and garbage. They are the music of life overflowing, of too many proclaiming to the very reaches of the universe the energies burning inside them.

And what of the dance floor? Pakistan is a land decorated in the ugliest poverty but also with more color than a thousand springtime mountain meadows. Then, too, there are the singers, wailing the Koran from lotus-shaped mosque towers, chanting from overcrowded schools, and harping of their gold, silk, or rotting fruit from inside seedy closet-sized shops.

Finally, there are the dancers themselves. As numerous as atoms they twist, roll, squirm, bob, and side-step from one spot to another with all the quickness of untiring sprinters. Most are dressed in turbans and mustaches. Many are young. A few peer over veils with eyes as seductively beautiful as those with which earlier civilizations graced their goddesses. Nearly all seem happy to be swirling with life's forces.

How is it possible one tiny planet, let alone one nation, could be such a paradise of life? Everywhere there is a throbbing, a dashing and clashing and mashing of man and beast that won't allow the heart to slow. Even time must race to stay ahead: no sooner anymore am I shaking off the chill of dawn than dusk has again returned, and I am crawling back into canvas and down, to avoid bumping into those who prefer the darkness rather than the flames of twigs or kerosene.

The warm smiles, the limp handshakes, the humble bowing of heads leave no doubt I am among friends--perhaps the gentlest yet. Still, my eyes dart about like caged animals. With so much energy loosed, one must be constantly attentive, or suffer the inevitable collisions with everything from bicycles to hand-pushed carts to arrogant camels. Five minutes in the market district of any town or city brings with it more speeding objects than a "Star Wars" battle scene. Unlike in western societies, where technology and strictly enforced laws have managed to direct each day's rushing masses into some semblance of channels, here man and beast and machine are always challenging the other for the right-of-way.

Half a dozen civilizations have flourished here along the banks of the Indus River. It's tempting, with all the exotic foods and architecture and people, to think that none of those of the earlier societies have left. Yet the millions of graves and the tired soil say otherwise. Historically this land is one of the most ancient cradles of society. Cities thrived here before Babylon's first bricks were laid, and the inhabitants of those cities were supposedly practicing citizenship before the Greeks knew of such principles.

"Love is life." So goes a popular saying in this almost exclusively Muslim nation of over 80 million. If that is so, then here love is greatly manifested. Certainly there is no doubting their love of life. Nearly three out of four people still farm the land. Even in the cities the side streets are more like barnyards than roadways. While in the markets, the caged chickens, pigeons, canaries, and parrots for sale add their squawking to the din.

Though the present culture is Muslim, the vestiges of the prior one of the Hindus are everywhere. Not only is there the love of the soil and of nature in general, the temple-shaped mosques, the spicy rice and curry dishes, the long shirts and baggy, drawstringed, pajama-like trousers, and the sari wrappings, but there is also a love of color that borders on obsession. The most ordinary buses and trucks, with their skirts of wind chimes and their streamers and hand-painted panels of peacocks, jet planes, roses, tigers, and nature scenes make it appear as if everyone is rushing off to a Mardi Gras parade.

Indeed, I'm still waiting to be served my first bowl of rainbow rice!

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Peshawar, Pakistan
November 7, 1984

Dear Folks,

After escaping from the brutal police commander in eastern Turkey, I had no choice but to make my way back to Greece. With my imprisonment by the Turkey police being but a stone's throw from Iran, I had in effect accomplished my goal of crossing all of Turkey on foot.

In Athens, Greece, I rested and made preparations for the second half of the Worldwalk. I then flew onward to Pakistan. On the long flight aboard the Russian Aeroflot jet--first to a freezing Moscow, then to a steaming Karachi--bouts of frustration gripped at my insides from time to time.

I was mulling over my failure to gain the permission I'd needed to cross Iran on foot from Turkey to Pakistan. I had visited the Iranian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, before my return to Greece, in the faint hope of finding a way to cross its interior on foot. But, alas, the results were as disheartening as ever. I was told I must wait up to eight weeks for a visa, and then I could only visit (not on foot) certain areas for a very short period. Any way I looked at the conditions offered, it amounted to a waste of my time and energies.

Perhaps it is as well that I had to go around Iran, for while inside the consulate I had studied a map which showed that much of Iran's western area, even up near the U.S.S.R., had suffered attacks by the Iraqi army or air force. Also, there were posters and blown-up photos on the walls--dozens of them, all screaming of death and the glory of spilling blood.

