“Hitching to the Dead is not serious business,” someone once told me. Quite a few Deadheads would disagree. For many in the seventies it was a lifestyle. People were crisscrossing the country with backpacks and bandanas on Winter Tour, Spring Tour, Summer Tour and Fall Tour: the Eternal Tour. Colleges were even giving credit for this. You could tell where the next show would be by the scribbled destination signs at freeway onramps. Alas, this was a commitment I could not then make. I was too busy being serious. I had immersed myself in the ancients: leaning Greek; reading Plato, Homer and Sophocles; deconstructing the mysteries of Eleusis and Delphi. Friends had dragged me to my first show a year and a half before. After that I allowed myself the luxury of only Winterland and a few other California shows. They were close. I could not bring myself to venture further.

Then came the summer of 1978. It was the beginning of what would now be called my gap year. That Fall I was headed for Europe. I had saved long and hard for this. There were too many gaps in my understanding of Western Civilization that books could not fill. My summer job flipping burgers at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk was not to start for a week. The Dead were playing in Oregon. It was a sort of recess; a time for play. So I scratched “Further” (“er,” not “ur”) on a scrap of cardboard, stuck it out on Highway One and headed to Eugene. I had no ticket, no place to stay and only the vaguest of plans.

After a couple of rides I was dropped outside of Garberville. I stood by the side of the road trying to catch drivers’ eyes as afternoon gave way to evening. Redwood shadows lengthened over me. Cars swished past me. Dampness seeped into me. Finally a pickup stopped for me. “I’m going to Fortuna too,” the driver said, having misread my sign. I didn’t correct him. It was Grateful Dead synchronicity. I had just attended a lecture on the Roman goddess Fortuna. As it became so clear that day, she was the incarnation of hitch-hiking. You always reached somewhere, though not necessarily the designation on your sign. It depended on the vagaries of fate. A friend from high school had just moved to Fortuna. I would have a warm place to sleep that night!

I made it to Eugene the next day just in time for the show. Tickets were no problem. But if not for DeadBase, that handy concordance to live Dead, I’d have no idea what was played. Even my tape of the show was incorrectly labeled. It turned out to be from January. So for years I was confused about when they actually played the “Close Encounters” theme. The only memory I am sure of was being told about the September shows in Egypt. The wheel of Fortuna turned. I now had a new destination.

It was not as easy to hitch to Egypt as to Oregon. First, there’s that ocean in the way. Second, I’d have to pass through all those embattled borders. Third, I had limited time and resources. I thought I would make it at least as far as Athens. But after a day of Peugeots and Renaults whizzing past me in northern France, I began to finger the Eurailpass in my pocket. It was good for only two months. I had planned not to activate it until my return from Egypt. When the next day resulted in no further progress, I gave in to fate. Returning to town, I bought a day old croissant for lunch, and helplessly asked the baker, “camine de fer?” He had no idea what I meant. It was the name of a brand of jeans with a train logo. Now I know I should have asked, “ou est le gare?” (But now I’m a fifty-something lawyer, with much more travelling under my belt.) Finally he got the idea and pointed me to the train station.

Some 36 hours of trains, ferries and buses got me safely to Athens, the city that had been my obsession for the last two years. But, instead of going to the Agora or the Acropolis, the theater of Dionysus or the site of the Academy, I headed for the airport. When I tried to book a flight to Egypt I was told no seats were available. In fact, there were none to be found for a week. So I sat under dim lights all day waiting for standby. This was not Fortuna’s city and she appeared to have abandoned me. I returned that evening to the youth hostel in the city: a long round trip I ended up having to repeat many times. It was fortunate bus fare was so cheap.

This was not the way I had imagined seeing the city of Socrates and Aeschylus. I spied the columns of the Parthenon sticking through the smog from the bus window. Vaguely, at times, one could make out the Pireaus and Homer’s wine dark sea. But, mostly it was asphalt and smoky exhausts—and the continual honking of horns. The airport was filled with policemen and guns. Each day I reported to the airlines, got my name on the standby lists and waited. Life drained from me.

