Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 by Kai Bird

Author:Kai Bird [Bird, Kai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, History, Middle East, Israel & Palestine, General
ISBN: 9781439171608
Google: h9FZaNi5ToYC
Amazon: 1416544402
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-04-20T17:34:04.631000+00:00

6

“A Man Without a Country,” 1967-1970

Kai, Kodaikanal School, India, 1968

There have been times recently, when I thought it a pity that you should have to go through such a soul-searching period when yet so young—but I’ve finally decided that it is probably a very productive exercise, and one that you will not regret, though difficult at the time… the direction you have set for yourself is good, difficult, but not impossible. You are in good company, and need not fear being taken for a crank..

Jerine Bird, letter to Kai Bird, March 31, 1970

Our hasty expulsion from the Middle East was emotionally jarring. I had spent most of my nearly sixteen years in places where Arabic was spoken in the street. The Arab world had been my home. I had expected to finish high school in Cairo. Father had hoped to be reassigned to Cairo, but now we knew that after a summer’s home-leave in the States, we would be moving to Bombay, India. For me, that was foreign territory. And so, too, was America.

What I knew of America still came from Time and Newsweek —meaning that I knew little. Mother once wrote me that she worried about the “Americanization of Kai Bird…. It is so easy to become a ‘man without a country.’” With this in mind, my parents decided, while we were on home leave in the summer of 1967, to enroll me in a monthlong wilderness-survival-training course in Oregon, their home state. As a young man, Father had climbed many of Oregon’s mountains with his high school friend Willi Unsoeld—who in 1963 was the first man to climb the difficult west ridge of Everest. His idea was that the Outward Bound mountaineering school would introduce me to my Oregon roots and simultaneously toughen me up.

I spent the month of August hiking through the Three Sisters Wilderness Area. I was the youngest of the forty teenagers enrolled in the program. One day, we scaled all three “Sisters” in fifteen hours. Each of these mountains is over 10,000 feet. We fought a major forest fire. It was hard, physical work—and every evening I had to make sure I got to the campfire before all the food was gone. In Outward Bound I realized that no one cared about my identity as an expatriate. What mattered was forming the right alliances with people I could trust—who would help me survive! At one point, we elected as patrol leader a boy who was very strong physically, but he had a mean streak. He set the pace, and he pushed it too far for the weaker boys to keep up. A group of us revolted and selected another boy to lead the patrol.

At the end of the month each boy had to “survive” four days and three nights “solo”—without a sleeping bag or food. We were given a fishing line and one hook—and three matches with which to start a fire. I survived, huddled by my fire, drinking stream water. I caught no fish and found nothing else to eat.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.