It was so saddening to think the once beautiful Persia had aged into something so wretched and devoid of smiles. Had she no more compassion or love or humbleness? If she did, they hid themselves well from my eyes.

Iran now lies behind, a missing link in the walk's growing chain. The empty pages that should have held her stories now must serve to remind me of how vulnerable learning is to tyranny.
In Karachi, Pakistan, I bid the hefty stewardesses of the world's largest airline good-bye and descended onto the opposite side of our world. Now it is Pakistan--a nation that, from what I have seen these past several days, still simmers in a heat and a humanity as stifling as when it was known as the Western Province of India.

As in other poor areas of my journey, the beggars still defy the imagination in their variety of
contorted frames and afflictions. Also in their numbers, as one is never far from their reaching arms. And, too, there is the endless crowd of loosely-garbed humans still rushing and buzzing as if possessed with the energy and mindlessness of insects.

Such commotion I have never witnessed. There is the temptation to conclude that, here, man has lost all control of society, that somewhere in the past he suddenly went mad and is becoming all the more so with each minute. This is the land that many who should know of such things have said the worldwalk's final chapter will be written. So frightening have their views of my chances been, that I have come to wonder if by coming here I, too, have lost my mind.

Way back, in the worldwalk's dawn, there were those like Pakistan's own embassy officials in Washington: "You will not walk there!" the consulate director had shouted, angrily flinging his eyeglasses across his desk top. "There are too many thieves! You will be killed, of that I am certain! You must take a train or a bus."

Then later, there would be many like Phillip, a seasoned traveler who had been to that still distant nation: "In Africa you stand a chance because the bandits have only knives. But in Pakistan"--his eyes narrowed--"they carry rifles. Life there has no value. They'll shoot you for less than your shirt."

And now, just a little over two weeks ago, there was this written warning from my own nation's embassy in Athens: . . . a high incidence of nighttime robbery by bandits. Visitors should be certain to reach their destination before dark. Bandits have been engaged in robbery, abductions and shootings directed against road travelers in daylight hours . . .

As I write these words to you, I am being mercilessly rocked about in the dusty carriage of a train taking me to the Khyber Pass on Afghanistan's northeast border with Pakistan. The land rushing past my window has, for the most part, been flat and hazy with dust being kicked up by camels, oxen, and the sandaled feet of what has seemed like a million fragile brown-skinned figures. Today the world has shown her age and her weariness in trying to support so many for so long without any sleep.

Yet, I am not unduly worried. Soon the scenery will be young again. Soon, in only a few hundred kilometers, nature will once again sing and man will be reveling, not suffering. It is said that where I am going the snow on the distant Himilayan peaks rivals the sun in brightness, that the fields are full of fruit and the perfume of rare flowers, and that the people are so fiercely independent they have never been conquered by any army, from Alexander the Great's to those of the British colonizers.

It is the land of the Pathans I dream of--the largest tribal society in the world. It is beneath their turbaned heads and handmade guns that pass the most famous routes from the Middle East and Central Asia to the Indian sub-continent. So great is their determination to live as they wish, that the military rulers of this young nation (formed in 1947 for India's Muslims) have not dared to wrest from those men their many guns.

Perhaps some may consider me a fool for entrusting myself during the first part of my walk across Pakistan to so much pride and cold steel. However, I think it is my safest option in a nation filled with so much lawlessness. It has been my experience on this journey that those peoples whom others speak of with much awe and reverence are always societies in which law and order dominate, where there is a heightened sense of what is right and what is wrong.

And, especially important in my case, such esteemed peoples generally are all too aware of the painful consequences to be suffered by any of their own who dare to act dishonorably.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Athens, Greece
October 15, 1984

Dear Folks,

Turkey, in the remaining miles to the Iranian border area, was as desolate as my own boots. Dirt turned into restless dust, then into rock, then finally into cooled lava battered into grotesque forms by centuries of Russia-bred winds. Objects like farmhouses and grazing livestock, normally barely noticed in passing, stuck out from the earth's baldness as starkly as the subjects in a Salvador Dali painting.

The people themselves often took on the raggedness and ugliness of those in a Charles Dickens' slum. From the hairy lips of many of the men there no longer came forth offers of tea and food but, rather, fanatical exhortations to the greatness of Allah and bitter grumblings about their deepening poverty.

