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.
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.
