Hikers share their stories of being in Iranian prison

On their last day of freedom, the trio of Americans woke early for a hike. One kicked up a cloud of yellow dust as he wandered ahead, up a valley in Iraqi Kurdistan. The other two lagged behind, holding hands as they walked. They were quiet and contemplative.

They stashed a pack in a bush, they napped in the shade, and they drank water from a little spring.

At one point the woman, whose boyfriend could feel her emitting nervous energy, asked, game-like, a question that didn’t even consider the true danger that was literally on the horizon:

“Would you rather get surrounded by five mountain lions right now or five members of al-Qaeda?”

Within hours, the trio would be arrested by Iranian soldiers for crossing the border into Iran. The Hikers, as they were branded by international media, were accused of spying and thrown into a notorious Iranian prison while they ultimately waited 26 months before all three were released.

Sarah Shourd, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal have written a shared account of the circumstances of the imprisonment that began in 2009. “A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran,” told in alternating voices, tells of the solitary confinement, fluctuations in relationships, unlikely friendships, power plays between feuding governments and the efforts of friends, family, strangers and the actor Sean Penn to get them released.

Shourd and the Minnesota-raised Bauer, whose sister Nicole Lindstrom lives in Duluth, will present a reading and book signing at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Spirit of the North Theater at Fitger’s.

The 300-plus page book, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was released on March 18 and has garnered blurbs from writer Dave Eggers and Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!”

The trio began kicking around the idea for a book soon after Bauer and Fattal were released in September 2011. They had done some writing on the sly while in prison, hiding pages written with stolen pens.

“I think there were different reasons for it,” Bauer said in a phone interview. “One was to just kind of tell our story. One was, we all felt like what we went through was, at the same time, a singular experience but also universal. There are people around the world who have experienced wrongful imprisonment.”

The story is written in chronological first-person chunks with the author’s name at the top of each segment. While they saw each other regularly while in prison, the writing process brought out dark personal moments and fractures that occurred in their relationships with each other.

Shourd spent about a year in solitary confinement and wrote about her hunger for human connection, the animosity she felt toward Bauer and Fattal, who were sharing a cell, and her emotional breakdown.

Bauer and Fattal were careful to shield her from the word “we.” But their own proximity, particularly after Shourd was released for humanitarian reasons, created an unparalleled closeness, and its own sets of power and privacy struggles.

Writing, Bauer said, was cathartic at times —but parts were harder than being in prison.

“It felt destructive, in a way, to be working on it,” he said. “Now I do think it was therapeutic. None of the stories have weight anymore. I’ve worked through all of them and dealt with the baggage attached to them. There is nothing anyone could ask me that I can’t go into.”

Shourd said that, while writing, there were times she just wanted to think about something else and move on with her life.

“I realize that if I hadn’t had that opportunity to really put everything on paper and make sense of it, I wouldn’t be able to move on as positively as I’ve been able to,” she said. “You really have to go back and unearth all of the pain and look at it —especially when you have some distance from it.”

Shourd said she lived with a fear that the experience would forever change her and that she would not be herself when she was released.

To combat that, she kept a disciplined schedule of studying, exercising and singing and “everything that helped me stay on track mentally and feel human and alive.”

She broke prison rules. She connected with the other women.

“It gave me something to do every day. It just kept the fire alive. It kept my anger and defiance at the forefront of my daily routine,” she said.

Bauer and Shourd were engaged in prison — he created a ring using woven scraps of string — and were married after his release. They live in Oakland, Calif. Shourd contributes to Solitary Watch, a website that focuses on the use of solitary confinement in the United States. Bauer continues to write long-form pieces of journalism for Mother Jones, in addition to also focusing on the prison system. Fattal, according to the book jacket, is getting an advanced degree at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

Shourd said the experience has taught her to live differently and push boundaries.

“I’m constantly challenging myself to get past whatever fears or assumptions about the world that are limiting my own thought process and choices I make in the world,” she said. “Even in the free world, it’s a constant path you have to stay on. Every day that I wake up, I think, ‘How can I make the most of this day?’

“I’ve challenged myself to dream big and live big and never underestimate how precious life is and how much influence we can have.”

Bauer said he carries with him an appreciation for freedom.

“It’s not that necessarily every day I think about being in prison,” he said. “Sometimes I’m in the house, and I don’t want to be inside. I appreciate that I don’t have to be inside.”

If you go

What: Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd book-signing and reading from “A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran”

When: Thursday, 6:30 p.m. book-signing and 7 p.m. reading

Where: Spirit of the North Theater, Fitger’s Complex, 600 E. Superior St.

Duluth News Tribune