When the tractors turned into oxen and the stacks of firewood into high cone-shaped piles of cow dung, an uneasiness grew inside me. The villages had decayed into settlements nearly as primitive as those Genghis Khan's arrows had once targeted, and the dirty faces that stared at me from inside the smoking mud-walled homes had an intensity I'd not seen since Africa.
There are many who say the Devil himself presently reigns in neighboring Iran, a beautiful and exotic land once known as Persia. Perhaps there is more truth to that than the rational mind is willing to give credit: From the amount of war-related material moving in that direction and the deteriorating state of nature and man as I drew closer to its borders, I was left with a strong impression that beneath the curtain currently draped over the Iranian society there are few rays of laughter and song.

A young, English-speaking, fanatically devoted Muslim police commandant whom I was brought before in Eleskirt, a military-ringed town 20 miles from the end of my Turkish journey, may have provided a glimpse of what would have awaited me in the present Iran, had I gained permission to cross into it. At the very least he was a good example of the condition a man's soul can take when he refuses to learn about others firsthand but, instead, relies only on his own emotions and on what others tell him.

The commandant's Gestapo-like subordinates found me in a dark tea house on a side street choked with horse-pulled buckboards and shouting schoolboys in dark suits and ties. I was busily working on my notes at the time, which apparently gave them the excuse they needed to raise their voices and show how intimidating they could be. While the others in the room slunk past the grimy windows and back out into the street, the officers fired away with questions like: "Why are you here?" "Why aren't you in a part of Turkey where the tourists go?" "What have you seen?" "What are you writing?" "Whom have you spoken to?"

My explanation that I was walking around the world and that their town simply happened to be along my route seemed to fall upon deaf ears. Even my newspaper clippings, my journals and the signature book failed to make an impression. I was perplexed. Why didn't they want to believe me--or even listen to me, for that matter?

At the police station their commander's words and actions provided me the answer. To my embarrassment, I was brought to his office with a policeman close on either side of me, as if I were a criminal. Before I could sit, his first question was hurled in a mocking voice at me: "You (Americans) think you are first class citizens?"

When I answered yes, he flung my passport at me and then spat, "I think you are fourth-class citizens!"

He continued with much disgust. "Every day I read in the newspapers how your country is all homosexuals and drugs. You are perverts--you think only of money and sex!" Then after a sick laugh came from his muscular chest, he snarled with much delight, "And I think your President Reagan is the biggest pervert of them all."

So that was why his men had refused to listen to me in the tea house. Like their commander, they hated Americans and relished the thought of having a chance to bully one for a while. In all likelihood I was the only American to have stopped in their little domain in years, certainly the most vulnerable and accessible one.

My fears became all the more certain, the more the commander spoke.

"Where is your permission from our government to write about us and take photographs?" he asked. Of course I had no such papers--something I hated to admit, because he had let me know that he had information from his government stating I was a journalist.

He smiled arrogantly and tapped my journals. "I think I will lock you up for a few weeks. How do I know you are not a spy?"

I told him that what he was saying was not only obviously absurd but also potentially embarrassing to both him and his government.

He laughed all the more loudly.

"Every day people write bad things about Turkey. What is one more bad story?" he said angrily. "If I want to, I will lock you in prison for years and not tell anyone! This is Turkey. You are under my power now."

No, I thought sadly to myself, this is not Turkey, not the warm and gentle country of smiles and new friends I'd been walking through the past two months. This was something else, an extension of Khomeini's hell perhaps, but no, not Turkey.

The rest of his profanities and mockeries seemed aimed at provoking me into some angry response or action that would give him a real excuse to toss this "enemy of his beliefs" into a cell to rot. But I remained calm. I had seen for myself, both growing up and in my walking, what my own society was like, and it was nothing like what he had so foolishly let others convince him it was.

I became very much alarmed when the commandant placed me under house arrest, and I realized things were getting seriously out-of-hand, when two guards armed with machine guns marched me away to a separate, isolated concrete building. There they left me alone in the empty, darkened bunker. One of the guards remained stationed outside the front door.

Much later that night, when I found to my amazement that a rear window was open and not being guarded, I took it upon myself to make an escape. My heart pounded, as I wondered if it was just a "set-up," where they were out there in the dark night waiting for me, so they could shoot "an American spy trying to escape." All the same, I decided that I must take my
chances. I slipped out into the freezing blackness, then crawled on my hands and knees away from the jail and made my way out of town to some nearby mountain peaks.

