When his work was finished, he told me that his organization needed someone like me and offered me a job with a salary that was remarkably good for its time. The problem was that the workplace was in Asaluyeh.

Since I had a habit of making sudden decisions, I got up early the very next morning, took my own car, and drove to Shiraz and then on to Asaluyeh over the next two days. I stayed there for half a day and drove back again.

I didn’t like the atmosphere there, or the ever-present smell of sulfur hanging over the city. Even so, whenever I wanted to brag about how good I was at driving, I used that trip to Asaluyeh—with its mountain roads—as my example.

That story was another one of the things that made my mother utter her famous line: “Thank God you weren’t born a boy.”

There was also something funny that happened on that trip, something I never told anyone. Because our usual journeys were toward the west of Tehran, when I set out for Asaluyeh I automatically started driving west. I was almost in Zanjan before I suddenly came to my senses and wondered why on earth I was going that way.

If anyone thought the extra distance would tire me out or discourage me enough to postpone the entire trip until another day, they were badly mistaken. I turned around at the first possible opportunity and continued toward Asaluyeh.

I ended up driving nearly three thousand kilometers in total, simply because I was so excited that I had lost my concentration and forgotten to check the route before setting out.

Compared with those three thousand kilometers, the few hundred kilometers to Qaleh Sorkh, for a purpose that mattered so much more to me, hardly counted as anything.

Imagining life with the tribe exactly as I had dreamed it was almost a drug. It was an intoxicant of its own, pushing me forward.

To reach Qaleh Sorkh, I had to take the terrible road through Delijan. As far as the eye could see, there were tractor-trailers and trucks on that road, with a small passenger car every few kilometers.

Strangely enough, whenever the truck drivers saw a woman in a Pride trying to overtake them, they would spring into action with all their gallantry, using their indicators and various signals to somehow make room for me. I overtook one truck after another and kept going.

Of course, there were also some who seemed to feel their masculinity was under threat, and my overtaking did not sit well with them. I could tell from the headlights and mocking honks they sent my way. I turned the music up loud, laughed, and kept driving.

From my previous experience, I had arranged the bedding I had brought with me on the front passenger seat and put a hat on top of it, so that from outside it looked as though another passenger was in the car, asleep.