“I’d like to hear that, too,” Kathy said.
“I’m not going to say no to that option,” Ray said.
Kevin scowled. I could tell by his expression he would probably quit if we tried to go through Chad. He was right to be scared.
“But, I think right now, we just head for Libya and go for it like we’re not stopping,” Ray said.
That seemed like the best plan. Run toward Libya and hope for things to work out. I could live with being turned away, but I could not live with not trying.
We ran east out of Agadez full of uncertainty. The girls rode in the support vehicles and greeted us at every break. It was nice having Lisa there, offering encouragement, and knowing she was seeing the Sahara for the first time allowed me to see it anew. And Kathy’s presence had Ray bubbling over with happiness. For Kevin, though, having Nicole there seemed to heighten his loneliness rather than ease it. She reminded him of home, of everything he was missing. I could tell from their body language and expressions they were having serious conversations. I got the feeling that whatever they were talking about was not good for the expedition.
After four days of running east, Kevin came to me. “I’m thinking of leaving early.”
“You don’t want to do that, Kevin.”
“I have my concerns. I don’t mind challenging the environment at all. But challenging people could be quite dangerous. We have come a long way. If we stop, no one will laugh.”
I told him we would talk about it later, in front of the whole group—and in front of the cameras. I felt obligated to capture any drama on film. And I figured that by the time we got everyone together, Kevin would have come to his senses.
On day fifty-nine, after eighty-four marathons, we gathered in a tent and Kevin announced to the group he was planning to leave the expedition. He would go back to Taiwan the next day with Nicole. I couldn’t believe it. Part of me thought, Fine, if he doesn’t want to be out here, then he shouldn’t be out here. Another part of me wanted to scream at him that he had committed to doing this thing and he was going to continue. But I knew that yelling at Kevin would just make things worse.
Ray and I talked alone later after Kevin’s announcement. We agreed we had to do everything we could to convince him to stay.
“We can’t just let him quit,” I said, “because I know how he will feel about that later.”
“We’re a team,” Ray said. “We have to finish this together.”
The two of us went to find Kevin. He was leaning against one of the trucks talking quietly to Nicole. He wiped away tears when he saw us. I asked if we could talk to him, and he walked with us.
“You can’t quit,” I said.
“You fought back from the knees, you fought back from the sickness,” Ray said. “You have to fight back from whatever this is.”
“This is very difficult for me,” he said. “I love you guys.”
“Expeditions are difficult. There are no answers!” I said. “That’s the whole thing. You always have to wait and see what happens next. That’s why it’s exciting. If you don’t want excitement, then run a marathon, you know? You can get water at every station and take a shower and sleep at night. But that’s not you, Kevin. That’s not you. You can do this. You don’t want to quit. We are going to finish, but we want it to be with you. We’re a team.”
“Absolutely,” Ray said.
Kevin stared at the ground.
“Don’t quit,” I said. “Just run to Libya. Ten more days. Five hundred K. If you still want to quit, then you can quit. Will you stay? Until Libya?”
Finally, Kevin gave us a slight nod.
“Yes!” Ray said with a fist pump. “Thanks, Kev.”
I put my arm around his shoulder and pulled him close to me. “Thank you.”
- - - -
On New Year’s Eve, we said good-bye to Lisa, Kathy, and Nicole. It was difficult to see them go, especially for Kevin, who had, for a time, convinced himself he would also be heading for the airport. When we knew the ball was dropping in New York City, we had a small celebration with some horns and confetti Lisa had left for us. It was a new year. We had to focus on what lay ahead.
The next few days dawned cold and clear. We were in open desert now on terrain marked only by ripples made by wind, camel tracks, and the tire marks of our support vehicles. I felt obligated to stay upbeat, but at night, under the cold light of a million stars, I let uncertainty and fear seep in. My shin was killing me. Ray was also hobbled with leg pain and diarrhea. Kevin was distant and still emotionally raw. Though we forced ourselves to eat high-calorie food—cookies, Cheetos, Pringles, candy, peanut butter—we were all losing weight. Forty pounds so far for me, thirty for Ray, and twenty-five for Kevin. We had no fat reserves, nothing to tap into.