I walked all night, carefully avoiding the roads. When I arrived at Agri, 20 miles away,and on the backside of the mountain range, it was under the grayest clouds I'd seen in my 55 days of walking across Turkey. I was exhausted, injured from a beating at the hands of the police, and feeling sick. But at the same time I was happy: I'd escaped what I'd felt was certain death at the hands of that madman. And to make it all the better, I was now at the end of my walk through Turkey...and more than halfway home.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 7:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Erzurum, Turkey
September 29, 1984

Dear Folks,

Just before the one-quarter mark of my journey, I wrote the following from Spain to a friend:
"The World Walk continues to provide me with more romance, excitement, beauty, and wonderment than I'd ever have imagined possible. So much has happened to me that at times I am moved to tears by the impact of all that I have seen and learned.

"What an incredible planet we live upon. How will I ever be able to properly share with others even a tiny fraction of all the new things I have become aware of? Indeed, these past months since departing from my hometown of Bethel have seemed more like fiction than reality. Can life really be this magical?, I've asked myself so many times. Let no man tell you that he is bored or that life is dull, for there can be no excuse for such feelings on such a paradise of activity as Earth. And, likewise, let no one convince you there is not heaven, for it is all about us."

Now, the halfway mark itself--7,500 miles--has become another ingredient in my memory's caldron. Those words I penned in south Spain ten months ago remain true. Still, with all the obvious benefits that have come my way through the walk, the question of why I'm doing it remains strong in the minds of many who've learned of my journey.

The whole thing began innocently enough as a 9-year-old's whim to someday grow up and explore the entire universe. My inspiration was (and still is) that old killer of cats: curiosity. Growing up with the awareness that there's a whole world of strange things out there waiting to assault my senses was all I needed to keep my itch alive. It was to be one fantasy which refused to go away in the sobriety of growing up.

Still, the dream might have slowly passed away if not for the disturbing words of my 80-year-old grandmother. Though her own legs were too weak to support her anymore, she always wore the world's firmest smile, and she had once told me: "Whatever your dream is, do it while the urge is strong. Don't put off the dream until a`better day,' because life never gets any better than when you're struggling to see your dreams come true."

At the time of my grandmother's advice I was 23 and more tempted than not to follow the secure course of a 9-to 5 journalist. But the more I contemplated her words, the more sense my boyish fantasy made, as opposed to what seemed the "normal and reasonable" route to take. Taking the extra time and effort to explore in detail the world about me just seemed to fit. I loved learning, meeting people, exploring and traveling. So, why not?

Traveling on foot, strange as it may sound, even made sense journalistically: when you're walking an area you are exposed to everything. Little misses your senses. Plus, I would be able to collect enough interesting personalities, settings, and stories to satisfy my writing needs for a lifetime times ten.

I also felt there had to be more goodness in the world than the stories coming across the news wires were telling me. I disagreed strongly with my journalistic peers' pessimistic views of the world and its future. I knew from hitchhiking across the United States several times during my teens that, more than anything else, people love to help others. Many times they couldn't seem to do enough.

Thus, all the more reason to travel on foot with only a backpack. In that manner I would be purposefully depending on the everyday common people to help me around the world. In a sense I wanted to test mankind, and if it responded as I thought it would, I might even, in my own small way, help to break down the popular conception that this is mostly a cruel, cold, selfish world.

Depending on others forces me to meet many day in and day out. So, in my own subtle way, I was forcing myself to experience far more human encounters than the average traveler can ever have. And a greater variety, too.

There seems to be a mystique about the young lone traveler with a pack on his back. It's as old as history. In the Middle Ages monks and people of the church used to go on long pilgrimages alone. For thousands of miles they would walk and people always took care of them. And it's still true. People--you and I--still feel an inner compassion for the lone traveler seeking nothing more than knowledge and friendship.

All of which, as you might guess, suits this particular knobby-kneed pilgrim just fine.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Koyulhisar, Turkey
September 17, 1984

Dear Folks,

His face was ugly enough to scare away the meanest grizzly, his hands thick enough to be roots of the mountains guarding his golden rice paddies. In a more primitive setting, say in central Africa, his strength and 73 years would have made him the village chief. To the one hundred or so inhabitants of Guney, Koyu, however, most of whom worked in his rice fields in the valley far below or were related to him through his four previous wives, Aydi Bekir was simply the boss, grandfather, or father.

My path across north-central Turkey to his mud-walled domain had taken me through a land whose character changed quickly and erratically. One day I might be staggering over terrain as barren as a lunar plain, while the next day I would be floating through a deep river valley as lush and green and filled with children's laughter as a postcard from Katmandu.

