By David Morris
Well, here I am, back in Western Civilization, or, as historian Mike Davis once put it, west of Western Civilization, i.e. in California, but still decidedly back from the Maghreb. The writing’s done, the photos cropped, the article at the printers (check the March issue of Surfer’s Journal) and so the inevitable, nonjournalistic questions arise: What’s it like over there? What did you see? What did you learn? Does the good ol’ U.S. of A. seem different now that you’re back? Did you get diarrhea in Morocco and, if so, what kind? The deeply metaphysical kind that nearly kills you over the course of a month, altering forever how you look at unfamiliar foodstuffs, or the merely passing novelty-Welcome-to-Our-Crazy-Wonderful-Exotic-Cuisine variety? Do you have any photographs of said gastrointestinal fireworks?
Like so many great journeys, my trip to Morocco began with a simple dream. During a reporting trip to Western Iraq in 2007, in the middle of the hot, thermometer-breaking months there, where the temperatures regularly pushed into one-thirties, I had a textbook escapist dream one night. In my dream I imagined a fantastic land that was equal parts Iraq and California, an Islamic country where you could enjoy the exotic surroundings, eat great strange food and go surfing. Trapped in a version of hell on earth, I had completely on accident conjured a modified heaven, a Morocco, or at least my mind’s version of it.
My idea then, as the ill-titled Global War on Terror entered into its second decade, was to travel to Morocco and do a real-world reconnaissance on this terror-dream of mine. On the flight over, I fancied myself a psychological expeditionary, filling in my mind’s map of the world, to see what waking adventures might be possible on Islam’s Western Shore. And is there anymore apt metaphor for the subconscious than the ocean, that birthing ground, that mother of all things, that storm-tossed infinity made up of the very fluid said to most closely resemble human blood?
It was around my third week in Morocco, somewhere between Mirleft and the Atlantic coast, where the weeds grow thick between the rocks, and the crumbling buildings, paint fading into a photographer’s dream, alternate with the wild argan trees in the most beautifully Godforsaken way that it dawned on me that everything I knew about Morocco, or thought I knew about Morocco was wrong.
I had miscalculated the distance between the beach and my hotel and so, in the absence of any taxis in town, I found myself road-bound, hiking the three miles to the coast with a longboard under my arm. A few hundred meters outside of town, a boy pulled up on a tiny moped, extending me a curiously sheepish grin. With a jerk of his thumb gave me the international symbol for “You want a ride?”
“Umm, sure.” I said, carefully hoisting myself onto the back of his bike.
With a swift sense of purpose, the boy, whose name I would later learn was Ahmed, nodded to no one in particular and then gassed it.
Before I knew it we were hauling down the coastal highway, the brush and buildings blurring into a beautiful tableau vivant, the road wind threatening to drag my surfboard down into the gravel. Ahmed was so nonchalant, so matter of fact and functional and unprepossessing about the whole situation that it struck me that this is just how it was done here in Morocco, this country where I had expected to be the conspicuous Westerner, the infidel. Here helping out travelers is custom. Helping out travelers is how you keep the country going. Helping out travelers is just part of the deal. Dude. Chill.
There is something to be gained from traveling in a country where you are the hated outsider. Colleagues of mine who have traveled to rural Syria and Pakistan and Burma have all returned carrying hair-raising stories that made me envious of their karma and pluck and glad that I wasn’t there (though it would’ve been cool to have been there after the fact, just for the story). Clearly, while Morocco haunted my mind, it was not one of those places.
It is always disappointing when the world doesn’t quite live up to our expectations, especially when the part of the world we’re talking about is so far afield. If you can’t find edgy, unalloyed adventure in places like Morocco, where can you find it? Of course, it’s possible that I’m missing the point of travel entirely. I’ve never been to a place that lived up to my dreams, or my nightmares for that matter. But then I have yet to travel to Bali. Or Somalia
Heaven and hell, terror and bliss, beauty and horror, war and waves. These are the things I hoped to find in perfect balance in Morocco, a place possessing my version of heaven (warm, empty emerald waves wrapping in perpetuity around abandoned headlands) and my version of hell (an austere, tee totaling, sexually-repressive monotheism). How better to experience the breadth of the world than to see these elements laid one against the other? The world is messier than that, obviously, but isn’t it nice to dream it so?