The worst of it was we didn’t know where the hell we were going—other than vaguely east. What if this was all a colossal waste of time? At night, I allowed myself to fantasize about getting hurt, maybe breaking an ankle, something that would make it plain that I had no choice but to stop. It would be a graceful exit; no one would say I didn’t try my hardest. I didn’t want to quit, but it was impossible to be positive all the time. In the morning, I chased those doubts out of my mind. I was all systems go. I had to be.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Ray said to me, as we labored across an expanse of windblown sand.
“Don’t sweat it, dude.”
“I’m just really doubting myself. I feel like I’m on the verge of wanting to quit.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s all going to work out.”
“I’m scared today,” he said.
“I know. I get it.”
We ran in silence for several minutes.
“That fear, Ray? I don’t think it’s from this, you know?” I said. “The fear we have today is based in the fear we’ve had our whole lives, and that’s exactly what brought us to this desert.”
“Yeah,” Ray said.
“Yes,” Kevin said. I didn’t know he’d been listening.
“It’s why we’re here,” I said. “We’re feeding that fear, you know? We’re trying to feed the monster.”
“It’s just a hard day for me,” Ray said.
“Look, we’re only about thirty K from turning north,” I said. “Hell, we could turn now, but I want to see Fachi.”
“I want to see it, too,” Ray said.
Fachi was an oasis town, an important stop for camel caravans over the centuries. Mohamed had told us it was a special place, but nothing prepared us for our first glimpse of it. It rose like a dream out of the arid moonscape—a movie set of feathery date palms and ruined fortress walls set against high sand hills. On the outskirts of the town, we passed checkerboards of salt pits. Hundreds of molded cones of salt leaned against a low wall waiting to be loaded onto camels.
Dark-skinned women, with a single gold ring in one nostril, squatted in bright printed dresses at the shallow salt pools. Donkeys grazed near low green shrubs. I reached down and brushed my hand against a bush and smelled the fragrant leaves of thyme. Men filled buckets at a well. There was water here. There was life.
As we ran, children appeared—five, then ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred—coming out of the shadowed alleys between the low mud-brick houses. The girls had close-cropped hair and colorful ankle-length dresses; the boys were in T-shirts and dusty pants. They fell into step with us, laughing and shouting.
“Bonjour, bonjour!” we said.
I felt someone grab my hand and looked down at a little boy, barefoot, scrawny, maybe ten years old, wearing a faded Chicago Bulls shirt. He beamed up at me. One of his eyes was bloodshot and oozing. He shouted something in Arabic as he ran.
“Good job, man.” I smiled back at him. “Good job.”
The boy laughed as he kept in step with me. More kids joined us, whooping and
hollering. Dogs trailed along, barking and racing back and forth along the edge of the group. I started to play with the kids, getting them to mirror my moves. I lifted my knees in an exaggerated march and they all did the same. I went up on my toes and they mimicked my catlike prance. When I lengthened my gait into a comic slow-motion stride, they followed my lead. Kevin and Ray played along when they saw what was happening. Through it all, the little boy never let go of my hand, never stopped smiling. He squeezed my fingers. I squeezed back.
The kids sang and clapped and we bounced along with them. I felt myself being transported through this town as if on a magic carpet, borne up by these beautiful, smiling kids. Their joy was my joy. All the worries about whether we would get permission to go through Libya fell away. I forgot about the pain in my leg and the fear and the doubt. I could see in Kevin’s and Ray’s faces that they felt it, too.
There would be no quitting, no exits—graceful or otherwise. We’d come this far. We would go on. If Libya wouldn’t let us in, then we’d turn north for Algeria or south for Chad. We’d keep trying until no one was left to turn us away.
