By the way

After a blistering cold wind, the warmth of House of India on North Street is welcome. Today they serve rice, lentils, chicken in ember-orange spices, vegetable fritters, and cilantro, sharp yogurt sauce, and sweet coconut cream. A steady line of us serve ourselves by lifting the lids of copper pots and hanging them on hooks above. The music playing is high and clear.

Since I moved back to the Berkshires, I keep finding ways it has expanded, as I keep refinding its essential flavor. 500 years ago these mountains were seasonal lands for the people who lived south in the Hudson valley. (Does that sound familiar?) People have come and gone and come again here for a long time. And new people have come, and the place has changed and grown.

We celebrate the growth. Pittsfield will hold its fifth annual Immigrants' Day Friday, Feb. 29, with dancing and food and art and services. And the Cantilena Choir will sing next week, March 8, a collage of the journeys of people who came to this country in 1910 and 1921. These people spoke to the guards at Ellis Island and recorded their stories, the family they found and lost, the shoes they would not wear until they set foot in New York.

Have you heard of Berkshire Publishing in Great Barrington? Somehow, I hadn't until I found their blog today. Along with a guide to computer and human interactions, and a newsletter on current events in China, they have a unique history of the United States. It's a history from the outside: a guide to what other countries think of us.

Imagine what a history of the United States would sound like, if everyone wrote it. Let Navajo writers tell the stories the southwest, and Russian writers contribute their trade routes with Alaska in the 1400's, and the space race. Let Phyllis Wheatley write her real impressions of New England. Let slaves and small farmers and Scots and cajuns speak of the deep south. I am continually stumbling on stories and people that are part of this country, that no one told me about in school. Doctors gave up their practices to vaccinate the plains nations against smallpox. When horses came to the midwest, the Comanche became the best light cavalry in the world within 50 years.

This Berkshire Publishing project makes me curious, about more than the past — about the present. They are offering to tell me just how good a place this country has among other nations. I wonder what Canada thinks; like the neighbors I've just moved next to, it keeps to itself. But they've lived on my street loger than I have.

Posted by Katherine Abbott at 6:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What you want in an international journalist — you want a guy who sees a new place from the ground. He gets through floods in a wooden boat and on the back of a motorcycle, and he tells you about water washing up to the roof tiles and the steam over the rice patties. He walks into government offices and village meetings about tree plantings, and when stretchers pass by he asks who was hurt and why. You want a man who sees people.

Robert D. Kaplan does that. And he knows what he's looking at. He has been reporting on difficult, dangerous and developing places for more than twenty years. He began as a freelancer, covering the Iraq war in the 1980's, and since then he has written for The New York Times, , and others, published seven books, and influenced two U.S. presidents. And he will be speaking at the Stockbridge Library this Sunday at 4 p.m..

He will talk about his latest book: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground, published in September 2007 by Random House. He has spent months travelling with small U.S. military units in farflung places, and here he gives an inside view of the navy and the marines and their varied assignments abroad.

Kaplan asks hard questions about the way countries develop — and the way they hold onto moderation and dignity, or lose it. In Waterworld he writes about Bangaladesh:"squeezed into an Iowa-sized territory—20 to 60 percent of which floods every year—is a population half the size of that in the United States and larger than the one in Russia."

Like many developing countries, he argues, Bangaladesh is torn between the competing pressures of its own non-government organizations, reclaiming land tree by tree, and foreign aid, and fundamentalist extremists. His articles have raised hot debate. Agree or disagree, but one impression remains clear: that he speaks with respect of the people who live there, in the monsoon rains, and know what it feels like.

Posted by Katherine Abbott at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hello, Berkshires!

Last Saturday, a brittle cold night, I stood on a sidewalk on Elm Street with a friend, looking in the window of the African Market. He pointed past scales and down aisles of bright cans to a row of orange bottles and said they were palm oil, and a universal ingredient in Ghanaian cooking. Who knew this place lay right around the corner from downtown, next door to a comic book store? And I thought – this is my job.

A bare few weeks ago, I took over Berkshires Week here at the Eagle. So it's now my job to be curious. Anything to see, hear, touch and taste in the county belongs in these pages. And because it's winter, and Berkshires Week too has drawn into a smaller, inside spot, in the Thursday D section of the paper, many things will show up here. Farm stands and drive-in movies, squeezebox festivals and blues and drumming on the green and canoe trips on the Housatonic may all appear in this blog, and daily things too: the first mallard ducks returning, and the morning the first bloodroot blooms.

Barn on Old North Main Street, Lanesboro, courtesy Ethan Zuckerman

The Berkshires are familiar ground. For four years, before it came under the Eagle's fold, I wrote for the Advocate in south county. Then I went away to school. But I left too many things undone, not to come back. I have not yet found the Mohican stone sweat lodges in the south county woods. I haven't hiked to Bash Bish falls, or dug solidified spills of glass out of the slag heap of the old Lenoxdale glass factory, or danced to Mountain Laurel's fiddle.

When I do, I'll let you know. As Melville once wrote to Hawthorne, "this isn't a letter, or even a note — but only a passing word said to you over your garden gate." Talk back any time.

Posted by Katherine Abbott at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)