Book 1:#14 Maya

Book 1: 14 Donkey Walk.  

Maya

                                         Our donkey walk starts. We set out down the long beach south from Essouira                                                        Image courtesy Luke Kwiatkowski - Flickr

We took a bus from Marrakesh to Essaouira, on the coast.   Two young boymen in the seat in front engaged us in a lively conversation in which they made out they wanted to learn English, and being the compliant sweet cultural ambassadress, I tried to oblige.  When we stopped at Essaouira they got off the bus quickly and disappeared.  I reached down for my bag on the floor and it wasn’t there. I had 2 shoulder bags, one with the daily stuff, which I had on my lap.  The other with clothes and bulkier papers like my drawing book, travelers cheques, letters and the main cash stash. I’d put on the floor beside me against the side of the bus. This was gone. 

On the bus to Essouira

On my hands and knees I located it three seats back.  Empty. My Western clothes were gone, leaving just my Moroccan caftans, djellaba & burnoose behind strewn on the filthy bus floor.  I’d been conned and robbed. Most of my cash and traveller’s cheques had gone. They must have been a well-organised gang, using their most charming pretty boys to engage me while the others surreptitiously hooked my gear away quietly from under the seats.   

I was devastated.  In a blur of paranoia, fear and confusion we made our way to a wayfarer’s hotel. Tom still had some cash. We collapsed to take stock of our situation in a room about as big as a wardrobe, all we could afford. 

Essouira today - Krisee Oliver 2017

Thankfully I still had my passport.  I found a bank and cancelled the cheques and tried to organise replacements but was told I would have to wait a week.  Virtually penniless I now only the clothes I had on my back plus the Moroccan regalia.  In my shoulder bag which I had had in my lap on the trip, as well as my passport, I had had a few coins & notes in my purse, a few bits and pieces, like the bead and colored threads I used to make God’s Eyes, photos of home and Klea, pens, pencils, watercolors, brushes, notebooks, and my flute. Fortunately, I had been holding my lotar through the trip, playing it at times to entertain the friendly thieves. Thinking back, I now realize the theft of my western clothes was in fact a propitious turn of fate, forcing me to “go native”.

When in Morocco...

With my dark tan, my waist length dark hair, dressed in a caftan, burnoose & sandals, I easily passed for an Arab or Moroccan. I blended in far better at any rate, than if I had been in my Portobello, Formenteran boho mode. I moved more lightly, freer in the loose airy robes. When I saw other travelers from Europe I almost pitied them, tied up in their conventional constricted outfits. I was transformed, albeit unwittingly. It had definite advantages but locked me in to a certain way I was perceived. Evocative responses. It would be some years and a very long walk before I was to wear Euro/Western clothes again.

We decided to make the best use of the week waiting and continue with our plans.

That night we sought out the waterfront, finding a street vendor grilling big fish on open coals. 

Essouira fish vendors today - courtsey Krisee Oliver 2017

As we squatted around the fire waiting our meal we got talking to a traveling merchant who told us we could buy a donkey at a nearby weekly livestock market some 20 km away. Fortuitously due on next day. Quite excited we hitched out early to find it.  May as well spend the week waiting for money clearance usefully by engaging with our new companion. The market turned out to be a corral near a main road, with nothing but a melee of screaming Arabs and a lot of confused animals.  I couldn’t approach the crush of men, all arguing at the top of their lungs, they were all so fierce and forbidding. Tom went in, all flowing white robes and long swinging blond hair, parting them like the Prophet parting the waters, and came back in what seemed like a very short time, with the smallest donkey I have ever seen.  Barely came up to my waist.  Behind him pressed a mob of jeering, screaming Arabs all jostling to get to be nearest this way-out foreign weirdo, pushing him along.

The donkey, apart from seeming a bit cranky was oblivious to it, all just ambling along, lost in its’ donkey world.

“We’ve GOT to get away from this,” I yelled at Tom, as he came up to me, looking in despair at the ravening crowd all seeming hell-bent in crushing us underfoot.  They seemed really unfriendly. Yelling insults and “What you want with donkey!”, “Ha hahaha mad foreigners” and suchlike.  It was beyond their ability to understand so we didn’t enlighten them. We kept our dignity, somehow got the donkey back to the main road and started walking the twenty kilometres back to Essaouira. At that point I became determined to learn the language. It wasn’t all Arabic, there were bits of French, German, English and another language I couldn’t identify and later found to be Berber-  all mixed in a local argot that defied interpretation by the newbie outsider. Obviously if we were to survive in the back country we would need to know enough to get by.  