But this was Purgatory, not Hell. All good things in all good time. One afternoon, as I was sprawled over my now usual seats at the terminal, I heard my name called. “Marc Sherman, please report to the Olympic Airline desk.” I lugged my backpack across the wide expanse of floor, a scintilla of hope in my eyes—until I noticed a sign that said the flight had departed.

At the counter I was told that I had someone else’s passport. I was dubious and protested. When I checked my pocket, though, out came something large and red. “It must have been exchanged when you checked in,” I was told. In horror, I imagined myself stuck in Greece for the rest of my life. But, this was short-lived. A man in a suit next to me had my familiar blue passport. He nodded and we traded. He was given his ticket and pointed to where to board the plane to Cairo, strangely still at the gate.

I watched with envy as I picked up my pack for the long slog back to my seats. Then I heard my name again. “Mr. Sherman.” I had to hear it at least twice before responding. At twenty, I was not used to answering to “Mr.”

“Yes?” I muttered, wondering what other tortures these Greeks could inflict on me.

“We have one more seat, if you still want it?”

“To Cairo?” I gulped.

“Yes.”

I checked my watch. “Yes,” I said. “Yes!” I was in a dazed state of disbelief and found myself handing my passport back to the clerk. She double-checked it and scribbled me a ticket, apologizing that I would have to carry on my pack myself. I slung it over my shoulders and boarded the plane, passing Keith and Donna Godchaux, who were comfortably ensconced in first class. The last seat was next to a guy in a Journey shirt. Bruce. He was going to the shows too.

After a short flight over the Mediterranean we landed at dusty Cairo airport. It looked more like a military base than an airport. Soldiers were everywhere, their Kalashnikovs half drawn. Tanks were scattered along the tarmac and jets were lined up on the far side of the field. It didn’t feel welcoming—particularly for a Jew. But, I had arrived.

Bruce and I shared a cab to a hotel he had been told about: the Golden Hotel. It was close to the center of the city, now famous Tahrir Square. The proprietor charged one Egyptian pound—about $1.50—for a mattress on the floor of a common room. “For democrats,” he said. For aristocrats, meaning a private room and real bed, he charged two. Next door you could get lemonade for 7½ cents: five lemons in a blender, rinds and all, poured through a strainer and mixed with as much sugar as you could stand. We met Bruce’s friends, talked travel, mysticism and the Dead as the weariness of the last week of traveling fell from me like feathers from a molting bird.

The next day we walked to the paved faded vacancy that was Tahrir Square. The Hilton Hotel towered above it, overlooking the Nile. To the side was the museum of antiquities—called the British Museum or Egyptian Museum, depending on your views of imperialism. Close to the museum, as I remember, stood a small shack. Pasted all over it were Alton Kelly’s posters of the Great Winged Disk of Ra and Horus superimposed on a pyramid. Not the Great Pyramid; portentously, it came to a point at the top. The poster announced the shows in both Arabic and English. I got the best seats available, paying about twenty dollars in total. But, in three days, I never found them.

And, oh, those next three days! Sipping Stella Brew, Egypt’s’ national beer, in the Mena House, complete with occasional glimpses of the Dead entourage. There were the Keseys, both Ken and brother Chuck. Bill Walton hobbled around on his broken foot. Bill “Uncle Bobo” Graham popped up anywhere and everywhere, like a cartoon character. The band slipped in and out of view, and we occasionally caught snippets of conversation, like why the mikes placed inside the pyramids weren’t working. It was late afternoon, the first day, before we crossed the road and hiked up the small mound of sand to King Khufu’s supposed tomb, the Great Pyramid itself. Ritually, we circumambulated it. Then, dodging the guards and cries of “baksheesh,” we began to climb. But it was getting dark, so we turned back before getting too high.

Now, dear reader, the chronology of all this may not be exactly perfect. This was a long time ago. While I’d never have admitted it then, I was much too young to take it all in. Only with the interval of years could I begin to understand. But, this all happened. Maybe not just as I remember.

