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Land is power in rural Idaho, but careful how you wield it.

Late in the summer of 2003, after the lambs had gone to market, Mike Stevens ’90, then president of Lava Lake Land and Livestock, packed a sleeping bag and a shotgun into his pickup and drove north from his home in the Sun Valley of Idaho to the North Fork of the Big Lost River. A colleague at a federal agency had called him that evening after spotting a pack of wolves not far from Stevens’s sheep band. The year before, a similar call had come from a forest ranger: Did he know wolves were killing his sheep? He hadn’t; nor had he any clue a pack was in the area. By the time he made it into the field, he had lost 18 ewes and lambs. This time, knowing wolves were near, he wouldn’t take the risk.

The sheep camp was on the north end of the valley, tucked into a grove of lodgepole pine. Stevens found Ernesto there alone. The young Peruvian herder had left the flock on a rocky outcrop by the river bottom. Normally, the sheep would spend nights on a high ridgeline and wander downslope the next day to find water, but on this fork, the canyon walls were steep, and sheep grazed the lower benches and meadows. Stevens sat with Ernesto a while, and at dusk, headed toward the sheep band. He laid his sleeping bag under a pine and the shotgun beside him. The ewes shifted and sighed in their sleep. His own sleep was restless—a guard dog, circling the band, visited routinely to lick Stevens’s face. When he woke at dawn, he found the dog beside him. Together, they walked the band’s perimeter. There were no signs of wolves, but at the far end lay a mangled ewe, killed by coyotes. Stevens looked down at the dog, and noticed, then, the sheep blood crusted on its snout.

He never intended to shoot a wolf; that night, he meant only to deter the pack with his presence and make noise if any came near. Stevens is a conservationist at heart, a believer that all things, hoofed or sharply teethed, can coexist. He is, you might say, a purveyor of the happy medium: common values, collaborative approaches. But what he sees as reasonable, others in the environmental community have considered traitorous. He will not condemn grazing on public lands, and believes, rather, that livestock can have a minimal impact if managed carefully. A master of the positive spin, he reasons rhetorically: “Most people look at sheep ranching as the problem. Well, can it be part of the solution?” It was for this ideology—and not for his ranching experience, of which he had none—that he was hired to run the operation at Lava Lake.

The ranch is the brainchild of Brian Bean, a wealthy San Francisco investment banker, and his wife, Kathleen, who formerly worked at the Nature Conservancy. In the late nineties, the Beans were looking to buy a small allotment in the West to place under conservation easement—an agreement that limits development on a property in perpetuity, even when the land changes hands. But the Beans realized that unless they worked on a bigger scale, their conservation efforts would be to little effect. Large wildlife, such as antelope and wolves, move over vast areas, weaving through a patchwork of public and private holdings, each managed according to the rules and whims of various agencies and landowners. “If we wanted to have a conservation impact, we had to work on a landscape scale,” said Kathleen. “And to do that, we had to be livestock operators.” Running sheep would allow them to lease—and practice low-impact grazing—on federal property. By 2002, when the Beans hired Stevens, they had acquired roughly a million acres of ranchland, a quarter private and the rest by public lease, stretching from the Craters of the Moon National Monument into the Pioneer and Boulder Mountains.

At the time, Stevens worked for the Nature Conservancy in the Sun Valley and was tasked with negotiating the Beans’ first easement. “I knew immediately that this was someone with a highly developed collaborative instinct,” said Brian. When the Beans offered Stevens a job, the idea of working on a large scale excited him. “In Idaho, ranching is where the power is,” he said. “If you say, ‘we’re part of the sheep industry,’ people recognize that. It’s part of the culture and tradition of the state.” He also knew that as a rancher, his conservation efforts would have more leverage with government agencies than those of any nonprofit. “We would be part of the establishment,” he said. “To be fair, it’s the very thing that an environmental activist has to fight against, but we were able to use it to our advantage.”

Before he took the job, Stevens reminded the Beans that he had never ranched before. They assured him that among the ranchers whose property they had purchased, and the Peruvians who had tended the flocks for many years, there was plenty of institutional knowledge. They reasoned that it would be easier to teach Stevens to run a ranch than to find a rancher with as strong a conservation ethic as his; Stevens shared their values, and values were never something they wanted to argue about. But the Beans’ confidence did not allay Stevens’s concerns entirely. “I was never going to be a real rancher,” he said, “and I wasn’t a normal conservationist either. The implicit risk was not being good at either of those things, and not being part of either community.”

