The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (43 page)

I awoke before dawn and saw snow: thick, dense, choking, blinding. Like plankton suspended at the bottom of a sunless sea, swirling white in the beam of my headlamp. It was the dust. Hundreds of animals in Elema's village had churned up a cloud as fine as talc. Goats, sheep, and camels—but, sadly, not our camels.

The cargo animals I had requisitioned months before (a key arrangement in a project that has consumed thousands of hours of planning) were nowhere to be found. Their drivers, two nomads named Mohamed Aidahis and Kader Yarri, were absent, too. They never showed up. So we sat in the dust, waiting. The sun rose. It began to grow hot. Flies buzzed. To the east, across the Rift, our first border, Djibouti, was receding at the rate of three quarters of an inch every year—the speed at which Arabia is drifting away from Africa.

Are you crazy? Are you sick? Yes? No? Maybe?

The Afar Triangle in northeast Ethiopia is dreaded as a waterless moonscape. Temperatures of 120°F. Salt pans so bright they burn out the eyes. Yet today it rained. Elema and I have no waterproof tents. We have an Ethiopian flag, which Elema wraps himself in as he walks. We have found and rented two camels. We plod across an acacia plain darkened to the color of chocolate by the warm raindrops. We tread on a photographic negative: the camels' moccasinlike feet pull up the frail crust of moisture, leaving behind ellipses of pale dust.

After a dozen miles, Elema already asks to turn back.

He forgot his new walking shoes from America. And his flashlight. And his hat—and the cell phone. So he hitches a ride from our first camp to his village to retrieve these vital items. And now he has jogged all the way back to catch up. He complains, laughing, of crotch rash.

This absentmindedness is understandable. It is impossible to remember every detail on a walk of this scope. I have forgotten things myself—nylon stuff sacks, for instance. Because of this, I begin my trek out of Africa with airplane luggage, a city slicker's rig with plastic rollers and collapsible handle, strapped to a camel's back.

It is the scientists of the Middle Awash research project who invited us to begin walking at Herto Bouri, our symbolic mile zero in the Ethiopian Rift—one of the richest human boneyards in the world. This is the famous site where some of the world's oldest human fossils have been found.
Homo sapiens idaltu
. Gone for 160,000 years. A big-boned ancestor—a dawn version of us.

The Middle Awash Project researchers, a team led by Tim White, Berhane Asfaw, and Giday WoldeGabriel, have uncovered in Ethiopia many of the most important hominin fossils of our day, including
Ardipithecus ramidus
, a 4.4-million-year-old biped. My unpredictable Afar guide, Elema, is their veteran fossil hunter.

Raised in a nomad culture feared for its tough warriors, Elema speaks three languages—Afar, Amharic, and a profane English patois gleaned from the Middle Awash scientists. He is a paleontologist in his own right. He exclaims “Wow” and “Crazy, man” and “Jeezus” while identifying the Rift's key geological strata. (Me he calls, not without endearment, White Asshole; I return the compliment with equal fondness, dubbing him and his perennial rash Burned Asshole.) He is the
balabat
, or traditional leader, of the Bouri-Modaitu clan of the Afar. His cell phone holds the numbers of Ethiopian grandees and French academics. Educated to the eighth grade in schools of the Emperor Haile Selassie, he bridges more cultures than a Malinowski. He holds more time warps inside his head than an Einstein. He is a phenomenon.

We are camped at Aduma when the Middle Awash scientists find us. They have come to show us a Middle Stone Age site.

“These tools are still a little early for the people you're following,” says Yonatan Sahle, an Ethiopian researcher based in the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “But their technology was basically as advanced. They made throwing weapons that allowed them to outcompete the other hominins they encountered outside Africa.”

We lean over a delicate stone point, a work of art that lies where its maker dropped it 80,000 to 100,000 years ago. In the distance we hear screaming. We look up.

An Afar woman strides in from the desert, waving her arms wildly. Where did she come from? Is she warning us off her hill? Is she mad? No. She marches up to a man dozing nearby on the ground. She gives him a sharp kick. She hefts a stone—a Middle Stone Age tool, perhaps—and threatens to brain him. Is it the collection of a debt? A matter of the heart?

