This is Post #15 in the new Series “Going to Afghanistan”.

Fred Clayton kept a diary of sorts as well as the record contained in letters.  The pages were 4 x 6½ inches in size, preprinted with the year and date and for 1958 the names of Catholic Saints associated with certain days, not that he was Catholic - but the diaries sold in 1958 in America had this built-in flavor of religion.

October 2nd was the 275th day of the year (the diary tells us), there are “90 days to come”.  These are reassuring words for someone just arrived in Afghanistan, or not, as 90 days (three months) is not a great deal of time to accomplish that task which one has been given.  Maybe the diary is only for “this year” and does not mean what the words seem to say.  Nevertheless, Fred notes his “1st Staff meeting of USOM Afghanistan”, he abbreviates the word Afghanistan.  That night he has dinner “@ Fox & Price - Reunion of International Club of Amritsar”.

The 3rd of October is dedicated to St. Theresa.  “Went down Kabul River gorge to Bridge site with Bill Shaw of E.B. Steel Co.”  He returned to a Staff House Italian dinner - Neapolitan Nights as it was billed.

Saturday October 4th - St. Francis of Assisi - Fred took administrative leave to see a game of Buzkaski, “the dragging of the goat”.  He notes that the “King and Voroshiloff (were) there”.

Each person in life chooses what he or she may see as important, noteworthy, worth remembering or writing about.  For Fred it was mostly about the people, eating was almost as important as engineering, lastly came events.  The makes and models of cars made little difference as did the clothes that people wore.  His pictures told that story better than all the incantations of the followers of tailors.  But Fred expected people to be properly dressed and expected his dress to be equally proper.  The “Staff” wore coats and ties at dinner at the Staff House then, the evening meal was observed more in the British tradition, a formality that might end each day.

I have posted about Bush-ka-shi, the national sport of Afghanistan.  It is not at all like football, not like football at Notre Dame and certainly not a sport that the patron saint of San Francisco would have wildly endorsed, but that alone does not make Bush-ka-shi bad.  What you see here is world’s colliding; the Afghan King and the Soviet President enjoying sports while the Americans can only watch and meet in meetings and take International Harvester Carry-alls down the Kabul Gorge to visit bridge sites on the road to the Khyber Pass and to Peshawar in Pakistan.  But first one must go as far as Jalalabad where the river widens and the gorge has ended and there is a plateau reaching toward the Pakistan border.  Fred did not go that far this trip.

There are three holy days in each week; depending upon ones religion.  Friday is the Sabbath of Islam, Saturday the Sabbath of the Jews and the Adventists, Sunday is holy to the Catholics and some other Christian faiths.  In Afghanistan one had Friday and Sunday off.  Saturday was a work day, or a school day if one were young.  Every week had a “three day weekend” with a little work wedged in-between; the system worked well once one became used to it.

It was upon the holiday of Fred’s first Friday in Afghanistan that he went down the Kabul Gorge to see a bridge being built across the water.  The Kabul Gorge is like an untamed Khyber Pass for those that have or have not seen it.  It is like the “Million Dollar Highway” in Colorado only with lanes half as wide and the same absence of guardrails or block walls or rock obstacles to help keep one on their footing.  The gorge is an ancient route through which countless armies and countless missionaries have ebbed and flowed and walked and carried and carted their way to “march on India” or “march from India” to the unknown world beyond from where all things  first flowed, or so goes the myth of Ariana, land of the Aryans, the people of the global heartland as Humboldt called the space, some call it “waste”, the vastness of central Asia.

The Hindus came, according to the legends, through the Kabul Gorge to settle India and to bring civilization to those more southern shores.  The British first invaded Afghanistan and then retreated through this same canyon of the river.  Every mile meant another 50 lost, it is a formidable place to pass.

In peace the flow of maybe millions would mark the canyons passing as each spring the wandering people of what seemed like all of central Asia would follow the river uphill and west from the valley of the Indus to regain the mountain pastures of their ancient home.  But that was before customs points and border crossings and checkpoints and military fortifications with barbed wire and machine gun nests and pill boxes and all the things that made the modern Khyber Pass impassable into Pakistan; but in Afghanistan the way still was free.

Almost everything American came into Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass and the Kabul Gorge.  It came by way of Peshawar.  It came in first by sea through Karachi, then made its way north by rail or by truck, then things were sorted out in Peshawar and the trucks bound for Afghanistan were loaded.  From Peshawar they were Afghan trucks, those from Pakistan would not usually venture up the Kabul Gorge.

The Russians were building all the roads into Afghanistan from the north, from mother Russia, from places like Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent.  The Americans were building (or rebuilding) the roads into Afghanistan from Pakistan, from (old) India, the old colonial highways that the British were not invited to build as the memories of earlier invasions were still too fresh.