Before I ever met Mahnaz Rezaie ’13, I knew certain things about her. Mahnaz means “beautiful moon” or “glory of the moon.” It’s a Persian name, even though she’s Afghan, and she finds it wonderfully elegant. She loves the sound of the syllables reverberating in her throat: Maah-naahz. I also knew that in 1997, when she was eight years old, her Shia Muslim family fled Sunni-Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. They went to Iran, which was the country closest to their home in the southwestern province of Herat. Iran was more westernized, and in some ways life was better for the Rezaies, but as Afghan minorities, they also faced harsh discrimination. At one point, the Iranian Ministry of Education banned all Afghan children from the schools. Because Mahnaz was academically gifted, her principal shielded her from expulsion.

At the age of nine, Mahnaz had endured a horrific accident one night while she was at a family wedding. She was pouring tea from a giant samovar when it toppled over, sending a cascade of boiling water onto her arm. She watched her skin peel away from her body and drop to the floor along with the sleeve of her dress. The pain was so excruciating she thought she was dying. Her family, fearing the Taliban would kill them for breaking the 10 p.m. nightly curfew if they took her to the hospital, instead used toothpaste and mashed potatoes to treat her wounds. The next morning, Mahnaz went to a doctor who scrubbed her burns clean with a brush. This procedure was nearly as painful as the initial scalding. During the next six months, while she was recovering, she developed scars that would impact her life in many ways—including, she believes, putting her on a more academic path that led her to Middlebury, where she is now a student in her junior year.

I first learned Mahnaz’s story through articles she wrote for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP), a nonprofit writing collective based in Kabul, Afghanistan. Founded in 2009 by American writer Masha Hamilton, the writing project provides Afghan women with a place to write—a so-called writer’s hut where they can compose their stories, primarily in English, using computers and Internet access that many of them don’t otherwise have access to. Some of these women, who range in age from their teens to their 40s, are forbidden to write by their families, and they do it in secret at AWWP headquarters, using pseudonyms. The project  also provides a venue for these women to publish their work; twice a week, their personal essays and poetry are posted on the project’s  blog. U.S.-based writers, women with backgrounds in journalism, fiction writing, and teaching, serve as long-distance writing mentors, providing prompts for story ideas, guidance on writing fundamentals, like grammar and story structure, and feedback on their stories. I am one of those mentors.

Mahnaz began contributing to AWWP after a friend told her about the program during her senior year of high school. Her family was living in Kabul then, her father having decided his children would get a better education in Afghanistan. Mahnaz is a naturally gifted writer, and soon after she took AWWP’s initial writing workshop, she was penning poems and essays in English, her second language after the Farsi she learned in Iran. “She’s always been a strong writer, and she’s so amazingly brave,” AWWP executive director and former writing coordinator Elisabeth Lehr told me. “Hers is a tremendous story. Her mother is illiterate, which in and of itself says so much about Afghanistan today.”

The way Mahnaz strung English words together was surprisingly eloquent and evocative to Lehr, and her stories carried a gravitas and emotional depth that betrayed her age, not to mention the fact that she’d only been studying English for a few years. Another thing that stood out about Mahnaz’s work was her feminist leanings. In writing about her childhood, she explored the inklings she’d had from an early age that the discrepancy between the way men and women were treated in the  society she inhabited did not work for her.

When she was a girl in Iran, she and her family often worshiped at a Muslim shrine—a place she found so spectacular and inspiring that she wrote this about it: “I want to sink in this sacred air. I want to hear my heartbeats and listen to the breeze as it cools my face. I want to fly to farther lands where only imagination can go. This is the magic of being in a place where you love and feel you are yourself. This is the magic that allows you to think freely.” Yet, as much as she loved the temple, it didn’t seem fair to her—even at age eight—that the men should pray in the front of the shrine while the women were relegated to the back. Her mother’s explanation reflected a widely held religious belief: Men are entitled to stand in front of women because they have higher positions before God. Mahnaz was outraged. But she was powerless to change the rules—this time.

Emma Kitchen’s last memory of December 2010 came on the first day of the month, a little before 6:00 p.m.

It was cold, dark, and rainy when she walked out of the Peterson Family Athletic Center and hopped on her bicycle for the five-minute ride to Proctor, where dinner awaited.

Her friend Bronwyn Oatley ’13 was with her, and as the two pedaled down South Main Street and turned left onto the service road that would take them past the health center, the back of the Service Building, and up the hill toward Stewart Hall, they mostly chatted about the weather, how raw it felt as the cold rain pelted their faces.

They picked up their pace as they started up the hill, and in the dark they did not see the flash of a figure racing down the hill on his own bicycle heading directly for them. And he didn’t see them either.

The impact of the head-on collision sent Emma Kitchen ’14 flying backward off her bike, and the first part of her body to make impact with the ground was the back of her head when it thudded onto the pavement.

