Pete Goes Berber
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” Pete thought as the Air Maroc flight from JFK to Casablanca lifted off. Pete had never even had a passport before about a month ago. He had never been outside the U.S. and had only been west of the Mississippi once before. In fact, it had never occurred to him to go overseas, but when the opportunity arose, his wife Nancy and his sons Pete Jr. and Anthony were suddenly so excited that he couldn’t find an excuse not to go. They all viewed it as the trip of a lifetime and he couldn’t figure out what to expect or why he was doing it at all.
A week later, Pete was trudging up a hill in a small Berber village in the middle Atlas Mountains by the name of Tidili Meseioua (Pete had never seen five vowels strung together to make a name like that). He had trudged up many hills, coming from a hilly town like Ithaca, but he wasn’t sure he had trudged up a hill with a cow’s ass in his face before. This path was the main access up to the village from the riverbed below. That cow was laden with a bale of grass fodder, which was probably dinner and breakfast for the cow and her pals in the village. The amazing thing was that this cow was being led by an 80-year-old toothless Berber Bubba and a four-year-old helper. It was a tough climb for the cow, but the Bubba seemed quite used to it.
Tidili Meseioua was a happening town with at least a dozen, tired hillside homes and no visible shops. The one thing that Pete did note was that one resident was having a satellite dish installed. There was no evidence of electrification of the village and from the water jugs around the neck of the cow he had seen, Pete was pretty sure there was no running water either. But they could watch Saturday Night Live on Satellite TV.
Amazement at the inconsistencies of the lifestyle of Berber villagers was hard for Pete to reconcile. He kept his thoughts to himself, because he wasn’t even sure what Berbers were. The tour guides had tried to explain that Berbers were spread all across the Maghreb (that’s sort of northwest Africa) and apparently, they had been Christian, Jewish, pagan, polytheist and now mostly Muslim, showing a certain versatility. They were sort of African, sort of Asian, sort of European and now very Arabic. They pretty much seemed like chameleons based on whomever was crossing the desert or the sea to conquer them. It was unclear why, but they all seemed to want a piece of whatever the Berbers had…the Romans, the Ottomans, the Califates of Islam…one after another.
The funny thing is that history seemed undecided about whether the Berbers were more nomads or farmers. When Pete was taken by the guides into a Berber home, he got seated right next to a cow’s ass (different cow) while being served honey cakes and tea. Would a farmer or a nomad be more likely to live cheek-to-jowl with his cow? Hard to say, but Pete was pretty sure he wouldn’t do it.
Then it suddenly started to make sense. Berbers that got kicked around had turned into the infamous Barbary Pirates of legends. These guys were the scourge of the entire Mediterranean. It was payback for centuries of pillage and rape and Berber women were thought to be as tough as the men. Pete had seen that in the Berber Bubba. But he felt that these inland Berbers were probably not the descendants of pirates. They were so pleasant and gentle.
As Pete left the village, several small boys approached him with some beautiful small geodes they had found in the hills. Pete was a rock hound, so he admired the geodes and thought the boys had no idea what they had. They took $5 for two geodes and off they skipped, oblivious to the bargain they had just given Pete.
The travel group was about seventeen strong and they had arranged the whole trip, including tour guides, and a van to take them from Casablanca to Rabat, Meknes, Fez, Marrakech and Essaouira. There had seen palaces, mosques, Roman ruins at Volubilis, casbahs, souks, High Atlas villages and now the Middle Atlas Berber villages.
After landing and loading up the vans, Pete was bouncing off to the third largest mosque in the world on the coast of Casablanca. Pete had never been in a mosque before, so he wasn’t sure what to expect. He was used to the holy water vessels in the Catholic Church back home, but the foot bath was something new to him. The mosque itself was cavernous and for the life of him he couldn’t find any adornments like alters or crucifixes of even statues of saints. Lots of mosaics and lots of marble, but plain otherwise. As they drove away he heard a distant wailing from some sort of loudspeaker up in the minaret of the mosque. He couldn’t understand it, so he just ignored it.
The next day at the Royal Palace in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, he heard that distant wailing again and wondered again what it was all about. They headed out towards Fez, with a stop at a Roman ruin. Pete was reminded of that scene from Patton where he goes to the Carthaginian ruins and says that this is where the battle had been. In fact, he learned that these were the ruins of the furthest outpost in the Holy Roman Empire. That finally meant something to a good Italian boy like Pete.
In Fez, they pulled into the hotel, which looked like an old warehouse from the outside. When they went inside it a world unto itself. There was an inner courtyard with a pool and palms and fountains. There was even a peacock wandering around. All the rooms opened onto the courtyard. Pete was experiencing one new thing after another.
Walking through the main square in Marrakech, Pete saw snake charmers, whirling dervishes and all manner of strange acts that reminded him he wasn’t in Ithaca any more. He saw people selling geodes for $20 apiece and reminded himself that he was smart enough to buy his geodes at the source in the Atlas Mountains.
Back in Ithaca he was telling tall tales of the wonders he had seen in Morocco. When he showed his geodes to his geologist friend, he took the geode to the sink to rinse it off. When he ran the tap over it, the geode started to melt right before his eyes. His geologist friend laughed and told him he had been had by one of the oldest tricks in the rock world. Someone had sold him a fake, home-made geode.
Pete thought back to the Berber village and the earnest and cute Berber boys and suddenly saw the Barbary Pirates for what they were.