On Trails (39 page)

The newscaster on TV was dressed in a black blouse; her hair fell to her shoulders in dark curls; she sat with her hands folded at a
desk, with electronic graphics flashing in the background. In other words, she looked like a newscaster on any channel in America, except that the words she spoke meant nothing to me. Sitting there in my synthetic clothes, pantomiming comprehension, I felt oddly at home and yet profoundly out of place.

The Germans have a word for precisely this feeling:
unheimlich
(literally, “un-homelike”). According to the theorist Nicholas Royle, the
unheimlich
(often translated as “the uncanny”) is defined as “a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar.” We are comfortable with the familiar, and we are comfortable with the wholly unfamiliar (which we perceive as exotic), but when the two are combined, we begin to feel unstable. The result, Royle writes, is “the experience of oneself
as
a foreign body.”

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The next morning, the three of us hiked up and over a ten-thousand-foot pass, following sheep trails. Before we departed, Asselouf had hired a local mule driver to carry our backpacks. As we neared the top of the pass, I learned why: one needed to move quickly through this cold and otherworldly place. Mist blew up from the valley below, cottoning us in. The downhill sides of every plant were shrink-wrapped in layers of ice: the tall grass became icy white feathers; shrubs resembled coral reefs. The mule driver blew into his hands, his curly hair collecting little nerds of ice. At one point he got spooked and tried to abandon us, pulling our packs off the mule and setting off in the wrong direction. In the end, Asselouf had to double his wage to lure him back.

On the other side of the ridge, in the lee of the wind, Hammou knocked some dry roots out of the ground with a sharp rock, built a small stone fire pit, and kindled a fire. Asselouf made grilled lamb kofta, with olives and fresh pita. It was, without question, the most delicious lunch I had ever eaten on the trail.

Afterward, we headed down the left-hand side of a rocky gorge.
During our descent, ­Hammou took a shortcut that required us to scramble down a scree slope, which neither Asselouf nor the mule driver liked very much. Hammou, meanwhile, was as nimble as a goat. Near the bottom of the pass, he stopped and waited for us while pecking at his cell phone.

Over the coming days I would learn that Hammou had a tween-like obsession with his cell phone; he could walk for miles without looking up from it once. I asked Asselouf what he was always doing on it. She said he was probably texting one of his many sweethearts; he seemed to have one in each village (in addition to the wife he had at home). Later in the trip, he would often find an excuse to reroute us through the towns where they lived, so he could spend a few minutes (or, in one case, a few hours) flirting with them in their homes, while Asselouf and I waited outside. Afterward, Asselouf would chide him for wasting our time and being unfaithful to his wife. He would respond by scowling at his phone.

Hammou seemed to particularly resent the fact that his boss was a woman. Whenever one of his friends called to ask how Asselouf and I were faring, he would joke that Asselouf was crying. Once, Asselouf told me, he turned to her and asked, “Why don't you go home and raise babies like a normal woman?” Asselouf shrugged off these provocations. She'd heard worse.

From the outset, Asselouf's chosen line of work had been a struggle. Back when she was in her early twenties, she had told her mother she wanted to take a course in mountain guiding, but her mother forbade her. When Asselouf persisted, her mother slapped her face. Asselouf went anyway. She was now thirty-nine years old. She lived in the same home where she and her seven siblings had grown up. They all eventually moved out, leaving her to take care of her ailing mother, alone. Currently, she was one of only two female guides she knew of in all of Morocco.

In the Berber highlands, she stuck out. She dressed unconven
tionally, in gray yoga pants, a knee-length merino sweater, and a black rain shell. When we passed through villages, she was regarded as the oddity, not me. The children gathered behind her, speculating in whispers whether she was from France or America. When she turned on her heels and told them that she was a Berber too, they burst into fits of nervous laughter.

