November 29, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ed Caesar’s terrific “Only Disconnect,” an account of his recent experience “getting lost” in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The quotation marks are necessary because his experience was, as he says, “both real and extremely theatrical.” His trip was organized by a firm called Black Tomato that offers a package called “Get Lost”: 

A client is dropped somewhere spectacular and scantly populated, and challenged to find his or her way out within a given time period. From the moment that Asher left me in the valley, I was allotted two days to walk to a rendezvous point eighteen miles away, over and around mountains.

But this is only part of the challenge. As Caesar explains, 

The concept of Get Lost isn’t only that clients must find their way out of desolate situations; they have no clue where in the world they are going, until the last minute. Participants are also encouraged to surrender their cell phones. The imperative is not just to disappear but to disconnect. 

Two days before the start of the trip, Caesar receives his tickets: Manchester to Marrakech. The morning after his arrival in Marrakech, he’s picked up at his hotel and taken on a ten-hour drive to the starting point of his trek. He describes this part of the adventure as being like “a very pleasant kidnapping, with coffee breaks.” 

He’s taken to a remote location in the Atlas Mountains, “an apex where two high valleys met.” A member of Black Tomato’s support team briefs Caesar on the journey that lies ahead of him. He has two days to walk to a rendezvous point eighteen miles away, over and around mountains, carrying fifty-pound backpack stuffed with “clothes, paper maps, a compass, two G.P.S. trackers, spare batteries, notepads and pens, a big knife, a sleeping bag, flashlights, fire-lighting equipment, dried food, a few energy-rich snacks, three litres of water, a mosquito shelter, a roll mat, and a tarpaulin.” Caesar writes, “I was going to trek for two days, at altitude, with the equivalent of my six-year-old daughter strapped to my back.”

The next day, off he goes into the wilderness, wearing a shemagh, or head scarf, to keep his head from “boiling” in the hundred-degree heat. He says the first hour was hard (“Loose rocks on the ground often gave way, particularly on steep grades. Navigating posed its own challenges. The G.P.S. kept me pointed in the correct general direction, but it was sometimes fiendish to pick out the precise path that I was supposed to take”). He describes the terrain (“Some rocky expanses reminded me of footage from the Mars Rover”). At around lunchtime, he encounters some Moroccan men with mules:

The men were making Berber tea, which is the color of rust. They seemed delighted to see a stranger, and came out to greet me. Their grooved, hard faces confirmed a lifetime spent outdoors. Next to them, I looked like a newborn. They gave me bread, a tin of sardines, and a glass of the tea, which was as sweet as a candy cane. I happily devoured all of it.

He wants to stay longer with these guys, but he can’t; he has to be at his camp in time to set up for the night. So he moves on. He writes, “It wasn’t lost on me how perverse it was to break off an authentic and unusual experience—a chance exchange between mutually interested parties—in order to hew to an arbitrary timetable, on a trip supposedly designed to reconnect me to authentic modes of living.”

He arrives at the spot indicated on his map for his campsite, sets up his tarp, and makes supper:

The main part of my meal—“Veg Chilli and Rice”—was surprisingly edible, and the only thing missing from the sunset was a cinematographer: the whole plain glowed red. The view made me ecstatic but also a little blue, because there was nobody to share it with. I fell asleep in no time, waking only to the sound of rain on my tarpaulin, and a clap of thunder at around 11 p.m. As the eye of the storm grew closer, lightning illuminated the plain, and the raindrops grew heavier. I wondered for a few anxious minutes how much rain would have to fall to send a flash flood down the gully I was in. My conclusion: a hell of a lot. I went back to sleep.

The second day of Caesar’s walk is more challenging. The sun is brighter and the temperature soon reaches a hundred degrees. He writes,

My head pounded, and my pee turned the color of Berber tea. I had tried to drink plenty of water the previous day, but clearly it had not been enough. (I concluded, too, that an insufficiently rehydrated dessert I’d eaten the previous evening—an egg-custard imitation—had sucked some moisture out of me.) I resolved to stop more often and drink more. Given my G.P.S.’s unreliable battery supply, I also used the rests to pay attention to my paper maps. It was pleasing to reacquaint myself with analog navigation, and my compass replaced my G.P.S. around my neck.

Now, he’s in the final stretch of the journey. He says, “I could see from my maps that I had only a few hundred yards to walk. Suddenly, I did not want the experience to end. I slowed down, to revel in my last minutes of simplicity.” 

The trip ends in the tiny village of Ichazzoun. When he arrives, there’s a wedding going on. “Four musicians performing at the ceremony had heard about my trek, and they all came to greet me, in matching white-and-green outfits. They sang and clapped, and formed an honor guard for me to walk past, as a finish line.” Caesar says, “It was a surreal, embarrassing, joyous moment.”

Caesar sums up his trip:

My experience had been both real and extremely theatrical. The mountains and the rocks were solid enough to have broken my bones. But I was able to travel as I did only because a group of experts had prepared a route customized for my level of fitness, and had monitored my every move so that I could feel danger without actually being endangered. There was a touch of “Westworld” to Get Lost. And I hadn’t been truly disconnected; rather, I had been given the luxury of living for a short while under the illusion that I was. The adventure was every bit as confected as my hotel stay.

“Nevertheless,” he says, “my hike was deeply gratifying.” 

My summary of “Only Disconnect” doesn’t do it justice. I’ve omitted many delightful details, not to mention several narrative twists, including a flashback triggered by a bar of Kendal Mint Cake. Suffice it to say here, the piece is double bliss. Its subject is transfixing; its writing is superb. I enjoyed it immensely.