Fellows Forward: Three journeys—to Montana, Omaha, and tomorrow

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Late last month I had to pick up a car from my mom’s house in northern Idaho and drive it back to my place, in Brooklyn. Two thousand five hundred fifty miles. I’ve driven across the country several times; I love it. (When I was a kid, I wanted to be a long-haul truck driver. Kind of still do.) A long drive puts you at the mercy of communities you’ve never encountered before. You cannot know when you’ll see the next gas station, your bladder will be full, your stomach will growl, your curiosity will get the best of you. You cannot know where you will end up stopping, or who you will meet. It’s humbling in a way we could all stand to experience a little more often. It’s exciting. Certainly, it accords with the spirit of fellowship.?

Anyway, one of my stops on this drive—this one was anticipated!—was in Livingston, Montana, where I met up with oral historian Francine Spang-Willisand went for a hike in the place that inspired her fellowship project. I’m excited to tell you about it, as well as a few other trips involving our Fellows.?

So: grab your favorite road trip snacks, top off, and let’s get a move on…

OUT AND BACK

Four of us tumbled out of Francine Spang-Willis’ Jeep next to Porcupine Cabin, a rustic Forest Service lodging at the end of seven miles of muddy unpaved road: Francine and me, plus Erica Lighthiser and Sarah Stands of the Park County Environmental Council (PCEC), a conservation organization based about an hour away in Livingston. We were there to hike a portion of the trail that runs from the Porcupine to Ibex Cabin.

Francine and Sarah took the lead, then Erica, and then I, as the city boy/out-of-towner, brought up the rear. When we left the trailhead, we came to a green steel gate that hung across the start of the single track. As Erica unhitched the latch and removed the chain to open it and let us through, I noticed it was pretty new, in great condition with fresh-looking paint. In fact, the trail itself was in very good shape. “Thank you, mountain bikers!” Sarah said, in a small moment of gratitude, as we got going. I asked what she meant, and she explained that the local Livingston Bicycle Club helped maintain the trail. But it wasn’t just them—the entire trail, it turned out, was a community effort.

What’s now known as the Porcupine-Ibex Trail has existed, in various forms, for a century or more. And it has been disputed terrain in recent years, with some portions at times blocked by locked gates. Land in the Crazy Mountains, like much of the West, is a melange of claims and usage rights and ownership and cultural significance. Some land is private, some public, managed by federal or state agencies. People use it for recreation, for hunting, for subsistence, for cultural practices. There are Indigenous peoples, settlers, ranchers, and—especially around the renowned ski town of Bozeman—recent transplants. The current version of the trail, completed in 2021, was the first successful result of a local working group, including PCEC, aiming to resolve conflict and safeguard the Crazies as a shared public resource. They worked with local landowners and the Forest Service and secured easements for a realignment of the trail that would mostly stick to public lands. The new version, the one we were walking, should be available to the public in perpetuity.

But getting a trail realigned might be the easy part. The hard part is sorting out all the underlying questions that a map can only gesture at. This would be what Francine calls “layered history,” the way that people over generations, since time immemorial—and not just people, but also plants and animals—have been vesting a landscape with their hopes, dreams, and livelihoods.

On one part of the trail, a clearing to the southwest afforded a view of what looked to me like pasture land, with a road or game trail of some kind cut across it. “I once pointed out that path as the old Forest Service trail in front of the rancher,” Erica said. “‘Actually,’ he told me, ‘I cut that road myself.’” The Crazies are dense with history, mottled with sometimes-confusing intersections between past and present. There is no simple story to be told. Making sense of the morass is why PCEC originally connected with Francine.

Together they founded the Crazy Mountains Oral History project. As the lead of the project, Francine will initially be speaking to 14 different narrators from constituencies that make claims to the Crazies, creating a record of the landscape that will deepen the collective understanding of the place—and help the diverse communities of the region come together to steward the land. As we continued up the trail, Francine talked about the power of speaking with narrators, recounting moments of unexpected catharsis in the conversations, profound instances of connection that helped her see the place anew. “Different voices—that’s how the evolution happens,” Francine said.

The entire Porcupine-Ibex Trail is 17 miles long, so there was no way we could hike the whole thing, especially not with me weighing us down. At a certain point, we had no choice but to stop going out and start coming back. We turned around, and a remarkable thing happened: Now, I was in front. And I have to say, everything looked different. The vantage was different, the sky was different, the mood was different. At one point, I even stopped, and asked Francine whether I’d missed a turn. I hadn’t. I was just seeing a place that hadn’t been fully apparent to me before. ?

