Morocco—Hassan the Munificent

The summer of my junior year at Colorado College, I hitch-hiked around Europe and North Africa. I was lucky enough to see Tangier, Rabat, Fez and Marrakech in Morocco. But I'm not sure I got to Casablanca. So this time it was all I would see. Eating cast iron peanuts in Spain while playing pool, I broke a molar with the cobra of a mercury filling coiled inside.

After long negotiations via phone with Med-Ex, and talks with our inter-port lecturers, I began to pursue several dentists in Casablanca. Hassan (now Hassan the Munificent to me) became my dentist. He was fluent in Arabic, French and English (having studied and gotten his degree at Georgetown).

There were long, often dangerous petite taxi rides across the city to the burbs, with Buster Rhymes remixed with a Moroccan hip-hop choir blasting, and the cabby bouncing off cars, bicycles and pedestrians. One driver was Mr. Magoo on meth, and he stopped the car to have a fight with a copper who had taken away his ID card, and was waiting, presumably, for a bigger bribe. After this petite stop du pit, the driving was even more erratic, as if we've climbed inside Grand Theft Auto on a computer. Another older Turkish cabby, who was utterly fair about the fare, had a wooden Tear of Allah hanging from his mirror, and complained about the smoggy gridlock, constantly pointing ahead at "le situation" (some accident or bottleneck we could never quite see).

Carried a ginormous wad of cash in my shoe to pay for my new crown, which is now—thank the gods, including Allah—working well. Went alone that late night, and got into trouble with a driver who was taking me where I didn't want to go. But, in spite of the lidocaine, or whatever had made my mouth numb enough to speak bad French like Elmer Fudd, I got safely back to the ship, but had to surrender the last of my mula to do it. I think what saved me was seeming to be—forgive the slight to downs syndrome folks everywhere—retarded.

The population of Morocco has doubled since I was last there in 1970, to 33 million. The thick smog from buses and taxis turns many of the more traditional city center apartments, with their mix of European and African architecture, a sooty off-white:



The newer hotels or most boring skyscrapers still have doors that harken back to all the beautiful, traditional wooden ones (I got a poster with doors from all over the country), as well as wrought iron: Open sesame, baby!:





For me, the best of this city, and the country in general, is the central market or bazaar. I walked around the inside and outside covered boardwalk, admiring the color of the vegetables and flowers, and listened to heated discussions over strong mint tea and coffee of men reading the paper or arguing politics and philosophy. This brought alive the book my students read by Naguib Mafouz, Midaq Alley, which I read at their age, set in Old Cairo. Even though our itinerary changed and we didn't go to Egypt, we weren't able to change books we had ordered.

But this text—about a young woman whose only and eventual choice for escaping the tenth-century world of the old city into the 20th century of the post-colonial burbs is prostitution— works well enough for all of northern Africa. Like those beautiful, delicate, intricate orchids that produce a smell of rotting meat to attract insects as food, the old quarter of most of these cities can't re-locate the dirt that follows the poor, whose lives are bartered in their wares in the souks in the Medina, which is about a mile away from the central market. Its tower marks the gate:



The winter rain that is condensed up against the Atlas Mountains washes the grime off the cars, waters the thirsty palms, and makes mud:



All my life I've loved hands, and what they can do. Not just the opposable thumb that has allowed a few chimps to break nuts open with a stick, but those left-hand power-runs on flamenco guitar, or the graceful hands of belly-dancers. The ten fingers tie knots, haul in fishing lines, cut diamonds, apply sunscreen, hold a sextant or perform a card trick. One student is doing his multiwriting project on hands, and the student doc film podcast teams are at work on a solely visual pod on hands. In a bookstore specializing in Islamic art and music, I took this picture in a book of the henna-dying:



Many of the female students on the ship got less intricate henna-tats in the Medina, and I asked a few to display them:





The Hand(s) of Fatima is a symbol worn for protection around the Middle East from the evil eye (which many cultures have). Ye Olde Wikipedia isn't too far off with info on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsa

I took a picture of some versions/tributes to this in an art book:



The ship was moored in the heart of a very industrial port, which involved walking several miles through muddy streets, past truckers sleeping in their seats, while dodging fork-lift drivers loading platforms that cranes would host onto the cruise and other ships, like ours:



I've read that 95% of the cranes in the world are in China, and imagine many of these were being used in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and the buildings for the Olympics. I love to watch them buzz and swing, especially in the evening, when they mimic enormous insects. Most of the time the stand still, like herons waiting for fish.







