As I travel around the country talking about my most recent book, Skeletons on the Zahara (thank you Northern Trust for sponsoring the California Literary Society and the Las Vegas Literary Society), I think about the nature and power of stories and how the sum is much more than the parts. And how stories live and continue to grow.

     One incident during my camel trek in the Sahara that I particularly like to recount occurred on a sweltering day in the inescapable dung dust around a well in the southern-most reaches of Morocco. We were sitting on a berm watching our guide Mohammed el Arab blowing on coals of brush in a makeshift fire pit, when one of our camels snorted out a little creature. It was a moist thing that looked like a pearl onion with legs. Squatting by the fire, Mohammed identified it as a dooda. A dooda starts out as a tiny parasite in a camel's nose. When it grows big enough to block the airflow, it has a re-birth of sorts. The born-again dooda then crawls away to do whatever adult doodas do.

     I was sitting on the overturned well bucket, the camels having already been watered, when I saw this. My semi-recumbent mind wandered to, well, the song with that animal’s names as its refrain. I started singing “Camptown Races” out loud. Being the fast learner that he is, Mohammed got it right away. Soon we were crooning away together. The fact that Mohammed had problems pronouncing many English words did not inhibit him a bit. He is that kind of guy. We made a dreadful noise and had a dandy time. I thought little of the incident, only laughing and basking in the spontaneous pleasure.

     It was only later, perhaps after I returned to the States, that it occurred to me that this was one of those wonderfully absurd significant moments that defines a person, place, or relationship. Reflecting upon it, I realized that the parts of the song that made sense to me made no sense to Mohammed. And the part that meant something to him had meant nothing to me two minutes earlier. Nonetheless, singing the song together united us in a way that even meaningful words could never do.

     Reality was good but the moment reflected upon and retold was even better. Such perhaps is the nature of stories, especially adventure stories. Events get translated into words, stories get buffed and polished, the rough edges chipped away to the point where they can become mythology. Compare the way I told the story above with the entry in the “Notes from the Road” section on this website. And I confess that when I typed up those notes, I reflected on them a bit, sometimes added context or a quick insight.

     If you are further interested, read, say, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki or Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, both great adventure stories, and compare that to, say, Michelle Vieuxchange’s  Journey to Smara, also a classic but of a different feel. Vieuxchange died before he could write up his story. His diary was certainly edited, but it it clearly much less massaged than the other two, Rawicz’s being perhaps greatly contrived. 

     All stories are told with a greater or lesser degree of manipulation. This is neither good nor bad (unless something is not what it purports to be). But the reader must always be aware and remain vigilant while basking in reflected rays of glory.