Category: Morocco

Cet article a été rédigé par Louden Kiracofe, ami, compagnon d’escalade et médecin à la retraite.

C’est en 1969 que ma femme et moi sommes arrivés à Rabat en juillet 1969 – l’année du premier alunissage – pour un terme de deux ans en tant que médecin du Corps de la paix, chargé de soigner les volontaires répartis dans tout le Maroc. Je voyais chacun d’entre eux au moins deux fois par an pour leur administrer les vaccins nécessaires. En tant que médecin américain, on me demandait souvent de voir des patients marocains et on m’a fréquemment invité à assister à des cérémonies privées rarement vues par des étrangers. Des touristes et des Américains vivant au Maroc me demandaient souvent des conseils médicaux. 

Un jour le professeur Vincent Crapanzano m’a contacté au sujet de sa femme, Jane, qui avait consulté un médecin local qui lui avait dit qu’elle souffrait d’une appendicite chronique et qu’elle devait être opérée. À la demande de Vincent, j’ai vu Jane. Après l’avoir examinée, j’ai cru qu’elle souffrait d’une infection bactérienne – la salmonellose – une infection bactérienne courante que de nombreux volontaires (ainsi que moi-même) ont contractée. Je ne pensais pas qu’elle avait besoin d’une intervention chirurgicale (une appendicectomie) et je l’ai mise sous antibiotiques. Elle a rapidement réagi, ils m’en ont été reconnaissants et nous avons commencé à nous fréquenter de temps en temps. 

Vincent Crapanzano est un anthropologue culturel de renommée mondiale qui effectuait des recherches sur les croyances et les cérémonies de guérison soufies. Par la suite, ses recherches ont été publiées dans un livre : Tuhami : Portait d’un Marocain. Vincent m’a demandé de l’accompagner à une cérémonie de guérison soufie. Il avait déjà assisté à une telle cérémonie et voulait être certain que ce qu’il avait vu était bien réel et non la conséquence d’être dans un état de transe tout comme les soufis qui pratiquaient le rituel. J’ai accepté son invitation sans hésitation.

Un soir à une heure avancée, nous nous sommes rendus en voiture dans un vieux quartier de Rabat, où les touristes ne s’aventuraient pas. Vincent a frappé à une porte et on nous a invités à entrer et à monter les escaliers jusqu’à une petite pièce non meublée qui ne contenait que deux chaises qu’on avait prévues pour nous. 

La cérémonie de guérison avait pour but de guérir la jeune fille de l’hôte. Cette dernière, âgée de 8 ans, avait soudainement subi une paralysie du bras droit. On croyait que c’était la conséquence d’avoir offensé un djinn, un mauvais esprit. Selon les normes médicales occidentales, un tel cas de paralysie serait considéré comme une « réaction de conversion ».

Quelques minutes plus tard, une autre porte s’est ouverte et dix hommes vêtus de lourdes djellabas sont entrés. L’un d’eux s’est assis sur un petit tabouret dans un coin avec un tambour. À côté de lui, un homme jouait de la raita, une flûte à anche double au son aigu et strident. Un hibachi aux braises incandescentes a été placé au centre de la pièce et une petite bouilloire a été déposée dessus. Elle commença rapidement à produire de la vapeur. Les autres hommes formaient un cercle et ensuite la cérémonie a commencé. Avec les tambours bruyants et les sons stridents de la raita, le cercle d’hommes a commencé à chanter en avançant en traînant les pieds. Au fur et à mesure que la musique et les chants devenaient de plus en plus forts, plusieurs hommes ont commencé à brandir des jambiyyas (poignards traditionnels courbés) qui avaient été dissimulés dans leurs djellabas. À ce moment-là, il m’a semblé que les hommes étaient en transe. L’hôte s’est positionné de manière protectrice devant Vincent et moi. L’un des danseurs a commencé à taillader son cuir chevelu chauve avec sa jambiyya. Le sang coulait librement sur son visage. Un autre s’est dirigé vers le hibachi, a pris la bouilloire et a commencé à verser l’eau bouillante dans sa bouche. Je pouvais voir de la vapeur qui sortait de sa bouche. Ensuite, un autre a enlevé ses sandales et s’est mis pieds nus sur les charbons ardents, avant de rejoindre les hommes qui traînaient encore dans le cercle. 

C’est alors que, sans aucun signal apparent, la cérémonie s’est brusquement terminée. Les hommes ont tous quitté la pièce ensemble et, après quelques minutes, ils sont revenus en tenant des conversations animées les uns avec les autres. J’ai regardé très attentivement et je n’ai vu aucune trace de blessure au cuir chevelu sur l’homme qui avait tailladé son crâne chauve et rasé ; aucune trace d’inconfort chez l’homme qui se tenait pieds nus sur l’hibachi. Soudain, une autre porte s’est ouverte et plusieurs femmes ont apporté de grands plateaux de nourriture. Tout le monde se met à manger et à discuter aimablement, y compris celui qui s’était versé de l’eau bouillante dans la bouche. Il était entendu que la jeune fille malade était guérie. Je n’ai pas eu l’impression d’avoir été en transe et j’ai cru pouvoir vérifier que ce que Vincent avait observé et ce que nous avions vu tous les deux cette nuit-là s’était – bien que presque incroyable –réellement produit.

En début de cette belle matinée de juillet, alors que nous sirotions tranquillement notre café au lit, une marmotte traversait la cour et des moqueurs chat effectuaient des sorties pour se nourrir des drupes rouge vif de la viorne située à l’extérieur de notre fenêtre. Pendant ces quelques instants de calme matinal, les problèmes du monde nous semblaient bien loin. Rien dans notre pelouse non tondue ne rappelait exactement le beau poème de Matthew Arnold, mais je ne pouvais éviter le sentiment, partagé par beaucoup, je crois, que le monde se précipite inéluctablement vers un désastre d’une ampleur inimaginable. Mesurez-le à l’aune de la foutaise MAGA si vous voulez, même si la vacuité de Trump, l’ignorance, la démagogie, la cupidité et le pouvoir des élites qu’il embrasse ne peuvent se comparer aux véritables problèmes auxquels l’humanité est confrontée.

Dresser une liste exhaustive des catastrophes en cours et à venir remplirait facilement une page, mais, tout comme Brassens a pu chanter sa guerre préférée, je peux énumérer mes préférées, celles qui m’inquiètent le plus : le changement climatique, encore nié par beaucoup, la pollution sans répit de l’humain, invisible et insidieuse, l’extinction massive à une échelle et dans un délai qui n’ont d’égal que celle causée par la météorite de Chicxulub, la prolifération nucléaire, qui paraît irréelle aux yeux des Américains qui n’ont jamais vécu la destruction occasionnée par la guerre en Europe et au Japon, l’aggravation des inégalités et de la faim, à une époque de richesse et d’abondance immenses, l’intolérance religieuse croissante partout dans le monde et l’utilisation grossière, odieuse et finalement immorale de la force militaire, à des fins discutables et sans tenir compte de l’énorme souffrance des innocents.

Dans son poème, Arnold déplorait le recul de la foi et cherchait du réconfort dans l’amour, ce à quoi on n’aurait rien à redire;cependant, Arnold vivait à une époque d’optimisme où l’on accueillait le progrès comme faisant naturellement partie de l’avenir.  Pour moi, cependant, la retraite que j’aperçois est celle de la foi en la raison. J’ai récemment terminé l’ouvrage de Stacy Schiff, Une grande improvisation, Franklin, France et la naissance de l’Amérique, qui relate la période de la vie de Benjamin Franklin en tant que commissaire des colonies américaines en France, qui faisait de son mieux pour obtenir une aide financière et militaire de la part du gouvernement de Louis XVI. Le séjour de Franklin à Paris a marqué la fin de l’âge de la raison, rapidement suivi d’une Révolution qui a donné le coup d’envoi à une nouvelle religion : le nationalisme.

Depuis l’époque de Franklin, le nationalisme et les religionsanciennes ont rivalisé avec la raison pour conquérir l’esprit et le cœur des hommes. On ne peut qu’espérer…et prier…pour que les actions des hommes soient tempérées par un mélange adéquat des deux, et guidées par une puissance qui soit supérieure à l’intelligence artificielle. L’internationalisme, selon la façon dont on l’envisage, s’avère un puissant antidote au nationalisme. Malheureusement, les Américains, qui ont inondé le monde entier de leur culture, tendent à avoir l’une des cultures les plus insulaires, et la xénophobie et l’isolationnisme sont présents dans notre pays depuis sa création.  Seules des menaces imminentes et existentielles semblent inciter les Américains à s’engager à l’étranger. Pourtant, aujourd’hui, quels que soient les critères retenus, les Américains, confrontés à de nombreuses menaces de ce type, font preuve d’une complaisance remarquable. Obnubilés par les multimédias, beaucoup ont perdu l’art de la réflexion.

