by Kurt Caswell
We heard a knock at the door.
“Oh, Jesus,” Bob said.
The knock came again. “My friends,” Ahmad said through the closed door. “It is me, Ahmad. Your guide. Please answer, please.”
Bob opened the door.
“Yes,” Ahmad said. “It is me. Your guide. Did you enjoy your day in Tetouan? Yes, of course you did. You received a nice tour of the city, a good dinner. This gentleman,” he pointed to me, “bought a fine rug for a very nice price. You received this accommodation in the best hotel, and then a nice smoke. Now, what are you willing to give?”
Bob rolled his eyes. “Look, man,” he said. “We’ve paid enough.”
“I have given you a very nice service. Now you must pay.”
“You told us no cost,” said Bob.
“At first, yes, there was no cost, but now there is some cost.”
“Get lost, man,” Bob said.
“I cannot go to my family without my wage,” he said. “My grandmother needs medicine. My sister must eat. I must buy shoes. You see what I mean. What are you willing to pay?”
“Unbelievable,” Bob said.
“Please believe, my friends. I must have my wage.”
“What have you got?” Bob said, turning to Ron and me.
We pooled our cash. About 300 dirham, which was about $35.
“Here,” Bob said.
“This is not good,” Ahmad said. “I must have twice this money.”
“It’s all we have,” Bob said. “Now please go.”
Ahmad threw his hands into the air. His kind face became dark and stormy. He stood in the doorway a moment. What was he going to do? He waited. He stormed. He seemed to be about to burst. Then he turned and went out. We closed the door and locked it.
As the sun got up, so did I. Bob and Ron lay together on the far bed with their heads on one pillow, their legs entwined. I did not wake them, and I did not say goodbye. I went quietly downstairs into the lobby, then out into the street to hail a taxi for the border.
“How much?” I asked.
“Eighty.”
“To Ceuta?”
“Eighty.”
“I paid only twenty to get here.”
“Private taxi,” he said. “Eighty.”
“Twenty.”
He motioned me to get in. We picked up four other men, and when we arrived at Ceuta, I paid him thirty. He smiled and thanked me.
Now the border. I passed through a gate and showed my passport.
“This way,” a fellow told me.
I went that way to another Moroccan checkpoint and showed my passport once more.
“This way,” that fellow told me. “The window, please.”
I went to the window, showed my passport, received my stamp, and passed through one more checkpoint.
Several feet beyond that, a man accosted me and demanded my passport.
“I just showed my passport several times,” I said. “I have my stamp.”
“Give me your passport,” he said.
“I have already shown it several times.”
“I am a policeman,” he said.
“Let me see your badge.”
“I am a policeman!”
I showed him my passport, and he snatched it from my hand. I snatched it back.
He took hold of my arm and pushed me in front of two uniformed guards. They looked at me and shrugged.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I did not—”
“You shut your mouth, boy,” he said.
He forced me through a small door in the checkpoint station. Inside was a desk and a chair.
“You smoke?” he asked. “You have something inside? Let me see your bag.”
“I am sorry,” I said again. “I did not mean to be disrespectful.”
He searched my backpack. He looked into my plastic grocery sack, which I had carried since Cordoba. He pulled out a sealed container of warm yogurt. It dripped onto the floor.
“Must have sprung a leak,” I said.
He dropped the yogurt into the sack, threw my passport on the desk, and walked out. I gathered my things and followed him through the door. I was back in Spain.
On the train to Cordoba, I watched the blue sky over the countryside from the train window, the long ruffled rivers coming down into the sea, and the people the way you want Spaniards to be, old-faced with well-worn hands and tired eyes across the dust of their long history, a history bound up with the people across the strait. The green hills rolled on. We passed through Cortes de la Frontera, a village that fell below a great stone mountain draped in long green sweeps of grass and water running through it. I saw there an old man with his long walking cane bringing in a great band of goats, his dogs moving slow along his side, walking slow himself, looking up and out across his valley, the walls of his world fallen away across a sea of grass and sky.
