In 2010 I’d been in Lebanon for about four days before I headed to a town called Bcharre (again precisely how it’s spelled), locally famous for its spring water, and located very near to one of Lebanon’s ancient Cedar Groves. I paid a taxi driver from a beautiful little city called Byblos, which sported a crusader castle of some magnificence, built on the foundations of a Roman Temple, which was built on the foundations of a Greek Temple, which was built on the foundations of a…you get the idea.
In the Fertile Crescent the life you see is simply the tip of time’s iceberg. But the taxi driver, a friendly, pudgy man, took me to his wife’s little bakery for breakfast, showed me some of the sights on the way, proudly showed off pictures of his son who was in the military, and was generally a congenial temporary host. I rode in his aging Mercedes, of which most of the functions seemed to have ceased a long time ago, including the odometer which had stopped moving after the car hit 553,876 kilometers.
In the area of Batroun, or thereabouts, a number a cement factories were painting the wind a charcoal color and I discovered that cement was a big Lebanese export. “The fucking cement, they cut off the tops of mountains just so they can ship it to Saudi,” my driver moaned, and this refrain is fairly constant for much of the Middle East. The Saudis are somehow responsible for every ill that has befallen them, well, at least when it isn’t Israel. To be fair, the Lebanese have been screwed over by pretty much everyone over the years, with Syria and Israel bringing the brunt of the insanity most recently. I wouldn’t be surprised if Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, and Hirohito had all tried to invade them. After seeing Lebanese women for a few weeks most men can understand why a general would want to detour his army there for a little while. Anyway…
When we arrived in town the taxi driver took my bottle of store bought water, emptied it on the ground, and filled it up from the fountain in the middle of town that connected to some mountain spring. I asked one of the local restaurant owners where I could find young people drinking too much, this being a Saturday after all. He told me there was some kind of local festival going on in the next town, Hachet (maybe that’s not quite how it’s spelled). Not only did he inform me of this raging little event, he got in his car and drove me down there, about 3 miles down the road.
We started driving along the level highways the bisected Bcharre and went out of town, but before long there was a turn that went very, very steeply downhill. He stopped the car and pointed down the unlit vertical drop and off I went. The entire village was composed of thick stone structures, built on the hillsides and leading down into a kind of town square in the valley. The streets and alleys and lanes were absolute pandemonium. Noisy kids and teenagers darted around my peripheral vision as if powered by their own screams, and the windows on both sides of the street were all filled with friends and families, smoking out of hookah pipes and drinking beers.
Climbing into the mountains in Lebanon a day earlier I quickly learned that my ideas of “Arab” would have to be redressed. By the time I had reached Bcharre the only image I could conjure to compare the town was the beautiful German mountain towns near some of my extended family in Noinkirchen (exactly how it’s spelled), near Frankfurt. The orange-tiled roofs of the stone homes clung to the shadowy sides of hills and mountains while individual buildings nestled between evergreens. Hachet (hatch-eat) and the long train of coastal and mountain towns were far more reminiscent of Greece and Southern Italy than Dubai or Baghdad. Lebanon is quite simply more of a Mediterranean state than a “Middle-Eastern” one.
I wandered aimlessly through the crowds wondering what the hell everyone was so excited about. The well apportioned churches of the town had their giant wooden doors thrown open and people were dressed up and milling around. Further inquiries at a few of the town’s tiny, basement bars alluded to some kind of “saint’s day” or “st. somebody or other day.” There was surprisingly little English spoken, but the village was slightly removed from the tourist traps. The breakthrough came when I found the biggest open space, much like a town square, or the quad on a college campus.
The square was dominated by the skeletal concrete of an unfinished building that rose five stories behind a truck filled with bored looking police who were smoking cigarettes. This shell, devoid of walls and windows, which would look like a great place for a crack den under normal circumstances, was an entrepreneurial oasis. Every floor had a great load of housewives and husbands slinging beers and snacks from out of coolers and refrigerators. Bottles of propane rolled around like the final scene in Jaws, and wires were strung in ways that would make a pyromaniac blush. On the fifth floor I ran into a bunch of college kids who were home on break from universities in the capital (Beirut) and were much better English speakers than the random passerby and townie bar fly. I sat around and had a few beers as random speeches by elected officials rang through the Christian, Arab town, and soon after that a band started playing and the square filled up with dancers.