Still, certain images remain vivid, like the first night when I found myself with some of the crowd from the Golden Hotel inside a tomb below the Great Pyramid. How can you forget something like that? Dozens of these tombs were scattered along the Giza plateau. They were like balconies from where you could gaze out and see the Nile and all Cairo spread out below. Location, location, location. It was good to be an aristocrat in ancient Egypt; you got the best views! Too bad they covered your eyes in the embalming process.

We passed around a hookah filled with gooey Egyptian hash and talked about the shows. Most of these people were from Eugene—funny how it all circles back on itself—and they spouted a sort of theology that was evidently cobbled together by the Merry Prankster of Eugene himself. It seems that several years before Ken Kesey had conned—convinced—Rolling Stone to send him on a junket to Egypt to write some articles. He came back a proselyte of the pyramids. Kesey’s mythology for the shows was described to me as the hash pipe came around and around: a mixture of Edgar Casey and Steven Spielberg, with Herodotus, Plato and other assorted philosophers and nuts thrown in.

The idea was that the Great Pyramid’s long lost capstone would be found in some manner if and when the Dead played “Dark Star” during the lunar eclipse that was to occur the third night. This capstone—which once topped the Great Pyramid—was supposed to contain the knowledge of the ages and had disappeared too long ago to know even what was in it. Spacemen from a planet hidden behind a twin of the dogstar Sirius were supposed come to Earth and reveal it. This would save humanity, or at least, a la Revelation, a remnant. As the cloud of smoke become thicker and thicker, filling the tomb, my skepticism gave way to credulity. Hell, I had come all this way to Egypt. There had to be some purpose. I wanted to believe. We all wanted to believe. I almost did as we stumbled into the dark to make our way to the first show.

The Dead played in the son et lumière theater just below the pyramids. It is next to the paw of the Great Sphinx. Not coincidently, there is an old tradition that a secret passage leads from the sphinx to the Great Pyramid and that the capstone can be found along it. But there are a lot of stories like that. Four thousand years of the occult can do that.

As the sound and light show ended we followed the Klieg lights to our destination. People gathered as if summoned. Most were Americans. I heard that the Keseys organized a charter, as did someone out of San Francisco. Several Europeans found their way there, by plan or happenstance. There was also an assortment of Egyptians. To get the show approved, the Dead had agreed to donate proceeds to an antiquity charity patronized by the wife of the president of Egypt. While she wasn’t there (she was in D.C. with her husband), this was a big event for the upper classes. They showed up in their sparkling plumage and jewelry, which made them stand out among the Westerners in jeans and Egyptian teenage boys in faded cotton jalabiyas. The son et lumière theater was set off from the rest of the desert by a low masonry wall. Tickets were superfluous. You just stepped over the wall. Between the seats and the stage was a narrow strip, perhaps ten foot across. It was a perfect place to dance. That’s where I headed and stayed for most of the shows. There was never a need to find my seat. You can see me in the DVD. I’m dancing ecstatically in my Casey Jones hat with Skull and Roses patch.

Even before the houselights dimmed, a line of Nubian drummers filed onto the stage, fingers tapping hypnotically on tar hoop drums. Soon they were joined by Hamza El Din, a Nubian oud player, and they exchanged exotic entwining rhythms and scales. After a while the Dead joined in, Jerry somehow mimicking the oud. It was a strange mixture of East and West, something we Deadheads had not heard before, otherworldly, more ineffable than usual, as the tapes attest. But you can hear it for yourself. So why describe it here? Anyhow, as is so often the case, it is the events of a show, not the music, that linger the longest.

That night we roamed Giza, fueled by adrenaline and hash. Just before dawn we headed to the northeast corner of the Great Pyramid, as if magnetically pulled. Years of tourists have worn a path into the stone there. Otherwise, the blocks would be difficult to scale. But this approach has been used, literally, for millennia and has become a sort of stairway. You need to go early because, as the chariot of Ra rises on its daily circuit—as the sun climbs higher in the sky—it gets too hot. So you start in the moonlight, feeling for one foothold after another, wriggling and clawing your way up. These days the route is cordoned off and one can no longer make this sacred ascent. Even then you had to ignore the guards and “guides” who protested with feigned outrage, “verboten,” as you passed their outstretched palms.

