A Second Look at Salt

A Second Look at Salt (illustrations will come later)

What is salt? For most people it’s a grocery product they throw into their shopping cart without a single thought. It was not always like this. And in some parts of the world It still is not.

     Men once went to war over salt. Roman soldiers’ salariums (salary--from sal, or salt) was to buy salt. And if we are to believe historians, Moroccan caravaneers once got the people of Timbuktu and other Sahel towns to pay their salt with an equal weight of gold.
Salt also bought slaves. The hard part, with wells impossibly far apart in those days and Tuareg attacks inevitable, was for the caravaneers to return home alive to enjoy their new fortune.

     In some parts of the world people still suffer much hardship mining salt or bringing it to market. In 1965 I traveled for a month with a Tuareg salt caravan in the Sahara, sharing its thirst, hunger, exhaustion, and worry that we might miss a well and go on into the sands to die. Before the journey, my nine Tuareg friends had spent many months cutting enough grass to feed our 102 camels during their two-month pasture-less return journey through the Ténéré’s sand dunes, one of the Sahara’s most hostile  areas. Many months, too, using grass to braid hundreds of meters of ropes and weave several hundred straw mats to wrap the salt in.

      Back home, after their epic expedition, they would have to prepare for a second long journey, this time to go barter the salt on the Sahel’s markets for millet, clothes, sugar, green tea, and other necessities. All that work and ordeal, I calculated at the time, for the equivalent of $75 per person.

     In 1967, in another salt adventure, I followed a Tigrinya caravan from Makale, in the Ethiopian highlands. Traveling down the escarpment we descended literally into hell-- the Danakil Depression. The explorer L.M. Nesbitt once famously called that fantastic land of active volcanoes, boundless lava fields, boiling sulfurous sources, merciless desert, rock, and dried salt lakes the Hellhole of Creation.  An ocean is being born there and at more than 200 feet below the Red Sea’s level it is the world’s hottest region. For a hard day’s work each salt miner received the equivalent of $0.60, a large bread and a goatskin of water.

     In 1992, in Djibouti, I watched how Danakil caravaneers set out mining the salt of dry Lake Asal using only sharp stones found on the spot.

     In 2000, high in the southern Bolivian Altiplano, I traveled with a different salt caravan—a 69-year old Quechua Indian, his nephew, and the old man’s 28 male llamas. I followed the old man from his mud house to the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s highest and largest salt lake where a miner’s wife sold him the blocks of salt he would go barter in a distant village for the crops he could not grow at the frozen heights where he lived.

     And I traveled with the two men, walking six hours a day, the distance that separated stone corrals where we parked the llamas at night. We slept under brutally cold stars. At the end of eight days we descended into a Shangri-La valley that could have been in Nepal, with terraced fields espousing its contours all around.  There the barter took place. And I never saw people take leave from each others more satisfied.

     Colombia offers a different salt story. There, in the eighties, on the western coast of the Guajiara Peninsula, a finger of land jutting into the Caribbean Sea at the northernmost part of South America, I photographed Waiuu Indians shoveling sea salt. Feet naked in the brine, women and girls worked hardest, lending their strong backs to carry the 60-kilo salt bags that needed two men to lift on them.

In the next few days I will be posting photographs of all those experiences.