I'm biking west across the Sahara Desert, and have been for days. Rough tracks, no roads; I'm doing well to make 15 km an hour. It's the cold season--not murderously hot, just warm and bone-dry. Flattish stony plateaus. One ravine with spindly trees where a witch-woman lives. Like everyone here, her only water's from a deep well. No surface streams at all.

Dunno how I came to be biking or hiking across the Sahara. No wallet, no money, no ID... no memory.

A compound. Intrigue I've forgotten now--spies, impersonation. At last I top off my water bottles and get going again. Slow slog. See every goat. And they're not pretty--crippled, malnourished, deformed.

At long last the plateau starts sloping down toward the Atlantic coast. Didn't realize how high up I was. Down, down, down... still pretty barren. Just a string of fishing villages with a few dry palms along a coastal road. I expected a fertile strip, but no. Evidently I'm in the heart of the zone from 15-25° north, where the desert spills over, right to the sea.

On the beach, meet an American who doesn't know how they got here, or how to escape. No passport. I explain "Just go north or south--there'll be a bus. May be slow, but in a day or two you'll hit a real town, Dakar in Senegal or Marrakesh in Morocco, where you can apply at the American Embassy for help. Say your passport was stolen."

Then I realize the lost, amnesic American is... me.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Slog on foot across desert, compound, intrigue, deformed goats: all elements in Dark Wind, a TV series based on Tony Hillerman's book set in Navaho country.
• Western Sahara: in my mind, the most oppressed land on Earth. Morocco invaded it years ago and crushed local resistance. The UN did nothing.
• Aridity, groundwater: weatherman says this year California got more rain and less snow, especially in the north. Global warming. Must change water policy--snowmelt unreliable, so must catch rain & raise water tables.
• Dry land supports only villages even on the coast: dream-drought? My recall's been bad--recent stretches with zero or near-zero dreams. Caused a creative & spiritual slump. I've been trying to draw a decades-old dream that showed sleep as a desert and dreams as palm trees at oases, Dreamchart Oasis.
• Desert strip between fertile zones: my dream-drought (and America's dark night of the soul) isn't a one-way fade due to aging. It's a zone created by long-term causes. And a zone can be left.
• ACTION: draw this. Finish drawing Dreamchart Oasis. Go on voting for change. But expect... a long haul.

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