La viorne est originaire de l’hémisphère Nord, y compris des montagnes de l’Atlas au Maroc, et se cultive souvent dans les jardins aux États-Unis. Les baies rouges sont comestibles, mais ont mauvais goût. Certaines sont légèrement toxiques. Cependant, la couleur rouge vif est attrayante et la plante occupe une place et une signification particulières dans la culture ukrainienne. Les Russes la célèbrent également, et une chanson russe populaire du XIXe siècle, Kalinka, lui est consacrée. Lorsque j’étudiais le russe au lycée, le professeur se servait de la chanson pour enseigner la prononciation et le vocabulaire, ainsi que pour rompre la monotonie de l’apprentissage des conjugaisons et des déclinaisons. Bien des années plus tard, même si j’en ai beaucoup oublié, je me souviens encore du vers, В саду́ я́года-мали́нка, мали́нка моя́, « Mes belles baies dans mon jardin ».

Aussi beaux soient-ils, le moqueur chat et les baies ne parviennent pas à chasser de mon esprit les images d’innocents morts et affamés. Mon vieil ami d’université, Jim, croit que arriver à un consensus sur le changement climatique pourrait aider l’humanité à partager les valeurs importantes que nous avons tous en commun, et peut-être que cela se produira à mesure que les effets du changement climatique deviendront indéniables malgré la désinformation répandue depuis bien des années par les industries des combustibles fossiles. Je l’espère.

Early on this beautiful July morning, while we sipped our coffee in bed, a groundhog munched her way across the yard and gray catbirds flew sorties to feed on the bright red drupes on the viburnum outside our window. For those few moments in the early morning quiet, the problems of the world were far away. Nothing in that unmowed lawn exactly recreated the Matthew Arnold moment, but I could not the avoid the sense, shared with many I believe, that the world is careening away toward a disaster of unimaginable magnitude. Measure it by MAGAturd if you like, though the bathos of Trump, the ignorance, demagoguery, greed, and elite empowerment it embraces, can’t compare to the real issues facing humankind.

Creating an exhaustive list of ongoing and future disasters would easily fill a page, but I can list my favorites, just as Brassens could sing about his favorite war. Of the issues that worry me the most are: climate change, still denied by many, unabated manmade pollution, invisible and insidious, mass extinction on a scale and in a time frame only equaled by that caused by the Chicxulub meteorite, nuclear proliferation, unreal for Americans who have never suffered the war-made destruction of Europe and Japan, widening inequality and hunger in an age of tremendous wealth and plenty, growing religious intolerance across the world, and crass, abhorrent and ultimately immoral use of military force, for questionable ends and without regard to the enormous suffering of innocents.

Arnold bemoaned the retreat of faith and sought solace in love, and nothing wrong in that, but Arnold, despite his pessimism, lived in an age of optimism when progress had come to be accepted and expected as part of the future.  For me, though, the retreat I hear, the shingles on my beach, is one of faith in reason. I recently finished Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation, an account of the period of Benjamin Franklin’s life as a commissioner for the American colonies in France, doing his best to secure financial and military assistance from the government of Louis XVI. Franklin’s time in Paris marked the very end of the Age of Reason, to be quickly followed by a revolution that spawned a new religion: nationalism.

Since Franklin’s time, nationalism and traditional religions have competed with reason for the minds and hearts of men. One can only hope–and pray–that the actions of men will be tempered by a proper mixture of the two, and guided by some power higher than artificial intelligence. Internationalism is a powerful antidote to nationalism. Unfortunately, Americans, who have spread their culture around the globe, tend to have one of the most insular of cultural viewpoints. Xenophobia and isolationism have been with this country since its inception.  Only imminent and existential threats seem to generate American involvement abroad, yet today, by any standard, Americans faced by many such threats, are remarkably complacent. Besotted by multimedia, many have lost the art of reflection.

The viburnum in my yard is native to the Northern Hemisphere including the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, and often planted in gardens in the US. The red berries are edible, but they taste bad. Some are mildly poisonous. The brillant red color is attractive, however, and the plant has a special place and meaning in Ukrainian culture.

The Russians celebrate it, too, and a popular 19th century Russian song, Kalinka, is dedicated to it. When I studied Russian in high school, the instructor used song to teach pronunciation and vocabulary as well as to break the monotonous learning of conjugations and declensions. Years later, when I have forgotten much, I still remember the verse, В саду́ я́года-мали́нка, мали́нка моя́, My beautiful berries in my garden.

Beautiful though they are, the catbird and the berries can’t keep the images of dead and starving innocents long out of my mind. My old college friend, Jim A, thinks that a consensus on climate change might help humanity share the important values that everyone has in common, and, perhaps it will as the effects of climate change become undeniable in spite of the misinformation spread for years by the fossil fuel industries. I hope so.

In his recent debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden alienated alley cats the world over by accusing Trump of behaving like one. “You have the morals of an alley cat,” pronounced President Biden with scorn. The backlash was immediate and fierce.

“I might be an alley cat, but I’ve never had to resort to a purrnstars for sex,” said one Tom. Another, Minou, from Paris, lamented that some anglophones might confuse being a “félin” with being a felon. Moucha, from Sefrou, said Trump’s Access Hollywood remarks to Billy Bush on grabbing pussies still gave her nightmares.

Cats do not have the right to vote, so Biden’s offensive comment will have no effect on the 2024 election, but his remarks certainly elicited much comment around the kibble.

Trump brushed off the comment, contending that everything that he has ever done is purrfect, and, in any case, the only animals of concern to him were sharks and he would like to kill them all.

In Morocco, cats are regarded in a manner as kindly as possible in a country where many individuals have to scramble to eke out a living and put food on the family table. While living there, I heard stories about the prophet Mohammed and cats including the following which may be apocryphal, but certainly widespread:

“The Prophet had a favourite feline. She was called Muezza, and there’s one well-known story of both of them. One time, when the call to prayers was heard, Muezza was asleep on one of the Prophet’s robes. Rather than disrupt Muezza’s slumber, the Prophet cut off part of his sleeve to leave him in peace. Throughout his life, the Prophet was seen to always practise immense care for Muezza.” (HalalZill)

According to Wikipedia, cats enjoy a special status:

“The cat is considered “the quintessential pet” by Muslims, and is admired for its cleanliness, and was a beloved animal to Muhammad. Unlike many other animals, such as dogs, Islamic Law considers cats ritually pure and possess baraka (blissful energy), and allows cats to freely enter homes and even mosques. Although cats are ritually pure, their flesh is forbidden. Cats are believed to be the most common pet in Muslim countries.”

“In Islamic tradition, cats are admired for their cleanliness. They are considered to be ritually clean, and are thus allowed to enter homes and even mosques, including Masjid al-Haram. Food sampled by cats is considered halal, in the sense that their consumption of the food does not make it impermissible for Muslims to eat, and water from which cats have drunk is permitted for wudu (the ablution that is done by Muslims). Furthermore, there is a belief among some Muslims that cats seek out people who are praying.^“

I remember the cats of Morocco fondly. Street cats were common. One night in 1973, on my way to a home in the Oudaïa on Rabat, I came upon a cat and a rat, facing off in the middle of a narrow and dark alleyway. The former sat on his haunches, waiting for his prey to make a move to escape. As I was late, and hurrying, I never saw how that encounter with the rat ended, but I suspect that the cat had a big meal that evening.

Incidentally, that rat was the only one that I ever saw in Morocco, bar one other: moving into the Seti Messaouda house, as I entered the house for the first time, I saw a rat quickly disappear into the hole of the squat toilet in the bathroom. It evidently was able to swim through the sewer system, and it never reappeared as the Merrycat, who had adopted me at the primary school, and moved in to become the resident feline.

The following small gallery of old photos of Moroccan cats.

Nine years ago, an old Peace Corps friend, Gaylord Barr, passed away unexpectedly. In those days, I knew him as well as anyone. We shared a house for almost four years as well as many adventures and joint travel.

I thought that I would remember him to his friends on this, the day he died, with a few photos labeled with his own commentary from emails he sent in the last years of his life. Gaylord had a great sense of humor, a blend of silliness, self-deprecation, irony, and mild sarcasm. If he’s watching somewhere, he will surely get a chuckle from his remarks—or mine.

The pool of eels in the Chellah in Rabat, below this text, is a favorite both of women who feed the fish eggs and of the many cats that beg and scrounge scraps from them. Vendors would sell hard boiled eggs to visitors.