The children dropped off from our group as we neared the far edge of town. The boy hung on to my hand for a bit longer, then I felt him slip away. When I looked back for him, he was gone. Ray, Kevin, and I fell into step together. Ray put out of his hand and we bumped fists.
“That was amazing,” Ray said.
My eyes welled up as we passed the last of the settlement’s low walls. Just that quickly, Fachi was behind us, but I felt changed by the experience. This feeling was why I wanted to do this run. Ahead was the great emptiness, the high pale dunes of the Ténéré—and beyond them, the Libyan border.
That night, the crew set up my tent for me, but I decided to sleep outside. The moon was full and so bright that I awoke a few times, thinking someone was shining a light into my eyes. At two thirty in the morning, I woke up again—to some kind of freight train howling. It was the wind. I sat up and found myself covered in sand. Forty feet to my right were the tents where Ray and Kevin were sleeping. It took me a few seconds to realize that my tent was missing. I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the blowing sand. In the distance, I could see a black dot bouncing along in the moonlight, probably a half mile away. My tent. I stood up and considered giving chase, but as I watched, the tent danced up the side of a massive dune, then launched itself into the air and disappeared. I laughed and wished the tent a happy journey. I hoped that someone who needed shelter would find it. I got back in my sleeping bag. I loved sleeping outside, and now I wouldn’t have to make a choice anymore.
In the morning, the wind was still cranking. We figured it was blowing forty miles per hour—and we had to run directly into it. Because I was the largest and I was feeling the best, at least for the moment, I ran in front with Ray and Kevin tucked into my slipstream. To make things even more challenging, we had turned north and were no longer running parallel to the dunes. Instead, we had to go up and over the hills, like a surfer trying to paddle out to the break. We wore goggles and covered as much skin as we could, but the sand still found its way into our mouths and noses and ears.
Normally, we followed the tracks of our support vehicles when they had gone ahead of us, but in the blowing sand, their tracks were almost instantly obliterated. We had a handheld GPS with us, but even with that, if we were off by just half a kilometer, we risked missing the truck. One afternoon, we spent two hours trying to find our team—and the film crew that had been shadowing us came forward to tell us their satellite phones had gone dead and that they were lost, too. When we finally spotted the truck in the distance, we shouted with relief.
Later that evening, Don pulled me aside. I was grinning at him because I thought he wanted to apologize for getting so far ahead of us in the sandstorm.
“I may have to leave early,” he said. “I’ve got some commitments.”
I was stunned. “Leave?”
“Yeah, I’ve got an assignment. I have to be in Alaska.”
I was shocked he would even consider leaving the expedition. But I didn’t have the energy to have that conversation at that moment. I walked away. I told myself he wasn’t serious. He would find a way to postpone whatever was creating the conflict.
- - - -
In midmorning on January 10, Ray, Kevin, and I spotted Don and the camera crew waiting for us up ahead. It was unusual to see them out here at this time of day. We weren’t scheduled for a break for a few hours. My stomach flipped. Was it my kids or my mother? Maybe LivePlanet had pulled the plug. It took ten long minutes to reach Don.
“Gentlemen, I have news!” Don said with a big grin. “Libya! We’re in!”
Omar Turbi had done it. He’d gotten the Libyan government to allow us to enter the country. We all cheered and hugged.
“All they ask is that we stop at a few places as tourists—but that’s fine. We are in,” Don said.
“Kevin, you understand?” I said playfully. “Now you have to keep going.”
- - - -
My elation over being allowed into Libya faded quickly when Don, over lunch, said again that he would probably leave the expedition early. The whole crew was sitting there—and we were being filmed.
“I can’t believe you are telling me that you don’t want to stay to the end.”
“I didn’t say that. I said I had other commitments in February. I might go early. It might be February second or February ninth.”
