I also at one point got myself all the way to the border between Ethiopia and Somaliland, a breakaway state in the northern part of Somalia that had managed to keep itself out of the nasty civil war going on in the south. I was hoping to spend a few days in the city of Hargeisa, which I’d heard was pretty and welcoming. I had another motive, too: Like a lot of backpackers, I was a country counter. We were always looking to improve our numbers. Listing the number of countries we’d visited gave us a way to measure ourselves. Most country counters kept quiet about their numbers until they got over thirty. After four years of on-again, off-again travel, I’d been to forty-six countries. A trip over the next border would bring me to forty-seven.
The uniformed border guards—each with a Kalashnikov slung idly over a shoulder—took one look at me and started shaking their heads. “Not now. Too dangerous,” I was told.
I’m pretty sure “not now” meant not while Muslims around the world were feeling jittery and provoked. A few months earlier, a newspaper in Denmark had commissioned and published a group of satirical cartoon images of the Prophet Muhammad, setting off a furor among conservative Muslims. There had been riots and protests everywhere from Nigeria to Lebanon, and the controversy seemed to be continuing.
I don’t know if some faraway official had issued a dictum regarding foreigners in Muslim Somaliland or if it was a gut decision on the part of the border guards in their squat concrete shack amid the swirling dust of eastern Ethiopia that I was bad news, but in short order I was turned around and heading back where I’d come from, my country count stuck on forty-six. There was, I supposed, no upside to letting someone like me in.
*
Nigel, meanwhile, was coming alive in Ethiopia. When we talked on the phone during our stretches apart or I read his e-mails from an Internet café, I could sense him firing on the cylinders of each new day. I recognized the feeling. He sounded exuberant, untethered, even while complaining that he was ground down by the long bus rides and the flies that crawled up his nose and the unending barrage of begging children. When we met up, we feasted on meals of chopped collard greens and dollops of mashed chickpeas spread over pancakey injera bread. We tossed our backpacks into the corners of grotty guesthouse rooms and threw ourselves into bed. He was strong and capable, and I loved the golden hair on his arms.
I did my best not to worry about the girlfriend named Jane. When Nigel talked about her, he grew flustered. Sometimes when telling me a story about his past, I could tell he was editing her out of it. But mostly he didn’t talk about Jane. He talked about me.
He was soon to return to London. Before he did, we made one long excursion together, into the brown desert of northwestern Ethiopia, across a legendary swatch of land called the Danakil Depression. I’d read about it during my pretravel reading binge at home, in a National Geographic story titled “The Cruelest Place on Earth.” The Danakil was far from anywhere and scorchingly hot. My Lonely Planet carried a brief mention of the area but didn’t provide instructions or encouragement to go. Which somehow made it perfect.
We took buses until we reached a market village on the outskirts of the desert. The town was populated by a tribe called the Afar—Muslim nomads who made their living pickaxing salt from the flats on a distant edge of the Danakil, then loading it onto camels and trekking it many miles through the some of the hottest weather in the world to sell to traders. The Afar women wore loose head scarves, and many had henna tattoos on their faces, three thin lines or a series of droplets on their cheeks. The Afar men were famous, apparently, for castrating their enemies.
We wanted to see the salt mines. Nigel thought maybe he could sell some photographs of the miners to a magazine. I thought I’d try my hand at writing about the experience, possibly for a travel website or my hometown newspaper. After asking around, Nigel and I found a guide—a short, rotund Afar man with a face that was wrinkled like a walnut shell and a long gray beard into which he’d rubbed a rust-colored henna dye. Hereafter known to us as Red Beard, he spoke no English but, in an agreement brokered by a local guy who did, Red Beard said he’d take us out to the salt flats and back, a trek of about ten days. We were joined by a solemn younger man—the Camel Whisperer, we called him—who said nothing in any language but had beautiful bladelike cheekbones and a shy smile and walked devotedly next to the four camels in our little caravan: one for each foreigner, one for Red Beard, and one for the luggage. Each animal also hauled two yellow plastic jerry cans, sloshing with water.