At first the mass was indistinguishable, and slowly a circle formed. The dubke, that odd little 4-move dance which I’m not entirely sure crosses religious lines, grew and grew until it consumed the entire open space in front of the stage. The old and the young and the middle aged and the teen-aged and the twenty-something the MILFs and the cougars, the spinsters and the adolescent all holding hands and moving somewhat off-beat with the music, which may be what makes it so compelling and oddly difficult for us outsiders to get. At my friend’s wedding one of the Lebanese cousins told me that the secret to the dubke was that, “it doesn’t follow the beat of the song that’s playing; it has its own beat.” It exists as its own silent song, measured simply by the steps of the dancers.
It was the dancers themselves though, that interested me more than the dance, the smiling happy mix of people who should be bored, the ones that find themselves at home at Skybar or any of the other chic nightclubs blasting out trance from the rooftops and alleys and bomb shelters of Beirut. Something nostalgic flared within me watching the celebration. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but it reminded me of a parade, of a 4th of July weekend. This is what culture really is, it’s the radiation of joy that compels every generation to share the same moment at the same time. It’s the event that you pile your teenage kids in the car next to grandma and grandpa for.
I watched the circle spread like a virus and consume the severed generations of the Christian mountain town and felt that I was witnessing something that few tourists do, a genuine, unguarded moment in another culture. My friend’s wedding provided any number of the same moments, but this one was completely unexpected, which made it potent. The dubke kept growing even as the music changed from an upbeat tune to a kind of dirge, and exploding from the alleyways and the tops of houses were shards of silver aluminum, reflecting off of the lights like chaff from an escaping fighter jet. Beneath the waves of silver came a bride and groom, prancing through the streets and through a hole cleaved through the dubke with their groomsmen and bridesmaids in tow.
They all danced their way up to the stage where something of significance was said and done in a language I didn’t understand. There was much applause and cheering and drinking, and then the wedding party was down the stairs and surrounded by the circle again. The young guys were now preening much harder than before, maybe due to the appearance of bridesmaid cleavage, and many started incorporating all sorts of spins and flips and bravado into the dance. The wedding took place inside of a festival and as inexplicably as the bride and groom arrived they disappeared down the same alley.
After Bcharre I got into the next 40 year old Mercedes with a few hundred thousand miles on it, and another helpful, pudgy cabbie took me further east, to the Bekaa Valley. Before this detour from the Christian held mountain towns and the social and religious melting pot of Beirut I had no idea what could have caused all the problems in this beautiful country. We were rolling up and down the mountains of central Lebanon, watching tourists run off the sides of cliffs with hang-gliders. On the shadow clad floor of a valley a steel American flag covered a road sign.
“They grew drugs here. America bought all the drugs,” my cabbie informed me.
“And what do they grow here now?” I asked.
“Apples.”
This was the last fertile plain under Christian control before we hit the Bekaa Valley, and they too found it much more profitable to grow opium than apples or wheat. America, for whatever reason, did the reasonable thing and bought the drugs and then subsidized the growing of anything but drugs.
Why we haven’t done this in Afghanistan? I don’t think anyone really knows. Virtually all of our anesthetics in hospitals are still derived directly from the same plants that produce opium and heroin. At any rate it was odd to see the ole’ stars and bars in this little corner of Lebanon. I was very quickly to discover what drew the gaze of the American state department.
Not twenty minutes down the road the cab driver informed me that we were leaving Christian territory. The dividing line could not have been starker. As soon as the cab driver told us that we were in a Shia region the stone villages and bi-level homes had turned into shacks and shanties on the side of the road. The dust rose up and choked everything and men stood on the side of the road wiping the brown silt off of their watermelons and produce. There didn’t seem to be running water or electricity across the invisible line and the shacks kept multiplying deeper and deeper into the bled, away from the highway.