About the only consistencies I could count upon in this jumbled region were the rising of the land, the lowering of the lifestyles, and--much to my weariness at times--the incessant large crowds of curious menfolk in each distant village. And so it was to be in tightly-cloistered Guney Koyu, too, when I climbed its dirt footpaths to photograph some housewives I'd spied baking bread in an outdoor stone oven.

At first I was tempted to politely refuse Aydi's offer of tea. Already that long day I'd consumed 22 teas and two colas in the previous village of Hacihamza (Ha-gee-hom-sa), where I'd allowed myself to be enticed into several waiting crowds of men and boys dressed in crudely patched cloth. But when the smiling giant quickly added a bed and dinner to the tea, I motioned him to lead on.

The hospitality ritual which followed was typical of treatment a guest receives in Turkish rural homes. In many ways it is still largely unchanged from those described in Marco Polo's own journals. Like then, the guest is made to feel that he, not the host, is the most important person present under that particular roof.

At the bottom of the stairs leading up to Aydi's home above a grain storage barn, my shoes joined at least ten pairs of thin rubber sandals. Atop the wooden steps was a veranda of bamboo shades, intricately patterned wool rugs, rough wood benches, and one low hard sofa piled with long and heavy flowery pillows, upon which I was made to recline. Very quickly, the usual huge round tray of tea and food was placed before me by his sons, and the benches and rugs were filled with males of the village, come to satisfy their curiosity and show their respect to another of their kind.

As is normal in a Muslim household, the females stayed out of sight, their presence made known only through the comforts obediently served by the sons and, rarely, from a fleeting glimpse of a scarved head stealing a peek through an open door.

This particular day happened to be the first, and most important, day of the four-day-long Muslim "Bayram Kurban," or feast of the sacrifice. All through the Islamic world on this day, all who could had killed and butchered a ram for Allah, with one-third of the meat going to the owner, one-third to his neighbors, and the remaining to the poor. Thus, besides the normal bowls of yogurt, spicy vegetable soup and whole freshly-picked tomatoes and peppers on my dinner tray, there was a generous heap of the sacrificial animal, diced and covered in its simmering greases.

Five times (once every hour) one of the young boys sitting silently off to the side rose and poured perfumed water into each man's cupped hands. Then for several seconds the air was filled with the fragrance of lemon and the sounds of palms rubbing together against forearms and stubble, instead of coarse voices grumbling or boasting.

The Turkish language has been one of the easiest I've tried learning. So I was able, even if only in Tarzan fashion, to add my fair share of manly chatter during the evening. We joked about how I would become a "Bayram Kurban" if I dared to cross into Iran, and how it seemed everyone but me in the room was related to Aydi. Trying to figure just exactly how many grandchildren he did have provided plenty of argumentation.

Late that night, after the village men had returned to what must surely be some of the world's most patient wives, I was buried beneath a ton of blankets on that same sofa. A beaming
Aydi sat beside me dressed in striped pajamas and stocking cap, looking as if he wanted to do one more bit of goodness for me before retiring.

I hinted that a glass of water might be nice. He rose from his chair and dashed into the house as if every second meant the difference between life and death. He strode back to my side several minutes later with the water and a plate of more kurban. Not until I'd finished every morsel and he'd had the pleasure of fetching me one more glass of water did he go off to the wife I was never to meet.

For a while longer sleep remained as elusive as the stars shining between the mountain peaks now forming my bedroom walls. On my arms were goosebumps that I knew came not from the chilly air or the muffled thunder of the Kizi-lirmak River far below. Rather, they were caused by the realization that my walking was doing exactly as I'd hoped it would: it was placing a question mark in the minds of those I passed and impelling them to invite me into their homes, their hearts and their minds.

Now, only a handful of days from being halfway around the world, I've already seen so much it almost frightens me to stop and dwell upon all the new scenes added to my life the past 18 months. During the past week alone, I've camped with three gypsy families, bathed in a lavish 700-year-old village bathhouse, and marveled at the beauty I'd found inside a mosque a caretaker had silently waved me into.

I shudder. Supposedly the most exotic still lies hidden over the horizon.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 7:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tosya, Turkey
September 5, 1984

Dear Folks,

Like some endless procession of long, rectangular and angry elephants, they rumble through the bottleneck entryway into Asia Minor as if the dusty brown hills still hold the bandits of centuries past. With air horns trumpeting loudly and with insides fuming, the eighteen-wheelers of Europe charge to and from warring and material-starved Iran and Iraq in numbers that seem insane.