We rode behind Red Beard on a path that took us first across low hills of hard-packed sand and shrub and eventually out onto the flaking gray expanse of the sodium flats. From atop our camels, Nigel and I sang songs, played Twenty Questions, and shouting over our shoulders at each other, told silly stories from childhood. He had spent his school years at a boarding school for rural kids, where he hated all the rules. He’d been angry at his parents for years afterward, he said, for sending him there. He tutored me on all things Aussie—why they loved Vegemite; how to shout “Why the fuck not, mate?” as a kind of battle cry for life.
We slugged water out of our bottles, let the sun broil our shoulders, behaved like high-schoolers on a rambunctious first date, only our date was taking place in an Ethiopian desert, with Red Beard and the baby-faced Camel Whisperer quietly and inscrutably observing our every move. The unspoken assumption was that Nigel and I were married. Which was why it was okay for me to rest a hand on his cheek or for him to give my butt a playful knock as I pulled myself back into the saddled notch of my camel’s back after taking a food break.
I was coming to understand a few things about Nigel. He was less a photographer from London—at least not in the way I first interpreted it—and more a hopeful guy at the start of his career, even at the age of thirty-five. He talked about wanting to do more with his photography, how the idea of being a war correspondent appealed to him. We talked about Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, all the places in the world where wars raged, all the places where a photojournalist would want to be. I told him about the week or so I’d spent in Kabul, staying with Amanuddin’s family. Despite having been robbed there, I thought of it as intriguing and beautiful, a place I wanted to return to. Nigel let me borrow his camera—a black Canon, as heavy as a brick—and play around with it, clicking through its settings and experimenting with what happened when you switched one soup-can lens for another. He showed me how to frame a landscape shot, how to filter the bleach of the high sun.
On our second night, we stayed in a tiny Afar village, a way station for the camel drivers transporting salt. Red Beard had dragged a wide, thin mattress from someone’s twig home and put it out in the open air for us. There were zillions of stars blinking infinitely over the blue desert, slinging the occasional meteor, each one hooking through the sky on a quick shimmering tear before flaming out. It was impossible to look away; we watched for what felt like hours. I was just beginning to nod off when Nigel reached over and gave my hand a squeeze. “Know what?” he said. “Right now I can’t think of anywhere in the world I’d rather be.” He paused a second and added, “Or anyone else I’d rather be here with.”
I knew what he was trying to say and I was happy for it.
*
The Danakil Depression is a surreal, sunken basin dozens of miles wide and long, over three hundred feet below sea level in places. It’s like a half-picked scab on the earth’s surface, with the guts of the planet oozing in its cracks. As we moved deeper into the depression, we saw spitting fissures and bubbling pools of yellow and blue sulfur, which thickened the air with its stink. Nigel and I stared at it all. We took photos we were sure were gorgeous and unforgettable, anything to document that the whole thing was real.
Sometime on the fourth day, I stopped sweating. My thighs ached from all the hours clamped on the camel. My tongue felt heavy. My lips were cracked and sore. Even the desert-bred Afar men were getting fried. During a midday break in our lumbering, I refilled my water, a little woozily. Nig
el and the Camel Whisperer walked a short distance away to pee. Red Beard swatted two of the camels until they dropped to a kneel. He slid the heavy saddles from the animals’ backs and propped them up on the ground, stringing up a canvas cloth between them. His efforts yielded a low, makeshift tent that created a slim puddle of shade, into which all four of us crawled and quickly, within inches of one another, as if we had absolutely no choice in the matter, fell sound asleep.
By evening, I was shivering and disoriented, feeling ice run up my spine, dehydrated to the point of delirium. After another few hours on the camels, we had bedded down for the night on the salt flat, the crystals like little razors pushing through our straw mat. Nigel dribbled water from a bottle down my throat. I said something to him and watched his brow furrow; I was babbling nonsense, my bearings slipping away. The sky whirled overhead. Later, Nigel would tell me he was sure I would die that night, that they’d have to rope my body onto a camel to get me out, and the whole mess would be his fault.
