lenges. The G.P.S. kept me pointed in
the correct general direction, but it was
sometimes fiendish to pick out the pre
cise path that I was supposed to take.
Asher had encouraged me to follow
goat droppings or boot marks. Some
times I found them, but for nearly two
hours I frequently found myself off
course, scrabbling up and down steep
banks to relocate a path. After a while,
I became better at spotting the slightly
different shade of the zigzagging trail.
I stopped to catch my breath, and
looked behind me. Across the valley,
perhaps a mile away, I could see the
white Toyota. My eyesight wasn’t good
enough to discern any people, but I
imagined Asher and Imerhane watch
ing me with binoculars as I ascended
Jbel Kouaouch. I waved, but couldn’t
see if anyone returned the gesture.
After about an hour, I reached a view
so stunning as to be almost comical. In
front of me was a deep valley, gouged
as if from clay by a potter’s thumb, with
reddish mountains beyond. I stopped
for a few minutes and took a long drink.
My shirt was wet with perspiration, and
the wind was cool enough to cause me
to shiver. I pressed on.
A
rhythm set in. I’d walk for about
fifty minutes, then rest for ten. At
one stopping point, I noticed some men
with mules at the bottom of a nearby
valley, headed roughly in the same di
rection. The previous day, Imerhane had
pointed out some nomads making their
way from the mountains to the desert
as the temperatures cooled, telling me
that the range was one of the last places
in Morocco where traditional nomads
still lived. I wondered if the men I was
watching were also nomads. I was jeal
ous of their pack animals: they were
progressing much faster than I was.
Usually, I’d look out and see noth
ing moving in the landscape. Some rocky
expanses reminded me of footage from
the Mars Rover. I also thought about
Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,
with its hardy teenage heroes crossing
the American West. Those books were
the first adult novels I truly loved, and
a friend had read a passage from “All
the Pretty Horses” at my wedding. Some
of McCarthy’s lines came back to me
as I walked: “Things separate from their
stories have no meaning,” and “Between
the wish and the thing the world lies
waiting.” There was a great bit about
courage that I couldn’t quite locate. It
was irritating not to be able to check it.
In my twenties, I could recall whole
poems and passages from novels, and
sometimes say on what page of a book
the lines fell. No more. I thought about
how much of my memory I had out
sourced to Google. (I found the Mc
Carthy quotation when I got home: “All
courage was a form of constancy.... It
was always himself that the coward
abandoned first.”)
The sun remained hidden behind
thin clouds all morning, and the tem
perature was about perfect for walking.
I finally spotted some living creatures:
small birds with yellow bellies, flitting
from bush to bush. I didn’t know what
they were called. Every time I rounded
a corner, I’d encounter a sublime new
gorge or escarpment. In the haze, the
horizons of distant peaks braided to
gether. The nature writer Robert Mac
Farlane observes, in his book “Land
marks,” that a Scottish painter once described this phenomenon to him as
landskein. “Skein” can mean either a coil
of yarn or a flock of birds flying in a V
formation. Landskein, a neologism, uses
both, knitting the V’s of mountaintops
together. Each time I saw the jagged,
braided horizon, I thought about how
happy I was to know the word.
Now and then, I’d hear something
scurry beneath a bush as I walked past—
Asher’s warnings about scorpions and
snakes kept rattling in my head. At other
times, I’d half turn at the sound of a
distant rockfall whose provenance I
could not place.
At around lunchtime, I was on a sharp
descent when I noticed some mules
tethered in a clearing to my right, and
a tent from which men’s voices could
be heard. It was the group I had seen
earlier in the day. I put my head in the
entranceway and said hello. The men
were making Berber tea, which is the
color of rust. They seemed delighted to
see a stranger, and came out to greet
me. Their grooved, hard faces confirmed
a lifetime spent outdoors. Next to them,A Jazzy,Jolly HolidayFabulous Christmas trees.
Festive décor.
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Photo: Erik Kvalsvik