FOUR MOUNTAINS
United Kingdom and Ireland, 2007
Mount Snowdon, Wales (1,085 meters / 3,560 feet)
And so that morning of June 27, 2007, in heavy rain and fog, I thought I might climb Mount Snowdon alone. It’s the highest mountain in Wales. The waitress at Pete’s Eats in Llanberis, where I breakfasted on a monster omelet, open faced, with chips, told me only professionals climb Snowdon in this kind of weather. And a kind old woman at a shop where I bought fruit, cheese, and bread for the trail said, “What? You’re going up Snowdon? In this weather?” We looked out together at the rain slashing sideways at the windows.
“Why? Don’t people climb Snowdon in this weather?”
“Only if they’re mad.”
Therefore, I stepped out the door, squared off with the rain, and up I went, up the Llanberis Path, the most direct, least technical of the several routes to the summit.
Wordsworth climbed this mountain too and wrote an account in his epic poem, The Prelude. He went at night with a companion, and a shepherd as his guide, intent on seeing the sunrise from the summit. If I understand his poem, Wordsworth makes an astonishing discovery on that ascent. He comes to this great truth: “The highest bliss / That flesh can know” is “to hold fit converse with the spiritual world.” Perhaps you’re thinking this isn’t news at all, but there is a great difference in the wisdom that comes by experience and the wisdom that comes by way of musty books. To know, as others have said, you must make the journey yourself. For Wordsworth the climb becomes a pilgrimage, and he works out a kind of thesis for his life. The moment of discovery, he relates, “fell like a flash” before him. He looked up into the night sky to find “the Moon hung naked in a firmament / Of azure without cloud, and at [his] feet / Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.” It’s a beautiful moment, a beautiful passage, and on reading it, any wistful wanderer like myself cannot but ask: if it happened for Wordsworth on this sacred mountain, why can’t it happen for me?
But I had come to the United Kingdom for more practical reasons: (1) to attend a writers’ conference at Bangor University; (2) to travel with an old friend from my native Oregon; and (3) for sheep. I know, I know—there are all the various jokes and whatnot. But for me, sheep are serious business. I had spent some time traveling with shepherds in Idaho intent on writing about their lives, and so I thought the next step in my inquiry was to explore the pastoral landscapes of Great Britain. I had financial support too, a grant from Texas Tech University, where I teach. If I had had any sense at all, I would have roused to this good fortune. Isn’t it every writer’s dream to be handed a substantial budget and told, “Go find something to write about”? But truth is, I was racked with guilt. What did I mean by “explore”? Where was my inquiry headed? Why sheep, for god’s sake? Quite possibly nothing at all would emerge from my journey, and then I’d have to answer to the state of Texas for my irresponsible behavior. I was rather used to failure, but so far I had mostly done it with my own money.
I rounded an elbow on the Llanberis Path and passed a country house at the foot of the mountain. Here I came to a sign that told me not to expect t
oilets, shelter, or a café at the summit, luxuries I had no reason to expect until I learned I could not expect them. A little farther on, another sign appeared: “This is sheep country. Keep your dog on a lead.” Perhaps the state of Texas would get good value for its money after all. Thus emboldened, like Wordsworth “I panted up / With eager pace, and no less eager thoughts,” the black slugs, hideous and strange, making a gastropodinal minefield in front of me. Incidentally, it turns out that black slugs are not only black, but various shades of that color, which I understand to mean gray, and they can also be white. If you want to cull the population in your garden, the two best methods are, according to my source, dousing them with salt, or boiling them in a saucepan on your kitchen stove.
The rain let up, and I felt like the day might go my way. I picked up the pace and shed my Gore-Tex rain shell, strapping it happily to my Osprey daypack. My boots were comfortable and, so far, dry, and I could see ahead that I was gaining on two figures in the distance. I felt hale and fit as I overtook them, two young women in sporty outdoor apparel. I passed on the left and said, “Good morning,” to which they enthusiastically offered the same. I suppose I might have slowed and walked with them, but did I want company on my climb? Not really. At least I didn’t think I did. I pressed onward and up, passing a few scattered sheep, toward the heavy cloudbank settled in over the mountain. A huge boulder appeared out in front of me. My map told the story of a local legend: if you spend the night near the boulder you will experience a transformation—you wake up either a poet or a lunatic.