It didn’t go that way, though. Early the next morning, I opened my eyes and sat up. I felt better, with just the slightest hint of a headache. I shook Nigel awake. His eyes went wide.
“Aw, thank God,” he said, stroking my hair. “You gave us a fucking scare, you know.”
His relief seemed huge. I found it touching.
I convinced Nigel there was no reason to turn back, that we should continue. I promised to drink extra water and keep myself fully covered from the sun. He went along with it, reluctantly. “You’re pushy,” he said, handing my backpack over to the Camel Whisperer to strap on the cargo camel. “Pushy, pushy, pushy.”
That day we followed Red Beard over the last miles to the salt mine—a dirty, grim outpost, the extreme reaches of an already extreme place, where maybe two hundred painfully skinny Afar men dressed in shorts and T-shirts were using long sticks to pry up giant cementlike slabs of heavy gray salt, then chipping them into square tiles that could be bundled and loaded onto waiting camels. Upon arrival, Nigel and I disembarked from our animals, grinning with relief, stretching our backs and shaking out our sore legs as if finishing up a pilgrimage, as if we’d come to some end-of-the-road auberge and were about to have ourselves a soapy shower and a three-course meal. Because that’s the thing about the exact moment when you get somewhere that has required effort: There’s a freeze-frame instant of total fulfillment, when every expectation has been met and the world is perfect.
We weren’t thinking about the long trek back, or the fact that Nigel was still entangled with Jane, or even that the salt miners were staring at us with unbridled hostility. No, this was the moment before the moment when reality reasserted itself, which it promptly did, as one of the Afar miners spotted the camera in my hands and, pegging me for the invading alien that I was, scooped up a heavy chunk of salt and hurled it right at me.
10
A Camera and a Plan
From Ethiopia, I went on to Cairo, following my original plan. Nigel flew to London, where he said he was going to break up with Jane once and for all. He would then move back to Australia. I’d get a work visa and join him there. I bought a cell phone so he could call me as I continued traveling, which he did almost every day. Our phone calls were quick—we were on tight budgets—but loving. The longer we were apart, the more perfect he became. I’d never in my life imagined I’d follow some guy to Australia, but it seemed like precisely what was supposed to happen.
Then one afternoon he called me and, in short order, started to cry. The truth followed quickly, propelled by a rush of fully uncorked guilt. As it turned out, Nigel did not have a girlfriend in London named Jane. The woman in London named Jane was his wife.
They’d been together about ten years, like he’d told me in Ethiopia. What he’d left out was the part where they’d spent the last year of it married. They still were married, though it had been rocky, he said. He had gotten himself—with her, with me—into the ugliest sort of jam and was confessing all around. On the phone, I could hear his breath catching as he spoke, his tone pleading. He was calling the marriage a mistake, and lying to me about it had been another mistake. For a few minutes, we were both sobbing until, without another word, I hung up on him and stared at the yellowish high-rises outside my Cairo hotel window as both my plans and my heart seemed to burn up on the spot, as I thought, Did that really just happen? Then came the secondary thought as the recklessness of the last five months replayed in my mind, this time with “Married Man” subbing for “London-based Lover”: How stupid am I?
I felt adrift, cheated, alone. For the next few months, I traveled numbly—through Egypt, then Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Syria. Damascus had a labyrinthine covered souk where men sold things that glittered—glass beads, jeweled slippers, rolls of silk embroidered with gold thread. In the old city, there were cobblestone streets and arched wooden doors and vine-covered buildings built by the Ottomans some five hundred years earlier. There were shops selling flaky pieces of baklava dripping with honey and tiny cups of strong Turkish coffee. Rows of dark-suited old men sitting on benches in the shade. I met people, I saw things. My cell phone buzzed with calls from Nigel, but I ignored them. In my weaker moments, I clicked back through my photos of Ethiopia, studying his face, looking for signs of guilt and fakery. Sitting at an Internet café one day, I Googled Jane’s name, wondering what she made of the whole mess, trying to guess at what kind of person she might be. I put labels on all of us—her, me, Nigel—good, bad, villainous; innocent, dumb, guilty. Or maybe it was just victim, victim, victim. I wasn’t sure.