Steaming out the harbor, past the breakwater of Casablanca was our most dangerous passage, with waves up to six meters, hit sideways. Twelve TVs, bolted down, flew off their racks and smashed. All drawers flew open, and I had maybe a thousand sheets of paper flying around the cabin. One new arrival fell and cut his head open, and there were two broken legs and a broken wrist, as things came loose and flew around. I sat with the lights out, watching the enormous waves just below my cabin window, as my bed slid back and forth. The emergency scotch was well protected in a suitcase, but I had forgotten to secure my metal wastebasket, which kept flying at me, until I could get ahold of it and jam it below a bed with a pillow. I couldn't decide which of the Three Stooges I resembled most, but felt most like Larry.

A day or so later, after steaming along on one of the fastest ships for its size on earth, at 30 knots, we needed to anchor in the harbor in Dakar, Senegal, for more bunk fuel. The city loomed up slowly:





I thought of you, Spenser, studying here—knowing this place. And even though I know many of the slaves were loaded up north and south of here, plenty were lost just in the harbor, on their way to Goree Island just out of the harbor. I've waited a long time to see this, and I let the emotion and sadness rise up in me, humming some Sweet Honey and the Rock spirituals and remembering all I've learned about the Middle Passage:

Spain—The Play of the Duende

Salt. The white water of the wake, turning to turquoise; above, the dim haze of the bunk fuel...

Horizons are hard to see in bright light, or at night, when the water is blue-black, the sky gray-black. During the day, including my hour run to now/here on the elliptical, I scan for whales and dolphins, or even the other ship that rarely appears. This vessel is one of the fastest out there, built originally for Greeks. We sometimes max out at 30 knots, the ship's surfaces and stabilizers entwined with air, water and fish...

Across the Atlantic, these iron gates and heavy wooden doors carry the secret society of African blacksmiths, whose work reached its long hand through the desert from Arabia to make balconies, courtyards and gardens. These doors are a changing same, with all their consequences as thresh-holds where carried brides trail their gowns and mice await their chances to join the family.







As massive as they are, these wooden portals are dwarfed by stone, open into the cathedrals in the squares of Cadiz (pronounced KAH deethz, with the lisp), framed by our family empire's palms, which make each teeny relief from narrow alleyways an oasis...



Between the stone or cobbled streets and open squares there are wider boulevards, and promenades along the coast, which juts out. Behind the main cathedral is a view of the old Phoenician port, where sailors headed out of the Mediterranean...















Looking outward from the top of the San Francisco Cathedral, the old city; inside, the splendor and flourishes, the soft golden glow as relief from the bright white light and blue sea that surrounds the city:



From the top of the cathedral in the old city, the bell tolls, the bronze voice that will become muezzin from a minaret across the Straits of Gibraltar, where we will bunker up for fuel...

Outside this old city, where a hard-bitten apartment is half a million bucks, there are the new towers, built not to a greedy god, intent upon the Grand Inquisition, but to the real estate developers, whose non-descript towers I call the Great Imposition...

I can hear you now, mis hijos, mumbling about my European "village addiction"—narrow, cobbled streets between two-story buildings, without the cars and fast food. But I won't show you that homogenous world you already know, out in the burbs..



Up high, where the eye forgets to fly, my Greenman lives on, sometimes disguised by the gargoyles that have replaced him.



From Cadiz, we traveled to Chiclana, to see a flamenco show. The dancers first worked with a frothing, rather brutally trained horse, doing some dances from Sevilla. Then we moved inside, for a show with several dancers, a guitarist and women doing palmas. The candles cried because they refused to turn out the kreig lights above the dancers and musicians, their movements blurring present and past. Viva tourism! for students who had never heard the music. I just went inside my mind, remembering evenings in front of great flamenco guitarists...





After Cadiz, I traveled to the white towns that fold down, around the mountains like glaciers. The limestone provides the whitewash, and the tourists insist the condition persist, making a yearly white-wash obligatory. First the town of Arcos:



Then to Ronda, where no one but moi laughed when I photographed an Ayudame sign ("help me Rhonda"). This town, with its impressive cathedral, and one of the main up-scale hotel chains, was where Ernie Lemmingway wrote Chapter 10 of For Whom the Bell Tolls, was also where Orson Welles was buried. The famous German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, lived here, as well, and wrote "The Spanish Trilogy" in here in 1913.

Again the doors that fascinate me:





I like the unintentional gardens growing on the roof of many buildings:



Some window displays are almost shrines, like my cabin window:



Islamic art exists inside the Cathedral, as does the Jewish Star of David...



