A Walk in the Desert

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When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake.  I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, “Yeah, I’ve shit in the woods.

~Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods

Not to offend Bill or anything, but I think the desert is a much more trying ecosystem in which to attend to one’s daily operations. With eventual darkness as your only real security, bathroom breaks start to look pretty bleak as the sand meets the sky at some indeterminable horizon.

A new breeze has come to Cairo, carrying with it a lighter air scented with hibiscus that makes you almost forget the pollution. Last weekend, 50 other students and I rode this breeze west to the Black and White Desert.

Truth be told, I’m tired of playing tourist. But to a certain extent, having a mailing address in Egypt and knowing how to deal with taxi drivers in Arabic gives you a sense of extra legitimacy and slight swagger when venturing outside of Cairo. “Yeah, I live in Egypt.”

Going to the desert, though, you realize just how much you don’t fit. The profile one cuts against the rising sun is never going to be that natural elegance that befits a Bedouin. Sunburn is a painful reminder, too.

Walking on the Flour Stone, a calcium carbonate deposit the the middle of the White Desert, slate splintered under my feet like ceramic. The footfalls were muted as the sound-waves were absorbed by the chalky expanse. I felt muffled.

It’s hard to imagine actually living in the desert. How do people do it? You can literally go hundreds of miles in any direction and not find a living soul or sustenance. How did they come across oases? How did the logistics of living in such a hostile environment persist for so long?

How do you deal with tummy-aches?

That weekend my immune system lost its sense of adventure and decided to stay in Cairo. Stomach pain plagued our safari and each jolt of the jeep as we sped across the dunes reminded me that I was still partly white-pansy American girl.

You get over the pain and keep walking, forgetting yourself in the vastness of everything else. Earth for me was formerly defined by limited variety of American cities, a select few states, and the East coast. When did my world get so big to include alien deserts and lack of Peptobismol?

Lying on my back, listening to campfire whispers and laughter dissipate in the desert night, I lost any sense of my ‘bad-ass-ness’ at ‘braving the desert’, or worrying about how foreign and incongruity I am with Egypt, or even the constant irritation in my belly. Stars, sand, both innumerable, made me feel universal and isolated simultaneously. There’s something to be said for just being, realizing there’s a world revolving under your feet and the firmament is not the ever fix’ed mark you thought it to be. After trying to do so much with my time here, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that not everything can be something. It’s not all going to change you in a big or small way and waiting for that change could mean you miss out on the experience.

Philosophical musings aside, I think Mr. Bryson would agree that I earned the right to mild swagger.

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