Our instructor, Ahmed, went over the medical and liability forms with the five of us. It was early on Monday morning. We were all eager to do what we came to the Sinai to do: scuba dive.
As I went through the medical form, I came to a series of Yes and No questions that each of us were required to fill out. One in particular stood out:
"Do you or have you ever suffered complications from Asthma?"
Heh. Is Bear Bryant still dead?
Dustin, the Stefans, and Elana cruised through their paperwork. I stared at mine for a bit longer and finally turned to Ahmed and informed him that I had Asthma, but had not suffered from an attack since I was around eight years old.
"Okay," he said. "Just say no, but sign your name by it."
After finishing our paperwork and making sure that they would accept my credit card, we were fitted for our gear and taken up to the roof of Sinai Backpackers to watch a two-hour instructional video on how not to die underwater.
Everything was going great. The weather was perfect. The difficulties of the previous day had all but vanished from my thoughts and the prospect of scuba diving was sending a thrill through me that would have made even Chris Matthews envious. Despite my debit card being out of working order, at least the dive center took the credit card.
Stefan's theory on why all the stores and shops would not accept a credit card was an interesting one. Cash was a more difficult money trail to follow than credit.
"And it's easier to buy AK-47's with cash," Stefan said half-seriously. His gregarious personality seemed to thrive on having the next tongue-in-cheek quip.
Following the video, which essentially just reminded us that we were not fish, a cart was loaded with our gear. Ahmed took us down the promenade to an area known as the "Lighthouse." There was no physical lighthouse there, but the reef near that particular stretch was apparently particularly bright with exotic fish and plant life.
The first test we had to pass was a 200m swim. Dustin was naturally the first to leap off the pier and into the water. Stefan K was next. I followed. Then Elana. Then Stefan. I decided that I wanted to finish first and quickly caught up with Stefan and then Dustin. Our finishing area was a roped off zone that at its deepest was only 9m. Once we finished swimming, Ahmed had us tread water for ten minutes.
"I saw some competition out there," Ahmed said with a laugh as he shook each of our hands. "Let's go over the signals for when we're underwater."
We sat down at a beachfront restaurant. Ahmed rattled off some Arabic and secured our own private booth for the afternoon. We had two dives to make that day. But first we had to make sure that everyone could communicate with one another underwater. The signals were pretty easy. Although the sign for "I'm okay" was the Little Rascals version as opposed to a typical thumbs up. The thumbs up apparently meant "I need to surface." I would accidentally conflate the two later.
Ahmed showed us how to assemble our gear and made sure that we knew how to inspect each other. Dustin was fired up. He had been looking forward to this for months. After thirty minutes going over the signals and inspecting and re-inspecting our gear, we suited up and went down the final checklist. Dustin and I were teamed up as dive partners followed by Stefan with Elana and Stefan K with Ahmed.
Our German friend, upon hearing he had been partnered with Ahmed, looked at us and laughed. "Good. This means I will live."
The wetsuit felt strange. It certainly repelled the sting of the Red Sea's colder water, but the slick nature of the material made my skin crawl. We moved out into the roped off zone and following Ahmed's instructions, raised our BFD and descended a couple of meters down.
The first time I inhaled with my respirator, it was a surreal feeling. I was breathing underwater. It was like I was somehow cheating the natural system that had been put in place. This struck me as particularly awesome.
Ahmed had to put some rocks in Dustin's vest and in my vest to weigh us down properly. Apparently our 12kg weight belts weren't quite up to the task. At the bottom, the five of us sat on our knees and linked arms so Ahmed could go through some of the basic procedures and maneuvers. We learned how to utilize our BCD underwater, to raise and lower ourselves, to recover our respirator if knocked away, to use a buddy's emergency air if needed, to clear our respirator of water, and to swim underwater with our gear.
At one point, immediately following my test to recover my respirator, I signaled to Ahmed that I was okay with a thumbs up. He cocked his head sideways and even through our masks I could read his "What did I tell you earlier expression?"
I shrugged and threw up Spanky's "O-tay" gang sign.
Old habits die hard.
The final maneuver for the first dive was learning to swim underwater loaded down with all of our gear. Dustin seemed to struggle a little on this part. I figured it was okay. I had struggled with the respirator recovery. Dustin swam the 25m to Ahmed and then took his place at the bottom awaiting the four others. I was next and for reasons that elude me, the swimming technique came naturally. I surprised even myself at the speed and fluidity of motion I had underwater.
Ahmed seemed fired up when I reached him, shook my hand and slapped me on the arm. I linked up with Dustin who slowly raised a one-fingered salute as a cacophony of bubbles warbled out from his respirator.
