Free Hold the Enlightenment by Tim Cahill Page A

“I think that if you just went to church and prayed real, real hard, you’d have the same effect on your students.”
    Gretel Ehrlich, a writer whose books I greatly admire—especially her lyrical evocation of the West in
The Solace of Open Spaces
—is of much the same opinion. Once she and I were featured speakers at a writers’ conference in Montana. She gave the keynote address to the crowd of eager would-be writers, and was not at all encouraging. The speech had been written out in essay form. Gretel read it well, and with passion. Writing, she said, cannot be taught. Some teachers, she said, will tell you that there are matters of craft you can learn. This, she averred, is not so.
    “Any question or comments?” she asked at the conclusion of her remarks.
    The students, who’d all paid a substantial amount of money to learn to write, sat in a kind of poleaxed silence. Now, my own opinion is that elements of craft—matters of structure, organization, lead-ins, and walk-offs—can indeed be taught, and are, in fact, the only substantive principles professionals can impart to beginning writers.
    So, in the silence following Gretel’s request for comments, I raised my hand and said, “I thought the piece you read was very well crafted.”
    And now Gretel Ehrlich, in company with a certain Indiana Catholic high school lay teacher, thinks I’m a dickhead.
    The sun set over Steens Mountain, and I drove down to the remote cattle town of Burns, where I lingered for days, looking for stories. As usual, my initial prioritization was to peruse, for context analysis, the local papers, and taking it seriously. It was in one of these publications that I found a short article in the foreign news section that fired my imagination.
    It seemed that three Indonesian cult leaders were beaten to death by disaffected followers after their 9/9/99 doomsday prediction failed to materialize. The cult members had been told to sell their possessions and to prepare for the end of the world at 9 A.M . on September 9. But the day came and went without incident. The sun also rose on September 10 and, according to Saadi Arsam, village chief of Sukmajaya, east Java, “the members were really mad.”
    I wondered if the shortwave-radio personality was still in Winnemucca, or whether he’d gone into hiding. It might be worth driving back and looking for him.
    “Hey, what happened to doomsday?” would be my first question.
    If the disgraced doom-monger had any sense at all, he’d decline comment. Into each life, I understood finally, there falls a time when there are no words.

The Caravan of White Gold
    “T eem, wake up. There are some bandits.”
    An Italian—I don’t recall which one—was standing over my sleeping bag and nudging my foot with his. It was about ten o’clock on a cool, clear February night in the Sahara, and I had been asleep for half an hour.
    “What?”
    “Some bandits have followed us up from Kidal. We have to go back to Aguelhok.”
    “Tuaregs?” I asked.
    “Muhammad said they came from Kidal.”
    Muhammad, our recently hired security consultant, was a Tuareg himself. Kidal was a Tuareg town. But then again, so was Aguelhok.
    I struggled out of my sleeping bag and stumbled around for a few groggy minutes in the dark. We were about three miles west of Aguelhok in the West African country of Mali and a couple hundred miles north of the Niger River, camped near the central trans-Saharan road leading north to Algeria. This was to be the last stop before a high-speed run to the historic and formerly forbidden salt mines at Taoudenni, which—we didn’t know—might not even exist anymore.
    Our motorized caravan was parked amid a huge jumble of rocks that had probably formed the narrows of a swift-flowing, ancient river. The rocks were black, river-rounded, the size of large trucks,and many were festooned with drawings of creatures that must have existed here in a forgotten time, when the sun-blasted sandscape had