I.

First impressions of Casablanca: packed and loud with low-slung cream beige buildings, sun faded, grimy with diesel exhaust, and so many women here wearing the hijab—that I wasn’t expecting. The hijab looks like a piece of fabric designed to snuff out the individuality of a woman, but I did see one walking with her chunky headphones over her hijab—so incongruous those two things together—and no one she passed seemed to care at all, not even the wrinkly, bearded old timers.

 

 

II.

Morocco is awash in sunlight and their current drought has hit farmers so hard, the king sometimes goes on national news, encouraging everyone to collectively pray on a chosen date for rain. Abnormally dry times for this already arid land, and lots of migration from south to north, people escaping areas where the land is turning into desert so fast, no amount of irrigation can really make a difference. But the small, man-made reservoirs still look like cool blue lifelines for the olive trees, and the solar fields vibrate with energy—little signs of hope as the desert creeps her way northward and spreads out, disrupting lives.

 

Families are huge here, sometimes 10-15 people living together, and so much meat and bread and mint tea with every meal, but I still haven’t found one single place to drink a beer.

 

Heard the call to prayer for the first time, an otherworldly ancient sound that kicks in early and punctuates the day, following the track of the sun.

 

The three dominant elements of Morocco are family, bread, and prayer.

 

 

III.

The medina in Fes blows you back to biblical times most swiftly, a walled off section of the city constructed of no streets, just narrow serpentine stone paths chocked with sandaled people and rangy cats and men with donkeys and single sheep being led to slaughter. It’s a maze so complex, little kids are taught early what area of the medina they live in, so when they inevitably get lost, an adult can lead them back to their people.

 

You can buy anything here—freshly butchered meat, warm bread, copper pots, olives, fruit, wool blankets, squares of sticky nougat the flies swarm to—and the elderly men tending to their stands all have the same cough, an old world cough that’s wet and painful-sounding, always dragged out into a wheeze.

 

Boys especially seem to have so much fun in this medina maze—they dart around, lean and brown, disappearing into shadowed alleys, and when they call out to each other, there’s a raspy scruffiness to their words that makes them seem so much older and street wise compared to vanilla American children.

 

Never knew how the whole leather making process goes, how the hair-covered skins are soaked in vats of water and pigeon shit, the natural ammonia of the shit stripping the skins smooth so they can be dried and dyed different colors. A tannery reeks a tangy animal odor with notes of raw sewage. You’d think no one would want to do this work, standing knee-deep in vats of foul fluids every day, the stink becoming a permanent part of your skin smell, but the money is relatively good, so there’s never a shortage of manpower.

 

Spoke to a guy around my age today with ten kids and two wives, and when I asked if his wives get jealous and fight over him, he leaned back with a huge, proud grin and said they fight constantly.

 

 

IV.

Harsh and brutal landscapes moving south through the Atlas Mountains, lunar craggy rock hills, bone dry, and by midday all the blue is leeched from the sky, replaced with a thin skim milk scrim, an actual white heat that deadens your brain, minimizing the third world discomfort in your body, making you silly and ready to laugh at anything, similar to being on a morphine drip.

 

And then suddenly everything softens into sand, and there she is, the Sahara Desert, soft swells of mellow orange cinnamon, laid out languorously under the sun like a supermodel. She is so explosively beautiful, you just stare at her, and the camels that bring you up her dunes are such strange creatures, way more feral and indifferent to humans than horses.

 

Watermelon farming has been banned in southern Morocco—that’s how severe this drought has been—and all the villages look impossible to live in, every creek and river bed powdery rocks, no trance of cold, delicious water.

 

 

V.

 

Drank tea with a family in the village of Bouteghrer, where the houses are clay structures, the walls mixed with hay to increase tensile strength, and inside is always significantly cooler. But the ritual of tea is set in stone, almost oppressive. Everyone sits on the ground as the mom does a couple pours of hot water over the mint, then you’re served scalding hot tea on a scalding hot day, and that’s when grandma, the matronly boss, makes her dramatic entrance decked out in her ankle-length black djellaba. Right away I don’t like this woman—I can just tell she’s a stern witch—and her daughter-in-law and two grandkids seem to shrink in size as she plops down and starts holding court about her injured hand. On and on she goes, so finally I turn to the kids and start making this waterdrop noise by plucking my fingertips against my cheeks, and the kids flip out, all goofy smiles, then right back to stone-faced obedience. That is, until a few minutes later, when the little boy shoots me a mischievous grin and starts making clicking noises of his own, and now tea time is getting fun! We play this game until the grandma pauses for air, but when I ask the kids what they want to be when they’re older, their heads whip right back to grandma, since she’s supposed to talk for them with strangers. Grandma says they both want to be police, but she’s not happy with this plan. It’s the worst job ever for them, she explains, because she loves her grandkids more than the sun and doesn’t want them to leave.

 

 

VI.

 

Slipping in and out of sleep on the switchback roads leading down to Marrakesh, I kept zipping by what looked like the same group of men huddled around the same convulsing sheep, watching it bleed out into the gravel.

 

The sacrificial feast holiday of Eid Al-Adha is in full swing—everyone eats sheep and hangs with the family for three straight days, shutting down pretty much the entire country. I have never seen so many dead sheep, and last night a bartender kid brought me sheep livers from the kitchen as a complimentary gift, so I gulped them down, but some nights I only eat bread and Coco-Cola.

 

This Moroccan July heat has battered me into the pavement—my ribs are showing and I can’t think straight. Never before have I experienced heat this vicious or powerful; it’s the kind of heat that can kill people with ease.

 

Flying home soon to my own drought-stricken country. Being in southern Morocco shook me up, and I keep wondering what happens to the U.S. when Lake Mead and the Colorado River go completely dry. Rows of big straws gulping down that scarce fluid every minute of every day, millions of residents and massive industries operating as if what they require will always be there. But there’re no more reliable rains or snows anywhere, it seems. We’re in new territory now, and as the planet continues to dry, maybe it’s time we all began praying for rain.