I hear the victim laughing. I know this maniacal laugh. It is the man who will guide me to Djibouti, to the Gulf of Aden.

Dalifagi, Ethiopia

Water is gold in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia.

No surprise. This is one of the hottest deserts in the world. Walking for three days near the western scarp of the Rift, Elema and I find only one miraculous pool of muddy rainwater to ease our camels' thirst. But we stumble across a new type of water hole a day later—a coveted oasis of electrons, the village of Dalifagi.

The immense saltscapes that shroud the borders of Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea weren't even mapped until the 1920s. For centuries the martial Afar pastoralists who ruled the area resisted all incursions by the outside world. Today, though, besides their usual armament of pointy daggers and Kalashnikov rifles, they carry cell phones. They embrace the tool of instant communication with a vengeance. “It has given them power,” says Mulukan Ayalu, 23, an Ethiopian government technician who maintains the tiny power plant at Dalifagi. “They can call different goat traders. They can choose their selling prices.”

The diesel generator at Dalifagi chugs out a 220-volt current for six hours a day. Ayalu plugs in the nomads' cell batteries for a few cents each. On Mondays—market day—grizzled Afars line up at his office door. The folds of their saronglike skirts bulge with dead cell phones of faraway neighbors. The nomads are addicted to the devices. “Hallow?
Hallow?
” Elema bellows into his phone on the trail, with an accent that sounds, to my ear, straight out of Brooklyn. But he is asking directions to some ancient well. Or exchanging news of the dreaded Issa, armed raiders from a rival nomad group.

The electronic oasis at Dalifagi would never draw tourists, much less inspire the verse of caravan poets. But it is the real story today in sub-Saharan Africa. Nine hundred million people. A headlong sprint into the digital age. Exploding aspirations. Consequences unknown.

Near the Talalak River, Ethiopia

Footwear is a hallmark of modern identity. How best to glimpse an individual's core values at the start of the twenty-first century? Look down at people's feet—not into their eyes.

In the affluent “global north,” where fashion caters to every whim and vanity, shoes announce their wearer's class, hipness, career choice, sexual availability, even politics (the clog versus the cowboy boot). It is disorienting, then, to be walking through a landscape where human beings—millions upon millions of women, men, and children—slip on identical-style footwear every morning: the cheap, democratic, versatile plastic sandal of Ethiopia. Poverty drives demand. The only brand is necessity.

Available in a limited palette of chemical hues—black, red, brown, green, blue—the humble rubbery shoes are a triumph of local invention. They cost a pittance to manufacture. Any pair can be had for the equivalent of a day's field labor. (Perhaps $2.) They are cool—permitting the air to circulate about the feet on the desert's scalding surface. The ubiquitous sandals of rural Ethiopia weigh nothing. They are recyclable. And home repair is universal: owners melt and mend the molded-plastic straps over wood fires.

Our binary camel caravan—our two beasts are named A'urta, or Traded for a Cow, and Suma'atuli, Branded on the Ear—has been joined at last by its two long-lost cameleers, Mohamed Aidahis and Kader Yarri. These men caught up with us from our departure point at Herto Bouri, crossing miles of gravel pans and rumpled badlands during days of quickstep walking. In the manner of life here, no explanation was asked or given regarding the nature of their weeklong delay. They were late. Now they were with us. Each wore a pair of the region's signature plastic sandals. Color: lime green.

The dust of the Rift Valley is a palimpsest stamped by such footwear. Yet if Ethiopia's populist sandals are mass-produced, their wearers are not. One man might drag his left heel. A woman might mar her right shoe's sole by stepping on an ember.

Elema knelt the other day on the trail, examining this endless mutation of impressions.

“La'ad Howeni will be waiting for us in Dalifagi,” he said. He pointed to a single sandal track. La'ad was waiting in Dalifagi.

Near Hadar, Ethiopia

We are walking in the direction of Warenso.

The world changes when you are thirsty. It shrinks. It loses depth. The horizon draws close. (In northern Ethiopia the earth butts against the sky, hard and smooth as the surface of a skull.) The desert tightens around you like a noose. This is the thirsty brain compressing the distances of the Rift, sucking in the miles through the eyes, magnifying them, probing them for any hint of water. Little else matters.