As Oatley raced to the health center several hundred yards away in frantic search of help, the other bicyclist waited helplessly by Kitchen’s side, as she lay unconscious and unresponsive on the asphalt.

Her skull was fractured, her brain hemorrhaging.

Yet her nightmare had yet to begin.

***

Emma Kitchen’s nightmare had everything to do with her accident and nothing to do with what she actually felt. For most, the pain would be the worst, the pain associated with the fractured skull, the cerebral contusions, the subarachnoid hemorrhages. (The medevac to Burlington’s Fletcher Allen Hospital, the three days in the intensive care unit, the four additional days in the hospital, the remaining weeks leading up to Christmas convalescing at home in Collingwood, Ontario—those don’t even compute, because she remembers none of it.)

And if you can push past the inconceivable pain (and she did, convincing herself that as an athlete she was tough, tough enough to overcome even a traumatic brain injury), then surely what will get you, what will be the source of your night terrors are what follows: the dizziness, the nausea, the spinal vibrations, the inability to hold a thought. It will be registering -0.5 on a 0 to 7 neurocognitive assessment IMPACT test when you plead to return to school in February for spring semester.

But no, that was not the source of Emma Kitchen’s own living hell. It wasn’t even the five months that she was confined to bed rest, ordered to sleep 18 hours a day, and denied all visual stimulus—no books, no television, no computer—and all but minimal social activity.
It wasn’t even the fleet of doctors, the neurosurgeons and neuropsychiatrists and physiotherapists and acupuncturists and naturopaths, as caring as they were, who could offer little more than a “sleep and you’ll get better” prescription.

Emma Kitchen’s nightmare, her living hell, was her solitary confinement within her own head.

She had no one to talk to who could tell her “I know what this is like.”

No one to tell her “I understand.”

No one to share a look that says “I know, but it gets better.”

Even as she healed, as the 18 hours of daily sleep over seemingly endless weeks returned her to the land of the living, she grieved.

And it was only when she finally found someone who had been through something similar, found someone to talk to from a place of shared experience, that she began to awaken from this horrible, debilitating feeling of isolation.

And this caused her to wonder: how many others are out there trapped in the same nightmare?

***

“I want to be absolutely clear: this is not about me. This is about the 1.2 million student-athletes under 20 who have been diagnosed with concussions during the past decade.”

Emma Kitchen is standing before a roomful of peers (and a handful of professional men and women) gathered in Middlebury’s Kirk Center on a cold early February morning. She is a poised young woman with a strong voice and contagious smile, and there is not a trace of the broken body and soul that resulted from her accident two years ago.

On this morning, she is winning over a group of entrepreneurs who are judging a contest that is the culmination of the winter term course MiddCORE. The contest is called the Next Big Idea, and the pitch that has captured everyone’s attention is a support network for student-athletes who have suffered head injuries.

Although the prevalence of concussions among athletes—and the serious neurological impact associated with such injuries—have seeped into the national consciousness through investigative journalism and awareness efforts promoted by the likes of the National Football League, that has not resulted in a corresponding increase in a “concussion community,” Kitchen says, a place where those suffering can share stories and offer support to one another.

Kitchen wants to change that, and for about 15 minutes she outlines her ambition to create a website that would fill the void. She rattles off statistics (the 1.2 million student-athletes who have been diagnosed with concussions during the past decade, the startling estimate that this figure could be closer to 8.4 million because so many go undiagnosed). She outlines a business plan; she talks start-up costs (about $10 thousand).

There are seven other Next Big Idea finalists in the room. Kitchen is the seventh to present, and as she wraps up her presentation, one notices a collective shoulder slump among her competitors, followed by admiring smiles. They know they’re now fighting for second place.

***
Since the beginning of February, Kitchen has not only won MiddCORE’s Next Big Idea title, but she has enlisted a business partner (her friend Kaitlin Surdoval ’12, who has suffered four concussions in her lifetime), and has won another competition, this one sponsored by the College’s Project on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts.

This latest achievement came with office space, alumni mentoring, and $3,000 in prize money. Phase one of their project begins this spring. Each week until the end of the academic year, Kitchen and Surdoval will bring student-athletes down to their studio in the Axinn Center to record testimonials. With the arrival of June, the two will hit the road, visiting campuses and summer programs, where they hope to add more stories to their database.

Their prize money is enough to get them started, Kitchen says, though she hopes to raise an additional $7,000 that will see them through phase one, with the launch of a video blog before autumn.

Emma Kitchen’s nightmare is over. But, she knows, others’ are just beginning.

Emma Kitchen can be reached at emma@concussionsspeak.com. When her website launches this summer, it can be found at www.concussionsspeak.com.