Driving into the Sahara

Agadez is still 120 kilometers ahead of us. It is 5:05pm. A trick of this evening light enables all potholes to appear, deep and jagged, from precisely nowhere. We blew one tire about an hour and a half ago. One spare remains. I am sick to death of these costly tender black balloons. We've blown through nine of them now. We've tried all sorts and they don't last. Because of these insubstantial and chronically untrustworthy tires, our jack is my least favorite thing in the car. There are at least three thousand things in this car and there are many of them that I do not like. But I HATE the jack. It does not take advantage of centuries old discoveries in the field of leverage. It doesn't use leverage at all. It causes blistering, bloody knuckles, loss of equilibrium, sweat and cursing. It doesn't even fit together. We might as well lift the car with our teeth.

There are stretches of this road that more precisely resemble the middle of nowhere than anywhere I have so far been. Of course it is beautiful. The desiccated grazing weeds provide a softer lemonlime cover to the hardpacked dark gravel base of the Sahara's welcome mat. Two camels on my left are using flexible necks to reach the leaves on a thorny tree. To the right, two grown men in aviators, wrapped like nomads, trot along a ridge on a donkey, their legs almost reach the ground. Frequently, goats stand on their hindquarters to strip the lower branches of leaves; they look human, like performing dogs—it explains why all these trees are about the same height from the ground. (In agricultural areas, trees are protected by giant Chinese finger trap baskets until they are five or six feet tall. Otherwise the goats will destroy them. In the desert here, trees survive their infancy by being plentiful and full of spikes.)

Just now, as the sun sets further, all of the green bushes that have been making things look somewhat cheerful or at least neutral have whimpered off into the landscape behind us. Now it is true deep desert sand, indifferent, tan and salty. There are still scrubby tufts of grass and the occasional rock; but there isn't anything to shelter under or hide behind. In response to this rougher terrain, the road junks out. Now we are averaging perhaps fifteen or twenty miles an hour. There is no way to make Agadez before nightfall and while flat campsites are literally everywhere, we would be an obvious flock of oblivious snoozing gold geese to anyone who happened to want something nice from the unarmed idiots on the side of the road. Banditry around Agadez is common.

We decide to ask the next village for permission to camp in their territory. With ten or fifteen minutes of remaining daylight we approach a small settlement of perhaps a dozen squarish single story banco dwellings that are interspersed with the domelike gypsy huts of nomadic peoples—often these huts are strengthened with large monogrammed international food aid sacks. Sean claims to spot a sign reading "Bar and Restaurant" and that makes us slam on the brakes and choose this town. Anywhere with a bar and restaurant will cater to travelers. We swing into reverse and pull up next to three well wrapped men who are conversing by the side of the road. We expected to meet Sean's people, the Fuulani, so when they respond to his ritualized Puular greetings, Sean thinks he is understood and begins to speak freely and rapidly in his local African tongue. His inquiries about the bar and restaurant confuse them completely and after a few minutes it becomes clear that they speak about as much Puular as Tuuli.

The most outgoing amongst them leans lower to get a look inside the car. He asks us if we speak Hausa (in Hausa). He asks us if we speak Tamashek (in Tamashek). Then he asks us if we speak Arabic (in Arabic). I feel like I have just been dropped from one of those circus chairs into a basin of cold water. I was expecting to relax while Sean played ambassador. I was not expecting to be forced to recall my atrophied Arabic in eight seconds. But I start up with the same idiot questioning about a restaurant. I am told that I can find one in Agadez. I gesture at the placard Sean had read. Baba Salam. That was the name of the town; the sign was badly faded by desert sands; the hallucination of a bar and restaurant is excusable. However, there is definitely nothing resembling a bar or restaurant in Baba Salam.

I introduce us, tell them about how Sean and I come from Ireland and how Tuuli is Finnish. (I will generally lie about my American nationality when dealing on a short term basis with friendly Muslims in the developing world. There have been too many times that saying "I am from America" has had a shameful stink bomb effect on friendly conversation. So I avoid the problem by manufacturing a false personal history.) I apologize for forgetting my Arabic, tell them where and when I studied it, tell them it is a beautiful language and then get down to the task at hand. I want to ask if we can stay here for the night but I can't remember the verbs for stay or sleep or rest and I never knew the words for tent or camp or shelter. I manage something like, "When sun is finished, travel is no good. Possible we are good here? Put the car by our little houses and go to Agadez tomorrow?" The little houses bit throws him off; so he walks me over to a building that his people have not yet put into use. It has a sort of porch on which he encourages us to sleep. That's great. We accept the arrangement, the mosque sounds a call to prayer for the last day of Ramadan and now Hamada Ahmed (HMD, HMD, Mohammed Mohammed) must go. He promises to bring us milk to drink after he has broken fast.

The small crowd that had gathered around my faltering communication disperses to pray and to eat. We are left to our own devises. If the children felt like coming over to stare at us, they were not permitted. I have a deep respect for this sort of hospitality that is not fawning or intrusive. Hamada brought us delicious milk in a small tin bowl and urged us to drink heartily and deep for our health. He saw that we were cooking our own dinner and saw that we had established our tents; so, he departed, wishing us good night and saying he would see us the next morning if the lord was willing. No gaping, no lingering, no expectations, little ceremony, just a basic respect of travelers and their needs. He gave us a safe place to sleep and then allowed us our privacy there.

He returned in the morning with another generous bowl of milk to see us off. It was the feast day that celebrates the end of Ramadan's fasting, a time when Muslim children wear their finest clothing and expect gifts. We have been carrying around a small floppy Frisbee disk about the size of a tea saucer. "Is there a son of Hamada?" Yes. Hamada calls him a bambino. Whatever that term is doing in the Sahara, I have no idea. But I tell him that this is a Sallah gift (the traditional gift of the day) for his small ones. We show him how to use it and he throws it to some of the other adult men who are with him. It is very easy to catch because it is soft and several of the men laugh openly at the silliness of the thing. But they catch on and understand. Under normal circumstances they may well have refused any gift that we hoped to give them; but this is the one day for presents in the Muslim year and it is always harder to reject something that is given for one's children.

It turns out to be another two and half hours of driving to Agadez. It's a good thing we stopped.

This area is connecting our present trip with my experience living in Egypt. It is making me want to relearn my Arabic. It makes me want to live in the desert. We are now further north than we have been at any point on this trip, several hundred kilometers further north than where we started (in fact, if we were on the coast, we would be in Mauritania). But we are also further east, totally past the protruding Western bulge of the continent, somewhere straight north of Yaounde. Our trajectory is more or less straight south from here. Somehow, it feels oddly logical to dry out for a few days in the desert before free falling through all of the dense and muggy equatorial jungle of Africa's more notorious nations. The straightforward, contractual dignity of the desert's logic is grounding. It is one of those rare environments that you have to obey and I have always enjoyed its dryness.

And happy birthday Peter Nelson.
* posted by Nathaniel at 2:31 AM