Soon we started climbing again, and towns and villages began to appear. The driver then began a new refrain. “From Iran.”
“Those generators, from Iran.”
“That hotel, from Iran.”
“That hospital, from Iran.”
And this continued ad nauseam until we reached the city of Baalbek. I don’t know how much the cabbie actually knew and how much was bias or hearsay, but it painted an interesting picture of some of the dicier aspects of the Muslim/Christian/Druze/Sunni/Shia divides in the country. These get reinforced, subtly, almost everywhere as I continue traveling and paying attention to them. The city of Baalbek, in the heart of Hezbollah territory (Shia, for those of you not making the connection, is the same sect of Islam as mainstream Iran, the majority of people in Syria, and the powerless majority in Bahrain) has one of the most magnificent set of Roman ruins on planet Earth.
“Don’t take any pictures on the street,” the last words of my taxi driver, “only in the ruins.”
He painted a bleak picture of the people of the eastern part of his country. I don’t think it was entirely merited, but I didn’t and still don’t really know anything about the people of eastern Lebanon, and embracing your own ignorance is of paramount importance to any traveler.
I was dropped off directly across from the fence that guarded the Roman temples. Despite the absolute immensity of the ruins the area looked depressed. If there was tourism money coming into this site it wasn’t filtering into the town very well. I ate a big meal at a very passable café and dumped my backpack under a staircase in the restaurant, overcoming the cabby’s reservations and deciding to trust the “troublemaking Shia” with my belongings.
There isn’t much to say about the Roman temples here that pictures can’t say much better. They are, according to the plaques at the site, the largest temples ever constructed, or even attempted by the Romans. Unfortunately all that’s left of the biggest structure are about a half dozen free standing columns, which are simply massive. The smaller temple, dedicated to Bacchus, is still almost entirely intact though. And even this is a gigantic structure. It is worth noting that the ruins are so old that the graffiti on the walls of the temples now qualify as historic. It seems there were a lot of French explorers in Lebanon in the early 1800’s, or at least a few very tall Pierre’s who could put their names high on the rock.
Through the exit tunnel of the site the sunset spins strands of phosphorescent gold around the walls, and the last thing many tourists see is the small museum that chronicles the finding, unearthing, and protection of the site. As I peruse the artifacts, mainly tombs and tools and mosaics, I am somewhat surprised to find that the ruins have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983.
This is a surprise because much of the power of the ruins is transmitted through the empty spaces between the walls and columns. Air blasts around the walls, the sun beats down across the dirt and brown grass, and as I move from shadow to shadow trying to frame the immense pieces of Rome in the camera I never have to dodge other tourists. This magnificent place is a ghost town. For 27 years this spot has been recognized as a historically and culturally significant remnant of the human race, but I could have found more people waiting in line at a Burger King.
Outside a small man hoists chotchky plastic jewelry and yellow Hezbollah shirts. Suffice to say I didn’t buy any…this time. The sun began its descent while I ventured with my giant backpack (which I thought was a good way to notify people that I was too goofy for the CIA) around the city of Baalbek. I never strayed too far from the ruins, and other than some curious looks nothing seemed out of place. After I got tired of the markets (after a while a market is a market is a market) I began asking for directions to where the mini-buses cruised over and picked up people to go to the next town.
In Lebanon I often traveled in a little, white mini-bus, these seem to have filled the void left by a lack of public transportation (though I did take an actual bus once) and the expense of having a car. These little buses drive fast, erratically, and stop on a dime. People waited in spots along all the highways into and out of Beirut, and new mini-buses arrived and departed every few minutes…everywhere. They were often pretty full already when they stopped for me. Though there were other travelers and backpackers I rarely encountered any on the mini-bus, but I met Lebanese of all shapes and sizes. I imagine the only demographic you wouldn’t find on the bus are the wealthy. Often soldiers would get on and off, as well as college students and the elderly. And despite the tight quarters I never had any problems or issues with the drivers or other passengers. I was on one of these mini-buses on the way to Zahle, a little wine town, and then after drinking all night headed back to Beirut with what I thought was a hangover. I would spend the next six days in Beirut as sick as I've ever felt in my life.
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