Road Trips, Becoming an American in the vapor trail of The Sixties

Road Trips, a memoir by Tamim Ansary, recounts stories from his years as part of the American ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture, after he arrived from Afghanistan where he was born and raised. The book revolves around three arduous journeys he launched from his home base in Portland, Oregon, between 1969, when he hitchhiked across North America with five dollars in his pocket, and 1975, when he and a girlfriend went on a four-month road trip that ended up in the Yucatan jungle near the ruins of Tulum. These odysseys are bracketed by a prologue, in which ten-year-old Ansary accompanies his father on a journey to find a legendary alabaster mountain in southwestern Afghanistan; and an epilogue, in which Ansary stumbles on a sheaf of long-lost letters from his counterculture years. The stories unfold against the familiar background of communes and collectives, Woodstock and Watergate, sex, dope, acid, rock’n’roll, and the end of civilization as we know it, but at heart this is not a history of those all too-well-chronicled times; it’s a mythic private story of which we all have some idiosyncratic version of our own: the passage from wonderstruck childhood through tortured adulthood to contemplative old age.