Gordon Taylor ... The bus driver as historian
Back when I rode the bus to work every day, what got to me — what began to drive me a little crazy — was the repetition.
I knew every stop. Every light. All the rhythms of the traffic and the passengers, which seemed to bog us in delays at the same junctions every day.
I would wonder: How does the driver stand it?
I never asked. I should have, because now I know the driver might have said something like: "You think about something else. Like Kurdistan."
Gordon Taylor, 66, has been driving a Metro bus for 29 years.
On weekdays he pilots the agency's longest route, the 952 from Boeing's Everett plant down to Auburn. He also drives the 190, from downtown Seattle to the Redondo park-and-ride in Federal Way.
Not many of his riders know it, but Taylor often wanders off to Kurdistan, a remote region in northern Iraq and southern Turkey, even as he is merging his 60-footer articulated bus onto the freeway.
He's not a professional historian. But from the seat of that bus he just published an article about mid-1800s missionaries in the twice-yearly Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies.
"I'm the only one in there who isn't a Ph.D.," he laughs.
He also wrote a 354-page historical biography, called "Fever & Thirst: An American Doctor Among the Tribes of Kurdistan, 1835-1844."
Now out in paperback, it turns out the book — which "nobody bought," Taylor sighs — attracted the attention of one of the senior advisers to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. transitional government after the invasion of Iraq.
The adviser, a self-described neoconservative named John Agresto, saw Taylor's recounting of the failure and eventual death of an obscure American do-gooder among Middle Eastern tribes as a metaphor for today. It was all we should have known, but didn't, before invading Iraq in 2003.
Namely, that you misunderstand the culture, you come ostensibly to help but no matter how pure your intentions, you get seen as imperialist meddlers.
" 'Fever & Thirst,' like any great book of biography and history, is hardly a book just about the past," Agresto writes in the book's introduction....
Read entire article at Danny Westneat, writing in the Seattle Times about Seattle bus driver Gordon Taylor, who doubles as a historian of Kurdistan. (His work has been featured on HNN.)
I knew every stop. Every light. All the rhythms of the traffic and the passengers, which seemed to bog us in delays at the same junctions every day.
I would wonder: How does the driver stand it?
I never asked. I should have, because now I know the driver might have said something like: "You think about something else. Like Kurdistan."
Gordon Taylor, 66, has been driving a Metro bus for 29 years.
On weekdays he pilots the agency's longest route, the 952 from Boeing's Everett plant down to Auburn. He also drives the 190, from downtown Seattle to the Redondo park-and-ride in Federal Way.
Not many of his riders know it, but Taylor often wanders off to Kurdistan, a remote region in northern Iraq and southern Turkey, even as he is merging his 60-footer articulated bus onto the freeway.
He's not a professional historian. But from the seat of that bus he just published an article about mid-1800s missionaries in the twice-yearly Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies.
"I'm the only one in there who isn't a Ph.D.," he laughs.
He also wrote a 354-page historical biography, called "Fever & Thirst: An American Doctor Among the Tribes of Kurdistan, 1835-1844."
Now out in paperback, it turns out the book — which "nobody bought," Taylor sighs — attracted the attention of one of the senior advisers to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. transitional government after the invasion of Iraq.
The adviser, a self-described neoconservative named John Agresto, saw Taylor's recounting of the failure and eventual death of an obscure American do-gooder among Middle Eastern tribes as a metaphor for today. It was all we should have known, but didn't, before invading Iraq in 2003.
Namely, that you misunderstand the culture, you come ostensibly to help but no matter how pure your intentions, you get seen as imperialist meddlers.
" 'Fever & Thirst,' like any great book of biography and history, is hardly a book just about the past," Agresto writes in the book's introduction....