It is a long way to the top. The stones are less worn the higher you get; not many venture past the first hundred feet. There are fewer crevices to grab, fewer places to find for your feet. The blocks that make up the Pyramid, are, fortunately smaller as you gain altitude, but they are still balky and you have to stretch mightily to get from one level to the next. And they go on forever. It feels Sisyphean. The Pyramid is some 480 feet high. That’s almost 50 stories. It is higher than the Statute of Liberty—and the steps (and fall from them) are far more precarious and treacherous. But finally, after perhaps an hour of climbing, you get to the top and you sit on the ledge—the place where the capstone once was. There you can rest, catch your breath and watch the sun peak out over the desert, and, with the aid of imagination, perhaps make out the Red Sea beyond.

But you can take it for only so long. Soon the sun is blazing. The stones heat up. A long descent remains. You start, and almost immediately the sweat flows from your brow. Yet you persevere and work through the exhaustion from the long previous night, the long laborious climb and the long memory of the vision you have just been privileged to glimpse. We made it to the bottom just as the tourists, with their babbling polyglot, constant clicks of cameras and white legs in shorts, arrived. A taxi took us back to the Golden Hotel. An hour later, I was on my mattress, lightly covered by a cotton sheet on the communal floor, ready for a good long sleep.

That afternoon, on what I will call the second day (they all faded into one), I actually went inside the Great Pyramid. The charge was something like 50 piasters—75 cents. You bought a thin paper ticket and scrambled up several levels to a hole dug out in the ninth century. From there I climbed the slick, steep passage called the Grand Gallery. The ceiling got lower and lower. Darkness engulfed me. At the top I had to fold into myself and crawl through a narrow passage from one room to another. This was all supposed to make it difficult for tomb robbers. But, even in the dark, it was easy to find the King’s chamber, a large square room in the middle of the Pyramid. It was empty except for a large sarcophagus in the center. The thieves had preceded me. And the whole place spelled vaguely of piss.

The chamber is as devoid of light as anything I have experienced. You could see nothing; you could only feel. The room pressed down around you. Maybe it was the tons of stone overhead. Maybe it was the total separation from the rest of the world. The air was heavy and clinging. Strangely, it was more peaceful than frightening, like a womb—not that I remember that far back. The feeling was only interrupted when the tours clamored in and their guides began their spiels, passing off Ramesses, Tutaukamen or even Cleopatra as the builder of the Pyramid. One even said that it was Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair! Then their lights flashed, illuminating the room for a quick peak until they and their gullible looky-loos were satisfied and left.

I remained for what must have been two hours, bathing in the nothingness and quiet. For some reason I crawled inside the granite sarcophagus itself. I should have been creeped out, but, after 4500 years all traces of death had long since disappeared. It was only later I learned I had lain in the same spot as Napoleon and Alexander the Great. They came to early ends. Me, I still survive.

Eventually other Deadheads trickled in. We discussed the night before and sang songs. Later Keith and Donna appeared. For a while the chamber filled with chanting and oming. Boy, weren’t we the pretentious mystics! But, one tour group after another filed in and silenced us. The leaders made up their fables. Their lights fell upon my face in the sepulcher. Ladies shrieked, men snickered, the guides grumbled and made threats. It was time to leave. When I emerged into the glaring light, someone pointed up. I followed the finger to the top of the Pyramid where I had been just that morning. Instead of the capstone, flew a giant Steal Your Face flag. It didn’t last long, an affront to Egyptian sovereignty. But while it was there, we felt sovereign. For a while, I think, we were.

I have no memory of what the Dead played that second night? Who ever remembers a middle show? DeadBase and maybe a few hearty souls. Anyhow, by this time, we were all just awaiting the anticipated magic of the third night.