Built like a battlement, the towns cling to the hills:







Smugglers and "contrabanditos" lived in these towns, and the prison cells were built into the towers of the bridge that spans the abyss:





Off the narrow streets or closed boardwalks, there are always the patios beckoning:



Traces of the Greenman remain on doors and fascades:



And my nagual, the owl, is also there, waiting patiently:



In Cadiz, the jazz club, Cambalache, was closed, but Skye and I caught a popular local tango band at Cardenas, a small cafe/pub in the old city. Alas, La Cava was closed, and we missed the local legend on flamenco guitar by one day.

Waiting overnight in a long line of ships, we bunkered fuel at Gibraltar:

Periplum...

"Deep greens and blues
are the colors I choose,
won't you let me go
down in my dreams..."

James Taylor, "Sweet Baby James"

Epi-graph, not Epitamy:



Long after the champagne bottles break upon the christened bow, a ship sails away. No navy waves the blue-green water on, under a big sun—that orange behemoth that goes down in the green flash I saw upon the horizon the other night, out in the middle of the Atlantic, where 50-foot megallon sharks once roamed the deepest waters।
Our wake is not history, just simulation—a periplum, or chart made while moving, that lets us evaporate the already faulty memory...



We began in Miami. I stood before the ship and just stared, letting the blue wave of paint lead the eye up to the white caps of the top decks। This is where the chart begins. This mouse's eye-view of the ship is distorted, full of lies, like every other map. I'm remembering Mark Monmonier's How Maps Lie, and the life of Mercator, who my own saint, Paul, knows so well.

On a late-night run for small supplies I watched sewer rats slink by by the shivering poodles elderly guests at the Intercontinental Hotel were walking in Bayfront Park.

Walked over the bridge that roars with trucks headed to the port by day, but remains silent at night, when the containers are still being loaded, each full of goods and darkness under the bright lights on the piers. Went up the gangway. Entered the room made for hobbits, the bed too small for a Viking Beer-Clan warrior ready to be an Ambassador of the Inner Ear, stepping through the pitch and roll of every culture beckoning. All the cabinets have locks magnetized against the swells, all anchored against the tip-off.





Deck 7 is the crow's nest and bridge, but also a big outside bar, pool and weight room. Deck 5 and 6 have the large dining rooms, and the hearth is the rotunda on Deck 5, where the Bursar's Office controls the staff, and another desk the students. My room runs against the port side, above the anchor, with no balcony. But the portal is a wee window shrine, where I'm collecting the flotsam and jetsam of this journey.

I take a last look up at the ship, and wave goodbye to the two Cubans who ran the cheap supply store downtown, so deeply bored with the cruise ship trade, and everything available for less than a buck. Then the night arrived. The skyline is a lie: there's no glitter past the kitsch of South Miami Beach, full of disco balls and the same black leather jackets. Van Dyck's wee jazz bar and blues at Tobacco Road is about it.

Memory is the bridge: suddenly, standing before this great ship, I am back in the wee wooden dory, trimmed against the rapids, last summer in the Grand Canyon:



When it isn't reflected, or is too lazy to be absorbed, light bends, is tugged along past the containers...





We've cleared the port, where space is time, and time is money. We have to vamoose to make room for the Carnival Cruise ships. Further out, we anchor, with the skyline as our backdrop...



After several days at anchor, we begin a fast-paced trip toward the Bahamas. Suddenly we're there, amidst the hordes of disembarking Twinkies from the cruise ships, ready to buy something to talk about at the midnight buffet. It's mostly t-shirts, but I buy a cheap watch that will continue to re-set itself to Bahamas' time.

And I add some bourbon and scotch, to get me across the wide Atlantic. The parents' reception is a chance to visit with those alumni who have been in this program, remembering not what their children will do, but what mattered to them, long ago. I do manage to take a long walk around Nassau, where I found the bar I should manage, closed: The Taj Mahal—all red clay and yellow sun, like India...



Palaces and offices are living, colonial memories.



It's about dinner time in the Grey Cliff Hotel in Nassau, where couples drift in from the ginormous cigar bar. Beautiful flowers bloom like scars, and the verandahs beckon parties:



Bay Street and the downtown are deserted when the big ships leave, but by late evening the pimps and streetwalkers head toward the loud music upstairs in mid-town, while the remaining tourists drink at Senor Frog's. A cement church might withstand the hurricanes, but is charmless next to the old, wooden frame houses:





I love the ropes, braided and spliced to anchors disappointed they will never reach the deepest trenches. Wilson Harris' story about anchors is always with me, reminding me to hold on and let go. Each port will give us an excuse to let go again...



The New World was a series of doors (we'll see the spawn in Spain and Africa). The slaves walked through these doors, but brought their remembered handiwork with them, including not only drums they would make, but blacksmithing—the dream of wrought iron:



Then the tugs I love appeared, nudging us out into the Atlantic: