'Cause I am most ill and I'm rhymin' and stealin'
Ali Baba and the forty thieves
Ali Baba and the forty thieves
Ali Baba and the forty thieves
Ali Baba and the forty thieves (x4)
Torching and crackin' and rhymin' and stealin'
"There are still dinosaurs in Morocco," said Ismail. I played along.
"Impossible!," I said in the voice of a British explorer, "Stuff and nonsense!"
"It's true," he said, "and you will see."
In a few miles, we passed an enormous plaster T-Rex, and I sang the "Jurassic Park" theme in a Betty Davis voice.
We had left the desert after breakfast and were making our way from the Middle Atlas mountains to the High Atlas. Somewhere around here were also the Ante Atlas, but I couldn't keep them all straight. As the camel-riding places faded, they were replaced with "fossil museums," since there's tons of excavation out here.
But, as I learned in Fes, there's no such thing as a museum in Morocco.
We pulled up to one of these and Ismail encouraged me to go inside to learn about archaeology (is that the right field?) while he smoked. I knew this was going to be another gift shop situation, so I was resolved to have it be over with as soon as possible.
Dude met me at the door and led me into the back where an enormous Wile-E-Coyote-style buzz saw, something from Snidely Whiplash's porn collection was cleaving sections out of a giant cube of rock. Another dude had what looked like a giant floor waxer, and he was polishing the rectangles the saw was chopping out.
Inside the rock...hundreds of snails, squids, and trilobites. The stuff of a thousand science text books, the primordial soup that once was Life on Earth. Cool to think the desert was once the sea, that the world was once the sea.
Certainly fun and interesting to see but dulled after I was led into the next room which was about a mile-long warehouse of dinner plates, conference tables, coffee tables, and earrings all made from the stuff. Cool, I suppose, but it's hard to imagine paying more than a nickel for them after you see how very not rare all this stuff is.
Will be cool in ten million years to see coffee tables full of the cell phones and plastic water bottles from our oceans.
There were several busloads of (other) tourists pawing over the fossils, so it was easy to lose my guide and get back out to Ismail. And that's how I made my escape from the Etsy of Evolution.
He was like, "You weren't in there very long," and I was like, "I hope I didn't offend the trilobites," and we were off. The next leg of the journey involved passing through The Valley of Divorced Women to get to the Airport of the Donkeys. That all sounded perfect.
For most of the trip, we were in something called the Ziz Valley. Ziz means gazelle, and many of the places we passed had little gazelle logos on them. The gas stations were called Ziz. It all sounded to me like one of the books L. Frank Baum wrote when he was tired of the Oz books. I asked a lot of questions.
Why is this area called the Valley of Divorced Women?
A lot of them move here.
Do they marry again?
Only widows marry again. Divorced women are no good. Some do, maybe, but it is frowned on.
That just made me want to ask more questions, but I didn't. I also learned that the goal of getting married for a Berber is so you don't have to do anything anymore. You can have up to four wives, and the women do all the work. In fact, if it's discovered a man has done any work, he is ridiculed.
Children also work, but the boys try to get married as soon as they can so they can stop.
The truth of this seemed to bear out when we passed through villages. Every man I saw was sitting in a doorway or with other men in cafes. Women had giant burdens on their backs and shoulders, comically large bales of alfalfa to feed the donkeys with.
Boys drove the donkeys and dreamed, I suppose, of the lifetime of backgammon and free sex in their future.
We pulled into a small market as I was telling him it was surprising the Valley of Divorced Women didn't have a larger population.
It, the market, was fantastic, and I was very glad we were there. It was exactly what I wanted. A local place full of people trading spices and animals and vegetables. Very few tourists, it was a legitimate Market Day in a small-ish town. It seemed like real life.
Meat hanging from hooks that would be in someone's oven that evening. Vegetables that would be in someone's salad that night. Animals being traded, dragged by the leg, tied to posts. Like, it's tricky, I'm coming from a position of privilege, so there's something a little... off about my taking the position of Magic Observer, but.. it really gave me a lot of pleasure, and felt like a Richard Scarry book. It might be wrong, but it's how I felt. I loved being there and seeing it.
Cats were everywhere, of course. Well fed, happy. A man at a spice place gave us tea, and we stood there and drank it. It meant, I think, I was supposed to buy some saffron or rose hips or something, but I didn't want any, and I wasn't really aware of it, but... apparently it was the height of rudeness for me to drink and not even consider buying. Ismail kept putting me in these situations. Like, these kind of passive pushes to buy.
He knew everyone. At another stall, I bought an overpriced wallet from one of his friends. To make up for not having spent anything. It was a yellow leather thing, and I can't find it now. It's the one thing I lost from the trip. Besides my innocence. Haw! I made myself laugh calling the kiosk a Berber Shop.
The Airport of the Donkeys was a huge area where everyone parked their donks while they shopped or sold. Like, it was a parking lot for the villagers. They brayed and chewed and snored and displayed their concupiscence.
Over a hundred, it seemed like. Maybe it was kind of a glimpse into what it was like back when everyone took their carriage to the theater.
One was tied next to a wall with peeling paint and a long, looping sentence in Arabic. I asked what it said and I was told "Cleanliness is next to godliness." Ain't it the truth, folks. Ain't it the truth.
We left. I was in a good mood. I had hoped to get a sandwich there, but it was the sort of place where you buy dinner for eight for a weekend. So, I hoped we would stop for lunch soon. We did, but it was another hotel. He swore it would be better than the last one. I ordered the couscous. You can't screw that up... right?
They didn't. I hope the fifteen-cent kickback he got was worth it.
After, we listened to his music. It was "the hot sound from Mali." I quite liked that, listening to beats from a genre I wouldn't otherwise ever have heard. He said all the best bands were from Mali and that's what everyone in "the Maghreb" was into.