I’m sure Gaylord would have chided me for omitting pictures of his Sefrou friends and students. That’s for next year.

My home in Sefrou was about 30 kilometers from my workplace in Fes. I liked the fresh air and small town atmosphere of Sefrou and I was fortunate that I could live there. The downside was that life in Sefrou required that I take a shared taxi or local bus to Fes every morning.

Once one clears the edge of the depression in which Sefrou lies, the road descends to the rich agricultural plains of the Saïs. The ride wasn’t a long one, but it soon became a routine, and I needed a way to pass the time. I read books.

One of most memorable was Mikhaïl Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and the Margarita. Bulgakov died in 1940 and his novel was only published in the late 1960s.

The copy I read must have been the earliest English language translation, and how I came by it, I can’t say, though Peace Corps volunteers often passed on their books to others once they had finished them and I most likely got it from another volunteer.

Today there are many translations of the novel, several in English alone, and Bulgakov’s work is highly regarded as one of the few novels of quality written during the Soviet era. That said, it is not widely read. Many Americans do not like Russian novels because they are often long, and filled with difficult to pronounce Russian names, with patronymics, diminutives, and nicknames. In Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Idiot,” the character Prince Myshkin is referred to by his full name is Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, his patronymic, Lev Nikolayevich (using his father’s name, Nikolai), his diminutive Myshkin (a shortened, informal form of his last name), his nickname, the Idiot (a derogatory term used by some characters in the novel), and his formal title, Prince Myshkin. These variations do highlight the cultural and social nuances attendant with their use, and the author used them for that purpose.

The Master and the Margarita long and complex structure may also deter some readers. There are three intertwined plots: one centers on a writer driven insane by the havoc wreaked by Satan when he appears in 1930s Moscow, another on Pontius Pilate, with a realistic, but different, depiction of the judgement and death of Jesus, and the last, on a love story of a woman who would sell her soul for the man she loved, a novelist struggling with writer’s block.

The novel satirizes life under Soviet communism. Before he wrote it, Bulgakov had been a successful playwright, and it is said that Stalin attended one of his plays 15 times! Perhaps this is why Bulgakov survived the purges of 1930s. The secret police seem to have known that he was writing an unflattering account of the system.

The novel mixes stark realism with fantasy and satire, sometimes in startling ways and sometimes in broadly comic ones. One can read it quickly to pass time as I did then or one can spend a lifetime examining the connections between the characters and plots and speculating on what Bulgakov is really saying. Much in the novel is not as it really seems, which should be taken for granted in a novel where one character is a huge, black, chess-playing cat, who talks, walks on his hind legs, and packs a pistol.

Just recently there have been newspaper articles about a film version of the novel now playing on Russian theaters. The film has become a big hit there, and those commenting on it are quick to speculate on whether (or when) the censors will remove it. Authoritarian hypocrisy and toadyism aren’t limited to the communists.

There’s no better time to read Bulgakov. While many in America make their own Faustian deals in advance of the national election, others look forward to the arrival of Easter with its promise of redemption and new life.

Since the early days of Peace Corps in Morocco, many things have changed. I’ve said that before and I will no doubt say it again as long as I write here. As a senior citizen I do not take change for granted.

One development that has fascinated me, perhaps because many years ago I took college courses in geology, is Morocco’s increasing prominence in the world of paleontology stemming from frequent fossil discoveries that date from the time of the dinosaurs.

When the supercontinent Pangea could no longer abide by itself and decided to break up about 200 million years ago, North America and North Africa went their own ways and each got custody of some of their dinosaur children. Those children, separated by waters too deep to swim, evolved differently, and that is the interesting point of a recent article in The Conversation. The North American branch of the tyrannosaur family sports numerous fossil remains of T-Rexes from Montana, Alberta, and North Dakota, enough for some to have been sold to private collectors. Fossils of their North African relatives are rarer and are different in significant ways.

Much of Africa consists of high plateaus, mountains, and deserts. Until recently, Europeans knew little about Africa’s interior because rapids and waterfalls rendered the continent’s great rivers unnavigable for large craft. Volcanism, erosion, and rising sea levels have left Africa with relatively few areas where the fossil record is long and well-preserved. Fortunately, Morocco has been well endowed with fossil deposits where, in recent years, paleontologists have made numerous important discoveries.

Today some tourism companies tout fossil as souvenirs of Morocco, and I would never begrudge poor Moroccans for selling fossils. Just the same, I think that preservation of the country’s most important fossil beds as important cultural heritages, much as Canada has protected the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies and Britain its Jurassic Coast, should be incumbent upon the government of Morocco.

I did not return from Morocco with any rare fossils, but I do remember, when rambling about Jbel Bouiblane, that the gullies carved in the the mountainsides by melting winter snows did contain many fossils. In May 1969, on the outing described elsewhere on this blog, John Paulas found a large ammonite and had to be pulled away from the stream bed where he stumbled upon it so we could continue our way.

The ammonites had coiled shells varying from a few millimeters to over two meters wide. All ammonites were predators as are their modern cephalopod relatives, squid, octopuses, and chambered nautiloids. Though relatively common, overfishing and habitat destruction menaces the latter as well as almost all living things in the ocean today. 

Interestingly, in medieval Europe, ammonite fossils were often called “snakestones” or “serpentstones” and thought to have religious origins or curative powers. They constitute a common fossil on southwest England’s Jurassic Coast as well as on the Dinosaur Coast, near Whitby in North Yorkshire, England, where Captain Cook learned his seamanship and Dracula’s ship washed ashore. Whitby’s coat of arms  features “snakestones.”

When I began this blog, I used old color slides from the nineteen sixties as prompts for much of my commentary. I thought many of the photos that I took were interesting enough to share widely and some represented parts of my Peace Corps experience very well. Although I still have many slides from Morocco, I left off digitizing them a couple of years ago. Needing writing prompts, I have for some time looked to old documents, artifacts, and the media, but I haven’t posted nearly as often. Now, occasionally, an old memory or something that I wrote here earlier prompts me to write.

In the case of this post, I previously referenced the film Before Sunrise. The young protagonists of that film, French and American, meet on a train. The young man convinces the girl, who is on her way home to Paris, to stop off with him in Vienna where they spend the night walking and talking. He will fly home to the States in the morning, and she will resume her journey to France.

After I had written the post, another movie with a nighttime setting came to mind and made me think of Morocco. I watched the second film, Under the Skin of Night, (zir-e poost-e shab), in a theater in Tehran, Iran, in July 1974. Though my command of Farsi was poor, the dialogue was minimal and the action made most of the movie clear.

The theme of both films involves young people who meet by chance and decide to spend the night together. In Before Sunrise, the protagonists are privileged and wealthy enough to afford foreign travel, and self-discovery is not a luxury, just a part of growing up. They fall in love, even propose a future meeting in six months, to test the strength of their feelings. Their meanderings on a summer’s night in Vienna are filmed in color and involve no hardships.

Zir-e poost-e shab has a different story altogether, and begins, with a scarab beetle rolling a ball of dung. A young American tourist in Tehran spies a petty thief in the act stealing hubcaps, and her complicity creates a bond. The two do not search for meaning in life, neither speaks the other’s language, but, much more basically, for a place to have sex. For the girl, the sex will be casual. She, too, will catch a flight home in the morning. For the man, the night is the chance of his life to bed down with a foreigner, and perhaps even steal a new life from fate. But only one of this pair is privileged: the other lives from day to day on the edge of society.

Filmed in black and white, the story centers on a long, tiring, and ultimately fruitless search for a place where the two can be alone. He has no money. Living on the street, the man’s class and poverty work against his chances. Central Tehran is cold and unwelcoming. He takes the girl to Shemiran, a wealthy northern suburb that more closely resembled Beverly Hills than the rest of Tehran. The girl swims topless in the pool of a rich estate where his father was employed as a gardener, while the man is beaten up and thrown into the street. He ends the night in jail. There is no future to his relationship with the girl. They will never meet again.

I worked in Fes, a prime tourist destination, easily reached by bus or train from other major Moroccan centers. My office was in a government building in the Ville Nouvelle. As I lived twenty miles away in Sefrou and could not go home for lunch, I spent many hours in cafes, eating tuna-filled baguettes and nursing Cokes, often cut with a local sparkling water, Oulmès.

Young foreigners frequently visited Fes during the tourist season, and I often watched as equally young Moroccan hustlers worked to pick up tourists with offers promising authentic tours. Morocco was a place of unemployment and underemployment with a young and rapidly growing population. I once asked a shoemaker in Chauen if he’d ever been in the army. He replied laughing, “Yes, of course, in the army of the sitting”, a common reference in Arabic for the unemployed. Without family support or connections, neither an education nor a job came easily.

