"It's time, to put god away," sings Bill Callahan on my terrace. "damning the children/making the ill a little more sick…"
For days now, the sun has fixed itself in the cloudless, blue German sky. The last time I felt the rain was almost two weeks ago, sitting on the back of a camel in the Sahara. We drive straight south from Fez, over the middle Atlas, then the High Atlas; with the Enablers album "Tundra" looping on the car stereo as we cross endless miles of tundra. Closing in on the impassable Algerian border. Raindrops in the desert seem as big as dung beetles on the dunes. Where 25 years ago, the truck I shared with the goats and the chickens bounced across desert tracks, we're now afforded the comforts of a compact Kia cruising a new asphalt highway worthy of almost anything in America's Badlands, except with way better cell-phone coverage. Radio towers compete with cacti in the desert skyscape. A pre-dinner doumbek jam with our guide is suddenly interrupted when he drops his drum and jumps off the mat shouting "Afriika!" He's got a phone call. When I take the train from Dortmund to Hamburg, there are long stretches with zero reception, but 550 kilometers south of Fez, a 10 kilometer camel ride from the nearest hotel, in a tent with a single hanging bulb powered by a portable generator, my phone has 3 bars.
Soon after dinner, the wind kicks up and the power goes out. The blackness is utter. Sometime during the night, the wind wakes us with whipping waves of sound that snap the tent flaps like towels in junior-high gym class showers. Then it begins to rain. I fear our tent will be transformed into a Hammam, the giant masseur in the sky emptying gargantuan buckets on our fragile shelter. The camel pelts are stronger, of course. The tent holds. Having made it back to sleep, we're awakened at dawn by the sweetest of voices repeating "Good Mooorning" in a lilting, high tone until I manage a response. I don't know how many times Idriss has to repeat his call to rise, but it's the gentlest wake-up call I've ever had.
Out here in the dunes, there is no call to prayer. We are left without an anthropomorphic interpretation of command from the morning light, but just the light itself to inspire our ambition, humility and love. I scramble out of bed and through the multi-layered tent flaps. The air is perfectly still. Narrow, high clouds trail across the horizon, but save for the somewhat firmer consistency of the sand beneath my bare feet, it would be impossible to say a storm had just passed. The "oued"--riverbed--is dry. I walk a hundred meters to the top of of a small dune, the closest promontory. To the west is a rainbow. I have to repeat this sentence: To the west I see a rainbow. I squinted a couple times. I don't think I rubbed my eyes, but my character in the movie moment would have. A fat rainbow hangs over the dunes as the sun emerges across the horizon. To one side of our camp, the camels rest. I can't say that I feel total isolation. I'm well aware of the ATVs lurking behind nearby dunes and the other tourist encampments just a few hundred meters away, but the the desert is still large enough to conceal these intrusions and encroachments. Even the possibility of true solitude is enough for me at this moment. I could just start walking in the direction of the sun and soon enough, I'd be truly lost. The ability to lose oneself is the saving grace of the country whose passport I carry. While not quite the Sahara, the seemingly endless expanse of open land in the North American west contributes to a genuinely freer sensibility in the homeland of our fading empire than in most other places on our tiny planet.
Soon it's time to mount our rides and make the short, stately trek back to the hotel. Camel butt stays with us for days! At our hotel, a painting of a camel caravan says "Timbuktu 52 days." In the 80's I tried reaching Timbuktu from the south, through Mali, but was forced to stop in Mopti, it being rainy season and the riverbed not suitable for travel. Camels, if I recall correctly, weren't an option along that route. But in any case, my ass would have to be anatomically reconfigured to enable 52 days of nonstop travel on a dromedary. (That's what they actually are in West Africa, two-humped Camelidae not being native to the region.)
I'm often sadder leaving places, rather than people, behind. A friend is yours. A place is only for the moment that coincides with experience and perception. We head north, driving the Kia with "Tundra" in the CD slot and the dunes behind us, crossing the Atlas again, the Valley of the Roses, gorges terraced with ageless mud villages and town squares resembling Albuquerque--save for the predominance of the veil. Dropping off the rental car, I forget "Tundra" in the player. Maybe it 'll make another ride across the mountains and into the Sahara.
In Marrakesh, at the Djema El Fnaa, I share a bowl of snails with my son on his 14th birthday and have his "fortune" read by a tiny, 80 year-old Berber woman, her face and hands embroidered with Henna. Though swarming with foreign tourists, the Djema El Fnaa is still a magnet for Moroccan and other Maghrebian travelers and truthseekers. The malarkey and spiritual moonshine flows thick amongst the locals as well. Hard-bargains driven, tall tales told. No lacking in Viagra of all kinds. Though the exoticism of the Djema El Fnaa is perhaps more genuinely representative of Moroccan life, in a way, than a camel trek organized for short-term interlopers, the sheltering sky of the desert affords us the purity we need if we are to put god away and make the ill a little less sick.
About twelve hours after we leave the Djema El Fnaa and about two hours after our plane takes off from Marrakesh, headed back across the Meditterranean, a suicide bomber explodes his payload of nails in the marketplace of the Maghreb, killing 17 people.
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