“If we haven’t earned your respect after sixty-five days . . .”
“It’s not about earning respect.”
“This is nothing more than a job for you! I thought your commitment to this project was different than that. It’s your absolute right to live your life the way you want to live it.”
“Thank you,” Don said sarcastically.
“But I need you to go because if you don’t want to be here, then I don’t want you here.”
“I didn’t say I don’t want to be here.”
“You cannot commit now to staying to the end.”
“When is the end?” Don raised his voice. “When is the end?”
“The end is when we get to Cairo!” I shouted.
When we started to run again, I was fuming. I went out ahead of Ray and Kevin, not caring about the wind or the sand or the lousy footing. I wanted to get away. I felt the pressure building inside me, the kind that fifteen years earlier, I would have known just how to relieve. I was angry and hurt. I felt as if I were being abandoned. It was such familiar territory.
The next day, during a break, I was approached by a camera operator named Steve who had joined us in Agadez to work the Russian Arm, a special piece of equipment that allowed James to get shots from above. Steve had filmed the blowup between Don and me.
“That was rough yesterday,” Steve said.
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk to this guy about what had happened. We had a rule—no conversation between the expedition team and the production crew.
“Don’t lose your serenity, man.”
I looked him in the eyes. Serenity—that AA buzzword. “Are you sober?”
“Yes, I am,” he said. “For a lot of years now.”
I felt some of the pressure ease as if a tourniquet had been loosened just enough to let the blood flow again. “Then you understand.”
“I understand that right now, you are an untreated addict. You’ve gone almost three months without another drunk to talk to. No meetings in all that time. I’m surprised you haven’t killed anyone yet.”
I laughed. “No shit. I just feel like nobody wants to be out here. I would go to the ends of the earth for these guys.”
“What other people do is not your responsibility. You can’t control everything.”
“It feels like my responsibility. The whole thing is my responsibility.”
“Everybody is de
aling with their own fears right now. Everybody has doubts and feels stressed. I’m stressed. But, maybe you should try being a little nicer to people, you know? You’re sober, man! You’re running across the fucking Sahara Desert! It’s beautiful! You should be grateful to have this opportunity. You could be dead.”
I knew he was right. I had so much to be thankful for. I was being too sensitive. I just wanted everyone to care as much as I did. We were all working hard and we were all exhausted.
I went looking for Don.
“I would like for you to stay and get us through Libya,” I said when I found him near the truck. “No matter what I said yesterday. I was emotional. I appreciate what you’ve done, and if you need to go, I’ll hug you and wish you well. And I’ll hope you’ll do the same to me. But I would love it if you would decide to stay.”
- - - -
After all the phone calls and negotiations and hand-wringing, the Libyan border was laughably unremarkable. We walked past some coils of barbed wire, then between two metal oil drums with tattered solid-green Libyan flags flying on wooden sticks. No guards, no fences, no passport control.
“That’s it?” I said to Mohamed.
He shrugged his shoulders and we all laughed. We would have our documents checked later in a town up ahead, where we would also be joined by Omar Turbi and our escorts—six truckloads of armed soldiers.
After months in the Sahara, I had long ago stopped feeling like a tourist. But this was Libya—and I felt like a wide-eyed child. Everything was a curiosity. We passed through prosperous-looking towns with shiny new gas stations and shops with well-stocked shelves. The local people exuded a confidence we hadn’t seen in the other countries—a confidence that came from knowing they had access to water, food, electricity, education, and transportation. But those things came at the price of freedom.
The terrain was different, too. Beyond the rocky volcanic plains were flat-topped buttes and red-rock spires that reminded me of the American West. We wanted to run out across the open terrain, but our escorts insisted we keep to the paved highway. They said it was for our safety, but I suspected it was more for their own comfort. That meant we almost never were taking the shortest distance between point A and point B. One day we ran eighty kilometers but only gained twenty-six kilometers toward our goal.
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