The hostile rabble soon reduced to a few stupid-faced louts and even they dropped back and contented themselves hurling insults and the odd, fortunately dodge-able, rock at us.  Then, to our immense surprise and relief, as the road ahead back to Essaouira suddenly felt long and fraught, a Landrover pulled up with two jolly Norwegian geologists in it.  “Want a lift?”  O yes, we wanted a lift! With Tom’s help they lifted the cross and protesting little donkey into the back and we piled in too, me in the back holding the donkey’s head, stroking it, crooning to it. I was in love.  And off down the bumpy road to Essaouira we went, off to our Big Adventure.

On pense que l'on est le premier mais on découvre que l'on est simplement le dernier

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We called the donkey Maya, meaning “illusion” in Sanskrit.  It was hard to believe he existed, he was so tiny. Still a foal. I thought, grieving the loss of his mother, a karmic knife cut to my heart. I poured my love into him, giving him hugs, being as as kind and  considerate as possible. Grooming him, rubbing his ears. He liked that.

A very small donkey like Maya

At a saddlers we found some double pannier baskets for his back. Waiting for the traveller’s cheque debacle to right itself, we spent the days wandering the foreshore and backstreets of Essaouira, ambling as whim took us, taking it all in, accustoming ourselves to our new friend, his needs and little ways. I knew nothing about donkeys. As a child I had a pony for a short time, but donkeys were another story.

I loved Essaouira. Everything about it. 

These days it’s a spic and span whitewashed tourist destination, everything staged to attract the almighty $.
Although looking at my friend Krisee's photos from her recent visit there, Essouira would appear superficially unchanged.

Krisee Oliver 2017

But in the 60's it was far more casual, with few foreigners and they tended to attract curious questioning locals. The blue & white painted buildings were still ubiquitous, the fishermen still gathered on the waterfront above their blue dories clustered below.

Essouira waterfront today, as then. Thanx Krisee Oliver 2017

Hawkers of intricately patterned crochet hats and platters, rugs and carpets, wandered around and set up on street corners, then, as now.

Things now iconic, then embryonic
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Finally the travelers cheques were processed and we had enough money to start our journey. Who knows where it would lead us. For how long or what we would really need for this very ad hoc expedition. All based on a dream of a myth of no real substance – Atlantis. Did it exist? Was it on this coast?  What evidence did we expect? All I knew was I was being called, that the good surf would be reward enough. I wanted to walk unhindered by baggage, I wanted to sleep under the stars in the dunes and fields. Tom shared this passion.

We loaded our few possessions into Maya’s panniers and at sunup on a clear cool morning off we went down the beach walking south away from Essaouira, followed by a riot of young crazy Arabs, all shrieking and hooting as if we were the biggest and silliest thing they had ever seen.  Eventually they all fell back, fading into spots in the distance on the long beach. Then they were gone.

Essouira to Cap Sim

 We pulled up in the sunny lee of a dune away from the beach, made some mint tea on a small brush fire and took stock of our situation.  I was feeling a bit unwell, but I didn’t say anything to Tom, after all, this was our Moment, our Triumph.  We were finally actualising our dream.  The surf was non-existent, just a ripple on the sand. I didn’t feel like getting wet, just relaxing. We had a pipe and then another and the sun felt good and, well, this was the journey after all and we felt we would reach our destination eventually, but now, here, well we could just bliss out.  We were young, life felt good, we had all the time in the world. Before we knew it the sun was setting and it seemed ridiculous to move anyway. So we stoked up the fire, gave the donkey a rub-down and a bag of oats, hobbled him and settled down for the night, which was so calm, peaceful. All the world seemed to have dissolved, leaving just the bright dome of the sparkling universe above, the fire at our feet and the surging Atlantic Ocean glinting in the light of the rising big moon.  We danced and played our flutes and had a few more pipes and a wonderful dinner of soup and vegetables with khobs, that delicious small round Arab bread, still fresh from the morning’s baker.  Then Tom made chai and I lay back feeling very, very tired and fell asleep in his arms, exhausted, but exhilarated within in a fine sweet ecstasy.