More: After the hike, I asked Francine about her project’s intended impact. We put the answer on our IG. ● Francine’s last oral history project, “Becoming Wild Again in America”

MEET IN THE MIDDLE

What song could they play together? That’s what Abel Acu?afound himself wondering, back in May, as he prepared to take some of his former students to Omaha, Nebraska for a performance. Abel is a high school mariachi instructor at Edinburg North High School, in the Rio Grande Valley. Mariachi Oro, Edinburg North’s ensemble, is one of the best high school mariachi groups in Texas—a documentary about them, Going Varsity in Mariachi, will make its streaming premiere on Netflix in August—but this was not going to be an ordinary mariachi performance. Abel and his students had been invited to Omaha by his fellow EC Fellow Mustafa Babak to perform a concert with members of Omaha’s Afghan community, and the hope was to have all the musicians perform one song together.

There’s precedent in mariachi for performing across cultures. Mariachi Vargas, perhaps the most storied mariachi ensemble, famously performed in Japan, including singing in Japanese. But as Abel ticked through traditional Afghan songs Mustafa had sent him for consideration, he realized that most of them weren’t simply from another country, or another musical tradition, or sung in a different language, but were actually composed in a different musical language, built on a different set of notes than mariachi.?

The whole idea of the musical exchange, as Abel and Mustafa conceived it back when they first met at the opening convening for the Community Champs cohort in January, was to showcase “the power of music to bridge cultural divides and foster empathy.” A lot of mariachi standards, Abel told me, are about “bragging about how beautiful your land is, or how brokenhearted you are.” Perhaps these themes would resonate with the Afghan musicians too, members of a refugee community who had been forced to flee to someplace 7,000 miles from their home. As Abel watched performances of some of the songs Mustafa sent, he came across one that had instrumentation he thought he could translate to mariachi. “I saw a guy on the keyboard, and a guy on the bass, and I thought, this could work,” he said. Then he learned what the song was about, and he knew it could work.

The performance took place on July 13th, at 7pm, at the Lakeside Amphitheatre at The RiverFront, Omaha’s gorgeous park fronting the Missouri River. It was still a few hours before sunset when the music began, but the heat of the day was already coming down. The Afghan musicians opened the show with a few traditional tunes, and to close the show, Abel and his students performed mariachi standards (plus “I Just Called to Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder, a crowd-pleaser in any culture). In between, all eleven musicians took the stage together. Abel and his bandmates cast a glance over?the roughly 100 Omahans who’d turned out for the show. “Getting to look out and see it was really special,” Abel says.?

Together they performed the fusion song, called ???? in Dari, or in English, “The Mask,” by an Afghan musician named Jawid Sharif who is himself a refugee, in Germany. It’s about a man who falls in love with a woman whose face is hidden when he meets her. Her elusiveness is part of the allure as he pursues her, confident that one day his passion will lead her to “lose [her] mask.” It was a story that would have fit right into the mariachi oeuvre. It was also a reminder of one of the elemental feelings that all people experience, whether they are mariachi musicians exploring Afghan music, young adults from Texas expanding their horizons, or refugees finding their way in a distant land: the startling love of something new, beautiful, and mysterious. ?

INTO THE FUTURE

Dieuveil Malonga came into the EC Fellowship with ambitious plans for what he called the Culinary Innovation Village, a campus he wanted to build in Rwanda. It represented a major leap in Malonga’s efforts to elevate African chefs and African cuisine around the world, which began to crystalize in 2016, when he launched Chefs in Africa. If Chefs in Africa was to spotlight people and food, as Malonga wrote, “from Abidjan to Cape, Nairobi to Tokyo, Pointe Noire to New York,” the Culinary Innovation Village would be the metaphorical hub: when complete, it would include a culinary school to train chefs; a working farm to promote the use of healthy, local ingredients and sustainable farming methods; and a restaurant to showcase ascendant—but still far too little known—pan-African cuisine. But all that lay ahead. At the beginning of his fellowship, it was just a piece of farmland and an idea.

That was barely more than a year and a half ago, but today, the Village is nearly done. This month my colleague Cassia van der Hoof Holstein, who first met Malonga in 2020 while in Rwanda as part of her work in global health, visited the site, and I asked her and Barbara Kinney, Emerson Collective’s senior photographer, to share some updates. The project will bring up new chefs, employ local farmers and laborers, and, of course, produce delicious food—but the big picture is even more powerful. By “elevating the global visibility of African cuisine, ingredients, spices, techniques, chefs, and artists of many disciplines,” Cassia told me, Malonga is “changing global mindsets about African food and, by extension, the countries it comes from.” The first class is expected to matriculate this fall. ?

More: Last year CNN profiled Malonga and his mission.

I’ve done my best to avoid invoking the cliche that “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” In part because here at EC Fellowships, we actually believe that there is a destination—a more just and equal world—and that it is within reach. (Obligatory plug for our podcast, Almost There. Make sure to subscribe, because season 2 is dropping in just a few short months!) But also because I firmly believe that this is a false premise. The two are inextricable; the journey changes the destination. When you get right down to it, that’s what I learned in Montana. If you’re fortunate enough to travel this summer, I’d encourage you to think about how your journey changes your sense of where you’re going. And if you’re game, send me a message and tell me about it.

Forward!