Tourists were easy marks, especially those without good French, and the medina, the old city, was a maze of winding streets and alleys, not at all easy to navigate, a place where a guide was useful. The would-be guide could sell his services, collect commissions from the shopkeepers selling tourists everything from cheap souvenirs to expensive rugs, and sometimes offer nighttime accomodation, with sex always a possibility for the older and most charming. Sex for most young Moroccan men in those days virtually always involved prostitutes. No other women were available.

As for the foreigner, sex with a native might make an exotic souvenir for some. The sixties in the developed world were a period of experimentation with drugs and sexual liberation. Young people traveled the world as if they were still at home, and, being far from the eyes of their families, had even fewer social constraints abroad.

Moroccan street people were happy to oblige them. However, Moroccans (and Mediterranean men in general) looked down on the sexual mores of young western women and many found it hard to distinguish the sexual freedom of foreigners from that of local prostitutes. In those days, young women were seldom available for young men except through prostitution. The freedom of western women was incomprehensible. I heard this opinion often in North Africa, and once even here in North America.

I remember a night in Montreal, when a college friend and myself arrived to pick up our dates, two nurses. They shared an apartment and when we arrived, there were two Lebanese guys about to leave. Unaware that my buddy had grown up in Beirut and spoke an Arabic dialect, they talked freely with each other, disdainfully referring to the two women as prostitutes. I think that they had dropped by thinking the women had no plans that night and were disappointed. When Steve, addressed them in fluent Lebanese Arabic, they were taken aback. For us, their comments took some luster off the dates.

Moroccan hustlers did not target resident foreigners who usually kept to their own social circles. Volunteers usually dated other volunteers, consular personnel, French coopérants, or had girlfriends back in the States. A few volunteers that I knew did visit (or were visited by) local prostitutes, especially in Middle Atlas towns or in big cities.

Volunteers and coopérants were a privileged group. Though watched by the police and neighborhood informants, they were almost never arrested or prosecuted, and occasional, perhaps even habitual, bad behavior was overlooked. They were short-term guests of the government.

I cringed a bit as I observed the hustlers at work. They preyed on the naive and those avid for “authentic” experiences. Years later, as I look back, I am a bit less judgmental about their behavior. The influx of country folk had already turned much of Fes’s medina into a slum. Morocco’s population was growing quickly and a large segment of the population was under 21. Young Moroccans earned their money as they could, found sex where they could, while privileged foreign youth pursued pleasure and excitement, sometimes with an insouciance that astounded me. Caveat emptor.

The final scene of Under the skin of night is both powerful, sad, and as symbolic as the Sisyphean task of the scarab. Escaping class and poverty, in societies where great inequalities exist, is nearly impossible for most. A young Moroccan’s best chances for a good life often lay abroad or depended on foreigners.

As a footnote, the movie, Under the skin of night, though well regarded, seems to be difficult to find, but there is a poor copy, with limited English subtitles, on YouTube.

During the nineteen sixties, amid the turmoil and turbulence of an unpopular foreign war, a bitter struggle for civil rights, and a generational revolution, American university students discovered a British work of literature that had appeared in the 1950s without much critical acclaim in America.

Ballantine Books published the three paperback volumes of The Lord of the Rings trilogy with funky cover illustrations and a plea by the author for readers to buy only authorized versions of his work. Soon slogans such as “Frodo lives!” began appearing here and there to the mystification of those who had never heard of Tolkien, let alone Frodo.

I don’t remember if the Rings trilogy was included in the book lockers distributed in the early days of the Peace Corps, but there were certainly lots of copies circulating among volunteers.

I read the book for the first time in 1966 in a Canadian National Pullman car, somewhere between Vancouver and Toronto, while miles of mountains, prairies, and pine forests slid by my window. Everyone my age seemed to be reading it. Tolkien had created a fantasy world where one could lose oneself in an epic adventure, one replete with drama, action, and suspense. The Lord of the Rings relieved the tedium of travel and filled the day. The prairies and the boreal forests of Canada are beautiful, but they sometimes seem to go on forever, and are enjoyed best in glances.

I reread the trilogy again, a few years later as I traveled from Algeciras to Catalonia, on much less comfortable trains, and by bus into Andorra and France. Leaving Spain, Catalonia’s rugged mountain scenery provided a dramatic backdrop for the Concerto de Aranjuez playing through the vehicle’s overhead speakers. The trilogy made a wonderful travel companion, and seemed to fit in perfectly.

In 1967, training for Peace Corps service in Morocco in California, I had tried to imagine the new and exotic world to which I would soon travel. Having had a Moroccan friend who lived in the dorm room across from my own in my senior year in college, I was better informed than most of those in my group. Still, what I find today, looking back at the imagination of my youth, was something resembling Middle Earth.

There were no battles between good and evil, but Morocco was a land where the US kept secret military bases, and the Cold War was never far off. There were no imaginary creatures, but there were jinns and ghouls, no Shire except for douars dug into mountainsides, no elves and dwarves, but many forests and caverns where they would have made their homes.

There was no panoply of races and creatures, but there were Arabs and Berbers and Jews and those curious peoples from Europe, the French and the Spanish. There was no quest for us, just a two year stint of service, no fellowship except that of other volunteers, staff, and the Moroccans who befriended us, no band of hobbits, just 40 young Americans dropped into rural locations.

There was, of course, a history to the place extending back to antiquity, armed men on horseback, African animals, new foods, expansive views, walled cities and veiled women, palace intrigue, secret police, and coup attempts.

Morocco was a land where oleanders bloomed all summer in dried up water courses, and black tents surrounded cold, clean lakes that had no visible sources.

Goats climbed trees, porters worked themselves to death for a few dirhams a day, and some Moroccans lived in caves.

Morocco seemed old and timeless to our innocent eyes, both sadly poor and richly exotic. Moroccans in 1968 yearned for a brighter future, but were still shackled to the past.

Independence had brought pride and hope as they began to learn to live without the French and Spanish, but the real issue then was how Moroccans would live with each other once the foreigners had left.

None of our group died there, though at least a number of us came close. We willingly gave up many creature comforts as we worked in rural areas. Many of us lived without heat, hot water, and sit down toilets.

We finished our mission, as well as we could, before sailing off into the West on the wings of a Pan Am Boeing 707, “un Boeing bleu de mer” as Robert Charlevoix has described one. There we resumed our lives, continued our education, took jobs, married and had children, no longer worrying as much the war in Southeast Asia. Most of us had won the draft lottery or were fortunate to have local selective service boards that believed that we, though non-combatants, had served our country. Some of us even returned to Morocco and spent more time.

Middle Earth did not survive the wars and conflicts that finally led to the destruction of the one Ring. Change was in the air long before the trilogy’s protagonists set off for the Western Isles. And change was in the air in Morocco, too, even as we left.

Migrant workers were beginning to settle their families in Europe, rather than leaving them in Morocco and returning to them every summer as was customary. The population was growing rapidly and sprawling urbanization along with it. Cheap travel was bringing more and more foreign tourists. The revolution in transistors that led to the computer had just begun and eventually would provide much easier communications than the local PTT or rate hanout with a phone. Moroccan Jews as well as foreigners were leaving the country as the new Moroccan elites tightened their hold on the reins of power and began to enjoy the spoils of independence.

We never suspected that Berber would gain official recognition as a national language, and, more radical still, an attempt would even be made to write darija, the Arabic dialect almost everyone spoke, but never wrote. The colonial tongues would come under increasing pressure to the new international language, English, the language, of course, that many of us were teaching. Argan oil went from a prized element of Swasa cuisine to a Western cosmetic fad.

Today, PCVs in Moroccan still write home about the exotic, the romantic, and the quaint, just as we did, but now they do it on blogs. Cellphones and computers connect many of them in real-time with their friends and families back home. Many Moroccan students have now gone to the US for their studies. Moroccan restaurants are found in all the major America cities.

Morocco has established diplomatic relations with Israel, and Moroccan Jews and their descendants now return to Morocco as tourists.The populations of major urban centers have swelled and old provinces have been divided and subdivided into many newer ones.

Anthropologists, archeologists, and paleontologists make new discoveries daily that change the story of human prehistory as well as that of life from times far before humans walked the earth. Religious fundamentalism, not longer an artifact of the past, has become an active social force, not only in Morocco, but, to the amazement of some of us, in our native land.