The three of us made for odd travel companions; though we were walking the same path, we each had different goals. It seemed Hammou simply wanted to get us to Taroudant as easily as possible, get paid, and go home. Asselouf was trying to expose me to the local culture and natural beauty, while also heading off any potential disaster. And I was here, above all, to chart a potential route for the IAT. Asselouf often tried to communicate my rationale to Hammou, but it was clearly a struggle.
He
's here to map out a very long hiking trail that will one day stretch from North America and Europe to Morocco,
I imagined her saying in Berber. I could tell by his reaction he found the whole idea a bit preposterous.

Indeed, I was beginning to have doubts of my own. Aside from Hammou and Asselouf, my interactions with Moroccans had mostly been fleeting—a smile, a wave, but little more. I realized hiking might be a deeply inappropriate means of connecting disparate cultures. To truly connect to the people living here, one would need to stop for a year (or ten), set down roots, and learn the language. Hiking is about movement, a continual sliding over the surface of things. What meaningful cross-cultural communication could possibly come of it?

On our second night, we stayed in a home where everything smelled of fresh paint; the walls of the main entry hall had been painted robin's egg blue in preparation for an upcoming wedding. We sat in the kitchen as the matriarch of the household poured out glasses of milky Berber tea, redolent of thyme, and ordered around her five daughters and four granddaughters. Later, the patriarch ambled in, a ninety-two-year-old former judge with ears like giant moth wings. In a show of deference, everyone offered him their seat. Assel
ouf wisely intuited that the old man would like to rest his back against a hard surface, so she got up and moved a stool against the wall, where he gladly eased himself down. (Later, Hammou complained that Asselouf concerned herself too much with other people's feelings. “That,” she replied, “is why I am the best guide in all of Morocco.”)

Once we had exchanged pleasantries, Asselouf began peppering the judge with questions about the local topography. As part of his job, he had traveled extensively throughout the mountainous countryside, settling cases and arbitrating disputes, so he knew the name of every village and the most efficient route over every mountain. (He praised the French for widening trails and cutting new roads, if nothing else.) After a while he pointed to me and asked Asselouf something. I watched her explain, over the course of many minutes, using vivid hand gestures, the story of the breakup of Pangaea, the cleaving of the Appalachian Mountains, and the proposed trail that would link them all together. I turned to watch their faces, expecting to see bewilderment or mockery. The old man nodded his head slowly and said something. “He says that was the will of Allah,” Asselouf said. “He says that long ago we all came from the same place, but just this”—she pinched her cheek—“became different. Beneath, bones, blood, it's all the same. You understand what I am saying?”

+

We hiked on, over snowy mountain passes, along dirt roads and sheep trails. We hired yet more mule drivers, including one young man who routinely beat his mule with a wooden club; every few minutes the mule would retaliate by lifting its tail and releasing a pneumatic stream of gas into his face. The hills varied between gray, taupe, and blood-black. When the continents were joined in the Pangaea supercontinent, parts of Morocco would have nestled up against northern Maine. But I had trouble seeing the kinship between these sandy mountains and my green-backed, granite-spined Appalachians. (In
fact, I would later learn, we were still in the High Atlas, which was a much younger formation, geologically speaking. Only later would we reach the Appalachian geology of the Anti-Atlas.)

Two days later, we caught a microbus and skipped about fifty kilometers of the trail, so we could make it to Taroudant in time for me to catch my flight. Asselouf was careful to note the names of all the villages we would have passed through, so I could mark them down on my map later. On the bus, a young man with a round face offered to let us stay at his house. Asselouf eyed him suspiciously.

“Is your house clean?” she asked.

“You'll see,” he said.

“Do you wash your dishes?”

“You'll see,” he said.

Before she could go on, he preempted her. “Please, stop asking questions. Do you want to stay or not?”

When we finally arrived at his house—which lay at the end of a long road cutting through farms and fruit orchards—he turned to Asselouf and said, “Now you see. Everything is dirty.”

Asselouf sighed. Without another word, she began rinsing out the unwashed tea glasses and sweeping the kitchen floors.