Thinking it better to avoid both, I developed a steady cadence as I humped up the mountain, and soon became so preoccupied thinking god knows what that I didn’t notice the railroad tracks along the route until I passed under them, and then farther on, under them again, where at last I reached the ceiling of the sky. Apparently people don’t always climb this mountain but instead hop the train to the summit. I couldn’t imagine a Wordsworthian epiphany arising out of that kind of voluptuousness, but here, as I paused beneath the stone overpass, it began to rain again, and I wondered if the train wouldn’t happen by and stop for me. The temperature fell and the wind burned my exposed ears. Visibility was only fifty feet, perhaps even thirty, here in the misty clouds. What if, in my blindness, I walked off the western face and plunged to my gory death? Unlikely, and yet I thought about turning back. Then I thought about thinking about turning back: would I think about turning back if I were climbing with my old friend? No. We’d press on through the storm. I put on my toboggan cap, then my rain shell, and pulled the Gore-Tex hood over my head.
I had not felt lonely until now, and when it came it surprised me. I was alone on the back of the greatest mountain in Wales suffering impossible weather, and no one in the world really knew where I was. A million miles from home, I was hungry and tired and bereft. Because no one knew me, and there was no one here to know me, I thought I could be anyone in anywhen, and oddly the idea of wandering out of my old life made me happy. I wasn’t happy exactly, but happy that I was lonely. I thought of Bash and the three conditions for his haiku: sabi (loneliness), shiori (tenderness), and hosomi (slenderness). I thought maybe I had them all, and when I reached the summit, I hoped to find waiting for me a sort of grail, an answer to a question I had not asked. Who could accomplish such a knight’s errand but me? And Wordsworth, of course.
Then I heard voices. Lots of voices. Were they the songs of guiding angels descending with the rain? No, for out of the mist came a colorful band of several dozen schoolchildren, laughing and shouting and splashing in the rain. A couple of smiling teachers brought up the rear. “Cheers,” one of them said, as they passed on by. So much for heroics. I ate six Fig Newtons, then stepped out into the rain and muscled up the way. I could hardly see anything at all, but I found that as I walked deeper into the mist, a little more of the trail ahead was revealed to me, and in this way I reached the top of the mountain.
At the summit stone I now understood the sign below announcing that there were no services at the top. Not because there were no services at the top, but because the services at the top were under renovation. A dozen men scurried about concrete foundations, and several excavators tore into the mountain’s skin, making a horrendous racket. I stood there a moment in the sharp wind, the surrounding peaks of Snowdonia obscured from my view, and noted how utterly anticlimactic it felt. I wondered if I would have found the summit more enchanting had I climbed the mountain with my friend. As it was, the universal mystery did not reveal itself to me the way it had for Wordsworth, and I imagined no length of waiting around, alone and battered by the bitter wind, would change this fact. What was the problem, anyway? Were these not conditions ripe for a miracle? Were such miracles even possible? Here in the yeasty heights, I had to come face to face with the possibility that the great poet was full of shit. Then a thought rose up in me: If not here, why not there? Why not climb another great mountain with my old friend when he arrived in Dublin? What is the highest mountain in Ireland, anyway? In fact, why not climb the greatest mountains in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales? Perhaps Wordsworth had not led me astray after all. I offered the summit a final nod, knowing I’d likely never return, and started back down the mountain.
Mount Carrantuohil, Ireland (1,039 meters / 3,409 feet)
Bash traveled with a companion, Sora. Samuel Johnson explored the Hebrides with James Boswell. Bruce Chatwin claimed to have traveled alone, but he lied—he almost always went with a friend. Peter Matthiessen accompanied George Schaller into the Himalayas. And of course Wordsworth and Coleridge made regular walking tours in the Lake District. This tradition of traveling with a companion inspired me, and it was in Matthiessen’s book The Snow Leopard that I read: “The Roshi was pleased that there would be but two of us—this seemed to him a condition of true pilgrimage.” If making a solitary ascent of Snowdon was to bear me no fruit, perhaps hill walking with a friend would. Besides, I was tired of traveling alone and tired of being lonely. To my good fortune, my old friend Scott Dewing had agreed to meet me in Dublin.