After we finished swimming with our gear, we finally surfaced after about an hour under the water. We removed our flippers, trudged up the ramp, and unloaded our gear. We sat back at our table and Ahmed gave us his views on how we looked. Stefan K seemed to be the best at the moment. He had easily performed all the tasks required with little difficulty. Ahmed felt my respirator control needed work.
After lunch, we suited back up for our second dive. Elana asked us if we felt weird breathing underwater.
"Yea, the air is weird," I replied.
"Anyone else get a little feeling of panic when we have to practice recovering our respirator?" I asked.
"No."
"Nope."
"No."
"Not really."
"Huh. Probably just a residual thing from my asthma."
We took back to the water and this time prepared to go a bit deeper. Ahmed took us out to 6m and had us lower ourselves down. We were preparing to practice clearing our masks of water, breathing without a mask, and exhaling through our nose.
When we settled at the bottom, I found that I was breathing harder than the previous session. There were a lot of bubbles popping from my respirator that were obfuscating my vision. Ahmed reached me and had me practice clearing water from my mask. It took a couple tries, but I was able to successfully pull it off.
As he went back down to Stefan K at the other end of our arm-linked formation, I noticed that my breathing was becoming labored. We were now on to practicing exhaling with our nose. As the minutes elapsed and the others performed the task to various degrees of success, I couldn't help but notice that oxygen flow seemed to be decreasing.
Calm down. It's probably just the deeper water.
When Ahmed reached me, I felt as if everything I knew about breathing for the past twenty-four years had been an illusion at best and a lie at worst. Suddenly, I couldn't control the exhalation from my nose. Water was being sucked up through my nose and drained into my mouth. This caused me to cough violently. I pressed the front button on the respirator and cleared my tube of the water. I tried once. Twice. A third time to breathe out my nose without flooding my mask. Nothing doing.
My assiduous concentration on breathing was clouding everything else. I had stopped paying attention to Ahmed. This was not good. I signaled to him that there was a problem and that I needed to surface. He nodded and took us both to the surface.
Blasting to the top, I tore my respirator out and gasped for sweet oxygen, which rushed ferociously into my lungs.
"What's wrong?" he asked. "You're breathing so hard down there."
"I know. It's like I can't get any oxygen."
"You're okay. You know how to exhale out of your nose, right?"
"Yea yea."
"Show me," he demanded.
I did as instructed.
"Okay, let's do it again. You're okay, man."
Rejoining the others at the bottom and linking back up with Dustin was not as easy as the previous times. My breathing felt constrained. The slower I breathed, the less oxygen I received. The faster I breathed, the less oxygen I received. The harder I breathed, the less oxygen I received.
Ahmed came back to me a second time. At this juncture, the old sensation returned. I was suddenly four again. I was in the backseat of the car as Mom and Dad sped toward East Alabama Medical Center. I was gasping for air. I knew I was going to die. I was four, but I knew that I was going to die.
I was six. We were on a dirt road in Tennessee riding with the back window open of Dad's new Ford Explorer. The dust was caking my lungs. I was coughing. The fire inside was burning me alive. I was dying.
I was twenty-four. My lungs had lava coursing through them. My alveoli were bursting into flames. I was dying.
I signaled Ahmed and reached for my BFD, sending air into my vest and shooting to the surface.
"What's wrong?!" he asked.
I don't even remember what I said. I remember telling him it was an attack. I remember being unable to breathe even after surfacing. I swam for shore, gasping for air, which came in fits the closer I got to land.
God, don't let me die here. It's not my time, yet.
***
Tuesday was marked by hours in the hut by myself. The others were on their final dive to receive their 12m diving certification. Ahmed had been terribly upset about what had happened. Ahmed told me he was sad since I showed a lot of potential and struck him as a good leader.
I didn't see any of that. All I saw was failure.
The dive center told me I didn't have to pay them anything. They had even allowed me to use their computer to send Mom an e-mail about my debit account. With $6 to my name and the primary reason for going to Sinai eviscerated, the entire trip seemed like a waste.
Plus, the conditions of the hut were leading me to feel sick. My ears and throat were killing me.
I spent most of the day reading. When the others returned, we went to one of the seaside restaurants for lunch. We arrived at 3:00 in the afternoon. We wouldn't leave until nearly 11:00 that night.
It was a better afternoon. My bank back home activated my account for Egypt, so I was able to finally receive some Egyptian pounds from the ATM.
