Peter O’Toole, You Changed My Life

You always hear stories about a book that changes someone’s life, or a chance meeting, a la “Strangers on the Train.”  Well, no, let’s leave that murderous meeting aside.  But sometimes something so dramatic happens to you that it changes your life forever.

This happened to me my senior year in college when I saw David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” with, yes, the blue-eyed beauty Peter O’Toole.

Was it the story?  Was it the man?  Was it the history of it all?  No.  It was the vast expanses of desert.  And, okay, O’Toole played his part, but it was really the desert the called to me.

Before “Lawrence of Arabia” there was Sigmund Romburg’s “The Desert Song,” but let’s face it, all sound stage, though I loved the music.

Why do I find the desert so appealing?  I have no idea.  It’s a siren song, calling to my soul. Not to mention its pallete of colors that changes as the light changes.  I longed for the desert.  But how to get there?

Fortuitously, I met this strange little man in Princeton, who turned out to be a husband-in-waiting.  When I first saw him, I thought he was from India.  But it turned out he was from Israel.  Let’s go, Negev!

Of course, there were other considerations when we joined our fates together, but the Negev was high on my list of to-do’s.  Mission accomplished after the Six Day War, when we flew to Israel, I for the first time to meet his family.  Desert?  In Givatayim, a suburb of Tel Aviv, there was sand everywhere, but that didn’t quite qualify.  So off we went with a friend of my husband’s into Gaza City itself, Jerusalem, and finally to the Dead Sea, much larger then than it is now.

That was only my first taste and a very limited one of the desert.  I had to come back several times to experience the real thing, the Negev with the wandering ibis, then the Arava, driving down to Eilat, being caught in a sand storm, seeing the black Bedouin tents, having camels block the road.  Even now in reflection my heart rejoices.

But why stop at Eilat when the Sinai called?  While we hugged the coast,  enjoying the pristine beaches (at a time before it was totally developed for too many tourists), the desert was always waiting, well spied from the top of Mount Sinai.  How I made that climb, I’ll never know.

Then should we limit ourselves to only Beduin camels?  There were other deserts to explore.  Ah, the romance of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.  Tajines all the way, we drove first through the snow and then down into the desert, where we had to mount camels to take us on an overnight excursion among the Amazigh, previously known as the Berbers.  The evening fire was lovely, as was the meal. The tents?  Someone should have told us we’d be sleeping in sand.  Most threw their clothes away after that night and the camels, but I’m much too thrifty for that extravagance.

Australia and the great outback, I greeted you with enthusiasm. We started in Adelaide, boarded the Ghan and traveled through vast expanses of nothingness until we reached Alice Springs.  My heart rejoiced.  Especially when we hopped on camels that took us to a “chateau” for dinner.

Deserts in the United States?  Culturally?  No, of course, Death Valley, but for some reason it didn’t seem like a desert.  Maybe because no Bedu and no camels?

Now I live along Lake Michigan, where the water is endless, as far as the eye can see. I rejoice at the modern conveniences, like a flush toilet.  No longer is it necessary to go behind a sand dune and squat.  And yet— and yet—