The day before I left for Damascus and the Iraqi embassy, I drove around northeastern Syria with an odd man named Abu Baasir. He is the Qamishli town gombeen, the man everybody knows and no one takes seriously. Abu Baasir speaks English passably well, probably from his old days as a Syrian mukhabarat agent, but since it is nearly impossible to hire a translator in Syria, I was stuck with him. I met many people who spoke English well, but no one would take the job, and it took a few days for me to realize that this was another manifestation of the police state -- the secret police must authorize a translator, the state must give its blessing. Anything else is suspect.

Another point in Abu Baasir's favor is that he was always hanging around in front of the hotel, talking to the kids who waited for shoeshine jobs. Abu Baasir had time on his hands. A marginal man, his career had spun out long ago and he now lived with his mother.

I had run into him on the street one day when he tried to sell me a car ride to the ruins at Ain Diwar. I told him that it was important that he get me to a nearby town called Sheikh Amad, where I suspected somebody might have a boat for crossing the Tigris. What do you want to do there? he wanted to know. I want to go fishing in a boat, Abu Baasir, that's what I want to do, I explained. We had trouble finding the place. Abu Baasir reclined in the back seat, his hair slicked back and a gold charm around his neck. It had a small section of the Koran inscribed on its face.

On the map, Sheikh Amad sits next to an inviting lake, a blue oblong that cries out for fishing. So why not drive down to Sheikh Amad and search for boats? We drove all day, while Abu Baasir gave me his philosophy on life, a clutch of random observations. "Gentleman, let me tell you one thing, and that is that the mukhabarat in Syria know everything," he returned to the theme of the secret police.

I tell him that there is no way they can know everything that people do. It's just not possible. "Yes, in Syria they do, gentleman. I know this for a fact." Abu Baasir croaked out more advice from the back seat of the cab, his stream of weird Syrian facts. Wheat fields rolled past the windows. The land was flat, broken only by isolated hills topped by graves. Our cab got its wheels stuck in the rich mud near a madrassa town built by Saudi money at Tal Maruf. A mob of religious students told us to turn the car around and leave the village.

We drove past two identical houses under construction for the local mullah. The mullah's houses were the tallest structures around for miles, including the mosque. Abu Baasir said that the rich mullah of Tal Maruf was lucky to enjoy two paradises, an earthly paradise in his grand houses and a second in the afterlife.

When we arrived at Sheikh Amad, a Bedouin farmer told us that the lake was missing. It had evaporated. Worse, there were never any boats at all. The Bedouin walked over and brought us soft flat bread before we drive away, which we put on the arm rests of the cab so it would spread out in the sun. From Sheikh Amad we drove another few hours to Malkiye, a town close to the Tigris. We were looking for a boat in a cultivated desert, and finding one in this corner of Syria was impossible, a fool's errand. Syrians, both Christians and Kurds, were either suspicious or didn't know the answer, and the local authorities were becoming interested in the foreigner who didn't have the good sense to relocate. Boats are forbidden on the Tigris between Turkey and Syria, so even mentioning the smuggling plot was dangerous. A few days earlier, a Baath Party lady told me to leave town, saying there was no reason for me to stay. "There is nothing for you here. Why don't you go back to Damascus," she suggested.

In Malkiye, a small town near the river, we found an old Christian man who liked to fish, and I finally came clean with him and said I needed to buy a boat to smuggle myself across to Kurdistan. We were surrounded by locals and I hated having to say it in public. It was a mistake. When the men heard the plan, they burst into laughter, and they laughed for a long time. One man danced around the small storefront with an make-believe oar as a joke. The old man said I could use a toy raft if it meant that much to me. The men laughed even harder.

The fact was, I was in the wrong place. Syria has a stretch of Mediterranean coast and a major port at Lattakia, and though that was more 400 miles west of the place where I wanted to enter Kurdistan, I took my last chance and went there via Damascus. In Lattakia, the boyhood home of the late Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad, a friend picked me up from the hotel and then took me straight to the local chandlery. It was a small store heaped with nets and nylon rope run by a cantankerous old guy who didn't have time for tourists. In the window was a box with a picture of an inflatable two-man rowboat on it. Not too heavy, easy to hide. And it came with a pump and plastic oars. My friend translated my question into Arabic: "How much do you want for it?" The old man sold it to me at a fair price.

My friend drove me down a steep cliff road to the sea, where we unpacked the rowboat for its maiden voyage. Lattakians watched us from the cliff while N. hunched over the air pump until the boat no longer looked like a shriveled skin. It took shape and became a proper form of transportation in a mere minutes, a mundane transformation anywhere else but Syria. I did a jig in celebration.

Above us in an old seaside cafe, men sat smoking nargileh water pipes and drinking tea.

We carried the new boat, which smelled strongly like plastic, and put it in the water, and I climbed in and tried to get a feel for the oars. As the boat moved away from the shore, N. became a small figure, and soon there was only the sea and the soft air and the ships on the horizon. I rowed until my shoulders and hands burned and the boat flew in a straight line over the warm blue-green water of the Mediterranean.

I left the next morning for the Qamishli, the eastern border post. I had to cover the distance of 400-plus miles again, this time traveling by bus with my new boat rolled up and hidden in a cheap suitcase. The plastic oars bothered me. Even a Syrian cop could figure out what they were for, and they were easy to find in the satchel. The problem was that bus stations are closed police checkpoints where everything is haphazardly searched, especially foreigners. Once you're inside the station, there's no way out. The gates are immediately shut, and the police have the passengers at their mercy and can inspect and prod away at their leisure.

I wasn't even out of the Lattakia station before I was confronted with my first test. I was one of the only passengers traveling so early in the morning, and all of a sudden the Syrian official was by my side making searching motions. He searched the luggage of the man I was speaking to and then he searched the duffel with the boat in it -- and promptly pulled out an oar. The cop then put the oar nicely back in the bag.

Later, as I was changing buses in Aleppo, I was quickly arrested after telling the authorities I was a friend of Bill Clinton's -- but I was just as quickly released. A beautiful moment came and went as the station officials, bus drivers and other random onlookers heaped praises on an American president. Then the police found the boat again. The first cop put the oars back in their place and never asked me what I was doing with such a thing heading for the border. The commanding officer signaled for me to wait, so he could find the special permission stamp for Qamishli. He grinned as he stamped the ticket. Clinton's Herculean efforts at peace in the Middle East did not go unnoticed in Syria, and the mere mention of his name made things suddenly right, a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Seven hours and an uneventful ride later, the cops weren't around in the Qamishli station. It was a small victory, and it was easy to get to a cheap hotel with the boat and get ready for the river crossing the next afternoon.

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