As it has probably been since the time of Alexander the Great, Allah's Turks hold the overland keys to the Near and Middle East. And like the banner-draped caravans of long ago, today's cargo haulers still wear the distinctive color of their place of origin. The covered semi-trailers of communist regimes, for example, are always uniformly sharp, taut, of spotless military gray or blue, and marked with nothing more than efficiently-stenciled block letters spelling the nation's name. On the other hand, those of capitalist societies such as the very rich West Germany boldly fly the colorful badges of their entrepreneur lords.

However, the most exciting members of this parade of growling, gnashing work beasts are the much smaller Dodge, Fargo, and DeSoto vehicles of the Turks themselves. Darting recklessly in and out of the paths of the more arrogant and high-riding Volvos and Mercedes-Benz trucks, the Turks' ten-wheelers are driven with an intensity once reserved for their Allah-directed battle horses. Gaily adorned with silk tassels, rainbow-colored beads, tinsel, and hand-painted frills, flowers, and scenes of mountain homes and big-eyed children, their vehicles are wonderfully wacky misfits in the conservative world of commerce and trade. As I have found the people themselves to be, their trucks seem to take a mischievous delight in not conforming to the rules of a modern society.

Combine all these would-be vehicular warriors with the incessant curiosity and hospitality of the masses packed along the road shoulders, and you will have some idea of the maelstrom of human energy and encounters I was immersed in during the first 150 kilometers east of the Bosporus Strait.

Let's take a look at just three of probably a dozen different persons who managed to wave me off my feet during one day in a stretch between the cities of Adapazari and Bolu.

First to shout "Gel! Gel!" (Come here!) at my passing figure was tassle-haired 34-year-old Acip. As did most Turks, he mistook me for a German, but was all the more excited to find I was of a much less common species--the Americans. He is what is jokingly referred to here as a "Turk -Deutsch." As have millions of Turkish men, he has spent most of his adulthood working in Germany and has thus begun to look and act more Western than Eastern.

In our stocking feet, and over the usual Turkish breakfast of pickled black olives, hard boiled eggs, heavily-sugared tea in tulip-shaped glasses, honey, bread, and bitter yogurt mixed in cold water, Acip revealed that we were in his father's home where he had returned for a brief visit. Although he, his wife, and three children were now able to live a modern lifestyle, as a result of his employment in faraway "Deutschland," they were hardly able to enjoy it because of homesickness. The cold and rains of Hamburg only added to his and his wife's sense of isolation. Like it or not, he knew that his aging "baba" (father), "anne" (mother), and "Turkiye" (Turkey), would never be fully his again: his children had been born in Germany, and it would be all too foolish to ever leave behind the privileges of the little ones' German citizenship.

Lunch, and my next insight into this society, were in the town of Duzce, in the insurance offices of 21-year-old Birol's father. Between heaping plates of rice topped with fried goat kidneys, mutton meatballs stewed in peppers, and honeycovered apricots, the soft-spoken Birol described how last year, as a university student, he had been imprisoned for six months for passing out socialist literature. In addition to giving up any hope of a college degree, he was still under police surveillance. Also, he had been beaten with a whip during his imprisonment.

Later, as I packed my notes to leave, a co-worker asked to see my notepad. He scratched out the word "Lenin" that Birol had written while emphasizing some point. It would be "hayir guzel" (no good) for me if the military or police found such words on my person, he warned.

My dinner "host" for the day was to ride up from behind in the dark on a big old bicycle to invite me to tea in the tire repair shack where he worked the night shift alone. Thickly mustachioed, wide-chested, and handsomely iron-jawed, 20-year-old Aydin was the fiercely proud son of Russian parents who had fled the communists when he was a small boy.

At one point, while stuffing ourselves with cantaloupe and a rough, flat bread smeared with red rose-petal-flavored honey and goat milk curds, he pointed to a poster of fur-capped Russians with curved swords leaping high above pony-tailed maidens. Making a fist, he shouted that he would love nothing more than to be a free and fighting Cossack of his Caucasus homeland. Then he reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a grease-smeared harmonica, wiped it across his leather vest, and blew through it a Russian dance tune that would have had the maidens leaping, too.

When the harmonica at last became silent and the floor stopped shaking from the pounding of heels, Aydin invited me to give up the road for the night and try sleeping on a cot in the back of the shack. I accepted. It hardly seemed sensible to turn down three offers of bed and shelter in one day. And besides, the world could do without one more misfit for at least a few hours.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)