I prefer to remember Morocco as a quiet postcolonial place, awaking after a long nap, refreshed and energized by independence and eager for a hopeful future. Was it a better time? Were problems more manageable then? The French poet and songwriter Georges Brassens who has written many songs about the passage of of time, reminds us that Time is a disquieting god, “un dieu fort inquiétant,” killing time in his own ways. Time blurs the memory and softens the hard edges of the past. For some of us Morocco still may seem the garden of the golden apples, but we should know better. We were guests, not true residents.

And though our Morocco, a Morocco that was, has given way to a newer age just as Middle Earth did, memories of its many enchantments still remain alive for us.

Today, as I read my alumni magazines, I reflect on Peace Corps times, when I had recently graduated and when the members of earlier graduating classes seemed so ancient. Now the alumni of those classes are long gone and my generation has assumed their place. Another voyage to the West approaches, an inevitable journey that require no special conveyance, just a divorce between my body and my soul, a metaphor I proudly steal from Brassens. He would approve, I am sure.

Anyone who has taken the A10 road from Marrakesh to Taroudant—and many tourists and Peace Corps volunteers have made this journey—has passed the Almohad mosque at Tinmel.

Filled with religious passion, the Berber tribes of this region swept out of their mountain fastness in the twelfth century and quickly conquered the empire of their predecessors, the Almoravids, extending their own control to most of Muslim Spain. Ibn Tumart, the dynasty’s founder, has been compared to St Bernard, founder of the Cistercian order of Catholicism. Puritanical, the Almohads ruled strictly, but as they settled down into urban centers, their own dynasty slowly was transformed by the cyclical process described by Ibn Khaldun, whose writings are precursors to modern historical and sociological inquiry.

During the time of their rule, the Almohads built three great minarets, the Koutoubia in Marrakesh, the Tour Hassan in Rabat, and the Giralda in Sevilla. These structures manifest grandeur, not only by their size, but by their simple but harmonious decoration.

The Almohads have left many monuments across North Africa and Spain, but the one that spoke to me most eloquently was the mosque at Tinmel. Human in scale, simple yet elegant in decoration, the mosque overlooked the birthplace of the dynasty, and was in the distant past a place of pilgrimage.

Although both the French and the Moroccans put some effort into its restoration, the mosque at Tinmel, just 6 kilometers from the epicenter of Morocco’s recent earthquake, did not survive. A thousand years of art and history perished in a moment.

Still, bemoaning the loss of this monument should not obscure the human loss of the most recent tragedy to befall Morocco. There was a village at Tinmel and my deepest sympathy goes out to the villagers of Tinmel as well as all the others of the region.

I have written elsewhere in this blog, and at more length, about Almohad monuments, and I beg the reader’s indulgence for the brief repetition. Morocco has a special place in my heart and the recent tragedy is truly heartfelt.

If you would like to know more about Tinmel, here is a link to a recent article from The Conversation, and an article from the New Yotk Times on the Tizi n’Test road.

I have had this post in my drafts box for months. Some of the observations are trite, but they continue to have a special place in my memory. In view of the massive earthquake just suffered by Moroccans, I publish it because many of us did experience a quake in Morocco.

In Before Sunrise, two young people traveling on Eurail passes meet. The young man, an American student, convinces the girl who is on her way home to France, to get off the train with him in Vienna. He will be leaving in the morning for the US. They spend the night walking and talking and finally agree that they will meet again in six months. If you desire to know what happens next, watch the movie and its two sequels, but be advised that these movies by director Richard Linklater have much talk and little action. Not everyone enjoys that genre. I do. One of my favorite French directors is Eric Rohmer. In the Rohmer movie, The Green Ray, a girl can’t decide what to do on her summer vacation. Her story is a small slice of life, with boredom and indecision creating or replacing the drama.

The nights that I write about here occurred by chance, where serendipity and stupidity often fight it out. As for my serendipitous experiences, they usually lay somewhere on a continuum ranging from the innocuous to the dangerous. Sometime I found myself in places where I shouldn’t have been. In one’s youth, the line between the carefree and the careless is thin and often crossed.

My nighttimes abroad were more prosaic than those of Linklater’s protagonists. Still some gave rise to experiences that years later I still remember vividly, though committing old memories to print encourages remembrance and rumination and perhaps some inadvertent invention. Most of the experiences here are already described or briefly alluded to in other posts, but I mention them again with more elaboration.

On the last day of February in 1969, not very long after I had fallen asleep, I was wakened by a loud, roaring noise as my house in the Sefrou medina trembled. Turning on the lights, I could see that the bulbs that hung on long cords from the ceiling were swaying like pendulums. A great commotion had arisen in the street, and, outside the city wall, in the new areas of the neighborhood, there were sounds of people and vehicles where silence usually prevailed late in the night. Half asleep, an earthquake had awakened me. By the time I was fully conscious, I decided that the quake was over and I returned to a sound sleep. My neighbors, however, were terrified and many stayed out all night.

When the quake began, people naturally fled their houses for the wider streets outside the medina, and, if they had a car or truck, drove it into open areas where they would be safe from falling debris. The panic was understandable: in 1960, an earthquake destroyed the Moroccan city of Agadir, and killed 12-15,000 people in a matter of seconds.

That night in Sefrou there were no important aftershocks and most people gradually retreated into their homes rather than freeze in the cold night air.

The quake originated just to the west of the Strait of Gibraltar, where the African and Eurasian tectonic plates meet. At 7.8 on the Richter scale, the earthquake was felt widely in Morocco. With an intensity of VII on the Mercali scale, the quake was the strongest to hit Portugal since the Great Quake of 1755.

In the 1969, 11 Moroccans died and there was widespread minor structural damage, but the quake spared Sefrou. In Fes, I remember a volunteer’s house in Fes El Jedid that had a crack that extended more than two stories. Strangely, I don’t remember many volunteers talking about the quake, but I do remember a Peace Corps administrator and former volunteer, Don Brown recounting that he and his old Peace Corps volunteer housemate in Oujda were imbibing a late night glass of wine in Don’s Rabat apartment when they felt the shock. I emailed Don about it the other day and this is how he remembered the occasion.

The modern apartment building where Don lived was adjacent to the Peace Corps office and neither was damaged. For those of you who remember her, Emelina de Ros, the Peace Corps secretary, lived in the same building.

The quake left some Moroccan roads in bad shape. Even without a quake, the winter rains and thin soils often produced mudslides. Combined with the earthquake, many mountain roads were in very poor condition in March 1969, particularly those in the Rif region.

In the fall of 1968 I had moved into the Sefrou medina with another volunteer, Gaylord Barr, who had brought an 8mm movie camera to Morocco, but soon found 8mm film expensive and, lacking a projector, he could not even watch his films. I had brought a 35mm SLR along to Morocco and was taking photos and slides like mad. That convinced Gay that a 35mm camera was what he needed and I offered to help him pick one out. Photo gear was expensive in Morocco, but we knew that Ceuta, the nearest of the two Spanish enclaves on the Moroccan coast, just opposite Gibraltar, had duty-free shopping. We chose a long weekend to go there and decided that we would try to hitchhike rather than take a bus. Morocco was well served by the national bus line, the CTM, and smaller companies provided good service to more remote areas. Volunteers seldom hitchhiked. That said, for whatever reason, we decided to hitchhike from Fes to Tetuan where we could get a local bus to Ceuta. Perhaps we had missed the last bus of the day from Fes.

Gaylord and I must have got on the road late, because I have no memory of anything but a high speed nighttime drive on rough, damaged roads. The trip was through still unfamiliar territory on a dark, rainy night to boot. The driver was headed all the way to Tetuan and was kind to stop for us. All he wanted was some company.

The road from Fes north winds through the relatively hilly country of the pre-Rif, then barrels down mountain valleys between Chauen and Tetuan. As I worked for the Ministry of Agriculture in Fes, I became familiar with the southern part of the route. The Province of Fes then stretched from the pre-Rif to the Upper Moulouya. Later, living in Chauen, I got to know the northern part as well. It was in the north that the Spanish dictator, Franco, then an officer in the Spanish army, participated in a disastrous retreat from Chauen during the Rif War, one in which thousands of Spanish soldiers lost their lives.

Today the entire route takes about five hours, but negotiating rock falls and mudslides probably slowed us down. The driver might have been drinking. He was certainly driving fast under the trying weather and road conditions. The night turned out to be a long one. We got to Tetuan early in the morning safe and sound, but the experience had been somewhat harrowing. That ended my hitchhiking experiences in Morocco, save on the road between Fes and Sefrou, when missing the last bus or grand taxi after work sometimes forced me to stick out my thumb.