So the electricity that filled the hotel upon waking the next day was not surprising. It was more than the usual expectation of a final show. It was a viscous, tangible presence. Combined with the heat seeping in from the street, it felt combustible. At dusk, as we all knew, the moon would appear and then slowly darken, succumbing to the Earth’s shadow. Dark Star or bust! I filled up on lemonade, cheese and cheap Egyptian bread. A subsidized ten cents a loaf. If it had cost more there would have been riots. The modern rulers of Egypt were as savvy as the pharaohs: keep your people fed and filled with dreams—that done, you can get away with almost anything.

It must have been around three when the Eugene contingent and I finally left the hotel and walked the couple of blocks down to Tahrir Square. From there we caught a bus to Giza. Cairo busses are like bursting tin cans. They are over packed. People hang from the windows, clutch the back bumpers, perch themselves on the roofs, hang on for life. They lumber along the streets slow enough for more and more riders to cling their hopes to. If eighty percent of the passengers make it to their destinations safely, that is success. We were early enough to get seats inside. So many people were crammed and jammed around us, that, had we not been going to the last stop, we would never have managed to get off. It is a mystery how the Egyptians do it day after day.

The bus dropped us at the Mena House. We descended on the bar for Stella Brews. We waited, not quite patiently, for the night to begin. Would this be it? Would the secrets of the Pyramid be revealed? Would spacemen from Sirius appear and show us the capstone? What the hell would be the set list?

We abandoned half finished drinks when the sky began to darken. Again we climbed the sands of the Giza plateau toward the pyramids like nineteenth century British explorers. Someone had scored a fresh chunk of hash and off we went in search for a tomb in which to smoke it. We found one along a ledge with a clear view of the city. It smelled a bit rank and there were clumps that looked like turds in the corners, but it was large and offered a semblance of shelter and succor until the show. A pipe went around. There were the usual grunts, hacks and coughs. And then, from below, came the banging of pots and pans. The racket rang out from all over Cairo. We looked up and saw the moon was slowly being devoured. The clanging grew louder as the superstitious Egyptians tried to ward off the evil of the eclipse with their cacophony. To add to this, the son et lumière show stated. Recorded symphonic music and French narration blared from the theater. Colored lights flashed below and above us, as if we were in the middle of some psychedelic battlefield. The moon grew smaller and smaller until it became a scimitar hanging over Cairo—a sort of sword of Damocles. The moon had almost completely disappeared by the time the Dead were supposed to start. What? Too much! It felt like an opportunity about to be missed.

And it was. The sound and light show went on so long that the music did not start until the moon was no longer in full shadow. While the Dead came out first, postponing Hamza El Din and his processional of drummers, the moment had passed. You could tell as soon as they opened with “Bertha.” There was no “Dark Star,” just bits and pieces during “Space.” But that was later. Far later. Too late. No ETs from Sirius. No capstone found. No saved remnant. Nothing. We walked away drained and deflated; balloons that dared fly too high and now plummeted back to Earth.

But, as the master of unmet expectations, Samuel Becket, might say, you go on. That is, after all, the ultimate lesson of hitch-hiking—as life. You wait and wait. You have to. You grow gloomy with the prospect of failure. Godot will never come. Until he does. And then you thankfully take whatever chance has offered. You go on—go to wherever fickle Fortuna takes you.

And similarly, I went on. The next day I was on the overnight train south to Luxor. It was so crowded I had to spend the night on the corrugated metal floor where the cars linked up. I transformed myself into a wide-eyed tourist, spending a day in the tombs of the Valley of the King: Ramesses’, Tutaukamen’s, of course not Ozymandias’s. These kings hid their tombs by digging them into the soft sandstone. No ostentatious pyramids for them. Of course, they were still robbed.

