I didn’t argue with those who insisted that North Africa was a Petri dish of dictatorial regimes, angry impoverished peoples and hostile religious fanatics. I simply observed that if Islamic terrorism is the most pressing international problem facing the West, if the world truly suffers from a clash of civilizations, what writer wouldn’t want to witness and record events firsthand?
I wasn’t a war junkie; I didn’t have a death wish. I wasn’t going to Iraq or Afghanistan. I was traveling to a region where I had a grasp of the countries’ second languages, French, Italian and Spanish. In addition to my U.S. passport, I had an Irish one, through my maternal grandmother, and I assumed this would ease my way in spots where Americans weren’t so welcome.
For the past decade, I have rented a winter house on Key West, an island that refers to itself as Paradise. But however heavenly it may be, a two-by-four-mile scrap of land can get boring, and while I had no desire to forsake it forever or trade it in for hell, I was ready for something edgier, a challenge. At the end of the day, I suppose my trip to North Africa had to do with... the end of the day. Having started my career with a coming-of-age novel, I was dealing with a different coming of age. I had just turned sixty-five and was a senior citizen, a card-carrying member of Social Security and Medicare. Much as I didn’t like to dwell on it, the issue was unavoidable: If I didn’t make the trip now, I might not get another chance. And there was no denying that I felt I had something to prove—to myself if nobody else.
When I was younger, I needed no such excuse. I just went. I moved to be moving, for the pleasures of “merely circulating,” as poet Wallace Stevens wrote. I hit the road at seventeen and haven’t stopped since. If anything, I’ve grown more restless with age and still don’t own a home or have a permanent address. For me and for my work, travel is a need as urgent as oxygen.
Before I left Key West on a series of flights to Atlanta, then Rome, Athens and Alexandria, my sister Karen phoned to say goodbye. She mentioned that she had seen a movie, Into the Wild, that reminded her of me. She suggested that I see it.
I already had. I’d read the book, too—the story of a fellow in his twenties who, spurred by ecstasy and neurosis, abandoned his home and family and surrendered himself to an incessant quest. He ended up in the Alaskan wilderness, marooned in a wrecked school bus, slowly starving to death on a diet of roots and berries.
“Age aside,” Karen said, “are you that guy? Don’t get me wrong, Mike, but are you really ready for this trip?”
“I’m headed for North Africa, not the Arctic. There are plenty of hotels and food and doctors where I’m going.”
“That’s not the question. Do you know what you’re getting into?”
“Absolutely.”
But her call gave me pause. While I didn’t see myself falling apart or going haywire, I knew I might blunder off course into a sick-bed. Over the decades, I’ve sometimes had to be hospitalized while traveling. In 1968, on the Paris Metro, I flung out a hand to stop a door from shutting and wound up with twenty-six stitches in my wrist. I then suffered a feverish reaction to French tetanus serum, and my scar oozed glass splinters for the next month.
Years later, in Paris again, I was knocked flat by an infection and spent a week in the American Hospital. Then, during a 2001 rail trip through South Africa, I suffered such severe nausea and breathlessness that I had to be removed from the Blue Train and rushed to a clinic in Johannesburg. I thought I had food poisoning, but to my shock, I was confined to an intensive care cardiac unit, with a resting pulse rate of 138 and a heart wracked by atrial fibrillation.
Doctors prescribed medication that managed the condition until 2003 when on a trip to San Antonio, Texas, I slipped into arrhythmia again. An alert cardiologist attached jumper cables-actually, a defibrittator—to my chest and jolted my heart back into a regular beat. But a month later, in Miami, I had to undergo a catheter ablation, a procedure in which an electrical charge zapped the arrhythmic areas of my heart. This, along with beta blockers, had kept me on an even keel for the past five years.
My most disturbing episode of ill health occurred in Laos during a boat ride down the Mekong River. On the advice of a doctor in the States, I had dosed myself with the anti-malarial medication Larium. Too late I learned that the drug’s possible side effects include severe depression, suicidal ideation and psychosis. For hours I lay stunned on the boat’s throbbing deck. The odd foray ashore did little to relieve the despair that alternated with my panic. At every village Hmong tribesmen dashed out of the jungle, selling jars of pickled snakes and scorpions.
Among the other passengers there was, providentially, an American woman who recognized my symptoms and told me to throw away the Larium. A psychologist, she kindly listened to my gibberish for the next two days, and by the time we disembarked, I was as normal as I’ve ever been.
So as I packed for North Africa, I made space in my two small bags for Lomotil for diarrhea and Phenergan for vomiting; a statin to regulate my cholesterol; an anti-inflammatory in case my aching back flared up; Atenolol for my heart; and Prozac for my depression. All these and an extra pair of glasses, and I was set.
In early April, on the flight to Rome, I read Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus, and several of its sentences found their way into my notebook. “Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they’re made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self.”
This was my moment. I was convinced of that. But was I the man?
ALEXANDRIA
The Chinese sage Lao Tzu remarked centuries ago that the longest journey commences with a single step. But on this particular trip, I’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint when my foot first hit the pavement. I had been thinking about the project for years and arranging visas, travel permissions and transportation for six months. Yet these were mere preludes, stumbles toward the starting block: Alexandria.
Arriving in Athens at 10:30 PM, I learned that the flight to Alexandria had been postponed until 2:30 AM. If we had no further delays, I’d reach my hotel at daybreak; not the most propitious start, but good practice for the vagaries of North Africa.
My fellow passengers all appeared to be Egyptians, returning from Europe with curios and souvenirs in string bags and cardboard boxes. Like me, they seemed frazzled and exhausted as they shuffled through the gauntlet of metal detectors, passport controls and X-ray machines, juggling hand luggage, boarding cards, tickets, loose change and shoes. The security guards in Athens were an officious bunch, testy to a man and contemptuous of the Egyptians, whom they frisked and interrogated, shoved and assaulted with sword-length electronic wands.
I’ll concede that in the squinty eyes of a prejudiced airport profiler, this might look like a planeload of terrorists. Most men were turbaned and bearded, their foreheads darkened by zebibahs, or prayer bumps, from pressing their brows to the ground five times a day. The guards treated the women as if their ample burnooses and veils were designed