As a footnote, that trip was the first of many to Ceuta. Si Kamir, the director of the Sefrou Centre de Travaux where Gaylord worked, had been impressed by Gaylord’s slides, and asked him to buy an inexpensive projector. We made a special trip for that. It was a tiny, manual Olympus model with a bright lamp and a short throw lens, which proved perfect for slide shows on the walls of the house. I loved it and we had it for a very long time until Si Kamir finally asked for it. He had paid for it after all! In this age of digital photography and cellphones, it may be hard to imagine a time when cameras needed film which then had to be mailed to France for development, and when slide projectors, rare and expensive, were needed to appreciate one’s slides.

The next nighttime adventure happened on the road between Fes and Taza. The eastern Middle Atlas and adjacent Rif mountains are predominately limestone, and caves are plentiful. On one occasion, I went spelunking in a big cave south of Taza with a couple of Peace Corps architects who worked in Fes. I neglected to note that Jeep’s alternator light was red, and, on the way home, we ran out of battery power half way between Taza and Fes at three in the morning. The battery had completely discharged. With a defective alternator, we couldn’t even push start the vehicle. One of the architects hitched a ride into Fes, 45 km distant, found a tow truck, and came back with it. Remarkably, the tow cost virtually nothing. I should add here, for younger readers, that there were no cell phones and even regular telephone conversation was difficult in those days as few residences or small businesses had them. Often a volunteer needed to go to a PTT and use the post office’s booths. In any case, luckily for us, the road from Taza to Fes was a main east-west highway, and there was alway traffic, even in the middle of the night.

If you’ve read other articles in this blog, you already know about me being stuck in mud with swiftly flowing water pouring over a dip in the Tangier coastal road. In a driving rain, late at night, I knew my battery wouldn’t charge, and that I couldn’t afford to be stuck. Nevertheless, I struck out from Chauen for Tangier, in typical wet winter weather, and took the far less traveled coastal road between Tetuan and Tangier. Sure enough, as I came over a rise and into the dip, my car got mired in mud where water was pouring over the asphalt. The engine stalled and I couldn’t restart it, of course. The countryside was pitch black. I opened the driver’s side door to find water up to the sill of my often unreliable Simca 1000, and my glasses slipped off and fell into the rushing water. In total darkness, I frantically felt for them in the mud and the current, and luckily they had not floated far. The water wasn’t deep, so I decided to take off my socks and shoes and try to find help. Fortunately, help found me.

Farmers from the local douar had heard the car stop. I suspect that cars often got stuck there on similar nights, and they were just waiting. In any case, appearing out of nowhere, a half dozen men got the car onto dry land, gave it a push so I could start in gear, and I was ready to go on to Tangier. I rewarded them with the little money I had as well as copious thanks and as many religious blessings as I could remember in my limited Arabic.

And there was the time, another auto adventure, when I just used my Jeep’s gear box, rather than the parking brake, on a mountain road. It popped out of gear, of course. Rolling driverless down a mountain piste with me and Gaylord in hot pursuit, the scene was ridiculous and serious at the same time. Gaylord was able to hop in the doorless vehicle, but he couldn’t get control before the Jeep went into a deep drainage ditch. He wasn’t injured. Young humans often seem to survive in spite of themselves.

Some of my experiences involved situations requiring a bit of elucidation such as the experience which follows. Others are just mental snapshots of a moment, rightly illustrated by photographic snapshots or not—color film was expensive and exposures demanded tripods.

Thunderstorms provide a great display of the power of nature. Crossing the Great Plains and prairies of North America in early summer, great cumulonimbus clouds often appear, and, from an automobile on flat land, one can see the full extent of the enormous anvil shaped clouds from far off. Sometimes the storm will rise directly over the route. As one’s car enters the cloud, the sky darkens, heavy rain falls, thunder rolls, and lightning begins striking all around. If the rain or hail is not so strong as to force one to pull over, one just continues on through it, emerging in a short time into clear blue skies and a once again dry landscape.

In Morocco, where a Mediterranean climate prevails, thunderstorms are relatively rare. In George Brassens’ song, L’orage, the narrator comically recounts an affair with his neighbor. Her husband sells lightning rods and, alone on stormy nights, she is frightened and seeks comfort. The men in Brassens’s poems are especially good at rescuing damsels in distress, though they are usually not pure in their motives. The protagonists’s affair is doomed, however: the neighbor’s husband makes a fortune and takes her away with him to the sunny, cloudless climes of the Midi.

I recall only two thunderstorms in the seven or so years I spent in Morocco. One in the High Atlas rolled in just as I reached the summit plateau of Jbel Tazaghart in 1973. On the top of a mountain, a person makes a nice target, there is seldom much shelter, and lightning travels in strangely oblique ways on mountain slopes. That storm was in the day and involved a hasty descent from the immense, flat and featureless summit. The other storm occurred in 1970 in the Middle Atlas in midsummer.

The Sefrou house that I lived in had a roof over the courtyard with windows all around. In the dry summer heat, the inside air made the house stuffy even with all the clerestory windows open, but the rooftop terrace provided relief after the sun went down.

One night, sitting on the terrace in Sefrou, taking in fresh evening air, I watched a summer thunderstorm that lasted for hours. Bright flashes of lightning repeatedly lit up the skies north of Taza, each bringing the Middle Atlas mountain skyline, from Tazzeka to Bouiblane, into sharp relief. A pyrotechnic specialist would have been hard tasked to craft a more dramatic spectacle. No thunder accompanied the lightning. No rain fell on me. The mountains were at least 75 kilometers to tthe east. Sheet lightning and bolts followed in quick succession for hours. I sat watching late into the night, mesmerized. marveling at the storm’s display.

On that same terrace, I often heard nightsounds. In the winter, I stood on the terrace, watching the birds. Small flocks of the lesser Eurasian kestrels nested in the holes of the city wall that bounded the abandoned garden by my house. With the dying ray’s of the sun turning Bouiblane pink, the kestrels would fly in noisy circles before settling in for the night.

The streets surrounding the house were like canyons. On a terrace, guarded by high walls, few street sounds made it to the rooftop. More than once, in the darkness, an owl perched on the parapet of the terrace of my widowed neighbor, the Hadja. Her roof overlooked my own rooftop terrace. The little owls called plaintively with a voice that some Moroccans felt was an ill omen, but I liked the sounds of nature so close at hand. The Sefrou medina was too urban for nightingales. The city’s ancient gardens that hugged the defensive wall had long given way to houses, including the one that I lived in, but I did hear nightingales sing in the mountain gardens of the Sanglier qui fume hotel in the High Atlas.

One of my favorite after-dark spots was not in the mountains, however, but on the Atlantic coast of Morocco where two jetties stretch out into the ocean at the mouth of the river Bou Regreg, one in Rabat, the other in Salé.

The French built the jetties to provide small craft safe entry through the shifting sand bars that once made the river a haven for the Barbary pirates.

The Rabat jetty is easily accessible from the cemetery behind the Casbah of the Oudayas. Though I briefly lived in Sale, I do not recall ever walking to the end of its jetty, but more than once I walked to the end of the one on the Rabat side of the river.

During the day there were usually fisherman trying their luck, young couples or friends walking together, and children playing.

The Atlantic swells rolled in, heavy and impressive, sometimes breaking over the jetty’s revêtement, and leaving shallow puddles on the walkway. Anyone who has lived in the Rabat quarter of l’Océan will remember the loud, booming ring of those swells as they pounded the coastline and exploded against its cave-filled bluffs.

The ocean did not change at night, but the children and young lovers disappeared from the jetty and most fishermen went home. The lights of the city kept the walkway from total darkness, and they were often reflected in puddles left from the ocean spray. As one approached the end of the jetty, the fresh smells of the ocean and the sounds of the surf grew ever stronger, and replaced the heavy, humid urban atmosphere.

On bright moonlit nights, the swells and breakers caught and reflected the lunar reflection.Today, there are only memories of those moments. My film camera and slow Kodachrome film could hardly capture the night scene the way digital photography now can. Security never seemed an issue then. Today I wonder. In large urban agglomerations like Rabat, crime has always been endemic. Still, in those days of my youth, I never felt insecure on that jetty.

Returning to the mountains, I remember, how could I ever forget, another experience in the eastern High Atlas in April 1970.

Camping in the Cirque du Jaffar with Don Brown and Louden Kiracofe, an urgent need to relieve myself awakened me. I crawled out of the tent in the middle of the night. The night air was freezing at the mile-high altitude of the Cirque. Far from any city, stars filled the clear night sky, and, in the shadow of Ayachi, the light of comet greeted me. Like a searchlight, the comet appeared to perch atop a shoulder of the mountain wall. Half asleep, it took a moment for me to reason out what I was seeing and to accept it as real. I had never seen a comet before, and I have never seen one since in such a dramatic setting. As with the moon, the horizon gives perspective and the comet was truly stunning.