When I woke in the dawn I found I was bleeding.  I went to the surf and washed and when I returned Tom had made some tea and khobs with eggs for breakfast, but I couldn’t eat, I felt awful.  I just wanted to lie there and never move again.  But I forced myself up and we walked a few miles up the beach, each footstep becoming harder and harder for me.  I held on to Maya as I went, letting him balance me.  The bleeding got worse and cramping pains had me doubled up and gasping.   Ahead I could see, not far away, a headland, with a fort and a lighthouse on it.  People were looking over the parapet at us.  That was all I remembered, because I passed out.

Lighthouse fortress - Cap Sim today

 In the grey morning the child scream chokes me.  The pains rise and eat my chest, my neck.  My eyes stream silently, hot fire of pain.  I see her raise her little head for the face-touching game we play when she rides on the cross-bar of the bike, held close by my arms and legs.  When I am outside doing the washing, she climbs the loosely packed rocks of the wall watching my reaction as she at last stands wobbling on the top.  Don’t stop her, let her find her capabilities.  But she is daring, beyond her caution she knows she can do it, but I know better, there are always falls, always tears, if she gets it wrong.  But she rarely does. Chasing her down the lane towards the fat pig with the potato in her hands, if I don’t get her first the pig might take her hand off.  The not knowing if she is all right, the want to hold and protect my baby, will he hurt her too? How long will I last?  The pain, the pain.

Passing in and out of consciousness I have blurred recollections: a lighthouse on a headland, a group of raggedy rough but friendly people with a stretcher carrying me to a room with a view from a great height back the way we came. Kind eyes feeding me sweet milk and cus cus. Women washing me gently, enfolding me in clean clothes, Steadying me as I went to a very basic toilet, more of a hole in the floor. Then I slept.

Three days later it was, Tom said, before I came to properly.  I had had a miscarriage.  The lighthouse keeper’s tribe had carried me up to the fort and the women had tended me, undressing me, washing me, putting me in clean clothes in a clean bed, bringing me tea and soup until I was strong enough to manage for myself.  When I realized what had happened I was mortified.  I had put so many people out, I had lost a baby (was it Tom’s, was it Colin’s?).  The trip had not started well at all.   But I have a strong constitution and a few days later and I was as chipper as ever. Atlantis burning bright within, we Dreamers of the New Age set out again Our new friends, my saviors, waved from the parapets of this unique castle-like fortress lighthouse as we ambled down the dusty track, going inland to skirt around the rocky shores ahead.  We had made a lot of good friends among this diverse medley of lighthouse dwellers, and experienced life in this very curious one-off sort of a place on this planet we otherwise might not have, if we had just passed by below, waving.  From what I understood they seemed to be an amalgam of several families, each with the full components of ancient crones, the functioning middle aged lighthouse tenders, cooks, maintenance, animal tenders. A scribe who was also the teacher. Several very active  young breeding couples and about 15 teens, toddlers, babies. We offered them money to recompense the trouble we brought into their lives but we vociferously denied ” La! La! You are our guests. One day we will visit you. “  Faint hope I thought, reflecting on how my parents might welcome such guests as these wild people.

Ojo de Dios - God's Eyes

During my days of convalescence I made more God’s Eyes to pass the time, using the colours in a healing meditation for myself.  The women and children and some of the men too, became interested in them. They were attractive little truques, eye-catchers. Small exchange for the care we received. The little girls were soon sitting with me making them, then the older sisters and one or two of the young boys.  I often wonder if somewhere south of Essaouira a strange outcropping of the Native American Indian Church icon has prompted some Ph.D. researcher to explain how it traveled across the Atlantic to the Barbary Coast of Morocco.  Pirates, no doubt.

The lighthouse keeper advised us to go inland to T’a’fna, as the coast to the south was impassable. We could hook back to the coast and the next long beach from there. His parting shot was to watch out for lions.  Lions?  LIONS ?

It felt good to be back on our walk, warming in the early sun, Maya trotting along between us. T’a’fna said the signpost pointing down an unpromising rough track. No Yellow Brick Road this! Off we went, two dumb innocent crazies and a donkey, down the road to Unknown T’a’fna.

Donkey Dreaming