leaving egypt

My survey partner (above) and I are leaving this desert country - trading it for another . . . one we hear is under snow. New Mexico - unpredictable weather and those predictably excellent skies. Please keep your eye on the news and some of your best thoughts on us. We'll all be fine, and so will this ancient stuff. It can wait for another season. But it is so sad to leave some dear friends and especially at a time when their nation is in turmoil.

Homeward bound!

xo,
Gaea

when digging up bones . . .

My mother walks through cemeteries – it’s a habit she has. She likes how peaceful they are and she’s curious about the people at rest. When I was a teenager I walked with her through groomed graveyards, in the fall, in Connecticut.  Later, we visited cemeteries made lively and floral for Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead – in San Antonio, Texas. We looked over the tombstones of another era and wondered about the lives lived between the dash, between date of birth and date of death.

And now I’ve gotten comfortable excavating human remains (this feels like a weird sentence to write), but the tedious work of removal is my focus. This season one burial was different and made me think about the people whose skeletons rested, still and brittle. We exposed several skulls within a few minutes of excavation, until we had a total of four. We slowly exposed the rest of the skeletons (often the skulls are easy to clear, but the ribs, and so many other fragile parts, take hours to properly expose). As I looked upon these bodies, laid together - I related to them, whoever they were.

Here was the skeleton of an adult, and on those bones were two children, and to the side of the adult, an infant.  Something happened to these people and it happened all at once. Maybe it was disease or famine, but not likely anything unseemly, besides death. They were interred with care. I mapped the assemblage of femurs and tibias, ulnas, tiny and large, and mandibles with baby teeth. I drew them how they were interred - and how that had decayed. The right arm of the adult lay under the right arm of one child, as if it was reaching around its skeletal pelvis, holding it. It was all so tender – holding children in the eternal night. Placed this way it seemed a message traveled through time; it was a moment I could understand. Here was love and loss. I wrote practical notes, took measurements and other standard field practices – but I also felt moved by the circumstance of their mass death. And one day soon the biological anthropologist will examine those human remains and will say more about them – about their physical bodies and maybe about their lives. But so much time has passed, and those who knew them have passed. Much will never be known. The life they had, in some ways, remains secret forever.

the dead . . . are not far off

For four weeks I’ve been digging in a landscape filled with graves.  Human remains are a frequent “find.” They are often disarticulated; skeletons lost from themselves with nothing holding them but shifting sand. As we find them, complete or in part, I map and remove them from an excavation area. I do this work along with a crew of Egyptian men and boys, but mostly with a man, Ahmed, who is about my father’s age. I speak simple, half-sentences in Arabic, so I’m often quiet. There’s a lot to do when digging up bones – not time to imagine the bones with living skin and pumping blood. The occupant is gone, left its frame, and centuries have passed. In the time that disconnects us, all the people who knew them have passed on too. It is interesting to work on the old bones, but never sad; the gulf between us is too great.  

Before sunrise, I walk a path to our excavation. My feet crunch across wind churned objects in the sand.  I see pottery and mud brick bits ages old, and a person’s toe bone. In the same sweep - a chip bag, a sleeve with a pearl snap button, date pits, and donkey droppings. In a low spot between dunes is a carcass of a large mammal (probably mummifying naturally), and plastic bits – all sorts. I step over a bright white eye-socket (from a human skull). It’s given me something to think on - there’s more to this walk. The sand is part inorganic; it impresses me as a mundane context. In it, and grain-sized, are the remains of people, and what they built. It’s everything that ever was, but fragmented and less recognizable.

We really do - quite literally - become dust. I can see it here, beneath my feet, the return to the earth. And the earth will process our parts back into its stratigraphic record - even the plastic and cultural discards of this age. 

This is Ahmed at our job.

abydos

It seems that if I time-traveled back to an ancient Egypt, if I was part of a society on this very same piece of earth, but thousands of years ago, I would be preparing for the afterlife.  Or thinking about it, or making appropriate offerings - hoping that the god, along his procession way, would notice my efforts.  There is a procession way out here in the desert sands, sort of. At least, the archaeological evidence speaks to a great deal of activity with another plane in mind. Shrines, graves, subterranean tombs, and funerary structures of all kinds, constructed over centuries, were built as portals connecting the present to the eternal. The living were involved in relationships with those who had crossed into another realm. I cannot, in good conscience, call this other realm the place of the dead because it seems so lively and populated - at least it was viewed as such. No wonder some folks today ponder the likelihood that ancient Egyptians were in cahoots with alien beings. They were in communion, in their hearts and minds, with their ancestors and gods.

cairo and carcinogens

A fine layer of particulate settles on everything, the first strata toward an archaeological record. It rests on leaves and vertical walls, a patina of the tailpipe era. Zamalek, Cairo’s diplomatic quarter and an island in the Nile, is architecturally rooted in the early 20^th century. Its packed-in structures (both colonial and boxy modern) are graying. I followed my colleague and friend – he remembers the winding path much better than I - to the art supply store, a coffee shop, and a fair trade store.  We passed fruit vendors and souvenir shops. I bought a pomegranate stirring those neurons, with any memory of Arabic, to life. We walked until an unfamiliar weariness filled us. Jet lag? Less oxygenated air?