Most Peace Corps volunteers will probably have some similar tales, and perhaps they will recount them with the same wonder and lingering excitement. Night was always a time of mystery and enchantment, a time when marriages were celebrated and Aïcha Kandicha prowled deserted streets looking for prey.

Happily, I never met Aïcha Kandicha, but soon after I moved to Sefrou, one of the primary school teachers where the chicken coop was located got married. I attended his marriage with a couple of other volunteers who were visiting, and drove through the town that night, loaded down with friends and family of the groom, honking the jeep’s horn. The celebrations lasted well into the night, and the wedding was the first of several that I would attend. The groom, Hammad Hsein, became a friend and taught me and others Arabic.

All these recollections did not arise randomly. The other day, I read an article on energy conservation in southwestern France. A small city there had proposed dimming or turning off street lights after a certain hour in order to save energy. The idea of a darkened city brought up more memories of Sefrou and Europe and other experiences. Most have already been touched on elsewhere in this blog. Here they receive a different treatment or a bit more elaboration.

In Sefrou, I lived on one of the main streets of the medina, and going many places often meant crossing the old city. If I left my house and turned left, I immediately walked through a city gate into a newer part of the neighborhood, outside the defensive wall. The new area had wider and straighter streets. Every morning I walked through them up to the grand taxi stand across from the Bab Imkam to ride a bus or taxi to work in Fes.

On the other hand, leaving through my front door and turning right, by way of a twisting street closed to automobile traffic, I was only a minute or two from the main mosque, the kissaria, and the main street that followed the Oued Agaï to the Bab Imkan gate.

My housemate, Gaylord, and two women volunteers, Ruth and Jan, who moved into the Hadja’s house next to mine in 1970, took this route to traverse the medina once or twice a day to get to the lycee where they all taught English, crossing the river and continued exiting the medina through the Bab Mrebaa.

Walking through the bustling streets to get to shops or work was an everyday routine for us all.

Walking through those same streets on warm summer nights, however, was a different experience, and a kind of enchantment. There were enough street lights to find one’s way, but the streets were dark and unevenly lit, and the lights placed in the winding alleys produced deep and angular shadows. Shops were closed and shuttered. The life of the street ceased for the day and withdrew to private domains as families gathered together in their homes.

In the streets of the medina, an occasional passerby or two would disturb the silence, perhaps moviegoers returning from the Cinema Al-Arabi or a hammam. If they passed below the room of my house that looked down on the street, I would hear quiet conversations or someone whistling the theme from a spaghetti western. And as they moved away, their voices and their footsteps on the hard packed earth became fainter and fainter until silence flowed back into empty street.

In the summer of 1968, when traveling across Spain, I debarked from the Algeciras- Madrid night train in Cordoba at 4:00 a.m. A bar or two near the station were still open, but the city had gone to sleep. I walked for a time through the old quarters surrounding the Mezquita searching for a cheap hotel or pension. The city became quieter and darker as the streets became narrow and winding. The old medieval area around the Great Mosque was shuttered and dark. Not a single motor vehicule was in those streets, nor any persons. I had left Al Maghreb that day and now I felt truly began to fell that I had entered Al Andalus that night.

The past seemed to invade the present as I approached the great mosque. The hoards of tourists and sightseeing coaches had long disappeared. I would not have been surprised to meet a lamplighter or a night watchman or to have been challenged at a closed gate between quarters, but I met no one, not even an officer of the seemingly omnipresent Guardia Civil.

After a long, hot, and dusty day getting to Algeciras from Fes, and another long ride on the train from Algeciras to Córdoba, the fresh air of the summer night carried away some of my weariness. In the predawn darkness fainter shadows filled darker ones, shades of other times. Asleep the old city was magical, a scene that might have been drawn from A Thousand and One Nights. Alas, my tale had no Sheherazade to continue it. I eventually found a cheap place to sleep that night, and, the next night, in Madrid, I fell asleep in the Hotel Atocha to the sounds of traffic and trains rumbling in and out of the station across the boulevard.

One expects solitude in remote places. In the small Pyrenean town of Torla, perched on a mountainside only a few miles from France, I do not remember any night noise except the sounds of the rapids of the Rio Ara.

After long days hiking the national park and without a car, there was no place to go except to the sole bar, where the television replayed the day’s segment of the Tour de France. There I drank a shot of cheap Spanish brandy after dinner, before walking back to my pension room for some needed sleep. The cobble stone streets were dark. The night was calm, but the river, fed by melting mountain snows, roared.

A few miles from Torla and four years earlier, I made a foolish decision to walk up the Col du Tourmalet toll road to the summit of Pic de Midi. My hitchhiking partner had reached the col from Pau, late on a Saturday afternoon after classes, intending to return that night.

The toll road to the summit had closed to motor traffic for the evening, but we were determined to see the view and arrived on the summit just before sunset.

The scene near the summit was spectacular as the sun sank into sea of billowing, white clouds, with only a few peaks poking through.

The quiet serenity and the splendid vista seemed to justify the long hike down, but the rapid onset of night delivered a long, cold, descent to the Col or perhaps farther. We had hoped to catch an auto descending into one of the valleys, but, of course, there was almost no traffic over the Col at that hour, and the few cars which did pass wouldn’t pick up a pair of unexpected hitchhikers. Still, a full moon and a mild night made the long walk down to La Mongie impressive and not so much painful as exhausting. Dressed as we were in light summer clothing, the energy expended walking fast kept us relatively warm though the night air at altitude was cold.

The desk clerk at the ski resort in La Mongie expressed surprise upon our arrival near or after midnight. “I didn’t hear your car,” he said. Guests seldom arrived without a car and late at night, at that. It was not ski season and the hostel was virtually empty and cold, but a big relief from the cold mountain night.

The following day, needing to return to Pau, we once again stuck out our thumbs and waved national flags. A kindly young French family generously took us back up to the summit for a spectacular daytime view.

Today the toll road to the summit is closed, but a cable car will take you directly from La Mongie to the observatory atop the peak, where you can witness a sunset with much less effort, eat a good meal, spend the night in a comfortable room perched high in a Dark Sky Preserve, and then wake cozy and warm to a wonderful sunrise.

Finally, there was the night of a thousand stars in the Sahara. The Algerian trucker carrying Anne and me had driven through Ain Salah in a sandstorm. I was tired. The long harsh day that began atop the truck had exhausted me. We stopped for the night at Tajmout outside the dwelling of the self proclaimed poet, Bou Baggara. The driver, who often stopped there, had brought him a cone of sugar. Drinking tea with us, sitting around a brazier under a gas lantern, Bou Baggara and his guests traded gossip and news, and he ended the evening by reciting extemporaneous poetry including one praising Hassan II, then ruler of Morocco, knowing that we had come from Morocco.

Finally, we retired to our sleeping bags, outside on sandy ground, under a clear sky filled with stars. I had spent many hours that day huddled with our gear on the canvas top of the truck. After hours of being burned by the sun, deafened by the truck’s engine, choked by dust, and chilled by the wind, the silent desert night quickly put me to sleep. The next day’s ride took us to Tamanrasset. There were other nights on the desert, but I remember that one above the rest.

In rereading what I have written, I should add to this string of experiences from different times and places, sleeping on the ramparts of an empty British fort adjacent to the slave castle at El Mina on the Gold Coast of Ghana. There was no other accommodation in those days, nor would I have wanted any!

In the summer of 1974, I was travelling alone throughout Iran. I had just spent the night in Gorgan where I had visited the peasant village my thesis advisor, Dr. Dick Antoun had been studying.

Leaving Gorgan, I boarded a bus to the shrine city of Mashhad. As the bus traveled east, leaving behind the lush deciduous forests on the Caspian slopes of the Elburz mountains, the Gorgan plain gradually dried up and flattened out.

The bus stopped along the route to pick up passengers. Most were Turkmen tribesmen with oriental features unlike most Iranians, and in traditional nomadic dress. As the bus approached the city of Gunbad ē Kavus, the funeral monument of the Ziyarid prince Qabus, rose in the distance. From high points on the plain, the 200 foot tower can be seen from 20 mikes away. The tower is an architectural masterpiece, a United Nations Heritage Site, and unique in many ways.

At this point, it occurred to me suddenly that I was really far from home, and, on a bus full of Iranians and only speaking a little Farsi, I began to experience some cultural shock. As the tower grew ever talller, I came under its spell: here I was in Central Asia.

The spell was broken, alas, as the bus entered Gunbad ē Kavus. On the roadside, there was a huge yellow sign: The Lions Club welcomes you to Gunbad ē Kavus. Meetings every Thursday.

