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 counterculture of the '60s and '70s, after he arrived from Afghanistan where he was born and where he spent the first sixteen years of his life. The book revolves around three arduous journeys 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 ending in the jungles of the Yucatan peninsula. 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 this is not a history of those all too-well-chronicled times. It's about a collective dream from which the dreamers woke up alone; and it's about coming of age, that mythic private tale of which everyone has their own idiosyncratic version--the passage from wonderstruck childhood through tortured adulthood to contemplative old age.