That's an old political term for this region (including Algeria, Libya, etc.) and there's some linguistic connection to it that gives us the word "Moors." I don't know how it all works, but it also used to be called The Barbary Coast. Berbers, Barbary. Shave and a haircut, two bits.
So, today was working out very nicely (if you disregard the fossil shop).
We drove for about an hour enjoying the music, then down into a valley, a gorge, really, and I was given half an hour to hike. He drove away and left me to explore. It was like a national park sort of area. Locals picnicked and played in a trickling little river. It was cool down there, and the mountains rose high above. A very pleasant walk accompanied by birdsong and peace.
Men sold rugs on the rocks, of course. Women in headscarves checked their phones. The families here seemed more middle class. There was a hotel built into the side of the rocks, but it had been smashed by a boulder. That must have sucked. It looked like it had happened long ago.
I tried to imagine living nearby and coming here to relax or to write. I suppose if my four wives were scrubbing the donkey, I would have plenty of time. Maybe I'd bring three of our daughters if it wasn't prickly pear season and they weren't needed in the fields.
My reverie was broken by the sound of English being spoken in an American accent. Fat dude with a white beard was telling his Ismail that the "government was infringing on state's rights" and that people were tired of it. He said "liberal cities like Austin and Seattle are setting the agenda for the rest of us and people were tired of it."
It bothered me a great deal. Like, why bring that poison over here? Like, the grasping tentacles of the federal government must be wrecking your life. Times must be terrible. You must be drowning. Oh... wait, you're on vacation in Morocco and have a hired driver to take you from one gift shop to another. Tell me again how the liberals in Seattle have stomped on your rights?
It was making me angry. And I thought what a surprise if I were to start yelling at him in English. But, he was just some gassy old man. It was a good reminder, though, that I mostly live in a bubble and that the goofy people they make fun of in news videos are real.
And, of course, I wondered if Ismail liked me more than his driver liked him or if we were all just whales and I was just money to Ismail. Like a donkey in a fairy tale that coughs up coins when you beat him.
The guy wandered off, and I found the car. Ismail could tell I was in a bad mood and he asked if I hadn't liked the gorge. I said "my gorge rose when I saw another American," but I don't think he got it. He said that he had also seen that dude, though. And heard him.
I decided to try empathy and decided the old guy didn't have anyone to listen to him at home, so he was getting it all out here. I'm glad he found his outlet, but I'm sorry I had to hear it.
We moved on, another hour, more magnificent mountains in the distance, more vistas and palm trees. Dates. Olives. Apples. Fertility. And then not. We came to a little station on the roadside where an old well stood. It was a Berber well and had been drilled by foot pedal. Pretty fascinating.
There was a tent made of camel wool (!!!) and two dudes. Ismail smoked with one and the other took me to the well. There was a cave underneath that used to be where a river flowed. It was a little like the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam, I suppose, but I didn't have to crouch, and there was a lot of light coming in from the well openings above. The well system went for miles. But we only walked for a little bit.
Back at the tent, there was tea. And I'd learned tea meant money was supposed to be exchanged, but... I wasn't sure what there was to buy. Ismail was trying to act casual but it was clear something was supposed to happen. The four of us sat in the tent without speaking.
Finally, I said, "thank you for the.. tea?" and we left. I saw Ismail slip one of the guys 20 dirham, but I don't know if he knows I saw. I guess I was supposed to pay for the well tour? The ambiguity of these situations, the suggested obligations were almost as oppressive as the desert heat. But they also made me kind of... resentful?
We drove for a few more hours. He wanted to hear my music, so I gave him my player to plug in. It was a funny mix of country and sappy Chicago love songs and hardcore industrial and "music for the summoning of male sexual potency." I didn't tell him that part. We just listened. He knew the song Turn Down for What.
Randomly, he asked me if "douche" was a bad word in English. I said it meant, like, a person who behaves badly. He said his last clients had been from Texas, and when they passed a car wash that said "auto douche" on it, they cracked up and wouldn't say why.
More small villages, more lazy men and women bent with age carrying large bundles on their backs. Like a Led Zeppelin album cover. Randomly, again, he asked me if I'd ever heard of Ali Baba. I said, "Sure, Ali Baba and the forty thieves? Open Sesame? That guy?"
He said yes, but that in Morocco, they call him Ali Baba and the forty gazelles. Which I loved. They love gazelles here so much!
So, I was like, "Gazelles and not thieves?" and he said, "Yes, gazelles. But they help him steal."
And we both laughed and smiled for a long time until the music turned into Italian horror movie soundtracks and the energy changed. I still don't know why he brought it up.
We drove up a "switchback" road until we were high in the hills, and we pulled over so I could see what we'd done. It was very beautiful to see how the road had been made and how it turned back on itself. I took a nice picture.
Then we left. Apparently, that's one hour of the trip, going up to see what I think is a famous view, then back. We pulled into our hotel for the evening. Nice place filled with Dutch students who I wanted to sleep with. I felt like a bearded lizard, though. And I was too tired to tell them I'd written Tulips of Fury. But later, oh but later, how I imagined their breakfast-waffle skin and their mouths of syrup.
Ate a tajine (surprise!) for dinner and fell asleep early. Woke in the middle of the night and went out on the balcony, since I had one. The sky was full of stars, the ones I'd missed in the desert.
It felt like a dream, like some kind of wish fulfillment. I was sure I saw Mars winking from the eye of Taurus. I was so happy. Some force awakened me and compelled me to go out to the balcony to see it. I breathed in the cool mountain air and felt clean.
Majesty.
I read until morning. A cloud of gnats rose from my toothbrush, but I didn't kill them. I pretended each one represented one of Ali Baba's gazelles.
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