Elema and I have trudged more than 20 miles through the crushing heat. We have separated from the cargo camels to visit an archaeological site folded into a wrinkled draw: Gona, the location of the oldest known stone tools in the world. (Age: 2.6 million years.) Our water bottles are empty. We are uncomfortable, anxious. We speak little. (What can be said? Why dry the tongue?) The sun's rays corkscrew into our heads. An Afar proverb: It is best, when you are lost or thirsty, to keep walking under the sun, because eventually someone will see you. To be tempted into shade, to drop under one of 10,000 thornbushes, means death: no one will find you. So we stagger on into the blinding afternoon—until we hear the faint bleating of goats. Then we smile. We can begin to relax. Goats mean people.

Our hosts: an Afar family camped on a hill. Two strong, smiling young women. Eight children in thin rags that once may have been articles of clothing. And a very old woman—she doesn't know her age—who hunches like a gnome in the shade of a reed mat. Her name is Hasna. She has been sitting there, weaving with spidery fingers, since the beginning of time. She invites us to join her, to rest our bones, to remove our shoes. From a battered jerrican she pours us water—chalky and warm, so salty, so alkaline, it oozes down the throat like soap, but precious nonetheless. She offers us a fistful of yellow berries from a wild tree that grows in wadis. She is our mother.

When our ancestors wandered out of Africa 60,000 or more years ago, they encountered other species of hominins. The world was crowded then with strange cousins:
Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis
, the Denisovans, and perhaps other varieties of people who weren't quite us.

When we met them, perhaps like this, on some remote hilltop, did we share water, or even interbreed peacefully, as some geneticists suggest? (Outside Africa, modern human populations seem to contain as much as 2.5 percent of Neanderthal DNA.) Or did we rape and kill, launching our species' long and terrible history of genocides? (In a cave occupied by modern humans, Fernando Ramirez Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, has identified a Neanderthal jawbone mutilated by the cut marks of butchery, perhaps cannibalism.) Scientists still debate this puzzle. All that is certain is that we alone survived to claim the earth. We won the planet. But at a cost: We are without close family. We are a species racked by survivor's guilt. We are a lonely ape.

Hasna's gentle voice lulls me to sleep.

When I awake, Elema is hunkered in low conversation with the men of the nomad camp. They have returned from tending their flocks. We shake hands. We thank them. We leave packets of crackers for grinning Hasna, and walk on. We are hurrying to meet the camels, walking toward Warenso. That night, while sipping our gift of salty water around a red fire that saws back and forth in the wind, Elema tells me the men of Hasna's camp had threatened him. He was not of their clan. He nearly hit them over the head with his walking stick.

Dubti, Ethiopia

Moving north and then east, we abandon the desert and stub our toes on the Anthropocene—the age of modern humans.

Asphalt appears: the Djibouti-Ethiopia road, throbbing with trucks. We drift through a series of gritty towns. Dust and diesel. Bars. Shops with raw plank counters. Garlands of tin cups clink in the wind outside their doors.

Then, near Dubti: A sea (no, a wall) of sugarcane. Miles of industrial irrigation. Canals. Diversion dams. Bulldozed fields. Levees crawling with dump trucks. Elema becomes lost. Night envelops us. We end up pulling the weary camels in a gigantic circle. “Wow, man!” Elema says angrily. “No way! Too much change!”

This is the multimillion-dollar Tendaho sugar plantation, an Ethiopian-Indian project that is making the Afar Triangle bloom. Fifty thousand migrant workers will soon toil here, tending 120,000 acres of desert that have been scraped, shaped, molded, and flooded by the Awash River to sweeten the world's coffee, its tea. Eventually it could make Ethiopia the sixth largest sugar producer in the world. It will help break the country's dependence on foreign aid—a good thing.

But the benefits of economic progress are rarely shared equally with all involved. There are winners and losers in every improvement scheme. Here, one of the losers is a bright young Afar woman—a girl, really, though her poise makes her seem old beyond her years. She is wrapped in a red dress. She stands by a new levee. She is collecting water from what used to be the Awash River.

“The company moved us off our land,” she tells us, waving her arm at the sheets of cane. “We get a little work, we Afars, but it is always the lowest work. Watchmen. Shovel work.”