There's no road to speak of, just some tire tracks 
in the sand which frequently are covered by dust 
storms. Every few hundred yards, in the middle of 
nowhere, a set of tire tracks will veer off towards 
nothing. Sometimes, after passing no rocks for miles, 
we pass an isolated pile of sand-worn boulders ten 
or twenty feet high. Eventually, it gets too dark to
see, and we stop for the night. Oh well. So much for 
making Aguelhok tonight.

The Tuareg break out their minimal gear: blankets, 
a frying pan, a sack of flour-like stuff. The boys 
go off to look for wood. I go with them. We search 
a ways and find a few sticks on the ground. The moon 
emerges, which makes our task easier. I approach a 
low, scrubby, dead-looking tree. The boys laugh at 
me as I struggle, trying to tear off the lower 
branches. It is the thorniest, toughest, sinewy-est 
tree I've ever seen. It takes about five minutes to 
wrench off some completely worthless kindling.

On the way back to the camp I find some dry camel 
shit and carry it with me, knowing that it is easily 
combustible. When I return, the boys seem impressed 
that I knew that, and speak to me for the first time. 
One of the boys asks me "Vous-etes le chef de ton 
village?" ("Are you the chief of your village?").

I don't tell them that I'm a busboy. Or that I had 
to wear a black bow tie every day and dig tunnels 
for sewer pipes every evening to get the money to
make this trip. I just smile and nod sagely, glad 
to have been asked the question.

Normally, back home in Minneapolis,  I spend a huge 
amount of time being bored, hating my life and hating 
everything around me. I am a spoiled piece of shit in 
a country full of hollow crap that doesn't work 
anymore. It makes me sick. Millions of suburban brats 
seem to feel just like I do. That makes me sick, too. 
I don't even have the dignity of being unique.

But I no longer want to feel sick. I no longer want 
to be a spoiled piece of shit. I want to transcend 
my mediocre, suburban conditioning. I want to break 
myself into little fucking pieces just to see what 
happens. Cuz I'm bored.  Cuz I read in books that 
tribal people did trips like this, you know, the guy 
who wanted to be the medicine man (or wise man or 
shaman) would go out and suffer and then come 
back... interesting. So, call it seeing the face 
of God or whatever you want; I just wanna be 
interesting. Or interested.

So I've been traveling around the world like a bum, 
with less and less baggage and fewer and fewer plans, 
drifting this way and that, more and more aimlessly, 
deliberately getting into desperate scrapes and
unpredictable situations to see what happens.

The woman with the baby takes some of the flour-like 
stuff, mixes it with a bit of water, and makes a dough. 
She then covers the fire with sand, lays the dough 
directly onto the sand, and then covers it up with 
more sand. Then she puts some more fire on top of the 
sand. When it's done, she digs in and removes it with 
her bare hands, brushes off the sand, cuts it into
smallish pieces, and hands them out. I try to do like 
everyone else does, eating it with the sandy crust 
intact. But it's amazingly bad. Sand bread. (This is 
perhaps why you don't see many Tuareg cookbooks or 
restaurants.) On top of that, it's made me incredibly 
thirsty again. I'm trying to ration my paltry water 
supply. None of the Tuareg are drinking any. They're 
weird. They never drink water. And they never talk.

I hate to admit it, but I'm really upset. I'm hungry. 
I keep thinking they're going to produce some more 
food. It doesn't happen, and I don't want to deprive 
them of their food if they don't have enough to offer. 
But I have to wonder how they manage to live on no 
water and very little bread--sandy, horrible bread at 
that. I also wish I'd brought some food of my own. 
Normally I have a secret stash of treats like sardines 
and crackers. But there was no place in Timiaouine that 
looked like a store, much less a food store. I was sick 
and weak from the diarrhea, and  I assumed we'd be 
getting to another town tonight, so I didn't think 
about getting food.



The Tuareg grab a bunch of blankets from the truck and 
spread them out near the fire. They roll up together 
into a human medicine ball and hunker down for the 
night. Within five minutes, they're snoring peacefully, 
happily together. I feel significantly forlorn. It's an 
exciting and exotic situation to be in, but lonely
beyond belief. They all belong here, and I don't.

The temperature begins to drop rapidly now and the wind 
picks up. I don't have a sleeping bag or any of that 
crap--only a couple jellebas (Arab robes) from Morocco. 
I froze my ass off the night before last, curling up 
outside against the big wheels of Kerroumi's truck. I 
kept piling the sand higher and higher against my legs, 
trying to shield my body from the wind, but the sand 
wouldn't hold any heat. The night was unbearable. I 
know what I'm in for: a long sleepless night with way 
too much space and wind around me.

The trick will be to have enough wood to keep the fire 
going all night, if need be. So I walk around in the 
moonlight, gathering as much wood and camel shit as I can 
find. It takes about an hour. It's a wondrous sensation, 
wandering around in the Sahara desert in the moonlight. 
There are no animals of any size out here, and with the 
Tuareg asleep, no sentient beings of any kind. No 
consciousness but mine for hundreds of miles. I feel 
like The Little Prince, as if I'm the only one left on 
the planet.

The temperature drops to maybe forty-eight degrees. The 
wind fans the fire and burns everything I've gathered 
in about an hour. I wake up around five and can't sleep 
anymore. I'm really lonely. Lots of wind, lots of night. 
The Tuareg are all happy in their big family sweatball.

This is about the time I start thinking about God.

I realize now how carelessly and arrogantly I've gone 
into this whole enterprise. I've come to this place 
hoping, through sheer idiocy, to force something 
interesting and deeply spiritual to happen. Something 
miraculous and bold and memorable. I've thrown myself 
impetuously and defiantly into God's care to see if 
he'll get up off his lazy, indifferent ass and show
his face. I've assumed, too, that whatever appeared 
would be warm, enlightening, and reassuring; I just 
had to take the risks and it would all be made to 
happen. And here, now, in the middle of the night, 
it hits me that maybe I've pushed this idea far enough.

A note of foreboding sounds from some unknown 
dimension. I start thinking about what it would be 
like if I actually died out here. I imagine seeing the 
desert from a plane, trying to find my body buried 
somewhere in this vast sea of blowing, shifting sand,
with no marker.