I rambled around the back streets, bazaar booths and quays of the small town of Luxor, carrying my knapsack with water and supplies, my Casey Jones hat protecting me from the sun. One afternoon I found myself in the Temple of Karnac. And there were Garcia and Weir staring up at the faded columns. We stopped to talk. I slipped off the hat so as not to seem too reverential. I wanted to confront them: why no “Dark Star?” Why had they let the critical moment slip by? I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I wrung the hat in my hands, hiding its veneration and my disappointment, and let the conversation flow to wherever it led. We talked of the ancient Egyptians, the meaning of the symbols and hieroglyphics surrounding us, other mysterious and mystical spots and where the next show like this should be: Abu Dhabi; the Great Wall of China, Stonehenge? And then, as do all travelers whom fate suddenly brings together, we moved on; I to my pensione in town, they to their hotel by the river. The academic in me was impressed by their knowledge; the fan in me felt let down. Abu Dhabi? Why in hell would they want to play Abu Dhabi? Maybe I am misremembering. Abu Simbel was in Nubia, and that makes more sense. Or maybe that was just their next stop down the Nile.

My next stop was Cairo. I found my way to the Golden Hotel again. It was late and twelve hours of travel left me wasted. This time I splurged on a private room, sharing it with new friends I had met on the train: Brits that had propitiously found themselves in Egypt that September. They had not been Deadheads before—and I never saw them at shows again. But for those few days they were converts.

Despite our exhaustion, we could not sleep long the next morning. A strange din, like the buzzing of locust, awoke us. We quickly dressed and went outside to investigate. The streets were almost impassible with crowds. We could not figure out why until we made our way to Tahrir Square. There we found hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, mostly from the villages on the outskirts of the city. We learned that they had been bussed in overnight. People leaned towards the main thoroughfare, straining to catch view of a motorcade. There was something dangerous in their energy. It was barely controlled. At any provocation, it seemed, they would break through the police lines. Then they erupted. Anwar Sadat and other officials appeared, riding in a triumphant parade. They had just returned from Washington having made a peace treaty with Israel. That was not quite the capstone we had anticipated. But, I guess, it would do. Three years later I was at a show at the Rainbow Theatre in London when we heard Sadat had been assassinated. I remember the Dead’s playing “He’s Gone” that night. But DeadBase says they didn’t. Just a Blues for Allah jam.

Leaving Cairo was easier than getting there. I booked a ticket and within hours boarded a plane to Athens. My Eurailpass was quickly running out of time so I immediately hopped on a train and returned to my previously scheduled program: ruins in Greece and Italy; museums and cathedrals in France, castles in Germany; chocolates and hiking in Switzerland. It was the obligatory grand tour, backpack style. When the Eurailpass expired, I took a hovercraft back to Dover and began hitching around England. One morning I realized that I had left my Casey Jones hat in a pub and had to double-back through the Midlands. After retrieving it I continued my travels with the first ride I could get. By then, I didn’t care which direction I went. I ended up climbing the labyrinth to Glastonbury Tor instead of roaming the Highlands of Scotland. It makes little difference. The hat now hangs torn, tattered and shapeless in my office, a sad memorial to my youth. Had I not changed my course to get it, my entire life might have been different. Or, maybe not. One can never know.

It wasn’t until December that I returned to the States. It was too late to get a ticket for the closing of Winterland. I decompressed with family in Los Angeles, but managed to make it to the other post Christmas shows. I hitched to San Diego and slept on the beach, living off tales of Egypt. The night before New Years I was at UCLA where I saw a slide show that included pictures of me talking to Jerry and Bobby at the Temple of Karnac. It was like a flashback. A framed print of it now hangs on my family room wall, the only photo I have of my almost half year of travels.

After the show I ran into someone scalping a ticket for New Years. Seventy five bucks. It was too steep for me—on principle. I walked around the arena and headed to my grandparents’ who lived close by and where I had planned to spend the night. An old Jaguar raced past me. The driver looked like Bob Weir. But I was too tired to stick out my thumb. I doubt he would have given me a ride. Anyhow, my days of hitching to Dead shows were over.

Hitching to Egypt © 2017 Marc L. Sherman