All in English.

Sadly, I have no photos of my own of the tower, and most of the online photos suffer from a composition problem: how to make an isolated, round tower look interesting. One Wiki Commons photo used a camel. Had I had some time there, I would have found a more distant vantage point.

The death of Daniel Ellsberg this past summer reminded me of the release of the Pentagon Papers in a personal way. In mid-June of 1971, I was in Rabat. I had just come back from a cross-Saharan hitchhiking trip to West Africa. About to leave for Tunisia to study literary Arabic, I had stopped by the Peace Corps office in Rabat to see Dick Holbrooke, then the Director. I had sent him a postcard from Senegal and thought that he might be interested in my experiences in a half dozen other countries with Peace Corps programs. I had a degree in international relations from an Ivy college, which made me worthy to merit Holbrooke’s attention. He had gone to Brown University and was always impressed by Ivy credentials, not an especially enduring trait for me.

Holbrooke greeted me with a copy of the New York Times. The newspaper had just published the Pentagon Papers. “Have you seen this?” He asked, clearly agitated. Prior to the Peace Corps, Holbrook had spent time in the Paris peace talks between the US and North Vietnam and had even drafted a volume of the Pentagon Papers. His Peace Corps stint in Morocco was, I assume, what chess players call an in between move. His interest was in Southeast Asia, not North Africa. On one occasion, he confided to me that his ambition while in Morocco was to drive every paved road in the country. At the time, I wondered if he was putting me on.

I hadn’t seen the paper, and the war in Souteast Asia was not on my mind. By the autumn of 1965 I had reached my own conclusion, well before and without the Pentagon Papers, that the Vietnam war was poor policy and a bad mistake, and that the US should have learned from the French experience that the mix of nationalism and Communism in Vietnam was a potent one. Nor should it have been assumed that the rest of Asia would inevitably fall to Communism if the US withdrew from Vietnam.

Holbrooke, sitting at his desk on the second floor of the Peace Corps offices, was beside himself that so many secret documents had been published.

As it turned out, Richard Nixon was re-elected President a year later with a “secret plan” to end the war. Nixon left office in disgrace and despite the “secret plan”, the North Vietnamese quickly overran the South.

In his office on Rue Van Vollenhoven, that summer of 1971, Dick Holbrooke was no more interested in the meanderings of a couple of former volunteers in West Africa than he was in Moroccan affairs. More important things occupied him, and I am pretty sure that they did not include a road map of Morocco.

Dick Holbrooke went on to have a successful career. Only mortality thwarted his ambition. I only followed his progress sporadically, and had no interest in what he did until the Balkan wars. The Daytona Peace Accords put an end much of the brutal conflict in Bosnia, with its concomitant suffering largely borne by Muslims, and I think that was his greatest moment.

Much of the northern hemisphere has experienced the hottest summer ever recorded. Indeed, as I wrote this in mid-October, a heat wave continued in Europe and Great Britain, and an extreme drought had caused a host of problems there. Here the temperature was 70°F.

Fifty years ago, when I was a graduate student, the world had more traditional climates and less extreme weather, but some scientists were already beginning to worry about the effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. There were, of course, some extremely hot places even then.

In mid-summer of 1974, my travels in Iran took me to Bandar Abbas, an old port city near the mouth of the Persian Gulf. I arrived there by bus from Shiraz, where I had spent several days exploring the city and visiting Persepolis and the University of Pennsylvania archeological dig at Malian.

I was the only foreigner on the Shiraz bus, which drove through the night to avoid the scorching summer heat of the Iranian plateau. Most of my fellow travelers slept or listened to religious sermons on their cassette players. The Shah was still in power, but taped sermons were quietly, persistently, eroding his legitimacy. I dozed off and slept for much of the 8-hour journey. I awoke in the dawn hours as the bus descended to the gulf city of Bandar Abbas.

Within minutes, the hot, humid, suffocating atmosphere of the Gulf replaced the dry air of the plateau. The sensation was dramatic.

Though I did not remember it then, I now recall an introductory geography course taught by Professor Huke at Dartmouth. The class was large for the college, and the students, unless they loved geography, used it to fill the liberal arts distributive requirements. I took away very little from that class, apart from one of Huke’s off-color jokes, how inexpensive sea transport was, an anecdotal comment on Buddhism, and, what I remember most, the disparagement of Wengener’s theory of drifting continents. Plate tectonics was about to shake the scientific world, but the theory had yet to be widely accepted by geologists and geographers in the autumn of 1964. The continents really were adrift, though not quite as Wengener thought.

I also remember that the class, mostly white children of privilege, had a retired Navy man. He was Black, in his forties, and returning to school for a degree. Professor Huke, a former Marine, called him Chief and treated him fraternally as befitting a fellow member of the military.

Students were sometimes offered the chance to give presentations to the class. I gave one on transhumance in the Pyrenees after I had returned from France in 1966. I remember the Chief speaking about his service in the Persian Gulf. He had traveled the world and declared that the Gulf was the hottest, most uncomfortable place he had ever visited.

While in Iran, I spent three days in Bandar Abbas. An anthropologist whom I met at the American Institute in Tehran had given me the address of a former Peace Corps volunteer there. I contacted him. He had quit the Peace Corps and taken employment with a naval construction company. He kindly put me up at his traditional house and introduced me to his coworkers. I was quickly invited to dinner and their late-night card games. There was not a lot to do for non-Farsi speaking Americans in Bandar Abbas.

Except for the ex-volunteer, all lived in an air-conditioned compound. His traditional courtyard house was hot, humid, and stuffy.

The Chief had not exaggerated the heat and humidity of the Gulf. The temperature that August was 100° or more Fahrenheit with a humidity in the mid nineties. The heavy atmosphere stifled me. My very least effort led to profuse sweating, and the sweat clung to my body, never evaporating, never cooling. The feeling was an unrelieved clamminess, but from heat rather than cold.

On my last day there, I took a motorized dhow to Qeshm Island. Only there on the boat, on an open deck, on the waters of the Gulf, did I at last feel comfortable. The warm sea breezes were refreshing and cool compared to the stagnant, heavy air of Bandar Abbas. The passengers were congenial. Masked women smoked a water pipe and chatted quietly.

I met a Persian engineer, one of many Persians whom I encountered on the trip who had studied in America. Friendly and speaking excellent English, he invited me to stay in a guest house for Iranians working on projects on Qeshm, as there were no other accommodations. I thanked him, but declined. Now, in retrospect, I wished I had accepted the offer, but at that time I needed to return that same evening as I was leaving Bandar Abbas early the next morning.

My schedule was tight, with much more travel in Iran ahead, and, at the end of the summer, a long train ride back across Turkey to Istanbul. Delays might mean that I’d miss my flight home from Istanbul, and, on a skimpy, student budget, that was simply something that I could not afford.

A recent newspaper article elicited these memories of my Gulf visit. Qeshm Island has just had the dubious honor of experiencing one of the highest heat indexes ever recorded anywhere, 158° F (70° Celsius.) Last year even higher levels, up to 165° F (73.9° Celsius), were recorded in July on the island.

I had lived in Morocco and traveled extensively there in the summer, but had never experienced heat like that of Bandar Abbes, where extreme temperature and humidity were combined. At the Ministry of Agriculture in Fes, where I worked, summer hours sometimes provided for early starts and long afternoon breaks, but the dry heat was manageable, nothing worse than what one used to find in Spain away from the coasts. My biggest problems were what to do with a four-hour lunch break and how to find a ride home, when work finally ended at seven p.m. and the last bus from Fes to Sefrou had already left.

Sefrou, where I lived, sat a thousand feet higher than Fes, and was more temperate than Fes, with occasional cool Middle Atlas breezes and many clear nights when the heat radiated back into the sky.

Humidity prevailed along the coasts of Morocco, but the heat was seldom excessive, especially along the Atlantic coast which benefitted from cool ocean currents. A summer in Washington was far more unpleasant than one in Rabat.

These days, with one’s own senses, you need not be a prophet to divine the future. Some in America continue to deny that the climate is changing, though the weather this year has brought new extremes and more powerful storm events, all fueled, the vast majority of climatologists agree, by the increasing energy in the atmosphere. I am encouraged by the fact that a majority of Americans now accept the scientific view that climate change is real, but the big oil companies and their shills have done their damage and the delay in coordinated government action around the world almost ensures that there will be a climate crisis by the end of this century, if not well before.

Having tasted heat, I agree with Robert Frost, that given a second choice, ice might be nice. Alas, there are no second chances once you are extinct, and there’s not likely to be much ice left in the near future anyway.

Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.