The house was little more than a concrete shanty. The layout was bisected. Two of its four rooms were for humans: a kitchen, with a dirt floor and benches made of cinder blocks and wood boards; and a bedroom, where blankets covered a hardwood pallet. The remaining two rooms were dedicated to housing a milk cow. In this small, disheveled space lived four cousins. The three oldest—ages twenty-­three, nineteen, and seventeen—worked on nearby watermelon farms and orange orchards. The youngest of them, who was only twelve, worked as a shepherd.

To illuminate the room, one of the boys lit a large, swan-necked propane lantern, which resembled something from a chemistry lab. We sat down on the bedroom floor, and Asselouf served a dinner of lamb
stew in a tagine. The boys, who were used to simple bachelor fare like lentils and rice, devoured the stew, peeling off hunks of flatbread to sop up the juices. They were shy at first, especially the youngest, who hid behind his brothers and peered at us with suspicion. Before long, though, Asselouf was playing Wendy among the Lost Boys; she taught them phrases in Arabic and French, and teased them for their messiness. By the end of the night they were begging her to move in with them.

After dinner, the oldest of the boys, Abdul Wahid, challenged me to a game of checkers. The checkerboard was a piece of plywood where the squares had been drawn in by hand. For the pieces, we used small rocks he gathered from the yard. Checkers is a very old game—a three-thousand-year-old checkerboard was found in the biblical city of Ur—but its modern form was shaped by the French, who most likely introduced it to the Berbers. The French rules, which Abdul Wahid played by, were slightly different from those I had grown up with. (For example, when a piece was “kinged,” it could travel diagonally across the board, like a bishop in chess).

When our game was finished, the boys started playing with Latifa's camera. The two younger boys took turns posing while wearing my glasses and pretending to read my copy of
Waiting for the Barbarians
. Then Abdul Wahid posed with my iPhone held to his ear. At first I thought they were poking fun at me, but as the boys gathered around Asselouf's camera to inspect the pictures of themselves, I realized it was a kind of play-acting. They were imagining themselves into a different life.

“Real travel,” wrote Robyn Davidson, “would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another's eyes.” However, I was discovering that this process works both ways: a journey is never simply the act of gaining a new perspective, but also the experience of being
newly seen
. Again, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of the
unheimlich
, but this time, surrounded by kind, curious faces, the feeling was warmer, more expansive. Boundaries were dissolving.

As the night wound down we cleared away the dishes and lay down together—Hammou, me, and Asselouf—on the wooden pallet in the living room. In the kitchen, the Lost Boys were bedded down on blue plastic bags of grain. A radio warbled gently in the background as they whispered themselves to sleep.

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In the morning, we set off for Taroudant. The land that lay ahead was a hard clay pan between two mountain ranges, known as the valley of Souss. We passed by watermelon farms, citrus orchards, wheat fields, and groves of Argan trees. Heat wavered up from the earth and was dispersed by the wind; it felt like walking across the scorched bottom of a
tagine
. At one point, we were chased by three scrawny, vicious dogs, which we had to fend off with rocks. When we asked their owner why he didn't call off his dogs, he smiled and replied that we shouldn't be walking across his land if we didn't want to get chased.

In the mountains to the north of Taroudant, I had hoped to find a peak that would provide a suitable terminus to the trail, a Moroccan Katahdin. However, we were running behind schedule, and, without telling either me or Asselouf, Hammou began altering the plans to catch us up. It wasn't until around midday that I realized we weren't taking an indirect route to the mountains, as I had assumed, but were instead cutting a long hypotenuse across the flat farmlands directly to Taroudant. I turned to Asselouf and asked her what was going on. She asked Hammou, and then explained that he had taken this shortcut because it was faster and “closer to modern things.”

It was too late to change our route; we would never reach the mountains and make it back to Taroudant in time. I was disappointed, but not surprised. I had watched Asselouf attempt to explain the trip's rationale to Hammou on multiple occasions, always to his utter bafflement. He seemed to have no sense of why anyone would voluntarily choose to hike through mountains. Over the course of our hike, he had
often taken drastic shortcuts through less-than-scenic areas—on one memorable occasion, to save a few minutes, he had led us down a gulch snowed over with balled-up plastic diapers. Now, in one last shortcut, he had lopped off the journey's last, most important segment.