*
I got past my heartbreak the only way I knew how—by making more plans, bigger plans. I bought myself a new camera, a fancy professional one, an upgraded version of what Nigel had carried with him in Ethiopia. In some ways, given my finances, it was an absurd purchase, but I saw it as an investment in my future. I’d watched Nigel use his photography to sponsor several months on the road. It didn’t seem illogical to think I could teach myself to do something similar. I was a traveler, after all, and the world was full of travel magazines. Who was to say I couldn’t try to sell photos of the places I went? I wasn’t thinking about a career, just a little income here and there. The goal was to keep myself moving.
The camera became a salve, a new repository for my hope. I went back to Canada and spent the rest of 2006 waitressing to recharge my bank account. Meanwhile, Nigel never stopped calling. He was back in Australia, in the middle of divorce proceedings. His family and all his friends were mad at him, he said. Though the whole thing was uncomfortable and weird, I’d started picking up the phone when he called, feeling somewhere between still pissed and totally lonely.
I was twenty-five years old, fully accustomed to the cycle of making money fast in a Canadian bar and then spending it slowly, as far out in the world as I could get. I could travel on fifteen dollars a day without feeling hungry or uncomfortable. I still felt a knock of fresh happiness every time I reached a new place. I was also getting older, slowly outgrowing the flightiness of the people around me, both the waitresses back home and the travelers I met on the road. I didn’t want a desk job, but I did want to be something more than a waitress. I went back to Calgary and took a photography class between waitressing shifts. I started to nurse a larger purpose, thinking that if I declared myself a photographer, something good would come of it.
All the while, I continued to talk to Nigel, laughing a little bit more, wondering whether we really were fated to be together. Maybe it was his other relationship that had been the fluke and ours that had value. He lived in a house he’d built with his own two hands. He had a job he liked, working as a photographer for a newspaper in a small city called Bundaberg. It all seemed very stable and grown-up. About ten months after he broke the news about Jane, while I planned another trip through Asia for the winter of 2007, Nigel talked me into stopping for a layover in Australia.
*
It wasn’t instantaneous, the rebuilding of our romance, but it
wasn’t slow. I landed in Sydney on a February morning, and after fighting off a full-blown panic attack in the airport bathroom, I walked into the arrivals hall, where I watched Nigel turn and catch sight of me with a slow smile spreading upward. The beard he’d sported in Ethiopia was gone. He looked to be a paler, more neatly trimmed version of the person I’d known, dressed in new jeans and a pressed shirt. When he hugged me, it was firmly, as if placing me with a prolonged squeeze in his world.
This kicked off a honeymoonish tour of eastern Australia. We had two weeks before my I was to continue on to Bangkok and then Delhi, where I had plans to meet Kelly Barker, my favorite travel companion from home. Kelly had shifted from waitressing into working as a flight attendant, which had perks for both of us: She’d given me a “buddy pass” for a discounted flight to Asia and was flying for next to nothing herself.
In the meantime, Nigel and I climbed the Harbour Bridge, picnicked in a lush green park, and took a ferry to Manly Beach to play in the waves. We flew up the coast and booked a cabin on a small charter boat headed to the Great Barrier Reef, where we scuba-dived on psychedelic-looking blue and yellow coral and swam silently among flapping rays and gliding turtles. At night, we drank a lot. We picked apart grilled pink prawns and mud crab, dipping the sweet meat into melted butter. We sat up late, talking in the balmy sea air beneath an unreal pantheon of stars before taking ourselves happily to bed.
A House in the Sky: A Memoir Page 8
