Postcard from Dhankuta

& a new film about Robert Reich

Dear friends,

We’ve not been playing tourist in Nepal, so I haven’t picked up any postcards. The only person I regularly write postcards to is my 101-year-old grandmother. She lives in Pennsylvania, and through her backyard runs a creek that as kids we always called “the crick” but these are the same thing, the creek and the crick — these are streams. It’s good that we have lots of different names for ribbons of flowing water, I wish we had even more. This time of year in Maine, if the rain falls with abandon on the waterlogged earth a stream forms in the seam between our sloped backyard and the house, flowing off underneath my various decrepit vehicles and then off under the fence into the neighbor’s yard. I don’t know if he lives there anymore, haven’t seen him in months, not a postcard, not a peep. I think a good name for this little seasonal stream would be a “crickle,” like a trickling creek.

A lot of the crickles in Dhankuta, Nepal have dried up in recent years as the weather has warmed and dried. All day as we filmed on terraced ginger plots, we watched a forest fire smoke and spread on the slopes across the valley. At night it was a bright orange scar on the dark land. I tried to get a good picture of it, thinking it would make a haunting postcard to send back home. “Fire in the hills. No one seems concerned.” With or without a photo, most of our postcards these days are text messages. We often say the same things people used to say on old postcards: “Arrived without incident. Hotel is noisy but fine. The city is more colorful than I imagined. Miss you.”With text messages like this, you don’t mind if your seat mate on the airplane sees what you’re writing, in the same way that a postman might read your postcard.

Back in the states, my friend and colleague Elliot Kirschner has been hosting some screenings of Observer on the west coast, and we’ve texted back and forth about how things were going. One screening was in Palo Alto, at Stanford, and another in downtown San Francisco, a stone’s throw from the Exploratorium, a place so vivid and eclectic no postcard could do it justice. The Bay Area is 12 hours & 45 minutes behind Nepal, Nepal occupying a curious little patch of timezone more or less on the opposite side of the planet from the Golden Gate. As it happens, I’ve been re-reading John McPhee’s geological masterpiece Assembling California, so in the Advil PM fog of nighttime wakefulness here in Nepal, a country rising about a quarter of an inch a year, my blurry thoughts have swirled with memories of a recent film we shot out there where Elliot lives —not about geology, but about teaching.

A few years ago, Elliot asked me to help him make a new documentary about professor and former labor secretary Robert Reich, who was going to be teaching his last class at the University of California, Berkeley. As the son of teachers who had themselves recently retired, I loved the idea of exploring and celebrating Reich’s teaching. I liked the idea of filming a bit out west. Plus, Elliot and the wonderful Heather Kinlaw-Lofthouse had conceived the film as a more intimate encounter with Bob than you’d typically get from his very popular - and rather more opinionated - social media posts.

I settled into an executive producer and cheerleader role, so I can’t take much credit for what became a really moving and beautiful film, The Last Class, directed by Elliot and produced by Heather. But Bob Reich is a remarkable fellow and I loved getting the chance to spend time with him in Berkeley. Filming his class, with some 800+ students and members of the community attending, it was easy to forget what we were there to do (operate movie cameras) and instead get lost in his ideas about fairness and equality, expressed with heart and wisdom. I’ve written before about elders in America, and though there’s nothing “elderly” about the indefatigable Bob Reich other than some grey hair, he is an elder par excellence. He teaches you not what to think, but how to become a thinker.

My father, I think, taught this way as well, albeit with a focus on the visual arts: teaching students how to learn to see. Though I didn’t take his photography classes in high school, I spent a lot of time in his photo lab and I’m sure some of this seeped into me over the years, informing the premise of Observer. I can’t imagine ever capturing the full breadth of such topics - how to think, how to see - since the beauty of them is their inexhaustible breadth, but I hope some of these films become invitations to our audiences to see and think and feel in new ways. Let Observer be a chance to admire some great observers, sure, but even more so let it be an invitation for you to go observe: only you sense what you sense.

Some years before the Reich film, my friend Alden Smith asked me to make a film about two of my own past teachers - Jack and Sue Kruse - who were soon to retire from teaching at The Mountain School in Vermont. I leapt at the opportunity to spend more time with the Kruses, especially with Jack who was my adviser and English teacher.

One of the first scenes we shot was in Jack’s office. When Jack’s children went off to college, he got in the habit of writing postcards to them more or less everyday. He then began writing postcards to other family members, and former students, eventually getting in the habit of writing half a dozen or more postcards every morning while drinking coffee. Many of the postcards he picked up for this purpose were old & weathered & ridiculous, which provided fodder for Jack’s unparalleled sense of humor.

One of Jack’s postcards.

I asked Jack if people ever wrote back, and he said not really. But day after day, to this day, the postcards go out from Vermont in Jack’s neat writing, full of quips & questions & oddities. Jack is godfather to my elder son (who, like Bob Reich, is neither elderly nor of great height), and he has collected a few dozen marvelous postcards from Jack over the past few years, many of them ending with a prompt or question for Kepler to ponder.

The generosity of this simple act - sending little missives out with no expectation of return, or feedback, or reward - is perhaps something only a teacher, and a teacher of Jack’s caliber & integrity, could sustain. After all, that’s what the act of teaching often becomes: equipping students with new things to ponder, or new ways of thinking, and then sending these students out into the world, perhaps never to hear from them again. Every year my Dad hears from a student or two from his 50 years of teaching, and I’m glad for it, but I suspect he and my Mom - like Jack and Sue, and Bob Reich - trust that their students are out there seeing and thinking in new ways, the lessons from the classroom or the photo lab or the auditorium or the playing field echoing around inside them in some unknowable way, even if they the teacher never hear back. Every teacher affects the meandering, stream-like lives of their students, even if you could never tidily chart them.

The movie about Jack ended up being a series of snapshots or postcards that we captured and created together at the school in Vershire, VT. I’ve never discovered an asteroid or a new species of insect, but I get to name the films I make, so I called this film Postcards from Vershire. The film is on YouTube, where anyone may see it. It’s unsealed and open to anyone’s inspection, like a postcard. But of course, you never know if you’ll hear back from the people who see it.

Come to think of it, in putting a film out into the world I can’t always tell whether we’re sending a text message or a postcard. A text message demands a response. A postcard, you just hope it gets there.

We’re headed back to Kathmandu tomorrow night, where there are more tourist shops and postcards aplenty, with Mt Everest omnipresent. I think I know what I’m going to write to Grandmom, it’s a line from McPhee’s opus Annals from the Former World, an epic book largely charting the plate tectonics revolution, where he sums up more or less the whole shebang with a single sentence: “the summit of Mt Everest is marine limestone.” Maybe that’s not quite right. None of us on this shoot have had a proper sleep in days. Maybe I’ll just ask her how the crick is flowing.