one another.
I fell asleep desperately wishing for Laura.
I started falling for Laura, or more accurately started admitting to myself that I had fallen for her the moment I saw her, the day both of us nearly died for chocolate-chip cookies. A day that didn't take place in any country on this earth. It said so right in my passport. The French- and Arabic-language stamps reported that I left Morocco on April 14 and entered Mauritania on April 16. It was the day between, the fifteenth of April 1998, that we afterwards called Cookies To Die For Day.
The only way to go overland from Morocco to Mauritania was in a military convoy that leaves twice a week. At first I assumed this was just paranoid bureaucratic convention. I changed my mind when we drove past the first shattered Land Rover. We saw a good half-dozen of those, plus a few heaps of metal that might once have been motorcycles, the half-buried skeleton of a truck that looked disturbingly like ours, and occasional piles of bleached camel bones. Once we saw an actual land mine, unearthed from the sand by the desert wind. It looked like a rusted, frisbee-sized can of tuna.
On our second day in no-man's-land Big Bertha broke down. Big Bertha was our Big Yellow Truck, thirty- year-old army surplus, never designed to cross the Sahara where the omnipresent sand wreaks endless havoc on every moving part of any machine foolish enough to enter. We counted ourselves lucky if she broke down only once a day. For the umpteenth time Hallam and Steve donned their overalls, peeled back the cab, and dove into the grease and machinery. After a little while Steve emerged to warn us 'It'll be a few bloody hours. Unless it's a few fucking days.'
Big Bertha was physically divided into the cab, which fit three people comfortably, and the body, about thirty feet long, where us passengers rode. Between the cab and the body was a six-inch gap where the main table and assorted tools were stored. We entered the body via a retractable iron staircase in the middle of the left-hand side. Those stairs took you up to 'second class' or 'the mosh pit', a flat wooden floor with inward-facing benches on either side that extended towards the back of the truck. To the left of the entry staircase, two more steps went up to 'first class', three rows of padded double seats with an aisle in the middle. At the very back of the truck was a big wooden cabinet that contained our packs and, beneath them, the safes for our valuables. Instead of windows there were thick transparent plastic sheets attached to the roof of the truck which we could roll down and lash to thin vertical steel bars, spaced about two feet apart, that ran around the perimeter of the truck. Here in the desert we kept the sides open. With the plastic down the truck quickly became an oven.
Not a cubic inch was wasted. Overhead lockers hung above the benches. There was storage space beneath the seats and benches. Food supplies were under the mosh-pit floorboards, engine parts below first class. The bookcase, tape player, and frequently-broken fridge were at the front of the mosh pit opposite the stairs. Compartments accessible from the outside of the truck held twenty jerrycans of water, extra fuel, more tools, firewood, the stove, tents, folding chairs, cooking gear, etc., behind locked iron gates. The roof held spare tires and firewood. In all Big Bertha would have been one of the most impressive expeditionary vehicles on the planet, if only her engine didn't falter and fail at least twice a week.
Broken down in the middle of a minefield, in the middle of no-man's-land, in the middle of the Sahara Desert. It sounded desperate and romantic, but at the time it was teeth-grindingly boring. Melanie's thermometer told us it was 45 degrees in the shade. Too hot to read, too hot to play cards, too hot to do anything but sit and be miserable. So I decided to go for a walk.
Not quite as stupid as it sounds. We had finally left the trackless desert behind and were driving on a hard- packed, semi-permanent trail. From the roof of the truck we could see down the trail to the military checkpoint where the rest of the convoy waited, maybe two miles away. It seemed perfectly safe so long as we didn't venture off the trail. And no matter how many times I read page 17 of Walden I was too hot and too far away from New England to understand a thing.
I closed the book and looked around. A dozen people looked at me listlessly from whatever shade they had managed to improvise for themselves.
'Anybody want to go for a walk?' I asked.
There was no response. I felt a little like a visitor in a hospital's terminal-cases wing. The only life came from the few, Michael and Emma and Robbie, who occasionally raised their Sigg water bottles and used the tiny hole in the screwtop to drip a little water on themselves. It didn't really help. The only thing that cooled you down was the spray bottle, but Hallam had forbidden its use until we took on water in Nouadhibou.
'Nobody?' I said dolefully.
A voice emerged from the raised seats at the front of the truck. 'I'll come.'
I turned my head and looked at her. She smiled at me. I smiled back.
We had spent nearly six weeks in Morocco but this was only our second real conversation. Our first had been in Marrakesh, just before her two-week fling with Lawrence ended, almost a month ago. One of the weird things about truck life was that you were always but always in a group. With twenty people constantly crammed together, one-on-one conversations with anyone but your tent partner were rare.
We set out to the south, hatted, sunblocked, carrying a litre of brackish desalinated water apiece. For a little while we walked in silence.
'I really like the desert,' I said. 'I guess I knew I would. I mean my favourite movie was always Lawrence Of Arabia. But I didn't know just how much.'
'I do too,' she said. 'Although I was expecting more, you know, Hollywood, English Patient desert than this.'
Up until today the Sahara had consisted mostly of plains pounded absolutely flat by sun and wind, punctuated by straggling chains of rock and tufted with thorn bushes and cacti. Today even that hardy vegetation had begun to dwindle away. We didn't know it then, but Hollywood desert, the windswept fields of enormous dunes between Nouadhibou and Nouakchott, was only two days away.
'But it's amazing,' she continued. 'It, not to be all hippie on you, but it feels like it's alive. You know? It's the most blasted, dead place there is, but it feels…present.'
'You can be all hippie on me,' I said. 'I don't mind.'
'Okay. Good. And you can be all cynical on me if you like.'
'Do you think I'm cynical?' I asked.
'I think you'd like to be. But you never will.'
'Why not?'
'You're too nice,' she said.
'Oh.'
We walked on a few paces.
She said 'That was intended as a compliment, in case you're unclear.'
'I know,' I said, smiling sheepishly. 'Thanks.'
'Sorry. I'm crap at being praised too. I never know what to do.'
'I know!' I exclaimed. I'd often thought that but never heard anyone else say it. 'What are you supposed to do? You can say thank you insincerely, and then you look like you're just being polite and don't really care, or you can say say it sincerely and make a point of it, and then you seem insecure, or…I don't know.'
'Maybe we should just stick to taking the piss out of each other,' Laura suggested. 'We're all pretty good at dealing with that.'
'You Brits are.'
'Really? Is it very British?'
I raised my eyebrows. 'Are you kidding? You guys are miles, light-years, more sarcastic than the worst of my friends back home. In Canada you'd all be ostracized in seconds. One look and boom. National silent treatment.'
'Would you really ostracize me? Poor little old me?'
'Well…no. I'd still talk to you. But nobody else would. You'd have to rely entirely on me for translation.'
'Would you still talk to me if I told you Canadians were rude? And wimps when it gets cold? And crap at ice hockey? And,' barely keeping a straight face, 'secretly you all wish you were American?'
I grinned and put on a mock John Wayne drawl. 'Listen, lady, you better know where I draw the line. And I