From our seat at the restaurant, we literally sat on a small cliff's edge overlooking the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia could be seen in the distance. It was another sign of the insanity that characterized the trip thus far. Fortunately things brightened considerably. Lunch and dinner was phenomenal. We had seafood for the first time since arriving in the Middle East. We were treated to more food than we could possibly eat comfortably.
And a little Bedouin girl arrived to sell us her trinkets. She had handmade necklaces and bracelets. She was smaller than the other girls, but was clearly a little firecracker. She took Dustin's camera and started snapping pictures. She took a picture of her sister and then kissed it. She also jumped in a picture with me.
"I think Drew wants to keep her," Elana said with a laugh.
Her English was fairly impressive for a girl no older than seven or eight. I told her I would buy from her, but I didn't have a bill smaller than 200 pounds.
"Come. I take you to bankman," she said.
She grabbed my hand and walked me to the nearest branch for the Central Bank of Cairo. I exchanged my pounds for smaller bills and gave her the money for the necklace and bracelets.
"My name is Farah. If you want anything else, you come to me. Not to them!" she said pointing at a motley collection of other girls.
"Farah!" one of the others yelled at her in exasperation.
She smiled and skipped off to more potential customers.
When I returned to the table, the others were wearing smirks.
"Kid's adorable," I said as I sat back down.
Dustin had a shit-eating grin on his face.
"What? So I want to liberate her from this hell hole? I'm an American. It's what we do."
Laughter.
***
The blood poured from the wounds on my foot. The two Arab "medics" looked at it in confusion. Neither of them could speak English. Neither of them seemed to be versed in the latest techniques in field medicine. And neither of them seemed to give a damn.
It was Wednesday. As part of my consolation, the dive center had allowed me to go with the others to the "Islands," a renowned diving spot. I had been given snorkel gear to entertain myself while the others plunged into the depths.
The coral reef that served as the ocean floor extended some forty meters out into the water before dropping off and becoming a sheer cliff face. It was described as being akin to a continental shelf. the force of the Red Sea became extremely violent at the point of impact and the current was strong enough to sweep inexperienced swimmers away. All of that I was keenly attuned to.
They had failed to mention the reef itself. A laceration a half-inch deep ran from my middle toe to the middle of my foot. Two massive pieces of coral protruded from my heel and from beneath my pinky toe.
"No!" I barked. "Back off."
The Egyptian looked puzzled and then complied. He put the scissors back in the box.
There's no way in hell you're digging in my foot with rusty scissors.
I had the other medic splash iodine on the wounds while I attempted to pop the coral out from my heel and from beneath my toe. Anyone who has seen the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall knows what happened after I finally plucked them out. Blood spurted out as if from a hose.
I'm beginning to think higher forces are tormenting me.
I reached for a water bottle from a trash bin nearby. It had some dirty water still left in it. I pointed at the bottle and asked the two men if they had any water. One of them nodded, grabbed the bottle from my hand and started to approach my foot.
"Hell no! It's dirty! Dirty. Luh. Luh. Luh," I said with a mixture of pain and indignation.
An Australian diver came walking up. He had just finished his forty minute run near the "Islands."
"Ah! Mate that looks bloody awful!"
"No joke. These guys have no clue what they're doing, either. You have any water?"
"Yea mate, let me grab a fresh little pint," he said as he jogged toward a truck.
"Just keep it," he said sympathetically.
I poured the water over my wounds and cleaned the sand out. I then reapplied the iodine and bandaged the wounds as best as I could with the out-of-date medical kit.
The others came up out of the water shortly thereafter. When Dustin saw my foot all he could do was shake his head.
"This is not your week," he said ruefully.
***
The afternoon was spent at an outdoor lounge on the beach. There was no one on this side of Dahab. It was away from the tourist region and I was struck by the fact that if I had spent the entirety of the trip here, things might have been much improved.
We had already checked out of the Green Valley Camp. I had bought some more medical supplies, including rubbing alcohol, to help clean up my wound. We had to rest because at 10:00 p.m. we were departing for Mt. Sinai. It was a two hour drive in the night to Sinai from Dahab. And from there it was a three hour hike in the dark to the top. I had contemplated leaving Dahab and returning to Israel on my own, but I knew I would never get another chance to climb Mt. Sinai in my lifetime. I really wanted to just quit and go home after the reef incident. But I decided against it.
As 10:00 p.m. drew near, we left the beach and made our way to the King Safari Center. It was a small business on the main strip that specialized in trips to Sinai, Cairo, dune-running excursions, and the like. It was also run by one of the few Christians in the entire city. I was relived to see a giant portrait of Jesus on the wall when we first entered.