The Gorge Highway was not paved then; it was gravel or it was rock, but it was getting better with every day and every new bridge and every new turn-out and every new passing lane and every new rock retaining wall built by the hands of a thousand Afghans breaking rock with hammers and laying up the rocks and building walls a hundred or more feet high though they were measured in meters; Afghanistan was officially metric then, like America was; but Afghanistan really meant it in 1958 while America was still playing at measuring the world in “English” lengths.

With Mr. Shaw of EB Steel in tow one might think the bridge that Fred went to see was made of steel, not wood.  I think that that is the point.  It wasn’t.  It wasn’t made of steel.  It was made of wood.  It would be Fred’s first picture from Afghanistan, two men sawing wood the old fashioned way, long saw - working together.  This was their country after all; “who needed EB Steel?” he might have thought, but at the time he did not say.

Note:  Fred’s grandfather, Warren Shelton Clayton, was among other things a carpenter.  He helped build the first bridge in the State of Nevada, made of wood, crossing the Carson River near the site of Fort Churchill.  Pony Bob Haslam crossed this bridge just before bringing the news of Lincoln’s election to the telegraph at Fort Churchill.  By 1958 the bridge had been replaced by a newer one made of steel.

Kabul, Afgh.
Sat. 4, Oct.  ‘58

My Beloved,

Just a note to say it is Saturday and I love you so very much!

Yesterday was a day off and I went 40 miles down the Kabul River along the Kabul-Torkum road to see the bridge construction.

I’ll describe all this later.  I planned to do it last night but had to go to bed to keep warm.  No fires in the Staff House yet and the last three nights have been freezing.  Today the stoves go up so we should be more comfortable and I can sit up and write.

Stamps are very hard to get here.  I hope you got the cable O.K.

All my love
Your Fred.

Fred Clayton’s first photograph taken in Afghanistan.  It shows Bill Shaw of E.B. Steel standing by the “retaining wall construction” in the Kabul Gorge (an ICA - USOM/A, project).  An E.B. Steel Jeep is in the background.  Bill is standing there (in the picture) for a sense of scale, important to an engineer for communicating well with pictures.

All of the rock retaining walls and bridges were constructed with the native rock within the gorge, by Afghans, each stone laid by hand.  The water is probably at its lowest in October; the snow melt of the last year is almost over and the new water of the next winter has not yet begun to fall.

The retaining walls and handful of new bridges enabled a much improved road alignment that reduced the danger from rock slides and kept the roadway consistantly much higher above the river during the spring torrents that traditionally often closed the earlier road.  Resolved too were issues of “grade” which made the road much more efficient for both buses and trucks - the camels didn’t really care.

Second Bridge down the Kabul River Gorge under construction in 1958.

The poles are from the Lombardy poplar trees that originally came to Afghanistan from the Roman Empire in the time of the early empire.  The trees were fairly plentiful in Afghanistan (after at least 2,000 years) in 1958 and were used in the building of just about everything.  An Afghan is standing on the bridge (for scale) in perfect posture.  The Afghan near the river below is apparently washing his feet in preparation for prayer.  Religion on the job was taken for granted as a right in Afghanistan.

Men sawing - perhaps Fred Clayton’s favorite photograph from all his time in Afghanistan.

Fred W. Clayton had only been in Afghanistan for three (3) days.  He was quickly learning who the Afghans were and how they worked.  They could build bridges “in the middle of nowhere” with just the raw timber, a simple saw, a pair of hands, rock and a hammer and chisel.  The secret of course was working together.  Previously unpublished Fred Clayton photograph - October 3, 1958.

About half way down (or up) the Kabul Gorge was a small rock Tea House safely nestled against the towering cliffs and located between two tunnels.

Qala Bist (as a website) is about Tea and Coffee - Wine and Water and all the transformations that those drinks can bring.  Pictured is not the Tea house of the August Moon; but perhaps it is even better, more far away, maybe even more exotic.  They haven’t made a movie about this place with a sympathetic portrayal of its people; but there is time left.  We’ll see.

Note:  Both the Afghan paper currency (“Afghanis”) and the postage stamps for Afghanistan were printed by the British.  The stamps were not only scarce in Kabul, they were rare in America.  An unknown number of letters were stolen while in the custody of the USPS by employees wishing to get the stamps.  The problem was virtually eliminated by writing “please forward” on the letter-envelope underneath the stamp.  A number of letters arrived “forwarded”, but without the Afghan postage (stamps).  The “Staff House” was the USOM Staff House operated by the United States Mission to Afghanistan.  USOM staff members who were not married or did not qualify for family housing generally were quartered at the Staff House located to the east of Duralamon Avenue.

[First posted:  2010.03.09 / Tuesday - The Kabul River Gorge]