The night before I pushed 100 lbs of luggage through customs and bargained for a taxi. Rush hour traffic gave us close to two hours (and it can take 30 minutes) for the sensory barrage. Cairo is absolutely packed. Somehow everything ancient and contemporary, coexist. It feels dilapidated, shabby, and sheik, and it’s never still or quiet. Even the call to prayer, five times a day, echoing from hundreds of mosques, seems to slow the city half a beat. It feels voracious – devouring, dividing, – a metastasized city world.   Traffic made five and six lanes where four were printed on pavement. Horn honking continues almost unabated into the earliest hours. But how else could you survive this migration? The sidewalks are broken and always ending, leaving people to wade through traffic. The man, navigating this driving tetris, bringing me to the Golden Tulip Hotel Flamenco in Zamalek, does this job night and day - but says he likes Cairo best at night.

Cairo is one of the most polluted cities in the world – surely one of the most polluted I’ve been to. There’s much to explore and enjoy in this outrageous city world. Cairo is often the place that comes to mind when one utters “Egypt.”  Maybe Egypt conjures a resting sphinx or rising pyramids. Those places are here too; the city grows under the gaze of these monuments, and a wall stops them from growing right up over top.

american research center in abydos

I’m writing from the blessedly quiet American Research Center in Abydos, set down in a swale between dunes, a low spot formed by a water flow (though no water flows now). It’s 7 am December 17^th - nine hours ahead of my old New Mexico time zone. Most of the team is sleeping, apart from my British friend Tim – a doctoral student at Brown University. He’s reading here in the sufra (living room) – something about Napoleon’s Egypt. It is incredibly good to be here; getting here was full of those gyrations typical to Egypt travel. We couldn’t take the train – it’s off limits for Western travelers. We rented a van, waited for a police escort (for hours!), and cruised the rough desert highway south arriving at 8pm – nearly 12 hours after our planned departure.  This still, cool morning is refreshing after Cairo – and a calm before the commotion of the dig, which we’ll begin tomorrow. 

utah - we need this wilderness

Utah - for some a land of promise. For me, this is the landscape of Ed Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams. I'm northeast of the Aquarius Plateau, the territory Wallace Stegner referred to in his 1960 Wilderness Letter as a lively and terrible wilderness. I'm here to visit my own park ranger mom and my dad now living in Capitol Reef. They're living in an eden called Fruita, in orchards established by settlers in the 1880s and watered by the Fremont River and Sulfur Creek. This community has its own history - you may learn more here.

Capitol Reef became a national monument in 1937, but the geography we see as a part of the monument has been desert, then sea, then desert, and sea again - each era a layer, each strata a story of an older earth. The newer and intrusive layers mark volcanic eruptions or coagulated magma - cooled then exposed, like caps atop the red sandstone. The layers have character. The Dakota sandstone is full of mussel shells.

The Chinle formation is the most colorful. It's green, gray, and burgundy composition, ready for O'Keeffe, was a swampland that decayed into bright and curdled hills. 275 million years of the earth's history is exposed in uplift and canyon drainage.

For its grandeur we've made it a national park. Set it aside - a protected space that we keep safe even from ourselves. And it contributes to the health of our psyches. We need to see that we have foresight as evidenced by safely kept wild lands. We need to see that we today, and our predecessors too - carefully conceived of, and continue to understand, the fact that we are nature and we need nature. We need a place like this terrible wilderness especially now, while oil floods out into the Gulf of Mexico - as it has for more than 50 days after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig.
Wallace Stegner's Wilderness Letter made me understand that even if I come only to its edge - I need wilderness to exist. Not only I, but all of us. He said we are a wild species - and something will go out of us should we lose our wild places. He wrote in that letter a paragraph about the very place I am now exploring.

". . . let me suggest the Robbers' Roost country in Wayne County, Utah, near the Capitol Reef National Monument. In that desert climate the dozer and jeep tracks will not soon melt back into the earth, but the country has a way of making the scars insignificant. It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs. Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value. Roads would be a desecration, crowds would ruin it. But those who haven't the strength or youth to go into it and live can simply sit and look. They can look two hundred miles, clear into Colorado: and looking down over the cliffs and canyons of the San Rafael Swell and the Robbers' Roost they can also look as deeply into themselves as anywhere I know. And if they can't even get to the places on the Aquarius Plateau where the present roads will carry them, they can simply contemplate the idea, take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled part of earth is still there. "

(This excerpt of Stegner's letter was posted by The Wilderness Society).

But on this trip we did more than come to the edge of the wild - we went in. We walked through skinny canyons, soaked our feet, suffered fierce wind and even stubbed our toes in a manner that would make Ed Abbey proud. He was a park ranger too - and was faced with a predicament still a challenge in even the most beautiful places. That is - to make people get out and see them, not only drive through them."What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like mollusks on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not? Jesus Christ, lady, roll that window down! You can't see the desert if you can't smell it! Dusty! Of course it's dusty - this is Utah! But it's good dust, good red Utahn dust, rich in iron, rich in irony."

Desert Solitaire, Ed Abbey

You must come here - however you visit - just do. Come to its edge, watch a sunset, and maybe leave your metal mollusk shell. I think you will be compelled. The night sky is protected from the haze our cities shoot out toward space. You will see stars, planets, and maybe skipping meteors.

I leave you with Stegner's closing words. These are the words that make me sure we can keep sane if only we un-hunch ourselves from our machines, our devices . . lean back on solid rock and gaze out."We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

Very sincerely yours,

Wallace Stegner

___________________

And very sincerely yours,

Gaea McGahee

Now I must go out - to a summer full of the backcountry - on the Mountain Desert Trek. So long.