The owner of the business, Joseph, had arranged for our drive to Sinai and had arranged for another driver to pick us up the next day and take us back to the Taba Crossing so we could make our way back into Israel. He was an extremely gracious and kind man and stood in stark contrast to the other business owners that permeated the strip.
As we prepared to debark, I took a seat at some tables next door to clean my foot and reapply the bandages again before heading off to Sinai. It seemed like a prudent idea. What occurred thereafter shocked and enraged me. Looking back on it, it was a wonder I didn't do something exceedingly...stupid.
The five of us sat in the outdoor chairs at the empty Desert Divers shop next to King Safari. I pulled out my medical supplies and began to remove the current bandages. As we were sitting there, an Egyptian man, in his mid-to-late forties approached us. He was drinking something. Whether it was tea or alcohol was undetermined.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"Cleaning up my foot," I responded.
"I want you to leave," he replied.
"He's just treating his foot," Stefan interjected.
"You don't need to be here for him to do that."
"We're just waiting on him to get done," Stefan K replied back.
"I want you to leave," he replied again. His tone was stern and cold.
I looked him up and down as I poured alcohol over the open wounds. He turned and looked at me. Stefan K, Elana, and Dustin announced that they would wait outside. Only Stefan remained seated with me.
"Where are you from?" he asked me. His tone was intended to be intimidating. At this point, I was impervious to whatever it was he was trying to pull.
"I am from America," I said, condescension dripping with every syllable.
"Well, American, you are not respecting my shop," he said.
"And you're not respecting the fact that I'm injured," I shot back.
He took a swig from his cup and glowered at me.
"You will see me at the end of this year."
I started applying the foam. My blood might as well have been ice water. A tingling sensation ran down my spine.
"Excuse me?" I asked.
"You will see me at the end of this year in Miami. There will be a big operation in Miami," he said as he took another sip.
"Is that so?"
Stefan was looking at both of us. We exchanged concerned glances before returning to the man. This look was later described by an observing Stefan K as one of "pure rage" on my face.
I gotta speed this up. This is not gonna end well if it continues much longer.
"Yes. Have you ever heard of the Undertaker? He's an American wrestler. I'm going to murder him and everyone around him," he said. "You will see me again."
"I'll be sure to inform the appropriate authorities that you're coming. What's your name?"
"Get out of my shop," he said gruffly.
I finished applying the bandages and put my shoe back on. Stefan was already up and heading around the banister toward the others.
"You will see me again," he said quietly.
"I'll let the CIA and the FBI know that," I said as I stood up. He was slightly smaller than me. I unwisely stood up in front of him as we stared at each other for a moment. We were no more than a foot apart from each other.
"Toda raba ata ben zonah," I said angrily.
Speaking Hebrew, in hindsight, was not wise. Telling him "Thank you very much you son of a bitch" in Hebrew was definitely not something to be replicated in the future.
He glared at me as I walked out. He could have just as easily shanked me.
The owner of the King Safari, when told about this, promptly apologized. Apparently the man was not the owner of the Desert Divers shop, but rather a part-time security guard with a penchant for violence and an extreme hatred for Westerners.
At the time I didn't care. That was nearly the last straw. Of all the people to threaten a terrorist attack to, I was precisely the last person who would brush that off.
As Dustin would later quip, "You should have told him that you'd see him in Gitmo."
The nature of the incident spawned a lot of discussion. Stefan K remarked that that was precisely why the West was on edge. Whether he was joking or not, I didn't care. Because what the idiot didn't realize was that I jotted down both the address and his physical description.
He doesn't know where to find me. I do know where to find him.
***
The culmination of the trip to Sinai made it all worth it. We were taken up a treacherous and physically exhausting journey by a bedouin guide named Ali Baba. The hike up Mt. Sinai was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It was long. It was difficult. It was dangerous. Every step was steeper and sent fire shooting through my foot. But the top, which pinnacled at an awe-inspiring 7,500 ft. was glorious.
Seeing the sun rise from the top of the mountain was like seeing the face of God. It calmed me. It made me appreciate that sometimes things don't go the way you would like. And that sometimes, you just have to keep plugging along. Sometimes you need a reminder that life is comprised of its own mountains and valleys, that life has times of impenetrable darkness and times of brilliant light.
The trip began with uncertainty. Conditions deteriorated. For a time there was no money. For a time there was no air. For a time there was pain. For a time there was fear. For a time there was anger. For a time there was the desire to pack it all up and go home. For a time the climb was too much.
But sometimes, you remember that the climb is what it's all about.
Farah!
From atop the mountain.
Team Moses (minus Stefan).
Cresting over the horizon.
The Dawn.
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