Scott and I had grown up together, passing through those affected high school years and on through college. It was a kind of miracle—more so than Wordsworth’s inspiration in the face of natural beauty—that after twenty-three years my friendship with Scott was still intact. No. Better than intact. It was flourishing, which was far more than I could say for the numerous friends whose lives I had passed into and out of over the years. Certainly we had our differences. Scott was married with two daughters; I had been married and now wasn’t. (We were each best man at the other’s wedding.) Scott had put on fifty unnecessary pounds and lost his hair; I had grown my hair long and kept fairly fit. Scott had moved from northwest Oregon to southwest Oregon, with a few flights into foreign lands; I had moved from northwest Oregon to almost every state in the West and hit twenty-four countries along the way. I admired his steadiness; he admired my wanderlust. I sometimes longed for his family life; he sometimes longed for my solitude. He could still kick my ass, but I was sure I could outrun him. Yet we both still loved books and good writing, outdoor and indoor adventures, and long walks on the beach. Even as months, sometimes years, passed between visits, we always seemed to pick up where we left off. After high school, Scott and I had planned to make a journey together through Peru, but college and lovers and making a living took precedence, and we left that dream behind. Now, at long last, such a journey was imminent. I took this as a sign of good fortune, and after a long day of wandering Dublin in the rain, Scott and I boarded the train for Killarney Town to climb Carrantuohil, the highest peak in Ireland.
From Cronin’s Yard, the path leads up the Gaddagh River to the Devil’s Ladder, a steep scree-filled gully eroded by the thousands of hill walkers who make this trek each year. The sun broke through the clouds as Scott and I walked through Hag’s Glen and between the brilliant waters of Lough Callee and Lough Gouragh. We felt good and talked about old times, the mountain sheep grazing the gre
en green grass.
At the Ladder, I pulled easily away from Scott, scrambling over huge boulders, slick in the rain, as we rose up dramatically off the valley floor. I was passing other hill walkers with ease, and I felt fit and fast and wanted to go faster. Instead, I stopped shy of halfway to wait for my companion. Twenty years ago, Scott and I were fairly competitive, and a situation like this would usually awaken his anger. He’d fume and sputter to catch up to me, throw his pack down where I waited, and curse the weather or the terrain or his shoes. He wasn’t used to losing. He was bigger, stronger, and faster than me, but over the long haul, I usually beat him. Now it mattered not at all. Scott’s life was full and complete, and he devoted himself daily to his family and his work as a teacher and computer administrator. As I was single again, I filled some of my idle hours with running and cycling and wandering just to stave off loneliness. My fitness wasn’t a sign of anything, really, except time spent alone.
“How you feelin’, man?” Scott said. He put his big hand on my shoulder.
“I’m feelin’ great. You?”
“Haven’t felt this good in years. Look at that! Aw, man.”
We looked back down the Ladder, where the green valley drew a line to the horizon. This would likely be the only grand view we’d get, as the top of Carrantuohil was nearly always occluded by heavy clouds and mist.
“Don’t feel like you have to wait on me,” Scott said. “I’ll make my way up at my own pace.”
“No, man,” I said. “Let’s walk it together.”
The plot to climb the four highest mountains in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales rose out of our friendship and our search for a purpose. I had thought to climb Snowdon in Wales and Scafell Pike in England because these were the mountains of the great pastoral poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, but the notion to climb them all, and climb them together, came out of some deeper need to get things done. Much of my friendship with Scott revolved around getting things done—we skied the closed Forest Service roads deep into the Cascades; we trained and completed a triathlon at age sixteen; we created a course for ourselves in Egyptology when our high school failed to inspire; we ran the steep, winding trail to the top of 620-foot Multnomah Falls, the second highest waterfall in the United States; we paddled canoes up and down the great Columbia. Some of this was youthful exuberance, but we also made a concerted effort to lead each other forward, to imagine heroic labors because there seemed to be no one to imagine them for us. One day we realized, quite by accident, that those labors had made us the best of friends. Now here we were again, two decades later, up to our old tricks.