Arabian Nights in the Trinity Alps

It's been a while since my last post. I'm still working on editing and consolidating the photos from my two treks in Nepal. Likely, those will be some of my final posts in a couple weeks or so. For now, though, I wanted to write something about the closing of a chapter and opening of another that is taking place. Tomorrow I start my new job. I just got back yesterday from my last little hurrah, which I spent backpacking in the Trinity Alps of Northern California. It's a beautiful place.

I spent two nights up at these lakes by myself. It took me over a day to mentally slow down, to remember to breathe. At first I was so focused on maps and photos and so many distractions. But with time I was able to just be a bit more. I finished reading In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams by Tahir Shah. He wrote some about what traveling means to him. I especially appreciated this passage.

Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed, and you hold them to your heart.

That spoke to me. I could relate, out there sleeping under the stars, alone. And, too, it reminded me of my time in Morocco and beyond.

He wrote about a number of things that I've been thinking about in recent months. I'll share a few examples.

On the paradox of the proximity and yet the distance between East and West:

"A hundred years ago our worlds were separated," he said.

"By distance?"

"Yes. By distance. Now they are closer."

"Much closer--a short flight."

Fouad touched my arm, his lazy eye leering toward me. "But they are still very far apart," he said. "In their minds."

On the Western obsession with comfort:

"You people need much more than us," he said.

"But sunglasses just make life more comfortable."

"Comfort... comfort is from your world," said Fouad.

I especially like that: comfort is from your world. Think about that. What could it mean? Could there be any truth to it?

On different ways of knowing:

"That's how you are," said Osman scathingly.

 "What do you mean?"

"In the West it's always like that."

"Like what?"

"You read something in a book, some writing, and you think you are an expert."

"I'm not an expert," I said.

"Osman's right," said the Bear. "Our knowledge isn't the kind of thing you can find in a book. It's given to us through generations of..."

"Of conversation," said Marwan.

On being an outsider:

She apologized for causing a scene, but said it had all been too overwhelming for her.

"Was it the heat?"

"No, it wasn't that," she replied. "It was my ignorance, a sense of my own tremendous ignorance."

I asked what she meant.

"In the United States we know the system," she said. "But down there at the port I felt like a dancer about to go onstage to perform a dance for which I knew none of the moves."

"How did it make you feel?"

"It crushed me, and I always thought I was so in control," she said.

On understanding the meaning of symbols:

The result is that the symbols which ornament Western society--and are quite plain to Orientals--can't be decoded any longer by the Western mind. They are regarded as nothing more than pretty decoration or, as in the case of stories, as simple entertainment.

And finally, on why he wrote this book, and a big part of why I choose to travel:

"You must write a book to show the West there's more to the Arab world than Al-Qaeda and suicide bombers," he said.

I'm grateful for this time alone, contemplating in the Trinity Alps. And now, let the next chapter begin...